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Overall, this article is a tissue of misleading statistics, anecdotes, and lack of context. The largest figure mentioned is 4 billion pounds; which is about as

by gwern 9y ago

Overall, this article is a tissue of misleading statistics, anecdotes, and lack of context. The largest figure mentioned is 4 billion pounds; which is about as much as you might earn by selling an odd video game about crude blocks to Microsoft. Wow, so impress, much 'preservation of power'. The House of Lords rhetoric is also odd - how do anecdotes about a largely inactive house they've been mostly expelled out of show that they "preserved their power"? Or take this one: > The figures for Scotland are even more striking. Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies. More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families. In total they hold some 2.24m acres, largely in the Lowlands. 'private individuals and companies' != 'aristocracy', by any means. You could say something very similar about the USA, which has not had an aristocracy in 200+ years - because all countries have considerable wealth inequality. And, uh, what exactly are we supposed to take away from dicing Scottish landholdings into "estates of more than 5,000 acres"? Perhaps we are supposed to be astonished by the fact that rich people buy London real estate and "rent" it out? Or perhaps we are supposed to be impressed by > According to the 2016 Sunday Times Rich List, 30 peers are each worth £100m or more. So in other words, they're collectively worth about as much as Magic Leap or Slack? Truly impressive, I see now that England is ruled as much as ever by the aristocracy, it is merely hidden better. Hang the bastards!

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I think you're trying too hard. Minecraft is a phenomenon. Why would you feel the need to talk it down as an "odd video game" just so that its price doesn't seem so high. You apparently also think that an individual being worth the same as 1/30th of a highly successful business even though their main claim to fame was being born to the right person isn't remarkable.
- gwern 9y ago
  If Minecraft were the only video game in history, or the most successful one, or the majority of the video game industry, then you might have a point. But it is merely one of many franchises or players along with Mario, League of Legends, Starcraft, Dota, WoW, Angry Birds etc etc. That is my point: none of these numbers are given any kind of context and OP is relying on sheer innumeracy to intimidate the reader. "4 billion pounds! Wow, that's a lot!" Actually no, it's not, it's a tiny portion of an entire economy (UK national wealth is more like 9000 billion pounds). What OP needs to do is show that aristocrats control a large and relatively unchanged from historical levels of the economy, and they fail abysmally at that, to the point where you have to conclude the opposite: if the richest aristocrat they can find is that poor and these are the best statistics they can come up with, that rather disproves their case. > You apparently also think that an individual being worth the same as 1/30th of a highly successful business even though their main claim to fame was being born to the right person isn't remarkable. It isn't. The Forbes list has many non-aristocrats who inherited much or all of their money and are vastly wealthier. Consider the Waltons heirs. As I said, wealth inequality is nothing new or interesting.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    Surely you choose Minecraft because it was unusual, unusual in delivering so much wealth to one person. The creator of Mario isn't as rich is he? You could point to a lot of people who have contributed amazing things to society and who aren't even millionaires, but you did exactly the opposite. You found a game dev who was very unusually a Billionaire, then you talked down the product that made him so rich as if he wasn't even special. You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either. Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this?
    - gwern 9y ago
      > Surely you choose Minecraft because it was unusual, unusual in delivering so much wealth to one person. Notch shared a lot of the money, hence my focus on the total sales price. Lots of people have gotten extremely rich on an individual level from video games, if you want to nitpick about that: Gabe Newell or Palmer Luckey. There are other Asian examples, and a number of billionaires benefit heavily from video games, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. None of this affects my point: no matter how you slice it, the quoted aristocrat is not particularly wealthy. > You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either. That's literally from the article. > Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this? Because I am incensed by lying with statistics. There is no excuse for lines like "Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies". That is lying to the reader and trying to trick them. Unforgivable.
      - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
        The word inactive is not in the article. The article says the hereditery peers seldom turned up, not that the house of lords stopped having a say in how the country was run. The point the author is trying to make is the opposite of yours, that they rule without bothering to even give the appearance of interest in the affairs of those they rule over. Can you explain why you think the quote about 432 landowners is a lie and what it's trying to trick people into thinking? Can I also note that taking a noble stand against misinformation and misleading uses of numbers seems inconsistent with the points I've already taken issue with.
haspok 9y ago
I think the article implies - but does not state it explicitly, unfortunately - that the real problem is not that there are individuals with massive wealth or assets (that are almost impossible to get due to their limited availability, eg. land - google "leasehold" if you are not "astonished by the fact that rich people buy London real estate"), but rather that the source of their wealth is simply that they were born into it. A successful startup or enterpreneur achieves wealth because they create something that people want and are willing to pay for, in most cases on a non-zero sum playing field. And also if company A does X, and company B also tries to do X, there is a healthy competition in which there is usually a winning strategy for both companies. If there isn't, it is usually called a monopoly which is at least attempted to be limited by the law. In the case of nobility, the playing field is so much unlevel that this gives them "unjust" advantages from the start. Even worse, they did not "earn" their rights by creating something new that has value, for example. And nobody calls owning the bottom of a river a monopoly, not even when they get paid by simply allowing a bridge to be built over it (does this really not sound absurd to you?). The next question one could ask is if there is a better solution to this injustice. At this point in time, we already know several attempts at the solution, most of which failed spectacularly.
- gwern 9y ago
  If the real problem is simply inequality, it has done a bad job of arguing it. Many wealthy people in England are born into it regardless of whether their silver spoon came with an engraved coat of arms, many more wealthy people have little better claim to their London real estate (eg the Russian oligarchs), and more fundamentally, personal traits like intelligence are not earned or deserved either but are (currently) flukes of the genetic lottery + good luck in parental genes. Talking about the aristocracy, as opposed to all the much larger and more important groups, would be a severe case of missing the big picture, and runs up against all the ranting in the article & title about the aristocracy, so I am pretty sure that is not what they were aiming at in the first place.

