If money was distributed in the USA for something that is actually competitive, like athletics, then people of African descent would rule the country, as they seem to dominate this arena, even in venues like golf.
If you look at the wealthiest people in the US, they are people like the Koch brothers, who inherited their wealth, or the Walton heirs, who inherited their wealth, or the Mars children, who inherited their wealth, and so on.
You could also look at others. Bill Gates was born with a million dollar trust fund - his great-grandfather ran National City Bank, his mother was on United Way’s executive committee with the CEO of IBM, his father ran a law firm, he went to Lakeside high school (current annual fee: $33,000) which had teletypes and access to a GE mainframe in the late 1960s. Warren Buffett is also "self-made". His grandfather owned a chain of grocery stores, his father was a congressman, he went to UPenn and Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg's parents are professionals, he went to high school at Phillips Exeter (current tuition $36,000, more if boarding there).
The first group did absolutely nothing. They're not really being "rewarded" as the article says. They can just jet from Aspen to Monte Carlo their whole lives, expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. You can watch the documentary "Born Rich" which was made by one of these people (it's sometimes on Youtube) and is about these people. The second group - 1%ers who made it into the 0.1%, I suppose transitioned from one class to another, and had a hand in codifying how a large number of people worked. Even doing some of the initial stuff themselves - porting BASIC to yet another platform, selling a CPM ripoff to mom's friend on United Way's board, starting yet another social network (and being sued for stealing it), beating the S&P 500 year after year.
This is all helped by a massive mechanism of basically all of society tilted to let this class of what I consider parasites to expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who work. It's a social relationship - workers work and create wealth, and heirs expropriate our surplus labor time and the wealth we create during it. And use it as a cudgel against us not just in the world of business, and not just in the governments they created and maintained, and the schools those governments run, or the media they created and maintain and to a large extent monopolize, but also other social organizations as well like churches. Through the corporate owned news I learn Trump, an heir and businessman now running the government, this week signed a document which would allow churches to be more involved in selecting who is and is not in government. All goes into each other - you organize the wretched of the earth at the bottom of society to believe in some superstitious fantasies in order to select certain leaders who will be even more vehemently against their economic interests. One part of society flows into another, but it all flows back to the center, which is what we all wake up and do most days - work and production, and the relationship between the worker and those who are parasites on worker's labors and who have the upper hand at the moment.
Of course, several centuries ago it was the royal families who had the upper hand on the poor and the workers and the merchants, so these things seem to shift around as history marches on.
> It doesn't seem to be the case in the Forbes 400
Per the link, 7 of the 20 inherited their wealth. Of the others in the top 10, per Wikipedia:
* Gates' wealthy family background is described in another post in this discussion.
* Bezos' family (broadly defined) owned a 25,000 acre ranch in Texas and his father was an Exxon engineer
* Buffet's father was a member of the US Congress
* Zuckerburg is the child of a psychiatrist and dentist, and attended high school at Phillips Exeter academy (possibly the most elite high school in the U.S.).
* Ellison grew up middle class
* Bloomberg seems to have been working class
Note also that in the land of opportunity, where ~33% of the population is white-skinned and male, 90% (18 of 20) of the 20 wealthiest people are white guys and the other 2 are white women who inherited their money from white guys.
Most rich people in the US didn't inherit much money, they had to build it. A few prominent super wealthy did, but for the most part it is create it yourself.
> The top ten wealthiest people in the US did not inherit their wealth
Not sure what you mean by that. Just going through the wikipedia articles they certainly seem to have inherited some part of their fortune. Using money to make more money isn't particularly complicated. You also inherit the social standing which makes successful investments much easier.
A number of the most wealthiest (Top 15?) people in America inherited their wealth. The rest, well they seem to have exploited various aspects of the country and people.
Those 13 people I listed represent 13 out of the top 50 richest people in the US. Not cherry picked anecdotes. They represent 25% of the top 50 wealthiest Americans.
I'm not arguing about social mobility amongst the bottom quartile or the top 1% or anything else. I am refuting your claim that the all of the "super rich" inherited their wealth.
You said this:
>The far majority of the superrich inherited their wealth.
When I provided statistics that showed only 31% of billionaires inherited their wealth. You said this:
>It's bullshit. They were born into connected families and simply built on the advantages they already had.
You stated a fact without evidence, I provided evidence to refute your claim (also why do you care about evidence--you said earlier this isn't Nature).
At least 25% of the 50 richest Americans started out with no fortune or family connections whatsoever.
Even more of them were only upper middle class, but I didn't include them.
> Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined.
