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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 January 26

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January 26

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Vanderbilt connection to White Star Line and Cunard Line

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George Washington Vanderbilt II sailed aboard the RMS Olympic, due to switching sailing schedules from RMS Titanic. How was he related to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Timothy Olyphant?2603:7000:8100:F444:F408:EB4B:D85F:6EF7 (talk) 02:53, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You can see the family tree in Vanderbilt_family RudolfRed (talk) 03:37, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I looked, and got confused.2603:7000:8100:F444:F408:EB4B:D85F:6EF7 (talk) 06:45, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Here is a pruned tree:
 --Lambiam 11:00, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's an odd way of presenting a family tree, sideways and with reproduction by parthenogenesis. If I read it correctly then George II was Gert and Alf's uncle, and Timmy's great-great-great uncle. DuncanHill (talk) 23:59, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Looks perfectly normal to me. It is only depicting the direct lineage, not the "outside contributions" of spouses. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:14, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Lambiam's presentation works well. It's a style I often use in summarizing my own family trees. I would normally add the spouses too, but that doesn't seem important to the OP's question. Another way to state Timothy's connection is that George is his great-great-granduncle. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:45, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are there any major Nazi war criminals still at large?

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As topic. Not talking about some random guy who was a party member, or a soldier in the Waffen SS when he was 16 back in the day - but people who were legitimately responsible and had control over the atrocities that were committed. I know about 15 years ago there was someone who got sent down (rightly, as I recall from reading about it) for life for 100,000 counts of conspiracy to murder. Was he the last? Am I misremembering, or were there some old Nazis on the FBI's most wanted list about 20 years ago, next to Bin Laden? Anyway, are all the really bad guys dead and gone now? --146.200.129.22 (talk) 06:22, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

List of most-wanted Nazi war criminals lists a few thought to be still polluting the earth (shown in yellow). The worst of them is Herbert Wahler. Clarityfiend (talk) 08:16, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Peculiar — he doesn't seem to be "wanted" in the sense of a guy on the lam. The impression I get is they know exactly where he is and they don't have enough evidence to charge him, or at least say they don't. Maybe we shouldn't be referring to a living person as "the worst of them" without that evidence in hand. --Trovatore (talk) 18:45, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, there doesn't seem to be any dispute that he served in the Einsatzkommando unit Einsatzgruppe C, whereas the other survivors were accused of being guards or accessories, with the possible exception of Z. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:21, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If you follow the articles given as sources to his article, he apparently claims he didn't kill anyone and was there in some sort of medical capacity. I don't know enough about this unit to judge whether that's a plausible claim or not (and I also don't know who or what "Z" might be). --Trovatore (talk) 00:50, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Probably whoever put him or her in the table as "Z (unnamed)", right after "Y (unnamed)", doesn't know much either. Both are footnoted to the Wiesenthal Center, which also lists X. —Tamfang (talk) 02:15, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, thanks, that helps me understand Clarityfiend's comments about "the other survivors" as well. It wasn't clear to me that that had to do with the table(s) in the list article; I was looking more at the Wahler article. --Trovatore (talk) 02:29, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Prosecutions of former personnel at the Nazi concentration camps are still ongoing,[1][2][3] but although they are prosecuted as criminals for their roles in the Nazi atrocities, they are perhaps not what one would call "major" war criminals.  --Lambiam 10:27, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It should be noted that we're reaching a point where all former Nazis are reaching the end of their expected lives; someone who was say 18 years old in 1945 would be about 95 years old today. According to this, there were only slightly more than 20,000 German centenarians in 2020, and those 20,000 will likely not be alive much longer. Within a decade or so, there likely may not be any more living former Nazis. --Jayron32 16:44, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, there are quite a few new Nazis...and not just in Germany. But most of them are only wanna-be war-criminals so far. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:13, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In common usage, such people are neonazis, and not really relevant to people who may have committed war crimes on behalf of the actual Nazi party during World War II. --Jayron32 13:05, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Also note that it was not just Germans that were involved; the SS recruited in the France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway; this article describes attempts to prosecute former Danish SS members. The Nazis also raised large numbers of Schutzmannschaft auxilliary units from occupied areas of the Soviet Union, who were often employed to carry out the worst atrocities. Alansplodge (talk) 12:07, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian Nazis are no less subject to the arrow of time than the Germans are, and as such, none of them are younger than their mid 90s either. They'll all be dead in 10-15 years as well. --Jayron32 13:05, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. Alansplodge (talk) 18:56, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, if the Reichsflugscheiben go at a significant fraction of c, they might...at least if that Jewish theory is correct. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:35, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Does wealth itself have "diminishing returns"?

