8 ms·

It sucks, but what's the solution? Because let's face it, the primary purpose of "being rich" is to provide for one's family, at least from my point of view.

• dozzie 10y ago
  > If I work my ass off it's to make sure I can help my kids do better than I did. > What's the point of being "wealthy" if [...] You confuse "being wealthy" with "working one's ass off".
  • oldmanjay 10y ago
    Since that isn't even close to what the OP said it's pretty clear you're dedicated to the narrative of the evil rich. Keep plugging! It'll stick soon
    • rgbrenner 10y ago
      where did the parent say anything about "evil rich"? At the moment, your post is the only one on the page along those lines.. so it seems to be a narrative you're injecting. Edit: also, whether or not someone worked for their money, says nothing about good or evil. I'm sure we can all point out people in both camps.
    • terrywilcox 10y ago
      I believe you've swapped the narrative. A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids. Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem.
      • chinese_dan 10y ago
        "A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids." We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). Financial management should be a bigger part of our education system. "Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem." It has never and should never imply wealth. When I was in college, I worked my ass off and studied for an exam one time. I barely passed. Do you think this is fair? I probably worked harder than many of my classmates. Obtaining wealth involves: timing, hard work, intelligence, and discipline...with a little bit of luck thrown into the mix. Most wealthy people in the US did not inherit it. Before claiming that the system is rigged (which seems to be pretty common these days in our presidential campaign), we need to take a hard look at the responsibility of the individual.
        • ethanbond 10y ago
          Obtaining wealth is mostly timing/luck. There are plenty of hard working, well disciplined, intelligent poor people. There are plenty of lazy, stupid rich people. There's virtually no correlation between any of the things you named and wealth. The question then becomes how much should a lucky person be "rewarded," or how much should an unlucky person be "punished." A lot of people feel that being unlucky shouldn't mean living in perpetual debt, for example, or going bankrupt because you broke a leg. A lot of people feel that our society could gain a lot by helping those unlucky people rise to their potential.
          • vixen99 10y ago
            Where's your source for all these assertions?
            • ethanbond 10y ago
              Well using IQ as a proxy for intelligence, you can find many sources that say there's no significant correlation between IQ and wealth (https://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm https://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/intlwlth.htm). Many studies find that your parents' wealth is the single greatest influencer of your wealth (http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf). I would say that who your parents are is about as "lucky" a thing could be, considering it's totally independent of who you are or decisions you make. My only other assertions being that smart poor people and dumb rich people exist? I hope that's self-evident to anyone on this board...
  • dudul 10y ago
    Maybe. I didn't see any figure in the article to define what "rich" means in this context. Different persons have different definitions. I don't think I'm technically part of the 1%, but I do make very good money, I just work hard for it and wasn't born with it.
  • staticint 10y ago
    He works his ass off to be wealthy. He didn't suggest that is the only way to be wealthy.
    • logfromblammo 10y ago
      The set of people who worked their asses off and the set of people who were considered wealthy when they reached the median retirement age (or at the time of their death) don't necessary have a high degree of overlap. Ancestor post stated that the intersection was not equal to the empty set. Its reply post implied that the intersection was not equal to the union, and perhaps that the intersection was not even a significant fraction of the wealthy set. They were speaking past each other. Wealthy people like to overemphasize the contribution of hard work to their own wealthiness, which has a side effect of encouraging non-wealthy people to fall into exploitable patterns in their attempt to become wealthy. If you want to get rich, don't work hard. All that hard work is just going to distract you from what you should be doing--acquiring ownership of moneymaking machines that are either fully autonomous or have a very high multiplier for turning your own work into spendable money. You can buy them, or you can build them, but you'll have a hard time doing either unless you spend a lot of time around wealthy people, leeching off their knowledge of how the machines operate.
  • figers 10y ago
    They don't have to be mutually exclusive...
• adamnemecek 10y ago
  Fix the fucking educational system and stop wasting people's time.
  • busterarm 10y ago
    As a jumping off point, undo the damage Ronald Reagan did to it.
