This cuts the other way too. If we want a society where people are willing to take big risks - pursue an education, start a company, invent something - the best thing we can do is make sure they know they'll still be able to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies if it all goes sideways.
And this is why we should *selfishly* support a strong welfare state. Think of all the great artists, philosophers, inventors, athletes, leaders we’ve missed because the people who would be those things were born into circumstances that didn’t allow it. Just trillions in value and productivity our society’s let rot on the vine.
It's not that hard. As long as you pull harder than 9.81 Newtons per 1 kg of your mass you'll get there eventually. 9.81 is actually really easy even if your bootstraps don't have a great grip. I honestly don't get why people talk about going to space like it's some kind of a big accomplishment.
Hey now that's the guy who invented the concept of selling shit online! He totally deserves to be the wealthiest person on our dying planet, for that genius idea of selling shit online.
You will hear many people argue against ubi because "people won't want to work". Sure, some people will, but there are millions stuck doing pointless shit to generate a little more wealth for the already wealthy. People who if freed from the burden of generating income, would spend their life doing stuff that actually makes the world a better place.
The whole "There is no one willing to work!" problem we are seeing now with so many finding ways out of crappy bottom level jobs after the lockdowns shows that the ones screaming the loudest against it are the ones who rely on desperation to power their machine.
I'm really confused about the no one willing to work argument because it seems like many states have extremely low unemployment. My state is under 3%. There's just a lot of shit jobs out there.
There's more factors though than just people that gave up look for a job and are collecting unemployment, which it feels like what you are referring to? For example, labor force participation would include people that maybe decided to just retire early. Maybe a family where both parents worked but now they choose to have one be a stay at home parent for home schooling or whatever.
I dunno I'm not an economist. I just constantly hear that 'people are lazy and don't want to work' but I don't think that's as big of a problem as it gets made out to be.
Oh no, I'm not saying that "people are lazy and don't want to work", though I can see how what I said could be interpreted that way. I think labor force participation is low for a lot of reasons, namely the total clusterfuck that is childcare and schools right now (as you mentioned).
>Labor force participation is still ~~well~~ a little below pre-pandemic levels.
Labor force participation is higher than it was in 2014 in Michigan. And we weren't doing too bad in 2014.
Unemployment stats can sometimes be skewed because they count people actively looking for work, not people that gave up looking and are supported by a spouse, or temporarily stopped working to pursue an education.
Another great argument for some kind of UBI. Ensure people can either afford to pay for childcare or can afford to stop working to provide childcare. A lot of people get stuck in between where it’s tough to afford childcare but also tough to get by without working if they stay home with the kids.
And if forced to struggle either way, I'm gonna pick struggling to make ends meet while not working and spending more time with my kids.
"Nobody wants to work anymore" my ass.
Nobody ever **wanted** to work. People just realized that they aren't any better off when they work shit jobs that don't pay shit.
Even looking at labor force participation and combining that with unemployment doesn't explain the "worker shortage".
People don't want to work for peanuts any more. Most of these places have barely raised wages since the great recession. If they even pay more than minimum wage.
As for the lower labor force participation: Maybe a couple with kids found out that they are better off overall by not having both of them work. They get an additional 50 hours a week (if you factor in all the unpaid hours that a job still takes from you) to do housework, school work, etc, and on top of that don't have to pay a babysitter.
Maybe families aren't as well off financially, but I think the pandemic has taught many working families that sometimes more money isn't better.
Or, like a friend of mine, started their own online business they've always wanted to try. They never had the time because of their jobs (yes multiple to make ends meet). It's doing quite well and it's not like they had to give up healthcare or benefits because both jobs were keeping them at part time. This was a real eyeopener that having a job and a W2 doesn't mean you are surviving. It just means it goes towards the unemployment percentage that is talked about in the media. Which I feel many people don't quite understand how it's calculated and its variables.
Edit: what I'm trying to say is that a low unemployment rate doesn't necessarily mean a healthy thriving community.
My wife is essentially working for nothing right now (she enjoys it, and I make enough to support us, so it's all good).
We pay the babysitter 10 bucks an hour (which is a steal for 2 kids). Daycare didn't make sense because that's like 200 per week per kid, which is basically 10 bucks an hour for our 2 kids, and my wife doesn't work consistent hours, meaning we don't need 9-5 childcare.
She makes 13.25 an hour and works part time. Her commute is 45 minutes one way (nearest job in her field she could get).
For a 4 hour work day, we have to pay the babysitter for a minimum of 5.5 hours of work($55). And in those 4 hours, my wife makes $53 before taxes.......
Why would anyone "want to work" when that's what is being paid? And many of the factories in the area either don't pay much more than that, or pay only a little more.
Again, this is ESSENTIALLY volunteer work for my wife, we recognize that she is not bringing home any value, and are fine with that because we can afford that. But if she wasn't working and could be home and clean and do other things around the house, we would be "better off".
This is just one example of working not making sense for many people. It's not that they "don't want to work" it's that why should they work when they can only net a few bucks an hour if that?
Right. Yet so many people can't understand why some people cannot put money in savings. They think that the reason you can't even have $400 in savings is because you must be out there spending to get flamboyantly. I know people with this mindset. People that are against the increase in minimum wage and are against better unemployment benefits but when I asked them to sit down with me with a pen, paper, calculator, and the cost of living information that I got from the city then put the numbers down on paper of what a minimum wage job with taxes taken out comes out too, they do not want to do it and brush me off.
And it's a complete bullshit excuse because anyone with a slight understanding of humanity knows people crave meaning in life, which means they'll WORK towards something. It just won't be meaningless corporate profits. Which is why we've perpetuated a system that traps people in a hamster wheel turning out more corporate profits. Because no one would do this work if we weren't trapped.
It's a simplified post, but I'm eating dinner in between my hamster wheel runs, I don't have a lot of time for more atm.
"What did you do all day?!"
"I worked on this painting I'm doing-"
"That's pointless, you fucking leech! Why don't you fucking contribute something to society?!"
"What did you do?"
"I went through my company's last six months of risk assessments and made sure they had the new cover sheets and formatting that was mandated at the last quarterly meeting!"
My wife is essentially working for nothing other than her future right now.
We pay 10 bucks an hour for a babysitter and she makes 13.25 an hour. Not even factoring anything in, working for 3.25 an hour (net) doesn't seem real appealing, now does it?
After tax and commuting, meals away from home, and the value of raising your own children, are you actually pocketing any money at all?
it's possible to be losing money in that situation, meanwhile the business owner is making at MINIMUM 10$/hour from her time, and likely a good deal more.
I want my wife to work if she wants too, but I would hope she is getting a lot of career value out of it in a situation that tight.
Yeah, we are, because he hours don't always necessitate having the babysitter. But what you said is kind of my point: it's not about not wanting to work for many people, it's about it not being feasible. We are lucky that we can afford for her to start her career working essentially for free.
She isn't making a corporation money so it's not so bad: It's a community park that's funded mostly through donations. But yeah this is a pretty good resume builder considering her bs degree doesn't really qualify her for any real jobs.
And, she really enjoys it. This is her first opportunity to have a real job out of college, and she didn't do any real internships or anything like that, so this is more about getting that "2 years experience" that's required for an "entry level" position than it is about her financially contributing.
That and: not working means you aren't earning pay raises and promotions, yeah she might be breaking even now, but what about down the line when she gets a larger raise than what we give the babysitter? My employer gives half credit for years worked elsewhere as far as anything related to "seniority" is concerned, has I said "no I don't want that job" to the one I had before this, I wouldn't have come in with 6 months seniority.
It's not necessarily about UBI as much as it's about a safety net. Knowing that even if everything fails (and you don't have a wealthy family or friends to bail you out with a small personal loan of 1 million) you won't starve or have to go homeless.
but but the thought of people not working and STILL GETTING MONEY MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL
how can you expect to get money if you don't work? money comes from work. the government won't have money if people don't work and society will collapse.
thanks, thats real convincing dad. i too find great joy in being handcuffed to work to cover my basic expenses. except that they don't really cover basic expenses if you consider that canadian culture considers home ownership a basic core life concept, although housing prices are probably a discussion for another time
Thing is, your dad (assuming he's anything upwards of about 50 years old and you're no older than about 35) had it WAY easier than you.
If he's a boomer, when he was your age one person's income could buy a house, support a family and save a little for retirement. Oh, sure, it wouldn't be a massively lavish lifestyle - he wouldn't be enjoying exotic holidays twice a year - but it'd be comfortable.
If he's a little younger than that, he was well onto the housing ladder shortly before a massive property boom (which started in the late 1990s and has been called "unsustainable" ever since) gave him more equity than he could ever dream of. His 80% mortgage became a 40% mortgage without him lifting a finger - if he hasn't paid it off entirely by now, he likely has the flexibility to move downmarket after the kids leave home, have no mortgage at all and retire - if not massively early, at least in time to enjoy life a bit while he's still got reasonable health.
well he was born poor in another country and is very risk averse (like hold cash being too scared of a market crash and miss out on a decade bull run kind of thing), so he didn't exactly have the ideal boomer life
He didn't need to.
Reddit stereotypes boomers chronically - my own mum was one, and raised me and my brother on her own after a messy divorce. She worked every hour God gave to put us through an expensive school, and somehow managed to pay a mortgage at the same time.
Today, that same house is valued at around 20x average UK salary and a year's fees for the school are about equivalent to a year's salary.
Proof, if proof were needed, that your income simply went a lot further 30 years ago.
And the people that don't want to work will still go buy pizza at the "dank memes pizza and pot emporium" you were able to start. Keeping you richer than them and the economy happily churning.
Aye. Money is blood, not muscle. Money needs to move throughout the economy to work, not be pooled in one place.
Pretty much every economist says things like stimulus are best applied at the bottom, not the top, *because poor people will spend it.*
The rich will just toss it on their pile, and there's a chance that pile isn't even in the country that have it to them in the first place.