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I'm enrolled in a Bachelor of Business, and some of my units involved studying economics.

One of the things I learned, is that there are three or four common "elements of production": land, labour, capital, and natural resources.

A key point is that increasing any given element, in isolation, will have diminishing returns. For example, having one tractor (i.e. "capital") may make your farm far more productive. But after you have enough tractors, additional tractors will help little or nothing, unless you increase the area available for you to farm ("land"), and/or the necessary "labour" needed to drive the tractors.

Ditto for any of the other elements. Extra land won't help much, if you lack the capital and/or labour to exploit it. Likewise, extra labour isn't useful once you run out of land and/or capital to use the labour for/with.

This raised an interesting question: does one's accumulation of personal wealth itself have a point of "diminishing returns"? Or even, dare I say it, negative returns?

Like, if somebody wins $100 million at the lottery, will his or her life improve more than the person who wins a "mere" $2 million? In other words, if the other elements needed for a happier life aren't available, is there a point at which extra money won't help much, if at all?

From what I've heard (and this is purely anecdotal), it often is better to "merely" win a million or two, rather than $50 million plus. The former individual's life becomes more comfortable, but the basic structure remains intact. They still have reason to keep their existing job and life. By contrast, winning $50 million means that one has no need to ever work again, which can cause a "collapse" of a person's life and social circle. As I said, this is purely anecdotal.

Anyways, I'm trying to understand this through either the lens of economic theory, or real life studies of those who have accumulated (or, in the case of lottery winners, had a sudden windfall of) various amounts of wealth, from "small" to "large", and the differing effects on their happiness and quality of life.

@DOR (HK): you're our resident economist. What are your thoughts on diminishing returns and personal wealth?

@John Z: and @Dragons flight: you two have also answered my economics questions before. Any thoughts on this one? Eliyohub (talk)

