127 Comments

As a white straight cis neurotypical right-handed male with slim metabolism who grew up in a wealthy stable clean dry safe home away from crime, pollution, war and famine in a non-corrupt country where everyone speaks the language we speak at home, and with doctors and teachers that will always pronounce my name correctly ...

I started from nothing but a dream and determination and you can do it too no matter who you are.

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Don’t forget the hardships you’ve endured and overcome like when you went to college and it was hard so you dropped out or when your business went bankrupt four times but you succeeded on your fifth bail out.

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Have to be super truthful and straight up - I never started a business. I just went to interviews at companies where the people looked exactly like me. Now I do the interviews and I'm always looking for people with the same characteristics (looks like me, so probably a hard worker, we call it culture fit)

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Really respect that honesty - I can tell you’re a good man. You’ve got to be so careful these days with some of these new ones coming through who don’t know how to act (or take a joke).

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🤣🙃 On point

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Well. I started out with nothing, worked hard for 50 years and I still have a lot of it left. I don't have it all, of course, sometimes I had to eat some of it and, for years that is all I had to drive, plus it was also my housing portfolio.

So, when I retired, I was so happy that I had that to live on and look forward to.

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Awesome article. I never thought I’d be able to buy a home until my sister gave us a leg up through a scheme that let us leverage equity in her home to build our deposit. That changed the entire trajectory of our lives. I couldn’t believe it - we suddenly had monthly mortgage payments lower than our rent and we were actually saving money. We had security. The bank stopped hating us and literally GAVE us money. I will never forget that. So many don’t have that. Pure luck and I have so much gratitude. Fuck your self made bullshit.

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You get it - and aren't afraid to say it! I think the thing is just Hayden (and I) wish these people would ACKNOWLEDGE this system, and not just pretend it's all them and their hard work!

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Similar thing for me, absolutely changed the trajectory of my life. Didn't earn it but society treats me a lot more kindly than would otherwise be the case. Really detest it when people get so lucky and use their position to dump on people who haven't

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Like you, I got a family leg-up - since then it has been a tradition within my siblings, and now their children, to help each other with buying homes where we can. Not lots of $$$ and not flash houses, but for a 1st home or starting again after a relationship breakup with the other person you own your current home with, it can be everything!

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You are (by the looks of your name) female. I feel that women are so more likely to admit they received assistance than men.

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That's so great of your sister being able to help you like that! (Also is that an NZ scheme by any chance???????)

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It was NZ! Westpac Family Springboard 😊 the best thing is it only secures the deposit against the equity, rather than a guarantee which secures the whole loan. So worst case if we’d defaulted bank would sell our home but have no rights over my sis’s place.

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We were able to release her from any obligation within a year too due to the capital gain on our place in the meantime. Honestly it was such a gift.

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This is incredible! (and I'm also with Westpac actually). I've spoken to so many people and no one has ever mentioned this at all even when we've specifically asked if family could do anything with their houses to help. I wonder if it's still a thing or not? Either way, I'm really happy it worked out for you!

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(Stray fact: When I left school I was a teller for a year at Westpac as I figured out what to do and saved a tiny tiny bit of money)

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Ooooof Hayden you’re just the best

People get offended by the words ‘inter generational wealth’ or ‘intergenerational privilege’. Look - it’s not your fault that your parents were wealthy, private school educated, white, or all of the above but stop pretending it didn’t help (aka propel) you to success.

In medicine there is the never ending Māori and Pacific Admission Scheme “controversy” which apparently is an unfair advantage. Cos growing up in Remuera and going to Kings because your parents are rich is somehow a fair advantage.

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Oooof. The Daily did a good one on elite college admissions the other week: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Pi4F9gZXxSq6CbnxcymI4?si=2ce5e733edde4bd8

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I think a big big thing that also gets overlooked is that even if you don't have super wealthy parents, having "comfortable" parents/family you're able to fall back on is also a tremendous advantage. You're able to take bigger risks (with exponentially bigger rewards) if you know doing this thing isn't going to land you or your family in a cardboard box.

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Yeah I'm a PhD student, and one of the main reasons I could justify chasing that goal, is I have parents who will feed me and help me out with petrol money when my piss poor stipend doesn't cut it. It annoys me to no end when lectures and supervisors complain about the drop outs who "let life get in the way" because "we were all poor and it was hard". Some of these muppets earned the same stipend I now get 10 years ago and it was worth a hell of a lot more then

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Totally! Having that family structure to fall back on is huge.

