[HN Gopher] Just Be Rich (2021)
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Just Be Rich (2021)
Author : scarmoo
Score : 138 points
Date : 2024-07-14 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (keenen.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (keenen.xyz)
| polotics wrote:
| Not using a throwaway, and agreeing in principle: Paul Graham
| appears here oddly non-scientific.
| rvrs wrote:
| Oddly? His essays are regularly thinly-veiled excuses to peddle
| libertarian horse shit
|
| I thought Hackers and Painters was decent and even in those
| essays Paul couldn't help him self
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Totally agree. One of my biggest critiques of entrepreneur
| and hacker circles is how much they ride PG. dude is rich,
| not some sort of genius policy maker.
|
| The difference between a lot of hackers now and PG isnt
| talent, it is that someone was making a good website when the
| internet pretty much was empty lol. Google was still a baby
| compared to yahoo.
|
| edit: since i was pretty negative here, i will sing some
| praise.
|
| Graham is incredibly technologically capable, knows what
| problems are worth investing in, and is great at leading
| people. Those qualities are great, and he is a world star at
| it.
| metadat wrote:
| TFA put it clearly and succinctly:
|
| _> > You would think, after having been on the side of labor
| in its fight with capital for almost two centuries, that the
| far left would be happy that labor has finally prevailed. But
| none of them seem to be. You can almost hear them saying "No,
| no, not that way."
|
| > And there we have it. The slight injection of PG's true
| ideology relegated to the notes section and vague enough that
| some might ignore. But keep in mind this is the same guy who
| argued against a wealth tax. His seemingly impartial and
| logical writing attempts to hide his true intentions._
| immibis wrote:
| Multiple replies merged into one because of HN's post rate limit.
|
| I pulled myself up by my bootstraps once and now I'm the richest
| person alive.
|
| Paul Graham is forced to appear non-scientific because there is
| no science, that justifies our current economic conditions.
| There's the whole field of economics, sure, but that only studies
| what does happen in our current economy, not how we _should_ run
| an economy. The only things available to justify our current
| economic conditions are pseudoscience and appeal to power.
|
| A world where people get rich by starting tech companies that
| make a mark on the world that appeals to current rich people
| isn't much better than a world where people get rich by being the
| children of current rich people. In both cases you get rich by
| helping the rich class perpetuate itself, not by actually making
| the world better.
|
| Noahpinion's article misses a point: it talks about how there
| isn't that much _actual_ wealth and most "wealth" is fake zero-
| sum financial instruments and since there isn't much actual
| wealth there isn't much point taxing it. But it ignores that
| taxing zero-sum financial instrument wealth still alters the
| world, in a way that many find desirable: simultaneously deleting
| a positive-value financial instrument from a rich person and its
| counterpart negative-value financial instrument from a poor
| person may not change the total net wealth, but it reduces
| inequality.
| djhaskkka wrote:
| > no science, that justifies our current economic conditions.
|
| but there is.
|
| lots and lots and manipulation and misdirection honed thru the
| ages and written in plain view in traditions and old symbols.
|
| there's a reason old lord of the mannors had dog and horse
| breeds on their walls, while having power of who marries who on
| their domains. but modern science will never touch those
| points. still, there's lot of science on why you agree to the
| boom bust cycle and all that.
| xrd wrote:
| Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth and
| taxation. It makes me mad because it contradicts a lot of
| cherished ideas I have about the rich and taxation, but probably
| makes sense in this conversation:
|
| https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/theres-not-that-much-wealth-in...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Wealth is unelected power, a bug. It's reasonable to say there
| should be limits on wealth, considering most wealthy people
| were lucky (either by birth or "right place right time") but
| attempt to post rationalize it as anything else.
|
| 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.
| chr1 wrote:
| How many people who win lottery tickets become wealthy? Most
| of them squander the money they win, so your point about
| simply being lucky is not true.
|
| 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.
| eigart wrote:
| Obtaining excessive wealth is the same as winning the
| lottery (the billionaire founder class).
|
| Edit: Q: If you downvote this comment, do you believe
| someone like Zuckerberg was predestined to be a
| billionaire?
| aorloff wrote:
| What about wealth you build for yourself ?
