With the stock market, anybody can be an investor. It really should be a core part of modern life to own stocks.

xboxnolifes 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When one person is born into life with $1 and another is born into life with $5,000,000, no amount of "you can just buy stocks too" can be fair.

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Marsymars 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Should be? Like, it's effectively forced on people because you can't effectively fund a middle-class retirement without relying on stock-market-like gains, but there's no intrinsic reason that corporate shares should be a core part of modern life.

	▲	cpach 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Isn’t “external motivation” good enough of a reason to buy stocks? (Or index funds)

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an0malous 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That by itself seems fine.

I think the problem, trying to be as objective about it without taking sides, is that you make more money the more money you already have. This leads to runaway wealth inequality, which leads to civil unrest and eventually violence.*

If we at least didn't have all this systemic rigging in favor of the investor class, the wealth inequality would at least be less severe and maybe low enough for a stable equilibrium.

I'm not an economist but I would guess that you need the return on capital to be closer to the return on labor, and when they're about equal you have a stable distribution of wealth.

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tavavex 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All the effects in the parent comment favor the wealthy investors and huge companies over individual investors. Then the finishing blow is 'money makes money' with the compounding of investments and normal workers being naturally forced to spend a far higher proportion of their savings on survival and immediate expenses, which greatly reduces how much they can benefit in the first place. Sure, investing can still give you an edge compared to other people like you, but it does not right the wrongs of the system we're living in.

	▲	kelseyfrog 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To some/a fairly large degree, wealth fits a log-normal distribution[1]. A log-normal process is the statistical realization of the multiplicative product of many independent random variables[2]. When we take that as returns are a product (in a multiplicative sense) of investment, the result flows naturally. The basic multiplicative nature of investment returns is a direct cause of our wealth distribution - it couldn't have been different. Want a different wealth distribution? Use a different investment process. Good luck. The political machinations required to do that are left as an exercise to the reader. 1. Upper ranges more closely match a pateto distribution. For.the purposes of this argument, I don't think that is too relevant, but willing to change my mind. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution

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cullenmacdonald 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree that it should be normal for every one of us to own parts of every company, but probably not in the way you mean.

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stronglikedan 14 hours ago | parent [-]

everyone would own parts of nothing since no one would take the risk to start a company just so a bunch of freeloaders can own a part of it

	▲	cullenmacdonald 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I know at least one person who would still start something.

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stevefan1999 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can even buy national bond to get a share of the sovereign debt, but does that mean anything?

Well, besides from it is deemed as what the bankers call it "risk free rate", but I have already started to challenge this assumption 6 years ago

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stronglikedan 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gambling should be a core part of life? Sounds unnecessarily stressful and risky. Most gamblers I know don't come out ahead.

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xyzsparetimexyz 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have like €150 in my bank account bro

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hdgvhicv 14 hours ago | parent [-]

But you are no doubt filled with joy that the stock market is booming and gdp is up and other metrics that we are told are what’s important.

	▲	xyzsparetimexyz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'm pretty sure Germany is in a recession.

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mnewme 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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