The experience that I have is that the rich ARE different, not in their motivations, likes, dislikes or anything else. Rather in the sheer opportunity they have.
First off, they tend to have better access to education. Not so good at math? Nevermind we get a specialist tutor. Like music - we’ll send you to music lessons. These opportunities are not always open to the rest of us. ANd this is not to mention the successful people from all fields that the rich, by definition are surrounded with.
On top of this, there is (what I would call) a removal of risk that the rich experience. For me to start a business I would be risking it all - family home, income, putting food on the table etc. I would suggest that for the rich, even if it is not explicitly family money financing the operation, they have a far greter “safety net” than I do. This breeds a far greater willingness to venture forth. And then of course compounding this is the access to expert advice they get along the way - because they are surrounded by people that have done it before.
Finally I would also suggest that because things such as diet, and access to healthcare tend to be better amongst the rich, they do have more energy. The very rich have maids to clean the house (for example) freeing their time to attend charity events. It is not an issue for the rich to pay for a nanny while they “play” in their gardens etc.
Certainly. But by the same virtue, if one of the biochemists gets on the board, talking about what biochemists are like, I’m going to trust what he says a lot more than some book by Greenpeace. Saying “anecdotal evidence” is talking more about cases where someone comes up saying “Well I know a 130 year old lady who smokes eight packs of cigarettes a day, and she’s just fine!” That’s a lot different from a doctor coming in and giving his off-the-top-of-his-head break down of how many of his smoker clients have health problems. Yet both are anecdotal.
Your cite for this is something which starts off by saying that taxes have decreased on the wealthy from 91% to 39%, over the same period of time that the economy has really opened up to wealth stratification and the revolution of the startup. And there’s been plenty of trickle down debates on the board. So far as anyone can tell, cutting taxes probably would boost the economy, if it weren’t for the government (i.e. the Republicans) going to war each time they do cut them.
But as I said, while cutting taxes over the short term does boost the amount of money wealthy people have, in the long run all you’re really looking at is a decrease in government income. So whether that’s going to boost the economy or not depends on what the government spends it’s chunk of change on. If it drops that money back into the economy, then it’s going to drive the economy even though it may be taxing it a lot. While as if it blows it all on a war, then that’s just going right out of the economy and getting blown up.
It only does assuming that over the long run business people are going to do better at using the same money to boost the economy than the government would. Personally, I would generally believe that. The government may do fine in the short term, but over the long haul, I would tend to think it too fickle.
I’ve worked as a contract worker for several years now, and so far as I have ever been able to tell, a lot of the big companies waste a whole bunch of money paying twice as much as they need to on contracting as they would need to for in-house people. That I can tell, the goal is less to be able to minimize the amount of money they’re spending, and more to be able to quickly expand or shrink their worker bee headcount to match the needs of all the projects they have going. That some of those end up staying for years probably has more to do with the company being too big to track them all, than that they’re trying to screw the person over. In the end, all they’re doing is paying double the wage for someone they could have hired normal.
Not sure if the “temps” you’re talking about are contract workers like that though.
CEO salaries are set by the board of directors, and approved by the shareholders. A CEO going to the shareholders and asking for a raise isn’t any different than any other employee going to their immediate supervisor and asking for a raise.
Not really. 1% is a few. This is probably less than 1%, and of that probably a good percent aren’t guilty of anything but negligence.
Heck of a given. Cite?
I would suspect that in the grand majority of cases, politicians vote according to what they care about. In cases they don’t care, they throw a bone to whoever does, be it their voter base, or business interests. If they act too poorly, the press calls them on it, and they do more stuff for the voter base. Not necessarily the pinnacle of perfection, but for the most part over the last 200 years, the move has always been towards more personal freedom, a cleaner environment, worker rights, equal rights, etc. It’s hard to say the system is screwed when its entire history is a steady move in the right direction.
So over the last several years while the rich people stole all this money, everyone below them lost all their posessions, jobs, and what-have-you? Or if they did, this is due to rich people, rather than the war?
Certainly, but you’re not showing where the middle class are currently doing poorly, nor if they are how that’s the fault of rich people or taxes.
