Well, I didn't ignore your posts. It's just that The Who's Who of capitalism is a long list, and covers a few centuries. You or I or Joe Blow can list a batch of very rich people, the 1%, and what they did / how they did it. Whether the 1% are 'good people' or hideous gargoyles would require a lot of individual biography, since having a lot of money alone wouldn't make one necessarily good or bad. Carnegie might have been a harsh employer, but he was a good philanthropist. I regularly used the Carnegie library in our small town when I was growing up. Henry Ford was richer than Carnegie; he might have been a better employer than Carnegie, but he was a vicious antisemite.

it's worth understanding exactly who they are. — Xtrix

Brett denies being interested in the question "who they are"; he says it is your question. I've attempted to address what I thought was Brett's question, either who they are or how one could find out.

Here's my last attempt to explain it:

I read somewhere that most of the gold that was ever mined -- going back 3000 years -- is still in circulation. I don't know whether that is true, but it illustrates an important point: Wealth is cumulative.

The undifferentiated wealth sloshing around in the trough in 2020 has a history. You can trace the development of wealth backwards to sometime in the medieval period, probably not much before then. There are, for instance, a few companies in the world that have been in continuous existence since 1200. Some of the wealth in England goes back to grants that William the Conqueror (aka William the Bastard) made after he won the battle of Hastings in 1066. Some of the valuable land in New York City is owned by descendants of Dutch settlers before New Amsterdam became New York. Land is the original wealth. From land one can extract rent, food and fiber (like wheat and wool). England accumulated a wad of wealth by exporting fine wool to manufacturers on the continent. Later, it was coal and iron. The reason the British claimed North America was to have the land from which to extract wealth. The Germans wanted Lebensraum, and came close to getting most of Europe. Land is wealth. Nations are willing to go way out of their way to get it.

Over time, starting in the late 1700s the first industrial revolution starting up, and more wealth was created. Families who owned industrial works of various kinds became rich; their wealth was passed on in the form of investments and inheritances. Of course, sometimes big piles of wealth were lost -- someone took the land away from you; the factory burned down; one's valuable ship sank; one died without heirs, war ruined the country, and so on. But a lot of wealth moved on to other people.

The secrets of technology are another source of wealth. The British tried to hold on to the secrets of manufacturing, but as luck would have it, they failed. Americans swiped several important secrets and started up manufacturing in New England -- the beginning of the American textile fortunes.

The southern economy was devastated by the Civil War, and it took roughly a century for the southern states to recover fully. The north was enriched by the same war, and the fortunes earned (by banks, mills, railroads, farms, etc.) established a springboard to greater wealth. Metal and railroads were the leading industries after the Civil War. Andrew Carnegie was started working in 1848 at the age of 13--no huge credit to AC. Children usually were put to work early on.

Carnegie's first good job was with the Pennsylvania Railroad. He made enough money to invest in various industries and accumulated his first fortune. He started his investing about the time the civil war started. This was a period of huge growth in northern industries, and his (probably small) investments paid off hugely.

Carnegie had some money at just the right time. Had he first tried to invest shortly before the 'long depression' of 1873 which lasted 5 to 20 years, depending how one measures economic activity, he might have lost his nest egg and had difficulty recouping. Similarly, many of the people who lost a lost of wealth in 1929 didn't recover until WWII spurred huge government spending.

I’m trying to determine who they are. I don’t know why this is so difficult.
— Brett

The reason you are having so much difficulty answering the "who they are" question is that you are asking the question on a philosophy forum. What you will have to do is read history. Fortunately, that is not a dreary task. There are numerous interesting books which specifically or generally cover the question of HOW and WHO accumulated wealth from the getgo down to the present.

I am confident that you greatly exceed the necessary capacity to locate good, interesting, and economically oriented histories and read them. THEN you will know who it was that got rich and how.

I’m trying to determine who they are — Brett

And that is not the question. — Brett

OK, then what is your question? Who are the "who" you want to identify?

Regardless of how the money was made, that which might be inherited by a lucky member of the elite was created from scratch by someone before him/her. — Brett

I read somewhere that most of the gold that was ever mined -- going back 3000 years -- is still in circulation. I don't know whether that is true, but it illustrates an important point: Wealth is cumulative.

