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I have a conspiracy theory that there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe, also that most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them

I have a conspiracy theory that there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe, also that most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich.

slifin 5y ago
I have a conspiracy theory that Forbes created the rich list Which intentionally does not have despots oligarchs or royals to skew the conversation to a business matter which can get lost in the left/right divide
- vmception 5y ago
  The Forbes rich list has some criteria such as from their own revenue or share prices. Basically private market generated wealth. There are exceptions and the line gets blurred really quickly, but thats their stated goal.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Pretty simple with public companies. With private companies and current market it really does get messy. I'm thinking about Valve and how much higher it would be priced on public market compared to private... And that can't be only case. So the private market is quite dark place...
    - vmception 5y ago
      Yes, and most people aren't actually trying to be on the rich list. When I was in Monaco people were saying leave the bragging to the Americans. There is no transparency in the markets, thats also a distinctly American half-goal.
- sig-reduction 5y ago
  OP's conspiracy theory is absolutely true. There is a whole thread of academic research estimating the right tail of the wealth distribution (spoiler: the Fed household finances microdata is garbage). Diff the Bloomberg and Forbes rich lists... they're not the same list. One oligarch on those lists had their estimated net worth double after the Appleby leaks turned up some trusts. I'm pretty sure Bloomberg just calls people up and asks them how much they have.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    I guess it depends on where peoples wealth comes from. It’s probably far easier to estimate Zuckerberg and Bezos when you know it’s tied to a publicly traded company than if it’s all private. I have a good friend who is a billionaire that laughs at these lists knowing they know nothing about his money (not a public company), where it comes from, and where it lives.
    - raziel2701 5y ago
      Yup, Mexico has a ton of wealthy people because of drugs, you don't see their names on these lists.
- YinglingLight 5y ago
  The investor class, the salary class (us), the wage class, the welfare class. Every outcry for equality that doesn't speak in these terms is manufactured by the investor class. Occupy WallStreet scared the bejeezus out of them. We now have Critical Race Theory to divide us, Woke-ism, etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Now that is a good conspiracy theory :-)
- michael1999 5y ago
  The don’t list family trusts either. So multi-billionaire families like the Rockafellers and the Rothchilds aren’t there.
the_optimist 5y ago
You’ll never see rich people argue for a wealth tax, but they sure as hell will parade demanding that we raise taxes on income of the service class.
- hanniabu 5y ago
  No idea why you're being downvoted
  - TAForObvReasons 5y ago
    Rich != Wealthy. "Rich" tends to refer to people who are generating lots of cash, oftentimes through labor (like doctors or lawyers or athletes). "Wealthy" tends to refer to people who own lots of assets and generate cash through asset appreciation/sales and real property. Wealthy people will push for income taxes while trying to eliminate capital gains and inheritance taxes. This conversation came up years ago when Bill Gates Sr tried to push for income taxes in Washington state and critics pointed out that it would not affect wealthy people.
    - devmunchies 5y ago
      yes, this is why people calling states with no income tax as a "regressive" tax structure seems like a psyop. Income tax taxes people who work for a living. Property + capital gains tax both tax assets appreciation and rent seekers (unless the investment is a high risk venture into a startup or something ambitious).
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        Maybe, but they are less regressive. States without income taxes usually rely on sales or excise taxes. In a “high tax” state like New York, poor people don’t pay income tax nor sales tax on food or clothing. (A significant expense) Usually high tax pressure is from property tax. In a state like South Carolina, you have income tax, but property taxes are very low. They make up for that by taxing food, which results in higher taxation for poor and elderly people.
Cyril_HN 5y ago
What sort of evidence would we expect to see if that was true?
- dboreham 5y ago
  Widespread support for tax cuts for rich people?
- internetslave 5y ago
  I just don’t buy the wealth distribution that they are showing us. I don’t think the government even knows the true wealth distribution. I think it’s also partly political, they can’t go, “hey! Look how many people have 100 million!”
- Daishiman 5y ago
  It's not really a conspiracy. You just need to know the right people intimately. I live in a country with a thoroughly dysfunctional banking system which, by most accounts, fall right in the middle of the global income bracket. Yet I know a ton of people in the upper-middle and lower-upper class and they all have the following characteristics of their wealth, which _do not_ appear in most wealth statistics: * One or multiple bank accounts in offshore tax havens, with the US being the most important * Multiple properties, whose real ownership is hidden by being assigned to family members, friends, and relatives * A lot of overseas trips to buy things that are normally horribly expensive due to to import restrictions. * A deep, thorough understanding not only of tax law, but also personal connections with people who work in tax agencies to understand when to avoid (legally), when to evade (knowing the tax agency won't pursue evasions under a certain currency amount) and when to get into convenient tax amnesty regimes. Again, these aren't phenomenally rich people and they're easily hiding away 50-85% of their net wealth. By most metrics these people's income would, in theory, put them in median American lifestyle. Yet it's obvious that their standard of living _easily_ puts them in the top 2-5% of a developed country, with the addition that labor costs are so cheap that they can afford services even pretty wealthy people in other places cannot. This is a classic in Latin America, and I have no reasons to believe it's any different elsewhere; the instruments are just different.
