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Ask HN: What can we do to stop the rich from getting richer?

• alexashka 8y ago
  You already know, what you personally can do - nothing. Imagine asking what you can do, to stop the sun from rising tomorrow. Your question is not too far off. The world is going to go, the way it's going to go. If you've ever tried to get a relative or friend, or gasp yourself, to cease a harmful habit or pick up a good habit (getting in good shape, quitting smoking, etc) - you'll know how much or how little you can do to stop anyone, from doing anything. So really, the answer to your question is - pick something you know you should do, but aren't doing, and go do that with any consistency. Something that is unquestionably positive - not something along the lines of changing others. If you can stick with it, do one more, or do one less of what you know you shouldn't do. Repeat. If you can do that with any consistency - you'll quickly become a role model to some, and have a positive impact on society as a whole, which's what you seem to really be after. There's a path of violence - that appeals largely to young people, and then the path of peace, that one gets around to, usually when there's no more you can accomplish with violence, and lots to fix. Path of violence is thinking if only others were more like me, the world would be a better place. The path of peace is realizing that's a delusional thought, and that if you want to get along with others, that's a counter-productive way of living your life. Everyone wants to get along with others - not everyone is smart/wise/whatever enough to realize the place (violence) their attempts are coming from, is at least half the problem.
• ivanb 8y ago
  Capitalism will keep small players comfortable because if most people are comfortable with their existence there will not be a critical mass for a change. We will be fed and entertained. The equilibrium may shift due to individual greed of capitalists. If it gets bad enough something may change for a generation or two.
• sebazzz 8y ago
  Personally probably not much. But I was thinking: What if there was a upper cap on an individual wealth. For instance, 1 million dollars? And everything over that cap should go to "the community" (to be defined, maybe fix poverty, put it into scientific research, something to save our earth). Probably very short-sighted, but interesting topic nevertheless.
  • lostmsu 8y ago
    You are basically proposing communism in Silicon Valley, as there are no homes costing less than that :-D
  • Yetanfou 8y ago
    Just realise that the 'money game' is rigged, the deck is stacked and the house will win no matter what you do. That leaves but one way to 'win' this game and that is by not playing it. Yes, you need money but you do not need limitless amounts of it. You most certainly don't _need_ many of the products peddled by 'the rich' so that part of the game is easily avoided - just don't buy 'm. Use your money to become more independent of future money by buying land in an area which can support you and your family, either by producing stuff yourself or by buying it from people close-by - thereby avoiding giving money to 'the rich'. Don't buy into dependency through all sorts of long-term contracts, loans, credit cards, needless insurances and other such things. Given that you probably live in the USA I assume you need a car, what you do not need is the latest and greatest and certainly not a new one every other year. The same goes for all those electronic doodads which try to lure you into spending more and more of your waking hours staring at their mesmerising animations, all the while doing their best to serve their true masters. Home speakers which always listen to every conversation in your house was used as a dire prediction of times to come in novels like 1984, now it is supposed to the 'the thing to have for smart people'. Well, I'll just flick that light switch myself, thank you Alexa and Google and Siri. Mobile tracking beacons which communicate with billboards to show you tailored advertising, it might sound like something out of The Diamond Age but it happens right here, right now. To get rid of intrusive nonsense like that you need to take a good, deep look at that mobile device in your pocket and ask yourself how much of the software running on it is serving you, how much of it serves someone else. I could go on but I guess the gist of what I'm saying is clear: put your money where your mouth and thoughts are. That way you do not need to resort to such means as you suggest, you do not need to implement the next 'utopia' which is doomed to fail - viz. Venezuela for the last example of where such ideas lead.
• charlesism 8y ago
  In America, you would first need to improve the political system (ie: ranked choice voting, no more gerrymandering or disenfranchisement, prohibitions on lobbyists), and improve K-12 education. To accomplish that, you would need to exert more pressure on politicians than the lobbyists, who fight against such things, do. Since the lobbyists have more money, it would have to be social and peer pressure. Also, you would have to pressure individuals (ie: influential people, not their companies. Influential politicians, not their entire party). With that done, the obvious is possible. Raise taxes on the rich, crack down on tax havens, gut military spending, expand public heathcare, improve infrastructure, etc.
  • basch 8y ago
    at the end of the day, even if you fixed voting, gerrymandering and lobbying, as long as people can own newspapers/radio/tv, and amplify their voice; they will always be able to control: who is on the ballot, and who people vote for. MOST people dont have a substantial time invested in nuanced policy stance, they form an opinion based on what the tv or paper (or friends) says, and vote accordingly. democracy will always reduce itself to who can yell the loudest, who can create the most fear, who can be the most persuasive to the mass (even if not a sound factual argument.) and then every blue moon you will have a Trump, that finds a way to amplify their image on the cheap, by getting everyone to talk ABOUT them. all press being good press, and the bad press is free.
