The graph shows middle class wealth at 102k in 1980s and 115k in the 2010s.EDIT - these numbers have already been adjusted for inflation.

I read that graph very differently than you.

Thats not what the graphs show, though. It shows the rich getting quite a bit richer, the middle getting a little bit richer, and the poor remaining approximately as poor.

Good attempt to use semantic confusion to distract from the point, but his main thesis that &#x27;the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer&#x27; stands up to your points.

It was this part I found most distressing.  We found a way out and then it actually went backwards.

The graph shows that middle class wealth increased from 1983 to 2001, then decreased from 2001 to 2016. The latter period (with the decrease) is the most pertinent considering the Graham essay is from 2021 and called &quot;How People Get Rich Now&quot; (emphasis mine).

The author says that middle-class incomes have dropped since the 1980s, but the associated graph:(1) is pertaining to wealth, not income.(2) shows that middle-class wealth has increased since the 1980s, not &quot;decreased&quot;

Although the author is being sarcastic, but the solution is to &quot;just be rich, already&quot;

I don&#x27;t think there is a good short-term solution, otherwise you would already know about it.

I don&#x27;t agree with the rebuttal - it seems like the author is picking a fight that&#x27;s more of a woke-style personal attack than addressing problems that follow from wealth inequality in the US today. Knowing Paul Graham from years of reading his essays and tweets, he&#x27;s very much aware that there&#x27;s many people suffering in the current system. But that isn&#x27;t the focus of the essay, and in today&#x27;s climate you can&#x27;t get away with writing about the &quot;priviliged&quot; without spending three paragraphs on disclaimers first. PG didn&#x27;t put in the disclaimers, so he gets pummelled.Acknowledging that the USA has horrible problems with poverty, where wealth inequality superficially appears to be part of the problem, I have the following suggestions:-Universal healthcare-Social safety net in terms of indefinite unemployment support and disability pay, so health issues and unlucky upbringing or genetics doesn&#x27;t lead to destitution and permanently being in the world&#x27;s shittiest negotiating position. Maybe basic income.-Finance the above by taxing everyone, including the rich, at a similar percentage as the middle class, designing a tax system that avoids the big loopholes. A wealth tax may be a part of that.This ensures that lack of wealth doesn&#x27;t translate into de facto slavery and lack of power over one&#x27;s autonomy and personal life. It sets a minimum.I live in Norway, where total taxation is &gt;50% of income on average, we have a 0.85% annual tax on the total value of all assets, capital gains tax is 32%, universal healthcare, de facto basic income system where everyone uncapable of otherwise either get a public-sector administrative job or disability pay.We have imported the same debate that the author is fronting. This is ludicrous. We don&#x27;t have a problem with poverty. We have implemented the dream of the American left. Wealth inequality is only a problem if you find it morally problematic in itself. And yet people are still complaining about it.At that point, it&#x27;s only about envy and not trying to make the world better.

In the US you could start with the carried interest rule and the capital gains rate

Even with a well designed wealth tax, people will make the choice to leave, hence negotiations for a global wealth tax.A wealth tax is simply a more broad version of a real estate property tax.

Few. And those that do are individually expendable. The businesses will stay.

There is an expatriation tax for people leaving the US. It is one of the more clear cut wealth taxes that we have in the US.

Do you think anyone will expatriate rather than pay a wealth tax?

Because it&#x27;s more nuanced then that: the point of the uber-wealthy is that their net worth is tied up in investments. But because those investments have theoretically actualizable values, they can still &quot;spend&quot; them in the form of taking out loans against their assessed value.Which then compounds because a loan devalues with inflation, the bigger the loan the lower your interest rate and so on and so forth. So it winds up taking very little increase in their theoretical investments to offset a slow drip of &quot;actual money&quot; they&#x27;re borrowing to fund their lifesystems or buy off politicians or what have you.They don&#x27;t pay income tax like you or I pay income tax because the volumes involved are large enough that the &quot;startup capital&quot; for tax evasion is practical.

Why go straight to a wealth tax? In the US, there exists a comprehensive system for measuring economic activity and translating it to income. To measure wealth would require a huge invasion of privacy (not only of the wealthy but the &#x27;suspected wealthy&#x27;) and a whole new system of identifying and tracking things of value.Why not fix the income tax? At least try fixing it using the existing system, before creating this huge new boondoggle.Hint: the top income tax bracket is about 400K. It was 500K in 1913 (~13 million today adjusted with conservative, CPI-based inflation figures). There&#x27;s your problem. Nobody should be making 10 times more than the top bracket in a year. If they are, you add a new bracket and skim an extra few percent. Right now, the wealthiest make ~10,000 times more than the highest income tax bracket, plus they are typically paying the capital gains bracket, which is even worse, so they end up paying less than doctors and engineers.When politicians clamor for a wealth tax, it&#x27;s because they are either A. clueless or B. don&#x27;t actually care about the problem, but want more power and votes. I think it&#x27;s the former for Bernie and the latter for Warren.

I am pretty sure that more 1x managers around the world are paid more than 10x programmers

&gt; I vehemently disagree with the 10x programmer narrative in IT. It fuels &quot;management provides more value than replaceable workers&quot;.Eh? It&#x27;s the 10X programmer narrative, not the 10X manager narrative. The lesson is that some workers are vastly less replaceable than others, which is quite empowering for talent.

Wealth stored as money is already taxed in a way in the form of inflation. I would much rather have a tax system based on consumption of non renewable and finite resources. Primarily that means tax on materials, fossil fuels and land.Own a lot of land or a big house = pay a lot. Use a lot of fissile fuels = pay a lot. Leave your wealth in the bank and living like a hermit = pay very little. Basically align the tax system with your (or your company&#x27;s) environmental footprint.

A very well thought out and articulated essay. Essential to get the billionaires of the pedestal that they have perched on.Put your money where your mouth is and fund the wealth tax.Personally, I vehemently disagree with the 10x programmer narrative in IT. It fuels &quot; management provides more value than replaceable workers&quot;. If there were no workers, then management is just sitting there coming up with random ideas. Everything else is management lingo which is fine and good but we all have 24 hours in a day. One thing doesn&#x27;t make you more valuable than the rest.

Well, I don&#x27;t want to present my view in an absolutist manner, but there is a lot of survivorship bias in success stories.People tend not to note positive environment factors if they lived all their lives with them. And if you got burned through externalities beyond your control, you tend to be a bit sceptical on fairness of the game.Last, but not the least - &quot;don&#x27;t do anything stupid&quot; is easy post-hoc, but think of your teenage mistakes and consequences of &quot;doing stupid&quot; during those years.

Your mention of Musk should raise an alarm to your sense of reality. He comes from a well off family, moved to Canada at 17 to attend university. This alone already puts him at the top 1% of humanity in terms of privilege. Then he went on to attend Stanford...Not that it takes away from any of his achievements, but you are failing hard at realizing what things actually look like.&gt; It&#x27;s also totally feasible to position yourself so that even if you fail you can still land on your feet, you just have to be conscious of itThis is the famous “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” said by someone who’s obviously never had to.

While I agree to some extent with the point your trying to make, the way you phrase and portray this sounds like more of an excuse than a strong argument.&gt;Because they have family obligations that take priorityThis is on you. If your serious about it you should see this coming. Elons familial situation isn&#x27;t exactly all flowers and roses. A lot of my friends who managed to start successful business started yong precisely because they saw this coming and new it would be difficult to do with a family. I would argue the exception is if you have parents who are sick or need heavy financial support or whatever. If this is the case, would be a fair argument in favor of being rich (or at least middle class) helps you get rich.&gt;Because they live outside high-income countriesI would argue this goes both ways. If anything a lot of countries are trying to pile into developing countries now cause that&#x27;s where the growth is. Similarly I used to work in hk where living costs are absurd. Then I was relocated to China and after a while I quite my job to try my own thing because it was affordable to take the risk. You could live decently by being frugal with some savings and the benefit is still vastly in favor of being an owner than an employee. Access to education might be a differentiator but so many things are available for free online now.&gt;Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottomI think this is related to two somewhat. It&#x27;s also totally feasible to position yourself so that even if you fail you can still land on your feet, you just have to be conscious of it.&gt;Because they may have made a crippling mistake in their pasts that now prevents them from reaching their full potentialAgain this is the same for everyone and is on you personally. Don&#x27;t do anything stupid.But like I said, I generally agree that being rich or middle class definitely helps you become rich, but if you can go on and on about all these reasons your probably want to adjust your mindset as well

I grew up in a family of 7 (4 younger siblings), during civil war, father was into gamling and drinking, mother was unemployed and constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown (understandable given the conditions she was living in). To paint the picture, I have vivid memories of vomiting a boiled onion I ate after not eating for days (I think I was arround 5 years old). And we were poor well into my early 20s untill I left home.It took a long time to get out of that, and material problems were an issue for sure, but I would say the biggest obstacle for me was that I had no rolemodel and was forced to discover everything on my own. In retrospect I had plenty of opportunities to get out of my situation way earlier and I could have done a lot of things better, and it was pretty common sense to most normal&#x2F;functioning people - but I didn&#x27;t have a lot of those arround me.And that wouldn&#x27;t change if you gave my parents money - after my grandparents died my mother inherited some land and a house, in a year she managed to squander it away with terrible spending decisions and no long term planning (coupled with the sense of entitlement and expectation that things will just work out).I also never viewed school as something relevant, teachers were hardly authoritative figures (from my perspective their job was to babysit me and they were poorly paid - why would I accept them as authority on anything).So I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life.

Don&#x27;t forget malnutrition. High quality calories are expensive.

