While I think there are limits to how much money anybody can reasonably spend, if someone works hard and makes money legally and ethically by virtue of their efforts then that’s their own business. It’s different of course if they made their money through crime or exploitation, and it’s easy to think of examples, but that isn’t the case for most people.
Also, if people perceive inequity then the answer is progressive taxation and other forms of financial remuneration to the state which can be dispersed as they see fit. If billionaires were hit with super taxes then they’d still be billionaires but it would pay for services that would raise the quality of life for everyone else.
No one can do a billion dollars worth of labor in a human lifetime. The only way to get a billion dollars is to exploit the labor of many, many others.
Define “exploit”. If I give you a job at a competitive rate and you do the thing and you are financially compensated and enjoy a decent standard of living then where is the exploitation?
The exploitation comes from justifying taking the value created by another person’s labor through ownership of the tools they used.
I would argue that it’s difficult to attain that level of wealth ( hundreds of millions and/or billions) without someone being exploited.
Most commonly this is in the form of underpaying workers, essentially stealing their wages to bolster your own. This is incredibly common for any business owner, majority shareholder or CEO.
I would also remark that it’s especially common in tech. Where the only way to get any reasonable increase in salary is to change to a new job. Raises are basically non-existent in tech. They happen, but are frequently far below what should be given. The only “reasonable” raises I’ve ever seen were from Union positions, and tech jobs are notoriously non-Union.
There are a few big issues with that statement. First, Capitalism itself is exploitative, as ownership creates no Value yet entitles the Capitalist to all of the power. It is the case for all bourgeoisie.
Secondly, progressive taxation is a fantastic first start, but is absolutely not the solution, even with state reimbursement. The state is owned and run by the bourgeoisie, and as such they will pay as little as they can. It is only through revolutionary pressure, such as via vast grassroots movements like Unionization, that the bourgeoisie gives up any amount of power. Worse still, the exploitation of Capitalism remains!
The actual solution is replacing Capitalism with collective ownership of the Means of Production. True, Democratic control. This eliminates exploitation and creates more equitable outcomes, levels the playing field, and results in true liberation of the Proletariat.
Thanks for the Marxism 101 lesson which has never been demonstrated once in practice. Capitalism can and does work. Plenty of countries have capitalism, democracy and social services.
Are you saying workers have never successfully shared ownership of the Means of Production? That’s false, there are numerous examples, even Worker Co-operatives are more stable with higher employee satisfaction than Capitalist companies. You could take that same exact argument and use it against Capitalism in pre-revolution France and it would make just as much sense then as it does now.
Capitalism itself “works,” but it has numerous flaws that result in increasing disparity, enshittification, and exploitation. From the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, to the Boom/Bust cycle by which Capitalists acquire vast amounts of cheaper Capital, it certainly isn’t a good system.
They compare themselves to other billionaires, so they’ll never be happy
Bullshit like “the Forbes list” makes it worse because it publicly lists them in order.
Something as simple as only talking about how much they donate would make a huge change. They’ll gonna compete over something, might as well give them something helpful to do
Makes me think of that one odd trend the Romans did where nobles tried to impress other nobles by having an entourage of “Hired peasants” that would follow them so they could be given money.
For how backwards the Romans were, some parts of their culture were pretty forward
Yeah, it’s very common - even among non billionaires. You’ll regularly hear people who are making 4-5x the national median talk about how they’re barely making ends meet. It’s lifestyle creep and comparison with peers.
This is a great thought. It would be nice if our society wasn’t so caught up in how much money someone makes and talk more about how much they donate. Or discuss the the good work they have done by giving it back to the industry they serve. Whether it be in bonuses to the employees or research and development. The Forbes list is BS!
Yep, or just listing companies by median salary.
This shit isn’t complicated, it’s just what happens when capitalists run everything instead of sociologists.
American culture is obsessed with making as much money as possible, and the last forty years of 40 years of go-go reaganites running the show haven’t exactly worked out well for the average American.
The coke market has been doing well tho…
The billionaires don’t pay the salaries of the interviewers to ask hard hitting questions.
This is your reminder that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Take from that what you will.
He’s not the only one either. Oligarchs own nearly all of our news media. There are only a couple exceptions, and those are independent groups that are reliant on platforms like youtube.
Democracy Now! comes to mind. Great reporting.
