I don’t mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.
I think many will say yes, they can be, though it may be rare. I was tempted to. I thought more about it and I wondered, are you really a good person if you’re hoarding enough money you and your family couldn’t spend in 10 lifetimes?
I thought, if you’re a good person, you wouldn’t be rich. And if you’re properly rich you’re probably not a good person.
I don’t know if it’s fair or naive to say, but that’s what I thought. Whether it’s what I believe requires more thought.
There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn’t care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.
And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?
Very curious about people’s thoughts on this.
People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.
Agreed.
For me personally it’s more a question of does your money hoarding system exploit people or is it family money that’s been made unethically. I think keeping that kind of money to yourself is unethical. And I don’t mean you should go living from riches to rags but recognize that you own something to society and do something about it.
Soros attempted to gain wealth to use it as a tool to fight for the oppressed. Didn’t work out too well for him.
Can you at least try to explain this take… I think we are having hard time seeing where you are coming from?
How is some rich clown trying to influence political process for his own benefiting helping the homeless or the working poors?
What about middle class?
I don’t mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.
I firmly believe there are no ways to become “properly” rich that don’t require you to be a bad person.
To get out of that “doctor-making-150k-a-year” category you need some combination of greed, exploitative practices, manipulating broken capitalist systems, nepotism, ruthlessness, corruption, bribery, and outright lying.
idk, you probably have a small number of artists and genuinely lucky-sons-of-bitches who get proper rich without being bad people. Or at least with their wealth not coming from being a bad person.
Yeah, fair enough, I’m not too arrogant to admit there are exceptions to every rule.
And more power to artists and exotic chefs and others, who are able to get sociopath billionaires to fork out crazy amounts of money for their work.
They still benefit from regime in place to maintain their wealth and many are by default daddy’s lap dogs.
People love putting up singers or athletes as they earned their money “fair” etc but these people end shilling for the benefit of the same rich daddies
Their art literally supports the status quo.
For example NBA players and China, rappers shilling “prosperity rap” and many singers putting out generic catchy music. Wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds them, ay?
They mostly never take a stand but to be fair those that do get punished and removed from public eye.
George Carlin was an OG about it, said shit that was so true when most of us were still shitting diapers.
You can turn any of his content on today. 100% on point and relavent. It is a bit uncanny.
I am sure he made good money but at least he didn’t lie about how it works. Most celebs are more worried about other celebs accepting them into rich daddy club… Not their audiences
I agree totally, which is why I made that distinction. And my last point about participating in the system that oppresses the poor just to maintain your own wealth. I can’t see how someone like that could be considered good.
We’re all arguably participating in that same system.
Not like we have a choice, especially those of us in poverty. You’re dealt your hand and thats that. Born poor, die poor. Born rich, enjoy life. Shouldn’t be that way but it is
Not much choice but no doubt we are both victims and enablers of the regime.
People first need to accept this dichotomy before we can move forward. Daddies spend good money on PR to keep us bickering among our selves while they cashing in on our labour and taxes
You can be born into it.
I’d say you’re a bad person if you’re born into it and don’t actively try to get rid of it.
I think the point of being a rich asshole is 1 billion dollars usd. Even 999mm is too much, but over 1 bil is an easy demarcation of excessive wealth.
That was going to be my response. If you’re obscenely wealthy but you’re in the process of trying to get rid of that wealth via philanthropy, I think you get a pass.
And not just “pledges”. Actual donations.
So like, almost no multimillionaires.
999 million what? 999 million net worth? What happens when the market goes on a 15% hike like in 2020? Do you become the bad guy? Or is that 999 million in liquid assets (spoiler alert billionaires don’t have 1 billion in the bank). Thinking you have a point shows how ignorant you are about wealth except the fact you hate people who have more than you
1 billion? I think rich asshole starts much lower than that or 999 million, thats a fuck ton of money. Rich asshole begins at 1-3 million and up.
