Hot Take (for a leftist):
If the long term goal is making rich ppl obsolete, then a short term phenomenon of rich guys like #MrBeast is a step in the right direction. Should we stop there? Absolutely not! But if you're driving from a desert to a rainforest you'll have to go through some temperate shrublands. As long as we're still moving in the right direction, I don't see the harm in enjoying the view along the way. Celebrate progress! We still have a ways to go, but we've come a long way too
@Vincarsi I'd first stop and realize that making rich people obsolete is a tearing down when it's healthier to focus on building up.
But that dovetails with what you're saying, as stopping to enjoy MrBeast is building up.
We should focus on the positive and not the negative.
@magitweeter how do you figure?
Fossil fuels will be obsolete when a better option out competes them.
I don't know how you make a, what, a person that's better than rich? How do you outcompete a rich person?
A fundamental quirk there is that the rich status is itself indicator of relative competition.
@volkris @magitweeter you change societal values so that wealth hoarding is no longer considered a virtue.
There's been a lot of research done on how cultural norms affect behavior. Paraphrasing Dr Robert Sapolsky, people with high testosterone will compete for dominance in cultures that value strength above all. But in cultures that value altruism, they'll compete to give away more than anyone else because social status is determined by human values and wealth is just economic dominance.
But we're already there.
People working in the context of modern financial systems are discouraged from hoarding wealth and rewarded for spreading it around as society pays them returns on their investments.
There are no Scrooge McDucks with money pools in places with modern banking.
Such hoarding represents a tremendous opportunity cost, so people don't.
@volkris I'm gonna need you to check your work on that one. When the incentive for altruism is more dominance then the core values are not altruism. A culture that values altruism above dominance wouldn't have more empty houses than homeless ppl. Modern financial systems incentivizes only helping people who are useful to you. A fundamental value shift would mean that requiring a direct return on investment would make you a pariah who's considered a selfish person who doesn't value life
@Vincarsi I'm not talking about altruism, though. You brought that up, but it's not necessary to highlight that our culture doesn't value hoarding wealth.
Wealth hoarding is already not considered a virtue. It has nothing to do with altruism but rather alignment of interests, people being rewarded for working in common interests.
It's fine to prefer altruism and think that's panacea to all of society's ills, but in the mean time we can recognize the way the institutions we have now work for the common good.
And in particular, the way the institutions we have now punish the hoarding of wealth, if that's something you care about.
@Vincarsi where is that wealth?
Again, it's Scrooge McDuck. Do you think they have moneyvaults that they go swimming in? Giant piles of coins? Maybe their driveways are paved with currency?
No, of course not. In a modern society people invest their wealth, making it available for use by others.
Because modern cultures push those with money to share their money with others, and not to hoard it.
There's a good chance your paycheck is in part made possible by some rich guy sharing his wealth with your employer, even if indirectly.
Now I'm not saying anything about whether this is good or bad or whether rich people are good people. I figure most of them aren't. BUT the reality is that wealthy people don't tend to hoard their wealth.
Even if such stories make for compelling clickbait and political messaging.
@volkris I think where we fundamentally disagree is that you consider wealth being circulated through an economic system that is controlled by the interests of people who have inherited the spoils of an unprecedented scourging of the earth, theft, slavery and genocide, to be "sharing". While I consider not returning the wealth stolen and giving descendants the economic freedom to make their own choices instead of being tied to this restrictive and unbalanced economy to be perpetuating the abuse
You confuse wealth with money.
Yes, a million dollars sitting in your bank account is wealth.
A million-dollar house is also wealth. And even if you're “sharing” it by renting it out, it's still yours, it's your investment, and you're still hoarding it. All of that is true.
Spreading wealth would be giving away the house, not renting it out.
@magitweeter @volkris thank you, I was starting to wonder if we were inhabiting the same reality, where a net worth of a trillion dollars somehow doesn't count as wealth hoarding
It doesn't because in our reality the net worth doesn't really count what you HAVE but what you're OWED.
There's little hoarding with our banking system.
