Economic Inequality • Hacker News Board

Re: Economic Inequality

#191

Post by PSJ707 » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

Strawman Paul Graham's Conversation with the Poor

Man: I am worried about my next meal and seeing my children move up in the world past my station.

Graham: Well I can't relate to that I live in one of the best school districts in the world with some of the country's highest housing prices. My primary concern is what I will choose to eat at Sweetgrass or Chipotle.

Man: The school's in my district can't afford enough desks for students and are using Textbooks from the 90's. If the government was better funded by the taxes of the wealthy it could help to alleviate poverty.

Graham: Are you anti-startup? We have brought you Snapchat: the foremost service to allow upper-middle class teenagers to share pictures of their genitals, and Uber: a taxi substitute that makes it easier to get home after drinking yourself silly at the local gastropub. We created wealth, don't blame us for fighting tooth and nail to keep from paying our fair share into the government while we benefit from it's protection and services.

Man: I don't use any of those services, in fact I don't even have a phone or Internet services.

Graham: Well that's okay provided you fit into a model I have chosen to explain away the guilt I feel at becoming the thing I vowed to disrupt and change for the better as a young man, let me tell you about The Polynomial Curve. That should make you feel better for not being able to send your daughter to college.

Re: Economic Inequality

#192

Post by minimuffins » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #177

fweespeech wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg isn't really engaging in charity. Its basically buying political influence is one of his stated goals. I'm not sure why people keeping thinking he is engaging in charitable activity when what he really said he was engaging in investment & nonprofit activity.

I don't understand why you're being down-voted. It's eminently clear this is what he's doing: it's right out there in the open. http://fortune.com/2015/12/02/zuckerberg-charity/

Yeah, that was widely reported in publications spanning the political spectrum (excluding most of the tech press).

Re: Economic Inequality

#193

Post by throwaway2048 » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:34 PM UTC

obrero wrote: post #37

Robert Morris and Paul Graham are criminals. Morris crashed a large portion of the Internet in 1988. There is a large amount of evidence Graham had foreknowledge of this worm, which was presented in court. How much jail time did Morris do? Nothing. I don't think Graham was even charged. This is what inequality is. I know people who were arrested for hacking in early 1990, with less evidence, less destruction etc. But…

This post uses some inflammatory language, but people should really think about what its saying before they flag it. Being rich and connected is extremely likely to be why PG never ended up in jail and went on to create YC and this website.

Consider what other people that get written off by society for being poor or lacking connections or being criminals could have contributed.

A world where nearly everyone is relegated to these groups is increasingly becoming our world. That's why income inequality matters.

Re: Economic Inequality

#194

Post by geofft » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167

geofft wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These sorts of discussions always go downhill because they very quickly turn into defending (and attacking) people as if their identity is inextricably linked to their wealth, which means that policy discussions are read (and sometimes written) as personal attacks. Can we do better than that, please? I don't see a claim that any of these folks are bad people for their money. Gates, for instance, is doing extraordinar…

> If they had a 99% marginal tax rate once they have assets of $500M (on any form of gaining wealth), would we have a weaker Microsoft or Facebook or Google doing less good for the world because they wouldn't be working as hard? Would the good done to people on the lower end of the scale not outweigh any possible harm here? That seems hard to imagine. Maybe you're imagining it on the wrong time scale. If you say Larr…

That's a fine argument, and now that we are no longer making the claim that my proposed approach is immoral on the face of it, we can have a reasonable discussion. :)

I think you're totally right that this motivates public ownership (or at least Larry Page selling his company to other private owners, once his shares are worth $500M), and that this doesn't seem to be usefully doing anything productive for economic inequality.

I also think that there's no guarantee that Page or Ford will, in fact, decide to prioritize something other than shareholder value. In fact the argument for allowing them to make profits from the company seems to rest on the argument that they should value shareholder value. An alternative approach would be, once the CEO's shares are worth $500M, they should start to increase salaries or issue shares to their employees or donate to charity or something, such that their personal ownership interest remains valued at $500M but they retain creative control (which they wouldn't if they let it go public). But we're assuming they won't choose to do that, and that selling their shares is more valuable to them.

And there's no particular need for this change (which is extremely disruptive) to be the only change to society. What if we rework the assumption that a publicly-traded company needs to maximize shareholder value at the expense of employee welfare? What if there was a rule that, say, any publicly-traded company needs to at least start with majority employee ownership? Or union ownership?

These are probably also terrible ideas, but my claim here is that we don't have to accept that the world as it is is optimal. There may be fairly fundamental changes we can make to our assumptions that result in a better place.

Re: Economic Inequality

#195

Post by stale2002 » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #169

stale2002 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody is suggesting that we “prevent people from getting rich"" Yes they are. Don't you remember all the articles about Zuckerberg's charity, and how it is bad that rich people have so much control over society, and that the solution shouldn't be charity, it should be to prevent people from becoming so rich in the first place? That shit was all over the place.

