> "Lauren Carroll Harris is a writer and curator."
Current generations were sold on the promise that you can be what you want. That you have the right (and almost the duty) to follow your passion. In reality the game is rigged. The article points this out correctly, in my opinion, and conveys the bitterness that comes from unveiling this illusion.
Among the writers and curators in my social circles (I would add artists, musicians, actors, …), there is a tacit agreement that if you want to pursue such careers, you have to (1) come from wealth, (2) marry a banker, (3) live frugally. I perceive some sense of happiness, or at least peace with oneself, mostly from the ones falling under option (3), even if they have by far the toughest lives.
Of course, there's always the promise of (4) become tremendously successful, but I don't know anyone who made it. And (5) give up and perform a job that people are willing to pay real money for.
Personally, I support high inheritance taxes to balance things out a bit. I think it's healthier for everyone. Those trust fund kids are in a permanent struggle to live up to unrealistic expectations and I'm not sure that's so great.
As for the natural wines detour, it feels quite weird for me. I don't see how they're much different from craft beer in 2005 or nutmeg in the 1500s. There are perfectly good wines for under 5€, drink that instead. If your friends are looking down on you for that, find new friends, seriously.
Inheritance taxes take wealth away from heirs, but unless there’s tremendous faith in the quality of government it’s not clear that it benefits everyone else. In the US the people who’d get richer from the government being flush with inheritance tax money are more Lockheed Martin / Blackwater / private prisons / Wall Street / consultants. In India it would be bureaucrats and their cronies. I’d rather the wealth be passed on and used productively, or squandered into the local economy. Happy either way.
This argument would apply to any tax but the question is not how much the government should tax or spend but rather if an inheritance tax is somehow (1) good in itself or (2) no worse than other taxes.
The case against #1 is that no inheritance tax unless absurdly comprehensive could capture many pre-inheritance benefits. The article explicitly notes how some postpone accepting their inheritance as a form of virtue signaling. The very fact this can be done shows that wealth is being passed down prior to any taxable event.
Perversely, the government doesn't need to spend the tax money. The government can create money for whatever it wants. It can also simply destroy money, to fight inflation and/or the yawning wealth gap.
Inherited wealth leads to powerful dynasties, both at the local and national scale, who dominate local politics as well as economic opportunities. We see that in both India and the US.
> Personally, I support high inheritance taxes to balance things out a bit. I think it's healthier for everyone.
The difference it will make is so small you probably couldn't measure it. All that would happen is that it would apply to a handful of people each year who die very suddenly. The rich who grow old would simply transfer everything to their children before they die.
Even worse, this opens up a ton of loopholes that would only be exploitable by the very rich[1], leaving the middle-class paying the largest amount of taxes (again). Nailing down all the special exceptions in the inheritance tax code will probably cost more than you'd receive in inheritance taxes.
Taxing people simply because "they didn't work for it" is just another puritanical way of trying to punish people who were luckier than others. Doing it via inheritance taxes is especially puritanical, because it makes a mockery of fundamental property laws as well.
You may as well just proclaim "to each according to his need". At least that's an honest statement about the intentions behind the tax.
[1] Trust funds are already one of the ways to dodge inheritance taxes, as the "fund" doesn't necessarily hold cash. For example it could be holding shares in a private company that pays dividends. While tax authorities can liquidate any shares held in a public exchange to settle the taxes, they can't do the same with shares held in private companies[2].
[2] This is because there may be no willing seller at the price being asked. If high inheritance taxes becomes the norm, you can bet that every shareholder in a private company is going to regard a tax authorities need to sell the shares as a jackpot day, and buy accordingly for pennies on the dollar, at which point the taxes on the proceeds are going to be close to nothing anyway, and may not even be owed anymore.
Indeed for most people coming from low income backgrounds, if they are academically strong then they will likely go for a safer career choice such as engineering, medicine, finance, law etc
If you are a writer/artist/etc then likely your circle of friends will be disproportionately people with at least some safety net from home. That doesn’t mean it reflect all of societ
> Indeed for most people coming from low income backgrounds, if they are academically strong then they will likely go for a safer career choice such as engineering, medicine, finance, law etc
This sounds strange from a Finnish perspective. Fields with a clear professional identity and good career prospects are highly competitive, and it takes more than just being academically strong to get to study them. At least in my time, students of fields such as law and medicine were far more likely to come from wealthy high-status families with educated parents than those in more academic fields such as CS and history.
I used to know someone who joked he was the only leftist law student in his class of ~200. Leftist medical students were more common, but both fields were strongly associated with right-wing politics.
Keep in mind that money is not stuff. We can take all the rich peoples money and give it to poor and middle class - but this will not create one single potato. Instead we just have people spending more money on exactly the same amount of stuff.
You might suggest that all that money will cause people to produce more stuff - but whatever we produce comes instead of producing something else. We don’t have a large pool of non-workers that would suddenly become productive.
Giving poor and middle class people a bunch more money will simply drive inflation, empty shelves and lower quality overall. Which is exactly what we got with COVID related assistance.
I'm sympathetic to the article, but the author is painfully confused about "the rich", lumping everyone with more money than her into the same category. For instance, she mentions "1 percent—the Trumps and the Murdochs, the very, very rich." No, most of the 1% is a completely different world from the Murdochs, over three orders of magnitude away from the very rich and much closer to the middle class.
"What about the, say 19 percent of Americans in the upper-class income tier": who seriously thinks that 19% of Americans are upper-class? She's confusing the upper quintile with upper class.
