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Comment by roguecoder | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting: it reminds me of the results we're seeing from workplace democracy in Germany.

Companies with workers on their boards are significantly less likely to go bust than companies where only investors' opinions matter.

But of course, whenever someone else's opinion matters, investors use their wealth to try to change that. Rich people seem to prefer worse outcomes as long as they get to be in charge.

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Yes of course but there are downsides to this too. Workers will certainly prioritize survival and stability, but sometimes at the expense of innovation, efficiency and growth. They do not really have an incentive for the company to do better, but they definitely don’t want to lose their jobs or make them much more difficult.

For most established companies it is really not much of a challenge to prevent it from going bust if that is your priority, but it requires sacrifices, mostly opportunity costs.

Yes, the desire for power is as important as the desire for capital.

If you have $100m your life isn't going to measurably change if you increase your wealth to $1b or $10b

At that point you start trying to accumulate power instead of money, and of course money is a by-product for power.

I think proxy is probably a better word than by-product "for" power. Or did you mean by-product OF power?

Yes, of, indeed.

That's a pretty broad statement about rich people. How do you define rich?

Laughable that this is interpreted as a slur against r*ch people. It is a banal observation that power corrupts. Societies with constructs to check power experience better overall and individual prosperity in general.

The point I'm trying (and obviously failing) to make is that "rich people" is a very broad definition to the point of being completely meaningless. About 7 to 8 percent of my Americans have a net worth greater than 1 million dollars. Is that rich? By some standards, yes.

You mention constructs to check power? What do you mean?

1 million means you can stop working for 20 years and get around 4000 dollars per month which should be well enough to feed yourself, go out and get a roof on your head. Of course that's not even counting the revenue you can have this money generate for you while you are sitting on your ass.

So yes, I'd consider them rich. If you can totally stop working for more than 5 years I'd say you are rich.

I agree. And that's what I'm getting at, making statements like the parent post about rich people is a bit ridiculous.

Sure, "rich" means different things in different contexts. In this case it's a shorthand for the much smaller group of people who control large companies and can move major levers impacting employment and trade. Admittedly it's ambiguous, as so many English terms in common use are.

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