Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Easy as 1, 2, 22.8 billion, in reply to merc,
Play Monopoly with children, see what happens.
Usually, I thrash them, and prefer not to play them except to teach it. But yes, I seldom bother developing Mayfair unless for some reason the game has got to an advanced state and everyone has a lot of money. That's uncommon - if you've got enough money to develop Mayfair, you've usually already won. Doing so would be only to hurry the game to the end.
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OnPoint: Easy as 1, 2, 22.8 billion, in reply to merc,
Monopoly 101, never sell the utilities.
? I never sold anything unless I was already screwed, but I would often trade a utility with a big cash difference for any other kind of property, or neglect to buy a utility, given the chance, when I was low on cash. The utilities were lame assets in Monopoly. The average payout from landing on them if someone owned both was $70. Compare that with $700 for landing on one of just the weak blue properties with a hotel on it. Or $2000 for landing on Mayfair with a hotel - game over, most times. The railways were pretty good earners too, the best thing being the constant drip feed of cash since they're evenly distributed.
Pretty silly game, really. You can't force anyone to stay at a Mayfair hotel, but if you own the electricity and water, you can pretty much force them to pay you every month. You could quite easily make Mayfair an undesirable suburb by cutting the power and water.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to giovanni tiso,
It wouldn’t be a big issue for IT pros
To me it seems like a young man's game, so I wouldn't be too sure. The constant movement of technology ages IT people's skills pretty damned fast.
Much as I'd like to call bollocks to the whole idea and be done with it, may I humbly suggest that if all citizens got decent pensions paid into their account fortnightly or monthly, they'd be less likely to blow them in the way that you describe?
It would be quite literally impossible. And I don't object to "decent" pensions, depending what you mean by that. Therein lies the problem, it means different things to different people.
which happens to quite a number of people, mostly women - then retiring and trying to live solely on the pension is, well, probably a bit of a mission. It's not as if women who worked inside the home for a decade or more can count on their giant retirement savings.
Yet another reason for super funds that are administered by the government - it makes good sense that these are split down the middle in a divorce, unless there is a pre-nuptial agreement to the contrary. It would protect housewives/husbands.
This may be the most fantastic rationalisation of economic disparity I've come across in the last several years.
Not sure what you mean. People have been known to go crazy with money when they get it suddenly, which is one way it can be given out at the maturation of a superannuation fund. It's certainly a social problem worthy of consideration.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to giovanni tiso,
The important thing is to save people from the horrible shock of having their lifestyle actually improved in their old age.
Yes, that's nowhere near as crazy as it sounds. Having sudden access to a large fund when you've never had more than 10k in your bank account could easily lead to crazy wastage - people could gamble the lot away in a weekend, for instance, or go on drug and alcohol fueled bender for 6 months, the way so many winners of lotteries have done. I presume there are statistics on how many people do this in, for example, Australia. But people like that would also have done the same with their money if they hadn't saved it, so at least they get that one wild ride in their lives, if they are so inclined. It was their money, after all, that they saved. I'm pretty sure most people actually just spend a big chunk on some things that they want, then invest the rest and live comfortably.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to Rik,
Definitely it means people retire with different amounts of money. But that's a good thing about it, that retirement incomes are proportional to working ones, so people retire in the manner to which they have become accustomed. It's not some horrible shock to their lifestyle, dreaded to the extent that people will refuse to ever retire. There's still a pension for those who lose it all or never had much. Mostly the money stays invested in funds, and people live off the dividends, but there's no rule saying retirees can't go sick with their money. They'll just be living on a pension from then on if they do.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to Rik,
Yep, you're one the money - except for the complaining bit
OK then, fair enough. I'm sure both of our points here can look like complaining, and that's probably worth addressing. Most certainly I have heard many a person in my situation complaining about progressive taxation. I don't have a complaint, per se, but simply a point that income is not identical to wealth, and the equating of the two can be a source of quite suboptimal outcomes if you actually have a generally progressive attitude about economics.
The most stark example of this is companies that manage to avoid tax altogether because of near complete reinvestment strategy that turns all of their profit into capital. Anyone can see that owning an enormous factory is a sign of large wealth, and yet the only people paying a whole bunch of tax in the organization are the workers, and the most highly skilled ones, who typically have spent the most time investing in their own training, are paying the most tax of all. That can be a very strange outcome indeed, that people who have done without any income for a lengthy period, often incurring significant debt during that time for both training costs and living costs, are in a financial position that is worse than the workers who, as Marx might have put it, "bring nothing except their hands".
Strange, rather than wrong or bad. The advantages of having done that training are several - they get a lot more choice about the work they do, and might take higher satisfaction from it as a result. They will do things within the organization that have much greater influence, probably rising within the management structures. And if they're careful, within some period of time should be rapidly overtaking the financial position of people who didn't train.
