No, if you charge rent but aren’t actually investing meaningful capital in the property (most apartment building landlords do not in my experience), then that meets the definition of rent seeking.
From Wikipedia:
> Rent seeking, according to the Georgist, does not include those persons who have invested substantial capital improvements in a piece of land, but rather those who perform their role as mere titleholders.
Opposing Israel's flagrant violations of international law is not hate speech or discrimination against Jews, regardless of how desperately you want it to be.
Alameda was only profitable in the years when Bitcoin was going up. By 2022 their trading operations were deeply negative (hence the decision to steal customer funds).
Because people are interested in whether they, personally, could find a way to live longer. And so if you find places where you have bubbles of people who seem to cross a threshhold not really crossed in other places, you might tell yourself "maybe there's something special there".
The median life expectancy means you're only in the top half! But well... simply being well off means you're going to be more likely to hit above average there.
Extreme agers are rare enough that they're highly unlikely to show up in median statistics. If there are people living exceptionally long, they're still a small proportion. You might get some mileage from percentile analysis (95%ile, 99%ile), and there may be robust research methodology along those lines (I'm not tapped into that).
Which actually does leverage your concept somewhat (increase the sample size to include more members, and reduce extreme outliers). There is also plenty of analysis which does benefit by median (vs. mean or maximum) analysis, or by looking closely at observed distributions and outlier characteristics.
Median life expectancy is affected by a much larger number of variables, and is also susceptible to just as much (if not more) number fudging and statisitical nudging. Maybe the country also has a large subset of obese alcoholics for example. If someone lives to be over 100, that in and of itself is a pretty valuable data point
I'm also surprised it's so low, because I feel that doesn't align with my anecdotal experience. Perhaps part of the problem is they only did the analysis on "...for freshman admission between 1994 and 2011 for whom complete data were available on all covariates". Perhaps wealthy families are less likely to submit family income data, or the income data is somehow related to FAFSA, in which case wealthy families will be under represented. Also note, they used family income as a proxy for SES, which is understandable but also not completely correct. Many wealthy people have no-to-low income for tax purposes.
Indeed, the ultra-wealthy pay far less than 40% effective estate tax. Seems closer to 15% due to creative accounting, which is further reduced to 6.8% by charitable contributions:
> Specifically, for single decedents, estate taxes paid equal 6.8% of the value of Forbes wealth at death. The value of their gross estate is 39% of the Forbes estimate of their wealth. This large gap, already noted in earlier work (Raub et al., 2010), is likely to reflect the various techniques available to high-net-worth individuals to undervalue assets in the context of the estate tax. Taxable estate is then 45% of gross estate (due to deductions primarily gifts to charities) and on that base the tax rate is 39% (Balkir et al., 2025, Table 4 Panel B).
No, which is why there are very few vacant units in NYC: 1.4%-ish percent of total supply, whereas the rule of thumb I've heard is that around 5% is the sign of a reasonable equilibrium.
(In a well-functioning real estate market there are some units offline due to vacancy, turnover, and renovation, so we don't expect 0%. High vacancies of e.g. 10% suggest insufficient demand for the supply.)
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