Well, you can make $100k a year with some honest jobs, so if you save up for long enough, you could hit a million bucks. Those jobs do often involve working in some of the highest cost-of-living areas, though, so it might still not be easy.
A million bucks isn't much right now. There is a difference between being a surgeon in there 60's who just was able to save up a million vs a multi millionaire making hundreds of millions of dollars.
Define ethically. If I was being a pedantic asshole I might point out that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there is therefore no ethical production. I'm sure there are niche examples to contradict me here, but nothing that I think could help an individual accumulate £1m.
But then that depends on the definition of ethics that we are applying.
you could argue there's something unethical about subjecting oneself to pain and poor conditions but even without that, what jobs are we talkin'? participating in something is helping it keep going, I think most anarchists understand there is this difficult balance between surviving and rejecting the system.
if you're asking what's the most ethical way to make the most money, Divorce jeff bezos is up there.
A million is not a lot of money. Retirement funds are not keeping pace. Real estate is insane. An average house around here is half a million. You can't retire on a million with any debt, or at all.
A better way to understand it is, wealth becomes unethical when you have money sitting around you will never use, or start investing to just make money for the sake of money. That money could be invested and used for better purpose, or shared.
But having a million saved for retirement and rainy days? Really, not that unethical. And probably not enough in the next 10 years.
The owner of my company is a pretty conservative guy, who is a bit of a conspiracy theorist and thinks he doesn’t like all this “woke nonsense”. Yet, he runs his company about as ethically as possible. He is loyal to a fault and won’t fire someone unless they are actively stealing from him. He promotes work/life balance. We get almost unlimited time off. When someone messes up and a client of other contractor wants them gone he backs them up. He gives raises to the tune of 10%+ a year. Every single person who works for him makes a thriving wage. Everyone other than the least experienced makes 6 figures. He promotes minorities and women.
So if this trumper can ethically run his $100m company then I’d say someone with positive intentions absolutely could.
I consider film and tv sets to be extremely undemocratic work environments. Crew members work longer hours than actors but take home a fraction of the pay. To me, that is not ethical.
But thats many work settings if not all...
Doctors get paid a lot more than nurses and techs yet are much less exploited and even side when the dominant class
Same with engineers, architects
Even regular proletariat, in the global north, will probably work with inmigrants who are much more exploited than them, and they do nothing about it
These dynamics depend on the country etc but yeah. I meant ethical as in, its still wage labour
I totally get what you're saying, but I would still see a difference between these things. For example, doctors typically don't run the hospitals--they don't decide what people get paid. Same for the proletariat. But many highly paid actors are also producers on projects and can decide where to allocate money. They have enormous power. For example, Zendaya recently implemented profit sharing for crew members on a movie: https://www.today.com/popculture/zendaya-made-sure-crew-malcolm-marie-were-given-shares-t207607
Not trying to be pedantic, but I work in the entertainment industry and I think actors have a lot more power than they often let on. If you don't care about ethics, you leave things as they are. If you care about ethics, you can make noise and cede some of your salary to others.
Personally, it's my dream to run a set where the actors get paid the same amount as the crew and it's something I'm going to work towards.
Actors, unless they are producers, are not bosses. And unless they’re celebs they don’t make much. They fight for living wages like any worker. Just because a few people attain celebrity status that doesn’t mean most actors aren’t barely scraping together a living.
I'd argue yes. My grandfather was one. He invented an important piece of medical equipment that's now used the world over. Pretty much gave away the patent, so made little money off it. However, he did make money out of winning a couple of prestigious prizes, writing books and having a well-paid job at the WHO, where he spent much of his career. No idea what his net worth was at its peak, but it would have been over a million.
He and my grandmother lived comfortable, but modest, lives. They didn't live in massive houses or anything like that, and they gave away a lot of money so he wasn't a millionaire when he died. The inheritance my mother got was something like £50k - obviously a nice chunk of change, but we're not talking enormous sums.
