Economic Inequality • Hacker News Board

Re: Economic Inequality

#461

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:52 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #436

Apocryphon wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly is possible to recognize that disruptive startup businesses provide value and quality over preexisting services, and criticize them for flouting laws that are supposed to protect their workers, and/or customers. It also is certainly possible to recognize that government overregulation has enabled rent-seekers to do great harm in staunching competition and establishing a low level of quality for consumers…

"The majority of drivers are classified as independent contractors, are not protected by core employment and labor laws, and often work under arduous and unsafe conditions." Yeap, Uber is awful. Oh, wait, this is actually a report from 2007 describing the Taxi industry: http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/Unregulated_Work... There's a lot of propaganda about how Uber is reducing the welfare of drivers, but it…

We know that Uber is awful and managed by sociopaths in absolute terms. It does not need comparison to any kind of old taxi industry ideals. Plethora of reports we had for the last few years show this clearly. And old "taxi mafia" was at least subject to some improvements - each taxi company was local and had to listen to authorities, which in turn could be influenced by citizens. Uber? They don't give a flying fuck about the law, and they're too big for any single city to pressure them into anything. It's like trying to replace a bunch of crooked mayors with a warlord hell-bent on total domination in the region.

Re: Economic Inequality

#462

Post by soared » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 2:54 AM UTC

whistlerbrk wrote: post #270

wtbob wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon or Walmart, on the other hand... Some of these disruptive industries make a lot of people poorer by driving businesses into bankruptcy. Amazon and Walmart make the poor richer, because they need spend a smaller proportion of their incomes on food & goods. That's why Amazon & Walmart out-competed the mom-and-pops of a generation ago. This was bad for the owners of the mom-and-pop stores, but it was good for t…

I cant believe you're serious. People didn't vote with their dollars. They needed to eat so they sacrifice the long term for the short. companies like Walmart are able to leverage their miniscule effective tax rate compared to mom and pop stores to offer cheaper goods, combined with the FACT that they artificially lower prices to a point where an individual store loses money all for the sake of driving the local comp…

Are you claiming Walmart's success is based on a low tax rate and their effectiveness at driving out competition? I don't support Walmart by any means but they do a whole lot more than what you give them credit for.

Re: Economic Inequality

#463

Post by jessaustin » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:07 AM UTC

codeismightier wrote: post #223

cmurf wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a disingenuous rebuttal. The difference in wealth between someone worth $45B, and two people each worth $1 million and -$1million respectively, is identical. The millionaire is worth less than 0.01% of the first. If this were a card game, the millionaire could go piss himself. If it were possible to put $45B into a typical savings account earning 1% interest per year, that $45B person will make more money doi…

What's the problem with hoarding? There's no difference between a billion dollars stuffed under the mattress, never to be spent, and a billion dollars burned up in a fire. If the rich aren't spending, they are not consuming resources or causing pollution, so it's as if their money never existed. And if they do one day decide to draw down their accounts, then it wasn't being hoarded. >> If this were a card game, the m…

Just don't say that to a billionaire. It might make for an unpleasant learning experience.

Re: Economic Inequality

#464

Post by jessaustin » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:15 AM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #197

heurist wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I've agreed with your general direction in this thread, but here you've tied yourself in a knot. If the un-"real loans" you cite weren't available, far fewer people would be willing to attend college, prices would fall, and far less would be loaned and spent on education. In other words, without the distortions introduced by lobbyists and politicians, all this wonderful education debt wouldn't exist. So we have indeed identified a case in which lenders "through the application of their profits can alter those systems so that more debt is required to survive."

Re: Economic Inequality

#465

Post by jessaustin » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:19 AM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #269

notahacker wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a global scale, this is nonsense. The number of people globally who have negligible net worth because they earn less than $10 per day vastly exceeds the number of people who have negligible net worth because they've only just started paying down the mortgage on their McMansion and still have student loan repayments remaining. The purchasing power of those 80 people isn't going to start looking insignificant if you…

I disagree. If you take the 3 billion poorest people in the world and properly account for their future earnings, it will certainly exceed the combined expected wealth of these 80 billionaires. You couldn't have anything close to this sensationalist statistic. Also, global poverty is not the fault of Western riches. It's not something we (Westerners) can do anything about either, except engage in mutually beneficial…

Now you're not talking about wealth, but rather some other measure that is apparently more interesting to you. If you're going to count future earning, you ought at least count future spending as well, which quantity may completely swamp the other. After all wealth includes past spending as well as past earning.

