>"People who don't look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn't get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don't look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?"
And my answer to that question would be, arguably yes. Why? Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige. The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that it's not at all about meritocracy, it's that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.
The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fiction, but that they're intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous in ways that anyone else just can't understand.
Old money might have ignored you and thrown a party, but Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison.
C.S Lewis:
"“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Alas, no mortgage agency would loan for this property, there was no central heating system, and the roof was suboptimal. Only people that had $200k at hand could possibly consider it. And off course a cash offer came from a rich family who lived there for a week, did some renovations and sold it again for more then double the price, more then anything that a normal family could afford, even with a mortgage.
Things are bad indeed.
You can still have that. All you need is a real estate tax. But nobody wants that. People don't want cheaper homes, they want to become part of the home-owner elite and get their own appreciating asset.
For me housing is the least thing i want to worry about, so i gladly rent and simply can fix any problems by calling my landlord who is by law obliged to keep the house in a liveable condition.
Also flexibility, i can move whenever i want without worrying about the value of my house (which in reality likely only looses value)
US cities like LA, SF, NYC have been very expensive for a long time.
The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, had Jewish backgrounds but consider themselves non-religious. Facebook founder Zuckerberg had Jewish background and considered himself atheist at some point. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is Catholic. Paul Allen had Jewish parents. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was raised Catholic. Apple founder Steve Job's closest religious interest seems to have been Buddhism. Steve Wozniak describes himself as atheist.
So we don't find a single Protestant, certainly not a Protestant fundamentalist, among any of the founders of the 5 largest tech companies.
If you prefer the literal, think "Ayn Randian / Objectivist zealotry".
Corruption is an incredible poverty multiplier, combined with debauched and half-useless is just insane. Living in a society led by such people isn't fair by any means.
Arrogant new wealth is 100x better then old corrupt wealth that only seeks to entrench itself and friends.
New wealth in proper democracies at least has a proven track record of competency and general societal good, it can also do a lot of good when spent (see Bill Gates)
If you are all worried about wealth, just put 99% estate tax, will cover both old and new wealth.
Personally, I think these good ole nonprofit boys; Billy, Zuck, Warren, etc. are tax dodgers.
Obama wanted to reform nonprofit regulations, but chickened out.
That’s the story of the Titanic, sunk in 1913.
getting murdered vs getting aggressive cancer
Source please.
> it's that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.
Allow me to offer a different view. If you're one of the lucky few who went from nothing to millions (or even billions) you'd be pissed if society came and started talking about responsibility and equality _now_. Where was society _before_?
And that, I think, is the crux of the issue - society feels responsible for your successes but not for your failures. If you went from nothing to riches - society feels like you owe it some. But if you went from squarely middle class to being a drug addict on the streets then the fault is yours alone. Society will of course try to help you, but it will never consider the idea that maybe, just maybe, it is responsible for what happened to you.
The ultra-rich nowadays physically isolate themselves from the working class and generally have security forces and bodyguards to further ensure their separation.
- Quoting your comment: "The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that..."
- Quoting a line from the article: "His seemingly impartial and logical writing attempts to hide his true intentions."
- Denounce critics of happiness industry.
- Play-down the idea of minimum support framework. In general, play down community and governmental support infrastructure in favour of individual's agency.
- The current crop of rich people, by and large, earned it and their way of earning wealth is objectively better than earlier ones. So they not only deserve that wealth but also deserve the way it's been accumulated.
- In today's world anyone can be rich and so if you aren't rich then it's your problem.
- Tech will eat the world. Journalists who couldn't foresee Amazon and its ilk's rise are idiots who don't understand exponential curve.
I have dramatised the theme but it's not far off.
I won't judge if any of these are right or not because at the end of the day they are all opinions and he's entitled to have them based on his world view. Someone with a different world view and experience (such as me, for instance) will not agree with them and that's OK.
That said, based on the pattern above it's easy to see how can one assign intent to PG's posts.
I think they understand noblesse oblige. But it's a 2-way street. Don't expect them to feel a sense of obligation if you're going to assume the worst about them just because they are rich.
The rich donate because they are protecting their reputation and for the sake of their own self image (everybody needs to be the hero of their own story).
The only ones who can manage that and not be charitable are the utterly self deluded (e.g. Trump).
Don't expect them to donate a damn thing if they are lauded as heroes. Bill Gates likely wouldn't be giving his money away at all if it he didn't feel the need to repair his image in the 2000s.
Same reason all of the robber Barrons were philanthropists - do you think they would have been more charitable if they had been cheered on instead of villainized? Like hell they would.
This is nothing new either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation
[1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/executive-imperialism-the-myt...
(And the paper) https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/28722/bk0003v1h0r/
This is in stark contrast to the Organs operating the prisons during the Soviet era who would never submit themselves to torture to understand the plight of the prisoners they sentenced.
Anyway, just a fun anecdote, clearly noblesse oblige wasn't enough to stop the people from revolting in several cases.