In a Capitalist system Money Is Power and under Neoliberal Capitalism (which is all about the State removing itself from Regulating money, or in other words removing the Power From The Vote via the mechanisms of the State, controlled by representatives chosen via said vote, exercising almost no power, which, if you think about it, is against Democracy) Money is the greatest Power there is by a wide margin (even Fascism puts the State above Money, whilst Neoliberal Capitalism does the very opposite).
So these people hoard money because they live in a system were it gives them immense Power.
If you were a senator in 1789, you spoke for on average 39 000 people. If you are a senator today, you speak for 3 300 000 people.
I believe it’s mainly main character syndrome. Like when we play a game like GTA, you care more about your own stats, progress and wealth, and maybe that of other players, but couldn’t care less about most of the NPCs, and that gameplay dynamic seems attractive to most people.
Another way to look at it is the higher up on the perch you are, the more everyone else looks like ants. You probably won’t intentionally leave some sugar for the ants, but if they get a few you don’t mind.
As for the richest of the richest of the rich, they need to stay influential for various evil reasons.
The fact that people perceive the billionaires to be the problem — and not the society, and in particular the government which allowed that to happen in the first place — is, in my view, not a good starting point to effect change.
The state is of, for, and by the bourgeoisie. The fact that a bourgeois state continued to allow the gross swelling of the bourgeoisie does not itself make the state the source of the problem. The state is a symptom of the disease.
The state isn’t simply an instrument of evil by evil people. It’s a tool. Since people act in their own interests, those who can abuse the system to gain outsized influence over it control the tools, and wield them in their own favor.
They are hoarding money, not because they need it, or even because they just want more.
I am convinced by now that the reason they are hoarding wealth is to keep it away from you.
Billionaires don’t want you to have money because then you’ll be competition.
It’s just another example of boomers pulling the latter up with them.
Not even. Billionaires don’t want you to have money because if you did you’d have bargaining power and the ability to turn down jobs you don’t like, well, you’d turn down jobs you didn’t like. Or at least work fewer hours.
So long as you need some sort of job, you’ll do some work for them or those who work for them (essentially supporting their structure) rather than for others in your community for that sake (ie: earning less money to do a job you relate to more, which I think a lot of us would naturally do instead of working for corporations).
So long as someone is having trouble paying rent, they’ll do jobs they otherwise would have considered degrading or unconscionable.
So long as someone is stuck in the street without a home or job and hardly able to get food, and we see him, we’ll work twice as hard to make sure we don’t end up like that.
This is why they don’t give us money. Material need is a lever of control, that keeps their power intact.
You’ve always had that. You’ve convinced yourself otherwise, see this all the time.
Always had what? Being poor? Thanks
Now there’s that sense of helplessness I was talking about
The thing is, even if someone that’s super Ritch stops making more money, it doesn’t mean you will make more. You have to work for your money regardless and you have to have the same mentality as someone who is Ritch to have a “decent life”. Ritch people need poor people the way way you’d need employees if you have a small company.
Capitalists do not actually have to work to make money, that’s kind of the point.
In the end it’s about a feeling of fairness in society. A certain amount of inequality is probably beneficial as a motivator. But we are getting into territories where wealth is most likely to be acquired by inheritance rather than saving your income, this has to do with the economical and demographical growth rates as well as the typically higher yields already owned capital provides (and secondary the fact that bigger capital stocks tend to have bigger relative yields than smaller ones).
Again, some of this may be desirable, the level of inequality and the fact that this process is not going to slow down soon, means that a growing portion of the population is going to feel that they are treated unfairly.
As a fun thought experiment – to get £1bn someone would have to give you £1 per second EVERY SECOND for 32 years.
No one needs that much money. And anyone who says they do, or anyone who defends someone who does, really needs to adjust their point of view.
Who in this world has a billion in cash?
That… wasn’t exactly my point.
My point was more that people think £1bn is not that much more than £1m. That billionaires aren’t “all that rich”
I was trying to illustrate that one billion of anything is far more than you think it is.
If you met 100 people an hour, every hour, for every day it would take you one thousand, one hundred and forty one years to meet one billion people.
And yet people say “Eh – people shouldn’t persecute billionaires. They deserve that much”
My point is no.
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Extemely relevant:
Alright, no offense, but that has to be the least useful visualization of a billion I’ve ever come across. I already have to do the math every time I want to calculate how many minutes there are in a day and you want to use the number of seconds in 32 years as a reference?