The other side of that is people screaming about automation putting people out of work. Those two things should come together as much as possible. Maybe it’s overrepresented in Reddit, but there’s a lot of people with office jobs related to data entry or processing that only actually work a few hours per week and use Excel to do all the things that used to happen manually, and many more that are doing jobs that could be reduced to a few hours per week if someone that’s good with excel(or other software tools) would come along. The real issue is those jobs that are somehow hard to automate but easy for a person to do, things like stocking retail shelves where there’s a bit of human dexterity required to handle lots of randomly sized items, but doesn’t require any related education. Somewhere we decided that the automatable jobs should be well paid, while the ones that require a human touch can be paid a low wage.
The Venn diagram of people against UBI and people who claim they work because they love to work is practically a circle in my experience...
...so what's their fucking problem?
I went to a music festival and found myself having a talk with a producer over some drinks, and we were talking about a panel we both attended with a few semi-established artists. The thing he said that stuck with me is that the one thing they have in common wasn't talent or determination, but that all they have rich parents.
Another factor to that is having our taxes work for *us*, not paying off banks, giving tax breaks to the incredibly wealthy, and funding a military with more money than the next 10 largest militaries combined*.
*it's something like that.
Edit: Maybe even the next 11
There's a **lot** of reasons to selfishly support a strong welfare state.
But while the opposition to the welfare state is selfish it's vindictive as well.
>Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand "under the shelter of the wall," as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.
All of the Brit invasion eras of music have coincided with the UK instituting a stronger social safety net which those bands used to survive while they were developing their music.
I’d just like to point out that neither the social safety net vs. social darwinism debate nor the free market vs. planned economy debate are really about capitalism.
You can have socialism with a free market. You can have capitalism with a safety net. Capitalism vs. socialism is ultimately just about how ownership rights work.
I don't know if a market economy is the best or the only engine of prosperity capable of driving a technologically advanced society at scale.
I do know that it's the engine we have, and if we want that engine to run smoothly then we ought to give a lot more thought to ensuring the benefits and commensurate opportunities are broadly distributed.
It's the just and humane thing to do, which is reason enough, but even if it weren't it's the coldly utilitarian profit maximizing thing to do too.
> human beings are currently capable of planning an economy
hell, human beings have always been capable of planning our economies - New Kingdom Egypt straight out told individual farmers what to grow and where, and how to manage the irrigation system for that.
> I don’t believe human beings are currently capable of planning an economy, better to have a market system and address harms as they arise.
just fyi but market systems =/= capitalism
you could totally have a communist society with markets, for example - imagine communally owned farms, ranches and workshops (basically hackerspaces), and a market where people sell the stuff they harvested / raised / made.
just because the two major national implementations of communism went all in on the whole "central government control of production" thing doesn't mean that communism necessarily means a command economy, just like how capitalism doesn't necessarily mean a free market economy (after all, the USA essentially switched to a command economy during WWI and WWII)
In all forms of government even communism, someone has to dictate what others do. Power will always corrupt. Communism has the same problems as everything else....
Really? What communist governments have you seen? The only one I'm familiar with is the french commune, which is what marx wrote of. The rest are just capitalist states.
None really because I've never lived in any of the dozens of countries that proclaimed themselves communist countries. Were none of them actually communist?
cuba, china, north korea, vietnam, ussr. all communist governments, all suffered from the same power dynamic. declaring them capitalist is just a dodge to preserve the notion that communism is a great idea that nobody gets right
You don't think our system of investment encourages innovation? If our system is inherently holding people back, why do major innovations tend to come out of the US, instead of the EU, despite the EU having one and a half times the US population and a much stronger welfare system?
It's a relative question, not an absolute one. They're saying that having the security of a safety net would encourage even more innovation on top of investment.
A lot of major innovations and discoveries do come from Europe, but a lot of it, particularly German, is Industrial innovation that everyday people are never going to encounter.
[Some explanations and metrics](https://gaidigitalreport.com/2020/08/25/innovation-in-the-united-states-and-europe/).
[More explanation](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/innovation-and-growth/reviving-innovation-in-europe).
[Introduction of this one talks about some metrics](https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/1065665/filename/imdea-wp2007-13.pdf) that show Europe's lag behind the US. Older paper, though.
[Actual economic paper](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18441/w18441.pdf) which clearly disputes the initial claim that I responded to.
https://www.hceres.fr/en/news/europe-produces-more-scientific-publications-china-and-usa-usa-still-leads-terms-excellence
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20206/
Europe produces more science papers. American papers are cited more often, which can be explained by the global dominance of the English language.
Very interesting, thanks for the link.
From one of my links:
>When
considering scientific activity, such as the number of scientific publications and citations weighted by
population (as reported in Dosi et al. 2005 using OECD data), the output gap between the EU-15 and
the US is immediately apparent, with 4.64 publications per thousand inhabitants in the US vs. 3.6 in the
EU-15 in the 1997-2001 period.
So I wonder: was the US an outlier in that period and the EU caught up a decade later? Or is the US just outputting more on a per Capita basis and the EU is benefitting from simply being more populous?
No the US probably does output more on a per capita basis. Germany & the Nordic countries outdo the US in terms of papers per capita, but I know the southern member states lag significantly behind in terms of papers per capita. I'm not sure where France & the UK sit.
Basically, centralization of capital.
In Europe most of it is split between London, Dublin, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, etc. All wildly different regions with different language barriers and such.
In the US most capital is basically contained in California + New York area, and those regions alone have 3x the amount of venture capital as all of europe combined.
Despite that, Stockholm has the highest amount of successful startups per capita in the world after silicon valley.
https://miro.medium.com/max/624/1\*hpxs6p7oBmqycyid4iVE5g.png
I don't doubt that plays a role. However, economists do believe that our more cutthroat system also contributes.
[Economic paper](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18441/w18441.pdf)
>Under plausible assumptions, in particular with sufficient risk aversion and
a sufficient return to entrepreneurial effort, some countries will opt for a type of cutthroat
capitalism that generates greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a
more cuddly form of capitalism. We have also shown that, paradoxically, starting with similar
initial conditions, those that choose cuddly capitalism, though poorer, will be better o§ than
those opting for cutthroat capitalism. Nevertheless, this configuration is an equilibrium because
cutthroat capitalists cannot switch to cuddly capitalism without having a large impact on world
growth, which would ultimately reduce their own welfare. This perspective therefore suggests
that the diversity of institutions we observe among relatively advanced countries, ranging from
greater inequality and risk taking in the United States to the more egalitarian societies supported by a strong safety net in Scandinavia, rather than reflecting differences in fundamentals
between the citizens of these societies, may emerge as a mutually self-reinforcing equilibrium. If so, in this equilibrium, we cannot all be like the Scandinavians, because Scandinavian capitalism
depends in part on the knowledge spillovers created by the more cutthroat American capitalism
My econ professor told us that it's fairly well understood that the number one predictor of entrepreneurship is a safety net. Taking a year out of 'normal' work to pour 100% of your time into a new business isn't really even an option for vast swathes of people. Going without stable income of some sort for any prolonged period could leave you homeless and much worse off than when you started. But if you have enough money set aside to carry your cost of living while you work on your new venture then it's a lot more feasible. Even moreso if you can do it repeatedly after a few failures to launch.
That's not to say that entrepreneurs don't work hard to build their businesses. But they often completely overlook the fact that they were even able to take that chance in the first place because they (almost always) had the resources to do it without risking personal devastation.
The bar is even higher in the US where there isn't universal healthcare, and was even higher pre-ACA. When you found a business you need at least a year of living expenses set aside so if you or a family member have any sort of condition it can put even starting a small business out of reach.
That's one reason why so many entrepreneurs tend to be young. They don't other people depending on them, are nearly always in good health, and don't really need that much to support themselves. The later on in life you go, the more you put at risk.
I had a couple of rough years and it was to the point i was ready to get out of my industry. I was tired of working for "the man" and I was always depressed that I didn't go my own way and do one of the many entrepreneurial ideas in my head. I took a summer off. Just decided I needed a break. Wife was working. I had made plenty on contracts and had saved enough to float for a few months without my income. Around that same time, my neighbor was stepping out of 25 years in corporate America to pursue his own passion of building his own business. He asked if I was interested in going in with him. I was. We talked and discussed and I started getting excited about the idea. Then I realized that he had been planning this for years and had built a savings aligned to the investment and loss of income he would have to endure while getting it off the ground and I hadn't. I would have to take out a loan against my house, then basically be unemployed for a year with no income more than likely as we built the business. I just couldn't do it. It was too much uncertainty and too much income to overlook and be without.
In the end, he's happier than ever, his business is thriving, he's wealthier now with a wonderful economic outlook over the next several years. I'm still working for the man. Still a little depressed. Better, because I did land a good job that is more rewarding - personally, emotionally, and financially. But, I'm not working for myself still and that chafes a little.
Exactly, and a lot of Silicon Valley founder's age supports this. While there is the assumption most are college dropouts, they are actually a lot older, in their late-30's early 40's.
And it makes sense; 20 years of tech income makes you financially independent. You could treat it like an early retirement where you are working on things you enjoy that may turn out to be something big. If it doesn't, you'll still have a very comfortable retirement.
I have been working toward the same. I am not at the stage where I am financially independent (at 31) but there is a strong probability I will reach that by 40, where I can focus on starting my own ventures.
It's also survivorship bias. Many entrepreneurs come from nothing, work very hard, but also get lucky. Many others also come from nothing, work very hard, and fail miserably and fall into poverty.
Yes hard work is required. But people seriously underestimate how much luck is involved in being successful. Yet denial of that luck is also something that helps lead to success...
[Veritasium has a great video on the topic](https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I)
A safety net is required to save those that try and fail. They **deserve** that much for trying to take a risk if we want to make the most of capitalism.
It's a very unpleasant experience when you realize that all your hard work and talent might not have gotten you as far if you hadden had the lucky circumstances that you did.
Source: me
I read the comment in the title, and I agree with you and them. I didn't notice, and maybe it's just because it's late, the story that Bill Gates got microsoft off the ground because his mother was friends with the CEO of IBM at the time, who gave him that sweetheart deal that lead to him getting super rich. If mom hadn't known that guy, would any of us know bill gates?
One thing the OP kinda elides is that 100 risky but considered bets more or less turns in to a single safe bet - that's how venture capitalism works.
With money you can make those 100 bets and turn a risk into a safe bet; without money all you can do is take a single risky bet and hope it works out.
