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I wonder if at a certain point, someone learns about compounding, and just sticks with it, building generational wealth. And poof, the wealth just keeps growing as long as the descendants don’t make errors.

We seem to love creating stories about why so-and-so is rich, but, I suspect the most common answer is “time, patience, and no major bad luck”.

You make it sound easy, but there are relatively few billionaires in the US descended from historically wealthy families [0]. First off, this kind of compounding has only really been possible since the industrial revolution (~200 years). Before that, wealth came primarily from land ownership, which was zero-sum. Second, "no major bad luck" has been pretty hard to come by in most of the world across multi-generational time-scales. The US has had a historically exceptional period for the last 80 years or so, but there is no reason that has to continue. Third, "as long as descendants don't make errors" can also be a significant hurdle. Many Asian countries have a saying: wealth does not last past three generations (not meant to be taken literally, but people say it for a reason).

Also, to start compounding, you have to have enough to compound. Most people instead start off significantly in debt (student debt, mortgage/rent, etc.). Then they try to save enough to be able to raise their children and retire before they become too infirm to work, at which point they start compounding in reverse. All the while, they are competing with everyone else trying to do the same thing for how much they are willing to pay for scarce resources and how little they are willing to receive for their employment. Having your compounding achieve escape velocity is the exception, not the rule, and it has to be that way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Billionaires

I also suspect that’s the most common path to single-digit millionaire in the US. My parents were the first generation on either side to attend college and the steady economic progress across 5 generations is impossible to miss.

Teaching the next generation(s) about how to invest (in self and in markets), not spend time nor money to frivolous excess, and delaying gratification are other critical parts of sustainability of family wealth. I think those were as big a factor as any other in the 5 generations from my kids back to their great-great-grandparents.

I'm not sure if the next few generations will have the same opportunities as the last few that enjoyed America's dominate place in the world, who also took out incredible amounts of debt that the upcoming generations will have to pay back somehow.

The values you mention are timeless & should be taught to all.

Hopefully technology continues to be a thing that rises all boats & that more people can get said boat.

I fear the current tax laws, political contributions & financial regulations favor those with more wealth so much that when you factor in compounding, their wealth will continue to grow at extreme levels compared to those with less wealth. Retail needs to start pulling their money out of stocks until large companies reduce executive pay to reasonable levels. Otherwise we just blindly keep supporting this current chaos. I believe we also need to start taxing margin loans, instead of going down a wealth tax road.

> The values you mention are timeless & should be taught to all.

Agreed, with the related note that I think that facts/knowledge can be taught by strangers, but values must be taught by family or another tight community structure (church, respected elders, or similar). Schools can prattle on all they want about delayed gratification and it won’t move the needle in behavior.

It’s true in theory, but a couple of big things happen 1) for the vast majority outlays increase as fast if not faster than wealth, and 2) things like divorce/remarriage/second families happen creating massive dilution, 3) the experience of most HNW clients is more like 3-5% real after tax.
Yes I suspect the rich's strategy of owning nothing and controlling everything contributes as much to their wealth retention through the inevitable catastrophic events in life, as much as snowball interest accumulation does.

Middle class / poor people generally know how to build wealth through interest but make the fatal mistake of keeping their wealth largely tied up in on-paper assets in their name, this means they're ripe for the taking from every judge / wife / healthcare creditors / random guy with a lawsuit as soon as something in their life goes south. Of course once you get to a certain segment of underclass people who are basically unbanked you get back to horse-shoe theory and you'll never be getting their $50k gold chain they keep around their neck.

> the rich's strategy of owning nothing

I think you may be coming into this conversation with a different definition of "rich" than most people.

Even within compounding there's an interesting phenomenon.

Start with $100 and compound it at 10% per year for 30 years and you end up with about $1,700. Improve that return by just 1% to 11% and after the same 30 years you have about $2,300.

That small 1% edge produces roughly 35% more money in the end. Compounding is extremely powerful, and even marginally better money management leads to vastly better outcomes over time.

Over the last 100 years, the S&P 500 has grown with an average of 6% yearly adjusted for inflation (9.8% nominally).

That means an inflation adjusted doubling every 12 year.

It also means that if you manage to live on e.g 1% of the wealth annually, your wealth will double(inflation adjusted) every 15 year.

So yeah, as long as you don't get too many children (branching factor not more than 4) you 'just' need to get filthy rich, and none of your descendants ever need working.