“If you put it all in one dollar bills it would weigh ten tons”. There. Fixed. You immediately picture it now.
In pound coins it’d be 8750 tons, which is not quite as intuitive, but it’s a lot heavier, so it still has an impact, I suppose. That’s about as heavy as a small battleship, if that helps.You gonna sit here with a straight face and say you can visualize 10 tons of bills?
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What, you don’t have so much money that weighing it makes more sense than counting it?
“I’m so smrt I can vishulize money, ur ‘long time’ metafur is so dum I’m unable to even think bout it”
Imagine being so bent out of shape by an easily-grasped metaphor you go out of your way to tell the person they’re an idiot and make up a less-easily visualized metaphor to prove how easy it is. It’s literally “this is a long time, you have experienced time and know 32 years is a lot” vs “you need to know the general weight of a bill/stack of bills in order to know how many would be required for a certain tonnage”
I am super bent out of shape here. In pretzels, I am. There was a shape, and now there’s none. I am shapeless.
You though? A beacon of composure. Keep at it, you’re doing great.
I think the seconds analogy hits harder. Especially comparing 1 million to 1 billion (11.6 days vs. 32 years).
Your 10 tons doesn’t do much for me. A few F250s? A dump truck or two? Maybe do the comparison to a million idk.
But your comment came off pretty arrogant and condescending (“There. Fixed it. You immediately picture it now.” Not really man.)
Regardless the way people picture and grasp large numbers is certainly Subjective. The seconds analogy hits harder for me.
Well, that’s ten metric tons, so by way of removing three zeroes a million is ten kilos. The metric system wins again.
It also helps a lot in grasping why billions are a deceiving quantity, because increasing orders of magnitude gets weird. It’s just that the other units are a bit small so they paint a worse picture.
But still, how in the world does one not have an intuition for ten tons but goes to a specific pickup truck as a more relatable quantity? Is this why Americans keep measuring things in cups and football fields? I mean, if seconds work better for you that’s great, but… F250s? Seriously?
What’s your mental picture of 10 tons?
And how in the world does someone not have an intuition for time? How do you get to your apparently very heavy duty job on time?
It’s not an intuition for time, it’s an intuition for a cumulative quantity over time that’s the problem. I know 32 years is a lot. I don’t know if a thing a second for 32 years is a lot. If you gave me a thing a second for seven years or a bunch of stuff now I would need to whip out a calculator to figure out if it’s a good deal.
As for tons, well, you get that a ton is heavy, A car is a ton-ish, you probably know that. And one order of magnitude is still intuitive. Ten tons is ten of a heavy thing. You see ten ton things that say “ten tons” on them in real life. Trucks, cranes, that type of stuff. And it’s an absolute quantity, not a flow, so… you know, ten tons. If you use kilos like a normal person you also know how many of you ten tons is, because you know a 100 kilo person is a heavy person and you know how far from that you are. Again, the wonders of the metric system. I can tell you ten big people or twenty small people are a ton, so a hundred big people or two hundred small people are ten tons. I know what that looks like.
Anyway, at this point this conversation is fascinating mostly because it’s showing me that losing the scale intuition from the metric system makes you intuitively parse things in Ford pickups, and that’s more interesting than any of the possible ways to make people figure out the difference between a single digit multiplier and orders of magnitude.
“I don’t know if a thing a second is a lot”
So you’re just an idiot who has no grasp of how time works and your coping by saying “metric system”
There’s no metric time system. Everyone in the west uses the same clock. If I give you a brick every second of the day from sunrise until night, will you have a lot of bricks or just a few? That’s all you need to know for this analogy to work.
And regardless of if you use the metric or American system, most people don’t have a good grasp of the weight of big things. You don’t either. You say a car is about 1 ton, the average car is closer to 2 metric tons. Now your mental picture is only half accurate.
Your crane example is even more hilarious. Cranes are rated by how much they can lift, not how much they themselves weigh. A 10 ton crane , by necessity of how gravity works, weighs a lot more than 10 tons, but it can lift a stack of steel beams that weighs 10 tons. Also, how many cranes do you see every day that are rated for 10 tons? Do you work on large construction projects?
As for the groups of people, let’s play that out. I’ll just agree that I know what a group of roughly one hundred people looks like because this reply is already getting long. Now if I show you a group of pallets that are stacked with money that is the same mass as the group of people, how much money is that, how big are the stacks of cash? Do you know what 1 ton of cash looks like? Let alone 10?