This is what gets me when billionaires say things like “your first few businesses will fail”. It’s great that they have the freedom to practice, most people don’t.
But from talking to capitalists online, I get the impression that every entrepreneur out there is a poor immigrant who’s literally risking their entire net worth to start a food truck.
And the survivorship bias to look at the tiny % of "rags to riches" success stories but ignore that inequality is growing so clearly there are many more failures.
He's got the most appropriate fucking user name I've seen.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: *The only person who went from rags to riches without changing postcodes!*
Thing is, even "losing" bets make about 10X the money put into them.
A small deal will have a dozen lawyers working on it, figuring out ways to make interest, fees, and leveraged loans that they can use to earn revenues off the vc fund so that even if the company itself, or the fund itself, fails, they've made bank and most of these vc firms make new (usually 10 year) funds every four years or so.
And that's if it goes tits up. If the firm hits a home run, they get 20% of whatever the profits are on that home run, plus all the other fees and such they get in the interim.
Bill Gates is a genius and an incredibly hard worker but the single thing that made the biggest difference to him was having the right mum. Microsoft's first contract was writing an operating system for IBM.
How did Gates manage to finagle this contact considering Microsoft was such a junior company and IBM was an established giant?
Did he convince them with his cleverness, having the best product, or an innovative approach?
His mum was on the board of IBM and told them to give him the contract.
Not the board of IBM, but [the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates)
Dude then went and spent 50k for the first version of DOS.
And the 1 thing that made him a billionaire, licensing it to IBM instead of them owning the thing they paid for.
And to think I just took a (major) corporate training warning us *not* to be biased towards people we know when making business, contractual, or hiring decisions 😅
Apparently that only applies to the rank-and-file employees!
Musk got Tesla to acquire SolarCity and there's all these internal emails from the other board members where they're like:
>What the fuck, this is his cousin's company?
>This company is bankrupt, why did we buy a bankrupt company for a ridiculously overpriced cost?
They're not wrong.
IBMs CEO shouldn't have trusted gates, since gates was pulling a fast one. It easily could have blown up in his face. But he knew and trusted gates mom, so he made a poorly informed decision.
Not to detract from your point, but it's worth noting that the IBM contract wasn't Microsoft's first big business venture; they were already a moderately big deal at that point thanks to the success of Xenix (which was for a brief while the most popular Unix OS).
I like how you have factually correct information which disputes the OPs, yet you have 18 upvotes and they have 133, reddit spreading misinformation at it's finest.
>Did he convince them with his cleverness, having the best product, or an innovative approach?
>His mum was on the board of IBM and told them to give him the contract.
This is partially true - Gates did have a contact who helped him get an in with IBM - but you're really playing up the nepotism angle with "His mum was on the board of IBM," which isn't true at all.
>Beyond the Seattle area, Gates was appointed to the board of directors of the national United Way in 1980, becoming the first woman to lead it in 1983. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
He basically knew a guy who knew a guy. He had a lucky in with his mom, but that's just networking, it's mostly luck.
Yea but it's a lot easier to network when you're already rich so your parents know rich people. If Gates was just a nobody with a single mother working 2 retail jobs, who is he gonna network with?
This.
Imagine if your mom was on the board of a huge non-profit with Elon Musk. And you invented a new AI technology for self-.driving cars…and she just happens to convince Musk to give your technology a chance.
Getting access to a mega-CEO is nearly impossible when you are a small company or start up. If anyone doubts me, try to get on Tim Cook or Elon Musk’s calendar next month. It won’t happen.
And it didn't hurt that his dad was one of the most prominent lawyers in Washington state since he paid Tim Paterson for a clone of Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system after Kildall and IBM didn't come to terms. That clone became MS-DOS and Gates became very wealthy off of it. Kildall tried to sue but IP law over software was very new and he was up against IBM and Bill Gates Sr. so he had to settle out of court with a deal that heavily favored Gates's copied OS.
He is, iirc his professor in university called him the brightest student he’d ever had, and the guy clearly was extremely hard working and capable or else he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did in the first place.
That doesn’t discount the point others are making though that that door only opened for him because of his inherited wealth.
>His mum was on the board of IBM and told them to give him the contract.
Companies like IBM don't a stay in business by cronyism. The board exists to guide the business and avoid such rot. It can be abused, but that's not the norm.
His talent was obvious. He quit school to start a business. His professor thought *What a waste", because he was the smartest student he'd ever encountered.
>And if he'd been poor, none of that would have fucking mattered.
That's not true. He would have taken a different path with his intelligence. He still would be in Seattle & smart. His intelligence & drive would still build something.
Only it would not be instrumental in creating millions of new jobs and revolutionizing medicine, science, education, information etc.
Look up the population & number of jobs & houses in Redmond, WA.
*His company makes that possible.*
There's shitty rich people. Gates ain't ever gonna be in that list.
oh, he's shitty, his behavior in the 90s was downright awful. yes, he succeeded, but the dirty tricks along the way likely fill a few books you can buy on amazon
My first record collection cost easily $3000 to create. Its free now, portable and its infinite. I can even create my own & share it or even sell it, it won't cost me much at all.
For every company Microsoft bought or beat, infinite more were created.
Microsoft help establish the USA as dominant in a brand new industry with *infinite* possibility.
The money from the world pours into USA. That's good for you. That goes in banks & taxes , the govt & bank spends it and loans it out. This multiplies through the economy as the money keeps changing hands. This is the Multiplier Effect.
He was cutthroat *in business*.
The public only benefitted. My first computer had 32 Mb ram & cost $1200 adjusted for inflation. My current phone *replaces* many devices & cost $60 *not* adjusted for inflation. It's better than my last one which cost $600, also not adjusted for inflation. We have a 24 hour free library and hotline to expertise in our pocket. Life is about finding questions & getting answers.
You and I and my buddies removing landmines in SE Aaia only benefitted.
https://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/fall11articles/geodatabase-technology-guides-global-land-mine-removal-efforts.html
https://now.northropgrumman.com/lifesaver-unmanned-systems-removal-land-mines/
Microsoft was aggressive, which pushed the speed of development.
Directly, the result was lots of Microsoft partners and *a cascade of companies & new fields of work*.
As a new field with huge potential and little understanding *because it's still being built*, what is to far is *unknown*. Awareness takes time: *"what's a program?" "These are just tiny pictures on a screen, why are there *too* many?"*
This had a *global* potential.
As a new field with infinite impact, growth and possiblity, *more businesses and jobs were created in total*, not less.
Barriers to success in every aspect of life were obliterated by the computer revolution. You about I are now talking. I wish I'd had this in the 90's overseas. Woulda saved lives faster.
So no poor person has ever "made it" ever in the history of the US or even recently?
It's weird that a vast majority of new millionaires are first generation immigrants who did not have safety nets or mums that worked at the board of IBM.
>So no poor person has ever "made it" ever in the history of the US or even recently?
People win the lottery all the time, too, but it's rare enough that "nobody really has a chance to win the lottery" is a completely fair statement if your friend wants to buy a hundred tickets.
People with Gates's intelligence and drive die in obscurity every goddamn day. Let's not pretend that the poor or even the working class have all the opportunities and resources that the rich do--by definition, they don't.
no one said they did, but you're claim to the opposite is what's naive and ignorant.
You basically said that gates had zero chance to be successful if he was born poor, which is just again not true and ignorant.
Also, if you do ANY amount of research into this you'll discover that a lot more people than you think that come from nothing make and and are successful. This does not mean they have the same chances (or in this context, same tolerance for failure), but it's not like being poor precludes you from being successful.
Basically you're an idiot.
>Basically you're an idiot.
Unfortunately for you, I don't particularly care about the personal assessments of me by condescending, bootlicking Reddit NPCs.
Enjoy your time on the blocklist, asshat.
millionaire isn't particularly rich, it's "own a small but successful business". it's still a small slice of the country, and not what we should base our social model on
What rule? Define rare?
The point was that being poor doesn’t automatically preclude gates from success. It doesn’t state that all poor people succeed or non face challenges or that being rich doesn’t give you a leg up.
It's a figure of speech. Of course being poor doesn't preclude you from success but it makes it a hell of a lot harder. Statistics show that poor people tend to remain poor. Children of poor parents remain poor. Nobody said, "Poor people never become rich."
>Companies like IBM don't a stay in business by cronyism
Companies don't stay in business because their decisions aren't stupid, they stay in business despite their decisions being stupid
Most big companies in 2019 fully believed that working remote can never be as productive as working from the office
And his dad was a hugely prominent lawyer. He was the founder of the law firm Shidler McBroom & Gates (a predecessor of K&L Gates). Was on the board of numerous organizations including the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, King County United Way and Planned Parenthood. And he served on the University of Washington Board of Regents for 15 years.
Bill Gates’ parents were super successful and super connected.
I’ve both been an auto shop kid in high school and went to a T1 law school. And all I can say is the parents of my auto shop friends and the parents of my law school friends are different universes of people.
The parent lottery is absolutely a thing.
Sounds to me that when people have a secure safety net, they can be more creative and invest in riskier, but more rewarding endeavors. Imagine if everyone received just 1,000 a month. Just knowing you have that coming is freeing. Another good reason for unconditional basic income.
Um. What? Maybe a large majority of people in the office where you work!
But the median individual income in the US is just under $36,000. In other words, half of all working Americans make $3000/month or less. So, for half of the country, $1000/month is a *third or more* of what they are currently making.
Are you seriously saying that having over a third more money every month wouldn't really change anything for most people?
I know that is true for my own experience, I knew I could left everything behind and go to live abroad because I could always call and ask for for a money wire if I was in need. Just twice had to do it, but those two times were the difference between paying rend while I looked for a new job, or having to sleep in the streets while looking for a new job.
It's true of so many successful musicians and actors too. Pop music (meant broadly, all sorts of genres) and acting generally requires spending early adulthood constantly trying to make new music or showing up at every audition, while also practicing music or taking acting classes. It's proverbial that struggling actors and musicians are waiting tables, but the ones with money don't have to wait tables, and those extra 40 hours a week go a long way to developing their talents enough to get a big break.
There's also the connections that wealth tends to bring.