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Yes! My parents were super wealthy, but I grew up in a very comfortable household and it has 100% been a huge reason why I own a house, have some savings, and certain opportunities. Do I still work really hard and life frugally? Yes, but I don't pretend to think that any of my successes are self-made.

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I definitely meant *were NOT super wealthy* just wanted to clarify that.

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I grew up in extreme poverty after my dad abandoned us at age 3 - or so I thought. We always had food, but it often came from the roadside & there were never sweets or treats. What I didn’t know was that my Mama had squirreled away every cent (then Groschen) to save up for my future. So, when I managed to leave Austria to study my dream subject marine biology (an unbelievable dream for a poor girl from a landlocked country!) in Australia, I did so by myself with a scholarship from the Austrian government. But suddenly, without warning, my Mama deposited $35,000 in my account! I’d never seen that much money - I had no idea she had any money! She’d saved everything she ever gotten from my dad’s alimony & Austrian child support for decades (both pay until 27 as long as you study - which I did), and gave it to me so I didn’t need to hunger. Of course I squandered a lot of it on books and clothes… unfortunately, I did not have her insane ability & discipline to squirrel and save. But, despite living off less than $20K a year until I was 30, I managed to get a PhD which soon ended up paying dividends once I finally got a job. Then, at 30, the house me and my new husband rented was suddenly put on the market. We had no credit rating - I’d just gotten my first job at $43K a year and he’d been sued by the IRD and debt-collected by ACC! But it was 2005 and banks loaned to anyone with only 5% down payment. Which we didn’t have, of course. So my Mama helped again. And again now, when I turned the 100-year old beach shack we bought into a 35ha land purchase (which no bank wanted to touch, despite me having almost 90% of the purchase price in cash). So, yes, I worked hard, got a great education, and made wise property purchases. But none of this would have happened without the lifelong sacrifices my Mama has made for me. And I wonder if any of it would have happened had I been born even a decade earlier (as a girl), in a country with weaker social support, or with a darker skin colour. Luck is always a huge aspect of success, I have zero doubt about that. Which is why, if you were lucky enough to become successful, you should never pull the ladder up or kick down. Cause that makes you a sociopath, not a winner.

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Oh your mum sounds amazing. So, so amazing. And - you get it. Thanks for sharing this, as always you share good stuff.

And none of it was easy and it sounds insanely hard but you still *get* the privileged aspects of it all. God, I wish everyone could be as self aware arghhhhhh (that is a sound of rage as I think about so many who are not self aware of their privilege).

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Thanks David. It really wasn’t easy - including acknowledging and understanding her sacrifice and what it meant. It always came with strings attached. Only once I understood the multigenerational family trauma and untreated C-PTSD in my Mama and Opa could I empathise enough to forgive them their cruel & judgmental sides that hurt me and others a lot. Humans are complex yo! But one thing that definitely makes us better at humaning is acknowledging our own privileges and biases, and at the very least trying to step into someone else’s shoes. Thanks for giving us such a safe place to share our stories & traumas xxx

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Tautoko! "you should never pull the ladder up or kick down" is precisely right. Even being neutral is better than either of those - if you can't enable, then at least don't obstruct eh?

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The rich gaslight the rest of us by saying, give us tax breaks and subsidies so we can invest to grow the economy and make us all better off. They instead hoard the wealth, use other people’s labour to make themselves richer.

Societies were most equal when there was high marginal tax rates of 60 to 90 percent. The small businesses that are the main stay of NZ, do best when we earn enough to spend in their enterprises

NZ remember when you vote this year, that plastic waste maker paid a party $250,000 to get lower taxes for himself

Book on overcoming cognitive dissonance to do bad things “Mistakes were made but not by me”

Hayden thanks for your great work

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It always makes me laugh when people complain about higher taxes for the super wealthy by saying "THEN THEY'LL LEAVE AND TAKE ALL THE JOBS THEY CREATED WITH THEM, THEN WHAT WILL YOU DO???!!"

