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Degrees of Wealth
- titaniumrain 2mo agowow, someone talks sense instead of a binary answer. love it! thumbs up
- delusional 2mo agoIn Denmark we briadly call this distinction "the good life" (det gode live). Children are usually made to write something (an essay mostly) about it during their last few years in public school. The concept is exactly the philosophical implications of what a "good" life even is. How you can maintain and sustain a "good" life in a world where everyone else is trying to do the same. How your "good" life will sometimes be in tension with other people's, and how it'll even change for you as you live it. "Wealth" is a terrible measure of a "good" life, but for some reason it's the dominant one in the modern world.
- credit_guy 2mo agoWealth is not a terrible measure of good life. "Money does not bring happiness" is a trope that rich people would like poor people to believe. I don't think poor people fall for it, though.
- hackyhacky 2mo agoThe more accurate version is "Money does not bring happiness, but poverty really sucks." A billionaire is not orders of magnitude happier than a millionaire. But a millionaire is much happier than someone who is worried about being able to pay rent, afford food, etc. Thus, the solution to maximize happiness is to distribute wealth evenly.
- phyzix5761 2mo agoI wouldn't say they're happier. They have other things they're stressed about. An undisciplined mind finds things to be dissatisfied with no matter what the financial situation of the individual. Billionaires have desires and aversions just like people living in poverty. Yes, those desires and aversions are about different things but its the mechanism of desire and aversion that causes unhappiness not the external situation.
- hackyhacky 2mo ago> They have other things they're stressed about. Sorry, but I don't buy this. Equating stress about whether my company's stock price stays about $200 with stress about whether I will be able to afford a meal for my children is simply not on the same level. Billionaires may choose to be emotionally involved in their financial situation, but a person in poverty has no choice. A bit of mindful meditation will solve the former problem; only money can solve the latter.
- bluGill 2mo agoI don't know about billionaires, but I do know couples who between the two are earning nearly a million dollars per year - yet because their spending has grown to match their income they are stressed about having enough food to eat the last few days of every month - even worse than poor people I know who have almost nothing. Sure they both are driving new cars, living in a large house (near mansion?), their kids are getting music lessons and many other things that make their life much better than the poor families, but at the end of the month they are out of money and stressed about it. This isn't stress about their stock value (I haven't asked but I suspect they are maxing out their 401k and so have a nice amount in stocks that they can't touch), it is about enough food to eat today. The stress is exactly the same despite a much richer life.
- hackyhacky 2mo agoI don't understand the point of your comment. Am I supposed to feel sorry for the irresponsible upper middle class who spent themselves into debt? Do you think that equates at all to actually poverty?
- bluGill 2mo agoNo. You are supposed to understand them, and why despite having so much more wealth they often really do feel like they are in real poverty. I don't have sympathy for them either. I'm working hard enough to make my own [slightly] more modest life balance and wishing I had some of the toys they do, but I can't afford.
- a34729t 2mo agoI agree: Re happiness is greatly increased by not having stress of worrying about paying bills. Re wealth distribution, that works for a generation or two maybe, but you do need people to actually work eventually. Otherwise you get the Europe situation where everybody wants benefits, 6 weeks of vacation and a 30 hour work week. That's great, but when China and the US are slobbering to take over every industry (or obsolete them, or reinvent them), what are you going to do? My preference would be better services, and driving the cost of basic goods down to zero.
- CPLX 2mo ago> Otherwise you get the Europe situation I love when people use this as an argument. As far as I can tell “the Europe situation” is the most successful model for social and economic governance the world has produced so far.
- bluGill 2mo agoThat is a matter for debate. Europe generally doesn't have a bad life. However depending on what you personally value you might find it could be better. Would you be willing to compromise the lower work hours for more money - that might be the better choice for some people.
- CPLX 2mo agoWell, of course. But I think any list of well-run countries, societies, and so on that doesn't have places like Scandinavia and Switzerland tied for first is a little bit confused.
- a34729t 2mo agoHow long will it last though?
- whall6 2mo agoUnless there is a moral hazard to distributing wealth evenly!
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoThe even more accurate version is "happiness is correlated to the log power of wealth". You need increasingly more wealth to increase happiness. An even distribution maximizes happiness because of diminishing returns.
- ElevenLathe 2mo agoThis is called "marginal utility of money" and is IMO the reason wealth redistribution is at minimum rational to the point that it doesn't disincentize needed growth. In this light (and this is obviously a gross simplification that doesn't even begin to capture reality) the main disagreement across the spectrum from communists to anarcho-capitalists is really: where is that point? and how much growth is needed? AnCaps say any redistribution is too much, communists would like no inequality gap at all. Presumably the pareto value is in the middle somewhere and changes constantly based on charging preferences, technology, and a trillion other variables. This of course treats the whole issue in a very technocratic, whiggish way whereas the real disagreements between these groups is not like that at all.