&gt; This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher ratesSource?

Whenever this topic comes up, I like to link to these excellent and eye-opening articles:• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...</a>)• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;4-things-politicians-will-never...</a>)• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;4-things-politicians-will-never...</a>)

&gt; Poverty doesn&#x27;t just cause immediate issues it can also cause long term issues that can effect not only adults, but the children who grew up in that environment.This is absolutely true!&gt; This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes.This could be true with some families, but most parents try at least not to go below the financial level they are at. I remember my parent use to get all jittery even at a slight stress on the finances fearing that they will not be able to sustain. They had prioritised education, food, clothing in that order. Unfortunately, after education and food nothing was left! I remember wearing same set of clothes for almost a decade. Even now, even though I can afford to spend, I got into that habbit of wearing same clothes most of the time. I still use clothes that are almost 10 years old! I remember we(I and my friends, they too were from the same financial status) use to wear same worn-out&#x2F;torn school uniforms by doing something called &quot;rafoo&quot;. That made us kids understand value of money and the determination to get out of the situation as soon as possible. The problem we faced was lack of information and support network. We had to build it ourselves from scratch, most of the time stumbling. It also dents the confidence as you don&#x27;t know how long it is going to take to achieve your goals, if at all it can be acheived!

This. Poverty doesn&#x27;t just cause immediate issues it 
can also cause long term issues that can effect not only adults, but the children who grew up in that environment. This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes. So even a generation later it can be difficult for a family tree to be lifted out of that situation. It&#x27;s brutal not having a support system in place for people. What sucks is that it&#x27;s probably bad for overall productivity to not help people in these situations, but the usa has chosen to say screw it for many years (hopefully that is changing).Imo forget being &quot;rich&quot;, just growing up in a relatively sane environment is an advantage.

In the US at least, it is definitely decreasing. Income inequality is growing, as the original essay noted.

But is the portion of people without those restrictions increasing or decreasing? How would you measure it?

&gt; And so on and on. While I would still recommend everyone to pursue the dreams over never trying to do so - being poor is the single most powerful force that prevents people from doing that.IMO this is what offsets the dystopia of the coming human IPO market. Many millions of humans would economically benefit from having their own board of directors.

The more money you have the luckier you are.

In startups you have to be right only once.

And a lot of people who are as smart and motivated will start their own company but will not get rich because they are not as lucky. Luck play a big part in success

I&#x27;m always reminded of this quote by Stephen Jay Gould:&gt; I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

&quot;A lot of people who are just as smart and motivated as ...&quot;Wealth is not synonymous with intelligence. And certainly not with motivation.A lot of people who are wealthy will never be as smart as ... nor as motivated.

I have a cluster of cousins in the bay area, what do they do? None of them do startups. Doctors, nurses, and Google.I wouldn&#x27;t describe this as risk-averse behaviour. The simple fact is in the modern startup ecosystem, even if the startup has a successful exit, even early stage engineers will see very little wealth having been massively diluted, and would have been much, much better off having worked for an established company over the same time period. An early stage employee takes all the risk but all the reward goes to the founders and the VCs. It&#x27;s not worth it.

Beside the fact, that being a doctor or working at Google makes you much more money on average than founding a start up, you anecdote also seems to be an anomaly: The most high profile start ups have been founded by immigrants. Even the one you have given as an example for a boring job.

The thing that I&#x27;d expand upon is the support network.Somehow I have a wider range of friends and family than most people, and the thing that is missing from this conversation is that most people by far don&#x27;t know anyone wealthy, especially if they&#x27;re not themselves wealthy.The issue with that isn&#x27;t just the money and connections themselves. There&#x27;s a cultural gap of &quot;I couldn&#x27;t do that, only people on TV do that&quot; whether it&#x27;s starting a startup or pursuing one of those one in a million type careers like acting or sports.There&#x27;s a risk behaviour that is also affected by background. Basically you&#x27;re pushed to not take too much risk: your parents&#x27; entire productive output has gone into your education, you can&#x27;t just take a chance on it.Case in point is my family. The parents all got spread around the world as refugees back in the 1970s. Everyone worked really hard but they told their kids to go the safe route.I have a cluster of cousins in the bay area, what do they do? None of them do startups. Doctors, nurses, and Google.

So? Is this somehow related to the fact that getting rich by creating these companies is now an option? Just because you can think of 99 reasons people can’t do this doesn’t mean app people shouldn’t.

Agreed. It is not only about discrete circumstances ... environment also nurtures and affects development of people over time. Being exposed to better odds over time is also a factor (ppl that were able to create good networks in their youth vs ppl that somehow &quot;made it&quot; later in life...).

100% Agree. Just add another point:Rich people with supportive networks of course can pursuit their goals easier.Occasionally people from not very good families can do this as well because they&#x27;re so screwed by the environment and tried to get rid of everything in (the book &#x27;Masters of DOOM&#x27; is an example assuming it doesn&#x27;t try to be too dramatic).It&#x27;s much harder to do the same as middle classes with a lot of life obligations, distractions, and most importantly they are by default need to follow linear career developments - it&#x27;s much harder to be adventurous to had drastic improvement compared to previous categories.

There are many knobs and levers. The extent to which it harnesses &quot;capitalism and entrepreneurship&quot; for wealth creation is not the only thing defining an economic system, and arguably the poor are not best served by maximising capitalism and entrepreneurship.

Of course all of that is true but it&#x27;s irrelevant because you have to take a systemic view when talking about economics. The fact is that capitalism and entrepreneurship, while not fair in the cosmic sense you present it, is the best system we have for creating wealth for both the poor and the rich.

Gotta love blog posts piggy backing PG&#x27;s thesis and recycling it.

It might be more liberating if the success narrative in the US focused on relative success instead of “absolute” success. But afaik and have seen in my life thus far, the people everyone knows, worships, or revered for their &lt;INSERT_ACCOMPLISHMENT&gt; are 95% of the time the absolute best (sports star, movie star, fortune 50 CEO, bigwig politician, superstar dev, most well known doctor, most fancy medical practice in the US&#x2F;world, etc)

I agree, but I’d add that hard working talented people can still do great things without money and despite difficulties. It’s just that the reach or scale is amplified by the money. Money and opportunity are amplifiers.You can be the “Elon musk” of your world, that is you can hit the ceiling of what you were offered. Don’t compare yourself to Elon musk, compare yourself to what was possible for you.Maybe that’s depressing for some people but I see it as liberating.

Also what exactly is so &quot;scary&quot; about failing? Do people think they end up homeless under a bridge or something? I see a practically zero chance that could ever happen to someone who fights. You need to have some serious mental health problems and probably drugs to fall this deep.Well this is just not true. You have a fantasy view of life that does not ally with reality.

Half of that is caused by their own past decisions and the other half by their own present decision to not put 100% of their effort into changing it.&gt;being poor is the single most powerful force that prevents people from doing that.IMO absolutely wrong. The real reason is people dont try and risk it all. And they search for reasons why they would not be able to make it, including the oh so unfair starting points in this &quot;game&quot;. Yes its unfair very very unfair even. But it is so for almost everyone. And more importantly it can not be changed and even if it would, it would not retroactively have an effect on existing people.Everyone has one life and the number one reason to not reach a set goal is if it was not set and not attempted. You can make up all the good reasons why you would not attempt it because life is unfair but that doesn&#x27;t change the fact that you yourself reduced your chance to reach it to zero by your own decision to let circumvention stop you from trying.&gt;Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom.Failing is an possibility if you try, if you dont, its certain.
Also what exactly is so &quot;scary&quot; about failing? Do people think they end up homeless under a bridge or something? I see a practically zero chance that could ever happen to someone who fights.
You need to have some serious mental health problems and probably drugs to fall this deep. And given that health in unfair too you may get this anyway so even more reason to get yourself in a poison where health problems wont make you fall to the bottom.Ive financially failed before, as long as zero is the bottom (I dont make debts) is just a setback its not stopping me. I certainly had a good start in life but money was never given to me. I started form zero as a teenager and I almost went back to zero in my early twenties partially do to circumstances outside of my control partially due to bad decisions. I could have another 50 years trying so why would that stop me. 
My goals a higher than ever and the speed at which I chase them only got faster.

This !
So much easier to hussle if you have a clear goal in mind.
The threshold to « wealth » should be clearer. FIRE « levels » seems a good approximation but more detailed studies would be great.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I</a>video url

Veritasium had a video about success vs luck and survivor bias. There&#x27;s a bit of that here too.That said, I&#x27;d love to have a graph or model (or book even) to describe the tipping point at which things become increasingly better and easier.I observed that in the crypto bubble. Once you lifted off (fortune by accident maybe) you can comfortably ride the game from the back seat and pick what kind of new wealth you&#x27;re gonna pick up this month.

&gt; All you need is a computer.Plus free time. Plus motivation and energy which is probably in short supply when you&#x27;ve already done 8 hours in a supermarket &#x2F; your second job &#x2F; a full day of childcare &#x2F; etc.&gt; a few hundred bucks. It&#x27;s a pretty low bar.For a lot of people in the US, a few hundred bucks is the difference between eating that month and going without. Or being able to pay the rent and not be evicted. Or being able to afford transport to&#x2F;from their job.

Don&#x27;t underestimate the tremendous advantage both Wozniak and Bill Gates had even having access to computers at the time. And that access was simply not available to most people.Similarly, &quot;all you need is a computer&quot; is still very much an indicator of privilege on a global level. Good luck if you live in a favella in Brazil or slums in South Africa or India. It is easier than it was in the 70s, but by no means universally available.

