[lbo-talk] hard work

Michael McIntyre mcintyremichael at mac.com
Fri Feb 9 12:37:47 PST 2007


Yes, but why do they? The returns to the "hard work" of the rich can be broken down (analytically, if not empirically) into: *interest: what the rich could earn from their accumulated capital as rentiers *rent: what the rich earn due to ability to exploit deviations from the mythical market *pure profit: the residual - a sort of entrepreneurial wage

I don't think there's any reason to believe that "pure profit" is a large fraction of the total. I wouldn't want to have to try to live off of "pure profit" - what I could earn with a price-taking business capitalized entirely through loans in a competitive market. That leaves two possible explanations (that I can see - maybe there are more):

(1) Weber was right: the rich work compulsively in a post-Calvinist iron cage. (2) The real money is in rent. It takes a lot of work to identify and take advantage of rents, so the rich work hard, event though the social product of that labor could be negative.

What do you think?

Michael McIntyre mcintyremichael at mac.com http://morbidsymptoms.blogspot.com

On Feb 9, 2007, at 2:14 PM, lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org wrote:


>> In fact, the love of The Market is grounded in the antithesis of
>> hard work
>> and diligence - it is the shortcut from rags to riches, the
>> quintessence of
>> the American Dream that bypasses the drudgery of education, the
>> toil of hard
>> work, the burden of moral obligations, and the pomposity of high
>> culture.
>
> Though hard work is very often not rewarded, most rich people today
> work hard. The rentier is mostly a thing of the past. The ideal for
> the rich today is to work; even our socialites have a little handbag
> business on the side.
>
> Doug

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