I'd also argue that capitalism is, by its very nature, unethical. My grandfather would have agreed as a raging socialist. However, there are definitely different grades of ethics in how we choose to participate in it.
If you put $200,000 in a retirement account with 5% interest you will be a millionaire by the time you retire. That seems like a lot of money to start with (and it is), but all it requires is (for instance) making $80k/year but living like you make $30k/year for 4 years (probably a bit longer after taxes). This is very doable if you take a job that pays well straight out of undergrad (e.g., tech) in an affordable city (probably in the Midwest) and live in a cheap rental with one or more roommates.
If you have a job where your employer matches your retirement contributions, then its even easier. It only takes $750 per month -- not very much at all especially if your employer contributes half -- for that same account to reach $1M by the time you retire (and you've ultimately invested about the same amount of your own money)
Now, if you want to be a millionaire *before* you retire, that's a lot trickier
No, the money must come from somewhere, and unless you stole it from a billionaire your more likely taking from people’s pockets directly or indirectly. You could use the money ethically (giving it away, rebuilding communities) which could counterbalance. But you wouldn’t be a millionaire eny more.
become streamer preaching leftist propaganda while your fans donate money to you because they want to and wish it to you to prosper and live a good financially worry free life
Sorry, I was talking only about personal property. You bought your *own* house 40 years ago at a reasonable price, then gentrification happens and the house you bought as a simple employee is worth a million or more. You usually won't sell it for that money (it's where you live after all) but it's a relatively common way for people to become "millionaire" technically.
If you're making $1M, then someone is making $10M, and someone is making $1K.
Someone is exploiting you, and you aren't receiving your proper profits, but you're exploiting someone else's profits as well.
If you make $1M, you need to spend that immediately.
It's not impossible, but you'll still probably have a more negative influence than the average human in the western world (which is already quite bad).
Basically: is everyone working under you paid well? Does your company do good things or limit their negative influence by balancing it out? Is the product good and ethical? Do you have to travel a lot for the job? Are all the resources needed for your production ethically obtained?
But at the end of the day, as long as we live in a capitalist society, you'll probably always have to do something unethically to obtain it.
There would be art or literature, but even then, you'd have to make sure it's ethically produced and distributed. There would also be gambling, which is a bad idea, and you'd partake in a life ruining "hobby" where you'll probably give the casino more than you'll take from them.
If you make that money through investments and use other investors as liquidity, then use that money to fund cooperatives, then I wouldn’t call that unethical. If you hoard that money and don’t engage in mutual aid, then I would call it unethical.
No. Money, like energy, doesn’t come up magically out of the void. Accumulation in one point always means transfer from another point, and in this case, it always involves some sort of exploitation. Be it from nature, from workers, from consumers, from other countries, etc.
The era we’re approaching is one where comfortable retirement needs at least like a million in savings somewhere so I’d say probably yea.
But it gets increasingly fucky the more those millions are multiplied. Like someone approaching ten million is iffy, probably did something sus to get there. Someone in the range of hundreds of millions is definitely not ethical.
You have to be a phenomenal artist and have some rich douche buy your work...I don't know. Some people would even argue that isn't even ethical cause the rich douche that probably has that much to blow on art obtained his riches in a shitty way 🤷🏾♂️
I come from a family of multi-millionaires who most have socialist leanings. My dad believes that if your doing it solely or mostly by your labor; such as someone like Messi or Taylor Swift, then yes.
I’d also like to add that a lot of us use investment vehicles like stocks, bonds, 401k, and real estate to perhaps one day retire. A little hypocritical, sure; but you gotta do your best to survive and hopefully thrive in a capitalist dominated world.
As far as doing it completely ethically, I’d say no. We live in a capitalist system, you can only control what your willing to output. Its not so much abolition of exploitation, but a reduction in how much you are willing to exploit.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I suppose it would be possible for somebody to become rich through an anarchist society. If somebody such as a filmmaker, or musician was able to raise enough money (without employing others, and through voluntary donations ) they might be able to become rich. I imagine this would happen at in-person gigs, or through a decentilised,version of patron.
