18 ms·

The Rise of the New Global Elite

149 points by pointillistic 16y ago

jamesaguilar 16y ago
> . . . but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. Because opportunity springs not from the ingenuity of man but the granting of nations who "own" him.
- simon_ 16y ago
  I understand your sentiment, and don't really disagree, but keep in mind that it's basically impossible to innovate or build wealth under unfavorable institutions. So... some value probably "should" accrue to nations.
  - jamesaguilar 16y ago
    Yes, for sure. Some of the benefits should return to the nation that provided the favorable conditions (and do, in the form of that person's taxes and also in the form of opportunity-seekers from around the globe flocking to the places where growth is possible). But I don't like the notion that people owe their successes to their country any more than I believe they are indebted to oxygen or gravity.
    - lisper 16y ago
      Why not? Oxygen and gravity occur naturally. Nations with conditions favorable to technological innovation do not. They have to be built and maintained.
      - alex_c 16y ago
        Loyalty or gratitude to an institution makes little sense to me (I'm probably in the minority on this in the general population), simply because an institution is incapable of loyalty or gratitude towards me. I'm loyal or grateful to people, but rarely to abstract concepts. So setting aside questions of what occurs "naturally", who should I be loyal/grateful to? The few enlightened bureaucrats who make a system better than average? The taxpayers who fund it, willingly or not? The bureaucrats who, at best, are ineffective at ruining everything? The rebels who make things happen by bending or ignoring the rules?
        forensic 16y ago
        If you can't be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the "favourable conditions" of the institution. Support those conditions. Because those conditions DO give back to you.
        lsc 16y ago
        I wonder if the parent is objecting to the word "loyalty" - Loyalty implies a certain degree of unconditional support; while I think that when talking about countries, we're better off with conditional support. That said, if by loyalty you mean conditional support, I agree completely. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, and there is constant pressure from the those who directly benefit from a less-efficient government.
        alex_c 16y ago
        I am - and to be fair I don't think anyone else used the word "loyalty", so I could be swinging at strawmen, but that's what some of the discussion sounded like to me.
    - noahth 16y ago
      You may not like the idea but that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on its truth. None of us does anything on our own - water, power, roads, schools, the list goes on and on (not all directly attributable to the country itself, but certainly national governments are high on the list of contributors to these projects in almost all cases, and I haven't even mentioned things like tax policy yet). I think the days of the nation-state are numbered but we can't ignore what those entities did for human progress. Maybe not in the form of a literal debt, but it's short-sighted and antisocial to pretend that the elites didn't have a hundred million helping hands on their way up.
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        Perhaps, but the elites have already paid for all of those helping hands many times over. The top 5% paid about 60% of the nation's taxes, for instance, and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html In spite of this, most of the services they paid for are not the public goods (e.g., roads, power, water, police) you describe. Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US, only the 4'th is a public good. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html And this completely ignores all the consumer surplus they have created (i.e., the happiness you get from using a macbook rather than having $1000). The elites have paid their debt. Let them leave if they want to. The US should not become a prison state.
        Herring 16y ago
        This debt metaphor is really unproductive. Fact is it's easier to make money when you already have money. So the assumption here is a nation would be better off if it subsidized the money making process, same as it subsidizes education.
        kenjackson 16y ago
        and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. They've probably used more than 60%. Almost all of the money is a means to keep poor people "content" in this country. It's a small price that rich people pay. To put it another way, rich people could certainly cut off pretty much all education, pension, health care expenditures if they wanted to. But there's a reason they don't, and its not because they're nice people. But its in their best interest. It's their public good.
    - qq66 16y ago
      We ARE indebted to oxygen and gravity. While it's hard for us to destroy gravity we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet and it's not going to go very well for us if we continue.
      - anamax 16y ago
        > we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet Citation needed. (Increasing CO2 actually helps plants produce O2. Even the most dire warmist predictions have increased plant life.)
        qq66 16y ago
        deforestation
        anamax 16y ago
        mature forests are carbon neutral. Chopping down trees, storing the wood, and growing new trees is a carbon sink.
    - wazoox 16y ago
      There is a very telling story in the great book "Bad samaritans" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991 http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... ). Among other things -- the author explains how in the 1850s, American travellers in Japan were surprised by the Japanese laziness and inefficiency, so much to make it almost proverbial. Doesn't it sound funny? In the 1850s, Japan was terribly underdeveloped, and in an underdeveloped environment you simply cannot do much to innovate, undertake new projects. So people everywhere in underdeveloped countries just seems lazy to people from the industrialized world, that was true of Japan in the 1850s, Korea in the 1950s, and many African countries nowadays. The impetus later came from the central government, and in 1905 Japan was not a negligible country anymore. The moral of the story is that free-market bullshit and Ayn Rand books are just make-believe stories without any solid backing.
