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.
@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
@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.
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.
@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.
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?🙂
@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.
@magitweeter as you said, the tenant gets the ability to accept the terms as written by the landlord or to refuse them.
The landlord doesn't have the ability to set terms for other people.
In this case, the other people have the ability to accept the terms or not.
At this point you are so far away from the topic of wealthy people hoarding. Now you're down to arguing about the details of contractual negotiations, and really, I think that shows just how tenuous the original argument was.
Yeah, wealthy people hoard things! How do you know? Because a tenant has the ability to accept the offer made by a landlord.
I think it's just really striking how far from the original argument you're going now.
Far from hoarding wealth, you're talking about whether a landlord is going to fix a dryer when it breaks.
@magitweeter Right, and when a landlord agrees to let a tenant live in his house he gives up control as per the rental agreement.
So this is exactly an illustration of how hoarding is undermined in our society. The landlord declines to hoard control as he gives up control to his tenant.
@magitweeter keep in mind that the tenant is also imposing the terms of the rental agreement on the landlord.
The tenant demands everything from access through maintenance as per the rental agreement.
So it's funny to talk about the difference between selling the house versus renting when as a renter, the rental agreement gives me control over the landlord that I would not have if I had just outright bought the house.
If I buy my house then I am responsible for fixing all the things, and that's a trade-off that I might not be willing to make. So long as I continue to rent I can order the landlord to fix things as per the rental agreement.
So there's a difference, but it's a different set. Goes both ways. Both the landlord and the renter give up control upon the sale. That's not necessarily good for either of them, which is why we have rentals in the first place.
That's *if* the rental agreement includes a commitment from the landlord to fixing any problems that you point them to.
Which isn't necessarily the case. And even when it is, that's a commitment that the landlord is choosing out of their own free will—because they're the one who sets the terms of the agreement, not you.
That's control.
If they sell you the house, they can't impose any ongoing conditions as part of the sale. It's yours to do as you see fit.
That's control.
@magitweeter unless you're living in some kind of anarcho-capitalist hellscape, no, these legal agreements are subject to enforcement by law enforcement. Once the landlord gives up control in return for rent payment, it is not purely up to their free will whether they honor the legal agreements they made or not.
Yeah, it's not necessarily the case that the renter cares about fixing problems. And I am very much appreciative of diversity of values, where some renters won't particularly care. That's just a difference between my values and theirs.
But that still highlights the agency of the renter and the control given up by the landlord subject to the wishes of the renter.
It's not necessarily the case that the renter wants the agreement that I or you would want, but that's up to them. Because they have that control.
And if the landlord wants money then the landlord has to give up their control in exchange for that income.
The tenant gets the choice to agree to the terms set by the landlord, in which case they get to enjoy the use of the property in the limited ways allowed by the terms;
or to refuse, in which case they don't get to use the property at all.
The tenant doesn't get to dictate the terms of the agreement. Whatever wishes the tenant may have with regards to the property are ultimately conditioned to the landlord's own wishes and the terms dictated by them.
That's control.
@magitweeter have you ever not rented an apartment because the rent was too high?
I think most people have rejected rental agreements in their lives.
But none of that matters because none of it changes that the landlord gives up control in return for rental.
Again, I think it's striking how the original point about wealthy people hoarding has been narrowed to some point about a rental agreement, but even at that point, the rental agreement represents the landlord giving up control, the opposite of hoarding, even under the narrow terms that you are setting here.
Even if we accept the strikingly narrow definition of wealth that comes down too landlord-renter agreement, the landlord allowing a renter is doing the opposite of hoarding, the landlord is giving away wealth, even in that stretched framing.
Well, the discussion has become unreasonably narrow because you have, among others, a concept of “giving away” that's warped beyond usefulness.
So i'm trying a different, more material approach.
What makes a landlord a landlord is the ability to have their claims on property enforced by the state, up to and including state violence.
Under a rental agreement, the landlord always retains that ability, even if they waive it for as long as the tenant meets their obligations.
If the landlord transferred ownership to the occupier instead, that would mean giving up once and for all the ability to have their claim on that property enforced by the state. The occupier would then have no obligations to meet. They would be free from the threat of state prosecution and violence, as there would be no agreement to uphold toward the former owner.
@magitweeter and what makes a renter a renter is the ability to have their claims on property enforced by the state as well.
It's an agreement. It's not a unilateral dictatorial declaration.
And again, you've never not rented a place because you didn't like the terms? A landlord can't force a renter to rent.
You're really out on a limb with this one.
@magitweeter again, I was assuming that you were not living in some anarchocapitalist hellscape
If the rental agreement is uninforceable then all bets are off and you are talking about a different reality than I am.
At that point you're not so much talking about a renter as a squatter, so I'm assuming here that the rental agreement would be enforceable.
If you're talking about an agreement that's not legal then that's a completely different matter, one that's certainly divorced from modern societies.
“The tenant has the power to have their rental agreement enforced by the state” is true.
It's also not equivalent to “the tenant has the power to have the state enforce their claim to the property the occupy”.
The tenant can't, for example, sell the house to someone else. And that's not because the rental agreement says they can't.
@volkris @magitweeter a landlord can't force a tenant to rent, but our society is so hostile towards surviving by your own means that if you can't afford to buy you are effectively forced to rent under pain of being abandoned to the manmade hell that is homelessness in this society. I say this as a renter and a former front-line worker with the homeless.
How do you explain the abandonment of societies most vulnerable to piss, shit and sleep in back alleys if access to resources isn't gatekept?
@volkris @magitweeter seems to me that you're confusing theory with reality. Yes, in theory the landlord and tenant have entered into an equal agreement. In practice, ppl usually rent when they can't afford to buy, so the alternative to renting is usually homelessness. And landlords know this and will find loopholes and technicalities or just shit that's too expensive to fight in court to punish or reward tenants as they see fit. The power imbalance is usually massive.
@volkris @Vincarsi
«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.