It&#x27;s never been easier to start a company in the US. All you need is a computer. You can create a product on it and reach a worldwide audience, all for free.As for Jobs, he started Apple for a few hundred bucks. It&#x27;s a pretty low bar.

&gt; when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom.Thank you for this. I love when HN provides a view outside a typical Western middle-class cohort.At a larger scale, I think the same thing could be said to an entire society. In a poor society, your small mistake might lead to loss of healthcare, loss of voting rights, arrest by secret police, mob lynching, public shaming, or other forms of social bullying. There are many rich people who live in such a society, but they&#x27;re always in a somewhat precarious position. I don&#x27;t envy that.

&quot;Those who want to break out and go get things done, will find no excuses.&quot;Bullshit. Many people are constrained by things they cannot control.

You&#x27;re making a giant leap between getting out of poverty and becoming a business executive. Most people don&#x27;t aim to manage other people, they&#x27;re happy doing whatever they want to do (doctor, nurse, teacher, whatever) while not having to worry about having their basic needs met (food, shelter, similar). Can they achieve that under our current system?

Yet, there are many examples of those who made big from rags to riches. Am not talking about movie stars but business tycoons. Carol Bartz, Dhirubai Ambani, Naval Ravikant, Chamath to name a few.Bartz for instance
&quot;Bartz was born in Winona, Minnesota. After losing her mother at a young age, she moved with her brother to her grandparent&#x27;s farm in Alma, Wisconsin. She took a job at a bank at age 15 to help support her family. Good grades in high school earned her a scholarship to William Woods, a prestigious all-girls college in Missouri. She transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked her way through college as a waitress. In 1971, she earned her degree in computer science.&quot;Being poor can work as the single most powerful force for people to get out of poverty and pursue their dreams.Not to be rude, but for those who want to find excuses will find excuses. Those who want to break out and go get things done, will find no excuses.

You still need to make an effort turn up though.

&gt; Success is 100% luck.If that were the case, then there would be no disparity.** That is, unless luck is a function of circumstance. Which is kind of the point of the OP.

That&#x27;s a very cynical perspective. How did you come to believe that?

Taxes isn&#x27;t the reason why more people aren&#x27;t richer. In fact, taxes is the reason why more people aren&#x27;t poorer, because they pay for essential social services. At least in most countries, when receiving hospital bills you&#x27;re not afraid to end up with crippling debt.The reason more people aren&#x27;t richer is because of private property and the capitalist system. As a whole, humanity is pretty rich and is severely destroying the environment to make sure of that. Only a fucked up economic system with all the wrong incentives makes sure some people starve when we produce more food than needed to feed the entire population, sleep on the streets when there&#x27;s millions of empty&#x2F;abandoned housing units, etc.So, to be honest with you, i don&#x27;t think taxes is the solution, because as long as money and private property are a thing, taxes will only be a band-aid on this cancer. Arguably, taxes are also often misused to fund more human misery in the form of military and police services and other harmful institutions we should entirely get rid of. But i would say claiming high taxes is responsible for poverty is really missing the point of how capitalism works.

&gt; If you are born poor it is extremely difficult to escape poverty, especially because of high taxes that you are going to experience as soon as your education and determination lands you a good jobThat&#x27;s very easy to test, by comparing social mobility in countries with more or less progressive tax rates. I think the results say the opposite: progressive tax rates encourage greater mobility (because those taxes go to pay for free higher education, better public transport, mobility initiatives etc)

Do you have any examples of countries where progressive taxation would be a hindrance for escaping poverty? This frankly sounds like a made-up argument against taxation.

It reads like you think progressive taxation is not bracketed. Which is something often found with people from poor background.Let&#x27;s say you have some system where your taxed 0% for income &lt; $20k, 10% between $20k and $40k and 30% for $40k+. You currently earn $39k. You have to pay 10% of $19k so $1900, you keep $37.1k after tax. You&#x27;re offered a $2k raise. Lot of poor people think that you&#x27;ll suddenly have to pay 30% * $41k so $12k and lose money. But the 30% is only applied to the portion of revenue you get over $40k. With your raise you know have to pay 10% of $20k + 30% of $1k so $2.3k so you keep $38.7k after taxes, so your raise end up being $1.6k. You have not lost anything.Now the problem comes from social benefits which usually are not regressive and work on a all or nothing system.

If you are born poor it is extremely difficult to escape poverty, especially because of high taxes that you are going to experience as soon as your education and determination lands you a good job. This severely inhibits your means to save or to invest. The progressive taxation is like a back-stop to keep everyone in check and prevent people from going up the class ladder.
Meanwhile the rich, that are supposed to be the target of progressive tax, laugh and carry on paying very little.

Yeah, but income and&#x2F;or wealth inequality is a problem in itself, and that&#x27;s what libertarians such as PG don&#x27;t understand (or refuse to consider).It doesn&#x27;t matter if wealth acquisition was &quot;fair&quot; or &quot;warranted&quot;.It doesn&#x27;t matter if the process that allowed wealth to be acquired resulted in a net gain for society.When a group of people become incredibly more wealthy than the general population, their interests diverge and it breaks society apart.It&#x27;s even worse when said group is not diverse but is instead composed of just the same privileged people as it has always been.

I think there is some truth to this. Obviously too complicated subject for me to understand everything, but I wanted to add my own experience.One of the most motivating things I did to get a well-paying job and work hard to earn it was by having a deadend job as a kid. There is nothing that has motivated me to study hard as much as the realization that some people will be stuck stacking boxes their entire life.Motivation makes a big difference, but obviously those who always think about how to make rent and still have food on the table don&#x27;t always have the opportunity to live a better life...

Being poor is only a motivator for an incredibly tiny number of people who are probably prone to risk-taking anyway. The unfortunate reality is that some of them shade into outright narcissism.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psypost.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;narcissists-make-their-way-to-ceo-positions-faster-than-their-counterparts-study-finds-59517" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psypost.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;narcissists-make-their-way-t...</a>It&#x27;s vastly easier to become rich if you don&#x27;t care about employees, customers, tenants, and co-workers, or if you can persuade yourself that people who don&#x27;t take risks and succeed are somehow inherently morally inferior and deficient.In fact a good safety net is likely to increase entrepreneurial activity, because it makes it possible to fail into a safety net instead of failing into homelessness and catastrophe.Tax increases are a separate issue. But generally wealth inequality is politically as well as financially toxic.You want to reward smart, clever, inventive individuals. But you do also want to make sure they don&#x27;t automatically get privileged legal or ethical treatment which encourages destructive narcissistic and authoritarian behaviours in the culture as a whole.

This.
I come from a coal mining village in the eastern Ukraine, where people didn&#x27;t get salaries for 4-5 months and would live off the food that they grew in the back yard. My home village is controlled by the DPR separatists, my parents became refugees in their 50s.
I made it to the top ~5% in Germany. Of course there are many factors to it: my parents saved up to buy me a computer, I was fond of western culture to an extent of self-learning English and of course I was just very lucky. Now, here in Germany, all of a sudden I get treated as if I had a head start over the other 95%, especially given my skin color and gender. 
I&#x27;m definitely not a fan of Ayn Rand, but some tirades about people who are not poor get more and more resemblance with the monologues of her grotesque looter characters.

Not that I disagree with anything you said necessarily, but it&#x27;s so much more complicated than this.Sometimes being less fortunate is what motivates people to become rich. The truth is I had a huge amount of stuff holding me back as a child, and still do, but imo that is why I managed to succeed (relatively at least) where others I knew who had similar intelligence and better backgrounds did not. Even in my own family the difference between my sister and myself is massive, she&#x27;s probably in the bottom 10% and I&#x27;m probably in the top 1-2%, yet she has almost the exact same background as myself.Being poor might just be the single greatest motivator. It also teaches people a lot of valuable lessons for acquiring wealth such as how to save and ration. If you look at wealth statistics in the UK some of the wealthy people here are immigrants or second generation immigrants from India and East Asia which doesn&#x27;t really fit with this narrative of rich people get rich, while poor people stay poor.I understand sometimes people are so unlucky that the obstacles in front of them are insurmountable, but I also don&#x27;t think this paints a full picture. I also generally agree with the article, although I think it&#x27;s easy to criticise without providing answers. It would have been nice to see some suggestions on how to fix the problem of wealth inequality, because unfortunately many of the popular solutions (raising taxes, expanding welfare programs, etc) could just make things worse.

It&#x27;s somewhat &quot;ironic&quot; that pg seemingly has a blind spot on this when the norm for startups is to start with a &quot;family and friends&quot; funding round.Most people don&#x27;t have family and friends able to lend them a few thousand dollars, let alone tens of thousands, to invest in a complete moonshot (given that we all agree that most startups fail, i.e. lose the investment).This makes the startup scene extremely self-selecting. Even if you pretend that Elon Musk is a rags to riches story because he says he had to sleep in the office when he started out, he wouldn&#x27;t have had the millions of dollars to invest in Tesla if he hadn&#x27;t had an extremely lucky exit with Global Link and then again with X.com. Not to mention that he had previous access to both UPenn and Stanford, which also means massive networking opportunities (assuming he had access to those networks, which again requires a certain inherited status).

congratulations. that truly sounds awful, and i&#x27;m glad you&#x27;ve got this far so we can even have this discussion.without attempting to belittle your story, i&#x27;d place a large bet that for every one of you, there are tens - if not hundreds - of people with a better start&#x2F;more luck in life, that have worked harder than you, and have less than you do.

