Yup. The highest voted comment is even nearly verbatim.
What I will say is that it has become trivially easy to increase my wealth since selling my company. I've been retired for ten years and make more than I ever did, largely by doing nothing. I don't even manage most of my own finances.
It's kind of rigged. On a whim, I bought $20k worth of Tesla at $24 - because I could afford to risk the money. It was an impulse buy with my only research being reading a bunch of forum posts.
Most people can't risk that, even if they could technically spend that. The list goes on.
It's not 'fair' and very different than what I was used to.
I now have most of my money invested. I don't actually do anything, I don't even make many of my investment choices.
Some things I am involved physically in, for example, I bought a bunch of acres with an in-place commercial wild blueberry harvest. I like to be active with that, but I don't really have to. I just enjoy the work.
When I sold, I spent like a drunken sailor, after taxes. However, I've since recouped all of that spending and then some.
It's much easier to make money when you have money to start with. Or so it appears. Most of it, I leave alone and have managed for me.
Why is it not "fair"?
You earned that money, its yours to spend or invest how you see fit. If your company would have failed, you would have lost not only money, but also time, and the opportunity cost of doing something else (aka being an employee).
Yeah, that's why I put it in quotes. From an effort point of view, both mental and physical, I don't really do a whole lot but I make significantly more than people who do much more.
From a sort-of-physics view, I get more work out of less energy than most. It's not equal. It's okay, it's just not well balanced from an objective viewpoint. I am not sure if 'fair' is the right word.
it is possible to do hard "work" and produce zero value. Example: digging a large hole in the middle of the desert.
Conversely it is easy to do little "work" and produce tremendous value
Example: writing a script in 15 mins that automates hours of tedious CSV combinations and data grooming (I used this example bc I once did this and saved about 15 weekly hours of a highly paid financial analyst's time)
So now we are clear on work != value in the real world
I'll quickly tackle your investment income -- that was a risk buying 20k worth of Telsa. That easily could have gone to zero as an early stage tech growth stock. When buying a stock you are putting your money on a bet that the company will provide more value to the economy. When your bet pays off it is because the company is doing better and presumably, if following all relevant laws, providing enhanced value to the economy.
There is no law of physics in economics. In fact this thinking is practically dangerous and at the least fosters the wrong attitude towards success. Your success is not someone else's loss. In fact in a market economy, your success will ALWAYS be another's gain since they voluntarily gave you money for a good/service they couldnt do as efficiently as you could.
Economics is NOT a zero sum game. You can quite literally create value from nothing and grow the proverbial pie of value in the world. If you work in programming you realize this quickly.
The downside to a market economy is that work and value will never be a fair ratio. While in some ways unfortunate the more unfortunate alternative is everyone produces equal value from doing equal work. But take a minute to think critically about how that would be possible. I'll give you a hint -- innovation and ingenuity would plummet to zero.
See, it wasn't really a risk for me to spend 20k. Comparatively speaking, that's probably something like a minimum wage employee risking a dime.
That's the inherent unfairness in the system. I can just give 20k to my favorite charity and not even be mildly impacted. Chances are, I won't even save the receipt to give to my accountant for tax purposes. That'd buy someone a nice new car.
It's not fair. I am definitely at an advantage. Now, I earned that advantage. I worked for that advantage. That doesn't make it any more fair.
I'm not happy with the word fair, as it implies morality. I'm also far more able to help those who need it, and I do. So, from a moral viewpoint, I'm very much okay with it. That doesn't really make it fair, however.
What's Joe Sixpack going to do by investing a dime in a single go? Not much. I made enough on just Tesla to buy Joe's house, spending the equivalent of a dime.
It is what it is, but it's a huge advantage. I'm not suggesting it's morally unacceptable, just a reality. I'm not even suggesting we can change the system, just expressing the reality.
They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took the price tags off her clothes so that her nanny would not see them. “I take the label off our six-dollar bread,” she said.
She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”
Then how about paying your nanny enough so that she can also afford six-dollar loaf of bread now and then, also?