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Do you not see how this was luck? Certainly, actions were
| taken to encourage an outcome (holding an asset of
| potential future value), but luck as a component of a
| favorable outcome cannot be overstated.
| aorloff wrote:
| They were builders, they had businesses building for
| other people and invested their own money and time into
| these buildings for their own family.
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| See, you've caught yourself in the trap. Lots of builders
| fail, look at the YC startup failure rate.
|
| 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/2
| 011...
| aorloff wrote:
| I meant construction developers as a trade for others.
| kortilla wrote:
| You've caught yourself in the trap of thinking that
| passing something with a high failure rate means luck.
| aorloff wrote:
| In the context of a discussion about wealth, its true
| that the financialization of real estate and runaway
| values of the greater Silicon Valley were a stroke of
| luck, but when talking about building wealth, housing has
| intrinsic value that I think takes a lot of that kind of
| SV luck out of the picture.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Housing value is land value. Did you buy or build in the
| right location? Luck!
|
| Did commercial real estate know WFH post Covid was going
| to obliterate CRE values? Again, bad luck.
| soared wrote:
| Luck that their grandpa built the duplex. I am unlucky
| that my grandpa did not build a duplex. Luck that their
| parents held the assets and did not sell it.
| kortilla wrote:
| Of course it can be overstated. That's basically the
| entire mantra of progressives in the US right now and
| it's used as an excuse for incompetent people to attack
| people who successfully do things and (even worse)
| absolve themselves of responsibility for doing
| unproductive things.
|
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| On some level not all power being elected is good. Provides
| some balancing force for an electorate with... I'm not sure
| what to call it... volatile whims?
| WalterBright wrote:
| If people cannot accumulate wealth, we wouldn't have SpaceX.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Without wealth, there is no prosperity for _anyone_ except
| those who hold political power, full stop.
| Timshel wrote:
| It's interesting but at the same time I think some points miss
| their mark like :
|
| > 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.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| Noah is a smart person and that's why I'm surprised that his
| essay is so transparently dumb.
|
| "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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth
| and taxation
|
| 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).
| afpx wrote:
| When someone writes "confiscating rich people's wealth" I can't
| take them seriously. People make wealth from what
| infrastructure is available. Try making your wealth living in
| the middle of the Sahara.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Not only are the poor poorer but now they feel like crap from the
| tech social media dystopia they inhabit.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| There's also the surveillance economy. I'm not too happy about
| that, either.
| jongjong wrote:
| Yes, it's 24/7 gaslighting. One article after another telling
| us that things are a certain way and showing us all sorts of
| up-trending charts while we can see with our own eyes that it
| bears no resemblance to our reality... So then we start
| thinking "Maybe, it's true, everyone else who is not in my
| social group is doing well. Maybe there is some kind of
| conspiracy against me and my kind... Maybe that's why none of
| my startup project are allowed to get any traffic from Google
| and why bloggers and journalists never respond to my emails.'
| AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote:
| This article feels like an attempt to morally wash one's hands of
| the moral stink of capitalism. Do you really think that because
| you're in tech and not mining, that the accumulation of wealth is
| any less driven by exploitation?
|
| By the way, I don't know the answer to this. I myself am a
| landlord. But if we're getting into morality, let's fully examine
| this.
|
| 11.5% of Americans are below the poverty line. The same economic
| system that makes is possible to become rich enforces a roughly
| 5% unemployment rate. This unemployment rate is necessary to
| prevent a wage price spiral. There are people who are paid a lot
| of money (Federal Reserve), whose job it is to pull levers and
| turn dials until the unemployment rate is at that magic 5%. They
| actively ensure people can't make a living, to allow you the
| chance to accumulate wealth.
|
| You may not be directly responsible for their poverty- but their
| poverty makes your accumulation of wealth possible. Without a 5%
| unemployment rate, the delicate balance of the economy cascades
| into oblivion in a wage-price spiral.
|
| So here's my moral question- do you then owe them anything? Do
| you owe society anything?
