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Economic Inequality

paulgraham.com

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Re: Economic Inequality

#501

Post by throwupper247 »

drtz wrote: post #440
throwupper247 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hedonism is your ultimate phylosophical truth, is it? Strawberries are hardly as heavily industrialised as coffee, calling your relationship with a hot bevarage a romantic one is doubtful. I am as pessimistic as your logic is flawed. There are few things in live the brain is prewired to feel a need for. Coffee supplis the illusion of fullfilling two or three enssential ones of these, hunger and thirst and sleep, but…

I hate to continue on a tangent, but coffee is delicious and smells amazing and you'd have to be The Grinch to not enjoy the atmosphere in a good cafe. If you want some tangible benefits just throw in some sugar and cream.

It's disgustingly bitter, so much most can only bare it with milk and sugar.

Your subjective evidence is not convincing, even less as I was implying coffee had an addictive and hence behavioral conditioning effect, part of which comes from advertisement like yours, so stop it, will ya.

Re: Economic Inequality

#502

Post by vadym909 »

Usually love PG's essays but this one is pretty shallow in how it tackles the subject. Smart as he is I'm sure PG understands what people are talking about- the problem is the 90% that don't work in overhyped and overvalued software startups, but the regular worker- the factory worker at Tesla, the checkout clerk at Walmart, the teacher in the Public School. Unfortunately for them, no one told them software would be it 20 years ago. They can't just go start making chairs or open a private school. Its not that they are lazy or stupid. They just got unlucky because they thought they would get by doing these jobs- based on what they knew- and then the world changed. Is it any surprise they are pissed? and to add insult to injury- they see the rich bend systems unfairly to their favor to enrich themselves even more.

Re: Economic Inequality

#503

Post by zo1 »

funtimes32 wrote: post #470
zo1 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm guessing they would enforce some sort of standard valuation for things like that. Or only when it is possible. So a fledgling business, or shares that aren't publicly tradeable.

Any who, the point is. They will find a way that they will claim is "fair" and consistent but probably has loop holes, and figure out a way to tax capital.

Re: Economic Inequality

#504

Post by throwupper247 »

digbyloftus wrote: post #472
throwupper247 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hedonism is your ultimate phylosophical truth, is it? Strawberries are hardly as heavily industrialised as coffee, calling your relationship with a hot bevarage a romantic one is doubtful. I am as pessimistic as your logic is flawed. There are few things in live the brain is prewired to feel a need for. Coffee supplis the illusion of fullfilling two or three enssential ones of these, hunger and thirst and sleep, but…

Hedonism is as true as any other. Plenty of people, even if they are not familiar with philosophical terms and wouldn't self describe as such, are living according to hedonistic values. Plenty of people are living according to all sorts of different codes. Any system that defines value in a way that doesn't allow for these people, for example by saying that coffee doesn't have value, is a faulty one. Economically, if…

No, hedonism is not true. It's a deceptive misconception of what values are a good guideline for a sustainable life. I was getting at the common notion that hedonists don't want to work, because it's no fun, which is obviously incompatible.

>any system that defines value in a way that doesn't allow for these people

wat

Hedonism defines pleasure as the primary and most intrinsic good so any system allowing it is just hedonism. WTF? How would any system acommodate competing theories? Fun thought experiment, sure.

>Economically

Usually it would go the other way, if coffee is worth something to me, I will be willing to pay that. You mess up simple logic, get your head straight.

Re: Economic Inequality

#505

Post by WalterBright »

throwupper247 wrote: post #501
drtz wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to continue on a tangent, but coffee is delicious and smells amazing and you'd have to be The Grinch to not enjoy the atmosphere in a good cafe. If you want some tangible benefits just throw in some sugar and cream.

It's disgustingly bitter, so much most can only bare it with milk and sugar. Your subjective evidence is not convincing, even less as I was implying coffee had an addictive and hence behavioral conditioning effect, part of which comes from advertisement like yours, so stop it, will ya.

> disgustingly bitter

I take mine black. I admit it is an acquired taste, but oh what a glorious taste it is! Maybe you just had some bad coffee.

Re: Economic Inequality

#506

Post by zo1 »

throwupper247 wrote: post #498
zo1 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" Selling something that people want isn't equal to providing value. Let me be pessimistic: coffee doesn't provide a positive value, because it's a drug that get's people addicted however little and subliminal. Maybe that is a value to society in general, but it isn't to the individual. " If you don't think someone selling you coffee that you want is providing value, then perhaps you should try make your own. Once y…

That's just sad how much you are missing my point, all the while defending the coffee that your text kind of reads like you had too much before reading.