The remedies for this kind of "guilt" are ready available and quite simple, actually.
When this nanny starts a nanny management company and sends nannies to people who need them, she will probably earn enough to afford the six dollar bread.
Why is there so much hate towards the rich on HN? A few years ago HN was all about sharing your projects and talking about technology, completely different than what it is now.
There's nothing wrong with being rich, or buying $6 bread. I think most of the hate is towards people who feel guilty about being rich. It's hard to empathise with people in situations that have simple solutions.
It's really not that simple. The plans that people are likely to come up with and the amount of motivation they'll feel to follow through with them have a lot to do with their personal background. There are a lot of reasons that it might be easy for you to imagine starting a business and making a success out of it. But you shouldn't be confident that those same reasons will come into play in the life of this nanny.
Seems like you're striving for equality of outcome, instead of equality of opportunity. And I'm the first person to concede that there is no real equality of opportunity per say, a lot of individual factors come into play. At the same time, say if your parents had the foresight to save money for you to go get a good education/etc (personally I had to take loans), does that mean that those people should be taxed and their money redistributed to those who did not save for their children? Think about this as a software developer, what kind of incentives would that provide, what kind of behaviors would that encourage?
What does any of that have to do with the nanny? Anyone who feels guilty about how little their nanny earns is free to either (i) pay the nanny more or (ii) do without a nanny.
I don't have a problem with someone inheriting a few mil. Once you get beyond 10M, I think the money should be redistributed to society, but you said, When this nanny starts a nanny management company and sends nannies to people who need them, she will probably earn enough to afford the six dollar bread. So, I find it ironic that you're telling the nanny to pull herself up by her bootstraps, while failing to acknowledge that her employer inherited her wealth.
Thats because I don't see anything wrong with inheritance, in an utopia everybody might work for the benefit of the community as a whole, but that will never happen. Ask your plumber when he is digging in shit whether he is doing it out of the goodness of his heart, and get back to me with the answer.
I'd rather incentives would be such as to let people amass as much benefit for themselves as possible, and then if they want to voluntarily give back - all the power to them. Forced redistributions give wrong signals to people. If anything there should only be a flat tax, say 10% all types of economic activity (work/investment/etc...), and the government should provide as many services as that 10% can afford, not perpetually expand the list.
Forced redistributions give wrong signals to people.
What signal does does it send to people when you allow a privileged few to inherit (for practical purposes) anything they want without having had to put any work in to get it? What signal does it send when those same people can use what they've inherited to buy policies that only increase the discrepancy between them and their plumbers - who are doing hard work that few of us would enjoy?
It doesn't make sense for individuals to martyr[1] themselves for a cause. The same goes for people who pick on climate change campaigners who fly in planes or still drive cars.
But it does make sense that if you, as a wealthy individual, feel guilty about things like this support moves that improve equality overall in society: Medicare for all, higher minimum wages, good labor laws, good social safety nets, uniform access to education, maybe UBI, etc.
[1] this is probably a bad word choice but it's all I could come up with on the moment.
If you feel so guilty about how little your nanny makes, so much so that you're pulling tags off everything you buy, maybe it's not a bad idea to pay your nanny a little above the going rate. Partially for your own sake as well as hers.
I also think only supporting larger movements is the wrong way to go about things. The more local the problem, the more impact you can have on it. Support Medicare for All? That's certainly good to do if you feel that's right, but that's going to be a long, drawn-out battle. Paying your nanny a little bit more? That's very easy to do and can immediately improve someone's life.
This a bizarre view of virtue. Instead of displaying and modeling virtuous behavior yourself, it's sufficient to tell other people that they should be more virtuous.
She's presumably paying the nanny some kind of market rate. If instead she were to bump the pay up well above market rate, she would either attract significant competition over that particular nanny job (presumably not the goal), or be effectively giving a large cash handout to someone basically on the basis of happening to be around at the time. It doesn't seem obvious that this is a useful or desirable course of action, either on the basis of addressing inequality in the economic system or optimizing your interpersonal relationships.