|
| Maybe there is something wrong with "just being rich" if you
| don't attempt to use some of your money for the betterment of
| your community and society that is actively made worse to allow
| you to get rich.
|
| If you want to get rich, get rich. But don't fool yourself into
| thinking that it's morally good. It can be, but it's probably
| not. Because it's probably at the expense of others in some
| direct or indirect way.
|
| By the way I'm pulling punches here. This is a very gentle
| response to try and get you to think differently about your
| ethics.
|
| ---
|
| If you're the sort of person that always needs to feel morally
| right, then I would say getting rich probably isn't for you. Any
| moral argument you can come up to protect your ego would be
| fragile, and easily undone.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > By the way I'm pulling punches here.
|
| Out of curiosity where can I find the unabridged version of
| this?
| kortilla wrote:
| The fed does not target an unemployment minimum. Their mandate
| is to reduce it after controlling inflation.
| dash2 wrote:
| "Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for
| lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s."
|
| Doesn't look like it: median income in 2019 was $44K, in 2001 it
| was $31K. That's adjusted for inflation. Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_States
|
| I don't like it when the facts look wrong after two minutes'
| googling.
| ggg4468 wrote:
| What can you expect of someone who thinks "the rich are my
| enemies and the source of my problems". The bias and intention
| to force you to take his position is not subtle.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| It is interesting how much easier the stats for 50th percentile
| plus are easier to find than anything below that. Also only 2
| minute of googling, but 6/6 pages I checked provided either
| median or median as well as 60-99th percentile. None showed
| anything below.
|
| Not speculating on what those stats are, and I'm sure they're
| out there somewhere, but certainly less available or SEO'd.
| ggg4468 wrote:
| The left likes to constantly watch and complain of how much
| money others have.
|
| It's amazing how petty they are, behaviors frequently seen in 5
| year old children, and in leftist adults.
|
| Waaaah waaah, the size of his cake is bigger. Waaaaah
| OKRainbowKid wrote:
| Building strawmen and characterizing roughly 50% of the
| population as crying babies on the basis of you not agreeing
| with their politics sure seems like something a very mature
| and collected person would do.
| advael wrote:
| Dam, I didn't know the 80s started in 2001. Or is it just that
| that's the chart you can find with "two minutes' googling" and
| so that has to be good enough because that's the amount of
| effort it takes to find something that vaguely seems to satisfy
| your confirmation bias?
|
| Okay, though, let's just look at the chart you link. Let's
| assume that "inflation adjusted dollars" tracks purchasing
| power parity perfectly over that period and look at these
| numbers in relative terms, because that's what actually matters
| for stuff like "Who is competing to buy the limited housing
| stock available" or other things that actually matter to people
| and aren't just numerical games
|
| 31k to 44k? Cool. Seems like a lot. That's a 33% increase in
| the median income over that period! Over the same period, the
| top 20% bucket on the same chart grew from about 67k to about
| 103k, or by about 50%. The .0001% income bucket grew from 30m
| to about 60m, or about 100%. Keep in mind that the marginal
| value of extra dollars is considerably higher the fewer dollars
| you're making. So over this period of time, the Gini
| Coefficient, which measures inequality, has drastically
| increased, which is what you'd expect given the argument the
| article is making
|
| Now, maybe your point is that the one number, the median
| income, that you're talking about has gone, I dunno, vaguely up
| in some period of time. It seems like this misses the point of
| the article in favor of nitpicking about a minor factual error.
| "Look!", you might say, "they said median income went down when
| really it went up!" That seems to be your entire argument here,
| and it's fucking stupid, because if you're going to fixate on a
| minor factual nitpick, at least get your facts right. 2001 is
| generously a whole decade and some change out from the 80s
| xrisk wrote:
| The same Wikipedia article notes that the increase in median
| income is due to increasing women's wages and increased
| participation of women in the labor force.
|
| > While wages for women have increased greatly, median earnings
| of male wage earners have remained stagnant since the late
| 1970s. Household income, however, has risen due to the
| increasing number of households with more than one income
| earner and women's increased presence in the labor force.
| soared wrote:
| Agreed, that is a very weird sentence when the chart clearly
| doesn't show the same thing. Not sure what the author meant.
|
| > But middle-class incomes have not grown at the rate of upper-
| tier incomes. From 1970 to 2018, the median middle-class income
| increased from $58,100 to $86,600, a gain of 49%.10 This was
| considerably less than the 64% increase for upper-income
| households, whose median income increased from $126,100 in 1970
| to $207,400 in 2018. Households in the lower-income tier
| experienced a gain of 43%, from $20,000 in 1970 to $28,700 in
| 2018. (Incomes are expressed in 2018 dollars.)