Is there actual data to back this up? That 'old money' behaves in a more positive society-impacting way than 'new money'?
Who are you talking about when you say "this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sense of responsibility"?
If you believe that your wealth is entirely, or almost entirely, through sheer force of your own will, skills, and abilities, you have no responsibility to anyone with regard to that wealth. You earned it all without anyone's help. It's all yours. They can pound sand.
If you believe that your wealth is in part due to factors outside of your control - having connected family, having family money, attending good schools, lucky breaks early in your career, etc. - you're much more likely to feel a sense of responsibility toward the next generation. To give other people lucky breaks, maybe even ones less deserving than you were. To set up scholarship funds so other kids can attend good schools they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Edit to add: People in group 2 don't feel they "deserve" it any less. They still earned it. It's still theirs. They just understand the difference between being born on third base and hitting a triple. The run still counts at the end of the day.
Sounds like it was written by someone who didn't grow up around "old money".
There's plenty of statistical literature on this myth.
Okay, I'm attacking the C.S. Lewis quote and not your main point, which is interesting, although I'm not exactly sure who is trying to remake me in their image and what that would even mean.
Not to mention that "curing the ills of society" in the worst way imaginable (eugenics) was pretty in-vogue with early 20th century "old money".
Michael Young wrote this two decades ago now:
The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.
They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.
We're still near the beginning of the internet revolution. We're in the era where the inventors of things can get rich through their own talents. In every other industry that has undergone a technological leap forwards the same thing has happened until other people have bought up their talent and ideas and the inventors no longer make the big money. Just look at agriculture, manufacturing, publishing, news, automotive, aerospace, computing... They all saw the same cycle. The internet won't be different.
Old money wants subjects, new money wants worshippers.
Interesting observation. I recently learned from a Fresh Air interview with Heather McGhee about Hinton Rowan Helper, a white racist Southerner abolitionist. He wrote a book analyzing the way chattel slavery harmed working-class whites and white society, the essential dynamic being:
the wealth of the plantation class did not depend on the labor of the white working class, nor their ability to buy product from the plantation class (cotton and tobacco were shipped north and globally); as a result the plantation (ruling) class had no incentive to invest in society; Helper quantified this by looking at number of libraries, schools, etc. in the North vs the deep South.
Obviously I don't want to claim the horrors of slavery are comparable to the effects of tech companies on the economy... but I wonder if the same _essential dynamic_ is there:
- wealth equating to political power
- an industry driven to remove any reliance on an educated populous or satisfied workforce (through automation, and the secondary effects of automation as in the way Uber etc. offloads risk onto drivers/society)
- an industry for whom the populous are not customers but "the product"
> Because at least old money understands the concept of noblesse oblige.
Someone getting rich in 1982 isn't old money(!).
There is nothing except some kind of rose-tinted glasses to indicate that the rich in any era were particularly responsible in their use of wealth.
To be clear, you are comparing the mindset of new money to the pious protestants who held overwhelming sway over US society for almost two centuries? Just who do you think the old money is?
You out of your mind? What could possibly make you say "they knew it"? The amount of people rich-by-inheritance who are selling their bootstraps stories is stupidly high, and a lot of them believe it. One famous example got banned from twitter a couple months ago.
You can just count in your city how many buildings, libraries, concert halls and similar have been built by the rich of old, and how many by the rich of new.
Maybe the new rich give to ONGs instead, but ONGs can be seen as just another institution to exert power, influence markets, and buy people by giving them a position in ONGs where you invest heavily. On the other side infrastructure is infrastructure, yes, it makes you look good, but you have to build something real and solid that is easy to evaluate.
> This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fiction
It's not a fiction that entrepreneurs earned their money themselves. It's more complicated than that but it's not fiction. Most entrepreneurs fail, the ones who get rich usually do something innovative.
It is a fiction that entrepreneurs are "intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous" but, again, who really thinks of themselves that way, Paul Graham-style entrepreneurs or the lefties who insist that they are motivated purely by "justice" but are clearly at least partly motivated by resentment?
There are good arguments for left-wing policies. But the left today is culturally ascendant and many of its most popular arguments are petty vindictiveness (like, for example, that rich people didn't innovate in order to get rich -- most of them did!).
My god, so many people misunderstood you, and took this thing in the literal sense. HN is worse that I imagined.
>Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison
Tech became a global catalyst for many people to get out of poverty. A lot of people in countries like India, Nigeria or Ukraine would never had a chance to get out of poverty otherwise. I do not observe any increase in the sentiment in them remaking people in their own images. Half a century ago Ayn Rand was getting enough followers well before tech was even a thing.
The quote that you have provided reminds me of the zealotry of communist regime that my country went through. As well as the arguments of the woke marxists that are sadly getting more frequent today.
Anyway, thank you for an interesting take on the problem.
But never mind, it is hating on rich people, so it is always OK, right?
