A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality • Hacker News Board

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#191

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:14 AM UTC

boona wrote: post #153

Let's be clear that Thomas Piketty's book has been thoroughly refuted, not in some minor way, but Thomas claimed that all he did was objectively looked at the data, and that the conclusion simply showed itself. Unfortunately he cherry picked data, and fabricated bits of history to make it fit his claim. The following paper does a great job of completely dismantling it. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_…

So, just to be clear here, the refutation to Piketty was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise by a policy professor from George Mason University and another author from the Institute for Energy Research?

Or in other words, it was published in the Libertarian Journal of Libertarianism by a libertarian academic and a libertarian think-tanker at a libertarian think-tank, funded by the Koch Brothers[1]?

This really doesn't pass the smell test.

[1] -- http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Energy_Re...

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#192

Post by paulddraper » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:16 AM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #178

paulddraper wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that post Civil War blacks weren't doing well. (Actually, a lot of whites weren't doing well either.) But it's a real stretch of the imagination to say the current United States (especially post income tax and Social Security entitlements) is anywhere even close to post Civil War circumstances.

His point was not about blacks, whites, or even the Civil War. > Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. There is a difference between "slaves" in the popular sense (ch…

The quote was from Frederick Douglass, a black man living during the Civil War.

Impossible to know for certain, but I suspect he wouldn't be terribly pleased with a comparison of the current "lower class" to real slaves.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#193

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:16 AM UTC

puredemo wrote: post #148

Apocryphon wrote: post #40

Any hacker working in San Francisco can take a look outside and see the rampant inequality our industry is surrounded by.

It turns out people aren't all equally talented or employable. Shocking, huh?

Well of course people aren't equally talented. I don't see what that has to do with the economy, though. A market is a stochastic nonconvex optimization machine, not a tree of skill increases and level-ups in some MMORPG: it's not supposed to provide a neatly metagamed return-on-investment curve for your skills, it's supposed to match willing buyers of commodities with willing sellers.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#194

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

analog31 wrote: post #83

owyn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as if wealthy people take their money and put it under their mattress. No, they invest it. That investment money flows to other corporations who then spend it on goods and services, or spend it on their employees. No they don't. From what I've read (Piketty etc) they do not re-circulate it into the general economy. They use investment vehicles which are increasingly divorced from "real world" economics and m…

I wonder if this explains why the money supply is increasing without any accompanying inflation. The money is just getting turned into economic dead weight.

I think it's fairly well established that money supply increase has led to asset price inflation (but not consumer price inflation like you said), but that has also meant bond yields have stayed low, letting companies and countries borrow cheaply to fund their various projects. So I don't think 'dead weight' is the correct description.

Of course, it may have had other, less pleasant, effects.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#195

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

chimeracoder wrote: post #190

marshray wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're just really really attached to the idea that colonialism explains the modern world. Over the course of the 20th century, the Ottomon and British empires crumbled. World War II happened. The US and Soviet Union became superpowers, there was a Cold War, and the Soviet Union split apart. The US pursued aggressively open trade. Western Europe unified to a common economic zone. World power structures have b…

> you're just really really attached to the idea that colonialism explains the modern world. You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything of the sort. I said that one can't understand Western European socialism (the kind which OP appears to advocate) without understanding this aspect of those countries' history. The implication is that calling such socialism "nice" is ignoring and whitewashing the negative…

For the record, I didn't say you said that directly, which "putting words in my mouth" would imply.

It's my interpretation of your viewpoint.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#196

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

Umn44 wrote: post #154

"I find it astonishing that people compare modern-day income equality and the position of the poor in our time, in the Western world, to that of historical slavery" I'm sorry to tell you but you're a moron if you believe there isn't mass suffering when you are poor and low status. The amount of psychological abuse you take and feelings of self worth and being treated as subhuman by society and the business community…

If this affects more than a few otherwise nice, pleasant people, perhaps the dating and marriage prospects are not so dismal.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#197

Post by eli_gottlieb » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:26 AM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #120

Perhaps I've been sensitized by recent reading[1], but I don't think this response addresses the real problems with PG's article. The problem with inequality is not necessarily the inequality itself. The poor in America are significantly better off than the wealthy were not very long ago, in most material senses, as has been repeatedly pointed out. So what if they don't get as good health care or education or whateve…

>The thing that bothers me most: All of those fancy technologies that PG emphasizes, those that some commentors here are happy to trade 45 years of real wage growth for, had their direct roots in that brief period of weird equality. What happens next? What happens after AirBnB puts all the hotels out of business and we're all staying in each other's spare bedrooms on trips? What happens after Uber has killed off all the taxi companies in the world and replaced them with spare-time drivers? Do things still keep getting better and better? Sure, my nifty new Galaxy Note is better than my old land-line, but exactly how much better is an iPhone6 compared to a 5?

The Google founders attempt to throw us out of cyberpunk capitalism by setting off a technological singularity.

I'm not joking. Look at their hobbies: artificial intelligence, life extension, robotics. It's really obvious: they are trying to play at being Vernor Vinge characters.

Which actually carries an important point: a lot of the people who do the real work of pushing the high-tech business forward don't particularly care for capitalism itself. They'd just as soon push for far more technological solutionism and alter socioeconomic relations to suit.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#198

Post by puredemo » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:28 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #183

puredemo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out people aren't all equally talented or employable. Shocking, huh?

There are people out there working harder than you, but are stuck in poverty. They were born at the wrong time, or in the wrong family, or didn't go to the right schools. You ought to be self-aware enough to know that blind luck plays a huge part in your employability.

I don't agree with that framing. I don't just work hard, I work smart, and I come from generations who did the same.

Capability is substantially more genetic than environmental anyway, equivocating and hand-waving everything away as "just luck" is extremely facile.

Some people are oozing with talent and potential, most people are not, that's the reality -- it's science and breeding, not luck.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#199

Post by puredemo » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:32 AM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #193

puredemo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out people aren't all equally talented or employable. Shocking, huh?

Well of course people aren't equally talented. I don't see what that has to do with the economy, though. A market is a stochastic nonconvex optimization machine, not a tree of skill increases and level-ups in some MMORPG: it's not supposed to provide a neatly metagamed return-on-investment curve for your skills, it's supposed to match willing buyers of commodities with willing sellers.

It sounds like you're saying job markets are not meritocracies? I'd have to disagree, at least to a large extent.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#200

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 3:41 AM UTC

owyn wrote: post #188

yummyfajitas wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Picketty explicitly claims the opposite of this. According to Picketty, the rich invest in the economy and achieve a growth rate r. As a result the level of capital stock grows more rapidly than incomes (which grow only at the rate g, for r > g). In contrast, money spent on consumption does not grow at the rate r. Picketty even speculates (providing no real evidence however) that only the rich can achieve growth rate…

I shouldn't have name dropped that particular book since I haven't read it, only summaries/reviews of it. But the question still remains of how "rich people invest in the economy". Do they really? Or is it entirely indirect? Not one of them is giving small farmers money to buy tractors. Maybe they're building hotels which eventually employ housekeepers, sure. That's what I think of as the general economy. There's pro…

According to Piketty, rich people invest secretly into large mysterious companies. This pretty much precludes public markets, so they probably own lots of smaller businesses (e.g. hotels).

Why do you believe lending to farmers is a bad use for resources?

Investing in oil futures is transmitting information to the markets. It encourages current users to avoid unnecessary use of oil and produces to produce more. That's a valuable service.

What exactly do you think a hedge fund does?