- jandrewrogers 2mo agoI would much rather optimize for life satisfaction than happiness. If happiness is only weakly correlated with economics then it is poor policy to use economics as a lever to increase happiness. Life satisfaction, on the other hand, is correlated with economic opportunity. It is also more durable than happiness.
- Xirdus 2mo agoKind reminder that in 2026 USA, a millionaire is somebody who paid off their house mortgage and has 12 months of salary in savings but not much else.
- tensor 2mo agoWealth is objectively a poor measure of a good life, past a threshold. Scientific studies have shown that yes, up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), improving wealth improves happiness. After that, reported levels of happiness do not really change with wealth.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoAnd better studies later have shown that the threshold is just the knee in a log curve. Happiness improves with wealth on a logarithmic scale.
- BizarroLand 2mo agoThere's a dramatic difference in having the kind of money that allows you to look forward to retirement and having the kind of money that allows you to alleviate the boredom of you and your closest 5 friends by taking a 6 week retreat to Bali.
- prewett 2mo agoA six week retreat to Bali might alleviate the surface boredom, but it will just self-medicate the emptiness that causes the boredom, though.
- tensor 2mo agoAfter the knee wealth is not the major factor in happiness, other factors take over like friends, relationships, weak tie relationships, etc etc etc. If you want to be happy optimizing for wealth only makes sense under the knee. After that, it's other factors, and extreme wealth may even harm those due to inequality.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago>up to a level of wealth (e.g. being able to not worry about food, shelter, and future security), Assuming future security means affording cutting edge healthcare, this puts you in the 95th, if not the 99th, percentile of the world.
- CPLX 2mo agoMoney does not fix all unhappiness but lack of money guarantees it.
- the_gastropod 2mo agoWhich is why these rich people also spend so extravagantly on advertisements to encourage us to buy shit, too, right? Not like the rich get richer by convincing us we too could be rich if we work more and buy things from them right? No. Living simply is the cornerstone of many philosophies and religions going back thousands of years. Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, Epicureanism, Stoicism are all pretty aligned on this broad “money does not bring happiness” theme. I tend to think there is wisdom here. You’re not going to win the game of monopoly against the people who already own all the real estate. You win by choosing to play a different game.
- prewett 2mo agoMoney buys convenience and comfort, but it does not buy friendship, belonging, love, virtue, or purpose. The latter have usually been seen as more essential to the good life. You can look at the wealthy and get a sense of this. A lot of the artistic output of the 1920s was from rich people who had realized this: "Catcher in the Rye" is about a rich kid who finds life meaningless, and "The Great Gatsby" kills himself when he can't get love. (I think a lot of the current malaise comes from the rich people ["elites"] of that era discovering their meaningless existence--hence Postmodernism, and the rest of us buying into their assessment.) Trust-fund kids are known to go off the rails. The English upper class had a purposelessness (see Dorothy Sayers' main character of her mysteries, a the guy that Jeeves' serves; both again from the same period). In our own day, Elon Musk seems like a guy who is running around like mad, subconsciously covering the emptiness inside. Or our own culture, which is the wealthiest in the history of the world, yet we have rampant ADHD, depression, anxiety, and widespread drug abuse (I see more marijuana dispenseries than liquor stores--we cannot even relax without drugs).
- petra303 2mo agoCan’t view without completing a captcha?
- jaapgrolleman 2mo agoI think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
- hackyhacky 2mo agoThis is an insightful article but it misses the elephant in the room, which is wealth inequality. In Shanghai, there is vastly more wealth inequality than in Netherlands. The reason why nannies are affordable in China is because those nannies aren't paid very much, and consequently enjoy a much lower standard of living than their employers. In Netherlands, nannies are relatively expensive, but you the employee is much closer to the socioeconomic stratum to that of their employer. Same goes for the other examples in the article. The author, having a fancy car, modern phone, etc, clearly enjoys a high level of wealth and is able to leverage that wealth to acquire goods and services at a high level. But that only works if there are people willing to provide those goods and services for a price that he can afford. The author didn't mention that the people who provide these goods and services do not enjoy the same benefits of those goods and services: their nanny cannot afford to hire a nanny, nor a Chinese EV, nor a giant smartphone. The Netherlands has made the intentional decision to reduce wealth inequality and to achieve a fairer society. You can agree or disagree with that decision. But if I had to choose between NL and China, being cast into one country or the other without any choice about where in that society or what level of wealth, NL would be a much better option.
- epgui 2mo agoThere’s a term for what the last sentence expresses: John Rawls’ “Veil of Ignorance”.
- hackyhacky 2mo agoThanks. I knew that I had read about that thought experiment somewhere but couldn't recall the name.