The undifferentiated wealth sloshing around in the trough in 2020 has a history. You can trace the development of wealth backwards to sometime in the medieval period, probably not much before then. There are, for instance, a few companies in the world that have been in continuous existence since 1200. Some of the wealth in England goes back to grants that William the Conqueror (aka William the Bastard) made after he won the battle of Hastings in 1066. Some of the valuable land in New York City is owned by descendants of Dutch settlers before New Amsterdam became New York. Land is the original wealth. From land one can extract rent, food and fiber (like wheat and wool). England accumulated a wad of wealth by exporting fine wool to manufacturers on the continent. Later, it was coal and iron. The reason the British claimed North America was to have the land from which to extract wealth. The Germans wanted Lebensraum, and came close to getting most of Europe. Land is wealth. Nations are willing to go way out of their way to get it.

Over time, starting in the late 1700s the first industrial revolution starting up, and more wealth was created. Families who owned industrial works of various kinds became rich; their wealth was passed on in the form of investments and inheritances. Of course, sometimes big piles of wealth were lost -- someone took the land away from you; the factory burned down; one's valuable ship sank; one died without heirs, war ruined the country, and so on. But a lot of wealth moved on to other people.

The secrets of technology are another source of wealth. The British tried to hold on to the secrets of manufacturing, but as luck would have it, they failed. Americans swiped several important secrets and started up manufacturing in New England -- the beginning of the American textile fortunes.

The southern economy was devastated by the Civil War, and it took roughly a century for the southern states to recover fully. The north was enriched by the same war, and the fortunes earned (by banks, mills, railroads, farms, etc.) established a springboard to greater wealth. Metal and railroads were the leading industries after the Civil War. Andrew Carnegie was started working in 1848 at the age of 13--no huge credit to AC. Children usually were put to work early on.

Carnegie's first good job was with the Pennsylvania Railroad. He made enough money to invest in various industries and accumulated his first fortune. He started his investing about the time the civil war started. This was a period of huge growth in northern industries, and his (probably small) investments paid off hugely.

Carnegie had some money at just the right time. Had he first tried to invest shortly before the 'long depression' of 1873 which lasted 5 to 20 years, depending how one measures economic activity, he might have lost his nest egg and had difficulty recouping. Similarly, many of the people who lost a lost of wealth in 1929 didn't recover until WWII spurred huge government spending.

I’m trying to determine who they are. I don’t know why this is so difficult. — Brett

The reason you are having so much difficulty answering the "who they are" question is that you are asking the question on a philosophy forum. What you will have to do is read history. Fortunately, that is not a dreary task. There are numerous interesting books which specifically or generally cover the question of HOW and WHO accumulated wealth from the getgo down to the present.

I am confident that you greatly exceed the necessary capacity to locate good, interesting, and economically oriented histories and read them. THEN you will know who it was that got rich and how.

I would love to come up with some really original thoughts but I am inclined to think that the best way is not just to choose a topic that no one has explored enough. The reason I say this is that I believe that the most original thoughts come from experience, of battling with issues deeply. However, in philosophy there is a need to frame ideas in a way which can make them of use to others too. — Jack Cummins

"I try to think but nothing happens." Curly of the Three Stooges said,

My best thinking has occurred when I have been trying to solve a problem about which I was (at least somewhat) passionate. In isolation, one might think one had arrived at a genuinely NEW and IMPROVED idea, only to find that other people (also working in isolation) had come up with the same thing. Damn!!!!

The World draws us into similar thinking. EXAMPLE: In the 1980s the gay community had to find responses to the AIDS crisis. I was an outreach worker for the local AIDS organization, and part of the education and intervention group. I tend to be a loner and do not usually do well at collaboration, so I wasn't very aware of what other people in the country were doing. At an AIDS conference in Toronto, there was a workshop for outreach workers; it turned out that we were all doing very similar things.

Were we all doing similar things because we were unimaginative? Engaged in group think? Stealing each others ideas? No; we were doing the same things--maybe arrived at entirely independently--because the problem we were all working on--finding ways to change high-risk behaviors in high-risk settings--led us to the same approaches.

Granted, intervening in high-risk sexual scenarios isn't philosophy--though a lot of philosophy went into our collective thinking. Like, how much disruption are we willing to impose on our brothers? How does one balance the rightness of individual choice against epidemiology? The fact is that some people are risk averse and others are risk tolerant; how much change can one expect to achieve?

Another problem I wrestled with at the AIDS project was 'pitching information pieces at the right level of vernacular language'. This is a thorny problem because public health people usually avoid blunt vernacular language, and most of the public doesn't use public health terminology. My thinking about this was original to me but of course other people had worked on this problem and had come to similar solutions. (My 'original' solution was to write a computer program to help writers pitch their texts to a broad, low reading level. Original. Oh, slightly. Other people did the same thing, and better.).

WHAT'S THE UPSHOT OF ALL THIS?

Stop trying to be original. IF you have it in you, and IF you give your imagination free rein, you will come up with some ideas that are original to you. Somebody else, somewhere, some time, may have thought of the same thing. That's takes nothing away from your ideas.