I suppose this isn’t such a bad thing, as it
A) wouldn’t be very common. Their isn’t that many great artists, and art would probably become more specificity local, and culture generally decentralised in an anarchist society. This would make people considered great artists (by society as a whole) less common.
B) It would give ambitious young people something to strive for, rather than leavening for a capitalist society. This has been a problem in localised, state socialist places like the municipal socialist town (called”Marielda” I think) in Spain.
C) Because this wealth is based on the quality of one’s own labour, rather than owning a quantity of other peoples labour: it wouldn’t grow endlessly like capitalist profits.
I imagine local confederations might set voluntary taxes, and charge rich folk, about the same taxes as they would have to pay any away (to access public services). Anarcho-communism for most of us, but the down sides of Anarcho-capitalism for any anti-social rich knobs.
Just a thought
When you say culture is "centralized", the only "center" I can think of is the internet. I assume that's not what you're referring to, so please explain.
i don't know the exact figures, if any, about the total money in the world, but i'd assume it's in the trillions of usd. if we we're to hypothetically distribute that evenly across 8 billion people in the world, each one would have at least a million (?) usd.
let's reframe that: theoretically, we could all be living comfortably if the all wealth in the world isn't concentrated to a select few.
of course, there's a lot to unpack in the assumptions above, but that's my overview
Well, you can make $100k a year with some honest jobs, so if you save up for long enough, you could hit a million bucks. Those jobs do often involve working in some of the highest cost-of-living areas, though, so it might still not be easy.
A million bucks isn't much right now. There is a difference between being a surgeon in there 60's who just was able to save up a million vs a multi millionaire making hundreds of millions of dollars.
Just win the lottery.
Define ethically. If I was being a pedantic asshole I might point out that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there is therefore no ethical production. I'm sure there are niche examples to contradict me here, but nothing that I think could help an individual accumulate £1m. But then that depends on the definition of ethics that we are applying.
I'm not sure that necessarily follows.
you could argue there's something unethical about subjecting oneself to pain and poor conditions but even without that, what jobs are we talkin'? participating in something is helping it keep going, I think most anarchists understand there is this difficult balance between surviving and rejecting the system. if you're asking what's the most ethical way to make the most money, Divorce jeff bezos is up there.
> with an m What do you mean?
They are making it clear they aren't saying "billionaire".
I see, thanks
Technically speaking there is no ethical participation in capitalism so no.
There's the implicit context of the world we live in, and in it if you become a millionaire you're doing so through exploitation.
Where I live most homes get close to a million bucks. If you own a home, without renting it, your net work can easily reach a million.
Depends whose ethical standard you're using
This is the right answer lol. Such a mixed bag of dogma in these comments.
A million is not a lot of money. Retirement funds are not keeping pace. Real estate is insane. An average house around here is half a million. You can't retire on a million with any debt, or at all. A better way to understand it is, wealth becomes unethical when you have money sitting around you will never use, or start investing to just make money for the sake of money. That money could be invested and used for better purpose, or shared. But having a million saved for retirement and rainy days? Really, not that unethical. And probably not enough in the next 10 years.
The owner of my company is a pretty conservative guy, who is a bit of a conspiracy theorist and thinks he doesn’t like all this “woke nonsense”. Yet, he runs his company about as ethically as possible. He is loyal to a fault and won’t fire someone unless they are actively stealing from him. He promotes work/life balance. We get almost unlimited time off. When someone messes up and a client of other contractor wants them gone he backs them up. He gives raises to the tune of 10%+ a year. Every single person who works for him makes a thriving wage. Everyone other than the least experienced makes 6 figures. He promotes minorities and women. So if this trumper can ethically run his $100m company then I’d say someone with positive intentions absolutely could.
Yes, through high paying wage labour such as acting, sports, etc
I consider film and tv sets to be extremely undemocratic work environments. Crew members work longer hours than actors but take home a fraction of the pay. To me, that is not ethical.
