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Once you become rich not only does it become significantly easier to spend money, but it becomes significantly easier to make money. Essentially your money just

Once you become rich not only does it become significantly easier to spend money, but it becomes significantly easier to make money. Essentially your money just grows through investments, dividends and compounding interest. You gain more money by doing less work, so you stay rich for basically the rest of your life. This is a common trend among rich people and among experts who actually study economics it is also the prevailing reason behind the wealth gap. > 2) the richest Americans, as measured by Forbes 400, demonstrate that the majority are first generation in that class. This you can check yourself quite easily. Rich people as individuals tend to stay rich. However wealth is diluted exponentially when passed from generation to generation as inheritance. Think about diluting $100 amongst nodes for each level of a binary tree. The root node gets 100, the next generation each node gets 50, the next gets 25, 12, 6, 3... two generations and already the wealth is divided by four, and this only accounts for people having two kids, rich people tend to have much more!

ChrisLomont 12y ago
>Rich people as individuals tend to stay rich Can you provide a dataset with some cutoff for "rich," and demonstrate people in that class stay there? The entire point is I've tried to do this, and for each dataset that allows measuring such a claim I get the opposite conclusion. The majority fall out of that class, even within their own lifetime. If a person has 1B, and later has 100M, they have lost value. If your original definition of rich is 1B, then they fell out. So if you now move your definition of rich to include 100M, then you also need to consider all people that had 100M, not just the guy with 1B. Now you'll find most don't stay at 100M, most fall. Say you then move your definition to 10M. Then 1M. Then 100K. Repeat the process, but you're moving the definition of rich which is not accurate reasoning. I've done all this, and your claim is unsupportable from any dataset I've examined. For each dataset where I could see how many people started at some level of wealth or income, within their lifetime (and often much shorter), the majority fell below that wealth or income level. Can you provide a dataset showing otherwise? I posted how to get a few counter to your claim already.

ChrisLomont 12y ago

>Rich people as individuals tend to stay rich Can you provide a dataset with some cutoff for "rich," and demonstrate people in that class stay there? The entire point is I've tried to do this, and for each dataset that allows measuring such a claim I get the opposite conclusion. The majority fall out of that class, even within their own lifetime. If a person has 1B, and later has 100M, they have lost value. If your original definition of rich is 1B, then they fell out. So if you now move your definition of rich to include 100M, then you also need to consider all people that had 100M, not just the guy with 1B. Now you'll find most don't stay at 100M, most fall. Say you then move your definition to 10M. Then 1M. Then 100K. Repeat the process, but you're moving the definition of rich which is not accurate reasoning. I've done all this, and your claim is unsupportable from any dataset I've examined. For each dataset where I could see how many people started at some level of wealth or income, within their lifetime (and often much shorter), the majority fell below that wealth or income level. Can you provide a dataset showing otherwise? I posted how to get a few counter to your claim already.