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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13068 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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this theme came up a lot, where their parents looked like a genius fleeing Vietnam circa 1960 and yet circa 2020 the family (that was upper echelon enough to get the people that left the resources and education to leave) back home are 9-figure millionaires whilst the emigrant is a Doctor.

Vietnam has spent decades rapidly climbing out of crushing poverty, yet the number of centi-millionaires there was still only 58 just a couple years ago. If you know close relatives of 2+ centi-millionaire families, your experience may not be statistically normal. I know it's easier for a whole family than for an individual to amass that total wealth, but even plain millionaire individuals number only in the few tens of thousands in Vietnam.

Qualitatively, though, I'd bet there is a "big fish in a small pond" effect that applies to many more people. PPP is an average over many classes of goods, and some things (real estate, anything Baumol-effected) are much more affordable to Vietnamese residents than to Vietnamese-Americans here.

Unfortunately I couldn't audit their finances in detail, but the luxury goods they consumed and the way that their cousins gambled seemed indicative that they've got enough money to be 'ultra rich' inside Vietnam. Maybe not 9-figures explicitly, but I'm aware of 8 figures worth of cars owned by one of those families and that's just the overseas offspring without knowing a ton about their parents.

Baumol is huge for this sort of stuff. Servants and labor are vanishingly cheap compared to what they are in the West. I've had coworkers go back to India after getting remote privileges and turn 100k USD per annum into 3 live-in servants and a very nice house in second-tier cities

I suspect that Vietnam's numbers of the Rich are somewhat underreported due to a large amount of corruption in play over there, though 'capable of living the lifestyle of a 'rich person' in the West' is likely considerably cheaper due to Baumol and service roles being 10% of the cost. You're also probably going to have more leeway to get around potential legal barriers to your wealth like taxes. On the other hand, it could be VND Centi-Millionaires since that's only about 4k USD.

I'm based in SEA currently and FIRED and I'm fairly sure if I tried to mimic my current lifestyle it'd cost me about 10x what I'm paying for it now and I'm somewhere that's not as cheap as Vietnam.

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