  - DanielBMarkham 16y ago
    This might be a good time to take a look at history. Lots of examples of institutions destroying innovation. By contrast, not as many examples of them creating it. Or, to put another way, we did just fine innovating and inventing and such on our own -- in caves, on the Savannah, on trade routes, as part of tribes or guilds. Innovation and entrepreneurship is as natural a part of life as breathing. If this weren't true, we'd still be hanging around in trees waiting for the big cats to leave their prey. Of course, you can argue that institutions accelerate this natural ability, but there's a lot of room for doubt over exactly what magic sauce makes people super productive. At the very least we can agree that different folks have different answers to that question. (If there were some "proven" answer, we'd just all copy that and the world would be full of Thomas Edisons) I understand there are a lot of works of fiction and nonfiction that claim to explain why so much innovation happened in such and such a place, but it's easy to say or write something like that. In reality, lots of really smart folks have went at this problem and haven't gotten very far in terms of reproducible results. I find this line repeated over and over again -- that somehow if there is a lot of innovation in situation X that it naturally follows that we know all about X and why all this innovation happened. I think that's stretching logic a bit too much for my tastes.
    - locopati 16y ago
      You're so right, good thing the internet (created by a people at a government institution) exists for us to have this discussion.
      - johngalt 16y ago
        That's like saying the government is responsible for all business because they printed the money. The "internet" that the government created would be nothing without the private organizations that actually built it. When did the government start Cisco? Google? USR? Even the early iterations of the internet were built by private companies. It's more that the government was the first buyer of this type of technology. Edit: The idea that the government can take responsibility for the internet is gigantic hubris. In fact it's governments that are continuing to destroy what the internet has become.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
edj 16y ago
Single page: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-o...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
relic17 16y ago
Sadly, yet another author who either did not bother to read and think about Ayn Rand's work, or, worse, pretends to have NOT understood it.
- forensic 16y ago
  explain
  - sp332 16y ago
    Rich people already have power. Trying to minimize their political power, in favor of a more "democratic" system, is just denying the reality that the rich are powerful. If the government antagonizes rich people, the rich will fight back economically until they get what they want anyway (with lots of collateral damage). On the other hand, if you give the rich political power to begin with, you are merely acknowledging that they have power. Then they can wield it more effectively, and (Ayn Rand hopes) society will be better off. Edit: Also, income inequality is no big deal if the rich aren't stepping all over the poor. As the article points out, the super-elite in Shanghai haven't stopped the middle class in China from exploding, and average income is growing strongly despite the financial crisis. The super-elite aren't hurting anything.
    - forensic 16y ago
      That's a fair point but I don't think it is obvious from Atlas Shrugged. You can read that book in many ways.
      - brc 16y ago
        You know I've wanted to read Atlas Shrugged for a long time but I can't find a copy that isn't in microscopic brain-hurting print and crappy paper. Any ideas?
        Eliezer 16y ago
        Read Heinlein instead.
sayemm 16y ago
Good read on the world trending towards meritocracy, esp during these times as a lot of older institutions are getting turned upside-down. It reminds me of this old PG post, "After Credentials" - http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html "The course of people's lives in the US now seems to be determined less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years ago."
drinian 16y ago
This is a fine exposition on the state of the world today -- and the hope that these hard-working global citizens will help create a more equitable world -- but it's worth remembering that there's nothing new under the sun. After all, the British royal family is of German descent.
pero 16y ago
"Peter Lindert is an economist at the University of California at Davis and one of the leaders of the “deep history” school of economics, a movement devoted to thinking about the world economy over the long term—that is to say, in the context of the entire sweep of human civilization." North America: "Deep history" school of economics Rest of the World: "Marxist" Stuart Hall must be impressed...
- gwern 16y ago
  Pattern match detected: 'Deep history' and 'Marxism' both discuss human economies over millennia. Conclusion: Deep history == Marxism. Pattern match detected: 'George W. Bush' and 'a duck' both have 2 legs. Conclusion: George W. Bush == a duck.
  - wazoox 16y ago
    > Conclusion: George W. Bush == a duck. You're probably onto something here.
patrickgzill 16y ago
I question exactly how long-lived this new wealth is or will be. Look at the Rothschilds - they have figured out a way to take the initial 1700s wealth and keep it (we can assume mostly) together in a relatively cohesive lump for some 300 years. A less "notorious" example would be the duPonts, easily trillionaires if you were to add up the wealth accumulated amongst this wealthy family. Against that, someone worth $100 million who gives 90% of it away when he/she passes doesn't seem all that significant. Not sniping, just expressing a contrary POV to consider...
- cturner 16y ago