    • charlesism 8y ago
      There's a lot of truth to your comment. My hunch is that with less corruption, and better education, America would lessen inequality considerably. But catch me on a pessimistic day, I might say otherwise. As you suggest, just because something is a majority opinion, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
• kapauldo 8y ago
  Vote
• onion2k 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
  • cryptonector 8y ago
    That did not end well. The October revolution also didn't end well.
    • BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
      It went poorly, hello Terror, but the only sense in which it didn't end well is that the French realized that they actually did want an empire-building monarch after all, goodbye First Republic, hello Napoleon.
      • cryptonector 8y ago
        Did they? It's not like there was a referendum on whether to have an emperor, and then an election for who should be the emperor, and then periodic successive elections. It was all a disaster through and through. From La Terreur to Napoleon and his wars, it was a disaster. Worse than that, La Terreur set a pattern that has been repeated (and, sadly, "improved") in the many years since.
• nieksand 8y ago
  I don't care if the rich get richer, provided that the quality of life for the rest of us keeps going up too.
  • CamTin 8y ago
    Wealth isn't just about purchasing power, but about control. A small class of people controlling most of the wealth means that they can manipulate/buy the government and make our lives worse in ways that "quality of life" measured in something like the CPI can't fully capture.
    • winstonewert 8y ago
      It seems to me that we would should focus on is how to break the link between wealth and political power. If we could do that than a) we wouldn't care if some people were wealthier if we were all better off and b) the wealth couldn't make themselves wealthier by changing the rules of the game in their favor.
      • kgwxd 8y ago
        By what means? Money easily gets around law.
        • winstonewert 8y ago
          I don't know. Maybe there is no way. But if you can't do that, all other potential reforms are irrelevant.
    • vixen99 8y ago
      For example: George Soros
• simonebrunozzi 8y ago
  I think a good starting point is "Capital in the 21st century" by Piketty.
  • eesmith 8y ago
    FWIW, Piketty's proposal is a "progressive annual global wealth tax of up to 2%, combined with a progressive income tax reaching as high as 80%. I'm fine with that.
• diminoten 8y ago
  You're asking the rich how to stop themselves, I don't think that's going to go the way you want it to.
• BugsJustFindMe 8y ago
  You use the phrase "fourth estate", but do you know where it comes from? Look up "third estate" and you'll see the previous solution.
• mLuby 8y ago
  Developing a society where the accumulation of wealth is anathema would be good. Could be accomplished by low taxes on income and high taxes on net worth, encouraging lots of spending but not much hoarding. But you might actually be more concerned with accumulation of power, in which case let's address that directly.
  • winstonewert 8y ago
    That would be terrible: it would encourage everyone to operate entirely on short term thinking rather than long term thinking which we already don't do enough of.
    • mLuby 8y ago
      It would put rich people in the same long-term position as poor people, so everyone would have an incentive to create a robust societal safety net.
  • RhysU 8y ago
    Power and wealth are fungible.
    • mLuby 8y ago
      Agreed, but if we take wealth off the table, there are still ways to accumulate power. Which is why I asked if that was the actual underlying concern.
• nostrademons 8y ago
  Stop buying their products. It's that simple. The rich are rich because you give them money. If you and everyone else makes it a point to try out startups rather than always buying from the established company, buy from local businesses instead of big chains, buy fresh local produce instead of processed foods, rent from individual families instead of big corporate apartment complexes, invest your money yourself or stick it in Vanguard instead of paying a fund manager, and so on, the rich will become less rich. New people will become rich instead, but you don't expect to eliminate the whole concept of wealth, right? (The corollary is that if you want to become rich yourself, don't spend money and invest your time in activities that will cause other people to give you money.)
  • nicolashahn 8y ago
    Startups, for the most part, are funded by investors (the rich). Investing in Vanguard just has them put money into the top 500 companies instead of having to do it yourself one by one, if you're talking about index funds. The other suggestions are good.
  • onion2k 8y ago
    It's that simple. That's fine for things like food and drink, but for everything else there's a huge amount of "stealth consolidation" over the past few decades. For example, if you want a pair of glasses there is literally one company that make them - EssilorLuxottica[1]. They own everything around glasses. All the differentiation is false - they're just brands owned by two mega-corporations. The same is true of cars (14 giant corporations owning 60+ brands), food and drink (a few hundred giant corporations owning thousands of brands), etc. [1] A good read about them https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the-invisible-power-of-big-glasses-eyewear-industry-essilor-luxottica https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/10/the-invisible-p...
    • detaro 8y ago
      Although they are massive, they don't own literally everything, at least internationally. At least here in Germany I think avoiding them wouldn't be hard, but of course there's other large companies owning many of the other players, so leaving them != supporting small companies.