Or even if you did, you’ll still have yet to show how rich people are any less inclined to vote for their own benefit when it comes to politics than the rest of the populace or are more selfish. Being skilled at attaining ones selfish ambitions still doesn’t separate you from the rest of the population beyond “being skilled” until you’ve shown that everyone else is all that saintly.
A lot of opportunities are present to you even if you can’t hire a tutor or whatever. Libraries are free. But indeed, being brought up to think in terms of “I can do it!” does probably help when it comes to actually spotting opportunities like simply teaching yourself calculus at the library.
A safety net can equally make it easier to be a slacker though. And some businesses, once started, are fine to continue being run by even a slacker. so it’s rather hard to say the person was successful or inspired if he is solely the product of nepotism.
I really couldn’t say what percentage of entrepreneurs come from wealth. I would suspect that most come from the upper middle class, and succeed more because they had an entrepreneurial spirit by birth, and a solid upbringing. I don’t think they would have been raised to be “winners” or had much more in the way of extra tutelage than going to private school.
Nepotism obscures the numbers too much to really tell. Once you have a few billion, so long as you can hire some people who know how to do their job, it’s not too hard to start a new business and simply run it by delegation. That’s a lot different from entrepreneurship, but hard to determine.
Sounds like they’re those types of folks who are terrified of failure, and define failure as not being the absolute best at what they’re doing, and then push themselves relentlessly to achieve that.
You know the types- the ones who have a 95 average going into the final, yet they study like the damned for it, in spite of the fact that numerically, they CAN’T make a B average for the class, even if they skipped the final entirely.
I’ve known people like that, and while they may be materially successful, they’re not particularly happy- it’s like they’re pursued by their own demons, and being happy to them is not feeling like they failed, instead of actually taking pride and satisfaction in their accomplishments.
I say let them be rich. That’s not the life for me.
Here’s something I’ve never understood about trickle-down theory that hopefully you can explain to me. It seems to me the vast majority of people in the upper tax brackets are not going to use the extra money from a tax cut to start up a new venture, but are far more likely to simply invest it. For simplicity, let’s assume they all invest it in the stock market. How does that help the economy? Stock prices go up a few points, which gives money to other people who are already invested, but I don’t see where the trickling down happens. Companies don’t start hiring new people or paying their existing workers more just because their stock is up.
Do trickle-down proponents believe investment itself promotes job creation or wage improvement (and if so, how?), or is the amount of trickle-down primarily a function of enabling entrepreneurialship by those in the upper tax brackets?
I’ve never known anyone with an attitude like yours to be anything but axe murderers and cannibals, but I wouldn’t dream of using it as a form or argument. Just FYI.
A lot of you seem to think I dislike the rich. I don’t. I just don’t idolize them. They’re just people like anyone else to me. It that’s “attitude” then so be it.
This isn’t so much about being able to not pay benefits. Thing is, people negotiate for a total compensation package. Part of that is salary, part of that is insurance, part of that is working conditions. So if an employer tells someone that they’re a temp, so they don’t get any benefits, well, that person has to get compensated in other ways or they will go to another job.
Temps are often hired for a particular project. Take testing of a shrink wrap product. Yes, there will be FTE testers, PMs, SDETS, etc. But you also need a team of grunts to run the test scripts, do the adhoc testing, etc. You could have a team of FTE grunts, but Microsoft prefers to hire contractors for the project. Note that contract work is often an extended interview for an FTE position. The really talented contract workers get a blue badge position at the end of the contract.
And the thing is, a lot of those contractors are young people. They don’t care so much about insurance, since they never get sick and typically don’t have dependents. They’d rather get a larger paycheck. And contractors are hourly. That means they get paid OT. FTEs are usually salaried (although some lower-level FTE positions are hourly). You get into the end of a release cycle where people work 80 hours/week and the CSGs can end up making a lot more than the FTEs. Of course, there’s a huge crackdown on OT. Nowadays they’d rather hire 3 guys for 40 hrs/week than 2 guys for 60 hrs/week. Saves money.