It's possible that you will come up with an idea that absolutely no one else in the world has thought of, and therefore may seem like so much of an outlier that nobody will be interested in it. Or, maybe not. But most thinking involves addition and subtraction -- I mean, we add to or carve away parts of others ideas, and arrive at new thinking.

If consciousness is an illusion, who is the illusionist and who is the audience?

I don't know what consciousness is either, but calling it an illusion doesn't do much for me.

someone made it from scratch at some time — Brett

The people who made it from scratch were the workers. Andrew Carnegie didn't make so much as a pound of steel himself.

Why did workers agree to be employed by Carnegie? Because they needed work in order to earn money to live. Didn't Carnegie create the steel mills? Again, workers built the mills -- not Andrew Carnegie.

What Carnegie did was negotiate with investors and bankers to raise the capital to buy raw material. He directed the company on the macro-scale; more of his employees did the micro-managing of day-to-day production.

The pay the workers received for the millions of tons of steel they manufactured was significantly less than Carnegie's expenses. Carnegie walked away with the difference (an enormous fortune).

What goes on in a capitalist economy is exploitation and extraction of surplus value (the difference between the cost of the workers labor and the profit derived from the workers labor), It's not accidental; capitalism, and the legal systems of capitalist countries, is designed to enforce that system.

I am wondering if there are any new ideas which have not been advocated by thinkers already. This is based on my reflection on the way in which I have discovered that any idea which I have, if I do some basic research, seems to have been explored. — Jack Cummins

The more you read, the more YouTube lectures you watch, the more classes you attend, the more you talk to other people, the fewer new ideas you will come across, and the fewer new ideas you can have. So, if you want to have new ideas, ignore everybody else.

Education is, to a large extent, immersion in the ideas that have already been thought, written down, discussed, advocated, promoted, rejected, been forgotten on the shelf, and so on. Education saves us from having to think of everything ourselves, which is a great mercy.

Does all that mean you won't have "new ideas"? No. But... you probably won't think of any MAJOR new idea that hasn't already been turned up by somebody else. And that's OK.

Does all that mean that intellectuals have reached a dead end? No. There are a lot of great ideas that remain to be implemented, and the means by which implementation can be carried out requires... new ideas.

Take a currently popular topic: POVERTY. There is probably nothing new to think, say, or write about it that hasn't already been thought, said, or written about a thousand times over. Most people, when pressed, think we should not have millions (or billions) of people living in poverty. Unfortunately, we do not know how to ACTUALLY eliminate poverty, because we don't know how to reorganize society (and its wealth) in a way that doesn't make things worse. More to the point, we don't know how to get people to change the way they think.

So, Jack, there is a topic where NEW IDEAS are very much needed.

I hate to say it but it seems that we are more of a virus to this planet than COVID is a virus for us. — Thinking

Humans are as much a consequence of evolution as viruses, bacteria, clams, grasshoppers, sparrows, scorpions, kangaroos, and poison ivy. We are part of nature as far as I can tell. Maybe you believe that evolution has a destination, an end, the OMEGA POINT of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?

I

Thinking, you start out with a seemingly straightforward question by someone seemingly interested in the "problems of modern science". And of course there are 'problems'. But then you make a statement like

It is inherent that all artificially created devices break down over time and are created from the broken parts of nature and the Earth. — Thinking

Of course. tools, machines, and products deteriorate.

But then you go on to say

the devices and entities of nature are eternal and are capable of recreating themselves through the phenomena of birth and are infinitely more perfect than any device we can create today. This is due to the fact that natures devices are created by a seemingly universal intelligence that is reflected in galaxies and beyond.

So it would appear that you are more concerned with a 'religious' or 'spiritual' or some such matters more than scientific problems. You don't have much confidence in science at all. So, one wonders, what is your interest in "the problems of science"? It would appear that you have more confidence in "seemingly universal intelligence". Believe what you want, but it would be better if you were more up-front from the get-go about what your position is.

We pursue knowledge through science, true. We discover things. Sometimes what we discover is dangerous.

We pursue ends besides knowledge. Sometimes the end we pursue involves using knowledge for the purpose of making money or obtaining power. That often leads to disaster.

Sad, but true.

Edit: and you and Pfhorrest have drawn me off topic. — Brett

So, there have been several references to the lists of people who constitute the top of the 1%. However, the entire rich 1% of the population constitutes a far longer list than anyone would want to read. Hundreds of thousands of names are on that list.

Making the list would require a lot of searching in social registries, country club files, housing sales records, corporate records, tax records, property records, and the like -- some of which is, and quite of bit of which is not public.