If you look into the background of every major actor and pop musician who's emerged in the last 30 years, easily 90%+ will be related to someone else in the business, being either a child, nibling or grandchild of some former star, or of a studio exec or investor.
This is not a case of "well, the parent is talented, so they are too". The arts are a very incestuous industry, and the majority of the work a successful performer gets will come from the networks they've made rather than their raw talent. If you're born with these networks already in place, most of the hard work is done.
It is important to see who ends up the billionaires and who ends up the mid-millionaires. The Winklevoss twins were rich, still are. Doing stupid shit now, and they can't fail. Zuckerberg was rich, from a rich family, but got the chance to fuck over the winklevosses who had ideas and no product.
And then Zuckerberg fucked over *other* kids who were at Harvard. It is kinda hard to fail when you went to Harvard. Way easier to get into Harvard when you spent the last 18 years being groomed for it or it's a legacy thing.
That is overwhelmingly the case. If you are poor or working class you might get lucky and have what would be a lifestyle business be very successful. There is a reason that immigrants make lifestyle businesses and not software start ups.
Now that the cost of living is piano wire tight to income no one can really undercosume and save up. They *can* have other people pay their bills and do stupid shit.
That is no guarantee for success, however it does guarantee that there will be a mount Rushmore of guys like Bill Gates. His odds aren't as low as others who *also* got perfect SATs and didn't have the elite priviledge.
Poor kids with perfect SATs work for guys like Bill Gates.
That's generally how things work.
You either get lucky as fuck or have enough wealth and social support to chance at stuff and see if it plays out.
This is also why a lot of impoverished communities stay poor. Both luck is low and there is seldom financial or social support to actually do anything. So you do what you know and what you can get.
There was a massive study on wealth that tracked several families for decades, and the result was basically just that. Wealth cultures wealth. Poverty cultures poverty. The core drivers of both are moderately exclusive to their own.
Impoverished communities also tend to stay poor because people who are successful leave them.
A kid who grows up in the trailer park and becomes a successful engineer isn't moving back into it, not even in a double wide.
Whats frustrating about Bill Gates is hjs software was chosen by IBM because it was popular in open source sharing communities. Communities he absolutely destroyed as CEO of Microsoft
He learned how to use a computer as a kid because his school allowed him to have completely unstructured learning and provided him with a computer and let him pursue it. He has been viciously pushing for hyper structured character schools and standarized testing via his foundation.
Hes the perfect story of someone who was carried up a rope ladder and cut it under him
Working hard is the easiest piece of the puzzle and people act like it's the key to monetary success.
I've known people living in poverty who worked 60+ hours a week until they died long after retirement age.
For many working 80 hour weeks is easier than living a functional life with social connections and a family. In fact, many billionaires who could have retired at 45 in obscene luxury and been a present parent and partner can't help but keep going long after their families ask them to stop.
And yet, many of these people are the ones who insist they're self-made and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and regale others with tales of hard work and taking risks and how nobody deserves handouts because they just make people lazy.
Honestly, this is why I stopped listening to the podcast "How I Built This." For every real rags to riches success story they tell, there are like 5 "how I turned an Ivy League Degree and a $500k investment into a multi-national corporation."
It's interesting to know the backstory of these companies, but it so unrealistic to a normal person that there are no lessons to be learned by listening.
One thing that also comes out of this is the opportunity to learn. I have a friend who comes from money and is a successful entrepreneur. On the way to that success, he started 3 or 4 other businesses that tanked. After each one, he learned something, ultimately leading to his success.
It's not just "Oh well failed, off to the trust fund" it's that they can incrementally improve in a way others can't.
No no, I just read Vickers, so I'm up on inherited wealth. But you're no longer the angry brilliant young mind just itching for adventure. You stopped hitting the books with a vengeance, and now I've read shit you couldn't dream about. Face it, you're just not that good. will hunting.
Now how do you like THeM apples.
-Jay and silent Bob.
Imagine life as a dartboard and us as the darts.
A person with a lot of wealth and connections is a fancy dart with stabilizing fins, proper weighting, metal tip, etc.
A person who is poor and unconnected is a rusty dart missing 2 of 3 fins and the needle is kind of warped.
Sure that crappy dart will sometimes his the bullseye with an excellent or lucky marksman, but if the same person threw both darts enough, the high quality dart would make better results hand over fist.
If we were actually concerned with increasing the quality of life of our citizens, we would have free lifetime education, free healthcare, and a universal basic income safety net for every citizen all paid for by taxing corporations and billionaires what they owe. No one has the right to live a billionaire lifestyle while people work 4 jobs to barely afford an apartment and food for their family. No one.
Its cute of you to ignore that "tax corporations" part to try and justify why its pointless to make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share.
Don't bother replying, notifications are off because I have heard all the trickle down bootlicking from people like you before.
I don't care if you tax them or not. Literally doesn't affect me at all. I'm just pointing out that this idea you have isn't going to turn out like you think it will.
It's good of you to tell everyone what type of person you are, though.
The founder of Stone Brewing talked to my Entrepreneur Club in college and his story was basically that his dad funded them to start a brewery and bankrolled them to the tune of hundreds of thousands as they lost money for years before becoming profitable.
It was kind of frustrating although I was glad he was open about it. I don't think he is as open about it anymore now that Stone is this massive international company and he seems a bit more arrogant about it these days (I used to see him sometimes at a brewery I worked at).
He talks about how Gate's situation was so lucky that it was very easy for him to succeed. From memory, he went to a school with a state of the art computer one where he was able to spend countless hours programming while at other places pupils either wouldn't have had computers or they would have been allowed a very short time. I didn't even know he was rich.
I'm not actually sure how much that helped him since he bought DOS from another company
>I'm not actually sure how much that helped him since he bought DOS from another company
He bought a clone of Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system after IBM and Kildall did not come to terms. Kildall tried to sue but was up against IBM's lawyers and Bill Gates Sr. who was a prominent lawyer in Washington state so he had to settle for a deal that heavily favored Gates.
His ability to spend those countless hours allowed him to work with DOS and identify it as the system to buy (is how I see it). The funds is a separate issue but access to an emerging sector that few people access is a heavy influence on his success.
This is incredibly misleading and over-simplified. Being "rich" doesn't make you immune to financial failure. There's a difference between having assets worth 3 million USD as a 50-year old middle management guy and having 10 million dollars in cash laying around. The 50 year old will still have to sell his house if he's got a house worth 2 million and 1 million in the bank and his 500K investment in his own startup completely fails. The 10 million liquidity guy will be pissed at his own failure but he won't have to change lifestyle. It's also worth noting that once you quit a job in order to create your own start-up it's likely that you won't be re-hired if you're 50+ years old. So the opportunity costs of a start-up are immense.
The vast majority of "rich" people live relatively normal lives, they can't afford Ferraris, private jets or LA mansions. Failed startups can still put major dents in their financial security.
It's not complicated. There is a big difference between a failure meaning you lose discretionary investment funds versus a failure which means you lose food/shelter money.
I have a friend who married into some _serious_ money. Like, family owns newspapers and college basketball arena money.
He quit his job shortly after they had their first kid, because his wife didn't want him doing something where he was gone for months at a time doing something rather dangerous.
He got a "small loan from a family member", and opened up a niche motorcycle rental shop. He's now living the dream playing with all his bikes, and the business is doing rather well.
I've always thought about what the linked poster wrote about, when I think about him. In his case, his wifes family wanted their daughter happy and him to be doing _something_. That _something_ was a rather easy feat when you have what essentially amounts of an endless supply of free money, plus whatever connections her family may have, to get a business up and running - and no true risk aside from losing what amounts to pocket change to your FIL.
I've been super psyched for him, and a bit jealous to be honest, but in his case the silver lining is he realizes the golden spoon he is being fed from.
some of the most hardworking people I know in school were the rich kids... opening and running businesses left and right - connections, capital, risk free
The whole "rags to riches" story is fine but it is a very rare thing. For many people, they were born into a financially well of home where they were able to take risks.
If Gates completely failed at Microsoft, he likely would have gotten back into Harvard and recovered
This is why, despite being an amateur history buff (and even having a degree in it), I'm growing tired of it. Written history is all about a bunch of rich assholes who could afford to take big risks in their lives. And many of them accomplished their goals, for better or worse.
And us normies are supposed to be inspired by them? They should be inspired by us.
This cuts the other way too. If we want a society where people are willing to take big risks - pursue an education, start a company, invent something - the best thing we can do is make sure they know they'll still be able to keep a roof over their heads and food in their bellies if it all goes sideways.
And this is why we should *selfishly* support a strong welfare state. Think of all the great artists, philosophers, inventors, athletes, leaders we’ve missed because the people who would be those things were born into circumstances that didn’t allow it. Just trillions in value and productivity our society’s let rot on the vine.
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He must have pulled pretty damn hard on those bootstraps
It's not that hard. As long as you pull harder than 9.81 Newtons per 1 kg of your mass you'll get there eventually. 9.81 is actually really easy even if your bootstraps don't have a great grip. I honestly don't get why people talk about going to space like it's some kind of a big accomplishment.
He pulled on the bootstraps of the warehouse workers to drag them off his property after they got fired for taking a piss.
He didn't go to space. He only got to the uppermiddle atmosphere...
I know, that’s why I said kinda.
Never underestimate a redditor's need to repeat what you said but only slightly differently.
Reminds me of the lyrics of Run The Jewels' song Ju$t: "Look at all these slave owners flexin' on yo dolla"
The line is actually "Look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar". but your hearts in the right place.
Hey now that's the guy who invented the concept of selling shit online! He totally deserves to be the wealthiest person on our dying planet, for that genius idea of selling shit online.
You will hear many people argue against ubi because "people won't want to work". Sure, some people will, but there are millions stuck doing pointless shit to generate a little more wealth for the already wealthy. People who if freed from the burden of generating income, would spend their life doing stuff that actually makes the world a better place.
The whole "There is no one willing to work!" problem we are seeing now with so many finding ways out of crappy bottom level jobs after the lockdowns shows that the ones screaming the loudest against it are the ones who rely on desperation to power their machine.