Thanks for this.For some reason it reminds me of what some political philosophers think is the most interesting subconscious axiom that divides and subtly defines the ‘left&#x2F;right’ political debate; and that is the belief in free will (versus determinism).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;318842505_Political_Differences_in_Free_Will_Belief_Are_Associated_With_Differences_in_Moralization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;318842505_Political...</a>Those on the left tend to default towards determinism, while those on the right point to stories like yours as proof that people can rise above their circumstances. (And then the left will retort that your particular circumstances determined your success somehow etc etc)This debate opened my mind to why there is disagreement on almost every political issue. It is also an amazing starting point to many great discussions on being human.Anyway, thanks for sharing your humanity.

What you did is great, but there is still a part where luck made a role: you are still probably healthy, and you don&#x27;t yet know how to live together with a chronic disease.As a person who is successful in terms of money, but sacrifised my health, I suggest you to start taking your health seriously (sleep, nutrition, gym, air quality for you home). The problem is that nobody can tell you when you will start having real problems with it.

I mean good for you, and there are definitely people who are smart and hard working who make it despite various difficulties. But on-average those who are successful have more advantages than those who haven&#x27;t. If you feel like you aren&#x27;t one of the privileged ones then there&#x27;s no reason for you to feel attacked .

On HN I see the sentiment that you expressed a lot of times.I live in a country which will be categorized by western countries as a developing country.There is no social support system in my country, you are pretty much on your own. Nobody is coming to help you.And I have made serious mistakes when I was in school which resulted in not being able to go to a good college which makes things in my country ten times more harder. Even today if I were to apply to a good company (There are Google, Amazon Dev centers in my country), my resume would not get through the first pass, because I do not have a good college name on my resume.I make 5 times what my school mates and my college mates make, which makes me a lot more successful, atleast financially.When I meet anyone from my school or college they tell me the same things that you are writing here. They attribute my success to -Having no family obligations
- Which is BS, My parents are middle class, I have been taking care of them since I got a job.Having good parents, support network
- I have zero support from my parents, they were downright abusive. Since, I have been a teenager, there has not been one week where my father has not told me that I will be failure in life. My mother tried to pressure me to commit suicide on numerous occastions.Getting Lucky
- I had the same education that my peers had, same economic level. Same razor thin opportunites that they had.The only differentiator is that whatever tiny opportunity I got however small, I fought tooth and nail to capitalize on it. Worked for 15 hours every day, only 5 hour sleep. Ate one meal a day to save money and time.I hate it when people like you, my school friends, my college friends try to attibute it to some external factor. You will attibute my success to anything in the world, except my relentless hardwork.I have taken huge risks whose downside was total ruin. There is no social security checks, some benevolent relative waiting for me to fail. If I fail, I die, my family will perish. That&#x27;s how high the stakes are.Everything I had, I earned it with blood, sweat and tears. I have spent 12 hours coding in high fever just to make the release.I will close off this rant with one last statement.It all comes to down to how much you want and how much are will sacrifice and work hard for it. Rest are just excuses.This sounds like a motivational cliche but it is true.

What&#x27;s a good life?I know what I want from life, and what it costs, and I don&#x27;t want extravagance. I don&#x27;t have the capital to spend the 4-12 years training to increase my earning potential. My lack of capital is no fault of my own, I lost the womb lottery, why must I be relegated to live a meager life toiling for decades and have nothing to show for it while these billionaires you mentioned steal more money in a month than I&#x27;ll see in 10 lifetimes?

Why people are doing this?How can you compare Elon or Steve Jobs wealth level to well anyone?There are CEO&#x27;s of successful companies that worked their whole lives and never got to that level. Aiming for that is well crippling. People should aim to have a good life...

I agree, but I don&#x27;t see a solution on the present political landscape.Free enterprise seems to allow some tiny fraction of such highly motivated geniuses to excel, lets say 0.0000001%. Other systems seem to allow 0% of these people to excel, or at least to do so anywhere near their full potential. The comparison seems to be between a horrible system where almost nobody can excel and more horrible systems where absolutely nobody can excel.You occasionally get historical anomalies where bureaucratic or authoritarian states innovate, such as when the state machinery of the US and USSR raced to the Moon or the burst of innovation in Nazi Germany. In that case the forcing function was war (or Cold War in the US&#x2F;USSR sense), and war seems the only thing capable of motivating bureaucracies. I guess the other source of historical anomalies is when you have the explicit blessing of a king or someone really close to the throne, but the bandwidth for that is strictly limited and you often get long periods of idiot kings where nothing happens.Without war or extreme will at the top all you get is meetings to plan the meeting to do a study on the effectiveness of more meetings. In more militaristic&#x2F;fascist state regimes you also get a perpetual &quot;game of thrones&quot; at the upper echelons.Maybe what we need is a more egalitarian socialist system coupled with a perpetual threat of alien invasion? Wait... isn&#x27;t this sort of how you got the Star Trek socialist utopia? We need some Klingons.Edit: the trouble, I think, is that innovation and achievement are antisocial. We often like the result, but the act is always a form of rebellion. It&#x27;s often a rebellion limited to the mind of the actor, but it&#x27;s rebellion nonetheless. All human social systems act to suppress deviance, so what you need for innovation is a system that tolerates deviance and manages to do so in a peaceful way.Interdependent social structures of any kind suppress rebellion and channel human effort into social game playing such as the &quot;meetings about meetings&quot; and &quot;game of thrones&quot; phenomena I mentioned.Capitalism is the only system I know of that allows non-violent antisocial acts of innovation at scale. By violence in this context I am including lies, bureaucratic subterfuge, and fraud. (Yes you do get those in capitalism but they&#x27;re not required. There is a way to get there without them.) In all the other systems you have to hack your way out of the social jungle with a machete to innovate... or you have to be king and there&#x27;s only one of those.In any other system Elon Musk would probably have had to engineer a coup at the space agency by getting its present head thrown in prison for &quot;corruption&quot; (as they do in China) to assume his position and have an opportunity to get Falcon or Starship built. To get them across the finish line he&#x27;d probably have to focus a great deal of his energy on planting knives in the backs of his bureaucratic challengers. There would be only one space agency so there would be only one such throne to fight over, so if Elon&#x27;s approach failed there would be no Blue Origin or RocketLab.Basically we suck at politics. Every political system is horrible. I think this is largely because politics is still pre-scientific. We think in terms of political ideologies (fantasies more or less) dreamed up in an irrational evidence-free manner by arrogant mountebanks or populist meme wars. Instead we should start with game theory. AFAIK game theory and simulation have never even been leveraged to cook up a hypothetical political system.

You left out the most significant reason: that most people just aren&#x27;t as lucky as those guys. In the US, you can become a millionaire through hard work and dedication and not much luck. However, there is nowhere that you can become a billionaire without tremendous luck.Amassing that type of wealth depends on many other people embracing your ideas, and random events that are entirely beyond your control working out in your favor. There are ways to improve your odds of reaching this level of success - if you never start a business, your odds are zero. But luck is the ultimate decider of who becomes a &quot;self-made&quot; billionaire out of those that are actively trying to become one.

I think also coming from &quot;humble&quot; beginnings can mean you&#x27;re happy to &quot;settle for less&quot; as some may see it. I&#x27;m a mid-level developer, reasonably successful, with one bachelor&#x27;s degree, and a modest home I bought. Some folk might not see that as much and want to achieve more, but I am already much better off than I imagined I&#x27;d be 15 years ago, growing up in a financially poor family in council housing.

Even if you aren&#x27;t the most talented and smartest person, having the advantages they did would still almost certainly mean you&#x27;d be in a better position then you would be without them.

It&#x27;s easy to tell yourself you are as good as Musk or Jobs or Bezos. And comforting. But there&#x27;s also the possibility that they are truly different. More talented, more focused, more hard working, more driven. And more willing to take risks.I don&#x27;t know any of these guys, but I know plenty of people who got much farther in life than me because they were simply better than me in some respect.I also know some people who got farther by pure luck, but the thing is, when I look around me, I find more cases of merit- than luck-based advancement.So, yes, this, or that or that can hold you back in life. But, conversely, when you don&#x27;t succeed in life, we always find excuses, don&#x27;t we? It&#x27;s never &quot;I wasted hours on social media sites&quot;, it&#x27;s &quot;I didn&#x27;t have the same connections as Gates&quot;.

&gt; family obligations that take priorityThere&#x27;s a severe lack of small businesses in the USA. Totally fixable. So many low hanging fruit. Affordable health insurance and childcare would be revolutionary.I forfeited my fledgling software startup, just as it started to gain traction, once we got pregnant. I needed insurance for my family.For decades, young parents have struggled with health insurance, day care, and other really basic stuff. 30 years ago, cost of childcare was ridiculous, and very hard to find. Today, it&#x27;s completely insane.Of course new business formation is at historical lows. (Pre-pandemic, of course, in anticipation of the inevitable pedantry.)

All this is true but you&#x27;ve left out an even big key differentiator: most people cannot get a 250,000$ &quot;business loan&quot; from their mom and dad like eg. Bezos did.

One of example that pops into my mind watching Elon Mush show, he said something along the lines &quot;it is not difficult to get money there is plenty of money and investors who want to invest, I can just turn few phone and I will have investment of few hundred millions&quot;. Because hast that type of the network.For me and probably most of the people I know, I do not know where to begin, most average income people networks are not investors type, so we do not have a clue, where to even find people who are willing to listen for a five minute pitch, without feeling that you are begging for money...In that regard poor or middle class will never be the same as rich, it is amount of struggling to keep up the daily needs.
If rich person gets bankrupt, he can easily bounce back, with connections he has, he can turn few phone calls and again pop up on the ladder, issue with other people they are not even close to ladder, until you get to ladder, there is path through swamp, forest, dark cave, and dragon on two ...