And what about the ambitious? The rebels, the innovators who want to do things differently? — Brett

It might depend on what one is ambitious to do. Rebels? Innovators? Society needs them. Hopefully, they will make significant contributions to a good and better world.

Sorry, but I was just quoting Jesus. He's an expert in that area.

How would you enforce this, how would you manage human behaviour? — Brett

I'm not going to enforce anything, and neither are you, Ditto for managing human behavior. Human beings are well equipped to construct society, enforce group rules, and manage the behavior of the group. We have been using these capacities since the Stone Age when we struck out as hunter-gatherer bands a 250,000 years ago. And, please note, we still do. Most of the benefits of an orderly society derive from most people's willingness to cooperate. There are not enough law enforcement personnel in the solar system to make everybody behave. Most of the time, most of us behave because we understand following group rules.

Some people misbehave. There are criminals, anti-socials, capitalist pigs, and such that require the tender, loving care of the community. That's why communities hire people to police the town, and bring the drunkards in off the streets to sober up. That's why communities have mental health engineers to deal with anti-socials and capitalist pigs who just don't know how to behave. That's why there are jails, hospitals, and pleasant preserves on isolated Aleutian Islands to which totally uncooperative persons can be sent for rest and recovery.

To achieve that they would need to do what 1% did, which is build a business from scratch and produce the same wealth that so many resent the 1% having. — Brett

The 1% do not have a fated moral flaw. They are not rich because they are evil. the rich are evil because they are rich. Radix malorum est cupiditas." The love of money is the root of all evil.

OK, I'll dismount from this moral high horse.

Many people are stuck trying to imagine a different way of operating a large complex economy. They just can't picture a world without rich people running the show.

The thing is, we don't need the rich or their motivation to accumulate great wealth at everyone else's expense to have a successful, productive economy. The workers have the technical know-how to produce, everything from digging up iron ore to putting the finishing touches on a car. Workers supervise the factories (they are employees, after all) and workers do the accounting, payroll, design, advertising, production planning, etc. The owners of auto companies (Ford, GM, Fiat Chrysler, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, et al) do not do any of the work producing cars. They are, to a large extent, what @streetlightx called them: parasites.

The work of beginning an enterprise (let's say, making chicken McNuggets from stem cells) can be done by members of the community who want to provide a sustainable supply of meat (such as stem-cell McNuggets) to other workers. The local elementary school teacher, nurse, construction worker, or mechanic need not know how to do this, because there are people who already know how to do this. The community raises the funds, contributes labor, etc., however they want to do it, to plan, build and operate the ersatz bird pieces. They sell the product to other worker organizations that buy and warehouse food, prior to distribution. Yes, cash changes hands but the intent is not to maximize profit (the capitalist model) but rather to earn enough to operate the plant, pay the workers, and set aside something for future expansion, repairs, machinery replacement, etc.

None of this requires a capitalist bent on becoming rich. Indeed, it requires NOT HAVING such a capitalist deadweight.

The biggest obstacle to success is the dead hand of the past in the form of banks, corporations, politicians, and so forth that would hate to see such a development come to pass. So it isn't likely to happen without getting rid of the dead hand of the past.

There is no cosmic rule which requires the world to meet its needs through the capitalist model.

I don’t see how destroying the 1%, branding them as parasites or robbing them of their wealth will change things. — Brett

Well, gee whiz, Brett; I was just following Jesus on this: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God."

Not only that, but Jesus said to the rich young man “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor."

Upon Jesus' pretty plain advice, very few rich folk have ever made themselves poor, and if Jesus couldn't get them to give it up, I seriously doubt that they will give it up on my recommendation.

Supposedly the 90% are starved for wealth because 1% has it.[/quote]

Correct. Here's the principle behind it:
Workers produce goods and services for which they get paid.
The value of what they produce is greater than the wages they are paid.
The owner of the company keeps the difference between wages paid and value of goods produced.

Of course, there are some other pieces -- like plant maintenance, raw materials, heating an cooling, administration, taxes, and so on. What the owner takes away after everything is paid for is called surplus value. Accumulating surplus value (in the form of money) is the goal of the capitalist. He wants to make money for himself (or herself). The more the better.

But let’s assume the 1% didn't gain it, does that mean the 90% would have it instead? Where would it come from? — Brett

Labor ultimately produces all wealth--in any economic system.

IF there were only workers and no owners (no 1%), THEN what there would be some sort of socialist economy operating. Yes, the 90% would have it instead. Workers and their children make up the majority of the population. They would keep the value of what they produced. They would be better off because they would possess the surplus value they produced. (Obviously, they wouldn't all be filthy rich. One gets rich by accumulating surplus value, not by spreading it out evenly.).

