https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/theres-not-that-much-wealth-in...
not only is private wealth improving, wealth that is exchangeable for other things is improving as well.
its fine for other people to work on improving its distribution while keeping a finite set of resources affordable, because I dont have the solution to that and taking other people’s private liquid or illiquid wealth doesn’t solve that either
but its very interesting to me to see how abysmal liquidity is in every market outside of some US markets, and how we got here, and how many more things can become liquid wealth. It makes me not be able to take simpler proposals of solving out of control public spending very seriously.
Would you want someone who won a lottery ticket to have power over your life at scale? Because that’s what excess wealth is, a power dynamic powered by a suboptimal system masquerading as shades of a meritocracy that does not exist.
As for your question lottery winner having the power proportional to his money, is much better than bureaucrats having power to take anyone's money.
Edit: Q: If you downvote this comment, do you believe someone like Zuckerberg was predestined to be a billionaire?
Spoiler Alert: they spend it like it was water, and when their short career is over, they have nothing.
Many of the duplexes in town were built by small builders who passed them on to family.
Now they are treated like rich landowners but in reality grandpa built the wealth.
Luck in exactly what sense ?
Yes, they did not die of dysentery on the trail, so evidently some luck was involved, but the wealth building seems very intentional and causal.
Even investing in broad equity index funds is luck (sequence risk).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378138
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
Success in life will always be a combination of luck, and hard work to set yourself up to take advantage of the luck when it arrives.
For some, the luck will never arrive. And for many, the luck will arrive, but they won't be ready for it. The only practical advice to give people is to prepare the best they can for when and if it does.
Did commercial real estate know WFH post Covid was going to obliterate CRE values? Again, bad luck.
But the housing could have just housed the family members if times were tight. For at least the first generation, it did. That's intrinsic value, not valuation according to a market.
Your grandfather chose your grandmother and so too did your parents.
Your parents deciding to do something is not luck either.
I want my children to have an inheritance, the actions I take to ensure that are ongoing deliberate choices to build wealth over having fun.
You posted this comment 7 hours ago. Current you has zero impact on whether you posted it.
Time flows forwards, not backwards.
If my dad builds me a shed it is no more lucky than if I build a shed.
We should leave this here, I feel that we just have different relationships with our parents :)
Punishing people for not having something bad derail their business is tall poppy syndrome.
Luck is a part of why everyone continues breathing everyday rather than having sudden heart failure. We don’t need to constantly diminish people for living because they were lucky enough to not have a fatal condition.
We should be encouraging the people who were successful, even if part of it may have been luck. Any other approach punishes people doing the rest of the work that isn’t luck.
I am in favor of progressively increasing tax brackets that eventually get up to near 100$. Spend it or lose it. And if you lose it, it goes in to the very bottom income bracket where it will be used imediately. Trick up economics if you will.
> there needs to be some additional limits on it.
Then we don't get SpaceX or Tesla.
You paid $zero for SpaceX.
What does that mean? It's millenial Marxism unmoored from any specificity or facts.
Are the wealthy lucky? Yes. Do they use their wealth to shape the world as they see fit? Yes. Is the narrative that anyone can be wealthy if they work very hard and are exceptional despite the math showing this is not true? Yes.
Many of us have been successful from nothing and know friends who have been more so. There is usually a luck element in the size of that success but it is blindingly obvious to someone who was in the crab bucket to see that actions work.
It sounds as if you have an emotional issue with the idea that people can change their own situation. I literally have a choice tomorrow whether I paint my wall, study, fix up the leak in my loft, etc, or just sit and play my Switch. People who do too much of the latter do not succeed.
And no, parents or grandparents or country or genetics or whatever are not luck either. Choosing a suitable mate is about as close to the meaning of life as we have.
On the contrary, I am simply data informed. It sounds like you're operating from a mental model that overweighs ability in outcomes. I have provided links below to help you improve and evolve this model.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized")
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-... | http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ("Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure")
https://ustrustaem.fs.ml.com/content/dam/ust/articles/pdf/20... (2022 Bank of America Private Bank Study of Wealthy Americans: The impact of shifting generational attitudes amid an historic wealth transfer) [Only 27% of the ultra wealthy are self made; 70% of Americans who hold more than $3 million are over 56 years old.]
https://www.financialsamurai.com/your-wealth-is-mostly-due-t... ("Your Outsized Wealth Is Mostly Due To Luck: Be Thankful!")
> And no, parents or grandparents or country or genetics or whatever are not luck either.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-... ("Parental Income Has Outsized Influence on Children’s Economic Future")
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/7122514681658661... ("Global inequality of opportunity: How much of our income is determined by where we live?")
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-origins-of-menta... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292972... ("Genes Influence Children’s Success, Directly and Indirectly")
> Choosing a suitable mate is about as close to the meaning of life as we have.
~43% of first marriages fail, ~60% of second marriages, ~73% third marriages.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statist...
Good luck.
I'm confused because to me, everything you have posted backs up the idea that these things are in fact actions and not luck based.
Country of residence is not luck based, it's either pre-determined or chosen by parents.
27% self made is huge, I would have expected it to be lower.
Parental income having an effect on children's is also not an example of luck. If I work hard so that my children do well, that is not luck based.
Genes influence success, so choose good genes.
43% of marriages failing simply shows that many people don't take it as seriously as they used to due to things like no fault divorce. So choose well. Your partner, at least the type of person they are, should not be luck based. Your marriage definitely should not feel like a 4 in 10 dice roll, if it does you have really messed up.