"The world’s future landlords, multinational business owners, CEOs and media executives": one category here isn't like the others. Landlords (of which there are 8 million in the US) really have nothing in common with multinational business owners.
Thank you, I had the same reaction - there's a nugget of truth here, but the article can't find it due to the author's innumeracy. In my experience, the typical aging parent who has some-but-not-a-ton of assets (a house, some stock, maybe a small rental property) considers that money to be their retirement fund, and intends to spend most of it.
I think a better mentality to take for aspiring artists is that you have to absolutely love what you do and completely dedicate yourself to the craft. This might mean everything you say above - live fruggally, marry a banker, etc. You might work side jobs for years or for forever. But if you half ass it even a little bit then it is very unlikely to work out.
At least in the nordic countries you can pursue whatever passion you have while still living comfortably and compromising very little, even if you have nothing to your name.
Civilized and extremely rich. I grew up in a country with a welfare system probably as supportive as the Nordics, as a percentage of national wealth (I didn't check the figures). I can assure you that my musician friends that didn't give up on a music career (as I did), most certainly have to make sacrifices to make ends meet. Granted, at least they don't have to fear generational debt in case they get an unlucky draw in the health lottery.
My country is only a hundred years old and started as nothing but farmers fighting for independence. We're not just "rich" - we organized ourselves exceptionally efficiently and gained wealth from doing so, even while paying war reparations to Russia and investing massively into the unbelievably generous social safety net we still enjoy today.
Literally any peoples around the Earth can do it, if they really want to.
That feeling of "really want to" is enshrined in the Finnish language as "sisu", "described as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness."
I don't know enough about Africa to argue that. They seem to be getting their shit together fairly rapidly from a history of exploitation and oppression, but wouldn't know how far along they are.
Any country where one is forced to work a job they don't want in order to afford the basic necessities of life and able to pursue their passion in the vanishingly tiny amount of free time they have left after that.
The article meanders, but I think it does land on a point. There are tons of 'self made' people out there that have had unending support from their parents, every step of the way. That support gets you a huge leg-up when you're competing against peers raised without it. Failure is of no consequence when your safety net is a trampoline.
I don't think the group described is so much the "self-made" crowd so much as the "longsuffering, chronically underemployed millennial".
I personally have a lot of friends to who fit this description to a T - they will complain about living paycheck to paycheck but then also tell you which island in Hawaii is their favorite. And when you wonder why they are still turning down good paying jobs in their 30s you realize they eventually have a house and a sizable inheritance they are looking forward to one day.
In this regard, this is almost a warning about the "stealth wealthy" - people who talk about poverty and show up statistically as impoverished, but are really just role playing as poor people.
I think that millenials are probably _better_ as a whole on acknowledging the role their privileges have played in their success. At least in my cohort, the odds of someone who had a great upbringing telling you unironically to pull yourself up from your bootstraps is basically zero.
Also, I think calling it roleplaying is a little misleading because it implies they could stop if they wanted to. You can have a gigantic parental safety net and still have no great job prospects. It’s infinitely better than actually being poor, but there’s enough overlap to commiserate I think? People want to be self sufficient and can’t.
Personal experience has jaded me a bit on this. On 3 different occasions, I offered friends an almost guaranteed well-paying job at companies I was working at. All three of them turned it down:
- One was morally opposed to working at a software company
- One didn't want to get a drivers' license
- One started then quit after an internship because they didn't like the industry (it wasn't video games) and did not want to put up with a learning curve.
So while I commiserate who benefit from from a parental safety net (I would have loved to have had more rent-free years if I could), for my relationship with my friends it is often very frustrating. And it's easiest mentally if I treat them as someone enjoying the luxury of choices rather than chronically enfeebled.
There is a huge gap between someone who lives frugally and is under employed while the "figure it out" and someone who works two jobs because they must. The former will eventually have the problem solved via inheritance, while the latter must deal with the existential risk that they work two jobs until they die or become homeless.
Maybe we’re talking about different demographics? This is true of trust fund kids, but there’s a huge range of parental support. Most people I know have moving home as a safety net for homelessness, but they would be waiting until their parents die at 90 to get their first house if they were banking on inheritance.
Edit: It occurred to me that’s probably my fault from saying “enormous parental safety net” which maybe does imply trust fund kids. I really meant “people who have any parental support at all”, which seemed to be the net the author was casting. Even top quintile probably isn’t “financially support my children forever” money, is it?
With the direction housing is going relative to all other expenses, having a spare bedroom and a mortgage free home to inherit is becoming the equivalent of trust fund money.
In Boston, The value per bedroom to be ~300-600k dollars depending on location. This value is appreciating at ~8-20% per year in the current environment. If this trend were to continue for 30 years, a parent owning a 2-bedroom stands to impart 5 million+ to the child inheriting that property.
Obviously (hopefully), this trend can't continue - but having a free place to sleep is becoming a massive financial leg up. In many cases, this has become equivalent to the classic example of a "trust fund kid" from prior years. With most home owners earning money from their primary residence on paper for the last decade, simply providing the down payment for a child's home will yield a million dollar+ asset difference over 10 years compared to renting.
They aren't just role playing as poor for fun. It allows them to get undeserved political support from the actually less privileged. In NYC, HDFC properties are largely purchased with family money. High income earners are disqualified, but actual median income earners are priced out.
Anecdotally, I have a friend. His parents have bent over backwards to support him, and he stands to take over his father's business when he can no longer tend to it. The dude is smart, but he completely lacks any drive to push himself. I feel like it's sucked the wind right out of his sails, but he lives a chill, easy going life and I can't exactly hold it against him.