Andrew Carnegie and others have found that it is hard work to dispose of billions of dollars through philanthropy in a responsible manner. Most foundations (even ones that are loaded) give money away in dribs and drabs; usually about 5% of their total assets (less than what the foundation is earning on investments, one hopes). Target Foundation gives away 5% of its profits, about $4,000,000 a week.

If Bill Gates gave his money away at Target's rate, it would take him 500 years to get rid of it all. So, Billy dear, send me... oh, 400 million. It will make life easier for both of us.

Many on this OP regard the 1% as a blight on the land, parasites and responsible for the hardships of the poorer members of the community. — Brett

We live in a capitalist country par excellence and accumulating wealth (surplus value) out of the hides of the workers is The Name of the Game. The 1% are either the most successful capitalists, or they are the children of capitalists (or grandchildren...) Capitalism is not based on any sort of equal distribution of wealth. The Uber Capitalist himself, Henry Ford, realized workers had to make enough money in his factories if any of them were to be able to buy his products. He didn't raise their wages to $5 an hour in 1914 out of the kindness of his heart. Kindness had nothing to do with it.

The existence of extremely wealthy people today, by itself, is not the critical problem. The critical problem is that in heavily concentrating wealth among one to ten percent of the population the remaining 90% are starved for wealth. Large numbers of people (I should say, large percentages of people) can not acquire the basic pieces of a comfortable life style that was available 60 years ago. States, counties, and cities have increasing difficulties financing the essential services and amenities that make a big city and a given state a nice place to live. Students have to borrow a lot of money to pay for college (because legislatures have reduced state funding to higher education). And so on and so forth.

Between 1930 and 1980 the distribution of wealth was not egalitarian by any stretch of the imagination, but it was less severely disproportionate. That more egalitarian distribution turbo-charged the post WWII recovery, which started to come to a halt in 1973 with the Arab oil boycott.

So, within a capitalist milieu, it makes no sense to prevent people from accumulating wealth. Either accept some degree of inequality, or opt for abolishing capitalism.

I think Streetlight opts for abandoning capitalism; he's kind of bitter and resentful about it. I'm in favor of getting rid of capitalism too, but despite my handle I have a sunnier disposition. Odd how that works out.

How can anyone make judgements about these people without understanding who they are, specially here on a philosophy forum? Why would anyone do that? Why insist that — Brett

Yes, without understanding who they are, OR without understanding the social/political/economic milieu in which they exist.

As it happens, tax law has quite a bit to do with how well inheritance transfers wealth from one generation to the next. In times and places where inheritance tax law is quite restrictive, it is more difficult to be "born with a golden spoon in one's mouth". Where tax law is lax, it's much easier.

The organization and operation of the economy has quite a bit to do with how easily one can get rich through one's own efforts. Where investment capital is scarce, where investors are very skittish and reluctance to take chances, starting a company is much more difficult -- and the same for expansion.

How personal income and corporate income is taxed is also an important factor in getting rich by one's own efforts.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak DID NOT get Apple Computers going by buying parts from Radio Shack, building 5 computers, selling those, and using the profits to buy parts for 8 more computers; selling those, and so on until they were making first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of computers, finally seeing some real income.

What they did was get a loan to buy parts, rent space, hire some people, and then build a bunch of computers, sell them, and then show the bank that their plan was worth another loan. The banks made money, eventually Apple made money, and finally Steve & Steve got rich.

Businesses almost always require borrowing in order to operate -- even very large companies. Bankers can kill or promote a company with the denial or granting of credit. Start-ups especially require credit.

Why do banks lend money to some people and deny it to others? Well, connections matter a great deal. Backers (or guarantors) are another. Collateral helps a great deal. Some sort of track record is important. The fact is that a lot of people couldn't get a loan to get the greatest idea in the world off the ground if banks don't like their looks, background, connections, plans track record, or the astrological sign they were born under.

Of course, banks lend money to make money, and they hate losing it. Consequently, most credit seekers are going to be shown the door pretty quickly.

The OP is actually about who these people are. — Brett

There are a number of studies about who these people are, and how they operate. If you want to know more (much more) about wealth and power, start with G. William Domhoff, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His four books are among the highest rated titles in sociology (OK, not the same as the best selling books on Amazon).