I think you and I (really, me and most left wing media) have a different definition of luck. Luck is rolling a die and getting a number, these things are more like causative factors.
But still, there exist plenty of people who have been born into adversity and study and work hard, network and press the right buttons. That isn't luck, a lottery win is luck.
I dunno. It all just feels like a way to absolve one's self from responsibility to me. I did the washing up yesterday, so today I don't have to do it. Is today me lucky that yesterday me did it? Only in the colloquial sense.
> Country of residence is not luck based, it's either pre-determined or chosen by parents.
So you have very little to do with it; you can probably choose this after you finish school, but this is dependent on the place you would like to emigrate to letting you in, thus it's mostly not up to you.
> Parental income having an effect on children's is also not an example of luck. If I work hard so that my children do well, that is not luck based.
If I get the resources to do well because my parents worked hard, that is really not something I choose, so it's "luck".
> Genes influence success, so choose good genes.
One can hardly choose their own genes, can they?
> But still, there exist plenty of people who have been born into adversity and study and work hard, network and press the right buttons.
This is true. They would have had an easier time and achieved more if they did not have to dig out of the basement first before building up.
Nobody is saying that you cannot be smart and diligent enough to change your lot in life, we are just saying it is hard, getting harder every day, and it should not be.
39 year old me built a shed.
40 year old me then has a shed.
40 year old me did not influence or choose 39 year old me.
But 40 year old me does not have a shed due to luck.
It was causative.
Your parents and your past decisions are not luck based.
If you want to call that luck, then you need a different word for actual luck such as chance encounters, lottery wins, unexpected windfalls etc, because otherwise we are just misinterpreting each other.
Sure, I reap the fruits of my past decisions, like the shed. More to the point, I reap the fruits of my parents' decisions. Is that luck?
It's not luck from the perspective of actions having consequences, and parents doing things that help their children.
It is luck from the perspective of "you didn't pick your parents", or from the "if you were going to be born to someone random, where and when would you want to be born?" perspective.
So you and abenga are saying "yes it is!" "no it's not" about the same set of facts, because you're running different definitions of what is or is not luck.
Arguments about the definitions of words are really uninteresting. What you and abenga are saying boils down to "yes, actions have consequences, and better actions lead to better consequences, both for yourself and your descendents, but no, you didn't select the parents, country, or time you were born to".
Apart from the definition of "luck", do either of you actually disagree with either side of that? If so, with what part, and why?
And, if you do agree with it, what conclusions do you draw?
What it comes down to is that luck cannot be incentivised - a dice will always roll a 2, 1/6th of the time.
But good behaviour can be incentivised, e.g. people choosing their partners well and providing stable environments for their children.
We should incentivise good behaviour whilst also ensuring that luck doesn't result in unassailable leads e.g. a lottery win probably should not result in a 1000 year dynasty but a lottery win combined with intelligent estate planning, good mate selection, diversification etc probably should.
> if you were going to be born to someone random, where and when would you want to be born
I think that this is like asking, if 40 year old you were completely randomly spawned, whose life would you like to continue from. You can't. The lineage from your parents to you is the same as the lineage from you to you. It's a nonsense line of inquiry.
Yeah, I'd be OK with that. It's not like it would actually affect my life in any way whatsoever. We're not talking about the government taking the food out of anyone's mouth.
It's not actually a benefit to the world that we have individuals walking around with enough wealth to purchase, say, one of the major companies that acts as a backbone for communication and information-spreading worldwide. (Of course, it's also somewhat troubling that a single for-profit company can be such a backbone, but that's a separate conversation.) In fact, there's some pretty solid research indicating that it's destabilizing for entire societies to have that level of inequality.
> The wealth of America’s billionaires was estimated at around $5.2 trillion in 2023, while federal government spending was about $6.4 trillion. Confiscating every last penny from Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and all the other billionaires wouldn’t fund the U.S. government for one year. And of course you could only do it once.
Ok so just 750 persons can replace all form of taxation in the USA that's incredible. It's not like just replacing taxes from all 330m persons but all the companies too ...
And the USA budget is not the most efficient per capita (something around 20k ?), if you do the same for France you are closer to 6k.
"I think income is a lot more important than wealth."
If you keep receiving all the income you want and I'll get exclusive rights to all of your wealth, surely you got the better side of this deal then? Or is there more nuance at play and blankets statements about the relative importance of income and wealth are simply pointless.
"if you have a house, no one owes you that house"?
In this case of property ownership, your rights granted to you by society is the result of an agreement by the society you're a part of not to use the resource that you've been granted exclusive rights to. The allocation of control over resources is the essence of economics. It's the whole point of the field of study. I cannot believe he's setting up an argument about how that doesn't really matter because there isn't a lot of resource control without legally associated debts.
I think so, because you can use the income on consumables. Like say you got a no-limit credit card. You go on exotic vacations at tropical resorts. All you have are some (economically worthless) photos of yourself having a great time. When the credit card company comes calling, you turn out your pockets and say "sorry, I'm broke", and walk away to your next plane flight. Definitely seems like a good deal to me, not so much for the credit card company.
The simple fact is that most people are wealth-neutral or even wealth-destroying in that e.g. they wreck their car and just buy another.
As this article explains: the US could confiscate all US billionaires' wealth and that would only pay for one year of public US spendings. Not to mention that confiscating that much wealth would crash the very value of that wealth, so they'd get less than that.
That's what I meant in my comment when I wrote that we know how it's going to end up: they won't stop at confiscating the billionaires' wealth. The state shall immediately run out of that. They'll then come after the middle class' savings (which the EU is preparing at the moment, should be coming out in a few months).