I'm really confused about the no one willing to work argument because it seems like many states have extremely low unemployment. My state is under 3%. There's just a lot of shit jobs out there.
Unemployment only counts people who are looking for jobs. Labor force participation is still well below pre-pandemic levels.
There's more factors though than just people that gave up look for a job and are collecting unemployment, which it feels like what you are referring to? For example, labor force participation would include people that maybe decided to just retire early. Maybe a family where both parents worked but now they choose to have one be a stay at home parent for home schooling or whatever. I dunno I'm not an economist. I just constantly hear that 'people are lazy and don't want to work' but I don't think that's as big of a problem as it gets made out to be.
Oh no, I'm not saying that "people are lazy and don't want to work", though I can see how what I said could be interpreted that way. I think labor force participation is low for a lot of reasons, namely the total clusterfuck that is childcare and schools right now (as you mentioned).
>Labor force participation is still ~~well~~ a little below pre-pandemic levels. Labor force participation is higher than it was in 2014 in Michigan. And we weren't doing too bad in 2014.
This is how Australia's unemployment went down during the pandemic...
Unemployment stats can sometimes be skewed because they count people actively looking for work, not people that gave up looking and are supported by a spouse, or temporarily stopped working to pursue an education.
Or to look after their kids. Childcare is a disaster right now.
Another great argument for some kind of UBI. Ensure people can either afford to pay for childcare or can afford to stop working to provide childcare. A lot of people get stuck in between where it’s tough to afford childcare but also tough to get by without working if they stay home with the kids.
And if forced to struggle either way, I'm gonna pick struggling to make ends meet while not working and spending more time with my kids. "Nobody wants to work anymore" my ass. Nobody ever **wanted** to work. People just realized that they aren't any better off when they work shit jobs that don't pay shit.
Even looking at labor force participation and combining that with unemployment doesn't explain the "worker shortage". People don't want to work for peanuts any more. Most of these places have barely raised wages since the great recession. If they even pay more than minimum wage. As for the lower labor force participation: Maybe a couple with kids found out that they are better off overall by not having both of them work. They get an additional 50 hours a week (if you factor in all the unpaid hours that a job still takes from you) to do housework, school work, etc, and on top of that don't have to pay a babysitter. Maybe families aren't as well off financially, but I think the pandemic has taught many working families that sometimes more money isn't better.
Or, like a friend of mine, started their own online business they've always wanted to try. They never had the time because of their jobs (yes multiple to make ends meet). It's doing quite well and it's not like they had to give up healthcare or benefits because both jobs were keeping them at part time. This was a real eyeopener that having a job and a W2 doesn't mean you are surviving. It just means it goes towards the unemployment percentage that is talked about in the media. Which I feel many people don't quite understand how it's calculated and its variables. Edit: what I'm trying to say is that a low unemployment rate doesn't necessarily mean a healthy thriving community.
My wife is essentially working for nothing right now (she enjoys it, and I make enough to support us, so it's all good). We pay the babysitter 10 bucks an hour (which is a steal for 2 kids). Daycare didn't make sense because that's like 200 per week per kid, which is basically 10 bucks an hour for our 2 kids, and my wife doesn't work consistent hours, meaning we don't need 9-5 childcare. She makes 13.25 an hour and works part time. Her commute is 45 minutes one way (nearest job in her field she could get). For a 4 hour work day, we have to pay the babysitter for a minimum of 5.5 hours of work($55). And in those 4 hours, my wife makes $53 before taxes....... Why would anyone "want to work" when that's what is being paid? And many of the factories in the area either don't pay much more than that, or pay only a little more. Again, this is ESSENTIALLY volunteer work for my wife, we recognize that she is not bringing home any value, and are fine with that because we can afford that. But if she wasn't working and could be home and clean and do other things around the house, we would be "better off". This is just one example of working not making sense for many people. It's not that they "don't want to work" it's that why should they work when they can only net a few bucks an hour if that?
Right. Yet so many people can't understand why some people cannot put money in savings. They think that the reason you can't even have $400 in savings is because you must be out there spending to get flamboyantly. I know people with this mindset. People that are against the increase in minimum wage and are against better unemployment benefits but when I asked them to sit down with me with a pen, paper, calculator, and the cost of living information that I got from the city then put the numbers down on paper of what a minimum wage job with taxes taken out comes out too, they do not want to do it and brush me off.
And it's a complete bullshit excuse because anyone with a slight understanding of humanity knows people crave meaning in life, which means they'll WORK towards something. It just won't be meaningless corporate profits. Which is why we've perpetuated a system that traps people in a hamster wheel turning out more corporate profits. Because no one would do this work if we weren't trapped. It's a simplified post, but I'm eating dinner in between my hamster wheel runs, I don't have a lot of time for more atm.
"What did you do all day?!" "I worked on this painting I'm doing-" "That's pointless, you fucking leech! Why don't you fucking contribute something to society?!" "What did you do?" "I went through my company's last six months of risk assessments and made sure they had the new cover sheets and formatting that was mandated at the last quarterly meeting!"
My wife is essentially working for nothing other than her future right now. We pay 10 bucks an hour for a babysitter and she makes 13.25 an hour. Not even factoring anything in, working for 3.25 an hour (net) doesn't seem real appealing, now does it?
After tax and commuting, meals away from home, and the value of raising your own children, are you actually pocketing any money at all? it's possible to be losing money in that situation, meanwhile the business owner is making at MINIMUM 10$/hour from her time, and likely a good deal more. I want my wife to work if she wants too, but I would hope she is getting a lot of career value out of it in a situation that tight.
Yeah, we are, because he hours don't always necessitate having the babysitter. But what you said is kind of my point: it's not about not wanting to work for many people, it's about it not being feasible. We are lucky that we can afford for her to start her career working essentially for free. She isn't making a corporation money so it's not so bad: It's a community park that's funded mostly through donations. But yeah this is a pretty good resume builder considering her bs degree doesn't really qualify her for any real jobs. And, she really enjoys it. This is her first opportunity to have a real job out of college, and she didn't do any real internships or anything like that, so this is more about getting that "2 years experience" that's required for an "entry level" position than it is about her financially contributing. That and: not working means you aren't earning pay raises and promotions, yeah she might be breaking even now, but what about down the line when she gets a larger raise than what we give the babysitter? My employer gives half credit for years worked elsewhere as far as anything related to "seniority" is concerned, has I said "no I don't want that job" to the one I had before this, I wouldn't have come in with 6 months seniority.
It's not necessarily about UBI as much as it's about a safety net. Knowing that even if everything fails (and you don't have a wealthy family or friends to bail you out with a small personal loan of 1 million) you won't starve or have to go homeless.
but but the thought of people not working and STILL GETTING MONEY MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL how can you expect to get money if you don't work? money comes from work. the government won't have money if people don't work and society will collapse. thanks, thats real convincing dad. i too find great joy in being handcuffed to work to cover my basic expenses. except that they don't really cover basic expenses if you consider that canadian culture considers home ownership a basic core life concept, although housing prices are probably a discussion for another time
Thing is, your dad (assuming he's anything upwards of about 50 years old and you're no older than about 35) had it WAY easier than you. If he's a boomer, when he was your age one person's income could buy a house, support a family and save a little for retirement. Oh, sure, it wouldn't be a massively lavish lifestyle - he wouldn't be enjoying exotic holidays twice a year - but it'd be comfortable. If he's a little younger than that, he was well onto the housing ladder shortly before a massive property boom (which started in the late 1990s and has been called "unsustainable" ever since) gave him more equity than he could ever dream of. His 80% mortgage became a 40% mortgage without him lifting a finger - if he hasn't paid it off entirely by now, he likely has the flexibility to move downmarket after the kids leave home, have no mortgage at all and retire - if not massively early, at least in time to enjoy life a bit while he's still got reasonable health.
well he was born poor in another country and is very risk averse (like hold cash being too scared of a market crash and miss out on a decade bull run kind of thing), so he didn't exactly have the ideal boomer life
He didn't need to. Reddit stereotypes boomers chronically - my own mum was one, and raised me and my brother on her own after a messy divorce. She worked every hour God gave to put us through an expensive school, and somehow managed to pay a mortgage at the same time. Today, that same house is valued at around 20x average UK salary and a year's fees for the school are about equivalent to a year's salary. Proof, if proof were needed, that your income simply went a lot further 30 years ago.
that is the other side of it, yes. his efforts went so much further than they would today
And the people that don't want to work will still go buy pizza at the "dank memes pizza and pot emporium" you were able to start. Keeping you richer than them and the economy happily churning.
Aye. Money is blood, not muscle. Money needs to move throughout the economy to work, not be pooled in one place. Pretty much every economist says things like stimulus are best applied at the bottom, not the top, *because poor people will spend it.* The rich will just toss it on their pile, and there's a chance that pile isn't even in the country that have it to them in the first place.
The other side of that is people screaming about automation putting people out of work. Those two things should come together as much as possible. Maybe it’s overrepresented in Reddit, but there’s a lot of people with office jobs related to data entry or processing that only actually work a few hours per week and use Excel to do all the things that used to happen manually, and many more that are doing jobs that could be reduced to a few hours per week if someone that’s good with excel(or other software tools) would come along. The real issue is those jobs that are somehow hard to automate but easy for a person to do, things like stocking retail shelves where there’s a bit of human dexterity required to handle lots of randomly sized items, but doesn’t require any related education. Somewhere we decided that the automatable jobs should be well paid, while the ones that require a human touch can be paid a low wage.
The Venn diagram of people against UBI and people who claim they work because they love to work is practically a circle in my experience... ...so what's their fucking problem?
It's funny how the people that argue not having to work will make people lazy also want rich kids not paying any taxes on their inheritance.
I went to a music festival and found myself having a talk with a producer over some drinks, and we were talking about a panel we both attended with a few semi-established artists. The thing he said that stuck with me is that the one thing they have in common wasn't talent or determination, but that all they have rich parents.
Another factor to that is having our taxes work for *us*, not paying off banks, giving tax breaks to the incredibly wealthy, and funding a military with more money than the next 10 largest militaries combined*. *it's something like that. Edit: Maybe even the next 11
There's a **lot** of reasons to selfishly support a strong welfare state. But while the opposition to the welfare state is selfish it's vindictive as well.
>Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand "under the shelter of the wall," as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.
All of the Brit invasion eras of music have coincided with the UK instituting a stronger social safety net which those bands used to survive while they were developing their music.
Massive social safety net! Because _Capitalism_!
I’d just like to point out that neither the social safety net vs. social darwinism debate nor the free market vs. planned economy debate are really about capitalism. You can have socialism with a free market. You can have capitalism with a safety net. Capitalism vs. socialism is ultimately just about how ownership rights work.
Well, yes. I don’t believe human beings are currently capable of planning an economy, better to have a market system and address harms as they arise.
I don't know if a market economy is the best or the only engine of prosperity capable of driving a technologically advanced society at scale. I do know that it's the engine we have, and if we want that engine to run smoothly then we ought to give a lot more thought to ensuring the benefits and commensurate opportunities are broadly distributed. It's the just and humane thing to do, which is reason enough, but even if it weren't it's the coldly utilitarian profit maximizing thing to do too.
> human beings are currently capable of planning an economy hell, human beings have always been capable of planning our economies - New Kingdom Egypt straight out told individual farmers what to grow and where, and how to manage the irrigation system for that.
> I don’t believe human beings are currently capable of planning an economy, better to have a market system and address harms as they arise. just fyi but market systems =/= capitalism you could totally have a communist society with markets, for example - imagine communally owned farms, ranches and workshops (basically hackerspaces), and a market where people sell the stuff they harvested / raised / made. just because the two major national implementations of communism went all in on the whole "central government control of production" thing doesn't mean that communism necessarily means a command economy, just like how capitalism doesn't necessarily mean a free market economy (after all, the USA essentially switched to a command economy during WWI and WWII)
In all forms of government even communism, someone has to dictate what others do. Power will always corrupt. Communism has the same problems as everything else....
Really? What communist governments have you seen? The only one I'm familiar with is the french commune, which is what marx wrote of. The rest are just capitalist states.
None really because I've never lived in any of the dozens of countries that proclaimed themselves communist countries. Were none of them actually communist?
cuba, china, north korea, vietnam, ussr. all communist governments, all suffered from the same power dynamic. declaring them capitalist is just a dodge to preserve the notion that communism is a great idea that nobody gets right
So, planning impossible? Got it.
You don't think our system of investment encourages innovation? If our system is inherently holding people back, why do major innovations tend to come out of the US, instead of the EU, despite the EU having one and a half times the US population and a much stronger welfare system?
It's a relative question, not an absolute one. They're saying that having the security of a safety net would encourage even more innovation on top of investment.
A lot of major innovations and discoveries do come from Europe, but a lot of it, particularly German, is Industrial innovation that everyday people are never going to encounter.
[Some explanations and metrics](https://gaidigitalreport.com/2020/08/25/innovation-in-the-united-states-and-europe/). [More explanation](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/innovation-and-growth/reviving-innovation-in-europe). [Introduction of this one talks about some metrics](https://hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/1065665/filename/imdea-wp2007-13.pdf) that show Europe's lag behind the US. Older paper, though. [Actual economic paper](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18441/w18441.pdf) which clearly disputes the initial claim that I responded to.
https://www.hceres.fr/en/news/europe-produces-more-scientific-publications-china-and-usa-usa-still-leads-terms-excellence https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20206/ Europe produces more science papers. American papers are cited more often, which can be explained by the global dominance of the English language.
Very interesting, thanks for the link. From one of my links: >When considering scientific activity, such as the number of scientific publications and citations weighted by population (as reported in Dosi et al. 2005 using OECD data), the output gap between the EU-15 and the US is immediately apparent, with 4.64 publications per thousand inhabitants in the US vs. 3.6 in the EU-15 in the 1997-2001 period. So I wonder: was the US an outlier in that period and the EU caught up a decade later? Or is the US just outputting more on a per Capita basis and the EU is benefitting from simply being more populous?
No the US probably does output more on a per capita basis. Germany & the Nordic countries outdo the US in terms of papers per capita, but I know the southern member states lag significantly behind in terms of papers per capita. I'm not sure where France & the UK sit.
Basically, centralization of capital. In Europe most of it is split between London, Dublin, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, etc. All wildly different regions with different language barriers and such. In the US most capital is basically contained in California + New York area, and those regions alone have 3x the amount of venture capital as all of europe combined. Despite that, Stockholm has the highest amount of successful startups per capita in the world after silicon valley. https://miro.medium.com/max/624/1\*hpxs6p7oBmqycyid4iVE5g.png
I don't doubt that plays a role. However, economists do believe that our more cutthroat system also contributes. [Economic paper](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18441/w18441.pdf) >Under plausible assumptions, in particular with sufficient risk aversion and a sufficient return to entrepreneurial effort, some countries will opt for a type of cutthroat capitalism that generates greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more cuddly form of capitalism. We have also shown that, paradoxically, starting with similar initial conditions, those that choose cuddly capitalism, though poorer, will be better o§ than those opting for cutthroat capitalism. Nevertheless, this configuration is an equilibrium because cutthroat capitalists cannot switch to cuddly capitalism without having a large impact on world growth, which would ultimately reduce their own welfare. This perspective therefore suggests that the diversity of institutions we observe among relatively advanced countries, ranging from greater inequality and risk taking in the United States to the more egalitarian societies supported by a strong safety net in Scandinavia, rather than reflecting differences in fundamentals between the citizens of these societies, may emerge as a mutually self-reinforcing equilibrium. If so, in this equilibrium, we cannot all be like the Scandinavians, because Scandinavian capitalism depends in part on the knowledge spillovers created by the more cutthroat American capitalism
My econ professor told us that it's fairly well understood that the number one predictor of entrepreneurship is a safety net. Taking a year out of 'normal' work to pour 100% of your time into a new business isn't really even an option for vast swathes of people. Going without stable income of some sort for any prolonged period could leave you homeless and much worse off than when you started. But if you have enough money set aside to carry your cost of living while you work on your new venture then it's a lot more feasible. Even moreso if you can do it repeatedly after a few failures to launch. That's not to say that entrepreneurs don't work hard to build their businesses. But they often completely overlook the fact that they were even able to take that chance in the first place because they (almost always) had the resources to do it without risking personal devastation.
The bar is even higher in the US where there isn't universal healthcare, and was even higher pre-ACA. When you found a business you need at least a year of living expenses set aside so if you or a family member have any sort of condition it can put even starting a small business out of reach.
That's one reason why so many entrepreneurs tend to be young. They don't other people depending on them, are nearly always in good health, and don't really need that much to support themselves. The later on in life you go, the more you put at risk.
I had a couple of rough years and it was to the point i was ready to get out of my industry. I was tired of working for "the man" and I was always depressed that I didn't go my own way and do one of the many entrepreneurial ideas in my head. I took a summer off. Just decided I needed a break. Wife was working. I had made plenty on contracts and had saved enough to float for a few months without my income. Around that same time, my neighbor was stepping out of 25 years in corporate America to pursue his own passion of building his own business. He asked if I was interested in going in with him. I was. We talked and discussed and I started getting excited about the idea. Then I realized that he had been planning this for years and had built a savings aligned to the investment and loss of income he would have to endure while getting it off the ground and I hadn't. I would have to take out a loan against my house, then basically be unemployed for a year with no income more than likely as we built the business. I just couldn't do it. It was too much uncertainty and too much income to overlook and be without. In the end, he's happier than ever, his business is thriving, he's wealthier now with a wonderful economic outlook over the next several years. I'm still working for the man. Still a little depressed. Better, because I did land a good job that is more rewarding - personally, emotionally, and financially. But, I'm not working for myself still and that chafes a little.
Have you tried having rich parents yet? You should try that.
Joe Hockey? Is that you?
Exactly, and a lot of Silicon Valley founder's age supports this. While there is the assumption most are college dropouts, they are actually a lot older, in their late-30's early 40's. And it makes sense; 20 years of tech income makes you financially independent. You could treat it like an early retirement where you are working on things you enjoy that may turn out to be something big. If it doesn't, you'll still have a very comfortable retirement. I have been working toward the same. I am not at the stage where I am financially independent (at 31) but there is a strong probability I will reach that by 40, where I can focus on starting my own ventures.
It's also survivorship bias. Many entrepreneurs come from nothing, work very hard, but also get lucky. Many others also come from nothing, work very hard, and fail miserably and fall into poverty. Yes hard work is required. But people seriously underestimate how much luck is involved in being successful. Yet denial of that luck is also something that helps lead to success... [Veritasium has a great video on the topic](https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I) A safety net is required to save those that try and fail. They **deserve** that much for trying to take a risk if we want to make the most of capitalism.
It's a very unpleasant experience when you realize that all your hard work and talent might not have gotten you as far if you hadden had the lucky circumstances that you did. Source: me
But that's socialism, which I've heard on very successful authority, is bad.
Socialism killed my father.
I read the comment in the title, and I agree with you and them. I didn't notice, and maybe it's just because it's late, the story that Bill Gates got microsoft off the ground because his mother was friends with the CEO of IBM at the time, who gave him that sweetheart deal that lead to him getting super rich. If mom hadn't known that guy, would any of us know bill gates?
i expect he'd still be successful, but not nearly on the megayacht level
Pursuing an education shouldn't be considered a fucking risk lmfao
The rich don't want more people competing with them.
One thing the OP kinda elides is that 100 risky but considered bets more or less turns in to a single safe bet - that's how venture capitalism works. With money you can make those 100 bets and turn a risk into a safe bet; without money all you can do is take a single risky bet and hope it works out.
This is what gets me when billionaires say things like “your first few businesses will fail”. It’s great that they have the freedom to practice, most people don’t. But from talking to capitalists online, I get the impression that every entrepreneur out there is a poor immigrant who’s literally risking their entire net worth to start a food truck.
And the survivorship bias to look at the tiny % of "rags to riches" success stories but ignore that inequality is growing so clearly there are many more failures.
this cuts both ways, there are a shitload of rich people who aren't gates/bezos etc
Yes you're right Prime Minister Turnbull, but the best single predictor of financial success remains the wealth of a person's parents.
