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Smart-Tomato-4984 t1_jd2q010 wrote

Reply to comment by Surur in A technical, non-moralist breakdown of why the rich will not, and cannot, kill off the poor via a robot army. by Eleganos

Rich people don't leave their money in banks, or very little of it as a percentage, and SVB's failure was not the result of poor people.

Imagine if earth got twice as much habitable land and resources suddenly, you wouldn't expect this to make rich people lose all their wealth. The discovery of the new world didn't make Europe's Kings get poor.

Neither would reducing the population necessarily do that. Anyway, it doesn't so much matter what would happen as what they expect to happen,

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Surur t1_jd2qg4v wrote

> Rich people don't leave their money in banks

You were suggesting Elon Musk sell all their shares. Where would the liquid money go? Under his bed?

> Imagine if earth got twice as much habitable land and resources suddenly, you wouldn't expect this to make rich people lose all their wealth.

Strangely enough this is the logic of the flat earth movement lol

Lots of people's wealth is tied up in their property, and it is believed that this is why they resist the creation of more housing which would lower their property value.

In a simpler form - say someone presses a button and new land appears next to old land, free to claim - people would not need to buy the old land, they could just claim the new land, which would crash the price of the old land.

Or if we land an astroid, and your wealth was tied up in gold, you may suddenly find yourself much less wealthy.

So yes, if you suddenly increase supply, you will lose wealth.

> The discovery of the new world didn't make Europe's Kings get poor.

That's probably because it made one of them very rich.

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Smart-Tomato-4984 t1_jd2s5r1 wrote

If Elon Musk couldn't sell his shares off, then he would not be in any sense wealthy. They have value only because he can sell them off.

Anyway, it goes without saying that to kill of poor people would make the rich less rich by definition, since there would be no poor people around for them to be rich in comparison to.

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