[danjac]

Of extended family and friends, the ones with the most personal wealth by retirement got there not by being more creative, or inventive, or productive, or by studying and acquiring skills and knowledge, or starting and growing a business, but by inheriting, buying, renting and flipping properties at the right time.

I don't know much about macroeconomics or economics in general, but it seems that's how you climb in the Western world these days. "Working hard" and increasing your productivity - that's for chumps.

[killtimeatwork]

> seems that's how you climb in the Western world these days.

Or perhaps - used to climb. Property prices can't rise sharply forever. Not if you want real people to buy them too, not just the speculators. Real people have real limits on what they can afford, and, if priced out, you're just left with speculators and a speculative bubble, which won't go on forever.

[Gollapalli]

Well if they can't buy, rent to them! Rent-seeking in a nutshell. The value of a property becomes determined by "can you rent it for more than your mortgage?" and "how much credit can you get?".

Obviously, that's going to break down eventually, and it will be a mess when it does.

[axelroze]

It's the problem of diminishing returns.

If one is at rock bottom then working hard and being productive can get them to middle class lifestyle. It works. Helped billions of people in the past few decades.

But starting from middle class and working hard won't make riches. Think of it physically. A hardworking person can build a house compared to a drunkard who will be homeless. Yet the same hard working person can't build million houses and get insanely wealthy.

To get truly materially rich (millions+ usd, servants, yachts, etc) one usually needs to be evil and screw over other people. Productivity, in the sense of a machine making houses in the millions, would make the inventor fairly rich. But this is the exception rather than the rule. Most riches are arrived at immorally as parent comment mentions.

[arvinsim]

"Behind Every Great Fortune There Is a Crime"