  > keep it .. we can assume mostly.. in a relatively > cohesive lump for some 300 years. I think I disagree but it might just be over choice of words. It's an interesting topic that I want to develop and I'll charge on. On the topic of intergenerational wealth, it's not enough to say that you can keep a lump of wealth. During the 300 years you talk about, governments rose and fell, and currencies and sovereign debt with them. In order to stay above water, you have to float your position across multiple regimes and positions. Or keep it in a lump of gold. That didn't do that - they worked money hard. Rothschilds took on huge positions in the Napoleonic wars that could easily have gone wrong. They then would have lost it all due to poor timing over the end of the waterloo campaign but leveraged up by taking an audacious position on sovereign bonds that paid off and made them even richer. My point is, they gambled the house at several points. Part of what's striking about the Rothschilds specifically is that they kept a healthy mindset across several generations. This is a wildly interesting topic that has crossover with another article hacker news today link today to the atlantic, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072200 In that article you see lots of people who came from aspirational backgrounds. But how do you keep that? How do you raise a wealthy family in a way that passes on those values?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - patrickgzill 16y ago
    I upvoted you because you have hit on the core question: how do you stay hungry after that first x million, and how do you pass it on to the next generation? Some family members have achieved relative wealth and I see this with their children who attend private schools ... I see nephews and nieces likely to pursue professions, but do not see the same competitive drive being passed along.
narrator 16y ago
One thing that's disturbing these days is there is even a huge gap in wealth between someone in the top 1% and the top 0.1%.
- brc 16y ago
  Why? Why is that disturbing? This is a genuine question. It doesn't disturb me one bit. As long as each generation is relatively wealthier than the prior one, I don't care about the spread within that generation. My grandfather died of pneumonia at age 56 due to a lack of oxygen and antibiotics at the hospital. They didn't have enough money to paint their house and instead used old tractor sump oil. My parents, when married, didn't have hot water or a toilet inside the house. They had never travelled more than 200 miles from their place of birth. My kids have access to better health, leisure, education, food and housing than even I did, which is not that long ago. This continual improvement in wealth amongst my own family is proof enough that the very rich aren't impinging on what really matters, which is improving living standards for the majority of people. Paraphrasin PG in one of his essays - it doesn't disturb me that Mozart was 1 million times more musically talented than I am, or that Tiger Woods is 10 million times better at golf. Their ability and success doesn't impede on my life at all - if anything - it improves it. It's not unfair (in any real sense) that Federer can play tennis very well and I can't hit the ball to save myself. So why is it unfair that someone has talent at making money and can make a million times more money than I can? In a free society, (apart from a very tiny minority who steal or lie their way to it) the only way they can get (and stay) rich is by providing excess value to everyone else. That's true whether you are kicking a ball, trading stocks or building software. Nobody has ever successfully convinced me why wealth disparity in a free society is a problem. If anything, I see it as a sign of a healthy society.
  - giardini 16y ago
    "...apart from a very tiny minority who steal or lie their way to it..." Do you mean they are a "tiny minority" because - they are already members of a tiny minority (those who are extremely rich), or - those "who steal or lie their way" are a small part of those who are extremely rich? If the latter, then I believe you are wrong. That is, I believe that a very large percentage of those who are extremely rich partook or do partake of significant "stealing and lying" to get there or stay there. The dictum "follow the money" is a good one for prosecutors. Doing so almost inevitably uncovers corruption and firms working at the ethical edge of society. We merely don't have (or are unwilling to hire) enough financlal police to track them all down. We settle for the occasional big expose', hoping it will instill fear in others. It does not. So each decade we uncover or are surprised by new financial scams that wipe the economic slate clean and clean out our savings accounts. Then we start all over, like Sisyphus.
anaphoric 16y ago
Is wealth/poverty relative or absolute? I think most people would be happier if they saw it in more absolute terms. I have witnessed wealthy people made to feel like paupers when a yet more wealthy person puts on a display that they can't afford. The phenomena is actually quite comical. Still it's fairly clear that wealth will always be a measuring stick that people will use to display their relative worth. It's like plumage. A lot of resources go into growing those fancy tail feathers. In itself I don't see anything wrong with that. It's quite natural. However it's important for societal cohesion that the absolute wealth of the average does not fall and that they can maintain some semblance of dignity.
danenania 16y ago
Why is Greenspan so often referred to as libertarian or an ultra-capitalist? Central banking is the polar opposite of both these things. When Greenspan says something like "capitalism has failed", it isn't some sort of grand ideological reversal, it's an unwitting joke.
- borism 16y ago
  not that those references are true, but the guy was part of the friggin Ayn Rand Collective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism
stuaxo 16y ago
If I wasn't skint I would right now buy the domain fucktheglobalelite.com Not sure what it would have apart from a link to the article and "seriously, fuck those guys"
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Why do you have a problem with them? They made money and now they hack word poverty. What's wrong with that?