Who Rules America? (1967, #12)
The Higher Circles (1970, #39)
The Powers That Be (1979, #47)
Who Rules America Now? (1983, #43)

Don't be too concerned about the publication dates; the perches where the elite roost do not change very fast. Besides, he's still publishing:

More recently, he is the author of The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century: How They Won and Why Labor and Liberals Lost (2020); Diversity in the Power Elite (3rd ed., 2018, with Richard L. Zweigenhaft); Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (7th ed., 2014); The Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance From the Great Depression to the Great Recession (2013); The New CEOs (2011, with Richard L. Zweigenhaft); Class and Power in the New Deal (2011, with Michael Webber); and The Leftmost City (2009, with Richard Gendron).

Domhoff has a good website, https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/about.html which has more information,

Wealth and income are closely related, but maybe not inseparable. They are often reported separately, So, if you look at a list of people's earnings, it's often much less impressive than the list of people's accumulated wealth.

Then there is earned income from work, and unearned income from investment. If you are worth $100,000,000 your earned income might be peanuts, while your unearned income could be quite high.

Frugality is an underrated virtue, especially for people who aren't already rich. And for those who are really really rich, there is no amount of wealth that stupidity can't flush down the toilet.

Even someone who worked in below-average-paying non-profit or service job (with or without degrees) can end up a lot wealthier than one might suppose: If they saved money consistently; if they bought a house prudently (smaller, at the bottom of the market); if they paid cash for cars (by saving over the life of the present car); having adequate health insurance; investing conservatively, if they maintained a lower-income life style, and so on. They could end up having 350,000 to 500,000 in wealth when they retired. Were they employed in better paying jobs, or well-paid jobs (but not high-paying) they could, with the steps listed, end up as millionaires.

Having children is expensive, so raising a family might deter one from achieving any accumulation of wealth till later in life.

Frugality doesn't require one to live a pinched pleasure-free lifestyle, but it does foreclose freely spending on vacations, decorating, drinking a lot (alcohol is expensive, especially when regularly consumed at a bar), smoking (especially at the average per pack price of $6.30). Over 10 years a pack a day smoker would spend a minimum of $22,920. That's a significant hunk of cash. A 2-pack a day smoker in a state with higher taxes ($8-$10 a pack) would spend close to $60,000 over a 10 year period. Regularly eating meals in restaurants (even if run of the mill or fast food) can prevent one from saving much. Pack a lunch on your way to becoming a millionaire.

OK, so a millionaire today isn't what it was 20, 30, or 40 years ago -- let alone 100 years ago, but having cash in the bank is imminently better than owning money all over town. Even if one's wealth is minimal, avoiding debt is very desirable.

Of course, holding up a mirror to society might be an extremely political thing.

Full disclosure: I don't much care how you, or someone else, defines "action". However, as a confessed uninterested party, I would make this suggestion: Simplify.

Why?

The longer, more elaborate, and maybe rococo the definition, the more opportunities for misunderstanding, misconstrual, definitions of the words used to define the term under discussion, unproductive quibbling, and so on.

At some point the lengthy definition departed the road and ended up in the weeds.

Wouldn't your definition for "action" be a lot simpler, and say essentially the same thing if it was worded something like this: "anything which results in a change"? — Metaphysician Undercover

I like MU's definition better than yours. His may not be the best definition possible, but with a glance I can entertain his definition and think about it.

Practice prudent parsimony.

Hmmm, never looked it up. Well... never too late.

Yes, people do make money trading insubstantial derivatives. I don't really understand how this works, but a lot of money is involved. All kinds of commodities are covered by futures contracts -- everything from peanuts to platinum. People in this group trade commodity futures, currencies, credit derivatives, credit default swap insurance contracts, financial instruments--insubstantial - but real paper stuff. There is usually something of real substance underneath the speculation.

This is a short list from one small site

Bill Lipschutz - probably a Five Percenter; worth less than a billion. He was bringing in $300,000,000 a year for Salomon Brothers for a while. He was very good for Salomon, at least.

Joseph C. Lewis - worth over $4½ billion

Stanley Druckenmiller - worth over $4.7 to $4.8 billion; worked with Soros

Paul Tudor Jones - worth over $5.3 billion

George Soros - worth about $8.3 billion, but that is after transferring 20 billion dollars to the Open Society Foundation. Soros and Druckenmiller made $1B in their bank breaking bet against the Bank of England.

Bruce Kovner - worth over $5.3 - $5.5 billion

Martin Schwartz - a well known player, but his wealth figure is unknown; he's 75; he spends his time owning and racing champion horses

Andrew Krieger - unknown, but probably in the $100 million range

The last Tzar of Russia, Nicholas II, was worth an estimated $300-400 billion in current money. Well worth the Bolsheviks' time to liquidate his fortune. And it was time. The Romanovs had been running things for several hundred years (think Peter the Great--that's what his friends called him, anyway).