by gwern 9y ago

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

I think you're trying too hard. Minecraft is a phenomenon. Why would you feel the need to talk it down as an "odd video game" just so that its price doesn't seem so high. You apparently also think that an individual being worth the same as 1/30th of a highly successful business even though their main claim to fame was being born to the right person isn't remarkable.

gwern 9y ago
If Minecraft were the only video game in history, or the most successful one, or the majority of the video game industry, then you might have a point. But it is merely one of many franchises or players along with Mario, League of Legends, Starcraft, Dota, WoW, Angry Birds etc etc. That is my point: none of these numbers are given any kind of context and OP is relying on sheer innumeracy to intimidate the reader. "4 billion pounds! Wow, that's a lot!" Actually no, it's not, it's a tiny portion of an entire economy (UK national wealth is more like 9000 billion pounds). What OP needs to do is show that aristocrats control a large and relatively unchanged from historical levels of the economy, and they fail abysmally at that, to the point where you have to conclude the opposite: if the richest aristocrat they can find is that poor and these are the best statistics they can come up with, that rather disproves their case. > You apparently also think that an individual being worth the same as 1/30th of a highly successful business even though their main claim to fame was being born to the right person isn't remarkable. It isn't. The Forbes list has many non-aristocrats who inherited much or all of their money and are vastly wealthier. Consider the Waltons heirs. As I said, wealth inequality is nothing new or interesting.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  Surely you choose Minecraft because it was unusual, unusual in delivering so much wealth to one person. The creator of Mario isn't as rich is he? You could point to a lot of people who have contributed amazing things to society and who aren't even millionaires, but you did exactly the opposite. You found a game dev who was very unusually a Billionaire, then you talked down the product that made him so rich as if he wasn't even special. You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either. Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this?
  - gwern 9y ago
    > Surely you choose Minecraft because it was unusual, unusual in delivering so much wealth to one person. Notch shared a lot of the money, hence my focus on the total sales price. Lots of people have gotten extremely rich on an individual level from video games, if you want to nitpick about that: Gabe Newell or Palmer Luckey. There are other Asian examples, and a number of billionaires benefit heavily from video games, like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. None of this affects my point: no matter how you slice it, the quoted aristocrat is not particularly wealthy. > You also said the House of Lords is "largely inactive" which doesn't really seem connected with reality either. That's literally from the article. > Do you mind sharing why you're so keen to minimise this? Because I am incensed by lying with statistics. There is no excuse for lines like "Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies". That is lying to the reader and trying to trick them. Unforgivable.
    - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
      The word inactive is not in the article. The article says the hereditery peers seldom turned up, not that the house of lords stopped having a say in how the country was run. The point the author is trying to make is the opposite of yours, that they rule without bothering to even give the appearance of interest in the affairs of those they rule over. Can you explain why you think the quote about 432 landowners is a lie and what it's trying to trick people into thinking? Can I also note that taking a noble stand against misinformation and misleading uses of numbers seems inconsistent with the points I've already taken issue with.

haspok 9y ago

I think the article implies - but does not state it explicitly, unfortunately - that the real problem is not that there are individuals with massive wealth or assets (that are almost impossible to get due to their limited availability, eg. land - google "leasehold" if you are not "astonished by the fact that rich people buy London real estate"), but rather that the source of their wealth is simply that they were born into it. A successful startup or enterpreneur achieves wealth because they create something that people want and are willing to pay for, in most cases on a non-zero sum playing field. And also if company A does X, and company B also tries to do X, there is a healthy competition in which there is usually a winning strategy for both companies. If there isn't, it is usually called a monopoly which is at least attempted to be limited by the law. In the case of nobility, the playing field is so much unlevel that this gives them "unjust" advantages from the start. Even worse, they did not "earn" their rights by creating something new that has value, for example. And nobody calls owning the bottom of a river a monopoly, not even when they get paid by simply allowing a bridge to be built over it (does this really not sound absurd to you?). The next question one could ask is if there is a better solution to this injustice. At this point in time, we already know several attempts at the solution, most of which failed spectacularly.

gwern 9y ago
If the real problem is simply inequality, it has done a bad job of arguing it. Many wealthy people in England are born into it regardless of whether their silver spoon came with an engraved coat of arms, many more wealthy people have little better claim to their London real estate (eg the Russian oligarchs), and more fundamentally, personal traits like intelligence are not earned or deserved either but are (currently) flukes of the genetic lottery + good luck in parental genes. Talking about the aristocracy, as opposed to all the much larger and more important groups, would be a severe case of missing the big picture, and runs up against all the ranting in the article & title about the aristocracy, so I am pretty sure that is not what they were aiming at in the first place.