(Also, I feel like I may have some kind of disconnect here, because I'm not anywhere near those income levels, but $6 bread doesn't scan as horribly unreasonable to me.)
If you're paying that particular nanny for exceptional value that is provided on the basis of her individual relationship with you, that's great and a good idea.
If you're paying it to whoever the nanny happens to be because you feel guilty about being rich, that's got less of a rationale behind it.
I can't imagine any parent hiring a nanny to care for their children who would hire "whoever the nanny happens to be". Your point is valid for a lot of other cases, but not this one.
I like tempered capitalism, but sometimes communities are just better if we're not ashamed to pay over market rate if we can afford it. I straight up don't care that my tip for a coffee is a buck and a quarter for a $2.75 coffee, cafe workers don't make enough money.
That's about the price I pay for 400 g of traditionally baked high-quality bread. It comes directly from a bakery in a paper bag and has no price tag anyway. I buy such bread two or three times a week – it remains fine for about a week in a wooden bread box but fresh bread is always best …
If you have a $250,000 household income, you would need to pay your nanny half of that to have equal income, but why would you expect or want to have equal income in the first place? If you get a raise, do you pay your nanny more even though she's doing the same work?
If people give you money, you earned it. If you want somebody else to have your money, give it to them, they will have earned it. If you aren't willing to give somebody your money, then they have not earned it.
He wasn't suggesting giving the nanny equal income, but just enough that a $6 load of bread would not be unaffordable. (You don't have to be very rich to afford the occasional $6 treat.)
I think the waters on questions like these have been significantly muddied by a tax system that really does benefit the wealthy. This and we have around half of congressional lawmakers wanting more tax cuts for the wealthy, as though things weren't already easy enough for them. It's therefore entirely reasonable to imagine that the average person would feel resentment toward the wealthy and that the wealthy, in fact, should feel self-conscious about that.
The article begins with a dubious premise, namely, that how much wealth a person has is of moral consequence per se AND a matter of public concern. It isn't. (Side note: many people regard any discussion about income and assets with people other than a few select individuals in poor taste regardless of income.) As Harry Frankfurt has written, inequality is not interesting or relevant per se. What is relevant are things like poverty or the buying of influence.
An obsession with inequality per se stems from either confusion about what is relevant, moral confusion, jealousy or fondness for ham-handed and even immoral solutions to problems of public concern that the misuse or pursuit wealth can create.
The cleaning staff won't envy your $6 bread if you're also spending twice as much as strictly necessary on your cleaning staff. That is, if you buy $6 bread instead of $3 bread, you should also be paying $21/hour to your cleaners instead of $10.50/hour.
If the judgment you fear is "this person values bread more highly than people", then just make sure you value people more than bread.
Don't peel the price tags off. They know how much they're paid. They can guess how much your bread costs, because poor people are required by economic necessity to know what consumer goods are worth, and often also how much it costs for market substitutes and DIY ersatz copies. If you buy a fancy leather couch for $12000, the maid will know that you could have haggled the salesperson down to $8000, and maybe also that the same factory makes a similar fabric-upholstered couch under a different brand name, and sells it for $2250, or $1500 if you rent a box truck and drive to North Carolina to pick it up yourself. $500 if you ask Shady McLoadingdock about "damaged goods". $350 if you also give him some of the finer varieties of cannabis grown in your state. Poor people build and upholster all the couches. They drive all the trucks that move them around the country. They work retail and sales in the furniture showrooms. They have to hustle for everything just to make ends meet. Don't think you can fool any one of them just by yanking off a price tag.
The only thing rich folks should be embarrassed about is assuming poor people are stupid.
> His wife, whom I interviewed separately, was so uneasy with the fact that they lived in a penthouse that she had asked the post office to change their mailing address so that it would include the floor number instead of “PH,” a term she found “elite and snobby.”
Sorry, but fuck outta here with that logic. If you're uncomfortable with living in a penthouse, then you should've not gotten a penthouse. Y'all bought it because y'all wanted it. (Or maybe her husband wanted it and she was more whatever about it?)
