highfarfast

This forum needs a like button. Wholey moley!

dera

To be fair, that's what I would do if I won the lottery.
The amount of hookers and blow you could do with a few million. After that, back to normal life.

PineappleXpres

A King for a day or a Duke for a decade? Lesser income households spring for the nice car or sound system, cause they are still well shy of a house down payment. We know patience and discipline can go a long way, but where are the role models?

TransWorld

I grew up in a lower middle class household, bordering on poor. Most in my neighborhood were in the same position. In 5th grade I discovered the biography book series (every one exactly 200 pages long) in my school library. Successful people, every one. They became my role models. I read one every week.

rickair7777

This is a very key takeaway that impassioned youth rarely comprehend, and some folks never get it. I had to think about for a while.

The elites will always be there, in any form of government, under any economic system. Always have, and always will.

You can't get rid of them, but you do have some options...

Join Them. It's essential that you're passionate about climbing to the pinnacle... passion for airplanes, technology, science, engineering, etc usually won't get you there. Yes there are moments in history where a tiny handful of technocrats have an opportunity to hit it out of the park, but before the industrial and information age that was exceptionally rare. Also those folks have a passion for success and winning, their technical innovations are ancillary to that (Edison, Tesla, Ford, Hughes, Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerburger). The more reliable path is garden variety politics, business, colonialism, even military. Our favorite innovators, the Wright brothers, didn't have much to show for their efforts, they were in the same wealth ballpark as a senior legacy airline CA today.

Regulate Them. While they'll always find a way to come out on top (again it's what they do) in modern liberal democracies you can regulate the worst of their potential excesses.

Manage Them. They're playing a great game. What are the markers of success? It depends on the time and place in history... it's not always pure money, it often comes down to raw power, and that usually has very bloody consequences. Keep them focused on money and accolades and you might effectively harness them to work for the better interests of society. Communism really screwed that up bad... they (and most socialists) try to disregard fundamental human nature. You know, the one about absolute power.

Killing them off doesn't usually work either... then you just get Napoleons, Stalins, etc. Out of the frying pan into the fire.

SonicFlyer

Because they were daft when it came to vision and business skills. If they had been a bit smarter about their business dealings they would have been on top of the world, literally. They were great innovators but that was about it.

4dalulz

Basically what I was trying to say, albeit clearer than I wrote it.

Anyway, it's not about equal distribution of wealth - it's about avoiding a stratification of wealth which leads to way more inflation than some people in the bottom half of the economic ladder being able to afford rent and tylenol. The current system (tax, revenue, welfare, spending, etc. etc.) overwhelmingly encourages stratification of wealth.

SonicFlyer

Social media has a lot of them now. A ton of influencers. Some are on the side of growing wealth seriously, and others are on the side of spending it.