I always think the difference between a million and a billion the same as a decent vacation and a literal generation.
3 Cybertrucks
I simply picture a typical ten-ton object that has a similar density to dollar bills (just pick one among the many that you likely have nearby) and then imagine that it is itself made of dollar bills, and voila: An intuitive understanding of the nature of wealth.
No individual should have a… um… typical ten ton object made up of dollar bills, I guess. That seems like too many dollar bills.
Wait, I wrote “one dollar bills”? Sorry, ten tons is in hundred dollar bills.
In one dollar bills it’s a thousand tons, which has the same problem as the coins. Harder to visualize. I could update it, but at this point the correction is more interesting anyway.
It’s telling that nobody immediately noticed. Brains are squishy and don’t like counting too high. Or too small. The giveaway here should have been “wait, a coin is 875 times heavier than a bank note?”
And yet, not even I noticed, and I looked it up in the first place. Dumb squishy brains
Squishy indeed. Big numbers are hard.
This guy used rice to visualize the difference between one million and one billion and I thought it was pretty effective.
The fun part about that one is that Bezos himself is now reported at about one third more than reported in that video, so… that pile is too small now.
But also, if you’re gonna use visual aids that’s cheating.
If anyone ever wanted evidence that humans are too stupid to survive 1000 more years, they should read your comments.
Yeah, I think I’m exposing your stupidy pretty effectively, right? I’m killing it with the visualizations today.
“hey I agree with your point entirely but you’re fucking stupid. This other completely subjective way of saying your point is infinitely better even though it’s incredibly easy to find issues with! I’m way better at communicating than you, despite the fact that it takes two seconds to find and point out the flaws in my communication”
“I agree with your point entirely but you’re fucking stupid” is the best thing anybody has ever said to me. I’m making that into a t-shirt. A bumper sticker. I’m screenshotting that and using it as a wallpaper on my phone.
Volumetric comparisons end up grossly underrepresenting how much a billion really is. Human brain doesn’t really grasp the magnitude of a difference between a cubic centimeter and a cubic meter.
What we can immediately grasp is a difference between walking across a small parking lot and driving for a bloody hour.
In pound coins it’d be 8750 tons
Everyone knows it would be 1 billion pounds or 500,000 tons. /s
one of the goated baits of all time
That didn’t really hit me until I realized it’s £3600 per hour. That’s my monthly salary.
To hit that 32 year time line you would be getting that 3600 an hour, but you would be working 24 hours a day every day.
If you did 8 hours a day mon-fri at that rate you would earn 576,000 a month.
To get your 1bn at that pace you would have to work for 144 years.
86400 per year… i mean PER DAY
Wealth is not money.
Money is a subset of wealth
Mmm, no.
It’s not about the money.
20yrs ago, I made about a fifth of what I make today. I couldn’t buy all the things I wanted, but we were safe and paid our bills without a lot of stress. Today, I have a little more flexibility, but it doesn’t feel all that different.
I will assume that “lifestyle inflation” scales up, maybe it scales up a lot. But beyond some point, wealth becomes meaningless and the marginal dollar means nothing. Why keep hustling past that point? What drives people like that? Inertia? Lust for power? Competition with peers? Hard to say I guess but, something is driving them.
I also realize I suffer from lifestyle inflation, but …… the reason I don’t feel well off compared to my previous self is I’m still just a few paychecks from losing it all. If I lost my job, I lose it. I’ll have to cut way back, struggle to keep house and car, and will be anxious until I get another job.
I’ve read that feeling well off is having enough savings so you don’t need to worry about keeping your lifestyle in case anything happens. I don’t
Warren Buffet is a great example for this question because he does live modestly for one of the richest people in the world. If he lost his job/company, he could still support his lifestyle and obligations well beyond his life expectancy. So yeah, what is his motivation?
Being a multi millionaire in no where close to having enough money to do what you want when no regard. It’s enough to keep you comfortable until you die.
“It’s not enough to simply succeed. Your success must also contribute to the active failure of everyone else.”
Meritocracy at its peak
You know meritocracy is now a myth right ?
Always was.
You would never be hired to work for any of the media outlets that interview billionaires. Manufactured consent and aspirational capitalism is what media is for.