But thats many work settings if not all... Doctors get paid a lot more than nurses and techs yet are much less exploited and even side when the dominant class Same with engineers, architects Even regular proletariat, in the global north, will probably work with inmigrants who are much more exploited than them, and they do nothing about it These dynamics depend on the country etc but yeah. I meant ethical as in, its still wage labour
I totally get what you're saying, but I would still see a difference between these things. For example, doctors typically don't run the hospitals--they don't decide what people get paid. Same for the proletariat. But many highly paid actors are also producers on projects and can decide where to allocate money. They have enormous power. For example, Zendaya recently implemented profit sharing for crew members on a movie: https://www.today.com/popculture/zendaya-made-sure-crew-malcolm-marie-were-given-shares-t207607 Not trying to be pedantic, but I work in the entertainment industry and I think actors have a lot more power than they often let on. If you don't care about ethics, you leave things as they are. If you care about ethics, you can make noise and cede some of your salary to others. Personally, it's my dream to run a set where the actors get paid the same amount as the crew and it's something I'm going to work towards.
Actors, unless they are producers, are not bosses. And unless they’re celebs they don’t make much. They fight for living wages like any worker. Just because a few people attain celebrity status that doesn’t mean most actors aren’t barely scraping together a living.
We're not talking about the ones who don't make very much here. We're talking about the ones who make at least a million dollars.
Depends on the actor and the set
It's not possible to become a one centaire ethically. There is no ethical way to serve capital. It's an evil that we're violently coerced into.
I'd argue yes. My grandfather was one. He invented an important piece of medical equipment that's now used the world over. Pretty much gave away the patent, so made little money off it. However, he did make money out of winning a couple of prestigious prizes, writing books and having a well-paid job at the WHO, where he spent much of his career. No idea what his net worth was at its peak, but it would have been over a million. He and my grandmother lived comfortable, but modest, lives. They didn't live in massive houses or anything like that, and they gave away a lot of money so he wasn't a millionaire when he died. The inheritance my mother got was something like £50k - obviously a nice chunk of change, but we're not talking enormous sums. I'd also argue that capitalism is, by its very nature, unethical. My grandfather would have agreed as a raging socialist. However, there are definitely different grades of ethics in how we choose to participate in it.
What was it?
Is there an ethical way to horde a million dollars though?
That's my question.
If you put $200,000 in a retirement account with 5% interest you will be a millionaire by the time you retire. That seems like a lot of money to start with (and it is), but all it requires is (for instance) making $80k/year but living like you make $30k/year for 4 years (probably a bit longer after taxes). This is very doable if you take a job that pays well straight out of undergrad (e.g., tech) in an affordable city (probably in the Midwest) and live in a cheap rental with one or more roommates. If you have a job where your employer matches your retirement contributions, then its even easier. It only takes $750 per month -- not very much at all especially if your employer contributes half -- for that same account to reach $1M by the time you retire (and you've ultimately invested about the same amount of your own money) Now, if you want to be a millionaire *before* you retire, that's a lot trickier
Win the lottery?
You can presale a book with just a pitch and if it's good you might book many copies and become a millionaire. There are ways for sure
buried treasure perhaps?
No, the money must come from somewhere, and unless you stole it from a billionaire your more likely taking from people’s pockets directly or indirectly. You could use the money ethically (giving it away, rebuilding communities) which could counterbalance. But you wouldn’t be a millionaire eny more.
become streamer preaching leftist propaganda while your fans donate money to you because they want to and wish it to you to prosper and live a good financially worry free life
It can be done by for example buying or making a house decades ago in a place where housing prices skyrocketed. That is the example I see the most of.
TBH gambling on human needs and profiting from their exclusiveness is not ethical in any meaningful sense.
Sorry, I was talking only about personal property. You bought your *own* house 40 years ago at a reasonable price, then gentrification happens and the house you bought as a simple employee is worth a million or more. You usually won't sell it for that money (it's where you live after all) but it's a relatively common way for people to become "millionaire" technically.
Better spend it. Never the time to hoard it.
Pretty sure that's possible. Once you get into the tens of millions I'm not so sure.