It’s never good to make assumptions about the future that result in you prematurely cutting off potential opportunities, particularly in terms of inheritance. Anything can happen.
It took me a long time to realize that even in Tech, the reason many choose the founder/startup track is simply because their basic middle class lifestyle and retirement were assured from the day they were born. Otherwise it simply would never be financially wise to take a job at a hot startup, or start your own business. Meanwhile there are many engineers who actively choose this lifestyle.
I was naive and blind to this fact for way too long. I just assumed that everyone that founded a startup had a cast iron constitution and could somehow stomach the risk of destitution if it failed. It only later dawned on me how little risk these people were taking. It was almost all 'opportunity cost' for them.
Look at any field that’s somewhat prestigious but oversaturated enough that owners can pay poverty wages and you’ll find a ton of rich kids trying to live their dream! See art, film, journalism, architecture, political staffers. Can you blame them?
I think it’s important that young folks see this and internalize it so they’re not caught with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt in a field that ultimately depends on time and luck. You’re risking a lot more than many of your peers, and you’re going to have less freedom and energy to make it work.
Is any of that news though? This article seems like it’s trying so hard to point out something unique, but other than shifting tastes it seems the same as it ever was.
People with wealthy parents are more likely to be wealthy later in life. People who perform wage labor and do not have inheritances will not have as much wealth.
More news at 11, thank you for attending my TED Talk.
Only if they (or others) imply that "everyone could have done it" and use their "self-made" success to argue against social safety-nets like unemployment benefits and healthcare for all.
Absolutely not, but that person is in no position to then turn around and judge those who are struggling, or more subtly, refusing to support policies that would help those that are struggling. There isn't the blatant 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' admonishment but there is absolutely an empathy gap between the haves and have nots.
My comment got kind of far from its context, visually. By "supporting" I'm really referring to significant amounts of financial support, beyond what normal people would be able to give to their children.
I do think it's possible for a person to be self-made. But I think the much narrower concept of the "self-made American millionaire" does more harm than good, as a mythological idea in US politics.
Edit: Before you reply to this, read a little more of the thread I'm saying this in, where other people are making this point more eloquently.
I'm curious, who is more "self-made" in your opinion, someone with unsupportive parents who provide money, or someone with supportive (emotionally) parents without money?
What about someone that had neither, but due to the country they grew up in or the colour of their skin they have access to government funded incentive programs, or bank loans?
What if you benefited from colonialism hundreds of years ago, or the establishment of infrastucture such as roads or telephone lines? Are you self made?
This weird privilege check doesn't make much sense to me. The "self-made" test to me is "did you put in the work and do the grind?". That's it.
I don’t know about “future rich millennials” but the trend of millennials extrapolating from their circle of friends to all of society is one that I could do without.
Any data on whether inherited or gifted assets have become a larger fraction of net worth than labor for most Americans? (Or Australians for that matter? I’m sure Hacker News is full of people who are living proof that social mobility through wages exists. I don’t know if it’s up or down, but am sure it has nothing to do with the author’s friends taste in wine.
Also, all the talk of “inheritance” is weird in the context of millennials. The average person will only inherit their parents in their fifties or sixties, and even then split it with one or more siblings.
Eh. I'm in exactly the same group she's talking about (born in 84, so at the upper end of millennial age) and my inheritance has started already. My parents have calculated that they have enough to live on until the time they expect to die, so they're passing any extra onto me early to avoid inheritance tax.
Personally, it kinda grates on me. I'm very much a soft socialist, who believes in everybody paying their fair share of tax. I've also derived a lot of satisfaction over the years in becoming self-sufficient[1] and being able to pay my own way without them having to prop me up. But it's their money and they're free to do with it as they wish.
As it stands, I'm doing the privileged thing that the author mentions, and 'refusing' it: it's going in an investment account and I'll continue to live within the means that I earn myself. But I know that that still means that I'll never be afraid of having to live on the dole, or do a job that I utterly hate.
In any case, even without that money, as an ex-FAANG developer I'm still significantly more privileged than most of my peers: I don't have any debt, I own my (fairly cheap) home outright, and I own a (very cheap) car and motorbike, also outright. Amongst my friends, most of whom are renters working in precarious jobs, I just don't mention money.
[1] How does that work with the socialism? Well - I'm happy to take from the government, because everybody can get the same, and I've repaid that with taxes over the years.
Presumably there are (relatively) straight-forward solutions to this issue no? For instance; accept the money from your parents, invest it into an Index Fund without touching it, and when your parents do pass on, donate the inheritance to GiveDirectly or whatever charity you deem worthwhile.
> Any data on whether inherited or gifted assets have become a larger fraction of net worth than labor for most Americans?
Presumably, that's what the book The Asset Economy studies in detail, but unfortunately this essay only touches on it in broad strokes and does not serve as a review of it. Looks like here's one, though:
Seems kind of disingenuous to choose a career (curator and writer, according to the brief bio) which is known to not pay well, and then complain that working for a wage doesn't allow for upward mobility. She complains that the system is broken, but does not demonstrate that anything is broken except her strategy for upward mobility, if that's what she actually wanted. (Except that worked: hobnob among the wealthy and marry one)
I read a piece* some time ago arguing that in the Anglo economies, a conscious decision was made to use asset price appreciation as the engine of wealth creation rather than productivity growth and wage increases. Although I cannot know the truth of this argument, I feel like it explains a hell of a lot. I just rather wish I had understood such a policy had been pursued. For the author of the article, I feel she would do well to understand that who gets what is not an unfathomable and pre-ordained outcome. It is the result of the accretion of many policy choices which favour one outcome over another.