The last 100 years has been the era of the American Empire, which is monetized through the network effects of the dollar and dollar-denominated-assets. We don't have ships full of Potosí silver, but we do have 10% yearly S&P returns in an economy growing 3%. Extrapolating another year of that is probably reasonable, extrapolating another 100 years of that is probably not.
Yeah, it's easier to analyse the past than predict the future. I agree that I made a statement about the luxury of wealth the last century.

I don't know if the S&P500 will grow at the same rate the next century, but I am willing to bet a beer that stocks in wide index founds will grow faster than both inflation and average salary for the next century.

I think the realistic number is is more like 2-4% if it’s not supplemented by working (and sometimes even working) I also think when you add in things like paying for private school/ college, divorces, taxes, carrying cost of real estate, etc. luxury travel/clothes/meals/vacations it’s a big number.

I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I suspect the vast majority of grandchildren of a wealthy couple have meaningfully less than the original couple did, as well as less than their parents did.

2-4% of the wealth you mean? That surely depends on the wealth... If you need 200k a year that's 2% of 10 million, but 1% of 20 million.

If you manage 1% then the real value doubles after 15 years. If you need 2% annually, the real value doubles after 18 years. The moral of the story is the same, with enough wealth you can live comfortably while your wealth grows.

I'm struggling to interpret this study. They seem to attribute the majority (~96%) of inequality to non-ethnic, non-racial factors.

So the inequality of income of poor white people and rich white people has the same causes as for poor vs. rich black people.

Am I understanding it correctly?

I don’t think they say it has the same cause. They just say that the same income disparity exists in the various ethnic groups.
aint no war but class war, correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System

just realize that poster is more than a century old and it will probably still be being explained a hundred years from now.

That's as may be, but still, remember what Lyndon B Johnson said about controlling the lower classes.

Something about convincing the lowest white person that they're better than the best black guy.

I don't see that ploy failing to work in the US for a long, long time. So maybe the elites will lose control and thus, the "war"? But I doubt it.

Are you sure you aren't trying to quote Truman?

"To keep a black guy down in the gutter, you need a white guy there with him"

Not all societal issues can be directly linked to racism. Shocking, I know.
Why do you find that attribution surprising?
Privilege breeds privilege. Once you have at least a little bit of it. You can generate a little bit more with it.

The bar that you get to grow up in a relatively safe place, with non toxic friends or parents is quite high already. I haven’t been lucky to have grown up in a safe place or in a good family, but I did manage to make good friends, and if I had not been lucky enough to have positive experiences with some real smart resourceful people, I probably wouldn’t had been alive today. Not to sound too dramatic.

Every time I visited the US it was mostly to visit people who were in a very privileged position. They either rented an expensive apartment in new york city in an ok neighborhood, or they owned a 3 story house in the suburbs. When we drove to walmart I could already see in the parking lots the stark differences between people who called this country home.

Next to us parked a family, 3 kids, a car that looked like it was falling apart next to my friend’s huge modern SUV. I wonder if any of them will ever br able to afford an SUV, I wonder how many of them will be able to go to college. The father and mother were yelling a lot at those poor kids. Everyone looked overweight(no offense), the father literally obese. And we went on with our day. I bought a bunch of random stuff I didn’t really need and ate a lobster sandwich. And I kind of forgot for a long time that family ever existed, except for the couple of times I randomly remember them. Hope they’re alright.

I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about it in terms of “privilege.” It’s not about being lucky enough to be born into privilege, but not being unlucky enough to be born into structural dysfunction.

If you compare income mobility between parents and adult children in the U.S. versus Denmark, it looks quite similar for the top 80%. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012.... Someone raised in the second lowest income quantile in the U.S. has about the same chance of ending up in the top income quantile as someone in Denmark. It’s the bottom 20% where Americans are twice as likely to get stuck there in comparison to people in Denmark.

Activism was a big part of my life, even full time at times, from 1991-2005 and I spent a lot of time going into rooms inhabited by different groups building bridges not to mention tabling, going door to door, getting signatures for political candidates, you name it. So I've had a lot of experience to how people react to different messages when I deliver them and when other people deliver them and I've got strong and grounded opinions about discourses that are counterproductive and make me wish I could use a hook to shuffle people off the stage.

The word "privilege" and especially the phrase "white privilege" is at the top of that list.