For someone as smart as Elon Musk to never be able to start their own companies they really have to be born in a real shit hole country, in a real shit hole part of the country.  Even in India or China they would be identified and given opportunity.

I&#x27;m sorry but this is consolations for the losers. This will sound really harsh and I&#x27;m not directing it at you (except where I say &quot;you&quot;) but at this kind of tall tale I see a lot.If they (in the above story) were so smart and motivated (towards starting corps and getting rich), why&#x27;d they:Make a family and let that get in the way of that?Not H1B or student-visa &#x2F; postgrad it to &quot;high-income countries&quot;?Not cultivate and create their support network?Not overcome &quot;crippling&quot; mistake?And so on? And endless list of weak excuses for why they&#x27;ll only ever be mediocre, but hey, they&#x27;re just as smart as Elon Must and Steve Jobs. That idea can buzz off. If they were, they&#x27;d be doing like them.Did Musk and Jobs always &quot;have it easy&quot;? No, they got back up. Take 100 Musk and Jobs clones, I think only 25 will make it to the same approximate place they did. The rest will get done in by random stuff, and scattered across various levels of successful but not super successful. But I think only 1 or 2 will be &quot;failures&quot; or &quot;average people&quot; without any major success.That&#x27;s the character of these people. Succeed anywhere. But the &quot;story&quot; about it in the above comment, this story make it like choices don&#x27;t matter.A story to excuse &quot;they&quot;s own failure. A smug content, well, &quot;coulda shoulda woulda&quot; while wrongly taking the responsibility away from &quot;they&quot; and the &quot;Musks and Jobses&quot; for what they each got.Consolation that disempowers. It&#x27;s bad to do so. To tell people &quot;poor is a state that something else decided for you. You have not much power to escape.&quot;A person I think must have had it so easy to never have to work out how much you can accomplish if you commit and persevere.This sort of &quot;smug, content, rich country attitude&quot; that people in &quot;high income countries&quot; can afford to take, because everything, even the &quot;poor levels&quot; are so comfortable.Easy times, so they never have to get pushed to learn to take themselves higher. Symptom of privilege and an easy, unchallenged life to have these armchair opinions that success is meted out by powerful forces outside the ken of individuals and their choices.If one comes from adversity, one is more likely to learn their own power. But the easy-rich-country folk can choose to give themselves adversity to make up for this. Sad to see delusions like the above story. This delusion is the poverty of privilege, a sickness of the easy-riding armchair theorists content to coast through effortless existence.Adversity does crush, and does demoralize, but I bet you 10 folk from &quot;low income countries&quot; have twice the mettle, grit and heart that 100 folks from easy-riding &quot;high income countries&quot; with their easy excuses, and zero-cost &quot;regrets&quot; can afford. Give me 10 of the first lot anyday, better than the whining mewling of ne&#x27;er-do-wells too lucky to know how impoverished they really are in spirit, and how much they could have accomplished had they wanted it more.Heavy sigh. All these loser excuses the above &quot;story&quot; describes here pathetic and not the stuff that these &quot;Musks and Jobses&quot; would let get in their way. I think from the way you write about it, you have no idea.
I think you, and many others, are blind to the absolute smug arrogance (and waste via consoling thinking) of telling yourself sure that guy could be as good as Musk but he didn&#x27;t set it up that way, and made all these mistakes he couldn&#x27;t recover from, is blaming externalities when he had choices. How dare you take that from them. How dare you take that from yourself. What you chose.Musk&#x27;s hardships: awful father, abusive father-son relationship, no SA support network, social anxiety, had to leave SA over &quot;crippling mistake&quot;Jobs hardships: didn&#x27;t know his real father, never felt belonged to the adoptive family, no support network had to go his own way, had child early and paid for the &quot;crippling mistake&quot; of abandoning that family, no money in 1976Bezos hardships: didn&#x27;t know his real father, bullied in high school, had kids early, made plenty of mistakesOthers: Keanu Reeves, Meghan Markle, you think you can take these people and just say, &quot;they had it easy, the cream floats to the top&quot;, any woman who&#x27;s been successful (has to have 10x the grit of men to move through all the shit they get), any person who gets successful (has to have 10x the grit of non-successful people to get there, and stay there).Again, I&#x27;m sorry this is not at you, but this story that poor stops people, is such a broken story.

A lot of people who are just as smart and motived as Elon Musk or Steve Jobs will never be able to start their own companies and get rich.Because they have family obligations that take priority.Because they live outside high-income countries.Because they have no access to support network, so when they fail, they fall all the way to bottom.Because they may have made a crippling mistake in their pasts that now prevents them from reaching their full potential.And so on and on. While I would still recommend everyone to pursue the dreams over never trying to do so - being poor is the single most powerful force that prevents people from doing that.

what do you call the thing which is like the gini coefficient except for net worth instead of income?

There is both a pre-tax and a post-tax GINI co-efficient - it&#x27;s not fundamentally part of the co-efficient.This is further complicated by taxing at source (e.g. if your employer had to pay tax prior to giving you your pay, that likely wouldn&#x27;t be counted).Different data sources use either the pre-tax or post-tax figures.See Page 26 of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;documents1.worldbank.org&#x2F;curated&#x2F;en&#x2F;590731467992508711&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;WPS7489.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;documents1.worldbank.org&#x2F;curated&#x2F;en&#x2F;59073146799250871...</a>

Impossible. The Gini Coefficient is calculated on a pre-tax basis.

&gt; Of course the Gini coefficient is increasing. With more people starting more valuable companies, how could it not be?By taxing people properly?

Am I the only person that thought &quot;Paul Graham&#x27;s&#x2F;ycombinator&#x27;s product is startups&quot; when reading his essay?I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s nefarious, but I suspect he&#x27;s been incubating startups and nouveau riche, so his essays might map the territory he sees.

Renting is often cheaper in major cities.

Sure, I&#x27;m not saying the housing market is in an especially healthy position, just that the Gini index measures the wrong thing. Its increase alarms people, but it just puts you higher on a list with relatively very equal social democracies at the top. They go into some more detail here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Ot4qdCs54ZE</a>Note that I&#x27;m also not arguing that a large Gini index is good, it just measures something very specific that doesn&#x27;t really say a lot about inequality.

There&#x27;s a big divide between those who can get a mortgage, and those who can&#x27;t.When you buy, pay the maintenance expenses, and for a limited time (well, not Sweden, what they do is essentially renting from a bank) you pay back the loan to the bank and interest for it.When you rent (because you don&#x27;t have enough income to get a loan big enough, or have otherwise messed up your finances), you pay the maintenance expenses, and the owner&#x27;s loan and interest (and after the loan is paid, profit for the owner&#x27;s investment forever after), and their taxes.Also, it&#x27;s only cheap right now with the record low interests for the last 10 years, and it&#x27;s only safe in specific locations where (and when) the demand for housing is stable or increasing and prices increase over the rate of inflation.

Isn’t it agreed upon that the Gini coefficient is misleading though? According to it, the worst inequality can be found in the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, just because borrowing money for a house is cheap and safe.

Orwell’s work on poverty is a treasure because he actually went and became a homeless person and a minimum wage slave to learn about the conditions of the poor.Instead of reading Down and Out in Paris And London, PG is more likely to reread 1984 and use it to complain about getting cancelled on Clubhouse.

Nothing truly insightful about the troubles of poverty has ever been said by someone who never lived it. Divorced of the appropriate context, advice and opinions are like the proverb says; everyone&#x27;s got one and they all stink.

It’s unfortunate that getting rich is limited to entrepreneurs or otherwise business owners. I’ve known a few successful entrepreneurs who more or less hated their lives because their work wasn’t “personally rewarding” but ultimately they made the sacrifice because the financial independence would allow them to be able to do whatever they wanted later in life. It’s something I learned too late in life but I’m trying to catch up now and I’ve given up coding to focus on moving money around efficiently for my customers (for a modest cut). Ultimately my family will benefit and I’ll code when I’m 60.

&gt; Few dispute that wealth shares at the top have risen in America, nor that the increase is driven by fortunes at the very top, among people who really can be considered an elite. The question, instead, is by just how much.The Economist article concludes that the rich are indeed, getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That&#x27;s the heart of OP&#x27;s article.

I may heave misread the article, and the first graph, but it appears that the article confirms that inequality is growing.It just suggests that inequality is growing at a slower rate than the raw numbers suggest. The most generously adjusted estimates show a doubling of adjusted income for the 1% over the past few decades rather than the higher multiples that we are used to hearing about.Is it really good news that no matter how you try to tweak the numbers, the income gap is growing?

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. The EITC is a direct cash transfer to low income individuals that offsets inequality and is there money to do with as they wish.Why would you not include that?

These are not so much &quot;outrageous flaws&quot; but conscious and reasonable choices. For example, not counting things like SNAP as income makes sense because a government policy targeted at reducing inequality is not the same as that inequality not existing.It is far more desirable for those programs to be minimized by eliminating the inequality in the first place.Also, keep in mind that Gini is most useful as relative index.Making the changes you suggest would obviously result in a better number in the US, but when recalculated for all thee other countries it would not change the situation much.In fact, since both taxes and the social safety net are low in the US, it would probably drop the rankings.