*I’m very sorry I’m not able to post the link, which despite looking for myself again recently, I cannot find.
>Now, The Asset Economy presents hard new evidence for a disgusting truth: that wage labor is a scam.
This is, and has been, the truth since forever. There was never an era when you could get rich selling your back. Never. The best you could hope for was comfort. Anyone who says differently is glamorizing a past that they didn't live in.
Pretending that every boomer had a good union job is like pretending every millennial is a tech-bro with a six figure job and RSUs out of college. Younger boomers struggled. There was loads of social strife in the 70s as they came of age. They became adults in a world of massive inflation, war, and a general feeling of everything being awful.
That house they bought so cheap in the 80s came with a mortgage with double digit interest payments. That pension they had was probably gutted at several points by terrible business people. They faced challenges, much like we do. And they had their fair share of wealthy layabouts, much like we do.
All true, but inequality is dramatically and measurably worse now than it was then, and the costs of things like education and healthcare were much lower.
I liked this line near the end that helps bring together the article “But what if the question isn’t who are you, but what socioeconomic structures contain who you are?”.
The article says the the average down payment contribution by parents is $89,000 in Australia. I was curious about the American number so I looked it up. Apparently it is $39,000 in the US as of 2019 prices.[0]
Are you guys getting downpayment contributions? I had to buy my house on my own, my parents make way less than me, it will actually break my heart to take money from my parents.
My dad did well for himself working in the trades, and being thrifty and saving a lot. He certain out could have, but his philosophy was generally “you cherish what you work hard to buy or build”, and instead of providing money he provided guidance on how to budget, how to save, etc. I received no help with college or house purchase, and I am grateful for it.
As an example, at around 10 years old or so, he sat me down every month to go through budgeting, paying the mortgage, etc. He showed me how to make basic models that showed the benefit of various length mortgages assuming certain house appreciation percentages per year, and showed me the danger and the benefit of leverage.
As an aside, he never finished high school and worked a skilled manual labor job that combined hands on mechanical and basic electrical engineering, and still can’t spell for shit.
Through him I met many people with similar backgrounds, which formed the basis for my worldview of “the trades” being a great option for smart people, college not being the only route, etc.
My parents have never directly paid for any of my down payments, but money is fungible. My parents are wealthy, and I certainly did benefit from that directly, and also have always known that there is a safety net out there for me that others do not enjoy.
Judging from inflation-adjusted "net worth at same age" graphs, I'd say it's mostly about whether your parents were boomers (though not all of them would be in that position either, obviously, and of course some Xers have been very successful).
Mine are boomers. I've had assistance from them equivalent to probably $100,000 since turning 18 (I'm approaching 40). I have three siblings and I bet the total they've helped us all out amounts to something over $500,000 (some have received/needed a lot more help than me)
No down payment help for me. But they did buy me a house to live in for a couple years, once. (they broke even or made a little money on that one, but still, you'd have to reckon the value as at least what it'd have cost me to rent the same thing). And paid for my (very cheap) college tuition. Among lots of other things like a being gifted a hand-me-down car when I left the house.
My dad owned a couple barely-successful blue-collar small businesses when he was young, after growing up literally in a barn because their house was a cobbled-together four-room farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and didn't have enough space for all six of the kids, then had a blue-collar industrial job for 2ish decades and retired after making it into the lower tier of middle management for another decade or so. They briefly tried renting a house they bought and fixed up, but hated it and by the end had basically just paid to have a sub-minimum-wage job and a lot of stress, so that didn't help much (this is before house prices went insane, so the appreciation from owning that over the couple years they had it was minimal—I think it was the early 90s, and not a hot market).
That's all. Not a doctor or anything. My mom didn't work past about age 30, and worked in a low-level federal job before that. My dad even had a divorce in his background (a couple of my siblings are from that marriage).
It really, really was different for the boomers. I come from "privilege" but all they did to get me/us there was just live a totally mundane, middling life, and didn't colossally fuck up.
[EDIT] Oh, and their educations are "high school diploma" (dad) and "junior college secretarial certificate" (mom)
It was really, really, really different for that generation.
There’s some selection bias since only people who can afford a house are included. Tons of rich boomers out there giving money to their kids. I unfortunately am not getting anything either.
Weirdly, I found out about this previously because some of my peers who are no longer friends assumed by parents helped me out in this way. In actuality, my parents had no money to help because they were nearly ruined by 2008 and I bought my house at market bottom with my own money, having been saving diligently since I was bagging groceries in high school. In fact, I don't know a single person who had their parents help them make their downpayment, but all of my peers in my career are homeowners and Millennials. Frankly, I can't even fathom asking my parents for that money in the first place.
What is her beef against landlords? Or homeownership?
Why does she not consider managing investments work?
> What about the, say 19 percent of Americans in the upper-class income tier, who will defend their right to be landlords, to increase their unearned wealth through their investments?
This is a pretty weird article. I get that the author is unhappy with members of her cohort who are rich because of inherited wealth and she doesn't like conspicuous consumption of "natural wine" but the idea that natural wine is emblematic of these problems is just weird to me?
It's not as if inherited wealth, greenwashing, landlords, or conspicuous consumption were just invented within the last couple years by older Millennials with inherited wealth.
Similarly,
> As the growth limits of free-market economies are approached, the logic of late-stage capitalism dictates that new markets must be identified and aggressively pursued.
Identifying new markets isn't "late-stage" capitalism... It's just capitalism, period. Many people also believe that capitalism inherently leads to wealth inequality unless efforts are taken to stop that.