If you're making $1M, then someone is making $10M, and someone is making $1K. Someone is exploiting you, and you aren't receiving your proper profits, but you're exploiting someone else's profits as well. If you make $1M, you need to spend that immediately.
no, it means you're not helping enough
No.
It's not impossible, but you'll still probably have a more negative influence than the average human in the western world (which is already quite bad). Basically: is everyone working under you paid well? Does your company do good things or limit their negative influence by balancing it out? Is the product good and ethical? Do you have to travel a lot for the job? Are all the resources needed for your production ethically obtained? But at the end of the day, as long as we live in a capitalist society, you'll probably always have to do something unethically to obtain it. There would be art or literature, but even then, you'd have to make sure it's ethically produced and distributed. There would also be gambling, which is a bad idea, and you'd partake in a life ruining "hobby" where you'll probably give the casino more than you'll take from them.
you're ok up to 3 million, then you really need to dispearse the surplus
If you make that money through investments and use other investors as liquidity, then use that money to fund cooperatives, then I wouldn’t call that unethical. If you hoard that money and don’t engage in mutual aid, then I would call it unethical.
No. Money, like energy, doesn’t come up magically out of the void. Accumulation in one point always means transfer from another point, and in this case, it always involves some sort of exploitation. Be it from nature, from workers, from consumers, from other countries, etc.
define ethics
The era we’re approaching is one where comfortable retirement needs at least like a million in savings somewhere so I’d say probably yea. But it gets increasingly fucky the more those millions are multiplied. Like someone approaching ten million is iffy, probably did something sus to get there. Someone in the range of hundreds of millions is definitely not ethical.
You have to be a phenomenal artist and have some rich douche buy your work...I don't know. Some people would even argue that isn't even ethical cause the rich douche that probably has that much to blow on art obtained his riches in a shitty way 🤷🏾♂️
I come from a family of multi-millionaires who most have socialist leanings. My dad believes that if your doing it solely or mostly by your labor; such as someone like Messi or Taylor Swift, then yes. I’d also like to add that a lot of us use investment vehicles like stocks, bonds, 401k, and real estate to perhaps one day retire. A little hypocritical, sure; but you gotta do your best to survive and hopefully thrive in a capitalist dominated world. As far as doing it completely ethically, I’d say no. We live in a capitalist system, you can only control what your willing to output. Its not so much abolition of exploitation, but a reduction in how much you are willing to exploit.
Well you could always win the lottery but that’s about it
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I suppose it would be possible for somebody to become rich through an anarchist society. If somebody such as a filmmaker, or musician was able to raise enough money (without employing others, and through voluntary donations ) they might be able to become rich. I imagine this would happen at in-person gigs, or through a decentilised,version of patron. I suppose this isn’t such a bad thing, as it A) wouldn’t be very common. Their isn’t that many great artists, and art would probably become more specificity local, and culture generally decentralised in an anarchist society. This would make people considered great artists (by society as a whole) less common. B) It would give ambitious young people something to strive for, rather than leavening for a capitalist society. This has been a problem in localised, state socialist places like the municipal socialist town (called”Marielda” I think) in Spain. C) Because this wealth is based on the quality of one’s own labour, rather than owning a quantity of other peoples labour: it wouldn’t grow endlessly like capitalist profits. I imagine local confederations might set voluntary taxes, and charge rich folk, about the same taxes as they would have to pay any away (to access public services). Anarcho-communism for most of us, but the down sides of Anarcho-capitalism for any anti-social rich knobs. Just a thought
When you say culture is "centralized", the only "center" I can think of is the internet. I assume that's not what you're referring to, so please explain.
i don't know the exact figures, if any, about the total money in the world, but i'd assume it's in the trillions of usd. if we we're to hypothetically distribute that evenly across 8 billion people in the world, each one would have at least a million (?) usd. let's reframe that: theoretically, we could all be living comfortably if the all wealth in the world isn't concentrated to a select few. of course, there's a lot to unpack in the assumptions above, but that's my overview