In the United States, the measures we use for income inequality are outrageously flawedIn almost all measures of the Gini coefficient two significant flaws exist:1. Incomes are counted on a pre-tax basis2. Incomes are counted on a pre-government transfers basisThe consequence of this is that income inequality appears to be increasing _regardless_ of the level of social subsidies and redistribution.When you correct for these measurement flaws, income inequality in the US has been decreasing over recent decades.If you are in the “Tax the Rich” camp as a result of looking at the Gini coefficient, you may need to strongly update your priors.Sources:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;incredible-shrinking-income-inequality-11616517284" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;incredible-shrinking-income-ine...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;briefing&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;28&#x2F;economists-are-rethinking-the-numbers-on-inequality" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;briefing&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;28&#x2F;economists-are...</a>

There&#x27;s not much there and it&#x27;s not very good:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;butterflyeconomy.blogspot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;butterflyeconomy.blogspot.com&#x2F;</a>These are both related projects and I think they are vastly better:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectsro.blogspot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projectsro.blogspot.com&#x2F;</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eclogiselle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eclogiselle.com&#x2F;</a>(If you don&#x27;t see any relationship between the three: Sorry.)

If you think I am deliberately manipulating people: You are giving me waaaay too much credit for Machiavellian savvy I absolutely don&#x27;t have. I&#x27;m just amazingly stressed out and losing my shit Cuz Reasons.But I hope you got lots of kindy dates and held hands often. Go, you.

When I was in kindergarten, I would draw pictures of dragons and give them to girls, saying &quot;I drew you a picture of a dragon, it&#x27;s not very good&quot;. And of course they would say &quot;Oh no, this is a great dragon, thank you so much!&quot; Very deliberate on my part.

Not in my many years of lurking have I ever once seen someone point out that the metrics created by the world bank et al. are themselves terribly flawed. People just spout them out like they&#x27;re magic. Thank you for being a voice of reason.

My opinion about current wealth inequality, which I&#x27;m sure the entire world doesn&#x27;t give a flying fuck about, so I started my own blog based on the comment so I can talk to myself like a loon in a dunce cap sitting alone in my little corner of the internet like the bad child most of the world seems hellbent on viewing me as:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22028732" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22028732</a>

I agree to a point. Wealth redistribution is a huge problem for individual freedom, but extreme wealth in equality is a big problem too.My solution would be to let things fail. No more government bail outs. Let people take big risks but make sure it falls on them. Prevent Monopolies and keep everyone honest.

But it would also be against individual freedom to limit the amount of social status and power one can non-violently attain.I think the limit should be put when that power and status becomes physical violence.

I don&#x27;t think there is a very clear line where money turns into political power. After all, the most influential non-elected people in Washington aren&#x27;t billionaires or close to it, and if the 2020 election cycle taught us anything, it was that the effect money has on political advantage is hilariously overestimated.How much did Bloomberg sink into his own race, as well as into backing the Florida Democrats, and also into backing McConnell&#x27;s opponent in Kentucky? In excess of a billion dollars, and all of his backed candidates including himself failed spectacularly in their races.

I&#x27;m in NZ and it&#x27;s craz I&#x27;ve here too.I don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s a symptom of a wealth gap or something else. What ever it is it&#x27;s a real issue. I personally think prices are inflated by low interest rates and the bubble is going to pop at some point.

I would agree with you 100% if it weren&#x27;t for absolutely ludicrous house prices (for reference, I&#x27;m in Melbourne, but I&#x27;ve heard similar complaints from people in Canada and Hong Kong).  My wife and I have a far higher than average household income, and even we&#x27;re worried about how the hell we can afford to own our own home.  God knows what the average single-income, working class family goes through.

Absolute wealth has increased as the wealth gap increased. Standards of living for everyone have gotten better, but there is still an issue. Wealth is not just about your buying power it&#x27;s also about your social status and power. A lot more status and power is concentrated with the few. This is a big problem if you care about individual freedoms. They tend to erode very quickly with a concentration of power.

Economics aside, let&#x27;s not forget that personal relationships are inherently unscalable.Sure we can get &quot;5 personalized minutes&quot; with that superstar doctor or fitness instructor, but maybe we&#x27;re missing out on more human connections with average locals.

It can also be seen as a huge opportunity to create niche-stars. There is little value for the world in thousands copycats when you can have a large distribution. However, there is value to find the best fit. I have hope in a future in which everyone can find the best doctor to fit its own needs or even better, where the number of doctor &quot;specialities&quot; is broader.

PDF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;11563" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;economics.mit.edu&#x2F;files&#x2F;11563</a> about the disappearing middle-income jobs (because those are the things that sit at the optimum point on the cost-benefit curve for innovation - be that automation, offshoring, better organization, standardization, etc)The problem is, there&#x27;s too big of a labor market force pushing wages down in the low-income segment.

Doctors are still time constrained so that one seems like a poor example.

Great article, I wasn&#x27;t aware the share of the middle class had dropped so significantly.I think there is also another factor that plays a role in the de-democratization of wealth. In the olden days you could be the biggest fish in your pond, but as that pond grows it&#x27;s becoming more and more a winner takes all ocean.&gt; As more occupations become scalable, jobs that were previously stable are becoming risky. Telehealth enables superstar doctors to serve customers in markets that were previously inaccessible to them. Connected fitness devices like Peloton allow superstar instructors to serve thousands of customers at a time, making the average instructor in your local gym redundant. The same dynamic applies to many other service and knowledge jobs.- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drorpoleg.com&#x2F;the-ponzi-career&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drorpoleg.com&#x2F;the-ponzi-career&#x2F;</a>

Thanks for that comment, I largely agree. Let me try to summarize it:Old money wants subjects, new money wants worshippers.

&gt;&gt; In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals.&gt; Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.Someone getting rich in 1982 isn&#x27;t old money(!).There is nothing except some kind of rose-tinted glasses to indicate that the rich in any era were particularly responsible in their use of wealth.

Homes in the US today are much larger than they were in the 1970s. About 2x as large! Per square foot, the average home is actually cheaper today than it was then, inflation adjusted, and this isn&#x27;t even factoring in the modern 2.2% mortgage rates vs the 13% mortgage rates of those days.

There was a house for sale close to where I live. It was at a fairly comfortable price, a normal family could have potentially gotten a normal mortgage for it and paid it over time, eventually owning it. It was a modestly sized house, perhaps around 70-80m² enough for a couple with one kid and a dog. It needed some repairs, not anything serious, but some work over time; and the homeowners could live in it, perhaps get some savings over the next 5-10 years before starting the costly repairs. I was hopeful. I did consider it, but I thought if I didn’t get it some other nice working class family could move into it.Alas, no mortgage agency would loan for this property, there was no central heating system, and the roof was suboptimal. Only people that had $200k at hand could possibly consider it. And off course a cash offer came from a rich family who lived there for a week, did some renovations and sold it again for more then double the price, more then anything that a normal family could afford, even with a mortgage.Things are bad indeed.

World population crossed 4B in the 1970s and 5B in the 1980s, now we are about to cross 8B in the next few years. I agree with your point about real estate becoming more heavily securitized, as well as being used as a method to escape capital controls. But, you cant ignore the fact that there are a lot more people both rich and working class competing for those major world city houses than there were 40 or 50 years ago.

Pretty much every mainstream economist put the blame for this squarely on the massively increased regulation of the housing market since the 70s causing a massive decrease in the amount of new construction, not wealth itself.

You’re going to provide a source for a teacher owning a home in London in the 70’s, unless you mean far flung suburbs.US cities like LA, SF, NYC have been very expensive for a long time.

&gt; In the 70s and 80s even 90s someone on a teacher&#x27;s salary could own their own home in a major world city - say London.You can still have that. All you need is a real estate tax. But nobody wants that. People don&#x27;t want cheaper homes, they want to become part of the home-owner elite and get their own appreciating asset.

I think its more than just that. I think less people are interested in actually owning their housing.For me housing is the least thing i want to worry about, so i gladly rent and simply can fix any problems by calling my landlord who is by law obliged to keep the house in a liveable condition.Also flexibility, i can move whenever i want without worrying about the value of my house (which in reality likely only looses value)

The rich outbidding poor people is not what is causing a housing shortage. There are only so many houses a rich person can occupy. Even if you assume that every rich person keeps a number of spare houses, there are not enough rich people to cause a housing shortage.

True - I&#x27;m in my late 40s in London and accepted some time ago I will never own a home. If UK renters had the same protections as they do in eg Germany it wouldn&#x27;t be such a precarious existence.

Exhibit A. A-Rod (Baseball player) owns 13k units: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merlynnacquisitions.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;a-rod-owns-13-000-units-of-multifamily-real-estate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merlynnacquisitions.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;a-rod-owns-13-000-u...</a>

You are right but homes is the only asset regular people can get a fair shake at and the government helps by making interest tax deductible. If you want to stop the rich from cornering the market on housing, you have to switch to a land tax instead of a property tax. Then you need to stop the NIMBY zoning nonsense.

In the US at least, I would put healthcare and education costs way above house prices as bigger problems.

A gas station attendant being able to afford a newly built house is a historical anomaly. The kind that only happens after half the population dying of plague or after a world war. The current trend is just a return to the normal state of affairs.

The problem is all down to the basic human need of a home. In the 70s and 80s even 90s someone on a teacher&#x27;s salary could own their own home in a major world city - say London. Now, literally zero chance. Because homes have become an asset class and the rich can outbid regular people so they are pushed out. That&#x27;s the problem. I couldn&#x27;t care less how many billionaires there are if regular people can afford a decent home

I&#x27;ve also seen this referred to as guillotine protection taxes.