This whole article seems to be implying that the situation is some sort of moral failing of people who drink "natural wine" but if there's a problem here it's the underlying inequality, not the choice of wealthy people to spend money on veblen goods?
>This whole article seems to be implying that the situation is some sort of moral failing of people who drink "natural wine" but if there's a problem here it's the underlying inequality, not the choice of wealthy people to spend money on veblen goods?
The trick is that the article isn't about anything, really. There might have been a smattering of true facts in there, but the authors profession is getting paid to paint generational stereotypes and then talk shit about them.
Can’t agree more. Taking about inequality while looking at those who have more than you is never going to work for me. Her opinion would have been more interesting if she had written about how privileged she is compared to the vast majority of the world population.
I had a similar reaction. As luxury goods go, their quote of ~$30 per bottle natural wine isn’t all that expensive. But then I read:
> The trend is now in full swing worldwide, and in my area, you can order a “natty” at most good small bars and many larger establishments.
It’s not the item, it’s the culture around it. I understand the Australian predilection for shortening words but this makes my skin crawl. But responding to your statement:
> Many people also believe that capitalism inherently leads to wealth inequality unless efforts are taken to stop that.
Because there’s a lot of evidence to support that. I can grab you some references if you like.
When I was in college, a 'natty' referred to a far, far different drink. But then again, I did my undergrad at Flyover State U. On the other hand, I bet 80%+ of those folks own a house right now.
I'm pretty sure "natty" means Natural Light and/or Natural Ice at every college. Except maybe some of the rich-kid fallback private schools in the East that most people have never heard of. There, maybe not.
> As the growth limits of free-market economies are approached, the logic of late-stage capitalism dictates that new markets must be identified and aggressively pursued.
Also, "late-stage capitalism" was first identified... 120 years ago. If it's late stage, it's lasting an awful long time.
The reality is this is happening everywhere - how have we not run out of movies or music or books or ideas? New genres must be identified and aggressively pursued - and yet we are dealing with growth limits there as well. If late-stage capitalism is a thing, I would argue we are more in a late stage society.
Obviously "late-stage" is a continuum. Capitalism is always "progressing", and you can draw a line wherever you want and say: "That's it, that's where it crosses the line into what people will no longer tolerate, and something is going to have to change".
While maybe "late-stage" is a newish term, of course the idea itself isn't. Why might we credibly think that what's happening now is really "late-stage" as compared to, e.g. the industrial revolution?
I think you can make a case for it. You can make a case against it as well, but that leaves you arguing essentially "it's been just as bad for a long time, so there's nothing special about now". And at that point, it's a semantic quibble and you've nearly bought into the idea behind the phrase, which is "maybe something is going to have to change".
> Many people also believe that capitalism inherently leads to wealth inequality unless efforts are taken to stop that.
Or alternatively, capitalism is gamed by legislation passed by the government, written by lobbyists, to ensure corporate cash cows are never troubled. Medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, banking industries are good examples. That's not really capitalism.
You have that backwards. Capitalism is not gamed by legislation, buying legislation is a core concept of unregulated capitalism.
As is "buying people" and "paying someone to make the dead hooker go away and not be a problem"
One of the core ideas of a constitutional republic is that there are fundamental rights and laws that are not for sale. As such "efforts are taken" to prevent the worst that pure unrestrained capitalism could do.
Same goes for wealth inequality. Collecting taxes to finance schools available for free to those who could not pay for a school out of their own livelihood is "not really capitalism" and yet it is one of the key elements of social upwards mobility.
And yes unrestrained capitalism is creating more inequality. A core concept of a capitalist-social-democratic-republic is that workers can unionize to have more power in wage negotiations. In a pure capitalist society a factory owner would consider paying mercenaries to shoot the union leaders and beat up anyone willing to protest the conditions. That happened a lot in the last two centuries.
That's exactly capitalism: the system that emerged as the mercantile class leveraged their growing influence to wrest control of government from the titled aristocracy to themselves, and organized it to suit their ends as a class.
(It's not the utopian vision created to justify capitalism after critics identified “capitalism“ as a thing and started attacking it, but...that vision was always a lie to keep the working classes in line and believing that the dominion exercised over them was fair.)
There's a pretty stark difference between 'golden age' capitalism and whatever this is now we're moving towards. The author is right to point out that the old social contract, which consisted of mass employment and labour as the primary input is largely being replaced by more and more bizarre ownership and asset speculation schemes.
Natural wine is one example, a more topical one is the entire 'crypto-industry'. Which isn't really an industry because nothing industrial is going on. There's not really any employment, productive work or goods produced as much as it is one big desperate attempt to get your foot into ownership schemes of various sorts.
'Economic activity' in that realm primarily consists of shoveling symbolic value from one purse into the other without producing or consuming anything of actual use value.
> The author is right to point out that the old social contract, which consisted of mass employment and labour as the primary input is largely being replaced by more and more bizarre ownership and asset speculation schemes.
If you believe Piketty, this was true for most of human history, and the high value of labor was just a temporary blip from industrialization.
Yes-ish. Increasing financialization (going hand-in-hand with deindustrialization) seems like a precursor for this. With the difference I suppose that there is a core to banking of lending to the productive industry and allocating resources that is absent in the crypto world entirely. So more accurately maybe it's high finance on steroids
Ultimately, the existing banking system will either eat crypto, or crypto will become the basis for the new banking system.