admissionsguy 5y ago
Not sure about the first sentence, but how is "most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich" a conspiracy theory? Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism? I am asking honestly. The social order being a mostly immutable pyramid has always been the natural model of how things work in my mind.
- internetslave 5y ago
  I just think the distribution of wealth that we are shown, “only .x% of the country have 50 million” is way off from reality.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism? I think it's only exacerbated by government intervention (corruption) and regulatory capture. I do agree that human nature tends to winners and losers, but right now the losers are being bashed over the head by a tool they think is helping them.
  - admissionsguy 5y ago
    I mean fundamentally, accumulating capital would be pretty pointless if not for legions of poor(er) people willing to do whatever the owner of the capital wants them to.
    - makomk 5y ago
      One of the standard anti-capitalist arguments for redistributing wealth is that the super-wealthy do not, in fact, use their wealth to have others at their beck and call to an extent even remotely proportional to how much better off they are. The usual framing is that less wealthy people spend far more of their money on goods and services, therefore we're better off if they have the money instead of the super-wealthy, but of course it's the same thing really.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    At the same time, the natural flow of capital is upward. Without government intervention you end up back at feudalism as a very small percentage of the population controls effectively all of the wealth. The way to combat this is progressive taxation and government spending on social programs and infrastructure.
dillondoyle 5y ago
100% true. bill hwang is a recent example he was on paper >$20 billion. though levered to the gills and it blew up. But there are a lot more examples that aren't big headlines.
devmunchies 5y ago
the value of gold has gone up 30x (in USD) since the 70s. There must be some old noble families with vaults of gold that are "off the books".
vixen99 5y ago
Perhaps I'm missing something but how am I working to keep rich people rich? There must be specific instances but is this a general rule?
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  Sure. You know those police officers and courts of law and militaries you pay for? Those are the guys whose job it is to keep you from grabbing things from rich people.
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  You provide labour to earn your living as opposed to providing capital. If you're providing labour then it's likely that you're providing a small percentage of the return that those providing capital receive as dividend. Value of labor provider being transformed into profit for capital provider.
edouard-harris 5y ago
> there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe This is almost certainly true — apart from oligarchs, dictators, and crypto billionaires, it's broadly understood that "500 richest" lists also miss a fair number of anonymous Omaha residents, for example. > most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich I think this part is probably a mischaracterization (though I could also just be misinterpreting what it means). To take the limit case, consider a wealthy dictator who stole absolutely everything he owns, and who flees his ruined country. In this scenario, the aggrieved parties are the people he stole his wealth from, as opposed to, e.g., the waitress who ends up serving him drinks on a Caribbean island. That means to the extent you believe the "prop them up" part of the theory, you must also believe that most wealth concentrations arise more from things like theft, and less from things like value creation. My experience has been that this seems untrue today and almost certainly becomes more untrue every year (but I do understand that reasonable observers may disagree).
- dmcgee 5y ago
  > you must also believe that most wealth concentrations arise more from things like theft, and less from things like value creation. Maybe, maybe not. [1] [1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/cybercrime-to-top-6-trillion-in-2021-north-texas-security-firm-says/2636083/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/cybercrime-to-top-6-trillio... As a side note I appreciate the urgency in the tone of the quoted here.
- akiselev 5y ago
  That contrast of value creation against theft is a false dichotomy. Reframing the latter as "value capture" or "wealth extraction" and treating it separately from value creation gives way to a far more robust analysis.
  - edouard-harris 5y ago
    I agree terms like "value capture" or "wealth extraction" would probably be more descriptive. But note that I only mentioned "things like theft" in the gp, so I think we're really talking about the same sorts of activities.
importantbrian 5y ago
I've lived in Fort Lauderdale which is sometimes called the world's yachting capitol. After seeing my first boat show I was actually kind of shocked by the number of people in the "own a large yacht" wealth bracket.