Anyway, hiring contractors isn’t primarily about paying lower salaries, it’s about managing staffing levels and ensuring flexibility. Not that it’s any less or more evil because of that, but it shouldn’t be misunderstood as a way to cut employee pay, except in the aggregate. You pay the same or more total amount for contingent staff, the money savings is that you don’t pay them as long.
Fitzgerald’s original passage has already been quoted by Walloon in post #13 of this thread. The “they have more money” rejoinder is commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but should actually be credited to Irish writer Mary Colum. From this page:
It’s not an ad hominem. Your endless rants about the rich and successful provide a perfect, albeit anecdotal, example of how the attitudes and the behaviors of the wealthy are different from most people.
It’s like the difference between one student who portrays an attitude of “the popular kids are jerks, screw them” vs another who builds relationships, portrays themself in a contemporary and flattering manner and involves themself in various social activities. The second person may never be Prom King/Queen, but they will build social “currency” with their peers while the first person will largely be shunned as a bitter misanthrope.
I think who **bump ** is referring to are type - A overachieving personalities who are terrified of personal failure. I don’t know about VC firms but those type of personalities are common in banking, law and accounting & finance companies in general. Professions that tend to be highly structured, risk adverse and require a meticulous nature. IOW, the type of people who freak out over an A- instead of an A.
Traders, stockbrokers, salespeople, entrepreneurs (and probably VCs) have a much higher risk tolerance. They are just as smart and driven, however they have chosen a career where ability to make the big roll is more important than calculating the odds of winning.
Regarding the “temp” issue, my consulting firm hires a fair number of temporary contractors in addition to our full-time client service professionals. Some of them have been around for over a year. The reason we have them is that they provide a buffer in our staffing. We can add or get rid of contractors relatively quickly. They don’t need much training and we don’t have to invest a lot of time in them if they don’t work out. Occassionally we make an offer for one to become a FT employee.
Yes, what you’ve said about temps is essentially correct. But Microsoft hired people as t emps and kept them on for YEARS working on a variety of projects, with no benefits and no sense that they were permanent employees. In short, they were for all practical purposes regular employees but weren’t treated as such. There was a huge fucking scandal about it.
Yeah, I’m familiar with the issue. I happen to work at a large software company headquartered in Redmond Washington.
But the “they didn’t get benefits” is a red herring in my opinion.
As I said, your salary is only one part of a total compensation package. If two people make exactly the same salary but one gets lavish benefits and the other doesn’t, it just means the second guy is really getting paid less.
So they changed the policy and now all the a-dashes have to be let go after 365 days and can’t be rehired until 100 days. And so what? Now they just hire “vendors” instead of contractors.
I still don’t see the problem. I know lots of people that are career contractors by choice. Some of them do it for 10+ years even staying at the same company and I know more than a few that have opted to stay that way even though the big name companies offered them full-time employment. I was one until two months ago and now I think I may have made the wrong decision to go permanent instead of just taking my chances moving from project to project. I get less money and don’t get paid overtime now. It is just an alternate working arrangement and I never considered it abusive at all.
I’ll ask Pere Rat to stop by (no idea if he will), to see what he thinks. But I would guess that it would come down to:
Would the government be able to do more for the economy with the same money? Or would most of it go into better roads, military spending, etc.
Banks use the profit on investing your money to finance business loans.
Wealthy people are often asked to directly invest their money in startups. The grand majority of the time, they may refuse to do so. But they base their refusal on their experience as someone who knows how to succeed. So again, would the government be able to do better?
A company’s stock value does seem to positively (or negatively) effect it even after the original fundraising IPO. Perhaps through the ability to sell more stock through splits. I was never really clear on this point.
Note that I’m not necessarily a low-tax proponent. I was just pointing out the simple flaws in what Evil Captor was saying.
As said before, lowered taxes doesn’t give wealthy people more money except temporarily. People’s salaries, CEOs included, is based on the minimum needed to keep them doing the job. If less money is poofed away into taxes, that’s more money that goes to employees, and hence lower overall salaries, and hence less overhead. It becomes cheaper for companies to operate, startup and non alike. More revenue goes to employees instead of the government, and so they can hire more employees.
