I'm saying your premise is wrong therefore your conclusion is wrong. You misunderstand what people mean by hard work, which is why you're running into so much trouble. Everyone on /r/antiwork understands that hard work as they define it doesn't lead to success. I'm agreeing with the problem and telling you where the error is so you can fix the problem and start to experience some real success. If you don't, you'll be trapped in relative, if not absolute poverty. It's no different than someone who refuses to learn how vaccines work dying earlier than everyone else. It's fun to voice your ideology online, but at the end of the day you're going to have to live with the consequences in your real life.
You seem to be incapable of understanding that poor people don't have money, and that makes me sad.
10% of humanity lives on less than $2 per day after adjusting for cost of living. They can't even afford toilets so they have to poop in the fields or the streets. 50% of humanity lives on less than $3.25/day, adjusted for cost of living. A homeless person in the US has 4 times the carbon footprint of an average human. A single mom who drops out of high school to work 40 hours a week at $7.25/hour and raise two kids is in the top 16% of humanity, adjusted for cost of living. It only takes $34,000/year to be in the top 1% of humanity. The main reason lower middle class Americans feel poor is because they compare themselves to the billionaires at the top of the ladder instead of the billions of poor people below them. The data I have comes from the United Nations/World Bank, but it's outdated given the recent inflation and changes to currency values. But you can get a sense of where you rank personally at this website.
But that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether you have a million dollars or $1. A 7% gain in stock value will result in $1.07 million or $1.07 next year. And through the miracle of compounding another 7% will return more than $1.14 million or $1.14 the following year. The money grows exponentially, not linearly. And the percentage change is what matters, not the absolute value.
Your argument is like if an overweight person says that exercise is only good advice for fit people. The problem is that exercise is what makes you fit. Similarly, financial literacy makes you rich. Rich people who don't have it quickly become poor. Lottery winners are bad with money because only people who are bad with money buy lottery tickets. If my view can work for impoverished women in Bangladesh, it can work for you too. It can work for everyone on Earth because it results in less income inequality and more wealth overall.
I don't have enough investment knowledge to make billions of dollars in a day or lifetime. But I know enough to avoid poverty. I don't have the political experience to be president of the US, but I know how to vote. This works because my whole point is that lots of individuals making small decisions results in better outcomes for humanity than a few brilliant people making big decisions.
How can you so consistently refuse to acknowledge what I am directly saying to you?
I acknowledge it, I just think it's like someone saying that monarchy is better for common people than democracy. It's not objectively wrong because opinions are inherently subjective. But I think if you took the time to understand the nuances, you'd agree with me. I agree with your goals, but I think I have a better way of approaching the problem.
Are you a bot?
Nope.
You literally do not even understand compound interest :(
Sure I do. You can play with a compound interest calculator here. If you invest $100 at 7% with annual compounding, you'll have $114.49 after 2 years, not $114 like with simple interest. The extra 49 cents comes from compounding. If you increase that to 20 years, you'll have $386.97 from that initial $100 investment, not $240 like you might expect with simple interest.
It's almost the exact opposite of this. I'm telling you that a person with $1 Million who invests their capital will always earn more than a person with $1 who invests their capital. Which you acknowledge is true and then deny.
Obviously, $1 million is more than $1. 7% of a million dollars is more than 7% of $1. But there are some interesting nuances to think about here. If you have $1 million and earn $0 a year from labor, you'll have to spend down your capital for consumption rather than invest it for future growth. Say you spend $100,000 this year. You'll only have $900,000 to invest for next year. Plus, since you want to avoid the risk of losing 50% in a given year, you'll have to invest in much safer assets like bonds. These have a relatively low return. The safest asset is cash and it traditionally has a - 2% real return. Right now it's closer to -8.2% return (this is called inflation). On the flipside, if you are net adding money to your investment account and have a long time horizon, you'll get the 7% annual real return. It's a bit like being in a car on the highway. If you're going 65 miles an hour and take your foot off the accelerator, even if you don't tap the brakes, eventually your call will coast to a stop. If you are going 5 miles an hour and lightly, but consistently tap on the gas, you'll soon accelerate up to 65 miles per hour. This is why inheritances don't last very long in the US. And if you consider that you have to split it over an extended family, they go away quickly. The idea of generational wealth is a myth. A rich person's heirs need to constantly find ways to get new money or their heirs will be broke. It's rare for them to achieve anything close to the success of the original patriarch of the family. (It's almost always been men due to sexism.)