I find this take so hypocritical.
I bet you have more food than some people. Are you giving it to them?
You have a roof over your head, other people don’t. Are you giving it to them?
You most likely have more money than others, considering your access to the internet and ability to think up this post - are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?
Calling it “hoarding” is just intentionally vilifying having money. Are some rich people bad? Absolutely. Are they bad because they’re rich? No. Do they have an obligation to give their money away? Also no.
I think you’re missing the points about scale and marginal utility. If you have more food than 3 generations of your family will ever eat, and continue to take more while others are starving, you can make a moral argument that maybe you shouldn’t have so much food. Much less continue to try and get more. It becomes more egregious when you, say, take food from your employees who don’t always have enough.
Agree with this. We should remember that doctor-making-150k is far closer to being homeless than they are to a billionaire, with their individual wealth rivaling small countries.
Most doctors are one of us as many other well compensated professionals.
You better save that money while you can because if you are not able to trade your labour for money you are back where you started among the peasants.
I think you’re missing the points about scale and marginal utility.
Missing the point and misconstruing the argument to protect the wealthy is the point.
Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)
I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.
And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?
Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the too of my head lol.
Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?
I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.
It’s important to recognize just how much more billionaires make than millionaires, but at the same time, no, neither of them are good or can be while maintaining that amount of wealth, and the reason is because you cannot make that much money by working. The ONLY way to make that much money is by making profit off of others.
Idk man in some areas a house costs a million. If two people go into debt their whole life and work their butts off to pay for a house that now costs a million, I still think of them as normal people somehow yaknow
A lot of that is because we’re in the middle of a housing crisis thanks to enormous companies buying up all the property, pushing normal people out of the house market to renting. On top of that, buying a 1 million dollar house doesn’t make one a millionaire.
?? After you’ve paid off your million dollar house, you are a millionaire by definition.
Most of us don’t pay off a million dollars in one payment??? Paying off mortgages takes a long ass time, In smaller increments. You might “technically” be a millionaire, but you won’t be comparable to the kind of “rich” we’re talking about here. You can make that kind of money by working.
Have you looked up how much a Billion dollars really is? Billionaires are not living paycheck to paycheck. They could do so fucking much with their money and resources, but they choose to invest in shitty submarines and privatized space travel. I am all for pursuing advances in tech and life, but let’s solve the issues with earth first like world hunger, homelessness, and climate change.
For context: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Fantastic fucking visual.
WOW!!
Everyone please see this!!Holy shit somehow this struck harder than the Tom Scot video where he drives the length of the thickness of a billion dollar bills.
I suggest to scroll the entire page. Including the 3.2 trillion of the richest 400 americans. And remember that the tiniest scroll you can make would lead to you becoming a multi-multi millionaire that never has to look at their bank account ever again.
There’s a huge difference between having food to eat
And having millions of dollars doing nothing
Or me living in an apartment
And someone living in a building that could take up a whole city block
It’s not the fact that they have money. It’s how they get it and what they do with it.
I have money, but I don’t have enough to save. I don’t make enough to do much outside of maybe buy a small amount of food for a homeless person. I’m not solving shit. However, living in the city I have had people ask for some change, and I’ve done it. But I can’t do shit.
However, there are people who can actually help that won’t. They get more money than they need and then just sit on it. Many of them get it through exploiting others.
But if we want to ignore things scaling and just reach, if I give a homeless person a dollar, should he not share that?
I’ll add on here that there’s a major difference between
- being able to give a resource and be completely unphased
And
- Being able to give a resource and now either having to make do without that resource, or be on the edge of insolvency because you gave away the resource.
Even for Americans who are living a little better than paycheck to paycheck, I have read something like 30% of them are one personal disaster away from homelessness, themselves.
