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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money.

This doesn't feel quite right to me. The Musks and Bezoses of the world get a lot of hate. The more civilized inheritors of wealth get a pass,.

People are much more likely to accept generational wealth then they are to accept that some people are just literally better than them. And, in fact, you see a lot of cope. People bend over backwards to claim that Bill Gates or Elon Musk got where they did because of their semi-rich fathers. Anything to deny the reality that some who excel do so because of superior ability, or that others fail because of their own lack.

I think this is a matter of degree, and also that while talent is important, luck is also.

So I think most would be okay with Musk / Gates / Bezos having 100x the median wealth, maybe even 1000x, there is a problem with them having 100000x the median wealth. They may be talented, but they aren't that talented.

I may just be projecting -- I'm generally a big fan of capitalism, but I think the differences between the 0.01% and the 70% in the US are just too big -- and it's hurting overall society. I'm generally for fairly mild adjustments to redistribution (small bumps to, e.g., income tax, inheritance tax, maybe capital gains) to reduce the skew at the extreme edges.

The thing is, Musk/Gates/Bezos/etc. don't actually "have" 100000x the median wealth. Their "wealth" is simplistically calculated from the stocks they own in their companies. But they couldn't just cash out those stocks and dive into their wealth like Scrooge McDuck. First of all, they would have to find buyers. There's no one alive who would buy $200b in one stock, which means you'd need multiple buyers. But there also aren't $200b worth of multiple buyers waiting around for any one of these stocks at their current price.

Which brings us to the second problem: they'd have to substantially lower the amount they're willing to sell their stocks for, in order to find enough buyers. First, this would substantially lower their net worth (which, recall, is crudely calculated by stock value times quantity of stocks). More importantly, if they were to attempt to sell all their stocks in this way, the market would immediately assume they know something dire about their companies' prospects and the value of the stock would plummet.

So, the mega wealthy like Musk/Gates/Bezos have their wealth locked into their companies and can't unlock it to any substantial degree - they're going down with the ship if they try.

That's not to say they aren't very wealthy - they are. They can leverage their tremendous stock assets to essentially get huge loans to fund a lavish lifestyle ("Hey, loaner, I have a gazillion dollars in stock. Wanna lend me a tiny percentage of that in cash? I'm a low-risk borrower because, if I default, well, here's all this collateral!"). But it's not, like, a hundred billion lavish.

I see that as lining up with my claims rather than contradicting them. Most people think that talent-earned wealth is okay, but generational wealth is unearned, and therefore consider only the latter to be an insult and grounds for an attack. The vocal minority who hate all rich people are forced to frame their arguments in terms of unearned wealth because claims that "Musk is talented and therefore capable of generating tons of money and this is unfair so he should share the fruits of his labor with us less talented people" fall on deaf ears.

Something tells me the idle rich don't get a pass, per se, though they are definitely far less scrutinized than "active" billionaires.

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