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We “can’t do a capital gains tax as the rich will all leave “. All the places they would go to already have capital gains taxes

Also “they will take their assets with them” like you can pick up a farm, forest or fixed assets and move it to another country

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Exactly!!! Even Australia would tax them more

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I'm a "socialist" from way back & would love nothing better than finding a way to equalise the tax system - however from that viewpoint I have followed the arguments for/against "capital gains tax" for decades & come to the conclusion that it is fraught with compliance cost clawbacks in order to ensure it only targets the right people/entities, and that they can't/don't wiggle their way around it via clever tax accounting/lawyering etc. It seems counterproductive to impose a tax that costs as much as/or almost, as it brings in? We have a smaller base of people in Aotearoa-NZ that would be liable, making comparisons to most other countries who do it really hard to do.

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The alternative is high personal marginal tax rates that help prevent people accumulating huge wealth along with inheritance tax (with gifting restrictions) We have had inheritance taxes before and they did work

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I have similar views regarding capital gains tax (and the socialism bit) but I'm thinking (hoping?) it would act as a deterrent to stop wealthy people from doing things that are harmful to society.

E.g. houses should be for living in and should be affordable for everyday people, but because wealthy people want to follow the kiwi dream and own multiple properties they end up distorting the housing market.

These wealthy landlords then have a vested interest in having property values constantly increase because it gives them a larger equity pool to borrow against and thus buy more property.

It seems ridiculous that if a house goes up for sale, a first home buyer who just wants to buy the house to live in it, gets pushed out of the way because already wealthy landlords can pay that bit more.

I'm not certain that a capital gains tax will fix this situation but I feel that introducing it has more to do with being a deterrent than rebalancing wealth.

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I have zero tolerance for the super rich who tell us "peasants" how we can and should be fixing the world's problems rather than troubling them with facts about the cost of living. They have enough money to do this themselves and actually make a difference globally. Money does something very negative to people's sense of compassion and humanity and turns them into toxic assholes.

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This is another excellent piece with Hayden 💗💙 Thank you David! Hope your aches and pains are subsiding 🤞

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Thanks so much for publishing this. Plenty of people work as hard or harder than these Musk types, have big or bigger dreams, better ideas. There must be millions of people who work that hard, had ideas for things that could have changed the world for the better, (or worse or whatever) but regardless could have been as successful, but didn't have the rich parents, missed a flight to get to an interview, didn't get invited to a party to bump into a potential investor, or anything really that could have just been random chance. And of course you mention those who work super hard, cleaning, fixing, and running the world in various ways, working multiple jobs to support their families and communities and somehow the work-hard and get rich logic doesn't work for them.

These guys have created their own version of a prosperity doctrine. They believe that the fact that they have been able to hoard everything is proof enough that they must be smarter than everyone else and that they deserve it. I feel at a very basic level that sort of answers the question in the headline, they fundamentally cannot admit that. It feels like the same psychology that makes those mega church congregations believe in their leaders is at play here, the leaders themselves perpetuating and possibly coming to believe in the myth themselves.

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Prosperity doctrine is a good analogy. Definitely some links there. The idea that fortune is logical and earned and correlated to something you've done like 'had enough faith' or 'spoke last in meetings'

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Exactly. Their version of ... MLM that markets me and only me. You better believe it.

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I am so enjoying watching the twitter/X train wreck unfold , musk is clearly so much more intelligent than the rest of us... or maybe not ......

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I know , how anyone could pay $44 billion and do what he is doing just beggars belief.

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One interesting way to think about that is that it's become a redistribution of his wealth, where all of those previous shareholders are now sitting on their $54.20 that he paid out, able to go use that for other things while he goes and plays with his new toy. It may work or it may not, but where it looks right now Musk has effectively just given away ~$30B to an assortment of people as an experiment (based on buyout price and current estimated valuations).

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In 2008, Musk's comany was trying to build electric sports cars - Telsa. The US government developed a loan scheme (https://www.energy.gov/lpo/advanced-technology-vehicles-manufacturing-loan-program) roughly the same time to promote innovation in greener vehicles & a wee bit later used it to help bail out US car manufacturing companies though GFC.

Telsa got $465m (out of $8B available). Deadline to pay it back was 2022. The loan provided led to the launch of the S Model. About 150,000 Telsas have now been sold and the loan was fully repaid in 2010. (12 years before deadline)

A success story, supposedly led by Musk - but SEEMS to me the US taxpayer invested enough to make that venture work - not Musk. (so sick of tfg!)

