This is it. Although the selfmade millionaires are few and not many they are complete workaholics. The ones who inherited wealth are the ones screwing around and spending their money.
Nobody’s “selfmade”. That’s a myth perpetuated by Forbes, WSJ and the like to decrease resentment towards the people whose boots they lick for a living.
In reality, no matter how hard you work, you need the help of others to be successful and to be downright RICH, you need a whole lot of luck too.
You don’t understand what selfmade means. It means they did not inherited a fortune500 company at the age of 25. Selfmade means they started from a situation where they had a degree and a simple common job and made into a billionaire. Obvioisly no single person can create and manage a 20000 person company on its own, no one ever said it is like that.
I understand just fine. What I’m saying is that using that word implies that they have earned all their wealth and are more deserving than others who didn’t have the same help and luck. More deserving than others with the same background who have worked just as hard with less help and/or luck along the way.
Whether or not that’s the intention, that’s the implication and thus why using the word at all skews the conversation.
statistically there will be a few honest to god self made nillionaires
That’s not how statistics work. There being a lot of people doesn’t change reality to make the impossible possible.
You literally CAN’T become a billionaire without a SHITLOAD of help from and exploitation of others and that’s the case whether the world population is 30 or 30 trillion.
I wouldn’t call it impossible, just statistically insignificant.
Here’s how it works: people work in exchange for much less than the value they produce.
That surplus value is turned into profit for the company, exorbitant salaries for executives and stock market value. Those are the sources of income that makes a billionaire.
No matter how and where a billionaire started, that is how they became a billionaire: value produced by other people becoming wealth for one person. And a shitload of hoarding, of course.
Statistics document reality, they don’t change how it works.
God I hope you’re not old enough to vote cause you have no idea how anything works
Says the worst case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome I’ve come across all month 🙄
I’m bored of your pompous mouse roars and will let you be a willfully ignorant tool (in both senses of the word) without wasting any more time and energy on you. Have the day you deserve.
Nope. If someone with a net worth of $100m or more takes a gamble and loses, the company goes under and people lose their jobs while the rich guy gets a loan or a tax write-off.
“Seeing opportunities” for huge possible gains for yourself with all significant risks being to people much less fortunate than you and taking it isn’t a virtue, it’s self-centered greed.
And what my statement was meant to convey is the fact that the ventures you so laud are all reward and no risk for the rich and all risk and no reward for the poor.
If it had been a game of crabs, the rich would be rolling 4 loaded dice, picking which two count after throwing. The poor would have one dice at most, the most beneficial numbers missing at all times.
Literally semantics and who gives a shit. Erm ackshually, type beat. Obviously money flows, no one just generates money on their own without the creation of value by the governing body, or can provide goods/services without the goods/services needed to even start their own trade. No one legitimately believes selfmade means you did literally everything yourself, everywhere. It’s just people who earned a wealthy life without inheritance.
At a certain point these individuals aren’t really contributing much. They’re keeping themselves busy with unnecessary meetings, networking activities, etc.
If upper management takes a month off work at a steady company, not a lot of things slow down.
In Dutch there’s this joke: “netwerken is net werken.” Roughly translates to “networking is almost like work.”
I’d rather rich people spend their time spending all their money, then at least they’re benefiting the economy which has SOME minor gains to everyday people. It’s the ones who horde it that are the worst.
…No? “The economy” isn’t dollars and numbers in bank accounts. It’s steel and grains and fuel, and how that gets distributed amongst people. Money sitting idle is money that’s at least not actively causing harm; Money spent on products and services with actual value means hoarding basic necessities (E.G. buying up all the housing).
Rich people slanting the economy towards spending its finite labour and material resources on building mansions and yachts means that there will be less available, and it will cost more, to grow cops and build housing or provide services and do all the other things we actually need.
If “rich people spend their time spending all their money”, then your living costs skyrocket because of inflationary effects— Because now everyone’s working in the megayacht shipyards that the rich people spent their money on, instead of growing crops or fixing roads.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
The ones who spend their time giving away their money are the only good rich people.
Yeah, no. Handing out scraps to salvage your reputation after stealing the entire pie is not what a good person does.
Your problem is you’re starting from the position that money is bad, and you’re finding arguments to support that.
Actually, I’m starting from the position that there are basic physical constraints on productive capacity no matter what, and while a well-functioning economy might utilize that more efficiently, no amount of dollars changing hands is going to break the laws of physics and just magic a more efficient powerplant or a larger workforce or more arable land into existence (without competing with and detracting from anywhere else).
