• Steve
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    1 month ago

    Maybe if you saved it all in cash. But who does that?
    If you invested the first $100k and earned a very modest 4%/year. After 2000 years you’d have $1,165,946,431,999,999,965,770,988,108,697,149,898,752

    • 1dalm@lemmy.today
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      1 month ago

      This is my go to evidence that the whole beliefs that real estate values always increase is absurd.

      If real estate prices always increase, even modestly, then an apartment in Rome or Paris would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Obviously that’s not the case, and since land speculation isn’t exactly a new thing, there is a correction somewhere.

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        This is an astute observation.

        In fact, macroeconomic theory would say that appreciation in real estate should be tied to the rate of interest, which in turn should be tied the rise of the price level: inflation.

        There are discrepancies, of course. Lately real estate has been growing faster than inflation. And importantly, during the Second Thirty Years War, 1914-1945, those European apartments suffered great depreciation and outright physical destruction.

        The biggest thing that happened, though, is that inflation essentially did not exist until the second half of the nineteenth century. As far as we can tell, inflation was created by the industrial revolution. Before then, with wide error bars, you can tie prices from the 1760s to prices from the Roman Empire, in the same base metals.

        For more evidence, read the works of Jane Austen and Victor Hugo. They are full of specific prices for things that make no sense to modern readers. But the authors expected that future readers would be able relate to the specific prices. Modern fiction authors avoid mentioning specific prices when they want their work to feel timeless.

        Source, generally: Thomas Piketty. Capital in the Twenty First Century.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    But with all that money, why would you care whose ahead and behind you… And do they care about that, or is that just a narrative we’ve bought into, something to make us feel a certain way about the wealthy being unpleasant?

    • SparroHawc@piefed.world
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      1 month ago

      It’s not a question of who’s in front of or behind you. It’s realizing that even if you received a ludicrous amount of money, repeatedly, over a ludicrous amount of time, it still wouldn’t even scratch the utter lunacy that is the wealth of the ultra-rich. There is no way to earn that amount of wealth, in the sense of how you and I earn money. They acquired it by taking unjustly; there is no just way to become that wealthy.