It's not exactly a counter point, but there have been lots of new millionaires lately:
> People got richer last year, with Americans making up nearly half of the new millionaires across the globe. According to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, as many as 5.2 million people became millionaires in 2021; 2.5 million of those people were in the U.S.
> "This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the United States since 2016," the report stated.
Maybe the first generation wealthy, like William Gates Jr, but it looks like the inheritors of amazing wealth don't know that. They appear to think they just deserve it, based on some magical criteria.
I say this over and over again in all my comments on the subject, but wealth passed on through inheritance has fallen a lot.
I don't know why its always assumed to be true that all this wealth that's driving inequality is inherited. It's not true.
> Over the past 30 years, the origin of the wealth of the richest people in the United States has shifted away from old, inherited money. Our new metric, the self-made scores developed for the Forbes 400, shows that increasingly we find self-made billionaires among the ranks of the richest people in the country. This has accompanied the incredible increase in wealth of the members of the Forbes 400, which has jumped 1,832% times since 1984, when the total net worth of our list was $125 billion, compared with $2.29 trillion today.[0]
> There’s no doubt that entrepreneurship is thriving globally. Fully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth. Another 405 inherited at least a portion but are still working to increase their fortunes. [1]
> y'know: their mates from the golf club who could be counted on to play ball nicely. This was especially common if the founder was unconventional in any way.
And it's a pretty obvious conclusion from:
1. the fact that GPs have to put up $10s of millions into the fund to get the job
2. most (>50%) wealth held by affluent people (like the people who become GPs) is inherited from their parents.
These are people who grew up in affluent social circles and want people like them managing the companies they invest in.
> Kaplan and Rauh find that America’s wealthiest are no longer a collection of Rockefellers and Carnegies. During the period the researchers investigated, the number of individuals on the Forbes 400 who were the first in their family to run a business rose from 40% to 69%. Sixty percent of individuals on the list grew up wealthy in 1982 while only 32% did in 2011.
> Although being born into wealth is less and less necessary for admission to the club of America’s wealthiest individuals, ...
I don't think that this is a serious response but it deserves a rebuttal anyway. 80% of millionaires in the USA are first generation. Of that other 20% basically none goes back to slavery. Slavery made some people quite wealthy but it doesn't scale the way a modern corporation does so we are talking multi millionaires not billionaires. That level of wealth just doesn't last that long. One side of my family were slave owners in north Carolina and that money didn't even make it to my grandfather. Anecdotal but that's usually how it goes.
If you look at the wealthiest people in the US, they are people like the Koch brothers, who inherited their wealth, or the Walton heirs, who inherited their wealth, or the Mars children, who inherited their wealth, and so on.
You could also look at others. Bill Gates was born with a million dollar trust fund - his great-grandfather ran National City Bank, his mother was on United Way’s executive committee with the CEO of IBM, his father ran a law firm, he went to Lakeside high school (current annual fee: $33,000) which had teletypes and access to a GE mainframe in the late 1960s. Warren Buffett is also "self-made". His grandfather owned a chain of grocery stores, his father was a congressman, he went to UPenn and Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg's parents are professionals, he went to high school at Phillips Exeter (current tuition $36,000, more if boarding there).
The first group did absolutely nothing. They're not really being "rewarded" as the article says. They can just jet from Aspen to Monte Carlo their whole lives, expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. You can watch the documentary "Born Rich" which was made by one of these people (it's sometimes on Youtube) and is about these people. The second group - 1%ers who made it into the 0.1%, I suppose transitioned from one class to another, and had a hand in codifying how a large number of people worked. Even doing some of the initial stuff themselves - porting BASIC to yet another platform, selling a CPM ripoff to mom's friend on United Way's board, starting yet another social network (and being sued for stealing it), beating the S&P 500 year after year.
This is all helped by a massive mechanism of basically all of society tilted to let this class of what I consider parasites to expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who work. It's a social relationship - workers work and create wealth, and heirs expropriate our surplus labor time and the wealth we create during it. And use it as a cudgel against us not just in the world of business, and not just in the governments they created and maintained, and the schools those governments run, or the media they created and maintain and to a large extent monopolize, but also other social organizations as well like churches. Through the corporate owned news I learn Trump, an heir and businessman now running the government, this week signed a document which would allow churches to be more involved in selecting who is and is not in government. All goes into each other - you organize the wretched of the earth at the bottom of society to believe in some superstitious fantasies in order to select certain leaders who will be even more vehemently against their economic interests. One part of society flows into another, but it all flows back to the center, which is what we all wake up and do most days - work and production, and the relationship between the worker and those who are parasites on worker's labors and who have the upper hand at the moment.
Of course, several centuries ago it was the royal families who had the upper hand on the poor and the workers and the merchants, so these things seem to shift around as history marches on.
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