51 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadWhat I will say is that it has become trivially easy to increase my wealth since selling my company. I've been retired for ten years and make more than I ever did, largely by doing nothing. I don't even manage most of my own finances.
It's kind of rigged. On a whim, I bought $20k worth of Tesla at $24 - because I could afford to risk the money. It was an impulse buy with my only research being reading a bunch of forum posts.
Most people can't risk that, even if they could technically spend that. The list goes on.
It's not 'fair' and very different than what I was used to.
If you have a moment, I wonder if you could expand on that.
Some things I am involved physically in, for example, I bought a bunch of acres with an in-place commercial wild blueberry harvest. I like to be active with that, but I don't really have to. I just enjoy the work.
When I sold, I spent like a drunken sailor, after taxes. However, I've since recouped all of that spending and then some.
It's much easier to make money when you have money to start with. Or so it appears. Most of it, I leave alone and have managed for me.
From a sort-of-physics view, I get more work out of less energy than most. It's not equal. It's okay, it's just not well balanced from an objective viewpoint. I am not sure if 'fair' is the right word.
it is possible to do hard "work" and produce zero value. Example: digging a large hole in the middle of the desert.
Conversely it is easy to do little "work" and produce tremendous value Example: writing a script in 15 mins that automates hours of tedious CSV combinations and data grooming (I used this example bc I once did this and saved about 15 weekly hours of a highly paid financial analyst's time)
So now we are clear on work != value in the real world
I'll quickly tackle your investment income -- that was a risk buying 20k worth of Telsa. That easily could have gone to zero as an early stage tech growth stock. When buying a stock you are putting your money on a bet that the company will provide more value to the economy. When your bet pays off it is because the company is doing better and presumably, if following all relevant laws, providing enhanced value to the economy.
There is no law of physics in economics. In fact this thinking is practically dangerous and at the least fosters the wrong attitude towards success. Your success is not someone else's loss. In fact in a market economy, your success will ALWAYS be another's gain since they voluntarily gave you money for a good/service they couldnt do as efficiently as you could.
Economics is NOT a zero sum game. You can quite literally create value from nothing and grow the proverbial pie of value in the world. If you work in programming you realize this quickly.
The downside to a market economy is that work and value will never be a fair ratio. While in some ways unfortunate the more unfortunate alternative is everyone produces equal value from doing equal work. But take a minute to think critically about how that would be possible. I'll give you a hint -- innovation and ingenuity would plummet to zero.
That's the inherent unfairness in the system. I can just give 20k to my favorite charity and not even be mildly impacted. Chances are, I won't even save the receipt to give to my accountant for tax purposes. That'd buy someone a nice new car.
It's not fair. I am definitely at an advantage. Now, I earned that advantage. I worked for that advantage. That doesn't make it any more fair.
I'm not happy with the word fair, as it implies morality. I'm also far more able to help those who need it, and I do. So, from a moral viewpoint, I'm very much okay with it. That doesn't really make it fair, however.
What's Joe Sixpack going to do by investing a dime in a single go? Not much. I made enough on just Tesla to buy Joe's house, spending the equivalent of a dime.
It is what it is, but it's a huge advantage. I'm not suggesting it's morally unacceptable, just a reality. I'm not even suggesting we can change the system, just expressing the reality.
If you've already seen this article and a healthy discussion, you're free to move along.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20...
She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”
Then how about paying your nanny enough so that she can also afford six-dollar loaf of bread now and then, also?
The remedies for this kind of "guilt" are ready available and quite simple, actually.
Why is there so much hate towards the rich on HN? A few years ago HN was all about sharing your projects and talking about technology, completely different than what it is now.
I think you missed this part.
I'd rather incentives would be such as to let people amass as much benefit for themselves as possible, and then if they want to voluntarily give back - all the power to them. Forced redistributions give wrong signals to people. If anything there should only be a flat tax, say 10% all types of economic activity (work/investment/etc...), and the government should provide as many services as that 10% can afford, not perpetually expand the list.