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I don’t think everyone should be forced to give away everything they don’t need to survive, I just think (in America’s case) if you have enough wealth for several generations to live in luxury while our people are dying from inaccessible medicine and healthcare and more than half of our country has no savings living paycheck to paycheck, we’ve massively failed as a society to provide basic needs for our people. You could fund universal healthcare with just a tax on billionaires and they wouldn’t have to change their lifestyle at all. If I had enough money that I lost 90% of it and I literally couldn’t notice the difference, I’d be full of guilt every night watching people die because they rationed their insulin.
Even without a tax in place (and I seriously and truly support putting a tax in place), millionaires and billionaires could take relatively small steps to improve life for a lot of people.
Do you remember last year that news story where a church used the donations from the collection plate to buy up the medical debt for some people? If I’m recalling correctly, the church bought up the debt, pennies on the dollar, and with like $50k were able to help over 100 people. I may have wrong figures for the money value and the number of people impacted, but I think the point remains that a lot of people’s lives got better without the medical debt, both financially and emotionally.
Billionaires have the capacity to do this same type of thing. Just pick any city and throw money at a major problem that directly impacts citizens. You don’t even need to work with the city or state government there! Get together with your other billionaire friends and strategize to pick a variety of cities. Make a game out of it about who can afford to pay off the problems in Los Angeles or Chicago, and who can only afford to pay off the problems in Sacramento or Springfield.
Yeah this is missing magnitudes of scale here. Someone with 100,000 and someone with 1,000,000,000 are wildly different scales of magnitude. It’s like people who look at a mag-4, mag-5, and mag-6 earthquake. Each of those is on a log scale, so while you’re just going form 4 to 5, the scaling means that’s a massive amount of change.
Same diff here. The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change. So going from 100,000 to 1,000,000 is a pretty big change in the amount of security one has. So going from 1e5 to 1e9, that’s a change of 1000 on the scale. The level of change between those two is absolutely astronomical.
I get this facet of mathematics eludes folks. All the while the whole “double the number of grains per square on a chessboard” thing we all like to play with because it’s interesting. But this is that IRL. The average person and the average billionaire are on two totally different scales. It’s like saying, “why a beetle doesn’t glow when the sun does?” Like you can’t reasonably compare those two things. Yeah, both contain hydrogen at some level but in massively, massively different quantities. It’s like saying, your computer is just an overgrown abacus. It’s just ignoring scale so much that it veers into very wrong.
I get what you’re trying to say. But you’ve got to acknowledge the vast difference of scale here and that your point is not just oversimplification of an issue, but a gross by planetary magnitudes oversimplification of an issue. Just mathematically speaking, the average person and the average billionaire are not even close to the same kind of person in economic terms. It’s just completely unreasonable to even remotely think they are. The numbers are just too far apart, to even attempt this argument in good faith.
This is a great point, and the same logic applies to someone who’s destitute vs someone with the median net worth of about $100,000. The average person could give away half of their net worth to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn’t ruin their life, but we don’t. We’re all less guilty of ignoring the suffering of others that a billionaire is, but not without blame.
The average person could give away half of their net worth to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn’t ruin their life
Maybe the average person in YOUR social circle lol
I love when people say something highly specific to their social class but frame it as “everyone”. Bubbles, man.
If the average American gave away half their net worth they would be giving away any hope of retirement. If the average billionaire gave away half their net worth they would still be a billionaire.
I have nothing new to reply to this with because others who have replied to you have already said what I would have said perfectly. I do want to say I find your reply incredibly ignorant and I hope the other replies have opened your eyes a bit.
are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?
My ‘excess’ that doesn’t go to bills and food is like 15 bucks, while theirs is several hundred million. Great comparison 👍🏼
I’m sorry, but being able to feed yourself and dedicate decades of your life saving for a home, is not comparable to having multiple homes, and going on holidays for half of the year.
Why aren’t you giving yours away? Same reason as the rest of us. Pretty disingenuous and hypocritical to call people out on that.
The majority of people of adequate means have more than the vast number of people below that status. Most of them are probably hedging their bets against misfortune or retirement, and the former can wipe out most of the advantages they had, and the ability to actually attain the latter is pipe dream for most people.
