I think it’s a structural effect. Let’s play moral relativism for a second and assume that everyone has their own definition of what is ethical and what isn’t, and that people generally choose not to do things they would consider unethical even if doing them would benefit themselves in some way. So, the people with the widest array of options for benefiting themselves are those with the least restrictive ethical framework. This doesn’t always mean that they will be successful or powerful, as humans are generally pretty bad at predicting what is good for them, and even worse at consistently acting on those beliefs, especially over the long term. However, the hoarding of wealth has a few characteristics that make it different from other forms of self-benefit:
It’s easy to measure progress, and therefore easy to optimize for. This means that once you find a successful means of making money, you can fine-tune the process and reproduce it more easily than, say, a critically acclaimed novelist can write a critically acclaimed sequel.
(n.b. I’m not saying that getting rich is easy. In fact I think a lot of rich people, especially those at the very top, do genuinely put a lot of hard work and long hours into being rich. I think they’re genuinely passionate about being rich. I think it’s a selfish and self-defeating and catastrophically harmful goal to pursue, but I think they enjoy it and pursue it with the same vigor that any world-class athlete has for their sport.)Money makes money. This one I think has been discussed enough, but it’s an established fact that they easiest way to make money is by having money, which means that people with the most money tend (assuming they don’t wildly fuck up, which does sometimes happen) to become even more insanely wealthy. You can even pay people to help your money make money more efficiently, which strikes me as very funny though I can’t really articulate why.
Having money influences the behavior of everyone around you, whether you want it to or not. The very rich, especially (but by no means exclusively) the famously rich, have their relationships with other people skewed in a very systematic way. This is conjecture on my part, having never been famously rich, but I would imagine that this systematic alteration of relationships is very hard to account for, especially if you get famous before you have a chance to form deep adult relationships. And by account for, I think there are just things rich people do that they simply do not, or cannot, see. Relatedly, I think this is why dictators tend to overreact to political comedians, because that public discussion of their obvious foibles is really the only time they ever hear about it, and it’s intolerable because their tolerance for criticism is so low.
I think these traits mean that once you find a way to make enough money to become wealthy, you tend to stay wealthy as long as you can repeat the trick. And since there are tons of ways to make money in unethical ways, loosening or ignoring one’s moral compass can greatly increase the odds of finding a repeatable money-making tactic. And once you have a way to make money, the looser restrictions make it easier to grow your hoard faster. Which is why the richest person on earth is invariably some self-obsessed abusive criminal jackass.
IronBird@lemmy.world 1 week ago
i recently escaped the labor trap myself (that is what rich people call working btw), until that moment i had always been in survival mode…stressed about basic needs which all required $, something i didn’t have enough of. figured out how the stock market works, how it’s basically just one big casino a bunch of rich cunts with more $ than sense dump their ratfucked funds into…once you know how it works in incredibly easy to 10x your working capital (to a point, there’s scaling problems eventually…but by that point any normal person has more $ than they can spend)
first thing that happened after this was a mental breakdown as my mind apparently felt comfortable enough then to process a bunch childhood trauma i had mostly (consciously atleast) forgotten.
this trauma processing/breakdown eventually lead to my mom being concerned enough to reveal to me that i had been diagnosed with autism back as a kid when i was originally diagnosed with adhd, had kept it from me so i could “grow up normal” apparently…probably should have told me after highschool atleast…had these breakdowns atleast 2-3 times prior just not as bad.
after this i had the horrible realization of just how fucked our country/world is, that the reason nobody seemed to be doing anything about all this horrible shit (especially the blatant corruption of trump admin…) wasn’t that noone knew…it was that everyone knew, they’re just waiting for things to “return to normal”. they’ve all just either given up or don’t care to begin with because the system benefits them. the realization that now even with effectively infinite (personal) $, i’m still pretty much powerless to change/fix any of this…
kinship@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Can you tell me more about how easy is to beat the bank? (In your Casino analogy). I wan’t to learn such power.
And let me ask you as well… are you sure that you are not presenting survivorship bias? (The same as the billionares we are talking?). Ex: “I am a billionare because I worked hard and am way smarter”, etc.
I am genuinely asking, it sounds passive agressive but I guarantee you it’s not.
IronBird@lemmy.world 1 week ago
there’s a book called Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written over 100 years, that lays it out pretty cleanly.
but the biggest point is this, the US’s financial markets are specifically left unregulated compared to others to “facilitate liquidity”. in practice, the various actors meant to “facilitate liquidity” are more often than not just extracting liquidity for themselves, as US financial rules essentially give control of the PA (price action) to whoever has the most $ in play.
the next is just this, that even given derivative has actual value (in theory, future projected dividend returns) and it’s current value (whatever it’s trading at now). the more these 2 values diverge the more someone who trades understanding actual-value can take advantage of people only trading on current-value. note, anyone who “invests” automatically/passively is trading on the latter, and the majority of people trading actively trade on the latter deliberately (they know the game is rigged and pull their profits out deliberately and often). for example, the overwhelming majority of stocks don’t, and never will pay, pay a dividend. therefore…rheir actual value is worthless, so why is anyone trading them?
zorflieg@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m glad that worked for you. Everything changed in 2008. I would say the old cycles of the market and PE valuation rationality is gone in favour of meme stock style gambling. I think that anything written prior to 2008 on the subject is less useful and the yearly value taking cycle is only still maintained by the old school investors. Some who want some sort of comfort in their approach and want to believe they can make it work. Those people are just handing money to each other now while the billionaires just gamble large sums for bragging rights.