Except for those 1 percenters who make their money by trading in currencies and the like, most of the Uber-rich, super-rich, and merely rich make their money by supplying the world with stuff. Here's a list of the first 50 of the Fortune 500 companies:

Walmart
Amazon
Exxon Mobil
Apple
CVS Health
Berkshire Hathaway
UnitedHealth Group
McKesson
AT&T
AmerisourceBergen
Alphabet
Ford Motor
Cigna
Costco Wholesale
Chevron
Cardinal Health
JPMorgan Chase
General Motors
Walgreens Boots Alliance
Verizon Communications
Microsoft
Marathon Petroleum
Kroger
Fannie Mae
Bank of America
Home Depot
Phillips 66
Comcast
Anthem
Wells Fargo
Citigroup
Valero Energy
General Electric
Dell Technologies
Johnson & Johnson
State Farm Insurance
Target
International Business Machines
Raytheon Technologies
Boeing
Freddie Mac
Centene
UPS
Lowe's
Intel
Facebook
FedEx
MetLife
Walt Disney
Procter & Gamble — Fortune Magazine

Chances are, everyone here has bought something from one of these companies or from the other 450 companies on the fortune list. The major stock owners of these companies are likely to be among the richest 1%, 5%, or 10% (United States). Of course, companies own shares in other companies. 4½% of UPS is owned by Black Rock Fund advisers (31,243,809 shares). In turn, a large hunk of Black Rock is owned by Laurence D. Fink--Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock. He is worth about $1 billion.

Jamie Dimon is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase, the largest of the big four American banks. He owns a small percentage of MorganChase and is worth 1½ billion.

Hey, let's not be sneering at people who are worth only a billion bucks. I would gladly settle for $1B!

Just an aside... Rich, Super Rich, and Uber Rich.

With a fortune of around $400bn, Mansu Musa 1 of Mail, the first king of Timbuktu, may not be a household name, but by most estimates is the richest person who ever lived.

Deriving his wealth from his country’s vast salt and gold deposits, which at one time accounted for half the world’s supply, Musa ruled West Africa’s Malian Empire in the early 14th century, constructing hundreds of mosques across the continent, many of which survive to this day.

With a fortune estimated at between $300 to $400bn in today’s money, Tsar Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (Nicolas II) of Russia was deposed and subsequently executed by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

What you say sounds a lot closer to what people understand as Chomsky's approach.

It makes sense to me that the capacity and operation of language would reside in the brain as directed by our species' genetics. Our very complex brains were not built 'de novo'. The need for, and means to communication existed in our predecessor species. We are not born with a ROM-stored language (Chinese, Urdu, Swahili, Norwegian...) but we are born with instructions to acquire the available languages which present themselves to us. We don't have to be taught' it's more like "language falls into place in our brains".

an English text avoiding entirely words of French origin would be just as artificial — Olivier5

It would be artificial and it would be inordinately inelegant. However complete the Old English corpus of words might have been in 800 a.d., it has been irretrievably obsolete for a long time. I do not speak French (hélas; jugez-moi à la légère) but my guess is that Old French had a much larger, more sophisticated corpus than Old English did. Middle English had a much larger corpus, and then became Modern English in the 16th and 17th century as writers reached back into Latin and Greek for word-building materials. [One of the courses for training medical transcriptionists is a study of relevant Greek and Latin vocabulary.]

I like looking up those inordinately obscure words, and I keep a list of them--pearls snatched from the jaws of swine.

I have a (now retired) interest in common short words. When I was working in AIDS prevention back in the mid 1980s, I found it frustrating and annoying that public health pros found it difficult to simplify information for readers or audiences who sometimes were marginally literate. So I started investigating readability, word frequency, "Basic English", and the Anglo-Saxon words that make up the core of English, along with common words acquired from French, making Middle English into a richer language (thanks, of course, to William the Bastard).

One can write pretty good, best-selling texts in predominantly Anglo-Saxon and Middle-English; Tolkien wrote several volumes of it. Granted, Tolkien didn't have the problem of explaining viruses, the risks of anal sex (which is probably what the orcs preferred) or proper condom use.

My plan was to write a manual on how to discuss publicly important matters in widely readable text. I didn't finish that project, though I did write a computer program to evaluate readability and to sort the words in texts into several buckets, which involved making a lot of lists. This was pre-WWW. One can now find tools on line to do much of what I intended.

Unfortunately, the book on how to put the hay down where the goats can get at it, never got written.

