The truth is economic growth hasn’t been occurring in real terms for most people for a long time and the rich have been transferring money from the poor to themselves at a dramatic rate.

I’m starting to think the entire system is corrupt and we are headed for a destroyed Europe and a civil war in the US. Maybe I’m very pessimistic but this moment in history feels like the end of the American empire, what comes after this is extremely uncertain but people only seem to demand a fair piece of the wealth after a world war.

This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.

Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.

It’s the new feudalism.

https://investors.redfin.com/news-events/press-releases/deta...

They’re not hardcore enough to do meaningful research.

They’re too expensive to work in factories. (And not going to compete with Chinese slave labor)

What’s left? Hard to automate or offshore labor: service, or menial labor.

Surely you can’t become wealthy that way? I just happened to blunder my way into tech despite subpar education.

This study matches my anecdotal experiences. Second and third generations of wealth don't respect money and this manifest in all kinds of bad behavior that leads to wealth destruction.

I don’t know a single neighborhood in this city where the average household in that neighborhood makes enough to live there with current prices.

I genuinely don’t know why I even work anymore. I don’t have any achievable financial goals except save as much as I can until I move away to live off my savings in a cheap area

I hope we start there, a very simple and straightforward action to take.

It all happened so fast in 2022.

You don't cut off your finger when you get a splinter, or tell your earlobe it needs to fend for itself because it just hangs there and does nothing most of the time.

Pain in our bodies can make us shift our whole being to ease pressure on a stiff muscle or avoid a small burn.

Pain in our society falls on deaf ears and drives us to fight over scraps when there is abundance everywhere.

The solutions are simple. We all need our basic needs met, we should strive to end the suffering of others, and to help each other reach our true potential from where we are right now.

I wonder how much of this inherited wealth is from rising house prices. My parents' generation (I'm 38) have earned around €500k from rising house prices during their lifetime. The price of their house has more than quadrupled since when they bought it 35 years ago. That's a lot of money in inheritance right there. Something that children of parents who rent don't get.

But also there is a lot of upwards mobility.

And they do not need to be correlated even. What if rich families maintain their wealth, and meanwhile other families create wealth and become rich. How is this incompatible?

Even if I work my ass off, I won't be able to afford a house the same as my parents did. My only hope is that I inherit their house when they pass.

I think you mean to say "When we could steal land from the people who were originally on that land"

All either studied hard in school and went on to get a degree or left school at 18 and apprenticed in a trade or got specific qualifications.

I read so much about declining wealth and how each generation is worse off that I have to assume I’m in a lucky bubble because it’s not the case for me.

None of us are rich but the system appears to be working from a sample of say 30 people aged 25 to 45 from different parts and backgrounds in the UK.

The way the ultra-wealthy manage to make it entirely taxless; super evil for sure. Even so, it's not really the root - maybe a very large branch of it.

And why you guys are looking at Mars now.

Here in latam we haven't filled the land at all, you guys have been hard working and filled with riches. But our laziness might give us more longevity, we are playing the long game with the amazon

The US is setting up to make this worse by cutting services for the average person (like the CFPB and OSHA) and continuing to give tax breaks to the wealthy...again.

This is after the same group of people set off sky-rocketing inflation by injection almost a trillion dollars of new money into the economy by way of the PPP program, of course hurting the average person more than their wealthy financial backers.

The difference is that medieval peasants knew their manorial lords had bigger houses and ate more meat, but the visible local differences were small and religion could operate (for worse or better) as a stabilizing force. People tolerated a caste system because they were information poor.

There’s no reason today, though, for people to put up with the kind of inequality that is not only extreme and senseless but constantly being shoved in their faces via social media. The only way the rich stay out of the guillotines is by creating new, weird cultural spectacles like litter boxes in schools (not even a real thing) for “furry kids.”

Anyone not familiar with it needs to look up Georgism.

This transfer happens primarily via housing costs and rent payments.

The stratification of the rich happens via investment opportunities, but the core underlying mechanism for the majority of the population is via housing costs and Ricardo's law of rent.

Capital flight is a thing. Land isn't going anywhere.

Economists including multiple Nobel laureates on both the left and right have been screaming for land value tax for almost a century for this and many other reasons.

There is a lot of cheap land and even a lot of cheap houses for those willing to live in a different place. Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically. This has opened the door to many of them moving even farther away, unlocking an entire new world of affordability.

There was a brief moment where all of this looked like it was a very real possibility for many of us, but the rubber band is snapping back with remote work and now many are being required to move back to those few cities again to find the best jobs.

> but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing.

I don't think most people believe that you can just work hard and then have generational wealth for your heirs. That feels like a strawman argument. Generational wealth has always been a difficult feat for the few, not something we promised everyone could achieve.

However, people also underestimate the power of compounding for retirement savings. Obviously not helpful to someone working at McDonalds and trying to pay rent in a big city, but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. Not "generational wealth" or "setting up your heirs", but enough to make big contributions to education, helping kids with emergencies, possibly leaving some non-trivial inheritance. This happens all the time and continues to happen with millenials, as it will happen with Gen Z. Again, not literally everyone but to suggest that it's out of reach is really out of alignment with the reality of what we see people earning and saving.

Basically he compares two kinds of growth rates : the growth rate of the 'real' economy and the growth rate of wealth itself. You need the wealth rate to be low enough that rich people want to invest some of it in the real world, not leave it in the bank.

If you do tax the rich, they do very well and you also have money to pay for things like education, roads, affordable housing, medical services, scientific research .. which benefit all and lubricate the general economic market.

If you dont tax the rich, you end up with a gilded age of emperors and kings or a few robber barrons, a small rich coterie around them and the gawping masses of poor eeking it out.

Postwar 70s and 80s were a unusual period of relative lower-inequality, in which we had money in the real economy to develop things.

Garys Economics made an interesting point that inequality _itself_ is a problem - because the actual real value of the world remaining the same [ goods, energy available, land, workers, housing, technology ], when there is higher inequality, then the poor are losing a proportion of that real wealth to the rich. Extreme inequality itself starves almost all the population of a share of real wealth, for them to use their skills effectively - renovate a house, invest in stocks, get a masters degree, do a garage project, travel, have kids, install solar panels etc.

In a sense that basic housing now is luxury - yes.

I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore.

Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.

This article is another restating of the fact that wealth inequality is the greatest its ever been.

>People in advanced economies stand to inherit around $6trn this year—about 10% of GDP, up from around 5% on average in a selection of rich countries during the middle of the 20th century. As a share of output, annual inheritance flows have doubled in France since the 1960s, and nearly trebled in Germany since the 1970s. Whether a young person can afford to buy a house and live in relative comfort is determined by inherited wealth nearly as much as it is by their own success at work. This shift has alarming economic and social consequences, because it imperils not just the meritocratic ideal, but capitalism itself.

I suggest you look at historical trends for USD to CAD and trends for home prices vs income in Canada.

I may consider myself liberal, but general housing policy by most liberal leaders has been a total disaster and should be recognized as such.