In a functioning industry, more demand creates more profit incentive which causes businesses to produce more, bringing prices into equilibrium.
Duh. But that’s not relevant to this discussion.
“A functioning industry” is a subset of “the economy”. You seem to ultimately be implying some kind of infinite or free growth, which is sorta fine for modelling just one industry, but resources are very finite on the whole, and increased demand for shared resources by one specific industry, by mathematical definition, leaves less available for everything else.
That is why and how it is possible for businesses in a specific industry to produce more to meet demand, and bring prices (mostly) into equilibrium. (Though note “equilibrium” has nothing to do with affordability, or fairness, as you seem to possibly be implying it does.) It is also why trying to apply this logic to the entire economy as a whole doesn’t really fit.
The recent inflation we’ve seen has been a result of price gouging by businesses. Businesses use “inflation” as a justification for raising prices but not wages. It’s not real, it’s just massive collusion.
I’m aware of this. I also don’t see how it’s significant for the hypotheticals/topic at hand.
The role of government is to prevent that. And to prevent inefficient or undesirable allocation of labor and money, by taxing and subsidizing and fining and regulating. So the rich want everyone working on yachts and no one working on roads? Government taxes yachts until it’s too expensive to maintain them, and government subsidizes road contractors who offer generous payment terms.
I think you’re moving the goalposts. The discussion you started was about which spending habits for “rich people” would be the least societally damaging, by “benefiting the economy”. If you’re going to just say “government intervention” to limit the harm, then we may as well just say “wealth tax” and be done with it.
Also, economies with high wealth inequality tend to have ineffective or corrupt regulators already. So suggesting regulations could be used to limit the harm of what you were advocating for in examples of wealth inequality… Seems discombobulated, on multiple levels.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
Absolutely not. You clearly know what the velocity of money is so how could you possibly think that? Maybe you just heard the term somewhere.
Dude. The MV in MV=PQ is multiplication. it’s literally commutative. You’re actually right that I’m not fully as well-versed in economic theory as I could be, but assuming that basic algebra works the same in economics as it does anywhere else in the universe, reducing the velocity of money is literally, by mathematical definition, indistinguishable from reducing the supply of money.
If $20 is circulated only once in a year and only purchased one $20 meal, it only stimulates one meal’s worth of demand and only pays 1 meal’s worth of wages. If it’s circulated twice…
If it’s circulated twice, then it still pays for only one meal, which now costs $40 instead of $20— Because it turns out you only had enough people planting crops to make one meal in total.
(If it were circulated twice in the food sector but not in other industries, then you might be able to buy one and a half meals for like $30 per, by retooling more of the economy for food production, at the cost of reducing supply and probably increasing cost in other industries— But if it’s uniformly circulated twice in every sector, as is closer to what you’re suggesting, then there’s no profit incentive to retool anyway, so literally all you’re doing is creating inflation.)
Q remains effectively constant, because Q is bound by the productive capacity of the economy, as limited by basic physics (barring external factors like demographic and technological change), so only M, V, and P can really change in the short term.
Money that is removed from the economic cycle is money that is not being used to support it. The faster the cycle goes (the greater the velocity of money) the more good it does.
Saying “support it” and “faster the cycle” is entirely allegorical and metaphorical in this context, and doesn’t even pretend to have any rigorously formulated or defined meaning. So I can’t really respond to it directly. But the anecdote you followed it with is unsubstantiated and apparently basically nonsensical, and the personal insinuation you made right before it seems to fly in the face of the basic algebra it’s referring to.
Again: Money isn’t real. Steel and wheat and turbines are real. You can’t just magic’ up “more good” by making more money spin around in a circle; All that will accomplish is to make each unit of money worth less, because it still has to map to the same amount of goods and services in physical reality.
Not to mention the whole “there’s only a limited pie of goods” view caused incredible suffering in the 1600s and 1700s when European nations decided they wanted to grab the biggest slice they could.
I started writing a response because your tone sounded like you knew what you were talking about,
But really, what you’re asserting would probably require breaking a couple laws of thermodynamics, and also seems to be directly contradictory to the basic mathematical formulation and economic description of what you’re talking about.
…Ah, fuck it.
The 1600s called, they want their economic theories back.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
Absolutely not. You clearly know what the velocity of money is so how could you possibly think that? Maybe you just heard the term somewhere.
