[SimianSci]

"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula."

In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.

[kjkjadksj]

I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actually use at this income level. Or maybe their whole life is delivered to their door by this point.

[jerlam]

The personal automobile is the cause for most of these problems. The US gutted many of its cities by widening streets and removing public transport, and newer cities are simply not built to any comparable density because they are built with the car as the primary mode of transportation.

[kjkjadksj]

At least in LA transit was never really removed. The streetcar system evolved into a bus network that is far more comprehensive today than the streetcar system ever was. What changed was really income levels. Already by the 1920s streetcar systems were in decline as the used car market started kicking into gear and making a direct transport option affordable to most all working people. To this day it is still highly affordable to have a car. There are used car lots advertising $0 down $50/mo financing with merely holding a job at all being enough to qualify for that financing. "Tu trabajo es tu credito" painted on the walls.

Other places you see more transit use usually come with significant cost barriers to driving for most of the working population. In nyc this includes bridge tolls and paying for parking.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.

[kjkjadksj]

I'm not sure when it started per say. I just think its really odd how you have this pocket of very high income people and no one is bothering trying to cater to that demographic, but instead to the demographic that cleans their house or mows their yard. E.g. the flats of beverly hills fill with taco trucks during the work day specifically for the housecleaners and landscapers to get their lunch. Maybe this high income class of people just puts on very low demand for goods and services relative to lower income classes of people.

[qaq]

Are you sure paper wealth truly translates into world of atoms. The fact that market values some hypothetical future profits of TSLA at 270x current profits vs Ford 7x is cool but can you actually deploy a significant fraction of that into real physical world?

[SimianSci]

No, but I dont think it matters if wealth truly translates as a 1:1 relationship. What matters is that the wealthy specifically invest in the mobility of wealth itself. They will absolutely pay a premium to make the wealth move more easily from one place to another. Many will gladly pay $10 to make $5 more mobile, so to speak.

A prime example of this being many cryptocurrencies which can be argued are a means of making large sums of wealth more portable.

[conception]

https://www.dcfpi.org/all/how-wealthy-households-use-a-buy-b...

Yes they can get at that wealth, tax free at that!

[qaq]

Again to do what? at scale there are many physical constraints. You can't take physical resources used to create a 500M yacht and build 100 apartment buildings. Those crazy valuations exist in part because none really tries to convert any significant portion of that paper wealth into physical things.

[esrauch]

I'm not sure if I'm following this example. A 500M Yacht concretely uses a large amount of materials/engineers/building expertise, right? It's not the exact same skills as building apartments but it is concrete "atoms" in terms of materials, engineering, sweat labor, fuel. Those resources could be used on apartments.

It's not like there's a fixed number of naturally occurring megayachts around and the $500m price is a fiction that isn't fungible to be used on other things

It doesn't seem related to the "you have a trillion dollars on paper but that's mostly fiction" topic. The $500m yacht has been materialized to "atoms" and isn't on paper anymore.

[qaq]

Yep but if you take all that paper wealth and distribute it you aint getting much physical shit out of it. The yacht example is relevant for ratio of how even physically manifested rich people toys convert to real world things people care about. 250M NYC apartment only consumed physical resources enough to build 15 regular size homes and so on.

[conception]

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. What does it matter the actual physical atoms? A mole of gold costs more than a mole of carbon. How much you can “deploy” with 500m differs.

Maybe you’re trying to say if they actually liquidated their wealth to spend any sufficient fraction their paper wealth would disappear but that’s the point of pulling out the value without liquidating.

[qaq]

I am saying people imaging that significant portion of paper wealth could be converted into tangible things for regular people like housing, infra etc.

[conception]

This is actually pretty easy to get data on, e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tax-cuts-are-primar...

There are many studies on the various tax cuts for the ultra wealthy and how that has (purposefully) starved the government and limited its ability to provide tangible things for its citizens.

And that’s ignoring all the various tax avoidance schemes.

[johnnyanmac]

Whatever the banks approve, I suppose. Buy out a street block, "invest" in a new company, acquire another company, etc.

Put it another way: I'd also have little to worry about if I could borrow 200k from the bank for a project. That'd basically be used to pay rent and get minimal equipment I'd never be approved for it, though.

[ryandrake]

Yea, wealth seems invisible because we peasants aren't even let into the places where these wealthy people roam. They live in an entirely different world than us, and they invest heavily in that world's function.

[geff82]

This is exactly what I felt the last two times I was in the US.