Forget the 1%: it's the 0.1% who run the show

boing
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Here’s a (not) fun thought experiment since referencing the institution of slavery didn’t ground the discussion in a framework of real risks and actual remedies.

So … suppose a friend calls you in crisis.

She says her partner is emotionally and physically “abusive” to her. She doesn’t want to leave. She describes past incidents when she was choked and threatened and hospitalized.

The partner owns a handgun. He’s never been charged with a violent crime.

She’s pregnant in her first trimester, and they also have a toddler. She doesn’t want to leave him and wants you to keep the whole thing secret.

What do you do? How do you proceed with minimal risk of domestic homicide to your friend?

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“Dude, it’s ditch weed, but it still works!” munch munch

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I think it did - slavery is a much closer analogy to this sort of institutional exploitation than a dispute between two people.

What you describe does sound like a crisis, but I am not clear why they would confront me with the situation if they didn’t intend for something to be resolved. If a secret, and they don’t want the other person harmed, all I could do is go against their wishes, or confront the abuser while not having any clear basis for doing so if I didn’t know more about what sort of abuse it was. It sounds like telling me of a dire problem where they don’t want or expect me to actually do anything about it.

This last factor is the only one which I think makes it a cogent analogy - people seem to like sympathy, but anything which can actually change the situation causes them to panic. Other than that, it doesn’t seem comparable. I have had abusive partners, but how I dealt with that would be a (somewhat ugly and exasperating) topic in itself. The only thing my approach to the two scenarios has in common is lots of negotiation. Negotiating with a bad-faith actor sucks, but it affords lots of “outs” for them and can leave one’s conscience clear if they end up suffering as a consequence of their own transgressions, which sometimes cannot be helped,

If you know that somebody is using the predictability of human psychology to keep you in an exploited condition indefinitely, then de-conditioning yourself away from those expectations could be an advantage. Deal with these people as an anthropologist, from a completely outside perspective where you have no personal investment in how these factors affect the outcome of your own life. Their trick is then to convince you that there is no “outside the box”, and yours is to demonstrate the relativity and implicit values of their game. It’s not universal, so they need to sell you on it, otherwise you will do something else.

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Are there any statistics to indicate that a significant amount of their wealth is “locked up in vaults”. I don’t have any statistics, but the on any lists of wealth that I read, the vast majority comes from owning significant amount of one or more very successful companies.

I suspect those prone to locking up their wealth in vaults don’t become billionaires.

Also, I have to ask. I’ve never actually talked with any billionaires (maybe one or two worth low 6 figures, but while obviously wealthier, they didn’t see all that different from “the successful dentist”). Has anyone here known anyone in the 0.1% personally? Did they seem evil or sociopathic in person?

Yes, I’m curious.

Also, of those 115,000 households, how many of them have massively lavish consumption and how many have most of their wealth locked up in owning a significant portion of a successful company (while no doubt living very cushy lifestyles indeed)? Again, I don’t know, but I’m innately suspicious of “all members of X are evil sociopaths”. Mankind is prone to that sort of belief, and it rarely ends well.

Anyway, the US already has a inheritance tax (unlike most nations) that according to Wikipedia goes up to 40% after the first $6-7 million. I assume that’s considered massively insufficient. Is the consensus here that the US needs an annual wealth tax rather than just an income tax? What sort of rate are we talking about? It’d certainly change things up a bit - historically Americans are fairly iffy about the loss of privacy of having to enumerate everything you own to the government. And market evaluation of ill-liquid goods can be a bit tricky, so having to sell your company to pay a percentage of its perceived worth might engender some resistance.

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Sexual violence injures 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men in the U.S. during their lives.

You see the problem: There’s theory, and there’s practice. You don’t want to increase the risk your friend will be killed. The situation is what it is.

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Very few billionaires have all their wealth “locked up in owning a significant portion of a successful company”, by definition. They will own significant percentages of stock in many companies, and be limited partners in many others, and possibly still have ownership and/or direct involvement with the company that started their wealth (if they themselves were the instigator of their fortune) as well. And, lots more besides. It would be stupid to put all their eggs in one financial basket. You don’t become mega-wealthy by being that naive.