Fifth Grade called. They want you to redo the bit on multiplication, so you won’t try to claim (nM)V ≠ M(nV).
Though I will caveat that as modern national economies aren’t closed systems either, rich people in those nations “spending all their money” may well actually help their countries as a whole too, just in less of the “benefiting the economy” way you were suggesting and instead in more of the “incredible suffering” way that you ironically tried to condemn.
You’re just repeating irrelevant basic theory that everybody already knows, which has nothing to do with your particular assertion about rich people spending their money, while merely pretending it’s relevant so you sound like you know what you’re talking about. And you’re doing so entirely anecdotally, without any substantive principles, math, reasoning, or empirical basis to back it up, while talking down as if you’re spitting some great truth.
Oh, and you’re conflating technological progress with supply and demand, which, while technically related (in that it can be affected by supply and demand, like everything else), is not governed by the same laws, is not the same topic, and is in no way guaranteed (…and is not prominently featured in, like, any serious/major school of macroeconomic thought). Oh, and you’re conflating primary sector output limits as the sole possible bottleneck for productive capacity, which at no point did I assert, and which is plainly ridiculous. And frankly, I don’t feel like wasting the energy to pay attention in the rest of your tautological and bloviating rambling to check what else you’re mixing up, but from a quick skim, it looks like you also try to completely change your narrative from “demand” to “technology”, while twisting semantics to pretend you were never talking in the first place about what you were actually saying.
Frankly, if you can’t even explain that weird part where you just ignored and directly contradicted basic monetary theory and its constituent mathematical laws while insulting me personally, I don’t know why you would expect anything else you say about this to be taken seriously.
I linked to— What, five pretty rigorously studied basic economic and mathematical theorems, principles, formulae, etc., so far, to substantiate everything I’ve said. And you haven’t even addressed a single one of them— Instead, you’ve just been blindly bloviating about “how the economy works”, insultingly calling things “stunningly wrong”, and ranting about “how long [you] can keep telling” me about something where you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
Read the fucking manual. I even linked you to some encyclopaedic summaries. And stop talking about something you clearly have no idea about and have zero interest to actually engage in good faith on or do any serious referencing on, as if you’re some authority on it.
This is actually a subject on which my knowledge is quite incomplete, and I would have liked to be exposed to more, if you had anything to offer other than the economic equivalent of confused and angry fairy tales. But I think my disgust at this interaction now outweighs anything I might have hoped to gain from it.
But you have to imagine that the rich people giving away money only got rich by not paying their dues. So if they actually paid their workers well and every little tax they were owed, they wouldn’t be rich enough to give away money.
is workaholism a passion or an addiction, a way to distract yourself from having to experience the painful realities of looking at yourself in the mirror with vulnerability and honesty?
what if their passion is working and it’s more than 40 hours
This is it. Although the selfmade millionaires are few and not many they are complete workaholics. The ones who inherited wealth are the ones screwing around and spending their money.
Nobody’s “selfmade”. That’s a myth perpetuated by Forbes, WSJ and the like to decrease resentment towards the people whose boots they lick for a living.
In reality, no matter how hard you work, you need the help of others to be successful and to be downright RICH, you need a whole lot of luck too.
You don’t understand what selfmade means. It means they did not inherited a fortune500 company at the age of 25. Selfmade means they started from a situation where they had a degree and a simple common job and made into a billionaire. Obvioisly no single person can create and manage a 20000 person company on its own, no one ever said it is like that.
I understand just fine. What I’m saying is that using that word implies that they have earned all their wealth and are more deserving than others who didn’t have the same help and luck. More deserving than others with the same background who have worked just as hard with less help and/or luck along the way.
Whether or not that’s the intention, that’s the implication and thus why using the word at all skews the conversation.
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That’s not how statistics work. There being a lot of people doesn’t change reality to make the impossible possible.
You literally CAN’T become a billionaire without a SHITLOAD of help from and exploitation of others and that’s the case whether the world population is 30 or 30 trillion.
Again, not how ANYTHING works.
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As is made abundantly clear in my reply to your other comment, it is you that is confidently wrong and it’s an important issue.
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Here’s how it works: people work in exchange for much less than the value they produce.
That surplus value is turned into profit for the company, exorbitant salaries for executives and stock market value. Those are the sources of income that makes a billionaire.
No matter how and where a billionaire started, that is how they became a billionaire: value produced by other people becoming wealth for one person. And a shitload of hoarding, of course.
Statistics document reality, they don’t change how it works.