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
|
| The graphs in the blog posted are from this pew article.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Inflation isn't exactly a single objective truth as you can
| decide how to measure it.
|
| For example looking at the number of median salaries required
| to buy a house tells a different story.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Wealth inequality is just a radical left fairy tale to
| villainize the hard-working 1%.
|
| The problem with that mindset is that we _know_ how it 's going
| to end up: it's not only the 0.1% or 1% that are going to suffer
| the wealth tax. It's the 30%.
|
| At first the "tax on billionaire" was supposed to be that: a tax
| on billionaires. But then there are already publications
| explaining how "taxing anyone who has more than a million (a
| million, not a billion) would bring x in revenue for the various
| countries".
|
| Also note that it's never about distributing that money to the
| poor: it's always about the state getting more money. Money which
| is then spent in state-friendly companies.
|
| For example the EU is hard at work now imposing a mandatory, EU-
| wide, tax on all its citizens to "finance EU projects". It's not
| a tax to give money to poor people. It's a tax to give money to
| companies like Thales and Airbus and a shitload of sycophantic
| companies that'd be bankrupt if not for the state' intervention.
|
| Just look at how government are managing the insane money they
| get: do you think they're doing a good job when they're at, say,
| 130% debt-to-GDP ratio? Why would I want to encourage such
| irresponsible spenders by giving them even more?
|
| When a country like France, which is badly in debt and has huge
| deficits, has about 60% of its GDP that is tied to public
| spending, it's not the fault of "the rich" if the country is not
| doing well. It's the fault of the people governing that country.
|
| So, no, thanks but no thanks. I don't want any "let's tax the
| rich" discourse because I know that it's the middle-class, not
| the rich, that's going to end up getting owned.
|
| Just like fighting the four horsemen of the infocalypse is an
| excuse used by the states to gain every more power, attacking the
| rich is an excuse for the state to gain ever more power. It's not
| about helping the poor.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Is this the best example? It looks like France's dept to gdp is
| significantly lower than the US (110% vs 122%)
| soared wrote:
| How do we know that?
| pvg wrote:
| 1000+ comment chonkthread at the time
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787654
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for
| lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s.
|
| These analyses never mention the fact that the consumption of
| wealth by the government has vastly expanded. Where does one
| think that wealth came from?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I live in a country with wealth tax (Norway), and I'm a bit
| conflicted on it.
|
| On one side, it is effectively the only real tax a many in the
| "ownership class" are paying - relative to their wealth.
|
| On the other side, it is a really problematic tax for
| entrepreneurs. It is downright horrible for startups and scaleups
| - critical funds that should be used to grow your company, has to
| be given out in dividends to founders, so that they can afford to
| pay the wealth tax.
|
| And it is unfair - as it is a tax that foreign owners don't have
| to pay, but domestic owners have to pay. One natural consequence
| of this has been that the wealthy people are simply...leaving the
| country. (our total / combined max wealth tax is 1.1%)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > false claim that wealth inequality is solely due to more
| startups and not a real problem says a lot.
|
| The article assumes that wealth inequality is bad, but never
| explains it.
|
| The thing is, people all have different abilities and make
| different choices in life. These lead inevitably to different
| results. In order to make everyone equal, peoples' freedoms must
| be taken away.
| nojs wrote:
| > You would think, after having been on the side of labor in its
| fight with capital for almost two centuries, that the far left
| would be happy that labor has finally prevailed.
|
| PG does make a reasonable point here. Capital is much less of a
| barrier than in the past for starting a business. A small group
| of people with no outside investment can do a lot of damage.
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