What signal does does it send to people when you allow a privileged few to inherit (for practical purposes) anything they want without having had to put any work in to get it? What signal does it send when those same people can use what they've inherited to buy policies that only increase the discrepancy between them and their plumbers - who are doing hard work that few of us would enjoy?
But it does make sense that if you, as a wealthy individual, feel guilty about things like this support moves that improve equality overall in society: Medicare for all, higher minimum wages, good labor laws, good social safety nets, uniform access to education, maybe UBI, etc.
[1] this is probably a bad word choice but it's all I could come up with on the moment.
I also think only supporting larger movements is the wrong way to go about things. The more local the problem, the more impact you can have on it. Support Medicare for All? That's certainly good to do if you feel that's right, but that's going to be a long, drawn-out battle. Paying your nanny a little bit more? That's very easy to do and can immediately improve someone's life.
(Also, I feel like I may have some kind of disconnect here, because I'm not anywhere near those income levels, but $6 bread doesn't scan as horribly unreasonable to me.)
Or be paying someone in exchange for value. Loyalty and discretion are valuable. Why shouldn't someone compensate someone for that?
If you're paying it to whoever the nanny happens to be because you feel guilty about being rich, that's got less of a rationale behind it.
"Doing right by those around me, even if it doesn't change the whole world" is another way you could look at it.
I agree that it seems she's a bit over-triggered by that $6 loaf of bread, at least.
That's about the price I pay for 400 g of traditionally baked high-quality bread. It comes directly from a bakery in a paper bag and has no price tag anyway. I buy such bread two or three times a week – it remains fine for about a week in a wooden bread box but fresh bread is always best …
If you have a $250,000 household income, you would need to pay your nanny half of that to have equal income, but why would you expect or want to have equal income in the first place? If you get a raise, do you pay your nanny more even though she's doing the same work?
If people give you money, you earned it. If you want somebody else to have your money, give it to them, they will have earned it. If you aren't willing to give somebody your money, then they have not earned it.
Are you really sure about that? You may want to revisit this assumption.
I believe this is called humble-bragging.
The article begins with a dubious premise, namely, that how much wealth a person has is of moral consequence per se AND a matter of public concern. It isn't. (Side note: many people regard any discussion about income and assets with people other than a few select individuals in poor taste regardless of income.) As Harry Frankfurt has written, inequality is not interesting or relevant per se. What is relevant are things like poverty or the buying of influence.
An obsession with inequality per se stems from either confusion about what is relevant, moral confusion, jealousy or fondness for ham-handed and even immoral solutions to problems of public concern that the misuse or pursuit wealth can create.
If the judgment you fear is "this person values bread more highly than people", then just make sure you value people more than bread.
Don't peel the price tags off. They know how much they're paid. They can guess how much your bread costs, because poor people are required by economic necessity to know what consumer goods are worth, and often also how much it costs for market substitutes and DIY ersatz copies. If you buy a fancy leather couch for $12000, the maid will know that you could have haggled the salesperson down to $8000, and maybe also that the same factory makes a similar fabric-upholstered couch under a different brand name, and sells it for $2250, or $1500 if you rent a box truck and drive to North Carolina to pick it up yourself. $500 if you ask Shady McLoadingdock about "damaged goods". $350 if you also give him some of the finer varieties of cannabis grown in your state. Poor people build and upholster all the couches. They drive all the trucks that move them around the country. They work retail and sales in the furniture showrooms. They have to hustle for everything just to make ends meet. Don't think you can fool any one of them just by yanking off a price tag.
The only thing rich folks should be embarrassed about is assuming poor people are stupid.
She lives in a different world, so it's very likely that she has no idea how much a couch costs by looking at it.
Sorry, but fuck outta here with that logic. If you're uncomfortable with living in a penthouse, then you should've not gotten a penthouse. Y'all bought it because y'all wanted it. (Or maybe her husband wanted it and she was more whatever about it?)
Own your purchasing decisions.