149 points by pointillistic 16y ago

> . . . but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. Because opportunity springs not from the ingenuity of man but the granting of nations who "own" him.

simon_ 16y ago
I understand your sentiment, and don't really disagree, but keep in mind that it's basically impossible to innovate or build wealth under unfavorable institutions. So... some value probably "should" accrue to nations.
- jamesaguilar 16y ago
  Yes, for sure. Some of the benefits should return to the nation that provided the favorable conditions (and do, in the form of that person's taxes and also in the form of opportunity-seekers from around the globe flocking to the places where growth is possible). But I don't like the notion that people owe their successes to their country any more than I believe they are indebted to oxygen or gravity.
  - lisper 16y ago
    Why not? Oxygen and gravity occur naturally. Nations with conditions favorable to technological innovation do not. They have to be built and maintained.
    - alex_c 16y ago
      Loyalty or gratitude to an institution makes little sense to me (I'm probably in the minority on this in the general population), simply because an institution is incapable of loyalty or gratitude towards me. I'm loyal or grateful to people, but rarely to abstract concepts. So setting aside questions of what occurs "naturally", who should I be loyal/grateful to? The few enlightened bureaucrats who make a system better than average? The taxpayers who fund it, willingly or not? The bureaucrats who, at best, are ineffective at ruining everything? The rebels who make things happen by bending or ignoring the rules?
      - forensic 16y ago
        If you can't be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the "favourable conditions" of the institution. Support those conditions. Because those conditions DO give back to you.
        lsc 16y ago
        I wonder if the parent is objecting to the word "loyalty" - Loyalty implies a certain degree of unconditional support; while I think that when talking about countries, we're better off with conditional support. That said, if by loyalty you mean conditional support, I agree completely. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, and there is constant pressure from the those who directly benefit from a less-efficient government.
        alex_c 16y ago
        I am - and to be fair I don't think anyone else used the word "loyalty", so I could be swinging at strawmen, but that's what some of the discussion sounded like to me.
  - noahth 16y ago
    You may not like the idea but that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on its truth. None of us does anything on our own - water, power, roads, schools, the list goes on and on (not all directly attributable to the country itself, but certainly national governments are high on the list of contributors to these projects in almost all cases, and I haven't even mentioned things like tax policy yet). I think the days of the nation-state are numbered but we can't ignore what those entities did for human progress. Maybe not in the form of a literal debt, but it's short-sighted and antisocial to pretend that the elites didn't have a hundred million helping hands on their way up.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      Perhaps, but the elites have already paid for all of those helping hands many times over. The top 5% paid about 60% of the nation's taxes, for instance, and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html In spite of this, most of the services they paid for are not the public goods (e.g., roads, power, water, police) you describe. Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US, only the 4'th is a public good. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html And this completely ignores all the consumer surplus they have created (i.e., the happiness you get from using a macbook rather than having $1000). The elites have paid their debt. Let them leave if they want to. The US should not become a prison state.
      - Herring 16y ago
        This debt metaphor is really unproductive. Fact is it's easier to make money when you already have money. So the assumption here is a nation would be better off if it subsidized the money making process, same as it subsidizes education.