I have a conspiracy theory that there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe, also that most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich.

slifin 5y ago

I have a conspiracy theory that Forbes created the rich list Which intentionally does not have despots oligarchs or royals to skew the conversation to a business matter which can get lost in the left/right divide

vmception 5y ago
The Forbes rich list has some criteria such as from their own revenue or share prices. Basically private market generated wealth. There are exceptions and the line gets blurred really quickly, but thats their stated goal.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Pretty simple with public companies. With private companies and current market it really does get messy. I'm thinking about Valve and how much higher it would be priced on public market compared to private... And that can't be only case. So the private market is quite dark place...
  - vmception 5y ago
    Yes, and most people aren't actually trying to be on the rich list. When I was in Monaco people were saying leave the bragging to the Americans. There is no transparency in the markets, thats also a distinctly American half-goal.
sig-reduction 5y ago
OP's conspiracy theory is absolutely true. There is a whole thread of academic research estimating the right tail of the wealth distribution (spoiler: the Fed household finances microdata is garbage). Diff the Bloomberg and Forbes rich lists... they're not the same list. One oligarch on those lists had their estimated net worth double after the Appleby leaks turned up some trusts. I'm pretty sure Bloomberg just calls people up and asks them how much they have.
- azinman2 5y ago
  I guess it depends on where peoples wealth comes from. It’s probably far easier to estimate Zuckerberg and Bezos when you know it’s tied to a publicly traded company than if it’s all private. I have a good friend who is a billionaire that laughs at these lists knowing they know nothing about his money (not a public company), where it comes from, and where it lives.
  - raziel2701 5y ago
    Yup, Mexico has a ton of wealthy people because of drugs, you don't see their names on these lists.
YinglingLight 5y ago
The investor class, the salary class (us), the wage class, the welfare class. Every outcry for equality that doesn't speak in these terms is manufactured by the investor class. Occupy WallStreet scared the bejeezus out of them. We now have Critical Race Theory to divide us, Woke-ism, etc.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Now that is a good conspiracy theory :-)
michael1999 5y ago
The don’t list family trusts either. So multi-billionaire families like the Rockafellers and the Rothchilds aren’t there.

the_optimist 5y ago

You’ll never see rich people argue for a wealth tax, but they sure as hell will parade demanding that we raise taxes on income of the service class.

hanniabu 5y ago
No idea why you're being downvoted
- TAForObvReasons 5y ago
  Rich != Wealthy. "Rich" tends to refer to people who are generating lots of cash, oftentimes through labor (like doctors or lawyers or athletes). "Wealthy" tends to refer to people who own lots of assets and generate cash through asset appreciation/sales and real property. Wealthy people will push for income taxes while trying to eliminate capital gains and inheritance taxes. This conversation came up years ago when Bill Gates Sr tried to push for income taxes in Washington state and critics pointed out that it would not affect wealthy people.
  - devmunchies 5y ago
    yes, this is why people calling states with no income tax as a "regressive" tax structure seems like a psyop. Income tax taxes people who work for a living. Property + capital gains tax both tax assets appreciation and rent seekers (unless the investment is a high risk venture into a startup or something ambitious).
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Maybe, but they are less regressive. States without income taxes usually rely on sales or excise taxes. In a “high tax” state like New York, poor people don’t pay income tax nor sales tax on food or clothing. (A significant expense) Usually high tax pressure is from property tax. In a state like South Carolina, you have income tax, but property taxes are very low. They make up for that by taxing food, which results in higher taxation for poor and elderly people.

Cyril_HN 5y ago

What sort of evidence would we expect to see if that was true?

dboreham 5y ago
Widespread support for tax cuts for rich people?
internetslave 5y ago
I just don’t buy the wealth distribution that they are showing us. I don’t think the government even knows the true wealth distribution. I think it’s also partly political, they can’t go, “hey! Look how many people have 100 million!”
Daishiman 5y ago
It's not really a conspiracy. You just need to know the right people intimately. I live in a country with a thoroughly dysfunctional banking system which, by most accounts, fall right in the middle of the global income bracket. Yet I know a ton of people in the upper-middle and lower-upper class and they all have the following characteristics of their wealth, which _do not_ appear in most wealth statistics: * One or multiple bank accounts in offshore tax havens, with the US being the most important * Multiple properties, whose real ownership is hidden by being assigned to family members, friends, and relatives * A lot of overseas trips to buy things that are normally horribly expensive due to to import restrictions. * A deep, thorough understanding not only of tax law, but also personal connections with people who work in tax agencies to understand when to avoid (legally), when to evade (knowing the tax agency won't pursue evasions under a certain currency amount) and when to get into convenient tax amnesty regimes. Again, these aren't phenomenally rich people and they're easily hiding away 50-85% of their net wealth. By most metrics these people's income would, in theory, put them in median American lifestyle. Yet it's obvious that their standard of living _easily_ puts them in the top 2-5% of a developed country, with the addition that labor costs are so cheap that they can afford services even pretty wealthy people in other places cannot. This is a classic in Latin America, and I have no reasons to believe it's any different elsewhere; the instruments are just different.