The U.S. inheritance tax used to be 90%, so 40% – and only for estates bigger than any “family farm” or ma-and-pa business – is nothing to cry over, especially since it’s barely higher than the income tax rate in general.

And no, they’re not all sociopaths. But most have absolutely no idea what it’s like to try to live with a normal amount of money.

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I guess I’ll take your word for it, but I don’t get the impression that most billionaires have liquidated significant portions of the companies that made them their billions (and thus relinquished significant amounts of control). You’re right of course that diversification makes sense, but just like how so many dot-com millionaires lost everything in the crash, I have a hard time believing that the sort of people who’ve devoted every fiber of their being into making a successful company are even capable of acknowledging the possibility of failure (okay, except for a 100 or 200 million “just in case” fund.)

If you’re diversifying, it means that you are trusting other people to manage your financial success (= your life). Not a characteristic that I seem to see a lot of in the super-highly successful. (Although that’s through media, so God knows how distorted that is.)

Well, by global standards, neither do I.

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I can’t speak for anybody else, but I am more concerned with how I live, than how long I live. Eventually, death is inevitable, whereas living an equitable life is anything but inevitable. Also, threats of death and harm are in far more instances used as leverage to coerce people against their better judgement than as acts for their own sake. Refusal to be intimidated affords one the most options - and in the worst case one can still pretend to be intimidated without changing the outcome. I have had to call people’s bluffs with a gun literally to my head. It wasn’t pleasant, but I am still here. And if it went the other way, it would still not have been my problem anymore.

One difference is that with money, people can threaten to take money I have. But nobody can do anything to force me to use money if I haven’t it. This is in many ways more like threat of exile than violence. “You won’t survive! There’s nothing out there! We’re your friends! Here’s a loan!” Again - playing to / preying upon a person’s survival instincts as a way to induce anxiety and influence behavior.

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If you knew there were things you could do to decrease the risk your friend would be injured again or murdered, would you try to learn those? Practice what you learned?

Or would you rather make it up as you go along, reinvent the wheel and maybe think back on it later if she was killed?

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Don’t forget to eat the rich

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I have a hard time believing that the sort of people who’ve devoted every fiber of their being into making a successful company are even capable of acknowledging the possibility of failure (okay, except for a 100 or 200 million “just in case” fund.)

Why do you think billionaires have so much money because they each “made a successful company”? The countervailing truth is out there, and it isn’t hard to find.

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This would depend upon the values and goals of the friend, we would need to negotiate between the two of us what their preferred outcome would be. The hard fact is that I cannot presume that any of those other participants should be subject to my notions about safety, security, or sanctity of human life. Because then, in trying to help, I would be subjecting them to my values which would seem “obvious” to me. You defined most of that scenario in terms of what they might “want”, but wants are not very substantial concepts. For instance, if the want to stay with a chronic abuser and have no-one get hurt, then their wants are in conflict and they will almost certainly be disappointed in one way or another.

You might also be drawing a false equivalence between what could be assumed about or learned from one such scenario, and another. A situation being exploitive and/or abusive is still dependant upon the actual participants, and should perhaps not be stereotyped as functionally identical - any more than healthy relationships would be identical.

I suppose I would try to get them to prioritize. Are any of the participants more important than the others? Personally, I would favor the safety and survival of the innocents far more than that of the abuser. Do they prefer for the abuse to stop at any cost? Or is survival more important? How about freedom? If everybody survives and is safe, but the abuser is tied to a chair indefinitely, this might be the maximal safety arrangement - but still a less acceptable option.

Security and safety are not absolutes, they are ideals which are going to be realized to different extents in different situations. Leveraging these ideals against raw emotional motives such as wants and sentiments is anything but clear.

But this whole scenario is framed in an uncomfortably authoritarian context, where you are framing me as impinging upon other people’s relationship. My angle here is how participants formally negotiate and create the boundaries which comprise their social relationships. The primary values, goals, and choices are those of the participants. And if some of them chose to involve me, then we would negotiate what that relationship involved. The best way to help a person is to recognize their agency, and encourage others in the situation to do likewise.