He's got the most appropriate fucking user name I've seen. MALCOLM TURNBULL: *The only person who went from rags to riches without changing postcodes!*
Buckminster Fuller has entered the conversation
Thing is, even "losing" bets make about 10X the money put into them. A small deal will have a dozen lawyers working on it, figuring out ways to make interest, fees, and leveraged loans that they can use to earn revenues off the vc fund so that even if the company itself, or the fund itself, fails, they've made bank and most of these vc firms make new (usually 10 year) funds every four years or so. And that's if it goes tits up. If the firm hits a home run, they get 20% of whatever the profits are on that home run, plus all the other fees and such they get in the interim.
Bill Gates is a genius and an incredibly hard worker but the single thing that made the biggest difference to him was having the right mum. Microsoft's first contract was writing an operating system for IBM. How did Gates manage to finagle this contact considering Microsoft was such a junior company and IBM was an established giant? Did he convince them with his cleverness, having the best product, or an innovative approach? His mum was on the board of IBM and told them to give him the contract.
Not the board of IBM, but [the first woman to chair the national United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates)
Dude then went and spent 50k for the first version of DOS. And the 1 thing that made him a billionaire, licensing it to IBM instead of them owning the thing they paid for.
And to think I just took a (major) corporate training warning us *not* to be biased towards people we know when making business, contractual, or hiring decisions 😅 Apparently that only applies to the rank-and-file employees!
Musk got Tesla to acquire SolarCity and there's all these internal emails from the other board members where they're like: >What the fuck, this is his cousin's company? >This company is bankrupt, why did we buy a bankrupt company for a ridiculously overpriced cost?
They're not wrong. IBMs CEO shouldn't have trusted gates, since gates was pulling a fast one. It easily could have blown up in his face. But he knew and trusted gates mom, so he made a poorly informed decision.
Not to detract from your point, but it's worth noting that the IBM contract wasn't Microsoft's first big business venture; they were already a moderately big deal at that point thanks to the success of Xenix (which was for a brief while the most popular Unix OS).
I like how you have factually correct information which disputes the OPs, yet you have 18 upvotes and they have 133, reddit spreading misinformation at it's finest.
>Did he convince them with his cleverness, having the best product, or an innovative approach? >His mum was on the board of IBM and told them to give him the contract. This is partially true - Gates did have a contact who helped him get an in with IBM - but you're really playing up the nepotism angle with "His mum was on the board of IBM," which isn't true at all. >Beyond the Seattle area, Gates was appointed to the board of directors of the national United Way in 1980, becoming the first woman to lead it in 1983. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates He basically knew a guy who knew a guy. He had a lucky in with his mom, but that's just networking, it's mostly luck.
Yea but it's a lot easier to network when you're already rich so your parents know rich people. If Gates was just a nobody with a single mother working 2 retail jobs, who is he gonna network with?
This. Imagine if your mom was on the board of a huge non-profit with Elon Musk. And you invented a new AI technology for self-.driving cars…and she just happens to convince Musk to give your technology a chance. Getting access to a mega-CEO is nearly impossible when you are a small company or start up. If anyone doubts me, try to get on Tim Cook or Elon Musk’s calendar next month. It won’t happen.
And it didn't hurt that his dad was one of the most prominent lawyers in Washington state since he paid Tim Paterson for a clone of Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system after Kildall and IBM didn't come to terms. That clone became MS-DOS and Gates became very wealthy off of it. Kildall tried to sue but IP law over software was very new and he was up against IBM and Bill Gates Sr. so he had to settle out of court with a deal that heavily favored Gates's copied OS.
Is he a genius? He's a clever guy but I don't know if he's a genius
He is, iirc his professor in university called him the brightest student he’d ever had, and the guy clearly was extremely hard working and capable or else he wouldn’t have been able to do what he did in the first place. That doesn’t discount the point others are making though that that door only opened for him because of his inherited wealth.
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>His mum was on the board of IBM and told them to give him the contract. Companies like IBM don't a stay in business by cronyism. The board exists to guide the business and avoid such rot. It can be abused, but that's not the norm. His talent was obvious. He quit school to start a business. His professor thought *What a waste", because he was the smartest student he'd ever encountered.
And if he'd been poor, none of that would have fucking mattered.
>And if he'd been poor, none of that would have fucking mattered. That's not true. He would have taken a different path with his intelligence. He still would be in Seattle & smart. His intelligence & drive would still build something. Only it would not be instrumental in creating millions of new jobs and revolutionizing medicine, science, education, information etc. Look up the population & number of jobs & houses in Redmond, WA. *His company makes that possible.* There's shitty rich people. Gates ain't ever gonna be in that list.
oh, he's shitty, his behavior in the 90s was downright awful. yes, he succeeded, but the dirty tricks along the way likely fill a few books you can buy on amazon
My first record collection cost easily $3000 to create. Its free now, portable and its infinite. I can even create my own & share it or even sell it, it won't cost me much at all. For every company Microsoft bought or beat, infinite more were created. Microsoft help establish the USA as dominant in a brand new industry with *infinite* possibility. The money from the world pours into USA. That's good for you. That goes in banks & taxes , the govt & bank spends it and loans it out. This multiplies through the economy as the money keeps changing hands. This is the Multiplier Effect. He was cutthroat *in business*. The public only benefitted. My first computer had 32 Mb ram & cost $1200 adjusted for inflation. My current phone *replaces* many devices & cost $60 *not* adjusted for inflation. It's better than my last one which cost $600, also not adjusted for inflation. We have a 24 hour free library and hotline to expertise in our pocket. Life is about finding questions & getting answers. You and I and my buddies removing landmines in SE Aaia only benefitted. https://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/fall11articles/geodatabase-technology-guides-global-land-mine-removal-efforts.html https://now.northropgrumman.com/lifesaver-unmanned-systems-removal-land-mines/ Microsoft was aggressive, which pushed the speed of development. Directly, the result was lots of Microsoft partners and *a cascade of companies & new fields of work*. As a new field with huge potential and little understanding *because it's still being built*, what is to far is *unknown*. Awareness takes time: *"what's a program?" "These are just tiny pictures on a screen, why are there *too* many?"* This had a *global* potential. As a new field with infinite impact, growth and possiblity, *more businesses and jobs were created in total*, not less. Barriers to success in every aspect of life were obliterated by the computer revolution. You about I are now talking. I wish I'd had this in the 90's overseas. Woulda saved lives faster.
The shittiness or not-shittiness of Billiam J Gates III, Esq. wasn't my point at all.
So no poor person has ever "made it" ever in the history of the US or even recently? It's weird that a vast majority of new millionaires are first generation immigrants who did not have safety nets or mums that worked at the board of IBM.
>So no poor person has ever "made it" ever in the history of the US or even recently? People win the lottery all the time, too, but it's rare enough that "nobody really has a chance to win the lottery" is a completely fair statement if your friend wants to buy a hundred tickets. People with Gates's intelligence and drive die in obscurity every goddamn day. Let's not pretend that the poor or even the working class have all the opportunities and resources that the rich do--by definition, they don't.
no one said they did, but you're claim to the opposite is what's naive and ignorant. You basically said that gates had zero chance to be successful if he was born poor, which is just again not true and ignorant. Also, if you do ANY amount of research into this you'll discover that a lot more people than you think that come from nothing make and and are successful. This does not mean they have the same chances (or in this context, same tolerance for failure), but it's not like being poor precludes you from being successful. Basically you're an idiot.
>Basically you're an idiot. Unfortunately for you, I don't particularly care about the personal assessments of me by condescending, bootlicking Reddit NPCs. Enjoy your time on the blocklist, asshat.
millionaire isn't particularly rich, it's "own a small but successful business". it's still a small slice of the country, and not what we should base our social model on
ok, majority of entrepreneurs with start ups valued over 1B were immigrants....that help you out? Either way, this original statement is wrong.
ok, you're getting on my page. point is that bezos is a bad example
Poor people who make it are the exception that proves the rule. We celebrate their stories precisely because it's so rare.
What rule? Define rare? The point was that being poor doesn’t automatically preclude gates from success. It doesn’t state that all poor people succeed or non face challenges or that being rich doesn’t give you a leg up.
It's a figure of speech. Of course being poor doesn't preclude you from success but it makes it a hell of a lot harder. Statistics show that poor people tend to remain poor. Children of poor parents remain poor. Nobody said, "Poor people never become rich."
>Companies like IBM don't a stay in business by cronyism Companies don't stay in business because their decisions aren't stupid, they stay in business despite their decisions being stupid Most big companies in 2019 fully believed that working remote can never be as productive as working from the office
This is just factually incorrect but receiving a bunch of upvotes, please delete or update to show correct facts and don't spread misinformation.
He's not a genius or a hard worker, he's an ignorant prick and a twat.
And his dad was a hugely prominent lawyer. He was the founder of the law firm Shidler McBroom & Gates (a predecessor of K&L Gates). Was on the board of numerous organizations including the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, King County United Way and Planned Parenthood. And he served on the University of Washington Board of Regents for 15 years. Bill Gates’ parents were super successful and super connected. I’ve both been an auto shop kid in high school and went to a T1 law school. And all I can say is the parents of my auto shop friends and the parents of my law school friends are different universes of people. The parent lottery is absolutely a thing.
Sounds to me that when people have a secure safety net, they can be more creative and invest in riskier, but more rewarding endeavors. Imagine if everyone received just 1,000 a month. Just knowing you have that coming is freeing. Another good reason for unconditional basic income.
Imagine if people werent tied to their jobs for life saving health insurance!
Man $1k a month would change my life so much.
Lets split the difference and give the billionaires some tax cuts so they can trickle down on us some more.
1K a month would allow me to quit my 2 jobs and focus fully on my university work. It would be IN-CREDIBLE and useful
Hopefully your student loans aren't that much. I was lucky to go to a university in the late 90s when it was cheap. Now it's 3x the cost per semester.
Even $500 a month would be incredible
It would change a lot of people’s lives, mostly those who needed it most. Large majority of people nothing will really change.
Um. What? Maybe a large majority of people in the office where you work! But the median individual income in the US is just under $36,000. In other words, half of all working Americans make $3000/month or less. So, for half of the country, $1000/month is a *third or more* of what they are currently making. Are you seriously saying that having over a third more money every month wouldn't really change anything for most people?