It's not really any better or worse. People are excited about it now because the power structures aren't so entrenched yet. It looks like a chance to re-write the same history, but with yourself and your friends on the New Wall Street by dint of your cleverness and honest (ok, maybe not honest, but ) work... two things which no longer get you anywhere in the traditional finance sector.
I can't in good-faith argue very strongly _for_ crypto, but I can't argue against it either.
WINE IS THE SYMBOL OF DECADENCE!
Alcohol impairs regeneration of neurons:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2796092/#:~:tex....
It has been disproved that we are born with a fix amount of neurons, in fact living a healthy life (no alcohol, light cardio, no smoking, 7-9 hours sleep) do help you regenerate more neurons.
So wine is a great equalizer.
Rich dumb people are paying a lot of money to be stupider. Literally.
So don't play that game. Don't buy wine, don't buy expensive traditional watches (my 25USD Decathlon watch has time,date,alarm,chrono, light and the battery last 5+ years).
Do buy property and assets. Buy ETFs and invest wisely.
The people splashing their money are headed down. You are meeting them in the middle because you are headed up. Don't follow them downstairs.
Avoid the decadence of dumb people inheriting wealth and thinking that's the way to go.
If you follow your own advice and end up with a huge ETF portfolio, there will come a point where you can buy an undrinkable amount of wine and an unwearable number of watches without evening noticing.
Also, you never know when life will end - got to enjoy it while you have it.
I did and I do, I lived in 15 countries 6 months each while nomading and founding my company for 10 years. I've already had more adventures than the vast majority of people ever will. After some crazy 20ies I'm now having some serious 30s.
Raising 2 kids and working hard on my boostrapped company. I'm setting the stage for another round of wild achievements.
> unwearable number of watches
The thinks I want can't be bought. They can be made with a huge amount of money and work. I would never be satisfied in buying a great object, I would rather make a mediocre one I made myself.
Some people want watches and wine, some people want to go to Mars, to populate the oceans, dig tunnels, build awesome stuff, fix an illness for all humanity and generations to come. I'm sure you and most hacker news are closer to 2nd group.
>So wine is a great equalizer. Rich dumb people are paying a lot of money to be stupider. Literally.
This is hyperbole. There is a wide world of difference between someone who enjoys a 6 pack a week and the alcoholic who downs a fifth of whiskey a day. Alcohol's ill effects are a J-Shaped curve that increase exponentially after 20 drinks a week, but that's a lot of booze. One can consume in moderation with almost no consequence.
Alcohol is borrowed happines from the future.
You are trading +1 happiness now for -2 sadness tomorrow morning.
The more you age the more the hangover gets worse.
All those neurons lost. It's just better to focus on other things that make you happy that actually have compound effect instead of compound debt.
By the way, try to have a Mango smoothie or some great non-alcholic beverage next time you go out. It's actually very nice!
You can drink without hangovers if you exercise moderation and stay hydrated. The biggest mistake people make is seriously overdoing it. It doesn't have to be binge drinking or sobriety. Though, I do agree with you about getting smoothies when you go out. Alcohol is outrageously overpriced and I don't enjoy most bars anyway.
What a dreary article. If the author put down her Marx for a moment and ventured out into the real world, she’d be able to tell a much different story.
> the logic of late-stage capitalism dictates that new markets must be identified and aggressively pursued. With natural wine, a win-win situation emerges. The drinkers get the social capital, and the liquor industry gets the actual capital.
In reality, the natural wine world is full of enthusiastic independent makers who are challenging the dominance of the old chateaux, and getting people as excited about $30 bottles as the previous generation was about $300 or $3000 bottles. Visit a natural wine fair, and you’ll find one-man operations making interesting wine that can compete again the big wineries.
Yeah, in the media landscape that is certainly showing. Sadly that comes with a set of naivete that fails to hold colleagues to account. Sorry for being so negative about certain professions, but it has reached a level that is hard to entertain and I am not really lacking money myself.
But if the upbringing was that good it should maybe net a better education.
The author is of course mostly right but forgets to address the fact that she is also a privileged (even before getting married) when compared to the vast majority of the world population. So yes, we live in a world were a lot of who we will be is predetermined at birth.
I think that comparisons to most of the world population are irrelevant. Telling someone who is struggling in a developed country that somewhere across the world many people have it worse - this doesn't help anyone.
That's a surprisingly common attitude in my experience - "Even poor people in the USA live great compared to [historical serfs, people starving in afghanistan, (what i imagine it was like for) my grandparents, etc.]" . . . with the usually unspoken follow-on that [therefore it's fine to ignore their plight].
Yeah it's a really reactionary attitude! Most people who say it though aren't really able to articulate the why it matters. Because they clearly at the same time think lots of poverty related issues, like homelessness, are issues we need to solve.
It doesn't help their struggle, but it does provide a wider frame for their laments.
My hypothetical friend was complaining that he will only inherit $5M from his parents, because they made some bad investments, when he should really be getting $15M.
Does no one have a right to tell that person to stop complaining and accept what they have? After all, how does it help my hypothetical friend that some people happen to be struggling more than he is?
The difference is that your friend has his basic needs more than covered and he’s living a good life either way. That’s when perspective helps. But you can’t say the same thing about a minimum wage worker in the US for example - they’ll struggle and telling them that they’re in the top n % worldwide doesn’t help at all.
No, that’s my entire point. When we’re talking about covering basic needs you can’t add “compared to” at the end. They’re either covered or they aren’t.
> I noticed that a particular sliver of my contemporaries had stopped pretending to be broke, or poor
My thoughts on this: its kind of self-fulfilling by the culture.