There really are some privileged individuals who are entitled and could use some bringing down but if you're speaking to a group you really don't where people are coming and frequently when I talk to an individual I find my expectations about their history and point of view are completely wrong. In particular I know a lot of white people who have black problems including the meaningless-but-fatal confrontations with the police. For the most part [1] black people are more concerned about racism in America than white people, but know many black people who resent the idea that they are first-and-foremost descendants of slaves and victims of racism and it's such a strongly held feeling for some that if you give them a choice of a strident "anti-racist" and a flagrant racist they'll pick the latter.

[1] I've met exceptions!

People have been so hung up on this idea of intelligence being heritable or not heritable that it's almost forgotten that severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, major depression) is highly heritable -- and there are few things that can sidetrack your life like that.
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-neural-basis-of...

How's your self-object breakthrough? Okay, I might be jealous that you found a foolproof(?) way to have it published :)

Ofc I'm still mostly bouncing between the top 2 boxes here... (Being aware of it maybe makes that less concerning?)

(Pleasantly) surprised-- but maybe shouldnt have been-- that Chandrasekhar opened with thermodynamics

Heads-up. Regarding the self-obj. Might try to set up a three-way to sync with aeb* when I can tria(ge/ngulate) the relevant emotions better (modulo whatever mental resources my own PRE-breakthroughs require)

This turned up the other day and explains the overarching framework of how my practice (symbolic, embodied) fits into other approaches to facing the world

https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-end-of-reason

and i think communicates the sense of urgency in terms of the current crises such as the crisis of object relations, crisis of energy and the environment, crisis of political legitimacy, etc.

I've lived in about every demographic area of the USA and the only thing that would have gave them away to me as poor in your SUV/walmart story is that they were all fat. Being fat is the best marker of poverty in the USA. The rest just sounds like the lifestyle of Warren Buffett which isn't terribly unusual as the comfortably rich generally only worry about flashy cars if they're a motorhead and often get there in part by being thrifty.
I realize this isn't the meat of your post, but you ate a lobster sandwich at Walmart?

I cannot help but think of https://youtu.be/Pj-D0jc17D0?si=BiEGWr9aacGdAkGW

The walmart experience is so wildly different depending on who they're catering to.

When I lived in poor areas, I've literally been shaken down by gigantic bouncers in the parking lot for "stealing" (but not) a bag of $5 cat litter. Why on earth this is even worth the liability of sending bouncers is beyond me. And everything even remotely valuable and easy to steal is behind locked showcases, but no one gives a fuck to get it out to help you buy it.

In rich areas, it's lobster sandwiches and no one even bothering you for your receipt on the way out, and maybe someone might even help you find something in the store. Nothing you want is behind glass, except maybe something unusually valuable by walmart standards and miniscule like an SD card.

“Gas Station Sushi: Fresh one day a week, but no one knows which one…”

I read the post as involving seeing the other family at Walmart, but the buying of things not needed and consumption of lobster as happening elsewhere.

I spent a couple of years in the States before returning to Europe. I really had no idea what happened to people - what they became - if they weren't fed and watered properly. I had always assumed that the way people were was just how people are. Scary how much we take for granted.
This is true when you look at raw numbers but you'll still get some pushback on this fact since the pace of USA's drop in median wealth has been so sudden. As in my home country of Australia now has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita compared to the USA. This never used to be the case at all. Australia still has a lower average wealth but this is just telling of the extreme inequality. The median and averages aren't meant to be this far apart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

Sort by median and compare to average wealth to see the issue the USA has right now. The USA's median wealth in 2007 was $173,151 in inflation adjusted teams for some reference, it dropped in 2008 and never really recovered. It's now well below many other Western nations.

Nomadland the book documents this for a lot of Americans surviving in the brink in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, turning to living in vans and RVs, a less glamorous version of van life, barely scraping by and eventually bad luck or circumstance of some kind of another just crushes individuals. Even in Silicon Valley just a few streets from Google HQ in Mountain View on Longhorn and other streets there are several blocks filled with RVs of folks I assume like the ones in Nomadland. https://maps.app.goo.gl/KQY2AWL2sNfGem44A
Inequality is proof of free markets. Free markets are proof of prosperity maximalism. Worry about raising the floor, not the distance of floor to ceiling (there is no ceiling - shoutout Lil Wayne).
There are a sizable number of levers that raise the ceiling by lowering the floor. For some reason, intentionally giving all the power to people near the ceiling makes pulling these levers very popular. Not sure what the reason could be. Maybe we'll figure it out one day.
Not only that, but it provides opportunity to create levers such as you describe in the first place, due to the concentration of power and influence. Funny how that part of Adam Smith isn't worshipped as much
As a libertarian I also dislike the "crabs in a bucket" mentality people have towards inequality because it is clearly motivated by jealousy, but the massive amount of inequality we see today seems to undermine some of the assumptions behind democracy.

