1y ago

How rich people get rich

86 comments

I agree fully, but I do want to know what the original image said before "birth lottery" was edited in
- Looks like inherited is the original, but I also seen another one with "Luck"
  
  Luck is the most generically accurate, but ultimately it does come down to birth lottery, as someone can just be born poor and disabled and no amount of post-birth luck is going to fix that.
- I'm not rich. But I was born poor and am no longer poor. The Birth Lottery blessed me with a brain, and with that as my only asset, I learned esoteric skills which I can parley into a niche career.
  But more importantly, the social safety net in my country allowed me to get an education without becoming a wage slave for the rest of my life. Without that, I couldn't have pulled this escape from poverty off.
  I now run my own business. We have no employees -- only owners who have self-invested. Our business is growing and I anticipate a comfortable retirement. Haven't got rich off the working class either.
  So, thank you Canada for the opportunities. I've tried to make the most of them.
  
  So can you answer his question or did you just see an opportunity to brag about yourself.
  
  So the birth lottery of being born in Canada rather than Syria, then?
  
  How do you run a business without employees? What kind of business is that? Just because you call someone a self-invested owner doesn't mean they aren't an employee. The only types of businesses I've heard of like this are Mary Kay and AmWay (there may be others I don't know). Basically a sales ponzi scheme where you are the wholesaler for a distributor and the "self-invested owner" bought their products from you instead of directly from the wholesaler.
  I do agree with your stance on the state of education today but not in the same way. Some people party all through school and live off loans while others work during school to avoid loans. For every 1 person that takes the opportunity seriously and busts their ass to make something of themselves, there are 9 people who don't deserve the free pass. Making it free for everyone costs too much for those who have to pay for those 9.

Capitalism just has a feedback loop bug. In capitalism, resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So you get more capital for having more capital. In any business, who gets the most money that business generates? Whoever had the most money to buy into it. No work, no expertise is involved in the equation.
- See: Monopoly the game.
  The winner is declared in the first 10 turns and it's all downhill from there.
  
  You might or might not be referring to the fact that Monopoly was originally made to showcase exactly that; the impossibility of living under such a system.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game
  That's the original title.
- "Yeah, we got a 10-94 here, an Internet user has gotten too wise, send in the economics squad"

Or Luck/right place right time.
Ground floor entry on Bitcoin, Tesla, Amazon, whatever gave mad returns
- To be completely fair that's not pure luck. Those people took risks, why don't you invest in new startups? Because it's risky.
  But yes out of the people brave enough to invest, it's mostly luck they picked the right startup
  
  They took a risk and millions took risks in millions of other stocks and failed. So yea it's luck.
  
  That's like the actual definition of gambling
  
  I like that downvoted comments are no longer hidden but Pareto would like to tell you the ratio is 80:20.
  4 in 5 people pick the wrong start-up and lose everything.
  The remainder are busy rationalizing their luck as skill.
  
  You're right. They also had to have had the resources to blow on a pipe dream that blew up by chance.
  So it's luck, privilege, and thrn more luck on top of if.
  
  Or they could be employed at those places and get stock as a benefit. My current job is that way. It is still risky to keep a lot of eggs in one basket, but it can pay off if your employer is a newer publicly traded company.

You can literally just make the entire second pie chart "exploiting the working class", because "birth lottery" is dependant on that.

Have enough resources available in your social network to keep making bets until you hit a 10x/100x

Slightly more accurate may be combining both birth lottery and merciless exploitation.
Since winning that lottery let's them be the people who can mercilessly exploit people, who then have children who won that lottery, etc.
- Isn't that what it says already? 50/50 bit of both?
  
  Oh, I read it as half the people won the birth lottery, the other half exploited people.
  As a 50/50 split for the person yeah that's what it would be
  Just how I read the images sorry :)

Good charts comparing why the "just world fallacy" is indeed a fallacy.

Be in the political system and trade on stocks you have insider information on.

Own something valuable and then borrow against that thing. Easiest example would be to own stock worth say a thousand dollars and borrow a hundred dollars from that stock value you get to keep the stock worth nine hundred dollars growing in value while you pay the one hundred dollar "debt" off. If you ever get to where you could not pay it for some reason, you could always take $100 and pay it off immediately. I've heard this referred to as the buy borrow strategy and some people to avoid taxes will use this perpetually and they call it the buy borrow die strategy. Selling an asset often involves extremely heavy extortion from gangs that we call governments, where borrowing from the value of that asset does not incur such an extortion penalty.
Edit: The most important part though is just to make more than you spend from whatever you do.
- Tbf, most tax authorities haven't been completely captured by billionaires and they recognise what your just described as a disguised remuneration package.
  
  It works even in the United States. If you sell a stock within a year of owning it, you get charged like 30% extortion. If you sell it after a year, you get charged your normal extortion rate. And if you borrow from it, you get charged zero extortion.

Tbf I feel like a lot of them work pretty hard at mercilessly exploiting the working class. Like, Space Karen has sent over 20,000 tweets? That's a lot of ~~work~~ tweets!

How rich people get rich: Assets.

I would also suggest “Daddy’s credit card”.
- So, birth lottery

brownie points for people in the intersection

I agree for the most part. I do know people who got rich by working hard, treating employees fairly and with empathy, and providing a useful service.
- Them they overcharged for the service

Spot on!

...and sitting on their asses watching stock value climb.

I hate to be that guy, but not always exactly this. I have relatives that were born dirt poor but are now rich. You can definitely say they exploited people to get that way but the birth lottery gave them nothing financially
- For every example like this there are a million examples of poor people staying poor.
  Social mobility is much less than we like to pretend it is.
- Not sure your point. Yes you can get rich ONLY exploiting the poor and don't need to be born rich.
  I guess the op should have made it more of a venn diagram.
  There are no innocent billionaires. They all trade human lives for profit every day.
  
  My point is that oversimplification and being incorrect matters.
- It gave them birth in a advanced nation and no disabilities
  
  Which many other people including myself had and yet I'm not rich
- The chart says that 50% get rich by exploitation and the other 50% by inheritance.
  Edit: NVM, Im dumb and misread the meme. Still I doubt they were litterally "dirt poor" so birth lottery still applies.
  
  For sure, never ever trust a wealthy person's origin story. Even trump and Musk claim to be self made.
  Much better to go with the evidence of our eyes and ears.
  
  You are dumb I agree. Because that's what it takes to make up stories about other people's lives to make yourself feel better.
  These were people that literally grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity for years, in a community where owning a car meant you were rich. They were sharecroppers so they owned nothing and slaved away to make rich people money.
  But sure they weren't dirt poor because some dickhead on the Internet wanted it to not be true so they could keep generalizing people different than them as all the same.

Le Lemmy moment

How original
- Yeah it's a bit derivative. Everyone already knows this and agrees with it. It's self evidently true. Nobody ever needs this explained to them, everyone already knows and agrees!
  
  In this community, yes

86 comments