- steveBK123 2mo agoI do worry that the “app / gig economy” independent contractors with weak i9 verification is basically trying to import the developing-world inequality permanent underclass service sector here.
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- jdw64 2mo agoActually, the standard for wealth tends to be set by the people around you, and by the competitors in your field. If you let go of that and draw your own standards, it's enough. but in the end, money is what defines wealth. I know comparison is the problem, but companies know that without comparison, there's no consumption, so they keep creating it. I want to break free from that
- joeyagreco 2mo agoGetting a 408 :/
- jaapgrolleman 2mo agoI think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
- choutos 2mo agoSufficiency versus maximization. China maximizes output given the means available (and treats ever-growing means as self-evidently good), the Netherlands treats wellbeing as the fixed end and then economizes on the means needed to reach it: effort, resources, consumption. In words of E. F. Schumacher: "the maximum of wellbeing with the minimum of consumption"
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- jaapgrolleman 2mo agoI think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
- Cider9986 2mo agoArchive: https://web.archive.org/web/20260806144459/https://jaapgrolleman.com/degrees-of-wealth/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260806144459/https://jaapgroll... Double archive: https://megalodon.jp/2026-0807-0016-17/https://web.archive.org:443/web/20260806144459/https://jaapgrolleman.com/degrees-of-wealth/ https://megalodon.jp/2026-0807-0016-17/https://web.archive.o...
- ambicapter 2mo agoGetting a 408.
- jaapgrolleman 2mo agoI think it's too much traffic from HackerNews onto the website
- maerF0x0 2mo agoWebpage is struggling. Here is the text Degrees of wealth July 11, 2026 In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the mirrored version: do I miss living in China? Neither question is easy, because there are so many areas to look for answers in, and they’re clouded by personal confounds. We didn’t just change countries — we also moved from a metropolis to a small town. More importantly, ‘which is better’ depends entirely on how you value what. For a long time, I assumed the Netherlands was the wealthier, more developed country. But that holds only in certain areas, not uniformly. Living in Shanghai, I used to look down on the archaic technology of the Netherlands — the bank cards, the paper letters from the government, unimpressive infrastructure. But back here, I find the picture is mixed. I miss our luxurious Chinese EV with its battery swap feature, but the Dutch bicycle infrastructure is just so good and (at least when it’s sunny) such a source of joy. So the question is less a question than an area to explore: how to measure ‘wealth’ with different rulers: in money, time, trust, health, luxury, or convenience. Because the contradiction is that most Dutch people are wealthier than people in Shanghai, but have no air conditioning in their homes. They drive smaller, older cars with fewer features. Public transport is dismal by comparison. Phones are smaller, lower-resolution, and slower — as are televisions. Shops close on Sunday, and payments are still done by cash or bank cards. The biggest effect comes from the way money trickles down the economy, specifically through a much higher minimum wage. I really felt this when I had to call my Dutch bank: on the website I had to dig hard for a phone number, then join a 15-minute telephone queue to ask a 10-second question, whereas in China there’d be a chat feature in the app connecting me instantly to an employee. There are fewer public toilets, because servicing them would be so expensive here, and nobody is willing to pay for that. A private nanny or cleaning lady is much rarer in the Netherlands — just extremely expensive — and we’re back to full-time home cooking, because eating out is costly, as are food delivery options (which are also sparse and slow). But people have more spare time to do exactly those things, and they live in bigger houses with lawns, often front-and-back. And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market — for bicycles, cars, and furniture — not just apps for quickly selling off some stuff, like Goofish (咸鱼), but real businesses built on it. And so the slow pace of life is even embedded in the materials. Things have to be recycled, repaired, or made to last longer. We mop the table with a rag that we wash later, whereas in China we’d use throwaway paper towels. In Shanghai we bought baby products on Tmall or Taobao, reading about the latest generation of some toy or baby camera with AI features, wholly believing those neatly designed pages in the app. Here, my parents still have the toys, crib, and dish I used as a baby — which Hasse now uses, more than three decades later. Both are forms of wealth. In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old). The Netherlands is a very expensive country for most things. Yet China is more expensive if, for instance, you lose your job or get ill. Expensive and cheap, like rich and poor, depend on where you’re standing when you measure. Perhaps what I see is the frugality of a land that has time, versus the speed and haste of a country that is busy changing, fighting to gain more. So, to come back to the question — I’ll answer it the way I always have. Both countries are rich and poor in their own ways, they’re just different.
- triceratops 2mo agoThe author is comparing the experience of being well-off in a developing country to middle-class in a wealthy country. Of course they're going to be different lifestyles.
- ragazzina 2mo ago> And because everything is more expensive (both goods and labour), the Netherlands has a way bigger second-hand market The Chinese aversion for second-hand stuff is cultural. You don't buy stuff that's been used by someone else because it brings energy from the previous owner.
