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.
I think you’re missing the points about scale and marginal utility. If you have more food than 3 generations of your family will ever eat, and continue to take more while others are starving, you can make a moral argument that maybe you shouldn’t have so much food. Much less continue to try and get more. It becomes more egregious when you, say, take food from your employees who don’t always have enough.
Agree with this. We should remember that doctor-making-150k is far closer to being homeless than they are to a billionaire, with their individual wealth rivaling small countries.
Most doctors are one of us as many other well compensated professionals.
You better save that money while you can because if you are not able to trade your labour for money you are back where you started among the peasants.
Missing the point and misconstruing the argument to protect the wealthy is the point.
Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)
I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.
And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?
Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the top of my head lol.
Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?
I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.
It’s important to recognize just how much more billionaires make than millionaires, but at the same time, no, neither of them are good or can be while maintaining that amount of wealth, and the reason is because you cannot make that much money by working. The ONLY way to make that much money is by making profit off of others.
Idk man in some areas a house costs a million. If two people go into debt their whole life and work their butts off to pay for a house that now costs a million, I still think of them as normal people somehow yaknow
A lot of that is because we’re in the middle of a housing crisis thanks to enormous companies buying up all the property, pushing normal people out of the house market to renting. On top of that, buying a 1 million dollar house doesn’t make one a millionaire.
?? After you’ve paid off your million dollar house, you are a millionaire by definition.
Most of us don’t pay off a million dollars in one payment??? Paying off mortgages takes a long ass time, In smaller increments. You might “technically” be a millionaire, but you won’t be comparable to the kind of “rich” we’re talking about here. You can make that kind of money by working.
…which was precisely their point?
This is a good point.
I remember often being confused why I was being treated weirdly when I was teaching in a east-central African country.
The disparity of wealth, in absoulte terms, was not that high - I got a middle salary for that country, because I lived on what my country gives for a volunteer. Back home that would be way below substance limit bit there it was a medium salary at that time. But the perception that was prevalent made it so that most people thought that I was, in some abstract order, richer than them. It wasn’t really clear by how much or what order - factor 1, factor 10, factor 1000?
I noticed how people who didn’t know me or how I lived would always treat me weird and I came to the conclusion that them thinking about this - what order of magnitude is it? - made people treat me weird
Now for the bezos of the world and me, I know exactly what order of magnitude it is. But from which order would I start to see it as obscene?
I could live with someone earning double from me. 10x would start to feel unfair. But that is far far far removed from the reality of the global super rich. That factor is way higher, and it’s easy to focus on this really really high factor, but finding the low border up until which it is ok might be hard.
And I remember how people looked at me, trying to figure out exactly this
I hop I explain myself, it’s late here. If not I will retry tomorrow
Not looking to be combative, I’m curious: where is your moral line where the scale is too great, and why is it there? A lot of these comments read that that line should be “above me somewhere”.