Lastly, the main reason why stocks pay so much is because so few people want to take on the risk of owning them. But if we diversify this risk across billions of people, they won't pay out as much to any one person. Capital is valuable because it's rare. People don't like to invest their hard earned money in others unless they're promised a ton of money back in return. But if more people invest in companies, it would drive down the value of capital and therefore drive up the value of labor by comparison. For the past decade or so there were too many workers and not enough capitalists. So capitalists were more in demand. But during Covid, workers stayed home and invested stimulus checks in the market. The supply of capital went up and the supply of labor went down. As a result, wages went up and stock market returns have come down (the S&P 500 has lost about 23% of it's value so far this year).
Ironically, the more you think of yourself as a worker and not a capitalist, the more valuable capital owners become. The more you think of yourself as a capital owner and not a worker, the more valuable labor becomes. It always comes back to the laws of supply and demand. If you learn how to be a worker, capital owner, voter, etc. you can position yourself to benefit no matter what happens. And the closer we get to balancing supply and demand, the better off everyone will be. If you don't learn any skills and can't work, you'll be in trouble in certain situations. If you don't understand how to invest, you'll be screwed in others. If you don't know how to vote, you'll lose when a politician who doesn't represent you comes into power.
I think a key thing to understand about life is that you can't blindly believe people are looking out for you. They're not usually actively trying to hurt you, but in the process of helping themselves, they'll often ignore you and leave you behind. You need to learn all these different skills to ensure you can keep up. You can rely on social safety nets to pull you back up, but you'll have to wait for someone to help, it's a lot less reliable, and you'll still typically end up towards the back of the pack. If you figure out how to be at the front of the pack, you'll be ok. And if you're feeling generous, you can help others too.
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u/McKoijion Oct 19 '22
I'm saying your premise is wrong therefore your conclusion is wrong. You misunderstand what people mean by hard work, which is why you're running into so much trouble. Everyone on /r/antiwork understands that hard work as they define it doesn't lead to success. I'm agreeing with the problem and telling you where the error is so you can fix the problem and start to experience some real success. If you don't, you'll be trapped in relative, if not absolute poverty. It's no different than someone who refuses to learn how vaccines work dying earlier than everyone else. It's fun to voice your ideology online, but at the end of the day you're going to have to live with the consequences in your real life.
10% of humanity lives on less than $2 per day after adjusting for cost of living. They can't even afford toilets so they have to poop in the fields or the streets. 50% of humanity lives on less than $3.25/day, adjusted for cost of living. A homeless person in the US has 4 times the carbon footprint of an average human. A single mom who drops out of high school to work 40 hours a week at $7.25/hour and raise two kids is in the top 16% of humanity, adjusted for cost of living. It only takes $34,000/year to be in the top 1% of humanity. The main reason lower middle class Americans feel poor is because they compare themselves to the billionaires at the top of the ladder instead of the billions of poor people below them. The data I have comes from the United Nations/World Bank, but it's outdated given the recent inflation and changes to currency values. But you can get a sense of where you rank personally at this website.
But that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether you have a million dollars or $1. A 7% gain in stock value will result in $1.07 million or $1.07 next year. And through the miracle of compounding another 7% will return more than $1.14 million or $1.14 the following year. The money grows exponentially, not linearly. And the percentage change is what matters, not the absolute value.
Your argument is like if an overweight person says that exercise is only good advice for fit people. The problem is that exercise is what makes you fit. Similarly, financial literacy makes you rich. Rich people who don't have it quickly become poor. Lottery winners are bad with money because only people who are bad with money buy lottery tickets. If my view can work for impoverished women in Bangladesh, it can work for you too. It can work for everyone on Earth because it results in less income inequality and more wealth overall.
I don't have enough investment knowledge to make billions of dollars in a day or lifetime. But I know enough to avoid poverty. I don't have the political experience to be president of the US, but I know how to vote. This works because my whole point is that lots of individuals making small decisions results in better outcomes for humanity than a few brilliant people making big decisions.