I suspect that in 100 years time getting rich through Silicon Valley style tech companies will be a lot less common. Tech will have been throughly commoditized, it&#x27;ll be cheap to build things, and most of the knowledge will have been disseminated around the world. Anyone in a small city will be able to hire enough developer talent to compete.We&#x27;re still near the beginning of the internet revolution. We&#x27;re in the era where the inventors of things can get rich through their own talents. In every other industry that has undergone a technological leap forwards the same thing has happened until other people have bought up their talent and ideas and the inventors no longer make the big money. Just look at agriculture, manufacturing, publishing, news, automotive, aerospace, computing... They all saw the same cycle. The internet won&#x27;t be different.

&gt; they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their moneyTo be clear, you are comparing the mindset of new money to the pious protestants who held overwhelming sway over US society for almost two centuries? Just who do you think the old money is?

Such a privilege to have no idea how the Government can execute millions of its citizens having no doubt that they are paving the way to a Better Tomorrow.

It&#x27;s so weird that you seem to be kinda agreeing with the article while at the same time quoting some Ayn-Randian, hyper-libertarian, &quot;I&#x27;m from the Government and I&#x27;m here to help&quot; scare-tactic nonsense. Can we kill this idea that the spooky government helping a poor person is some sort of tyrannical insult to them? The government helps rich people all day long -- even the most bootstrapped businessman still uses government roads to ship his goods and government-backed police to prevent his offices from being raided by bandits. Yet it&#x27;s an &quot;intolerable insult&quot; that government should ever try to help a starving, homeless drug addict.Okay, I&#x27;m attacking the C.S. Lewis quote and not your main point, which is interesting, although I&#x27;m not exactly sure who is trying to remake me in their image and what that would even mean.Not to mention that &quot;curing the ills of society&quot; in the worst way imaginable (eugenics) was pretty in-vogue with early 20th century &quot;old money&quot;.

&gt; And my answer to that question would be, arguably yes. Why? Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige. The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that it&#x27;s not at all about meritocracy, it&#x27;s that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.Michael Young wrote this two decades ago now:The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody&#x27;s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2001&#x2F;jun&#x2F;29&#x2F;comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2001&#x2F;jun&#x2F;29&#x2F;comment</a>

Reading the other comments here, I think the argument is that when most people say they came from nothing, they are ignoring roads, electrical grids, sewer systems, fire departments, police to enfore property rights etc. &quot;Society&quot; provided those - before the person was rich. 
Of course, there are some people who got rich without any of those things, but probably a lot fewer.

Noblesse Oblige came less from the old wealthy being kind and more from them being physically close to poor people. They were under constant threat of physical violence by sheer proximity, so they had to care - because they likely realized how tenuous their positions were.The ultra-rich nowadays physically isolate themselves from the working class and generally have security forces and bodyguards to further ensure their separation.

&gt; Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.Source please.&gt; it&#x27;s that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.Allow me to offer a different view. If you&#x27;re one of the lucky few who went from nothing to millions (or even billions) you&#x27;d be pissed if society came and started talking about responsibility and equality _now_. Where was society _before_?And that, I think, is the crux of the issue - society feels responsible for your successes but not for your failures. If you went from nothing to riches - society feels like you owe it some. But if you went from squarely middle class to being a drug addict on the streets then the fault is yours alone. Society will of course try to help you, but it will never consider the idea that maybe, just maybe, it is responsible for what happened to you.

Yeah, that quote gave me more of a moralizing woke-person vibe, than tech billionaires.

Interesting CS Lewis quote considering it’s frequent usage against government regulation from busy bodies who “know best” on how the economy should work.

&gt; The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it.You out of your mind? What could possibly make you say &quot;they knew it&quot;? The amount of people rich-by-inheritance who are selling their bootstraps stories is stupidly high, and a lot of them believe it. One famous example got banned from twitter a couple months ago.

Perhaps inferring nefarious intent is unwarranted. However if you follow PG&#x27;s Twitter stream a reasonably clear pattern does emerge.- Denounce critics of happiness industry.- Play-down the idea of minimum support framework. In general, play down community and governmental support infrastructure in favour of individual&#x27;s agency.- The current crop of rich people, by and large, earned it and their way of earning wealth is objectively better than earlier ones. So they not only deserve that wealth but also deserve the way it&#x27;s been accumulated.- In today&#x27;s world anyone can be rich and so if you aren&#x27;t rich then it&#x27;s your problem.- Tech will eat the world. Journalists who couldn&#x27;t foresee Amazon and its ilk&#x27;s rise are idiots who don&#x27;t understand exponential curve.I have dramatised the theme but it&#x27;s not far off.I won&#x27;t judge if any of these are right or not because at the end of the day they are all opinions and he&#x27;s entitled to have them based on his world view. Someone with a different world view and experience (such as me, for instance) will not agree with them and that&#x27;s OK.That said, based on the pattern above it&#x27;s easy to see how can one assign intent to PG&#x27;s posts.

The worldview he is (poorly) attempting to prosthelytize is inherently nefarious. It doesn’t matter if he intends it or not.

Can&#x27;t one just counter his arguments without assigning nefarious intent? It feels conspiratorial at times.- Quoting your comment: &quot;The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that...&quot;- Quoting a line from the article: &quot;His seemingly impartial and logical writing attempts to hide his true intentions.&quot;

You&#x27;ve got cause and effect reversed. Bill Gates started giving his money away after he was attacked for his anti competitive behavior and attempts to kill open source, etc.The rich donate because they are protecting their reputation and for the sake of their own self image (everybody needs to be the hero of their own story).The only ones who can manage that and not be charitable are the utterly self deluded (e.g. Trump).Don&#x27;t expect them to donate a damn thing if they are lauded as heroes. Bill Gates likely wouldn&#x27;t be giving his money away at all if it he didn&#x27;t feel the need to repair his image in the 2000s.Same reason all of the robber Barrons were philanthropists - do you think they would have been more charitable if they had been cheered on instead of villainized? Like hell they would.

Putting your money into ONGs that you control is not giving away anything. It&#x27;s playing the meta-capitalist game, influencing markets at another level, markets in which you invest money while you pave the path for your investments by using your ONGs to work together with governments.This is nothing new either: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rockefeller_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rockefeller_Foundation</a>

Wealth tech people are giving their money away younger than the previous generation of billionaires:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;mtGgFW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;mtGgFW</a>I think they understand noblesse oblige. But it&#x27;s a 2-way street. Don&#x27;t expect them to feel a sense of obligation if you&#x27;re going to assume the worst about them just because they are rich.

American history and culture is heavily influenced by the Protestants that made up the early US. The Protestant work ethic is a commonly referenced aspect of American culture, and most Americans regardless of religion are not free of its influence.

The commenter is referring to the <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protestant_work_ethic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Protestant_work_ethic</a> which is the cultural handmaiden of contemporary american capitalism.

It&#x27;s a metaphor.If you prefer the literal, think &quot;Ayn Randian &#x2F; Objectivist zealotry&quot;.

It isn&#x27;t a literal argument that tech founders are protestants and I think you know that.

He&#x27;s comparing the zealotry they&#x27;re displaying which is similar to Protestantism. It&#x27;s not saying they are Protestants. I think you missed the metaphor. There&#x27;s most certainly a cult-like religious element that&#x27;s being displayed in silicon valley right now. That innate human behavior isn&#x27;t relegated to old Abrahamic religions. People will get drawn into &quot;worshiping&quot; different things and there&#x27;s a very specific &quot;God&quot; being worshipped by these companies.

He&#x27;s using &quot;protestant&quot; as an adjective of zealotry, not as an adjective of the people themselves.

Protestant zealotry? Seriously? When you bring religion into it, at least get the religion right:The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had Jewish backgrounds but consider themselves non-religious. Facebook founder Zuckerberg had Jewish background and considered himself atheist at some point. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is Catholic. Paul Allen had Jewish parents. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was raised Catholic. Apple founder Steve Job&#x27;s closest religious interest seems to have been Buddhism. Steve Wozniak describes himself as atheist.So we don&#x27;t find a single Protestant, certainly not a Protestant fundamentalist, among any of the founders of the 5 largest tech companies.

Huh, how do you know what the rich people of old were thinking? Your argument seems to be based on complete fantasy - both your assumptions about the mindset of rich people of the past and of people who got rich in SV are completely fabricated.But never mind, it is hating on rich people, so it is always OK, right?

It seems pretty straightforward to me.If you believe that your wealth is entirely, or almost entirely, through sheer force of your own will, skills, and abilities, you have no responsibility to anyone with regard to that wealth. You earned it all without anyone&#x27;s help. It&#x27;s all yours. They can pound sand.If you believe that your wealth is in part due to factors outside of your control - having connected family, having family money, attending good schools, lucky breaks early in your career, etc. - you&#x27;re much more likely to feel a sense of responsibility toward the next generation. To give other people lucky breaks, maybe even ones less deserving than you were. To set up scholarship funds so other kids can attend good schools they otherwise wouldn&#x27;t be able to.Edit to add: People in group 2 don&#x27;t feel they &quot;deserve&quot; it any less. They still earned it. It&#x27;s still theirs. They just understand the difference between being born on third base and hitting a triple. The run still counts at the end of the day.

You seem to be talking about a caricature of the &quot;silicon valley rich.&quot;Who are you talking about when you say &quot;this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sense of responsibility&quot;?

There&#x27;s a lot of evidence that old money is bad, I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s any that says it&#x27;s better than new money

&gt; Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.Is there actual data to back this up? That &#x27;old money&#x27; behaves in a more positive society-impacting way than &#x27;new money&#x27;?