Although I was raised to rely on my own earnings for everything, some of my parent's colleagues quipped that some of my accomplishments and risks I took were because I could fall back on my parents. My parents were insulted, I was insulted .... at the time. Were my 13 hour days and multiple jobs and barely making rent after barely finishing a college degree irrelevant!? But then I started to wonder if subconsciously it was true. Or what other forms of privilege I was enjoying. What I found was that the support system while I was in grade school and college was very important, and the lack of some distractions is important, but I still found that I had to play the cards I was dealt very meticulously, I was relying completely on my own acumen and finances - at the time.
Where this introspection did lead me though, was that I wasn't taking enough risk because they were correct, my parents would support me. So I took on more risk because "the proletariat" forced that perception on me and there's
A) No point in bragging about having no support from parents.
B) No point in wasting time being poor for the bragging rights. We are not the same no matter what.
My parents were familiar with corporate America and a career like that. I did that and I was good at that. But as I had begun noticing what a "friends and family" round was, and all these startup founders had their seed rounds filled by their parents, I noticed the complete cultural difference between the other side of society that says "don't take money from family" because of the idea that it will ruin all relationships. No, turns out when the covenants are clear, like with equity, as opposed to a promissory note, people are willing to be professional about it. So I did the same. Something I wouldn't have done, and made money on that, and took the difference as described in the contract. It wasn't all uphill, it was dangerous and scary and sometimes a loosing bet. But there was enough resources to do it again if necessary. I wouldn't have ever even tested the limits of my parents willingness to support. But now I can more clearly see other groups of people who have actual generational wealth based around this. Based around asking for millions of dollars of support into their new hedge fund, from their parents or community. The legal trusts that unlock as different rites of passage are hit, correlated with age. Something previously unrelatable, but now I see it. And I wouldn't have noticed if salty people didn't force their differences on me.
I feel like others have reached similar conclusions. That its gotten kind of boring pretending that "I got a good deal on rent" in that expensive area. Not everyone is rent controlled and good deal meant market price. The paths diverge, just own it.
If you have a card to play that helps your goals, then play it.
The trust fund kid that has a successful startup they didn't need to save up for could just as easily been an ambitionless person, perhaps even distracted by vices.
So its all about playing the cards you were dealt. I respect that, no matter what the cards are now.
I think the push to “recognize privilege” actually accelerates people to double down on it. Like oh we’re not pretending anymore, then lets make this gulf as wide as it can go.
I grew up as lower middle class, and so did my wife. We are doing well financially but we both have a huge aversion to debt which means we save and buy a lot of things in cash even when it's not an advantage. I know this is an artifact of us growing up lower middle class and dealing with the issues that brings. Many of our friends are much more comfortable with high levels of debt compared to income, but there is nobody my wife and I could turn to for money if we really needed it.
We have 3 kids, and eventually I want them to be able to take the financial risks we can't. I'd like to see how high they can fly when they've got what they need. I think all parents want that for their kids, even if it's not fashionable to say so.
> Like oh we’re not pretending anymore, then lets make this gulf as wide as it can go.
Privilege is a tool that can be used to minimize or maximize inequality. If you have privilege, you can (and arguably should) use it to pull others up, rather than pulling up the ladder behind you, so to speak.
You can do this by running or working for successful companies that provide valuable, dignifying services and employ thousands of people to give them a pathway out of poverty, without making yourself obscenely rich and "widening the gulf".
Sure, it also means doing all that, while living in the expensive neighborhood without pretending you barely got in, compared to it all comfortably fitting in a budget. It means knowing there is widespread resentment towards college kids whose parents pay for it, and paying for it anyway because there’s no utility for that unnecessary struggle for your children.
Your arguments sum up to "society makes me feel bad for spending my money on expensive things" and, you know, that's a you problem. No one forces you to spend money on your kids' college or to live in an expensive neighborhood. I still don't see how any of this justifies "widening the gulf".
That’s not the argument. Sorry you got that impression.
The “argument” or observation was “Society says I should recognize my privilege, and holy moly I was not leveraging that nearly enough!”
There is no guilt associated with that. It was about seeing if anybody could relate, since it isn’t talked about enough but the article was about how some people stopped pretending.
I’m totally down with normalizing that. Pretending was insufferable to the people that had wealth and a safety net, it was insufferable to the people that could tell there was a difference in the struggles.
> What fascinates me is that the authors of The Asset Economy are not talking about what anthropologist Dave Graeber called the 1 percent—the Trumps and the Murdochs, the very, very rich. What about the, say 19 percent of Americans in the upper-class income tier, who will defend their right to be landlords, to increase their unearned wealth through their investments?
This is something I want to drum from the rooftops - the political effects of a handful of billionaires is vastly overrated compared to the sheer number of "merely" wealthy people. Your local zoning issues aren't because Jeff Bezos has taken a personal interest in destroying the lives of poor people in your neighborhood, it's because there are enough doctors and lawyers and children of doctors and lawyers acting selfishly to protect their investments.
In this regard, I wish more people would read Progress and Poverty. The book is a lightning flash of clarity. Especially in the last decade, it has become shockingly prescient.
Do you have any recommendations for which publication/edition to choose? I have a Wikipedia-fueled, cursory knowledge of Georgism, but I'd like to learn more because it does seem compelling and relevant as you noted. It seems that it keeps coming up.
Yes the problem is class conflict, not a handful of people. The handful of people are just a sign of how badly the capitalist class are winning the conflict.
"the problem" is the pareto distribution of wealth and power we can observe in every human society we know of. The tension ("class conflict") between the 20% and the 80% is a symptom. Even those systems that try to reduce its effect still have it.