That "if they're careful" part is quite important. If they're careful, the workers who never trained can quite easily be quite well off, comfortably middle-class themselves. This is actually a good outcome, since it means mobility is possible for anyone that wants it. Workers in anything that requires a modicum of brainpower will soon be quite well trained themselves, and have direct access to the same potentials as those who undertook formal training. If they're not careful, then they'll be doing the same old dull tasks, and spending everything they earned, and sitting on the breadline, powerless, afraid of redundancy. The exact same position can be found by people on much higher incomes, just eating more expensive food, drinking more expensive alcohol, maybe living in a nicer apartment or house.
This lack of care is the biggest problem with the capitalist system, as I see it. While suffering the consequences of actions is one way to encourage people to take more care, the fact remains that many people just don't - across all class boundaries. And a purely capitalist system will punish this quite harshly.
Far better, IMHO, is to institutionalize good money management. I don't just mean by everyone paying heaps of tax and letting the government decide what to do with it. That would actively discourage the good money management that some people naturally have. I think the best system I've encountered is to force people to save. So I advocate compulsory superannuation at the very least, and I think other schemes could be easily devised. It seems to me one of the most compelling things about real estate as an investment is not that it's an especially good asset class, but rather than it tends to enforce a form of saving. That is the biggest factor in the ridiculous amounts of money tied up in property compared to other asset classes in this and many other countries. And it was also a big factor in the recent GFC, that the saving side of the equation was ignored, so people were given interest only loans, and very low equity loans, both of which are focusing almost entirely on the speculative side of the investment equation.
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OnPoint: It's real, in reply to BenWilson,
And to that end, I think that economic stagnation is a fairly inevitable consequence of socialist policy. I just don't think that's so bad. It's a curious leveling process, which is actually making the world a better place, that it means once nations get a basic level of economic stability, they will converge on the wealthier nations, and international inequality will decrease. It's a chaotic method, but it's also happening all by itself.
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OnPoint: It's real, in reply to DexterX,
That is in part my point faced with a choice "you" prefer the house over creating the brave new frontier.
I hope you can see that that is not the case. I choose to own property because it has been one of the soundest investment classes for decades in NZ, but in terms of actually making money I spent most of my time thinking about my day job, which does actually bring in money from overseas. Probably I should have put a lot more thought into the property, done it differently, followed in the footsteps of my grandfather who built a number of the shopping centers around Auckland. Trouble is, my natural bent is to do what I actually do do, to write software. I'm good at that, it pays well, and that's about all the excuses I've got for not having considerably more net worth than I do. I don't basically think like a capitalist, I think and act like someone who is, always was, and quite probably always will be, middle class. It's always been my view that a pervasive middle class is about the closest capitalism can ever get to socialism. It offers the best chance for people to work in, and live lives that aren't all about the money.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to BenWilson,
But the exact same argument could apply to investing in one's training.
And the latter would seem to me as widely regarded as better for the economy. I'm actually undecided about whether this is true, whether we have an unrealistic fixation on skilling up via tertiary education as the savior of the economy, that skills learned on the job are more economically valuable. I think increased tertiary training is a good for reasons that are less about economics, and much more about widening the scope of the lives of people who engage in it.
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to Danielle,
FFS Ben, it's an expression of frustration at this yucky entitled argument, not a *literal* take.
Yes, I got that. But even if it's yucky, it's still an issue with some complexity.
As the son of a tradesperson, I'm going to have to say bollocks to the idea that it's easy.
In the easy cases I'm referring to, that is how they refer to it, with considerable smugness, and with descriptions of work that does actually sound pretty easy. But in those cases I think they haven't factored in the danger side of their jobs - dealing with dangerous chemicals, and driving around a lot might strike them as easy only up until the day they have a terrible accident, or some horrible toxin related sickness.
tradesmen rarely or never reflect on what they do as something to look back on.
Does depend on the trade a bit. But for things that don't require much forethought, I'd say that's right. It's hard to know if that's a good or bad thing about that kind of work. Not many people of any stripe look back on their lives and deeply regret not spending more time in the office.
Often people living large have a net worth of nothing, people in rags own heaps. I'm not sure personally about where taxation fairness lies between big earners and careful savers.
Neither do I. I think big earners should pay more tax. But people with a lot of property assets do quite possibly have the same or more money to just use for less basic needs. I don't have a solution for that. 2 people in identical jobs with identical pay will pay near identical tax, but one of them might be a lot richer than the other, keeping or spending far more money for/on themselves. On the one hand, it seems that saving is it's own reward and should not be unfairly taxed. But the exact same argument could apply to investing in one's training.
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