5 ms·

What the Rich Won’t Tell You

45 points by bspn 9y ago

plandis 9y ago
This was already posted earlier this week, wasn't it?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- KGIII 9y ago
  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.
  - Diederich 9y ago
    > What I will say is that it has become trivially easy to increase my wealth since selling my company. ... largely by doing nothing. If you have a moment, I wonder if you could expand on that.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      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.
  - googletazer 9y ago
    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).
    - KGIII 9y ago
      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.
      - holograham 9y ago
        you are confusing "work" with "value" 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.
- uoaei 9y ago
  Not everyone reads HN obsessively. If you've already seen this article and a healthy discussion, you're free to move along.
molecule 9y ago
Recent submissions and discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20tell%20you&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20...
kafkaesq 9y ago
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.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- googletazer 9y ago
  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.
  - mwambua 9y ago
    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.
  - davesque 9y ago
    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.
davesque 9y ago
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.
whipoodle 9y ago
The problem with the rich is how much wealth they extract, not how much their couch cost.
- danielam 9y ago
  And how that wealth is used. 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.
  - whipoodle 9y ago
    No, no.
logfromblammo 9y ago
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.
- dfrey 9y ago
  They don't sell the $6 bread in the grocery store that the maid shops at and they don't sell $12000 couches where she buys her furniture. 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.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    She certainly works in that world for a number of hours every day.
nunez 9y ago
> 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?) Own your purchasing decisions.

45 points by bspn 9y ago

plandis 9y ago

This was already posted earlier this week, wasn't it?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
KGIII 9y ago
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.
- Diederich 9y ago
  > What I will say is that it has become trivially easy to increase my wealth since selling my company. ... largely by doing nothing. If you have a moment, I wonder if you could expand on that.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    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.
- googletazer 9y ago
  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).
  - KGIII 9y ago
    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.
    - holograham 9y ago
      you are confusing "work" with "value" 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.
uoaei 9y ago
Not everyone reads HN obsessively. If you've already seen this article and a healthy discussion, you're free to move along.

molecule 9y ago

Recent submissions and discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20tell%20you&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=what%20the%20rich%20won%27t%20...

kafkaesq 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
googletazer 9y ago
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.
- mwambua 9y ago
  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.
- davesque 9y ago
  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.

davesque 9y ago

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.

whipoodle 9y ago

The problem with the rich is how much wealth they extract, not how much their couch cost.

danielam 9y ago
And how that wealth is used. 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.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  No, no.

logfromblammo 9y ago

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.

dfrey 9y ago
They don't sell the $6 bread in the grocery store that the maid shops at and they don't sell $12000 couches where she buys her furniture. 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.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  She certainly works in that world for a number of hours every day.

nunez 9y ago

> 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?) Own your purchasing decisions.