I've been writing a series of pieces about what I've learned about how various key systems work, and the latest is on money: How the ultra-wealthy see money in a fundamentally different way than the rest of us do. It's not a bucket! https://www.anildash.com/2024/07/02/money-flows/
@anildash
> "you can't exert control over something if you've already stopped paying for it."
painful to recognize, yet so true.
@anildash This reminds me of when I heard Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier talking somewhere about the differences in independently making Clerks and then doing Mallrats with a studio. Producing Clerks involved a lot creative thinking and work to solve problems given the small bucket of money involved. Producing Mallrats , on the other hand, involved much less creative thinking and work because they could basically aim a money hose at most of those same types of problems.
@anildash “most of the money coming out of the faucet is not their own”
And even their spending money, the “bucket” of sorts, is generally not actually theirs. It tends to be money borrowed against their investments. So what would look like income to you and I, is actually technically a debt for them…with all the associated tax benefits.
I think also that people, especially those who believe “anyone can do it by their bootstraps”, don’t understand the huge advantages of being wealth adjacent even if you aren’t wealthy. They don’t accrue as much if you’re poor, but if you have enough money to take advantage of adjacency, they can be huge. A job or school reference that carries a lot of weight, a vacation where all you have to cover is the flight to get there, a loan of a home/pool/resort to hold an event for your friends or coworkers, the opportunity to meet major decision makers socially, a family loan at minimum rates, front row tickets to a game, access to exclusive clubs…. It’s a huge amount of social capital that can be leveraged into financial capital.
I think there may be some percentage of total wealth where an inflection point hits.
Below that number, even the merely "well off" (e.g. don't have to budget for groceries, but still need a job and salary and hope to send a kid to college) "bucket camp" folks can treat some smaller things as flow if they are small enough expenses.
Biggest than that, and once needs to count as bucket "stock."
Money can make problems go away. It's a question of size and amount.
@anildash I hate to be “that guy”, but as far as I know a centimillionaire is someone who has $10,000. I don’t think that’s what you had in mind 😀.
@pseudonym @anildash IMO all of consumerist capitalism relies on this, hence the push for subscription models… especially stark where new-media creatives are pitted as competitors for subscription dollars, which democratizes the ability to exert pressure on labor to perennially contort to audience influence because the audience hasn't finished paying. It constrains creative choice to create a funnel in which success chiefly means either absent, or monetized, controversy.