As regards domestic abuse, I think it is an important area, and affects many people. But I still don’t understand how you are relating it to systems of measuring or hoarding “wealth”. To generalize it, we’d need a lot of assumptions about people and thus stereotype them instead of treating them like distinct individuals or groups.

Is there somebody in your life with a gun who threatens you when you measure wealth in certain ways?

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I was in the top two percent for 18-25 months, depending on how you count. I am now in the top 35%. In a few months a may drop below 50%.

It was fun pulling in dosh. I funded kickstarters, met awesome people I’m still friends with, and supported charities. But as they say, easy come easy go. I should have pinched every penny, but I’ve enjoyed the choices I made.

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Yep. Going through that right now, and it’s not a black and white answer. But I maximize for survival and nurturing. That’s not everybody’s strategy, it’s mine, and I’m sticking to it.

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Thanks for the data. I actually underestimated finance (I’d have guessed 25%), but apparently I massively overestimated tech (doesn’t even make the chart).

Obviously I’m as prone to the “massive headliner represents the sector” as anyone.

However, I’m not sure that addresses my point. Do you think most billionaires made their money as employees? Buffet’s company is his, and they’ll pry his cold, dead hands off of it, even though it’s in finance. I imagine that’s the same for most.

Real-estate is notorious for making and breaking billionaires who you’d think would escape the lottery once they’ve one the jackpot. But no, I strongly suspect most are incapable of acknowledging the amount of luck that goes into becoming mega-successful.

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This is the main thing that Piketty calls for – ideally on a global, coordinated basis in order to defeat tax evasion. He says all the data we need exists, it just needs to be shared. The slightly inferior alternative is to get Europe to coordinate this, and have the US and China also act independently on it. (China already does have some laws on how capital can leave the country, etc.)

If I am recalling this correctly (I only finished last night) he suggested something on the order of 0.1% per year above $1 million dollars or euros, escalating to about 2% above some billions – but once the collection process began, hard data would be there to help zero in on the ideal amounts.

I’m fairly well convinced by his book that this would put a big damper on wealth inequality at least. We would also still need progressive income tax – higher than it is now on the $200,000 and up range, for revenue, and punishingly high somewhere above the $1 million range in order to shut down extreme corporate executive pay.

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All of us can put others at risk with what we think we know …

Did you know there’s a 24-hour crisis line in your county … every county?

The calls are free, legally privileged confidential calls answered by advocates trained to assess for lethality, offer safety planning, access emergency shelter and other help? They are trained not to blame or judge the caller or substitute their own judgments about safety for hers?

It’s also normal for a person to need multiple calls or attempts to decide how to most safely escape an abusive situation?

None of that is intutive information, right?

This issue is like the issues presented in the OP.
Wealth inequality and gender violence both involve groups of people coercing other people. The practical ways to remedies are also similar.

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This is right on. The majority of people don’t know what 1% means.

I went to have a routine surgery that I could have lived without and they told me I had a 1% chance of dying. I said, “It better not be 1%!” and they immediate switched to “This person knows math” mode and told me about the realities of the risks. Most people evaluation risk much better when told “30 our of 100 people will…” than “30% of people will…” “One percent” was always a metaphor.

We could take a market-based approach to the value of human life. If someone is willing to kill you and risk going to prison to get the money in your pocket then your life isn’t worth more than the money in your pocket. It’s the market rate!

I don’t quite agree. I think they are largely orthogonal in practice, but ethics are actually right, and being ethical is better, and smart people could figure that out if they weren’t so trapped in their two-year-old brains throwing tantrums when they don’t get things they want. Of course no one but me believes in objective morality, so this point is a bit of a tough sell.

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Your responses to me makes it clear that you spoke truly: you do not interact with high net worth individuals at all. Not sure where you’re getting your ideas from, but that’s not how the wealthy handle their financial affairs.

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Oops. Posted in wrong topic.