• kim0 8y ago
  Convert some of your wealth to community cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero...)
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• overlords 8y ago
  Persuade the Bill Gates, Warren Buffets, Mark Zuckerburgs to become the anti-Koch brothers by supporting left-wing politicians. Support the land value tax (Georgism). Much of rich people's wealth is tied up in the land value of big cities.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• justmetoday 8y ago
  There's nothing beings flawed in the ways that lead to this state of affairs (generally subsets of selfishness) can do but become the kind of beings that aren't flawed in those ways. So get busy changing yourself and raising new instantiations not thusly flawed.
• esaym 8y ago
  Start here at 1:30:30 https://youtu.be/6G59zsjM2UI?t=1h30m25s https://youtu.be/6G59zsjM2UI?t=1h30m25s and see all of nature follows a law of square roots. If you have 10,000 people, 100 will have all the money. If you have 10,000 music artist, only 100 will be getting their songs heard. This is a law of nature. Stop fighting against it and spend some time understanding it.
• tapiok 8y ago
  The elephant in the room is to focus on what motivates people to work, once they have enough wealth to address their existential needs. When we look closely, we notice that people desire wealth for social/psychological signalling. This explains phenomena like: * why one billion people volunteer their time to generate over a trillion USD/year in value, while not caring for an economic reward, * why many extremely wealthy people live frugal lives (Buffett, Ingvar Kamprad,...), * why many wealthy people give away (most of) "their" fortune (Carnegy, Gates,...), Another fact to note is, that economic inequality is a relatively recent phenomenon. The hunter-gatherer system - where people shared equally all economic "product", but exceptional contributors were rewarded with regard (social signal) - lasted for tens of thousands of years. These observations suggest how a system can be built bottom-up, that can topple capitalism. It will look like the HG system, but will be held together by apps running on personal computing devices to simulate the economic transparency necessary for the system to work. Crypto currencies are a caricature of such a system (the important parts are in place, but the proportions are way off).
  • eesmith 8y ago
    I do not think that "social/psychological signalling" has a good meaningful interpretation along the lines that you are using it. That is, many people seek wealth, and signal it through a lack of frugality. Look at the number of owners of super and mega yachts, and tell me how they are frugal. There are a lot of such yachts, yes? (You could say that they are frugal because they live well within their means, but that's not what you meant when you singled out Buffett and Kamprad.) Look at billionaries like the Koch brothers, or the DeVos family. Money gives political power, and both of those families have used their wealth to push their respective political agendas. Thing is, that can also be interpreted as "social/psychological signalling", could it not? So it seems like anything that a rich person does can be interpreted as "social/psychological signalling". I don't know what you refer to when you say "one billion people ... a trillion USD/year in value." Does that include all of the people who sing for free in their church choir, or who volunteer to organize a race, etc? Again, if you say those are all examples of "social/psychological signalling", then I think that definition is so broad as to be meaningless. Much has been written about Carnegie's philantropy. Quoting Wikipedia, '"Maybe with the giving away of his money," commented biographer Joseph Wall, "he would justify what he had done to get that money."' Isn't that a rather different interpretation than yours? Note too that Carnegie was far from frugal. Finally, you reference to hunter-gatherer systems (excepting the settled hunter-gatherers) in what seems which reminds me of Marx's description of "primitive communism." If I continue with a Marxian analysis, those hunter-gatherer systems had no mechanism for capital accumulation, and it's that accumulation which contributes to the social power imbalance we see now. How does "economic transparency", much less "apps running on personal computing devices" , result in a major equalization of social power gained from capital accumulation?
• candiodari 8y ago
  One of the few uncontroversial results of theoretical economics is that in bigger markets, money ends up in fewer hands, because concentration of power is inevitable. So what can we do ? Roll back globalization. Heavily tax or outright prevent international movement of goods and people.
• RickJWagner 8y ago
  Wrong question. We should be asking "What can we do to make becoming wealthy easier for everyone?"
• cheeko1234 8y ago
  This is the only way: https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/resource-based-economy/ This utopian idea from Jacque Fresco is practically impossible to implement unless an all-powerful benevolant dictator type AI is in charge of everything.
• msiyer 8y ago
  Trying to effect large-scale changes without rectifying fundamental issues is futile. We all want to change the system, but the system is only a large-scale reflection of individuals constituting the system.
• RhysU 8y ago
  Start a better business and defeat all of theirs! But then you would end up rich! Ahhhhh!
• alan_wade 8y ago
  What can we do to stop the healthy from getting healthier? What can we do to stop the smart from getting smarter? I've heard that 99% of the gallery paintings were created by 1% of the painters, and 99% of the best-selling books were created by 1% of the writers, and 99% of inventions were invented by 1% of the scientists. If we don't stop this, there'll be no paintings/books/inventions left for us regular folk, and then what will we do oh god what will we do.