Disco Stu meme
Paul is my favorite example of "brain gout." I learned what gout was as "a disease kings used to get by eating foods that were too rich." Paul's writing when he was closer to reality, in the early 2000's, was a lot more insightful, because he was closer to reality. But if you've spent 21 years never having a material concern, and increasingly interacting with other rich people (or young people who idolize them), it takes a toll on your grasp of things. It's a king eating rich foods for decades.
Like his "wealth tax" piece, he's very proud of doing elementary maths that ignore a major part of the reality at the start (in that case, he was assuming that their money wasn't growing, just being taxed, which... my man). It's sad to see, and I hope anyone who gets financially successful takes the lesson to try as hard as possible to keep living like normal people do. Buy your own groceries. Cook your own meals. Keep close to the friends you made before you were rich.
> Buy your own groceries. Cook your own meals
What's the point of being rich if you're living like a chump!
In my earning life, contrast my prior student life, buying groceries and cooking good food is my greatest pleasure.
That's maybe a 30% growth across the last ten years? It's reasonable to expect that in 2040 I'll be eating eighty meals a day and be happier and healthier in similar proportion.
Cooking your own meals is the most assured way to eat like a king.
Cooking your own meals is “living like a chump”? That attitude says more about your values than your wealth.
I thought he might be onto something interesting when he began with the growth-rate example, since that's most-obviously tied to valuation. But he skipped over valuation entirely and decided to lecture a bunch of Oxford grads about middle-school math as if he were onto something profound.
I think the way network effects and valuation creates billionaires is a more earnest defense. But that would start to lean into sociology and luck more than the hard-work he must insist upon, so I guess we sweep that under the "exponential because hard work" rug too.
So... what's the critique here exactly? "Oh hey everybody, Paul is out touch!" - Okay, now what? Rich people are rich, that's truism. Some comments made good counter arguments but this lazy polished ad-hominem attacks are more offensive than the piece itself.
[flagged]