When you deposit money in a bank the bank doesn't just throw the cash in their vault. No, that money is lent out and otherwise used elsewhere.
If you deposit $1T into the bank, so you have a net worth of $1T, you're not sitting on that cash. The cash is gone, with the bank transferring it to other people and institutions.
That's the disconnect between measures of wealth and hoarding. Hoarding represented an opportunity cost, so these days we've broken that connection through banking.
It's possible that we're all talking past each other because we mean different things by “hoarding”.
To you it seems like hoarding means taking physical stuff and locking it away out of existence.
To us hoarding means accumulating large amounts of titles to things. That can mean bank deposits, corporate equity, real estate, anything that represents an ownership claim on some resource.
Contemporary culture doesn't encourage people to say “this apartment building was mine, but now i'm giving it away to the tenants”.
It encourages people to say “this apartment building is mine, but people can live in it if they pay me enough”.
Which of those sounds like hoarding wealth to you? Which sounds like spreading wealth?
@magitweeter and I'm trying to point out that you are wrong about how banking works 🙂
When you have a bank deposit in a modern bank, you absolutely do not have a claim on any money. You don't own any money. Instead, the bank moves the money out of your ownership and gives it to other people.
When you deposit into a bank you give up your ownership of money.
What you receive in return is a claim against the bank itself, you receive a promise that the bank will give you other money when you request it. But you do give up your money when you deposit it in a bank.
So yes, I know that to you, hoarding means accumulating large amounts of titles to things, but what I'm trying to convey is that in modern financial systems you don't so much accumulate large amounts of titles to things.
(I'm trying to say this a few different ways to try to explain it)
So it's not so much that we are talking past each other, but that we have a disagreement over fact.
We agree that hoarding may involve keeping ownership of money. The difference is that you think these wealthy people do that, while I know that's not how banks work, and they give up that ownership when they deposit money.
Each is a different thing.
But it's so significant that so many talk about wealth in therms of currency, dollars and such, but so little wealth is actually held in dollars.
Take the real estate deed. The owner [probably] had to give up their money to buy that deed. The guy buying a million dollar house is a million dollars poorer after the purchase. He has literally given up a million dollars to other people who needed the money more.
We talk about wealth in these abstract terms that so often don't really match the substantial facts on the ground.
We want a rich guy to spread his money to others? Well, in old times that was a concern, but it's not really a concern now. With modern financial systems rich people are constantly transferring their cash to others since they're punished by inflation, not to mention opportunity costs, should they hoard it.
The only person in this conversation who thinks we're talking about money when we say “wealth” is you.
I suggest you read back through it. We've insisted multiple times that wealth doesn't equal money.
You seem insistent on convincing us that wealth doesn't equal money—something we're already aware of and have been since the start of this exchange.
@magitweeter @volkris I'm starting to suspect this person either doesn't know what they're talking about and/or are intentionally arguing in bad-faith. This conversation has gone in a pointless circle where they are arguing from technicalities and seemingly switching definitions to try and "win" instead of being intellectually honest and trying to understand our perspectives.
When a few people can use economic power to divert democracy while millions have no homes, that's wealth hoarding.
@Vincarsi you're missing that I do understand your perspective. It's just factually wrong.
It's not like you're the first person to buy into those myths about wealth and misunderstandings about how money works.
No, you're describing a perspective that's all too common. It's like talking to flat earthers who are laying out the same old story.
Yes, I know your perspective.
No, the facts don't support the theory you've been sold.
@magitweeter
@Vincarsi You know how i roll. I give people lots and lots and lots of chances before deciding they're arguing in bad faith.
The number one thing that drives me to keep talking to this person is that they seem invested in convincing *us* of something. I approach that type of attitude with an open mind.
That's a deep question that requires specialized economic and financial insight that i'd wager none of us have.
It's very easy, though, to give an intuitive answer that i believe is a good starting point:
Wealthy is someone who owns things, especially things that grant them control over resource flows.
@magitweeter I think that if you can't define wealthy then it's kind of silly to be talking about it.
It kind of hand waves away all of the substantial meaning of the term, and whatever point a person might be trying to make into abstract definitions that rely on someone else to make.
