this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I don't mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.

I think many will say yes, they can be, though it may be rare. I was tempted to. I thought more about it and I wondered, are you really a good person if you're hoarding enough money you and your family couldn't spend in 10 lifetimes?

I thought, if you're a good person, you wouldn't be rich. And if you're properly rich you're probably not a good person.

I don't know if it's fair or naive to say, but that's what I thought. Whether it's what I believe requires more thought.

There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn't care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.

And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?

Very curious about people's thoughts on this.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (33 children)

I find this take so hypocritical.

I bet you have more food than some people. Are you giving it to them?

You have a roof over your head, other people don’t. Are you giving it to them?

You most likely have more money than others, considering your access to the internet and ability to think up this post - are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?

Calling it “hoarding” is just intentionally vilifying having money. Are some rich people bad? Absolutely. Are they bad because they’re rich? No. Do they have an obligation to give their money away? Also no.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah this is missing magnitudes of scale here. Someone with 100,000 and someone with 1,000,000,000 are wildly different scales of magnitude. It's like people who look at a mag-4, mag-5, and mag-6 earthquake. Each of those is on a log scale, so while you're just going form 4 to 5, the scaling means that's a massive amount of change.

Same diff here. The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change. So going from 100,000 to 1,000,000 is a pretty big change in the amount of security one has. So going from 1e5 to 1e9, that's a change of 1000 on the scale. The level of change between those two is absolutely astronomical.

I get this facet of mathematics eludes folks. All the while the whole "double the number of grains per square on a chessboard" thing we all like to play with because it's interesting. But this is that IRL. The average person and the average billionaire are on two totally different scales. It's like saying, "why a beetle doesn't glow when the sun does?" Like you can't reasonably compare those two things. Yeah, both contain hydrogen at some level but in massively, massively different quantities. It's like saying, your computer is just an overgrown abacus. It's just ignoring scale so much that it veers into very wrong.

I get what you're trying to say. But you've got to acknowledge the vast difference of scale here and that your point is not just oversimplification of an issue, but a gross by planetary magnitudes oversimplification of an issue. Just mathematically speaking, the average person and the average billionaire are not even close to the same kind of person in economic terms. It's just completely unreasonable to even remotely think they are. The numbers are just too far apart, to even attempt this argument in good faith.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is a great point, and the same logic applies to someone who's destitute vs someone with the median net worth of about $100,000. The average person could give away half of their net worth to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn't ruin their life, but we don't. We're all less guilty of ignoring the suffering of others that a billionaire is, but not without blame.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

If the average American gave away half their net worth they would be giving away any hope of retirement. If the average billionaire gave away half their net worth they would still be a billionaire.

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