201–210 of 461 posts
http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html (Inequality and Risk, 2005) - economic inequality goes hand-in-hand with risk. If you remove the payoff rewards of risky bets like founding companies, then you remove the incentive to do those things in the first place.
http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html (more on Economic Inequality)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"if economics is darwinian" How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for…
> a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction When we apply economic thinking, this interaction is actually not zero sum - antelopes in general benefit from the signal that they need to be faster.
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…
> That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem of "fragmentation" as he put when it exactly is more like a "segregation" problem but not based on racial or cultural factors but on economic one into two completely separate societies between the haves and have-nots, between the 1% and the 99% of the population and it's getting worse and uglier by the day.
This kinda reads like word salad to me -- I have absolutely no idea what concrete policy changes it's meant to imply.
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 and highly connected people. > That's how we envision the solution to fix this problem of "fragmentation" as he put when it exactly is more like a "segregation"…
To start, SS taxes apply to all income levels. Next, you can't avoid capital gains by donating appiceated assets. Further, capital gains is taxed at the same rate as all other income.
And my personal favorite, there are zero corporate tax breaks of any kind.
Regarding income inequality, I recommend listening to some of the speeches/debates with Bernie Sanders. E.g. he argues that the greatest receiver of welfare in the US is the wal-Mart family, because they get even richer paying their workers so little that the workers have to live on welfare. (In other words the welfare is "paying" the workers so that Wal-Mart don't have to.) He proposes to rise the minimum wage. http…
Walmart employees are not compelled to work for Walmart; the employment contract is agreed upon voluntarily by both parties. The employees know how much they will be paid and agree to accept the terms. Walmart is operating within the legal employment framework set up by the government, including the welfare state and the minimum wage. That will not change by raising the minimum wage. Rather, Walmart will simply add a…
Yes they are, poor people are compelled by lack of opportunity to take whatever they can find even if it sucks. Pretending they have the option of just saying no to a low salary is a bit of willful misunderstanding of the reality of their situations.
> Minimum wage is arguably the worst idea when it comes to improving the lot of the poor.
No it isn't.
> If someone cannot command more than the minimum wage when it comes to productivity, intelligence, etc, then raising that wage means that person will be unemployable. That person will be a permanent liability of the State.
That is the point, a minimum wage allows people the opportunity to get into welfare because minimum wage is part of the welfare system, it sets the low bar. It's better to not have a job and qualify for benefits than it is to have a job that pays so little it's not worth having. The minimum wage forces society to deal with the problem of people who lack the skills to make a market wage, and that's a good thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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." Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a…
You don't try to make the distinction, you just regulate all political speech. During election time, you set aside fair slices of media time for every candidate, where they can make their case, and forbid all political speech outside of those times. Same thing with billboards, magazine ads, google ads, etc... The different candidates will police each other. Never going to happen in the US but definitely practically a…
Assuming that you do come up with a plausible way of drawing a line here, you also need to have general trust that this power will not be abused. Given the heavy politicization of regulatory agencies in the United States, a large portion of the population is worried -- not without substantial justification -- that "is this speech opposed to the party in power" will be one of the factors used to draw that line.
Great essay. I would quibble with the following though: > [Technology] means the variation in the amount of wealth people can create has not only been increasing, but accelerating. The problem with this is that success = ability * motivation * opportunity. There's no question that technology is increasing ability. But it's less clear what's happening with opportunity. Networks tend to be winner-take-all, which means…
success = (ability * motivation * opportunity)^hugeDoseOfLuck
There is no guaranteed formula for success, it is heavily luck dependent. Those who think otherwise are suffering from survivor-ship bias and/or the just world fallacy.
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…
This is not correct. If you read "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", the book most lefties are pushing nowadays, you'll see there is a chapter with recommended solutions.
The recommended solutions are things like government control of CEO salaries, confiscatory taxes on the rich (e.g. not taxes to pay for something, taxes to specifically change their status from rich to middle class, something the author even says wouldn't even bring in useful income for the government because there are so few rich to confiscate from), etc.. So their are central planning policies being recommended indeed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and will ride your coattails for a moment by pointing out that if economics is darwinian, then a possible way out of this situation might be human planning. It doesn't have to be central, it can be a way of living that amplifies the changes you'd like to see in the world. So for example, say a person acquires a certain amount of wealth and wants to make his or her home solar…
"if economics is darwinian" How can economics be Darwinian? The outcome of economic interactions is not a zero sum, whereas a lion who kills and eats an antelope is engaged in a zero-sum interaction. The antelope gets nothing out of it. As a point of contrast, if you buy a car from Toyota, you have not harmed Toyota, nor has Toyota harmed you (hopefully). It is theoretically possible, when humans engage in trade, for…
If that were true nobody would ever feel ripped off. People irrationally engage in inefficient transactions all the time. For example, people who smoke cigarettes are more likely to be (and admit that they are) acting irrationally than truly deriving so much social or chemical utility from puffing on cigarettes that it exceeds the risk-weighted disutility of lung cancer, emphysema and so on.
"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…
That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.
[0] - http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
[1] - https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-proper-definition-of-a-sta...