I think the reason why the social contract of democracy evolves from natural law is that the basic assumption is that we all have about the same fighting power, and voting is representative of this. This assumption does not hold when some minorities have 1000x the economic power but 1x times the voting power: the majority of people will vote to redistribute wealth, while the rich will be motivated to destabilize the peace and take advantage of their disproportionate fighting power directly (killbots? [1]).

Additionally, special interest groups will lobby to protect their cash cows. An increasing amount of the economy flows through government expenditure (including tax incentives, nationalization, etc.), for example palantir, flock, openAI and others. We live in an increasingly planned economy. In the USA, we import pretty much everything and we only build for the military and real estate.

The state of inequality is also concerning considering the recent technological improvements that threaten to totally devalue all labor. There's this notion that the lives of the 1% don't matter as long as we raise the standard of living for the lower class as you suggest, but what is happening now is more like a doomsday situation where we are pulling the ladder up and consigning the working class to the chasm of liquid hot magma below [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo1S52xdpI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

Hot take but the more time I spend with poor people the less respect I have for them. I grew up in Eastern Europe where the economies were actively suppressed during communism, so the story "poor people just need more chances" hit home because that's exactly what I saw around me. But then I moved into a poor neighborhood of a rich country and... no matter how you organize the society, a certain percentage will always either be incapable of participating in it, or flat-out refuse to do so. You can give them all the chances they need, they will stubbornly keep making wrong decisions.
Base classism isn't really a hot take on this forum.

> I moved into a poor neighborhood of a rich country and...

And what?

> no matter how you organize the society, a certain percentage will always either be incapable of participating in it, or flat-out refuse to do so.

And what percentage of "the poor" that you're maligning are you claiming this to be?

> Hot take but the more time I spend with poor people the less respect I have for them. I grew up in Eastern Europe where the economies were actively suppressed during communism, so the story "poor people just need more chances" hit home because that's exactly what I saw around me.

Well, what I saw around me in post-Soviet times was that as soon as people got any kind of wealth they would just spend it all on luxury cars, fur coats for their wife, expensive vacations and building a mansion-like dacha. Only the last asset on this list has any potential to appreciate.

> But then I moved into a poor neighborhood of a rich country and... no matter how you organize the society, a certain percentage will always either be incapable of participating in it, or flat-out refuse to do so. You can give them all the chances they need, they will stubbornly keep making wrong decisions.

Western left agrees with you, they just won't spell it out like you did. But their current policies are basically:

1. Just give money for free to the poor, both explicitly and implicitly (social housing, rent control, etc.).

2. All kinds of equality of outcomes policies, diversity quotas, etc.

Equality of opportunity got out of vogue because it didn't produce results the left was hoping for.

Where to read the full article?
So we don't need reparations?
Inequality has biological foundations. Plants and animals have inequalities of king vs death level. It is almost inevitable barring some rare occasions in history.

In the US stock wealth inflates inequality measurement. No way a billionaire can liquify millions of stocks in a stable current price. Most are multimillionaires. Although there is a lot of room for improvement based on the recent history of strong democratic national tradition.

If you’re in the USA, you are thousands of times richer that the vast majority of the world.

Stop whining.

Idk my family in the Phillipines can literally just build a shack near a city with jobs no permits or anything, then carry your kids 5 up on a moped without being hassled by cops. I took a family member to the ER and only charge was $5 worth of pesos for meds (granted if I hadn't paid they'd have got absolutely nothing, but at least it was cheap) , no other charges.

Building a shack with nothing but bamboo and no paperwork in US is illegal almost everywhere, transporting kids this way would get you pulled over, and you spend a fortune to get healthcare to the point of getting Phillipines tier healthcare.

Nominally we're richer, with the freedom to have cops bring violence to us if we're not and we try to keep our unpermitted urban shack. It feels like you have to earn a fortune in the USA to do the things poor countries almost take for granted.

Let's reduce government size and the number of regulations.