Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
paulgraham.com
Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
1–10 of 118 posts
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#2This is a pretty neat response to a debate that has had a lot of strawmen and arguing against statements nobody said.
The longer an essay is, the further apart the main arguments are and the easier it is to forget parts of the essays. The ones we remember most saliently, of course, are the controversial claims that trigger an emotional response, not the paragraphs of simple history fact-stating that builds up to the conclusion. As a result, responses to the essay tend to strip out the context of claims and argue against them in a vacuum.
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#3Original discussion here => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839314
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#4Paul Graham TLDRs Paul Graham because people can't resist misinterpreting him. Doubt it will help...
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#5[deleted]
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#6I am kind of surprised that PG insist on confusing extreme economic inequality (which is the one most people are talking about when they say it's bad) with normal economic inequality (which most people are totally fine with.)
Edited to clear up confusion
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#7[deleted]
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#8Economic Inequality Simulation: The Simplified version
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics...
"Many have preconceptions about how economies work that will be challenged by the results shown here"
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#9Only the last paragraph is original, but it is probably also wrong. So PG is saying that the major cause of inequality is technological advancement. But for example see that economic inequality decreased after WWII, but is it really that farfetched to imagine that technological power did not decrease during the war years? (E.g. Manhattan Project.) It is also not hard to imagine that wars would distribute technology more evenly.
Re: Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
#10>But economic inequality per se is not bad. It has multiple causes. Many are bad, but some are good.
This shows the confusion of the original essay, and this response.
There is the thesis, "economic equality is not bad", and then the support for the thesis, "some drivers of inequality are bad, some are good" that doesn't actually support it.
Saying that some things that concentrate wealth are not bad overall does nothing to shed light on whether vast disparities of wealth between classes of people is beneficial for a society.