"That shit" could be interpreted this way: Having "obscene" wealth accumulate with one or a few persons means the decision-making about using that wealth becomes idiosyncratic and volatile at worst, generally misdirected at best. In market-fundamentalist terminology, huge actors cannot result in optimal results. Markets work best with broadly-held wealth and millions or billions of small bets, lowering the criticalit…

So you are arguing in favor of exactly the "straw man" that PG is arguing against?

Thats totally fine. There are a lot of reasonable arguments for that (as you have just demonstrated!).

But my point is that PG is not arguing against an imaginary viewpoint. You believe it right here.

Re: Economic Inequality

#196

Post by thurn » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

rustynails wrote: post #166

The article is reasonable in the scope it addresses. It's ok for some to be richer than others. We get it. Where it's not fair is that the system is rigged (as other commenters have said). I'm very surprised it's missing from the article. Maybe, the author should talk about inequality of taxation and the good old Dutch Sandwich. No, the top 1% don't play fair or even remotely pay fair taxes. Pick the top 100 on NASDA…

The so-called Dutch Sandwich exists because the United States is the only country in the world to practice worldwide-basis taxation. In any other country, that income would not be taxable at all. Which is not to say that there are no issues with correctly attributing corporate income to the countries in which it occurs, but figuring out which governments are entitled to which corporate income is a fantastically complicated question without clear answers. It's certainly not obviously the case that the United States government deserves a share.

Re: Economic Inequality

#197

Post by wildmusings » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

heurist wrote: post #178

wildmusings wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that these measures leave out most people's most valuable asset, their future earning potential. There's nothing wrong with having a serviceable mortgage or car payment. I think you misinterpreted me. Yes, people do profit from that debt. Good! Because otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn some of that future earning potential into buying power today. This ancient innovation, the loan, allows us to do…

I did not misinterpret you, I understand fully what you are trying to say. I disagree with you. You and I are in the fortunate positions of being able to service debt and even avoid it entirely. Many people are not. Lenders have the ability to take advantage of social and financial systems that require debt, and through the application of their profits can alter those systems so that more debt is required to survive.…

I don't get your logic, that it's okay to go into debt for a boat but not your education, an investment in your future earning potential.

The problem with education loans is that they're not real loans. The government gives them distortionary financing that inflates tuition. Everytime the government raises the max loan amount, tuitions rise to match it. The college bureaucracies grow to match revenue. It's the same that happens with any bureaucracy that gets unearned money.

Everyone should pay the full price of their college education, either up front or in the future. That's the best way to keep college affordable.

Free markets work, why is there this presumption against them?

Re: Economic Inequality

#198

Post by ghufran_syed » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

gkop wrote: post #168

supercanuck wrote: post #124

Lots of window dressing to serve up PG'a core thought: >So let's be clear about that. Ending economic inequality would mean ending startups. PG also called those who questioned Mark Zuckerberg's altruistic intentions "losers." In reference to Altman's bewilderment at the criticism of Zuckerberg's donation to his LLC. I have tremendous respect for PG on startup related manners, but in terms of making a better society,…

The philanthropy point is not to be missed. The perception of Silicon Valley super rich people by the rest of the USA is that they are more stingy with their wealth than respected entrepreneurs in other industries. SV super rich are perceived to punt forever: "If I invest my $100M rather than donate it, then I can grow it to $500M and donate half of that, $250M! See, everybody wins." But then they never do end up act…

Like bill gates you mean?

Re: Economic Inequality

#199

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

cognivore wrote: post #171

That article, and really, almost every post here, don't make a damned bit of difference once the tipping point is reached and the 99% get fed up enough to do something about their situation. They're not going to try and create start-ups, either. We let the inequality keep growing and someday you are going to see people lined up against walls and shot. Don't think history won't repeat itself.

I'm skeptical. So long as the lots of the poor keeps improving (which it has- nearly nobody lives in single room dirt floor log cabins anymore. Thank you Progress, thank you Technology) it seems unlikely that hordes people's lives suck so much they wouldn't mind dying in revolution- even if the rich continue to get richer.

The righteous indignation option (ala Taxation without Representation- the instigators of the American Revolution were all well-off, not economically miserable) could come to pass if the top echelons continue to tighten their grip on the country, but that doesn't automatically come with inequality... hmm.

Re: Economic Inequality

#200

Post by ghufran_syed » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #134

ghufran_syed wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Democracy can be destroyed by wealth inequalities which then create power inequalities" : citation?

I'd not have thought that this would be a controversial statement given the current nature of US politics. Both parties are highly dependent on enormously wealthy donors. It's hard to believe that these people are getting nothing in return for their money. Graham's surprisingly naive about this. He simply says "The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy.…

It should be easy to provide a citation then, I presume? saying "it's obvious" doesn't actually count as evidence