This is an amazing quote, thank you.
Though, the more I read into it the less I see it applicable to the PGs quote, mostly because I disagree with this statement:&gt;Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparisonTech became a global catalyst for many people to get out of poverty. A lot of people in countries like India, Nigeria or Ukraine would never had a chance to get out of poverty otherwise. I do not observe any increase in the sentiment in them remaking people in their own images. Half a century ago Ayn Rand was getting enough followers well before tech was even a thing.The quote that you have provided reminds me of the zealotry of communist regime that my country went through. As well as the arguments of the woke marxists that are sadly getting more frequent today.Anyway, thank you for an interesting take on the problem.

Entrenched money stabilizes the world. Imagine putting 10% of the billionaires of the world on a boat, those who pull the strings of their empires to keep their nations into status-quo, and imagine the boat sinks. A year later, all those entrenched interests dematerialize, fewer powers hold people together, diplomacy isn’t as balanced as it has been when billionaires weighed in, and war starts.That’s the story of the Titanic, sunk in 1913.

Bill Gates 501c3 puts back less than 1 percent off their benovelent humanitarian money back to the United States. The country that coddled him, an his connected mother.Personally, I think these good ole nonprofit boys; Billy, Zuck, Warren, etc. are tax dodgers.Obama wanted to reform nonprofit regulations, but chickened out.

You had me until &quot;Arrogant new wealth is 100x better&quot;getting murdered vs getting aggressive cancer

&gt; The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it.Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn&#x27;t fair by any means.Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends.New wealth in proper democracies at least has a proven track record of competency and general societal good, it can also do a lot of good when spent (see Bill Gates)If you are all worried about wealth, just put 99% estate tax, will cover both old and new wealth.

In the Gulag Archipelago, there&#x27;s a story about Tsar Nicholas asking to be placed in solitary confinement so as to understand the conditions. The author notes that even this gesture was an indication of at least moral aspiration. Which I believe may fall under the umbrella of noblesse obligeThis is in stark contrast to the Organs operating the prisons during the Soviet era who would never submit themselves to torture to understand the plight of the prisoners they sentenced.Anyway, just a fun anecdote, clearly noblesse oblige wasn&#x27;t enough to stop the people from revolting in several cases.

noblesse oblige is, best I can tell, a cultural myth. There’s been quite a bit of writing on this subject[1]. I’m not convinced self-made wealth of today is any better or worse than the concentration of family money in the past - so I think your point is half correct.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldcat.org&#x2F;title&#x2F;executive-imperialism-the-myth-of-noblesse-oblige&#x2F;oclc&#x2F;64067727" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldcat.org&#x2F;title&#x2F;executive-imperialism-the-myt...</a>(And the paper) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;calisphere.org&#x2F;item&#x2F;ark:&#x2F;28722&#x2F;bk0003v1h0r&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;calisphere.org&#x2F;item&#x2F;ark:&#x2F;28722&#x2F;bk0003v1h0r&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.firstthings.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-ignoble-lie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.firstthings.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2018&#x2F;04&#x2F;the-ignoble-lie</a>

That&#x27;s like pointing to the free turkeys Mexican drug cartels give out on Christmas as an argument for letting them murder people.

&quot;Silicon Valley money&quot; also got you the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Computer History Museum and lots of other nice things. You see a Hewlett, a Packard, or another legendary Silicon Valley name on almost every Nice Thing in the Bay Area.

I didn&#x27;t even realize that there was a myth like that.

&gt; Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.Sounds like it was written by someone who didn&#x27;t grow up around &quot;old money&quot;.There&#x27;s plenty of statistical literature on this myth.

There&#x27;s a certain irony in you posting that Lewis quote. &quot;Omnipotent moral busybodies&quot; is a good description of a significant part of the left-wing these days.&gt; This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fictionIt&#x27;s not a fiction that entrepreneurs earned their money themselves. It&#x27;s more complicated than that but it&#x27;s not fiction. Most entrepreneurs fail, the ones who get rich usually do something innovative.It is a fiction that entrepreneurs are &quot;intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous&quot; but, again, who really thinks of themselves that way, Paul Graham-style entrepreneurs or the lefties who insist that they are motivated purely by &quot;justice&quot; but are clearly at least partly motivated by resentment?There are good arguments for left-wing policies. But the left today is culturally ascendant and many of its most popular arguments are petty vindictiveness (like, for example, that rich people didn&#x27;t innovate in order to get rich -- most of them did!).

&gt; Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse obligeInteresting observation. I recently learned from a Fresh Air interview with Heather McGhee about Hinton Rowan Helper, a white racist Southerner abolitionist. He wrote a book analyzing the way chattel slavery harmed working-class whites and white society, the essential dynamic being:the wealth of the plantation class did not depend on the labor of the white working class, nor their ability to buy product from the plantation class (cotton and tobacco were shipped north and globally); as a result the plantation (ruling) class had no incentive to invest in society; Helper quantified this by looking at number of libraries, schools, etc. in the North vs the deep South.Obviously I don&#x27;t want to claim the horrors of slavery are comparable to the effects of tech companies on the economy... but I wonder if the same _essential dynamic_ is there:- wealth equating to political power- an industry driven to remove any reliance on an educated populous or satisfied workforce (through automation, and the secondary effects of automation as in the way Uber etc. offloads risk onto drivers&#x2F;society)- an industry for whom the populous are not customers but &quot;the product&quot;

&gt;Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.You can just count in your city how many buildings, libraries, concert halls and similar have been built by the rich of old, and how many by the rich of new.Maybe the new rich give to ONGs instead, but ONGs can be seen as just another institution to exert power, influence markets, and buy people by giving them a position in ONGs where you invest heavily. On the other side infrastructure is infrastructure, yes, it makes you look good, but you have to build something real and solid that is easy to evaluate.

A bit odd to criticize them for being &quot;Protestant&quot; and then quote CS Lewis.

&gt;Protestant zealotryMy god, so many people misunderstood you, and took this thing in the literal sense. HN is worse that I imagined.

I&#x27;m just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself&gt;&quot;People who don&#x27;t look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn&#x27;t get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don&#x27;t look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?&quot;And my answer to that question would be, arguably yes. Why? Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige. The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that it&#x27;s not at all about meritocracy, it&#x27;s that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fiction, but that they&#x27;re intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous in ways that anyone else just can&#x27;t understand.Old money might have ignored you and thrown a party, but Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison.C.S Lewis:&quot;“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron&#x27;s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be &quot;cured&quot; against one&#x27;s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

Inequality is a normal state in most systems.&quot;The climate disaster is disproportionately the fault of the rich&quot;.Most disasters would affect a poor person more than a rich person. If I lose my job but have years of savings, it&#x27;s no factor that I lost a job. Sorry, I don&#x27;t see that as a strong argument, not even discussing the evidence for it.But you got me at dogs.

Why the bitterness? You could blame the politicians just as well for the climate disaster, or the corporations, why the wealthy?[1] What do you know of their family life or love of dogs?I think the rich are not who you think - if you put less energy into hating them you may have more time to improve your own life, e.g. by studying personal finance or 
investing:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;personalfinance&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;commontopics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;personalfinance&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;commontopics</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joshuakennon.com&#x2F;add-jack-macdonald-list-secret-millionaires-just-died-left-188-million-built-investing-stocks-charity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joshuakennon.com&#x2F;add-jack-macdonald-list-secret-...</a>[1] Incidentally, one of the best climate mitigations, a source fuels carbon tax, has been blocked not because the wealthy but because its supposed impact on the poor (limiting travel &amp; commuting). One hopes the Carbon Tax &amp; Dividend proposals will gain traction, but how can they, when they pay out to the people, instead of the special interests? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensclimatelobby.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;citizensclimatelobby.org</a>

Talk us through the &quot;hate dogs&quot; bit.

Whatever let&#x27;s you sleep at night, bud. I&#x27;m sure you really think like that, and not rationalizing your inability to become rich.

I hate that quote. Personally I’m not envious of the rich, I despise them. I hate the fact that there are rich people, not because I want to be one some day, but because they ruin the party for the rest of us. The climate disaster is disproportionately the fault of the rich, yet it is the poor who are disproportionately affected by it.I don’t envy the rich. When I see the rich, I see pitiful humans that work too much, that have a miserably family life, who hate dogs, and have ugly houses built for them. If I ever become a person like that, I would hate my self.

Every time I see wealth inequality being talked about, I remember this quote:&quot;It&#x27;s not greed that drives the world, but envy.&quot;.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Tale_of_Two_Cities" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Tale_of_Two_Cities</a>The intro paragraph is enough for you to get their point.

I don&#x27;t get it, what are you trying to say?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.It was the epoch of self-made tech billionaires, it was the epoch of stagnant median wages.It was the season of free knowledge, it was the season of credentialism.It was the spring of Hope, it was the winter of Nope.

Putting money aside, in terms of quality of life, we are definitely well ahead. Remember, you had to spend a day in a public library, to answer a question, that you can now lookup in seconds. (Intentionally not using a verb derived from a name of a certain advertisement company).

Even in the US, the bottom quartile of Americans makes more money than they did in 1982, adjusted for inflation.

Which do you think a more likely cause for improving circumstances in that case, totalitarianism or improved trade relations with the world&#x27;s largest economy?

This data of jump in equality is often cited, but it&#x27;s often left out that the majority of the people lifted out in poverty is from a country where they have a planned economy and gladly lock up or even execute the rich that do not cooperate with measures to stimulate wealth equality.

&quot;tons of people are struggling to meet their basic needs&quot;That&#x27;s just not true. There are billions less people struggling to meet their basic needs now, than there was in 1982.World is much more equal now than it was in 1982.

Just Be Rich