<story><title>How to get rich without being lucky (2019)</title><url>https://nav.al/rich</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonameiguess</author><text>Discussions like these seem to miss the critical difference between individually and socially rational incentives and behaviors. Surely, given you at least live in a place that is sufficiently secure and stable with liberal markets and access to capital, &lt;i&gt;anyone&lt;/i&gt; can get rich by following in the footsteps of the investor class. It is definitely not the case that &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; can get rich this way. If all 8 billion people on the planet did nothing but shuffle around paper ownership claims, there would be nothing to actually own. For an economy to produce anything at all, the vast majority of participants need to be on the ground making stuff, with only a tiny vanishing few shuffling paper at the top to decide who gets to own the inputs and outputs.&lt;p&gt;Maybe we&amp;#x27;ll actually reach some future where all production and maintenance labor is fully automated and most participants in an economy won&amp;#x27;t be human and we can just ethically enslave them for the benefit of human owners, but we&amp;#x27;re nowhere near that point.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m living right now in a hotbed of construction, a rapid growth metro, and I&amp;#x27;m in the middle of it. Three lots I can see from my bedroom window are being leveled and turned into townhouses. That work is being done by people. They certainly have machine work multipliers. Nobody is carrying lumber and stone by hand from quarries to job site. Nobody is leveling the earth with shovels and trowels. But the bobcats and trucks are still operated by humans. Pipe is laid by humans. Walls are erected by humans. If all those people tried to do my job instead and became coders, or worse, tried to become investors, I and all the investors would be left with nowhere to live because no one would be building houses. We&amp;#x27;d have no water or electricity if no one was laying the pipes and lines.&lt;p&gt;At some point, we should realize this and attempt to have an economy that recognizes most people in the economy have to be doing basic labor for there to be an economy at all, and figure out a way to accomplish this without these people needing to live paycheck to paycheck with the looming threat of a medical emergency able to wipe them out permanently. We can&amp;#x27;t just tell them to all change their focus from doing work to building wealth, because if they actually all do that, there will no longer be any wealth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ItsMonkk</author><text>The author is mostly right, in this meta the best thing you can do is leverage as much as you can and pray that it doesn&amp;#x27;t burst at the wrong time. But that takes luck.&lt;p&gt;Incentives drive behavior. If you perverse the incentives, the  economy will follow.&lt;p&gt;Why is our productivity growth at all time lows? Because our best are figuring out how to get people to click ads. Our best are trying to work out exactly which financial product will go up the most safely.&lt;p&gt;When the increase of the money supply outpaces the increase in productivity, everyone mistakes leverage for genius.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to get rich without being lucky (2019)</title><url>https://nav.al/rich</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nonameiguess</author><text>Discussions like these seem to miss the critical difference between individually and socially rational incentives and behaviors. Surely, given you at least live in a place that is sufficiently secure and stable with liberal markets and access to capital, &lt;i&gt;anyone&lt;/i&gt; can get rich by following in the footsteps of the investor class. It is definitely not the case that &lt;i&gt;everyone&lt;/i&gt; can get rich this way. If all 8 billion people on the planet did nothing but shuffle around paper ownership claims, there would be nothing to actually own. For an economy to produce anything at all, the vast majority of participants need to be on the ground making stuff, with only a tiny vanishing few shuffling paper at the top to decide who gets to own the inputs and outputs.&lt;p&gt;Maybe we&amp;#x27;ll actually reach some future where all production and maintenance labor is fully automated and most participants in an economy won&amp;#x27;t be human and we can just ethically enslave them for the benefit of human owners, but we&amp;#x27;re nowhere near that point.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m living right now in a hotbed of construction, a rapid growth metro, and I&amp;#x27;m in the middle of it. Three lots I can see from my bedroom window are being leveled and turned into townhouses. That work is being done by people. They certainly have machine work multipliers. Nobody is carrying lumber and stone by hand from quarries to job site. Nobody is leveling the earth with shovels and trowels. But the bobcats and trucks are still operated by humans. Pipe is laid by humans. Walls are erected by humans. If all those people tried to do my job instead and became coders, or worse, tried to become investors, I and all the investors would be left with nowhere to live because no one would be building houses. We&amp;#x27;d have no water or electricity if no one was laying the pipes and lines.&lt;p&gt;At some point, we should realize this and attempt to have an economy that recognizes most people in the economy have to be doing basic labor for there to be an economy at all, and figure out a way to accomplish this without these people needing to live paycheck to paycheck with the looming threat of a medical emergency able to wipe them out permanently. We can&amp;#x27;t just tell them to all change their focus from doing work to building wealth, because if they actually all do that, there will no longer be any wealth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qzw</author><text>&amp;gt; Maybe we&amp;#x27;ll actually reach some future where all production and maintenance labor is fully automated and most participants in an economy won&amp;#x27;t be human and we can just ethically enslave them for the benefit of human owners, but we&amp;#x27;re nowhere near that point.&lt;p&gt;It’s equally likely that in such a future most people will be on some version of UBI that allows them to get by, but wealth, in whatever form it takes, will still be limited to a relatively small subset of people. There’s no reason to believe that the robots&amp;#x2F;AGI&amp;#x2F;whatever means of production will naturally be owned collectively rather than privately. I hope the future turns out better, but there seems to be something in human nature that makes inequity tend to stick around.</text></comment>