Wealth distribution is not the same as class conflict, it's an effect of it, but yes class division has existed since civilisation began (not so much beforehand though).
In feudal times it was between the aristocracy and the peasantry, now it's between business owners and investors, and employees.
Buried lede: IMO the most important sentence in this is:
> Millennials are the first to live through an era in which asset ownership matters more than income and job mobility.
In the US I will add that this is a predictable outcome on intentional changes in patterns of wealth capture which began c. 1970 and accelerated in several stages thereafter via the feedback systems between wealth accumulation, and political and media capture.
TL;DR: in the US almost all real wealth gains have since 1970 gone to the upper few percent of wealth holders; the "19%" mentioned in the article refers primarily to what I call the "halo class" or DMZ of the uber-wealthy, which others have called the precariate: those wealthy enough to enjoy the trappings of what was in the 70s an upper-middle class income/wealth, but is now a precarious prerogative today. It is arguably the function of this precariate class to defend wealth recovery by lower tiers, out of fear of falling into them, regardless that the main impact of this is to prevent wealth recovery from the very few who have captured almost all of it.
These btw are not opinions and the data is no way controversial, editorialization such as attribution of anxiety and behavior to the upper 10-20% aside. This is well-known, richly documented, easy to prove, etc.,
yet almost entirely undiscussed in mainstream media including allegedly nonpartisan outlets like NPR whose intended function (at least on paper) was to serve public interest.
I will assert that this is directly related to the capture of media and government by extreme wealth.
--
Why mention this? Because it is reversible; and reversing it is IMO a mandatory step if we seek not just to preserve social coherence and democracy in the US (and West),
but also as a precondition for taking meaningful collective action wrt climate change.
Prediction: we won't do either; and my children will live to see an almost unimaginably more brutal and ugly world than the one I was myself promised.
I suppose I might sound like one of those people she's decrying in her article, but frankly my experience with my peers as I was building my career is that a lot of the people who I became friends with when I was younger over our shared passion for technology (and usually gaming) failed to develop the same skillset and career prospects because they didn't possess the same attitudes. Over time, I've drifted away from those people and built new friend groups as an adult through people from work and school, and almost all of those peers were focused on building wealth and supporting a family above other concerns. In both groups, all of the people involved had early access to computers (a privilege), opportunities for technical education (a privilege), and some measure of parental support (a privilege), but the choices and motivations matter, and those who are making the choices that lead to building wealth from a wage earned do so.
While the author might not look at it the same way, it's absolutely parental support that some of my former friends who are nearing (or into) their 40s are able to still live at home (which might be a trailer) with their parents in a small Midwest town and play video games all day while working a minimum wage job. One former friend was one of the most capable developers I've ever known, did tons of open source work, but just doesn't want to work in the industry and instead has worked fast food jobs for the nearly 25 years I've known them, while I was earning a six figure income that entire time working in tech with less skills.
Through some of my other personal connections, I know plenty of people in the art world as well, and pretty much all of them fall into one of four categories (1) inherited wealth [the focus of her article], (2) married well, (3) struggling working for mostly non-profits at mid-level or lower roles, or (4) art became a hobby while they went into a "real" job. The folks in (1) make up a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the people I've met in the art world, but a significant portion of those who make art their "career". I think this, to some degree or another, has always been the case. While this may be a shocking reality to stumble upon in your 30s, I'd suggest this means you haven't really been paying attention, rather than the world is an unjust and unfair place and all extant systems should be torn down.
As a Millennial, my observations and experiences have strongly supported a conclusion that life is mostly what you make of it. All but a handful of the people I call friends now came from very modest beginnings, myself included, mostly from small towns in the Midwest, with no special treatment to speak of in their education, yet all managed to build successful professional careers in technology by focusing on the right motivations and making the right choices for their goals. Most of the folks I know in arts in category (3) above love their position in life, because they get to do what they're passionate about every day, but they're also not under any illusion that they'll ever make as much money as the people who pursued high-demand professional careers. I don't know what it is about the author and many of the folks who end up in (2) or (4) above, but they almost always feel like life is unfair because they wanted to have the lifestyle of (1) or somebody in a professional career, while not doing the things necessary to earn it.
Thems the breaks, life's not fair, but it's not /that/ hard to figure out either. If you're figuring this out in your 30s, it's not ideal, but it's also not too late to make different choices now. It starts with accepting accountability for your own choices and making a change, not with whining about it, though.
Current generations were sold on the promise that you can be what you want. That you have the right (and almost the duty) to follow your passion. In reality the game is rigged. The article points this out correctly, in my opinion, and conveys the bitterness that comes from unveiling this illusion.
Among the writers and curators in my social circles (I would add artists, musicians, actors, …), there is a tacit agreement that if you want to pursue such careers, you have to (1) come from wealth, (2) marry a banker, (3) live frugally. I perceive some sense of happiness, or at least peace with oneself, mostly from the ones falling under option (3), even if they have by far the toughest lives.
Of course, there's always the promise of (4) become tremendously successful, but I don't know anyone who made it. And (5) give up and perform a job that people are willing to pay real money for.
Personally, I support high inheritance taxes to balance things out a bit. I think it's healthier for everyone. Those trust fund kids are in a permanent struggle to live up to unrealistic expectations and I'm not sure that's so great.
As for the natural wines detour, it feels quite weird for me. I don't see how they're much different from craft beer in 2005 or nutmeg in the 1500s. There are perfectly good wines for under 5€, drink that instead. If your friends are looking down on you for that, find new friends, seriously.