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services. They've probably used more than 60%. Almost all of the money is a means to keep poor people "content" in this country. It's a small price that rich people pay. To put it another way, rich people could certainly cut off pretty much all education, pension, health care expenditures if they wanted to. But there's a reason they don't, and its not because they're nice people. But its in their best interest. It's their public good.
  - qq66 16y ago
    We ARE indebted to oxygen and gravity. While it's hard for us to destroy gravity we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet and it's not going to go very well for us if we continue.
    - anamax 16y ago
      > we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet Citation needed. (Increasing CO2 actually helps plants produce O2. Even the most dire warmist predictions have increased plant life.)
      - qq66 16y ago
        deforestation
        anamax 16y ago
        mature forests are carbon neutral. Chopping down trees, storing the wood, and growing new trees is a carbon sink.
  - wazoox 16y ago
    There is a very telling story in the great book "Bad samaritans" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991 http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... ). Among other things -- the author explains how in the 1850s, American travellers in Japan were surprised by the Japanese laziness and inefficiency, so much to make it almost proverbial. Doesn't it sound funny? In the 1850s, Japan was terribly underdeveloped, and in an underdeveloped environment you simply cannot do much to innovate, undertake new projects. So people everywhere in underdeveloped countries just seems lazy to people from the industrialized world, that was true of Japan in the 1850s, Korea in the 1950s, and many African countries nowadays. The impetus later came from the central government, and in 1905 Japan was not a negligible country anymore. The moral of the story is that free-market bullshit and Ayn Rand books are just make-believe stories without any solid backing.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  This might be a good time to take a look at history. Lots of examples of institutions destroying innovation. By contrast, not as many examples of them creating it. Or, to put another way, we did just fine innovating and inventing and such on our own -- in caves, on the Savannah, on trade routes, as part of tribes or guilds. Innovation and entrepreneurship is as natural a part of life as breathing. If this weren't true, we'd still be hanging around in trees waiting for the big cats to leave their prey. Of course, you can argue that institutions accelerate this natural ability, but there's a lot of room for doubt over exactly what magic sauce makes people super productive. At the very least we can agree that different folks have different answers to that question. (If there were some "proven" answer, we'd just all copy that and the world would be full of Thomas Edisons) I understand there are a lot of works of fiction and nonfiction that claim to explain why so much innovation happened in such and such a place, but it's easy to say or write something like that. In reality, lots of really smart folks have went at this problem and haven't gotten very far in terms of reproducible results. I find this line repeated over and over again -- that somehow if there is a lot of innovation in situation X that it naturally follows that we know all about X and why all this innovation happened. I think that's stretching logic a bit too much for my tastes.
  - locopati 16y ago
    You're so right, good thing the internet (created by a people at a government institution) exists for us to have this discussion.
    - johngalt 16y ago
      That's like saying the government is responsible for all business because they printed the money. The "internet" that the government created would be nothing without the private organizations that actually built it. When did the government start Cisco? Google? USR? Even the early iterations of the internet were built by private companies. It's more that the government was the first buyer of this type of technology. Edit: The idea that the government can take responsibility for the internet is gigantic hubris. In fact it's governments that are continuing to destroy what the internet has become.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

edj 16y ago

Single page: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-o...