admissionsguy 5y ago

Not sure about the first sentence, but how is "most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich" a conspiracy theory? Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism? I am asking honestly. The social order being a mostly immutable pyramid has always been the natural model of how things work in my mind.

internetslave 5y ago
I just think the distribution of wealth that we are shown, “only .x% of the country have 50 million” is way off from reality.
reedjosh 5y ago
> Isn't that the whole basis of capitalism? I think it's only exacerbated by government intervention (corruption) and regulatory capture. I do agree that human nature tends to winners and losers, but right now the losers are being bashed over the head by a tool they think is helping them.
- admissionsguy 5y ago
  I mean fundamentally, accumulating capital would be pretty pointless if not for legions of poor(er) people willing to do whatever the owner of the capital wants them to.
  - makomk 5y ago
    One of the standard anti-capitalist arguments for redistributing wealth is that the super-wealthy do not, in fact, use their wealth to have others at their beck and call to an extent even remotely proportional to how much better off they are. The usual framing is that less wealthy people spend far more of their money on goods and services, therefore we're better off if they have the money instead of the super-wealthy, but of course it's the same thing really.
- jandrese 5y ago
  At the same time, the natural flow of capital is upward. Without government intervention you end up back at feudalism as a very small percentage of the population controls effectively all of the wealth. The way to combat this is progressive taxation and government spending on social programs and infrastructure.

dillondoyle 5y ago

100% true. bill hwang is a recent example he was on paper >$20 billion. though levered to the gills and it blew up. But there are a lot more examples that aren't big headlines.

devmunchies 5y ago

the value of gold has gone up 30x (in USD) since the 70s. There must be some old noble families with vaults of gold that are "off the books".

vixen99 5y ago

Perhaps I'm missing something but how am I working to keep rich people rich? There must be specific instances but is this a general rule?

cool_dude85 5y ago
Sure. You know those police officers and courts of law and militaries you pay for? Those are the guys whose job it is to keep you from grabbing things from rich people.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
You provide labour to earn your living as opposed to providing capital. If you're providing labour then it's likely that you're providing a small percentage of the return that those providing capital receive as dividend. Value of labor provider being transformed into profit for capital provider.

edouard-harris 5y ago

> there are far more rich people than we are lead to believe This is almost certainly true — apart from oligarchs, dictators, and crypto billionaires, it's broadly understood that "500 richest" lists also miss a fair number of anonymous Omaha residents, for example. > most of us are just working to prop them up and keep them rich I think this part is probably a mischaracterization (though I could also just be misinterpreting what it means). To take the limit case, consider a wealthy dictator who stole absolutely everything he owns, and who flees his ruined country. In this scenario, the aggrieved parties are the people he stole his wealth from, as opposed to, e.g., the waitress who ends up serving him drinks on a Caribbean island. That means to the extent you believe the "prop them up" part of the theory, you must also believe that most wealth concentrations arise more from things like theft, and less from things like value creation. My experience has been that this seems untrue today and almost certainly becomes more untrue every year (but I do understand that reasonable observers may disagree).

dmcgee 5y ago
> you must also believe that most wealth concentrations arise more from things like theft, and less from things like value creation. Maybe, maybe not. [1] [1] https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/cybercrime-to-top-6-trillion-in-2021-north-texas-security-firm-says/2636083/ https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/cybercrime-to-top-6-trillio... As a side note I appreciate the urgency in the tone of the quoted here.
akiselev 5y ago
That contrast of value creation against theft is a false dichotomy. Reframing the latter as "value capture" or "wealth extraction" and treating it separately from value creation gives way to a far more robust analysis.
- edouard-harris 5y ago
  I agree terms like "value capture" or "wealth extraction" would probably be more descriptive. But note that I only mentioned "things like theft" in the gp, so I think we're really talking about the same sorts of activities.

importantbrian 5y ago

I've lived in Fort Lauderdale which is sometimes called the world's yachting capitol. After seeing my first boat show I was actually kind of shocked by the number of people in the "own a large yacht" wealth bracket.