What nonsense. Chomsky's approach isn't anything like this whatsoever. — Xtrix

The mods will punish Oliver5 for writing reckless declarative sentences. Or Xtrix, once the most faulty declarative statement has been determined. I'm an agnostic on the matter of Chomsky's linguistic theories.

I have not found linguistics of much interest, but thanks for the historical piece.

Google Translate is useful --no doubt about that. Google Translate was introduced around 2006. I don't remember when I first used it, but it has gotten a lot better since. It still has significant limitations, depending. Sometimes it can't render a term at all, or renders it in an exceeding clumsy way. Specialized terms present more problems than everyday text.

Applications which turn voice into text are quite impressive too, as are apps which can interpret handwriting. I tried it on a handheld device back in the 1990s, and was impressed that it could do a pretty good job interpreting cursive writing that was not-too-carefully performed. .

Google Ngram is one of my favorite tools. It uses the vast text scanning project that has been going on for at least 15 years. 30,000,000 books have been hoovered into its servers. From the billions of words used, Ngram charts the use-frequency of words and short phrases since 1800. Knowing word frequency is useful for, among other things, studying readability. And it's just plain interesting. The term "readability" was scarcely used before 1900, but there were peaks in its use in the 1960s and 1980s.

One of my pet peeves is writers using inordinately obscure words. "canaille" for instance. It's a derogatory word meaning 'the common people'. The English got it from the French who got it from the Italians; it means 'pack of dogs'. It was most popular around 1820, so when a contemporary author uses it, you know the writer is 'putting on the literary Ritz' -- the hotel, not the cracker.

I have pleonastic tendencies. Peak pleonasm was probably before 1800. It's been receding in popularity ever since.

Sure, but what I’m getting at is that it’s someone’s fault that we have so many guns too. I just get the idea that some people treat society as if it was a separate entity capable of making decisions. It’s not. — Pinprick

I totally agree.

We could make a list of individuals who are responsible for the number of guns that exist. First, there is the list of individuals who own gun and ammunition factories. Then there is the list of people who own wholesale and retail companies. There is the list of gun buyers and gun users. We can make up a list of people who are Second Amendment fanatics.

We can divide this list up in several ways. The manufacturing-wholesale-retail owner group amounts to many thousands. Gun owners are roughly a third of the American population -- 100,000,000. The list of people who own a gun (like a hunting rifle) and regularly use it for hunting is much smaller than 100 million. The list of people who own hand guns and regularly use them for protection is smaller than the list of hunters. The list of people who have a hand gun and use it for nefarious purposes is smaller still.

So, 100,000,000 people is too large a number to not count as "society". Society is made up of individuals and individuals are formed by society. It's a circular relationship, but "society" doesn't trump individual decision making. It isn't society that makes someone put a cheap gun in their pocket and go to a convenient store and kill the clerk and empty the register. Or shoot somebody because they were disrespected.

"Society" can't make a decision, but it can and does constitute the cultural environments in which individuals do make decisions. Sometimes a small number of individuals, or even one individual, "shape" society. A president, a dictator, a pope, a charismatic leader, a madman... can constructively or destructively shape society. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were not a large number of people. Only 19 al-Qaeda men carried out the 9/11 terrorist attack that restructured some aspects of American culture and society. So have individual assassins who have killed charismatic leaders.

Sorting out how society and culture is changed is a difficult dicey game--so many variables.

I am reading Sophie's World and in that book they say that practically only philosophers and children have the similar sense of wonder in the world, — Thinking

One of the things that adults and philosophers tell us is that "We should not believe everything we read."

Childhood is overrated by adults. Do children think about how innocent and pure they are? No. Once we are past the irresistibly cute stages of infancy (similar to puppies) life gets more complicated by the minute. As puppyhood passes, we have to start dealing with reality which, face it, isn't organized for our personal convenience or happiness.

Pairing "a sense of wonder in the world" and "philosophers" is not even wrong. Where in hell did they get evidence for that?

The world has wonders and from time to time we ordinary mortals might apprehend some of them--but not because we are children or philosophers.

You must've met neoteny at some point in your life. — TheMadFool

Actually I just met her the other day. We didn't get along; probably won't repeat it. Too larval.

Who could imagine what could possibly go wrong with our attempt to "liberate Thailand" or Hong Kong? Or Cuba--or Monaco--for that matter. If and when there are enough liberation-motivated Thais they will liberate themselves.

The Book of Enoch is interesting because it speaks of angels coming from heaven and having sex with human women — Hanover

Was there a Yelp review of the experience? Did the women like it? Did human women merit the angelic effort? How did human women give birth to the giants--narrow birth canal and all that? Maybe the tale originated in barely remembered ancient matings of Neaderthals and Homo sapiens?