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

relic17 16y ago

Sadly, yet another author who either did not bother to read and think about Ayn Rand's work, or, worse, pretends to have NOT understood it.

forensic 16y ago
explain
- sp332 16y ago
  Rich people already have power. Trying to minimize their political power, in favor of a more "democratic" system, is just denying the reality that the rich are powerful. If the government antagonizes rich people, the rich will fight back economically until they get what they want anyway (with lots of collateral damage). On the other hand, if you give the rich political power to begin with, you are merely acknowledging that they have power. Then they can wield it more effectively, and (Ayn Rand hopes) society will be better off. Edit: Also, income inequality is no big deal if the rich aren't stepping all over the poor. As the article points out, the super-elite in Shanghai haven't stopped the middle class in China from exploding, and average income is growing strongly despite the financial crisis. The super-elite aren't hurting anything.
  - forensic 16y ago
    That's a fair point but I don't think it is obvious from Atlas Shrugged. You can read that book in many ways.
    - brc 16y ago
      You know I've wanted to read Atlas Shrugged for a long time but I can't find a copy that isn't in microscopic brain-hurting print and crappy paper. Any ideas?
      - Eliezer 16y ago
        Read Heinlein instead.

sayemm 16y ago

Good read on the world trending towards meritocracy, esp during these times as a lot of older institutions are getting turned upside-down. It reminds me of this old PG post, "After Credentials" - http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html "The course of people's lives in the US now seems to be determined less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years ago."

drinian 16y ago

This is a fine exposition on the state of the world today -- and the hope that these hard-working global citizens will help create a more equitable world -- but it's worth remembering that there's nothing new under the sun. After all, the British royal family is of German descent.

pero 16y ago

"Peter Lindert is an economist at the University of California at Davis and one of the leaders of the “deep history” school of economics, a movement devoted to thinking about the world economy over the long term—that is to say, in the context of the entire sweep of human civilization." North America: "Deep history" school of economics Rest of the World: "Marxist" Stuart Hall must be impressed...

gwern 16y ago
Pattern match detected: 'Deep history' and 'Marxism' both discuss human economies over millennia. Conclusion: Deep history == Marxism. Pattern match detected: 'George W. Bush' and 'a duck' both have 2 legs. Conclusion: George W. Bush == a duck.
- wazoox 16y ago
  > Conclusion: George W. Bush == a duck. You're probably onto something here.

patrickgzill 16y ago

I question exactly how long-lived this new wealth is or will be. Look at the Rothschilds - they have figured out a way to take the initial 1700s wealth and keep it (we can assume mostly) together in a relatively cohesive lump for some 300 years. A less "notorious" example would be the duPonts, easily trillionaires if you were to add up the wealth accumulated amongst this wealthy family. Against that, someone worth $100 million who gives 90% of it away when he/she passes doesn't seem all that significant. Not sniping, just expressing a contrary POV to consider...

cturner 16y ago
> keep it .. we can assume mostly.. in a relatively > cohesive lump for some 300 years. I think I disagree but it might just be over choice of words. It's an interesting topic that I want to develop and I'll charge on. On the topic of intergenerational wealth, it's not enough to say that you can keep a lump of wealth. During the 300 years you talk about, governments rose and fell, and currencies and sovereign debt with them. In order to stay above water, you have to float your position across multiple regimes and positions. Or keep it in a lump of gold. That didn't do that - they worked money hard. Rothschilds took on huge positions in the Napoleonic wars that could easily have gone wrong. They then would have lost it all due to poor timing over the end of the waterloo campaign but leveraged up by taking an audacious position on sovereign bonds that paid off and made them even richer. My point is, they gambled the house at several points. Part of what's striking about the Rothschilds specifically is that they kept a healthy mindset across several generations. This is a wildly interesting topic that has crossover with another article hacker news today link today to the atlantic, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2072200 In that article you see lots of people who came from aspirational backgrounds. But how do you keep that? How do you raise a wealthy family in a way that passes on those values?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- patrickgzill 16y ago
  I upvoted you because you have hit on the core question: how do you stay hungry after that first x million, and how do you pass it on to the next generation? Some family members have achieved relative wealth and I see this with their children who attend private schools ... I see nephews and nieces likely to pursue professions, but do not see the same competitive drive being passed along.