  • This is a synopsis of a well-covered study from a few years back which showed that, indeed, above a certain level, there is diminishing returns on the amount of additional happiness more money provides. It shows that, there was a maximum "gain of happiness" at around $75,000 per year (in 2010 dollars) and that above that point, while people were happier with more money, they showed less increases in happiness with more money. --Jayron32 15:50, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Jayron, that was indeed an interesting and relevant article. Anybody else have anything to offer, I'd love to hear. Eliyohub (talk) 16:16, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm more of an international macro guy, but we all know money can't buy you love, nor happiness. The capital in economics is investment capital, not personal wealth, so it is probably better not to mix the two. Now, a person can invest, but the actual change in the amount of personal wealth should not follow the law of diminishing returns. Where you will find diminishing returns in when an excess of capital drives down the return on capital.DOR (HK) (talk) 16:24, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The econ jargon for this is the diminishing marginal utility of money. The thing is, you're trying to analyze this in terms of "hedonic utility" rather than from a strict homo economicus standpoint, and this is always going to be somewhat subjective. If someone has a real killer idea for a business they want to start, but needs capital to do so, they're probably going to be happier with $50 million to start their business than a smaller amount. Generally speaking there's nothing that keeps you from dumping your lotto winnings in a trust fund invested in index funds, setting up automatic disbursements to pay your bills, and going on living as before. Maybe a more fruitful way of looking at things is to ask why, given a big windfall, so many people feel they have to "change their lives", which would be a behavioral economics/psychology kind of thing. --47.155.96.47 (talk) 01:03, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Lottery winners are a very unrepresentative sample so an unusual amount of blowing it all in a few years doesn't prove anything. They're all willing to have their name, physical appearance and number of millions won publicized and get bugged for donations (or should've realized that acceptance could result in being bugged for donations) and the more you play the more likely it is to win. So winners are often like my relative — extroverted hopey-feely people that play multiple tickets every day for like 20,000 days (that's 1 million percent of the dollars they play per day lost to vigorish in one lifetime), still dreaming about $x million every time even though they likely know you need to buy like 5 times the jackpot to have >50/50 odds, and picking birthdays even though picking highest possible numbers every time is clearly less of a ripoff. They might enjoy casinos too and even be addicted to it. If I somehow won a lot of money without everyone knowing then I'd quit almost any blue-collar job I might have as soon as deposit reversal became impossible. Even if I had to live in a tiny house to ensure not going broke by my 80s I'd quit most jobs in a heartbeat and and not be unfulfilled. Why use work for fulfillment when you can learn skills that people do for fun like sports, hobbies and games? I'd buy a pension that pays an inflation-adjusted check every month from age 85 to death (make sure it's really death and not 120), that way I can ensure not having to work or sleep in a car if immortality is invented. When 85 is near spend the OG dollars as early as I dare in case I die before getting to enjoy the safety buffer (stuff unlikely to cause death, so no prostitutes) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:55, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
While I agree they are an unrepresentative sample your second statement is simply wrong. In a number of places including the OP's Australia (see Murder of Graeme Thorne for one reason) lottery winners have the right to remain anonymous if they desire, and it's something many winners do take advantage of [4]. Nil Einne (talk) 13:14, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Other jurisdictions are more advanced than mine then. I don't know if it's still like this but New York jackpot winners (record USD65 million) are on the New York City metro area news with meter-long cheques (non-cashable). And the ticket fine print includes/d something to the effect of "we can pay zero for refusing". Including the other TV markets that's the population of Aus+NZ who can see on TV, even a tiny fraction of that begging with real and scam sob stories would still be a lot. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:29, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how the discussion got side-tracked to windfall economics, but the largest and most diverse group to suddenly come into significant money must be heirs. DOR (HK) (talk) 21:06, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't there a theory that nothing can make you happier for more than a few years if you're already at your maximum sustainable happiness? Maybe you can do this more than once (go from peasant who never saw or walked to seeing paraplegic, before getting used to that be cured of that too, before getting desensitized to the joys of walking become one of the poorest British uni students, before getting used to that meet first love, before getting used to that finish degree, get good job and make the couple middle class, before getting used to that some relative she's never heard of before dies and makes them rich) I wonder if the number of levels possible is the only limit (before getting used to richness he becomes a king, before getting used to that both suddenly become able to fly like Superman, before getting used to that they become like gods...). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:20, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding heirs: Probably not really... People who inherit money do so from the people who had that money when they were children; thus they were raised and grew up in that social class; went to the right colleges, worked in fields commensurate to their social class. Billy Bob the dirt farmer doesn't really inherit 80 billion dollars from their long-lost uncle, at least not more often than he would win the state lottery. Instead, Johnny, who is raised by his billionaire parents (or, let's face it, their hired help), goes to school with other children of billionaire parents, works for the colleagues of their billionaire parents, hangs out with other people from billionaire families, and then when their dad dies inherits those billions. That's not "coming into significant money" except in a purely numerical measure. That's how the system works, and it does not cause significant changes to a person's means or social situation. --Jayron32 11:52, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Is becoming a trophy wife sudden enough to count as a sudden windfall? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:06, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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