Hacker News Reader

Comment by inshard | Hacker News Reader

I am not seeing the connection. Whenever I hear capital and elites, it’s a clear red flag around lack of understanding. And just laziness about money. I think a lot of these voices would change if they just had 20% of [edited: discretionary] income auto-invested in equities from an early age.

View on HN

How exactly are young people betrayed by the system supposed to get that disposable income? I live in country with highest unemployment rate in OECD. We have tons of people with master's degree unable to find ANY job, let alone something that would fit their education. There's fierce competition for jobs like part-time warehouse worker or cashier.

Only thing I can think of is moving abroad, but sending lots of young people abroad is not very sustainable from a domestic economy perspective.

If we all had a significant sum auto-invested in an early age, we'd all have a stake in preserving the practices that are causing so many problems. I don't wanna live in a broken world forever, so I'm kind of glad that we don't.

As an ex-Apple engineer who grew up with four generations living in a duplex, and as someone who now sees people struggling with grocery and gas prices and utility prices, I feel like more people even having any disposable income at all might be a better start.

> I think a lot of these voices would change if they just had 20% of disposable income auto-invested in equities from an early age

What disposable income? When I was younger I had none, I was too busy paying rent and tuition,

Adam Smith observed in his famous book that when people get more money they almost always spend it on a better place to live.

I have observed people from the very poor homeless all the way up to multi-millionaires - his observation hold true for the vast majority. Nearly all of them are living paycheck to paycheck despite the massive amount of difference in income.

When you are young investing in education - that is tuition - is the correct call. When you finish school though many people stop investing at all instead of investing in equities.

Do you mean disposable income or discretionary income?

Because taking 20% of the former leaves a lot of the population unable to pay for essential living expenses because they effectively have zero of the latter.

Thanks I meant discretionary.

"just get some capital"

Bro it's so easy just save 20% of what you need above and beyond the basics of an upper middle class living, like maybe take one fewer trip to Bali each year, or cut back to only two cars per person, or timeshare your pool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com