narrator 16y ago

One thing that's disturbing these days is there is even a huge gap in wealth between someone in the top 1% and the top 0.1%.

brc 16y ago
Why? Why is that disturbing? This is a genuine question. It doesn't disturb me one bit. As long as each generation is relatively wealthier than the prior one, I don't care about the spread within that generation. My grandfather died of pneumonia at age 56 due to a lack of oxygen and antibiotics at the hospital. They didn't have enough money to paint their house and instead used old tractor sump oil. My parents, when married, didn't have hot water or a toilet inside the house. They had never travelled more than 200 miles from their place of birth. My kids have access to better health, leisure, education, food and housing than even I did, which is not that long ago. This continual improvement in wealth amongst my own family is proof enough that the very rich aren't impinging on what really matters, which is improving living standards for the majority of people. Paraphrasin PG in one of his essays - it doesn't disturb me that Mozart was 1 million times more musically talented than I am, or that Tiger Woods is 10 million times better at golf. Their ability and success doesn't impede on my life at all - if anything - it improves it. It's not unfair (in any real sense) that Federer can play tennis very well and I can't hit the ball to save myself. So why is it unfair that someone has talent at making money and can make a million times more money than I can? In a free society, (apart from a very tiny minority who steal or lie their way to it) the only way they can get (and stay) rich is by providing excess value to everyone else. That's true whether you are kicking a ball, trading stocks or building software. Nobody has ever successfully convinced me why wealth disparity in a free society is a problem. If anything, I see it as a sign of a healthy society.
- giardini 16y ago
  "...apart from a very tiny minority who steal or lie their way to it..." Do you mean they are a "tiny minority" because - they are already members of a tiny minority (those who are extremely rich), or - those "who steal or lie their way" are a small part of those who are extremely rich? If the latter, then I believe you are wrong. That is, I believe that a very large percentage of those who are extremely rich partook or do partake of significant "stealing and lying" to get there or stay there. The dictum "follow the money" is a good one for prosecutors. Doing so almost inevitably uncovers corruption and firms working at the ethical edge of society. We merely don't have (or are unwilling to hire) enough financlal police to track them all down. We settle for the occasional big expose', hoping it will instill fear in others. It does not. So each decade we uncover or are surprised by new financial scams that wipe the economic slate clean and clean out our savings accounts. Then we start all over, like Sisyphus.

anaphoric 16y ago

Is wealth/poverty relative or absolute? I think most people would be happier if they saw it in more absolute terms. I have witnessed wealthy people made to feel like paupers when a yet more wealthy person puts on a display that they can't afford. The phenomena is actually quite comical. Still it's fairly clear that wealth will always be a measuring stick that people will use to display their relative worth. It's like plumage. A lot of resources go into growing those fancy tail feathers. In itself I don't see anything wrong with that. It's quite natural. However it's important for societal cohesion that the absolute wealth of the average does not fall and that they can maintain some semblance of dignity.

danenania 16y ago

Why is Greenspan so often referred to as libertarian or an ultra-capitalist? Central banking is the polar opposite of both these things. When Greenspan says something like "capitalism has failed", it isn't some sort of grand ideological reversal, it's an unwitting joke.

borism 16y ago
not that those references are true, but the guy was part of the friggin Ayn Rand Collective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism

stuaxo 16y ago

If I wasn't skint I would right now buy the domain fucktheglobalelite.com Not sure what it would have apart from a link to the article and "seriously, fuck those guys"

tomjen3 16y ago
Why do you have a problem with them? They made money and now they hack word poverty. What's wrong with that?