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Says the worst case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome I’ve come across all month 🙄
I’m bored of your pompous mouse roars and will let you be a willfully ignorant tool (in both senses of the word) without wasting any more time and energy on you. Have the day you deserve.
it’s less about working harder, and more about seeing opportunities and being able to take the risk to go after them.
Nope. If someone with a net worth of $100m or more takes a gamble and loses, the company goes under and people lose their jobs while the rich guy gets a loan or a tax write-off.
“Seeing opportunities” for huge possible gains for yourself with all significant risks being to people much less fortunate than you and taking it isn’t a virtue, it’s self-centered greed.
the key to my statement is “being able to take the risk”. poor folks can’t take the same risks that the wealthy folks can take.
And what my statement was meant to convey is the fact that the ventures you so laud are all reward and no risk for the rich and all risk and no reward for the poor.
If it had been a game of crabs, the rich would be rolling 4 loaded dice, picking which two count after throwing. The poor would have one dice at most, the most beneficial numbers missing at all times.
Literally semantics and who gives a shit. Erm ackshually, type beat. Obviously money flows, no one just generates money on their own without the creation of value by the governing body, or can provide goods/services without the goods/services needed to even start their own trade. No one legitimately believes selfmade means you did literally everything yourself, everywhere. It’s just people who earned a wealthy life without inheritance.
At a certain point these individuals aren’t really contributing much. They’re keeping themselves busy with unnecessary meetings, networking activities, etc.
If upper management takes a month off work at a steady company, not a lot of things slow down.
In Dutch there’s this joke: “netwerken is net werken.” Roughly translates to “networking is almost like work.”
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…No? “The economy” isn’t dollars and numbers in bank accounts. It’s steel and grains and fuel, and how that gets distributed amongst people. Money sitting idle is money that’s at least not actively causing harm; Money spent on products and services with actual value means hoarding basic necessities (E.G. buying up all the housing).
Rich people slanting the economy towards spending its finite labour and material resources on building mansions and yachts means that there will be less available, and it will cost more, to grow cops and build housing or provide services and do all the other things we actually need.
Or, to put it another way, I think:
MoneySupply × VelocityOfMoney = PriceLevel × ProducedValueIf “rich people spend their time spending all their money”, then your living costs skyrocket because of inflationary effects— Because now everyone’s working in the megayacht shipyards that the rich people spent their money on, instead of growing crops or fixing roads.
Conversely, if somebody has $100 trillion-gazillion dollars just sitting in a vault somewhere, but they never spend it and none of it ever sees the light of day, while they instead live in a shack spending no more than a couple thousand dollars a month, then for practical purposes it’s effectively like that money doesn’t exist, right?
Yeah, no. Handing out scraps to salvage your reputation after stealing the entire pie is not what a good person does.
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Actually, I’m starting from the position that there are basic physical constraints on productive capacity no matter what, and while a well-functioning economy might utilize that more efficiently, no amount of dollars changing hands is going to break the laws of physics and just magic a more efficient powerplant or a larger workforce or more arable land into existence (without competing with and detracting from anywhere else).
Duh. But that’s not relevant to this discussion.
“A functioning industry” is a subset of “the economy”. You seem to ultimately be implying some kind of infinite or free growth, which is sorta fine for modelling just one industry, but resources are very finite on the whole, and increased demand for shared resources by one specific industry, by mathematical definition, leaves less available for everything else.
That is why and how it is possible for businesses in a specific industry to produce more to meet demand, and bring prices (mostly) into equilibrium. (Though note “equilibrium” has nothing to do with affordability, or fairness, as you seem to possibly be implying it does.) It is also why trying to apply this logic to the entire economy as a whole doesn’t really fit.
I’m aware of this. I also don’t see how it’s significant for the hypotheticals/topic at hand.
I think you’re moving the goalposts. The discussion you started was about which spending habits for “rich people” would be the least societally damaging, by “benefiting the economy”. If you’re going to just say “government intervention” to limit the harm, then we may as well just say “wealth tax” and be done with it.
Also, economies with high wealth inequality tend to have ineffective or corrupt regulators already. So suggesting regulations could be used to limit the harm of what you were advocating for in examples of wealth inequality… Seems discombobulated, on multiple levels.
Dude. The
MVinMV=PQis multiplication. it’s literally commutative. You’re actually right that I’m not fully as well-versed in economic theory as I could be, but assuming that basic algebra works the same in economics as it does anywhere else in the universe, reducing the velocity of money is literally, by mathematical definition, indistinguishable from reducing the supply of money.If it’s circulated twice, then it still pays for only one meal, which now costs $40 instead of $20— Because it turns out you only had enough people planting crops to make one meal in total.
