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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

"owner class" is too outdated and myopic. It's also incorrect, as plenty of people born into low income households go on to become elected representatives.

It's better to think about it in terms of "people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person".

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With any other disadvantaged/discriminated class (skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc.), getting elected in power doesn't change the disadvantage. So the incentive is still there to fight for that equality.

This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.

Elected officials should make the average salary from the year prior. If it's not enough to survive then they'll need to do something about it!

Let's follow the money. A policy that pumps stocks by dumping labor + consumer rights delivers a roughly equal cost to everyone but delivers benefits in proportion to net worth. Suppose it pumps assets by 1%.

A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.

A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.

A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.

A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.

If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.

In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.

owner class: people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person

There now it’s both. They want to own agency if the idea of owning stuff is too gauche for modern audiences.

Just because they weren’t born into the owner class (or “capital class”) doesn’t mean they didn’t work their way into it. That’s kind of the American dream.

You can only become wealthy later in life at which point you can’t advantage your past self. Thus new money receives fewer benefits than old money from the exact same policies.

Further having 100m at 40 doesn’t suddenly bring the kind of social connections that going to the right schools and the right parties would. At the extremes, the average lottery winner is surrounded by people asking for help, the average Fortune 500 CEO’s social circle aren’t. So if they suddenly fall on hard times the lottery winner is stuck but that CEO may very well claw their way back.

It’s still possible for poor people to succeed and 3rd+ generation wealth to fail, but the odds are wildly different.

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