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The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Refragmentation

#121

Post by sce »

Plough_Jogger wrote: post #103
sce wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of minimum wage, they would indeed be forced to pay more, rendering the need for welfare to those same people unnecessary, thus shifting the cost from the state/government to the employer. That is in effect wealth distribution, which again closes the big income inequality. (That's the intended effect anyway.)

> thus shifting the cost from the state/government to the employer. This would simply shift the cost from the state/government (read taxpayer) to end consumers (read taxpayer).

If the employer responds by increasing the prices of the goods/services they sell, then yes. However, in the market the consumers have a choice, so they can choose to not buy something, or buy somewhere else, and the market thus regulates itself. Don't want to pay taxes? Not much choice there. So I think having the market regulate itself is better than enforcing the cost of labor through taxes. (Who knows, maybe the employers would be forced to cut their margins even.)

Re: The Refragmentation

#122

Post by wh-uws »

gotchange wrote: post #101

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…

"No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people."

And what non lefties are asking is how do you solve income inequality without those policies?

And more fair? Fair by what metric exactly?

Re: The Refragmentation

#123

Post by harryh »

panic wrote: post #118
harryh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes an obligation on Wal-Mart's part to pay people according to their need. In a market economy, people are paid according to their ability.

In a market economy, people are paid just enough so they don't leave. Salary depends more on the typical economic situation of an employee than their ability.

Ya, ability isn't really the best word to use there. I was being cute by using the words of Marx. In reality "output" is probably a better word here.

Re: The Refragmentation

#124

Post by three14 »

One taboo on HN is pointing out that even though software is a huge lever, there's no sign of the end of raw human labor. In every industry you can point to jobs being lost to automation, yet you still need many, many people in health care, or construction, or manufacturing, or police, or teaching, or mining, or working for utilities, etc. It's complete speculation to suggest that jobs are disappearing faster than they could be replaced. It's not surprising that people who used to work for big auto manufacturers can't continue to work for those same manufacturers, and that says nothing about whether those same people could find low-skill jobs in other industries, nor whether investment in sectors other than GM or Ford could create more unskilled jobs.

If there was a larger market for unskilled labor, the competition for workers would tend to drive up wages and lower inequality.

Re: The Refragmentation

#125

Post by lisper »

wh-uws wrote: post #122
gotchange wrote: post #101

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…

"No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people." And what non lefties are asking is how do you solve income inequality without those policies? And more fair? Fair by what me…

Income inequality is not the problem, it's a shorthand for the real problem, which is the mutual reinforcement of wealth inequality and political corruption. Rich people use their disposable income to buy political influence which they then use to get laws passed that allow them to collect rents.

The solution is to 1) roll back the corrupt laws (like the preferential tax treatment of carried interest and high-speed trading) and 2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery.

Re: The Refragmentation

#126

Post by MBCook »

Click the link (I'm on an iPhone), see a few lines as a 'read more' link.

All apparently so I can see the 'sidebar' menu below the content?

When I follow a link to an article why should I have to press a button to read the article?

I'm getting so tired of this crap on so many sites. I'm really disappointed to see it here.

2nd big story in two days that I found unreadable due to poor web design on someone's relatively simple site (i.e. not crammed with junk like Bloomberg).

Re: The Refragmentation

#127

Post by _delirium »

Typhon wrote: post #65

I remember when Paul Graham pointed out that, « internally, most companies are run like communist states » (in http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html ) The picture he paints here of postwar-America as a bland, uniform country dominated by a few mega-institutions reminds me of the USSR. How ironic.

There was a kind of interesting boomlet in the 1930s-40s when U.S. and Soviet management literature had a lot of interests in common, and pretty openly borrowed ideas from each other. Some aspects of the Soviets' rapid industrialization were seen by American management theorists as very modern, basically taking to the next level the "scientific management" idea that the U.S. industrial trusts had pioneered. The Soviets were in turn also very interested in American management literature, especially the more rationalized/scientific approaches aiming to quantify and optimize factors of productivity. They would've loved the current trend towards pervasive metrics!

Re: The Refragmentation

#128

Post by switch007 »

jacquesm wrote: post #90
tomjen3 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European, I doubt that unless you are thinking balkan scale wars on the edges of Europe in countries that are not normally considered Europe as the term in commonly used or possibly Turkey actually get of its ass and do something about ISIS. It is true that there are a lot of rivalries, but nobody wants another world war. We are all fat, rich (relatively compared to 1939) and entertained, but more importantly th…

On what time-scale are you looking? A decade out? Two? Three? Europe is in flux in a way that it hasn't been in a long time. And I mean that in a downward way, until the mid 00's we were converging, since then we have been diverging with the '08 crisis as one catalyst and the whole nationalist resurgence as another. Add a couple of million refugees as a convenient scapegoat and the stage is set. Between Le Pen, Wilde…

And it's not like the existence of the UN means much (2003 Iraq invasion) when a certain western superpower can bend, break and bulldozer members' arms to get their votes.:

"The Institute for Policy Studies published a report[10] analyzing what it called the "arm-twisting offensive" by the United States government to get nations to support it. Although President Bush described nations supporting him as the "coalition of the willing", the report concluded that it was more accurately described as a "coalition of the coerced." According to the report, most nations supporting Bush "were recruited through coercion, bullying, and bribery."" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...

Re: The Refragmentation

#129

Post by hoorayimhelping »

gotchange wrote: post #101

A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…

The last paragraph was the whole point:

>I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its consequences.

A few people making rules didn't cause this to happen. It was the entire world reacting to things the entire world did for the past hundred years. A few people making rules can't stop that kind of force, even if they have good intentions for everyone else.

>What we're looking for is just more equality in economic opportunities and esp capital and that distribution of capital to be more fair across all the classes and not to be a privilege only for rich people and highly connected people... That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem

He mentions this:

>You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.

I think you're looking at a lower scale than pg. From how I read it, he's saying that yes, you can do a little bit to ease the inequality, but you're not going to fix it unless you stop all technology from happening or you stop paying people their market rate. He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that; the most you can do is take from people at one end and give to people at the other end.

Re: The Refragmentation

#130

Post by abvdasker »

api wrote: post #88

I think there's a fascinating flip side to what PG calls the refragmentation: the decline of counterculture both materially and in terms of relevance. PG talks about his yearning for something outside the mainstream bubble. For decades the major source for that was the various mostly youth oriented subcultures that made up what we called the counterculture. Hippies, punks, goths, 80s rockers, hip hop, ravers, geek fa…

I tend to think the diminished role of counterculture in the US is the result of having a lot more choices available within the mainstream. The narrow conformity of the 1950s PG discusses has been supplanted by a much wider range of acceptable/marketable cultural styles. Generally people today are more tolerant, meaning there is more room for more diverse people and lifestyles under the tent of the mainstream.
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