- arjie 2mo agoIt’s just the age of the civilization. The Dutch were the originators of much of modern trade capitalism - the joint stock corporation being instrumental to their ability to run long voyages and so on. This happens to everyone. They prosper and then switch to retirement mode and start extracting wealth from the younger people. The speed of your growth determines the top most point of your arc (which is not parabolic but concave down) and after you hit the top you do this sort of thing. So one way to live a good life is to move to a growth-oriented country in your youth and to a retirement-oriented country in your old age. In this way you get the benefits of both.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> Dutch were the originators of much of modern trade capitalism - the joint stock corporation “The earliest records of joint-stock companies appear in China during the Tang and Song dynasties” [1]. What the Dutch pioneered were tradeable shares, which in turn massively increased the amount of capital a society could rally from its population. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint-stock_company
- arjie 2mo agoDefinitely a critical but unintended inaccuracy on my part. I absolutely intended to mean the tradability etc. A Splendid Exchange has a good bit on this. I suppose I meant the public corporation or whatever. Thanks for the correction.
- maerF0x0 2mo agoAbuses of power (of which wealth can be used to acquire it) aside[1]. The main arguments that allow inequality are arguments against the costs of enacting outcome leveling policies. Some examples. - The growth rate of an economy which enacts redistribution policies will be stymied, leading to lesser outcomes for all, particularly in aggregate, but over the long run also for the bottom percentiles. The rough idea is in absolute terms now is one of the best times to be in the bottom quartile basically ever. This is measured in things like total consumption, access to medicines and technology, number of TVs and airconditioners etc. By changing the growth trajectory through redistribution today we improve the lives of todays people at the cost of lowering the lives of future people who would have had their lives lifted by higher amounts of growth over time. - Redistribution as a form of injustice -- property rights are an important element of a functioning non-authoritarian society, and taking from someone in an unjust (using that word beyond "legal" or "democratic"-- remember the tyranny of majority issue) represents a degradation of society of sorts. There is little difference, in many folks minds, between a mob with pitchforks versus a mob with ballots. The cost of redistribution might be less "justice" in a system. This deters people from viewing the state (city, region, country) as an investible market. - So long as wealth is able to generate wealth (such as owning an income producing asset) inequality will be inherent to reality. The compounding effect of purchasing assets with asset derived income will accelerate the gap in individual earnings. Making failing bets (hence why gov't bailouts are really bad), and the regression towards mean outcomes (hence why maximizing the bottom half's opportunity is critical), are crucial to the system. And in the US we've essentially done the opposite through bailouts, only hiring from expensive universities, denying certain investment classes only to the elite accredited folks, and by erecting regulatory barriers to entry that disproportionately encumber the little guy in the market. - Assets buying assets results in increased average price of a dollar of earnings which creates net opportunities for those who transition from employee to entrepreneur. One way to see historic S&P p/e multiples is to see it as the reward for creating a dollar of income stream as being highly compensated today, whereas it was less compensated in the past. [1]- Particularly citizen's united in the USA context, and any similar issues in other countries
- heaney-555 2mo ago>In broad strokes, the Netherlands is a small-scale, low-tech society. Small-scale in that the city hall here has just one window open to queue at, whereas Shanghai has hundreds of citizen service centres, each with dozens of desks. There’s one ATM I know of, and a small library (which, I must say, had a lot of visitors, from young to old). It sounds a lot like the author is comparing their small town in the Netherlands to one of the largest cities of China.
- red-iron-pine 2mo agoShanghai is a global mega city, in the top 5 largest, #5 after Tokyo and Delhi no comparison, really. estimated population for the Shanghai metro area is more than many first world countries.
- gabesullice 2mo agoSo many parallels with my experience moving from the US to France. Things aren't as easy to get done here. I'm pretty hot today with my struggling, portable AC. We have to wait for our laundry to air dry. I miss having a garage for tools and equipment. I missed American customer service. But: I can stroll to a bakery here. The vegetables taste. I walk my son to school and we hold hands and talk. It took me a while, but I don't start panicking when someone in the family needs to see a doctor or visit an urgent care center. And that customer service I missed? I realized that it often (but not always) manufactures a feeling of (in)superiority. I now assume loud cracks are engine backfires, not gunshots. On the other hand, I recognize that I was lucky to start life in the US. I wasn't the best student and I dropped out of college (albeit for financial reasons I may not have had here), but I was still able to get a good job in software development—credentials aren't as important in the US as they are in France, in my experience.
- siliconc0w 2mo agoThere are cost externalities that generally unaccounted for- maintaining an underclass paid subsistence wages or using disposable products that as a society you eventually have to grapple with.