(If it were circulated twice in the food sector but not in other industries, then you might be able to buy one and a half meals for like $30 per, by retooling more of the economy for food production, at the cost of reducing supply and probably increasing cost in other industries— But if it’s uniformly circulated twice in every sector, as is closer to what you’re suggesting, then there’s no profit incentive to retool anyway, so literally all you’re doing is creating inflation.)
Qremains effectively constant, becauseQis bound by the productive capacity of the economy, as limited by basic physics (barring external factors like demographic and technological change), so onlyM,V, andPcan really change in the short term.Saying “support it” and “faster the cycle” is entirely allegorical and metaphorical in this context, and doesn’t even pretend to have any rigorously formulated or defined meaning. So I can’t really respond to it directly. But the anecdote you followed it with is unsubstantiated and apparently basically nonsensical, and the personal insinuation you made right before it seems to fly in the face of the basic algebra it’s referring to.
Again: Money isn’t real. Steel and wheat and turbines are real. You can’t just magic’ up “more good” by making more money spin around in a circle; All that will accomplish is to make each unit of money worth less, because it still has to map to the same amount of goods and services in physical reality.
Productive Capacity ≠ Imperialism!!!
Trying to equate the two is just bizarre…
I started writing a response because your tone sounded like you knew what you were talking about,
But really, what you’re asserting would probably require breaking a couple laws of thermodynamics, and also seems to be directly contradictory to the basic mathematical formulation and economic description of what you’re talking about.
…Ah, fuck it.
Fifth Grade called. They want you to redo the bit on multiplication, so you won’t try to claim
(nM)V ≠ M(nV).Though I will caveat that as modern national economies aren’t closed systems either, rich people in those nations “spending all their money” may well actually help their countries as a whole too, just in less of the “benefiting the economy” way you were suggesting and instead in more of the “incredible suffering” way that you ironically tried to condemn.
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You’re just repeating irrelevant basic theory that everybody already knows, which has nothing to do with your particular assertion about rich people spending their money, while merely pretending it’s relevant so you sound like you know what you’re talking about. And you’re doing so entirely anecdotally, without any substantive principles, math, reasoning, or empirical basis to back it up, while talking down as if you’re spitting some great truth.
Oh, and you’re conflating technological progress with supply and demand, which, while technically related (in that it can be affected by supply and demand, like everything else), is not governed by the same laws, is not the same topic, and is in no way guaranteed (…and is not prominently featured in, like, any serious/major school of macroeconomic thought). Oh, and you’re conflating primary sector output limits as the sole possible bottleneck for productive capacity, which at no point did I assert, and which is plainly ridiculous. And frankly, I don’t feel like wasting the energy to pay attention in the rest of your tautological and bloviating rambling to check what else you’re mixing up, but from a quick skim, it looks like you also try to completely change your narrative from “demand” to “technology”, while twisting semantics to pretend you were never talking in the first place about what you were actually saying.
Frankly, if you can’t even explain that weird part where you just ignored and directly contradicted basic monetary theory and its constituent mathematical laws while insulting me personally, I don’t know why you would expect anything else you say about this to be taken seriously.
I linked to— What, five pretty rigorously studied basic economic and mathematical theorems, principles, formulae, etc., so far, to substantiate everything I’ve said. And you haven’t even addressed a single one of them— Instead, you’ve just been blindly bloviating about “how the economy works”, insultingly calling things “stunningly wrong”, and ranting about “how long [you] can keep telling” me about something where you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
Read the fucking manual. I even linked you to some encyclopaedic summaries. And stop talking about something you clearly have no idea about and have zero interest to actually engage in good faith on or do any serious referencing on, as if you’re some authority on it.
This is actually a subject on which my knowledge is quite incomplete, and I would have liked to be exposed to more, if you had anything to offer other than the economic equivalent of confused and angry fairy tales. But I think my disgust at this interaction now outweighs anything I might have hoped to gain from it.
This is useless.
But you have to imagine that the rich people giving away money only got rich by not paying their dues. So if they actually paid their workers well and every little tax they were owed, they wouldn’t be rich enough to give away money.
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is workaholism a passion or an addiction, a way to distract yourself from having to experience the painful realities of looking at yourself in the mirror with vulnerability and honesty?