Including time, which isn’t cheap (especially if you still need to concern yourself with the lower tiers of Maslow’s pyramid). Also social capital.
And education. Unsophisticated people who see money as a score-keeping mechanism or as an indicator of character or divine favour would like to boil these situations down to “more risk = more reward” and “a business owner adds value just in being a job creator” and “bootstraps and the Protestant work ethic are all it takes”. However, any self-aware and educated person (wealthy or not) who’s actually started and run a business knows it’s a lot more complex than that and that blind luck plays a huge role.
Right now in the U.S. and U.K., it’s difficult to advance and accumulate wealth if you don’t start from a certain baseline of family wealth (Richard Reeves puts it as being born into the top ventile). If things keep going the way they are, that situation will only get worse, effectively creating a new form of hereditary aristocracy.
Interestingly, Gates himself sees the value of laziness.
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
I don’t think he’s the only supposed avatar of the Protestant Work Ethic who thinks this way.
And there’s no way that a multi-billionaire signals that an economy is healthy and sustainable. When I see a multi-billionaire, 90% of the time the next thing I see is a monopoly or semi-monopoly in an industry.
One thing that honest and smart wealthy people convey to the young people in their family is that, as things stand, the game is rigged. Those same people do their best to make sure those young people learn the life skills to play it as if it’s fair despite the fact that it’s not.
Gates himself is like this, as I noted in an earlier topic:
Now we all can laugh about the “hardship” and “normalcy” of flying first class, but this indicates how distorting and isolating that amount of money can be, and how it can thwart even the best intentions (which I believe that Gates genuinely has, whether its in bringing up his kids or in his philanthropy).
tl;dr: if you know anything about money, you know that the presence of multi-billionaires are not a healthy sign for an economy.