Re: Economic Inequality

#466

Post by jshen » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:20 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #460

jshen wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Graham's point is that if one person makes more than another because they're more productive, you don't want to "fix" that, because it's not a problem, it's what fuels economic growth." I do not believe he said this, and it's a non sequitur

> I do not believe he said this How many of his essays have you read? It's a fairly common theme in them. > it's a non sequitur The argument is pretty simple: people who are more productive are capable of creating more wealth; the best and most straightforward way (and the only one that's been shown to work consistently) to motivate them to exercise that capability is to allow them to get richer by creating more weal…

Please show me a quote where PG makes this argument.

I doubt Steve Jobs would have created more wealth if he were allowed to pay 10% lower taxes. Do you?

Re: Economic Inequality

#467

Post by geofft » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:25 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #445

geofft wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you do a progressive tax on consumption, such that the rough cost for essentials is essentially untaxed, from there to average upper-middle-class consumption is moderately taxed, and O(a yacht) is highly taxed? I suppose this used to be impractical because consumption taxes are generally implemented at point of sale, but since most large transactions are digital (and there are well-accepted laws about moving huge…

> Can you do a progressive tax on consumption, such that the rough cost for essentials is essentially untaxed, from there to average upper-middle-class consumption is moderately taxed, and O(a yacht) is highly taxed? Of course. But weird taxes are very hard to get right. You can basically order taxes by how progressive they are. The least progressive is a head tax; everybody pays a fixed dollar amount every year, inc…

Thank you for this argument! The "invert the sign" thing feels like it must be wrong somehow (even to someone who likes the argument for a basic income) but it does actually seem correct.

Re: Economic Inequality

#468

Post by tdaltonc » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:29 AM UTC

questerzen wrote: post #434

jacobolus wrote: post #8

Graham is arguing against an enormous straw man. Nobody is suggesting that we “prevent people from getting rich” or “end all economic inequality”. The most extreme proposals I’ve seen in America are ones like, “institute an unconditional basic income as an alternative to means-tested welfare programs,” or “allow every citizen/resident into a single-payer healthcare system,” or “go back to the tax structure of the 195…

There are two separate issues here and it is important to distinguish them clearly. PG is correct that there are two basic strategies for making money: rent and productivity. 1) rent, although it has a positive aspect (it helps to efficiently allocate scarce resources to where they are most valuable and provides an incentive to add scarce resources to the economy), provides an inherent redistribution of wealth which…

As he pointed out in the article though, capital is playing less and less of a role in startups. Terms in SV have never been as "entrepreneur friendly" as they are right now.

Re: Economic Inequality

#469

Post by tdaltonc » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:33 AM UTC

I think that his critique of academic economics is spot on. Economists do not have a good way for thinking about where Mark Zuckerberg's money came from. In macro they would call it return on capital because he bought some stock from Facebook on day 0 and held it until it was worth billions. Great return. But that doesn't seem to be a useful way to model it. Economics needs a better way to think about what entrepreneurs do as neither capital nor labor.

Re: Economic Inequality

#470

Post by funtimes32 » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:48 AM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #423

funtimes32 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one tax capital?

I would guess they calculate some amount of tax that you have to pay based on how much capital you have. And you keep paying it until you go below some magical threshold. Or, you don't pay and they just take it from you. Of course, a bit trickier if you don't have capital, but rather have plenty of tangible goods. In which case, they'd probably ask you to submit your "profit and losses" for every year, keep track of…

How can you pay your tax bill with capital? Do I give the government shares in my corporation? Or, am I forced to sell shares every year to pay the bill? What happens if the corporation is private, and there is no liquid market for my shares? In that case, how can you even determine how much capital I have? What happens if the company I own shares in goes bankrupt at the start of the year? Do I still owe taxes on the capital from the year prior?