Point being, there’s a huge difference between someone with multiple lifetime’s worth of money hoarded that would afford food and shelter to tens of thousands of people and still not hurt their ability to enjoy life vs the person who is trying to shore up the minimum barrier between themselves and poverty and prepare for the day they can’t work anymore. For a lot of us that’s a pretty tough goal to reach.
How is the take hypocritical? Having a roof over your head and money to spend on nice things isn’t the same as having enough money to live 10 lives and never run out. You’ve drawn parallels that quite literally don’t exist.
No.
I think if a good person were to amass half a billion dollars they would spent enough of it on charity that they could never become a billionaire. So there are no good billionaires, but perhaps a few good millionaires moving to ex-millionaire.
Moving to ex-millionaire? A million isn’t even enough to retire in the US.
Yeah that math is a little outdated. I think the “you have too much money” range has gone up to around $3-5 million now.
My thoughts as well, pretty much exactly what I meant in my post.
if you’re a good person, you wouldn’t be rich.
Hardly any millionaires become ex-millionaires by choice, it’s that difference that can help distinguish the ‘good ones’ from the ‘not good ones’. If they chose that route through donation, charity, whatever it may be, they are good. If it had to be ripped away from them through just natural shitty circumstances, and otherwise would keep being hoarded, not so much.
I’m probably more on the extreme than most people here but I don’t completely agree with some of the things others say on here. I do see that in our system, the kind of person and the things that you have to do to attain that kind of money requires that you be a sociopath. There are certain points on the path to that kind of wealth where you consciously make decisions that are unethical.
What that looks like is making the conscious decision to fire thousands of people, real people who have families to feed, health insurance they may depend on their employment which in the end which ultimately simply boils down to wanting to have a bigger profit margin.
I mean even just thinking about it—when you have
much more money than anything for one single person to do with, why hoard it when there’s so much you can do in the world with it? The moment you begin to care for things beyond yourself is the moment you realize that no matter how much money in the world you attain, there still would never be enough left over for you to be able to be wealthy.I think a mistake in thought you might be making is that people are not simply “good” or “bad.” I 100% agree with @UziBobuzi that hoarding more wealth than you or your descendants could ever reasonably spend is a “bad thing.” And maybe that’s a “very bad thing,” that would tend to cast a dark shadow on other “good” things the person might do. Still, those good things are not erased; they still exist, and should not be subtracted.
Another important concept is that, while there is a lot of overlap, a person’s actions are not the entirety of who they are. We all have bad habits, and regrets, and other shortcomings that we are fully aware of and have difficulty rising above. That doesn’t make us bad people, it just makes us people.
I disagree. Sometimes, due to your particular circumstances, life forces duties and responsibilities on you. If you choose to become a police officer, but you’re too cowardly to protect children from getting shot, that is a bad act and you are a bad person for doing it. If you are born into wealth, you are obligated to help the less fortunate. If you don’t do it, that is a bad act and makes you a bad person. It would take a LOT of other good acts to atone for that.
No
Many rich people fall into the trap of legitimizing their wealth to themselves the wrong way. Everyone, not just super rich people, had some help during their career. Everyone got lucky at some point too. Connections, inheritances, family friends and so on.
But the wrong way to go about it is to just say, if I can do it and so many others cant, it must be their fault. They must be lazy or stupid or both…
Even people who just won the lottery, so actually really just got lucky, can fall into that trap. And the they start to treat others according to their net worth.
Good people don’t become super wealthy because once they get enough to live comfortably they start sharing it with people around them or people that need help.
In theory, it’s defenitely possible. Let’s imagine a person who inherited 1 billion dollars. How their parents made that wealth has no impact on the morality of the person who inherited it. The only thing that matters is what they do with the wealth afterward.