My entire point is to focus on the substantial aspects of wealth here. And your reply sounds like you are ducking that, setting aside the substantial aspects, and just floating in the hand waving abstraction.
These are real people's lives that are impacted. I want to talk about the real people, the real ways that are institutions function. I'm not so much interested in your intuition.
I actually don't think the topic of wealth requires any arguments to authority. It's more, what do YOU mean when you talk about wealth.
When we are talking about hoarding of wealth, well what do WE mean by that. What substantial resource do you think is being hoarded.
In the common usage, people do tend to measure wealth in dollar figures, or some other currency figures. It seems like you are saying you don't do that, and that's fine.
So in the end the question comes down to, what are you talking about?🙂
«When we are talking about hoarding of wealth, well what do WE mean by that. What substantial resource do you think is being hoarded.»
The resource being hoarded is control. Voice and vote in who gets to access a resource and how.
The owner of a company has ultimate say in the choice of business partners, production schedules, hiring, and even the ability to shut down.
Your landlord has ultimate say in what gets fixed or improved and can command police to evict you.
@magitweeter but I think that ends up being theory that runs into a brick wall of reality.
The landlord has to relinquish control of the property when renting it to a person. When I sign a rental agreement, the landlord agrees that I get control as per the agreement.
I get to walk in and out of the front door as I wish, cook food, sleep, do all of those things as per the agreement that the landlord has signed on to.
So I don't think it's realistic to frame this as the landlord being in control when the whole realistic situation. Here is the landlord giving up control.
And this is so core to what I'm trying to say: you talk about hoarding wealth when in reality our societies encourage people to give up wealth.
If you want to define wealth as something like control, I think that's unusual way to define it, but even then, when we look at the real world we see the opposite of hoarding, we see landlords giving up their control to their tenants.
@magitweeter I don't know what you're talking about.
Most rental agreements involve tenants paying rent in exchange for the landlord giving up his ability to do things like evicting them.
@volkris @magitweeter if I lend a book to a friend, I retain ownership of that book. If I give a book to a friend, and tell them they can have it and do what they want with it as long as they agree to give me an identical book when I ask for it, I'm still retaining ownership with a quirky little twist. Money is use value. It's not anything other than what it represents. Someone who gives money to the bank with the agreement that they'll get the same amount with interest is retaining use value
@Vincarsi yes, and that's EXACTLY not how banks work.
When you deposit money at a bank you don't retain ownership of that money.
That's a core point here.
@magitweeter
But that touches on my point: the million dollars *doesn't* sit in your bank account in modern financial systems.
The bank writes down that it owes that money to the depositor, but then it takes that money and loans it out to others.
That million dollars doesn't just sit there. It goes to help a small company make payroll for the week, or it helps a machine shop buy a lathe, or it helps a middle class couple buy a new car for their commute.
The idea that money is sitting in an account is exactly the misunderstanding people have when they talk about the wealthy that way.
That's not how modern banking works.
Banks create money by lending it out. The limit to how much money a bank can create is not the bank's total deposits, but the reserve ratio set by the central bank.
If one bank needs to meet its reserve requirements, it borrows from another bank, sometimes from the central bank.
Sure, your million dollars will make it easier for your bank to meet its reserve ratio. But it's not the thing that's getting loaned out to other people.
Anyway. That's all a diversion because we're not talking about money, we're talking about (physical) wealth.
Owning a company is hoarding wealth. Giving the company away is spreading wealth.
Owning a rental apartment building is hoarding wealth. Giving the apartments away is spreading wealth.
Owning a machine that you can't use, so you have to hire other people to make stuff with it, is hoarding wealth. Giving the machine away to those who can use it is spreading wealth.
@volkris again, I'm failing to see what you're talking about. I live in a world where less than 1% of people have amassed half of the wealth in the world, and in terms of social status they're considered superheros with near godlike influence on our social systems. The fact that there's some incentives to invest money in order to get more of it doesn't disprove that getting more money is culturally considered the default "win" condition. Even your earlier comment implies that rich=better person