This is Sagerat’s father. I don’t know if I’m in the category of “rich”, but I certainly qualify as having had a successful business career. I built a fairly large company that I sold, and now spend most of my time traveling and enjoying life.
There are a few issues on this thread that I thought I would comment on, from the perspective of someone who has been a CEO of a public company, as well as having hired CEOs for companies.
Success, in business, isn’t easy. Perhaps there is a magic formula that I never learned, but generally, companies get larger if they generate profits, and smaller if they don’t. Most companies are very lucky to make a profit at all, and to the extent profits grow, 99% of the time, this is reflected in a growing workforce.
Does anyone want to argue that countries which discourage entrepreneurism generate more jobs than countries that don’t? This is a large planet, with a multitude of countries, each with varying political beliefs. The US is, or, is amongst the most, capitalistic countries in the world. We are also amongst the most financially successful. I would argue that this is not a coincidence.
Do you believe competition is good? Do you think it is fair that airplanes have coach seats, and first class seats? Do you think it is fair that some people can pay more for better seats at football games? This is really a discussion on how you feel about capitalism. If some people are allowed to “succeed” more than others, then some will work harder, and push harder. If there is no reason to push hard, why do so? Briefly, early in my career, I worked for a moving company. I remember on my first day on the job being assigned to a truck with a father and his son. Both were union employees. One had been doing the job for many years, the other for a few months. Both were making the same pay, and doing the same job. I remember thinking that this felt completely wrong. Without higher pay for higher performance, why put in the extra hours required to get ahead? I do not mean this as an anti-union comment. There are many good things that unions have done, however I am concerned with anything that might negatively affect competitive spirit, or a free-market environment.
Yes. Some CEOs do earn a lot of money. My only comment on this is that it is the board of directors who hires the CEO. The Board is charged with trying to make decisions that are in the best interests of the shareholders. Let’s be clear about what shareholders want – to see the price of the shares that they own rise. Share prices tend to track with profitability. If you want a higher share price, you grow the profits. It’s really very simple. The right CEO can add millions, tens of millions, or even billions, to shareholder value. If you were on a large company board, and interviewing a slate of potential CEOs, and one convinces you that he/she can add far more in profitability than the pay they are demanding, should the board not hire that person because their salary demand seems “too high”? The quest for higher earnings drives the decision making process at many companies. As a former CEO, I can tell you how much I hated having to find ways to grow profits quarter after quarter after quarter. It was relentless. However, the concept of stock and stock ownership, is integral to America, and has been key to our success. Half of Americans own stock in one company or another. Does someone want to argue that these people should stop hoping that their stock prices will rise?
Is the need for companies to maximize and grow profits bad for employees? I can see how many people might believe this, but I don’t believe it is supported by the facts. Companies that are cost conscious, and highly competitive, tend to grow, whereas those that aren’t tend to shrink. Companies that shrink tend to lay people off, cut benefit programs, and go out of business. How can this be better for employees.
I’m not sure how to respond to this thread. It always bugs me when I hear people refer to “evil corporations” and “rich people”. There may be evil rich people, and evil corporations, but these would be the exceptions. Most companies in America are just trying to do what they need to do to grow their business and make a profit.
There are certainly some rich people who inherited their money, or won a lottery. This is not your average rich person. Most are people who were willing to make the extra effort to do what it took to get ahead. I always think in terms of competition. If I wanted a promotion, and the other guy was willing to work 50 hours a week, then I knew I had to work 60 hours a week. If the other guy could make 10 widgets an hour, then my goal was to build 15 widgets an hour. Once I had my own company, the goal became to build widgets cheaper, better, and outsell the competition. Along the way I generated thousands of jobs. Had I stayed in the union job, and done “just what the job required”, I would have generated exactly ZERO jobs. How can that be better for the economy?
I’ll stop typing now, and see what responses I get. I’m curious to see how people will either a) Argue that capitalism is bad, or b) capitalism is good, as long as everyone succeeds the same way, or c) capitalism is good, as long as no one gets too rich, and no one stays poor, or d) ???