While your argument is that a good person would give it away, that’s a rather short-sighted approach. If instead, they invest that wealth at a 10% return and donate 99% of the returns to charity after 11 years, they have contributed more than if they would have immediately given away their entire wealth. But they are still considered a billionaire. And they are still making 1 million a year for themselves.
So just because someone has a high net worth doesn’t prevent them from being good. And you don’t have to play any “games” or exploit anyone to stay rich. Obviously, the exact numbers might not match the oversimplified version I presented. So instead of 11 years, it might take 15-20 years to give more than donating everything at once. But if set up correctly this could pay out money to people in need forever. Adjust the payments so that the initial sum keeps up with inflation and you could in theory pay out around 70 million in today’s money a year for eternity.
I think the hazard of temptation that comes from not immediately giving away as much as possible makes this strategy a failure. The longer you have money, the more you get used to having money and acquiring more. How many billionaires have pledged to give away all their wealth, and then surprise! Their kids inherit everything.
Just give it all away ASAP. Get it the fuck out of your hands.
millions to billions of dollars.
2 million and two billion are different worlds.
How rich are we talking about?
If you’re a billionaire, you didn’t get there through hard work and perseverance, you got there by lying, cheating and manipulating others. There’s not one single person in this world who has personally created a billion dollars worth of value. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Bill Gates or the Waltons, nobody. The wealth they hoard is generated collectively by their ideas, the work and contributions of their employees, taxpayer funded services like roads and railways that facilitate their ability to do business, the products they use that are produced by other people and companies, etc. If you’re a billionaire, that means somebody else along the way (or many somebodies) isn’t getting their fair share.
Beyond the already presented arguments from the utilitarian perspectives and the perspective of active wealth accumulation that requires a lack of morals, I want to offer a perspective on the control that this much money gives you. Since a billion dollars, or even further, the billions of dollars that billionaires have are hard to imagine/visualize, here is a handy visualization which i urge you to scroll through. (you have to scroll to the right)
Now, beyond being simply astonishingly awful because of the amount of good those people choose not to do, it’s evil (I dont like the word in this context but I lack a better one) because of the control these people gain. Having billions of dollars is not just money in the sense you and I think about it. Its control, its capital. Simply through its absurd quantities it gains the emergent property of influencing millions and billions of peoples lifes, often in subtle ways like where factories are built or how resources are allocated, decisions that should by all means have democratic legitimization but are controlled by individuals like feudal lords.
And beyond that, this power influences elections through voters or through plain and simple corruption. But not the kind of small level nepotism we think of where a company wins a bid for some building, but corrpution on a level that influences state legislature and millions of people for decades to come.
I don’t understand the obsession with rich people and their not spending/giving money in ways that please others. Also, the notion that wealth can ONLY be achieved through exploitation of others is silly. Has SOME wealth been acquired through exploitation? Of course. But it is easily provable with basic math that living beneath your means and steadily investing long term can result in a very comfortable, and sometimes early, retirement. There is no benefit focusing on what others have, focus on what you are doing. This is straight grown-up advice, if you disagree, you don’t have enough life experience yet.
This is straight grown-up advice
Nope. You wanna know what actual grown-up advice looks like? Go read Nougat’s comment in this thread. Or read OP’s post. Again.
Those are not the kinds of people that everyone here is talking about. This is what we are talking about.
Lmao nobody is getting 10s of millions or billions of dollars by just being frugal. OP is pretty explicit he’s talking about the truly wealthy and not someone who saved well and retired modestly at 55 or 60.
Rofl you try saving your way out of poverty on $27,000 a year, you entitled twat
But it is easily provable with basic math that living beneath your means and steadily investing long term can result in a very comfortable, and sometimes early, retirement.
It’s incredibly sad that if you’re not filthy rich, you have to dedicate your life to living “beneath your means”, being incredibly frugal, giving up the chance to have experiences because you must save money, working yourself to death all to have somewhere decent to die in the last few years of your life. Not sure what your point was.