BTW - the loan scheme seems to have been a success and saved a sh*t-tonne of carbon being thrust into the atmosphere - see link above.

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Yuuuuuuup. Couldn't agree with all of this more.

Everything is luck. Good. Bad. Whatever. Call it fate, call it chaos, call it chance, it's all the same thing, and we're ALL subject to it, all the time.

So often we're happy to attribute bad things to luck (shit happens, gods plan, etc) or factors outside our control, but at the same time, we want to take credit for all the good stuff as personal choice etc.

We want to eat our cake, and have it too.

I essentially believe we have the perfect illusion of free will, but basically all the important factors of our life are largely outside our control. Which can be a very uncomfortable thought.

But, in my opinion, embracing this reality is an excellent way of increasing your empathy. You realise everyone is just riding the wave, for better or for worse and you (hopefully) stop judging those less fortunate and maybe even start trying to help.

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Because how else do you justify hoarding that much money unless you think you deserve it?

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I saw a quote that resonated this week - something like ‘If a monkey hoarded all the bananas at the expense of other monkeys starving, scientists would study it to see what was wrong. When a person does it, we put them on the cover of magazines’.

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Such a good observation. These bastards could literally end poverty if they wanted to. Not to do so, and instead to hoard it, is a choice. That kind of personal wealth should not exist.

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I do put the likes of Bill Gates into a different place in my head than the likes of Mu$krat - I'm sure he's got much more personal possessions/assets than he needs, BUT the Foundation he & Melinda set up has done a huge amount of good work in the "teach a person to fish" category of enabling people to feed themselves through grants to small businesses, plus research & delivery of health/medical resources to under-developed regions. And there are SOME rich people who fly under the radar and just do stuff without our knowing, and don't go around inferring the rest of us are stupid or lazy because we aren't as rich as them! The ones Hayden highlighted, plus the ones who use their wealth to get politicians and lawmakers to skew the playing field in their favour, certainly don't make being wealthy admirable to me ... not only do THEY think they "deserve it", but they think they deserve more?

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I have to say I disagree. First off, I do not think it’s appropriate to talk about Bill and Melinda as one entity. She divorced him for very, very valid reasons. I do not understand this one billionaire is better than the other contest. Why can’t we saw they’re both shitty?

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Without going into marriage/personal dynamics, their "Foundation" WAS one entity under the umbrella of which they both supported/promoted humanitarian & research projects, as I understand it? Bill Gates philanthropic work and attitudes towards using personal wealth to lift millions out of poverty/preventable health deficits, lifts him far and away above "shitty" Mu$krat IMHO - accepting Melinda may have influenced that direction, although from memory, was the basis not Bill Gates' father's foundation? (too lazy to look it up right now!) Not to mention he IS an actual "genius" rather than stealing other's inventions/developments, while being modest enough to work with other people for the common goal.

Certainly don't condone men (or women for that matter!) having affairs rather than just dealing honestly with their partners and whatever problems/deficits they may perceive ... however, none of that has anything to do with being a billionaire and more to do with being flawed humans, given the average income of most of the people who are unfaithful & have affairs! (And money & philanthropy aside, Bill Gates doesn't pollute the social-media sphere with unmitigated right wing conspiracy theories - just saying!) Melinda is someone I greatly admire - so is Bill.

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Totally. Totally.

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I vaguely remember playing a Sid Meier's Civilization game in the early 90s. With the bitter end insight, there was the collective World in mass social upheaval, pollution, nuclear strikes both unchecked and all the resources were being funneled into a satellite/spaceship for the privileged few to jettison to Mars like pilgrims looking for a New Plymouth.

A very psychopathic way to play outside of a simulation.

The Bear oh boy, saw a post once saying "Italian Americans don't do Therapy" l aways recommend this show to collegues or people that may need to understand that trauma often steals opportunities and love from right from of us without our knowledge in the here and now.

Truly brilliant complex show.

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Thanks once again for making thought provoking, interesting pieces which leven the gloom sufficiently that I don't feel that the world my granddaughter is inheriting is without hope.

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Great stuff as usual Hayden (thanks David for lending your platform)... I've been doing a lot of thinking about wealth (over on my own 'stack) and, completely beyond the meritocracy nonsense that we use to justify this excess, it's just so clear that humans are not very good at understanding how the physics of wealth work (vs how they *should* work), and what that does to us collectively.

Really important that we keep talking about this.

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