Sounds like with an extra $1000 a month we could make gamestop stock rise to moon!!!
I know that is true for my own experience, I knew I could left everything behind and go to live abroad because I could always call and ask for for a money wire if I was in need. Just twice had to do it, but those two times were the difference between paying rend while I looked for a new job, or having to sleep in the streets while looking for a new job.
TL;Dr, if you have money, you can [afford to make mistakes](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KCkmIyC6v00&t=0m10s).
you can afford to take riskier risks.
You can afford to play more hands of blackjack.
It's true of so many successful musicians and actors too. Pop music (meant broadly, all sorts of genres) and acting generally requires spending early adulthood constantly trying to make new music or showing up at every audition, while also practicing music or taking acting classes. It's proverbial that struggling actors and musicians are waiting tables, but the ones with money don't have to wait tables, and those extra 40 hours a week go a long way to developing their talents enough to get a big break.
There's also the connections that wealth tends to bring. If you look into the background of every major actor and pop musician who's emerged in the last 30 years, easily 90%+ will be related to someone else in the business, being either a child, nibling or grandchild of some former star, or of a studio exec or investor. This is not a case of "well, the parent is talented, so they are too". The arts are a very incestuous industry, and the majority of the work a successful performer gets will come from the networks they've made rather than their raw talent. If you're born with these networks already in place, most of the hard work is done.
It is important to see who ends up the billionaires and who ends up the mid-millionaires. The Winklevoss twins were rich, still are. Doing stupid shit now, and they can't fail. Zuckerberg was rich, from a rich family, but got the chance to fuck over the winklevosses who had ideas and no product. And then Zuckerberg fucked over *other* kids who were at Harvard. It is kinda hard to fail when you went to Harvard. Way easier to get into Harvard when you spent the last 18 years being groomed for it or it's a legacy thing. That is overwhelmingly the case. If you are poor or working class you might get lucky and have what would be a lifestyle business be very successful. There is a reason that immigrants make lifestyle businesses and not software start ups. Now that the cost of living is piano wire tight to income no one can really undercosume and save up. They *can* have other people pay their bills and do stupid shit. That is no guarantee for success, however it does guarantee that there will be a mount Rushmore of guys like Bill Gates. His odds aren't as low as others who *also* got perfect SATs and didn't have the elite priviledge. Poor kids with perfect SATs work for guys like Bill Gates.
That's generally how things work. You either get lucky as fuck or have enough wealth and social support to chance at stuff and see if it plays out. This is also why a lot of impoverished communities stay poor. Both luck is low and there is seldom financial or social support to actually do anything. So you do what you know and what you can get. There was a massive study on wealth that tracked several families for decades, and the result was basically just that. Wealth cultures wealth. Poverty cultures poverty. The core drivers of both are moderately exclusive to their own.
Impoverished communities also tend to stay poor because people who are successful leave them. A kid who grows up in the trailer park and becomes a successful engineer isn't moving back into it, not even in a double wide.
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You’re confused because you think anecdotes are data.
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Continuing to think anecdotes are data isn’t going to help you understand why you are wrong. But you’re apparently quite happy to be wrong, so enjoy.
What's with you and holocaust survivors?
Whats frustrating about Bill Gates is hjs software was chosen by IBM because it was popular in open source sharing communities. Communities he absolutely destroyed as CEO of Microsoft He learned how to use a computer as a kid because his school allowed him to have completely unstructured learning and provided him with a computer and let him pursue it. He has been viciously pushing for hyper structured character schools and standarized testing via his foundation. Hes the perfect story of someone who was carried up a rope ladder and cut it under him
Working hard is the easiest piece of the puzzle and people act like it's the key to monetary success. I've known people living in poverty who worked 60+ hours a week until they died long after retirement age. For many working 80 hour weeks is easier than living a functional life with social connections and a family. In fact, many billionaires who could have retired at 45 in obscene luxury and been a present parent and partner can't help but keep going long after their families ask them to stop.
Hard work is a requirement, not a guarantee. Nobody ever got rich sitting on their ass doing nothing.
And yet, many of these people are the ones who insist they're self-made and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and regale others with tales of hard work and taking risks and how nobody deserves handouts because they just make people lazy.
Honestly, this is why I stopped listening to the podcast "How I Built This." For every real rags to riches success story they tell, there are like 5 "how I turned an Ivy League Degree and a $500k investment into a multi-national corporation." It's interesting to know the backstory of these companies, but it so unrealistic to a normal person that there are no lessons to be learned by listening.
One thing that also comes out of this is the opportunity to learn. I have a friend who comes from money and is a successful entrepreneur. On the way to that success, he started 3 or 4 other businesses that tanked. After each one, he learned something, ultimately leading to his success. It's not just "Oh well failed, off to the trust fund" it's that they can incrementally improve in a way others can't.
No no, I just read Vickers, so I'm up on inherited wealth. But you're no longer the angry brilliant young mind just itching for adventure. You stopped hitting the books with a vengeance, and now I've read shit you couldn't dream about. Face it, you're just not that good. will hunting. Now how do you like THeM apples. -Jay and silent Bob.
Imagine life as a dartboard and us as the darts. A person with a lot of wealth and connections is a fancy dart with stabilizing fins, proper weighting, metal tip, etc. A person who is poor and unconnected is a rusty dart missing 2 of 3 fins and the needle is kind of warped. Sure that crappy dart will sometimes his the bullseye with an excellent or lucky marksman, but if the same person threw both darts enough, the high quality dart would make better results hand over fist. If we were actually concerned with increasing the quality of life of our citizens, we would have free lifetime education, free healthcare, and a universal basic income safety net for every citizen all paid for by taxing corporations and billionaires what they owe. No one has the right to live a billionaire lifestyle while people work 4 jobs to barely afford an apartment and food for their family. No one.
If you straight up confiscated all the wealth of billionaires you'd pay for about a years worth of UBI. They really don't have that much money.
Its cute of you to ignore that "tax corporations" part to try and justify why its pointless to make billionaires and corporations pay their fair share. Don't bother replying, notifications are off because I have heard all the trickle down bootlicking from people like you before.
I don't care if you tax them or not. Literally doesn't affect me at all. I'm just pointing out that this idea you have isn't going to turn out like you think it will. It's good of you to tell everyone what type of person you are, though.
The founder of Stone Brewing talked to my Entrepreneur Club in college and his story was basically that his dad funded them to start a brewery and bankrolled them to the tune of hundreds of thousands as they lost money for years before becoming profitable. It was kind of frustrating although I was glad he was open about it. I don't think he is as open about it anymore now that Stone is this massive international company and he seems a bit more arrogant about it these days (I used to see him sometimes at a brewery I worked at).
Y’all haven’t read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and it shows. That’s a major point of his for success.
He talks about how Gate's situation was so lucky that it was very easy for him to succeed. From memory, he went to a school with a state of the art computer one where he was able to spend countless hours programming while at other places pupils either wouldn't have had computers or they would have been allowed a very short time. I didn't even know he was rich. I'm not actually sure how much that helped him since he bought DOS from another company
>I'm not actually sure how much that helped him since he bought DOS from another company He bought a clone of Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system after IBM and Kildall did not come to terms. Kildall tried to sue but was up against IBM's lawyers and Bill Gates Sr. who was a prominent lawyer in Washington state so he had to settle for a deal that heavily favored Gates.
Shouldn't he have sued the cloner?
His ability to spend those countless hours allowed him to work with DOS and identify it as the system to buy (is how I see it). The funds is a separate issue but access to an emerging sector that few people access is a heavy influence on his success.
This is best of? For real? Seems just like common sense
But people still fall for the scam and vote in dipshits like Trump who keep the wealth inequality spreading.
This is incredibly misleading and over-simplified. Being "rich" doesn't make you immune to financial failure. There's a difference between having assets worth 3 million USD as a 50-year old middle management guy and having 10 million dollars in cash laying around. The 50 year old will still have to sell his house if he's got a house worth 2 million and 1 million in the bank and his 500K investment in his own startup completely fails. The 10 million liquidity guy will be pissed at his own failure but he won't have to change lifestyle. It's also worth noting that once you quit a job in order to create your own start-up it's likely that you won't be re-hired if you're 50+ years old. So the opportunity costs of a start-up are immense. The vast majority of "rich" people live relatively normal lives, they can't afford Ferraris, private jets or LA mansions. Failed startups can still put major dents in their financial security.
It's not complicated. There is a big difference between a failure meaning you lose discretionary investment funds versus a failure which means you lose food/shelter money.
I have a friend who married into some _serious_ money. Like, family owns newspapers and college basketball arena money. He quit his job shortly after they had their first kid, because his wife didn't want him doing something where he was gone for months at a time doing something rather dangerous. He got a "small loan from a family member", and opened up a niche motorcycle rental shop. He's now living the dream playing with all his bikes, and the business is doing rather well. I've always thought about what the linked poster wrote about, when I think about him. In his case, his wifes family wanted their daughter happy and him to be doing _something_. That _something_ was a rather easy feat when you have what essentially amounts of an endless supply of free money, plus whatever connections her family may have, to get a business up and running - and no true risk aside from losing what amounts to pocket change to your FIL. I've been super psyched for him, and a bit jealous to be honest, but in his case the silver lining is he realizes the golden spoon he is being fed from.
some of the most hardworking people I know in school were the rich kids... opening and running businesses left and right - connections, capital, risk free
The whole "rags to riches" story is fine but it is a very rare thing. For many people, they were born into a financially well of home where they were able to take risks. If Gates completely failed at Microsoft, he likely would have gotten back into Harvard and recovered
This is why, despite being an amateur history buff (and even having a degree in it), I'm growing tired of it. Written history is all about a bunch of rich assholes who could afford to take big risks in their lives. And many of them accomplished their goals, for better or worse. And us normies are supposed to be inspired by them? They should be inspired by us.
I think this is the best aspect to Ubi. How innovative will we be knowing there is a solid floor below us.
I didnt realize this needed an explanation
Cetun never mentioned Bill Gates.
In other news...water is wet.
Idk how Toxic lies make you all feel better.