>"Selling something that people want isn't equal to providing value."

This is the point I was addressing.

>"Let me be pessimistic: coffee doesn't provide a positive value, because it's a drug that get's people addicted however little and subliminal."

Oh, so now it's "positive value". This is something you are imposing on the person based on your own personal opinion about value and coffee.

>"Maybe that is a value to society in general, but it isn't to the individual."

No, it's a value to the individual that chose it. You, being external to the hypothetical individual we are discussing, don't get to make decisions for said individual.

>"That's just sad how much you are missing my point, all the while defending the coffee that your text kind of reads like you had too much before reading."

My comment had nothing to do with advocating coffee.

Re: Economic Inequality

#507

Post by throwupper247 »

zo1 wrote: post #506
throwupper247 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just sad how much you are missing my point, all the while defending the coffee that your text kind of reads like you had too much before reading.

>" Selling something that people want isn't equal to providing value. " This is the point I was addressing. >" Let me be pessimistic: coffee doesn't provide a positive value, because it's a drug that get's people addicted however little and subliminal. " Oh, so now it's "positive value". This is something you are imposing on the person based on your own personal opinion about value and coffee. >" Maybe that is a valu…

>My comment had nothing to do with advocating coffee

My comment did. You can't just reply to the whole comment without considering that part.

Re: Economic Inequality

#508

Post by chroma »

chroma wrote: post #432
jubalfh wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with being a socialist (or even a communist)?

I don't think it's an immoral position or anything, just a mistaken one. I covered why in my last paragraph: > If there's any societal system that has been shown not to work, it's communism. That experiment has been tried so many times, in so many countries, with varying cultures, geographies, and levels of development... and not one of them was successful. Yes, capitalism has had failures, but at least it's had succ…

Commentary for those wondering why my comments are gray: As soon as Steve Klabnik tweeted about this thread, all of my comments were downvoted.

I see nothing incorrect, nor unnecessary, nor unkind in my statements. If anyone disagrees, I welcome responses.

Re: Economic Inequality

#509

Post by icebraining »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #461
icebraining wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I don't like Uber either; I just dislike dishonest propaganda, even if targeted at a bad actor.

> They don't give a flying fuck about the law, and they're too big for any single city to pressure them into anything.

I think that's a little overblown. Uber has been forced to leave many cities (Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Madrid, etc) and parts of cities (e.g. Calgary Airport).

Uber may be willing to bend the law, but the cities can literally call their cars and ticket them (or even impound them), it's not like it's an underground operation, and not even Uber can sustain that, as we've seen.

Re: Economic Inequality

#510

Post by foldr »

noobermin wrote: post #435
nhaehnle wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that you focus on the individual when it comes to wealth creation. This is not random, and it predisposes you to believe that there is a pie fallacy going on when in fact there might not be one. The truth is that almost no wealth creation is done by individuals. There is a vast range of levels on which wealth creation is a shared enterprise and it would be boring to trot them out again, but usually,…

To you and foldr, I was only responding to his comment, that such reasoning still sounded like the pie fallacy. If you really need my personal opinion, I believed that wealth inequality is a problem before I read pg's essay because it seemed persuasive. I still disagree with a bit of it, but I don't like shutting off others' ideas due to my biases[0]. You make an interesting point though, the idea of how wealth is di…

>he is responding to an often used argument that assumes wealth is a zero sum

This is not an often-used argument. It's obviously false that wealth is only ever redistributed and not created, and someone as knowledgeable as Stiglitz would obviously not believe something so silly. He even goes out of his way to explain that he doesn't believe this. And yet pg still decides to make out that he's fallen for the "pie fallacy".

The pie fallacy is, in essence, the fallacious argument that one person can get rich only at the expense of another. Approximately no-one thinks this is true as a matter of economic or metaphysical necessity. Some people think that as a matter of fact, the enrichment of the 1% in the U.S., in the last decade, has to a significant extent been at the expense of the rest. To deny this because "pie fallacy" is to commit the inverse pie fallacy: to assume that individual wealth is always gained from creation and not redistribution. How wealth was gained in any given instance is an empirical question, not a logical or moral one.

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