4 ms·

A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). No, that's a person with "high hourly earned income". Making wealth is not the onl

by kourt 12y ago

A rich person earns more money per hour than a poor person (by definition). No, that's a person with "high hourly earned income". Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation. - Paul Graham

smsm42 12y ago
We're not living "a few centuries ago", however. And there is also an important qualifying word "rapidly". One doesn't have to become rich overnight to be rich now. As for the "bad reputation", given that most things that were written and otherwise arrived to us were composed by people of some means at least (excluding monks, etc. which are harder to classify by modern standards) - really poor folks had high illiteracy rates, little spare time to create records that we could read, and not many people that cared for their opinions enough to create permanent record of them. So, given that, how exactly Paul Graham knows what reputation the wealth had amongst folks who weren't wealthy?
- wpietri 12y ago
  One study says that only a third of the Forbes 400 started from a middle-class background or lower. [1] A third of them had purely inherited wealth. [2] And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with, they aren't enormously more productive than their peers. Often it was a right-place, right-time thing. If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire. So I think it's an enormous error to confuse wealth with creating lots of value per hour. Wealthy just means you control a lot of capital. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/49167533# http://www.cnbc.com/id/49167533# [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-made-forbes-400-billionaires-earned-their-money/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-...
  - smsm42 12y ago
    The third is not a majority. The first link says 57% were not born wealthy. >>> And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with Anecdote is not data. I don't know where you live, but depending on it and your social circle, the minuscule number (compared to the whole nation) of people you can observe personally would be very different. >>> Often it was a right-place, right-time thing. It was. So what? Nobody claims billionaires are superhuman. The claim is only they deliver (or delivered) value. Did they come into position of being able to deliver the value by luck? Maybe. So what? If you per chance found a deposit of gold or discovered very valuable technology - they fact chance played role in it does not change the price of gold or the usability of technology. >>> If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire. Sure, so that guy everybody mentions would be called "John Walles" instead, it's no different.
    - wpietri 12y ago
      >> It was. So what? So maybe you should read all the way to the the last line of my post, which explains my exact point: someone currently being a billionaire doesn't mean that they will make the world much better if they spend an hour on one thing versus another. Ergo, kourt's point stands: somebody being wealthy is not any sort of proof that they can create more value per hour. Which is the (wrong) notion that NhanN was promoting. If you're going to jump into a conversation in the middle, please try to pay attention to what's going on. It's frustrating to have to connect the dots for you.
      - smsm42 12y ago
        >>> somebody being wealthy is not any sort of proof It's not a proof, but it's higher probability, by the virtue that in majority of cases being reach means producing value (at least in the past, as your own links prove) - and if the person produced a lot of value in the past, there's a big chance he'll continue doing that. As for the question if it makes the world better - it's a very subjective matter, everybody has their own "better". I think it'd be better if Uber would disrupt taxi cartels, but taxi cartels and medallion investors think it'd be worse. >>> It's frustrating to have to connect the dots for you. That may be because the dots are connected by non-sequiturs. E.g., the question if somebody was lucky or not bears no relation to the question if he produces or ever produced value. A quote of how one could rapidly become rich three hundred years ago has little connection to how the majority of rich people slowly become rich now. Etc, etc.

by kourt 12y ago

smsm42 12y ago

We're not living "a few centuries ago", however. And there is also an important qualifying word "rapidly". One doesn't have to become rich overnight to be rich now. As for the "bad reputation", given that most things that were written and otherwise arrived to us were composed by people of some means at least (excluding monks, etc. which are harder to classify by modern standards) - really poor folks had high illiteracy rates, little spare time to create records that we could read, and not many people that cared for their opinions enough to create permanent record of them. So, given that, how exactly Paul Graham knows what reputation the wealth had amongst folks who weren't wealthy?

wpietri 12y ago
One study says that only a third of the Forbes 400 started from a middle-class background or lower. [1] A third of them had purely inherited wealth. [2] And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with, they aren't enormously more productive than their peers. Often it was a right-place, right-time thing. If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire. So I think it's an enormous error to confuse wealth with creating lots of value per hour. Wealthy just means you control a lot of capital. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/id/49167533# http://www.cnbc.com/id/49167533# [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-made-forbes-400-billionaires-earned-their-money/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2013/09/18/how-self-...
- smsm42 12y ago
  The third is not a majority. The first link says 57% were not born wealthy. >>> And when I look around at the rich people I'm familiar with Anecdote is not data. I don't know where you live, but depending on it and your social circle, the minuscule number (compared to the whole nation) of people you can observe personally would be very different. >>> Often it was a right-place, right-time thing. It was. So what? Nobody claims billionaires are superhuman. The claim is only they deliver (or delivered) value. Did they come into position of being able to deliver the value by luck? Maybe. So what? If you per chance found a deposit of gold or discovered very valuable technology - they fact chance played role in it does not change the price of gold or the usability of technology. >>> If Bill Gates had been born 50 years earlier, for example, it's hard to imagine him becoming a zillionaire. Sure, so that guy everybody mentions would be called "John Walles" instead, it's no different.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    >> It was. So what? So maybe you should read all the way to the the last line of my post, which explains my exact point: someone currently being a billionaire doesn't mean that they will make the world much better if they spend an hour on one thing versus another. Ergo, kourt's point stands: somebody being wealthy is not any sort of proof that they can create more value per hour. Which is the (wrong) notion that NhanN was promoting. If you're going to jump into a conversation in the middle, please try to pay attention to what's going on. It's frustrating to have to connect the dots for you.
    - smsm42 12y ago
      >>> somebody being wealthy is not any sort of proof It's not a proof, but it's higher probability, by the virtue that in majority of cases being reach means producing value (at least in the past, as your own links prove) - and if the person produced a lot of value in the past, there's a big chance he'll continue doing that. As for the question if it makes the world better - it's a very subjective matter, everybody has their own "better". I think it'd be better if Uber would disrupt taxi cartels, but taxi cartels and medallion investors think it'd be worse. >>> It's frustrating to have to connect the dots for you. That may be because the dots are connected by non-sequiturs. E.g., the question if somebody was lucky or not bears no relation to the question if he produces or ever produced value. A quote of how one could rapidly become rich three hundred years ago has little connection to how the majority of rich people slowly become rich now. Etc, etc.