    • refurb 10y ago
      Reagan was last president almost 30 years ago. Time to blame someone else.
      • jowiar 10y ago
        Sam Brownback?
      • ethanbond 10y ago
        Yeah, everyone knows that causality has a hard limit of 25 years! It's a ruse to imply that Reagan's policies don't play a role in this. GP didn't claim that he's exclusively responsible, just that correcting those mistakes would be a good place to start. Do you think that kids aren't thrown in jail every single day for war-on-drug offenses simply because Reagan was president almost 30 years ago?
        • refurb 10y ago
          just that correcting those mistakes would be a good place to start That's my point. Regan has been dead for a while, he can't fix things now. If you don't like how things are going, blame the current people in power.
          • ethanbond 10y ago
            Nobody asked a dead man to fix things. GP asked us/the govt to fix the problems the dead man created.
• dleslie 10y ago
  The solution is to diminish the income gap. If we believe that few employers are happy to carry employees who provide a net productivity deficit, then on the face of it we cannot assume that those who are impoverished and employed are not meaningfully productive. The question we ought to ask ourselves is how much disparity is acceptable to allow across the incomes of productive individuals; or more bluntly, why do the executive and management typically earn several orders of magnitude more than the producers? Is it necessary to encourage upward motivation, or is it exploitative and predatory?
  • Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    Anything that increases social mobility would be good. America is doing quite poorly in terms of social mobility, compared to other top-tier countries.
    • dogma1138 10y ago
      I wouldn't be on it, being poor in America still means you have more money than everyone in the world, including more than the middle class in most EU nations. Social mobility in Europe is also really not great especially once you adjust for the immigration, you also need to account for the fact that social mobility studies in Europe are based on the income level of parents and grandparents, both WW2/Eastern Block and immigration from Africa, Asia and the Middle east inflate the social mobility figures considerably.
      • ethanbond 10y ago
        > I wouldn't be on it, being poor in America still means you have more money than everyone in the world, including more than the middle class in most EU nations. Source?
        • dogma1138 10y ago
          OECD median income per country: http://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm http://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm The US poverty line household income is $22,541, this is more than the median income in Poland, and not that far from the median household income in developed countries like Belgium.
• dforrestwilson1 10y ago
  Not sure why you were down-voted. It would seem to be a valid point that offspring are a motivation for achieving success and wealth.
• rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  If you worked very hard to become rich in your life (and presumably secure a future for your children), then congratulations, your hard work paid off. If your children squander your fortune and squabble over their inheritance, how you feel about that is entirely up to you. Warren Buffet said he would donate the vast majority of his wealth to charity upon his death. When asked about inherentance for his children, he said that a couple hundred thousand each would be enough. Parting thought: if your children waste the fortune that you worked so hard to build, that says just as much about you as it does your children. But this is all hypothetical. I'm sure you have fine kids.
  • dudul 10y ago
    Note that I wasn't talking about inheritance or legacy. The article makes the point that people with money are able to spend more time helping their children, or maybe pay for a tutor, or send them to a great private school. Basically spending money to help them learn how to be successful and be happy. I don't think I'll ever reach a point where I have a "fortune" to give to my kids :)
  • kbenson 10y ago
    (View this as a follow-on, not a counter. I agree with both you and the GP). Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels. It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion. For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.
• pfraze 10y ago
  I generally agree, but we benefit from realizing everyone's potential, and this study seems to indicate we're not doing so now. There's also a political angle; Meritocracy is an important justification for American capitalism. If you can't make the argument that the system is beneficial to the whole, then there's going to be support to overturn the system.
• Retric 10y ago
  Wealth is associated with having more kids, not just weather kids. Which provides an evolutionary incentive on it's own.
  • vixen99 10y ago
    on its own.
• rch 10y ago
  You're probably correct in the N+1 generational context, but there are good reasons to consider policies that mitigate entrenched multi-generational aristocracy.
• bbctol 10y ago
  The arguments you present seem orthogonal to the point. What's the relevance of people wanting to be wealthy in order to give their kids a better life? It's not as if we should improve equality by making sure children have worse lives than their parents.