Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality • Hacker News Board

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#221

Post by timthelion » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #218

timthelion wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that instability is surprisingly good for capitalists, however, I don't know if they "want" that instability. I live in Prague, and the instability and corruption following the fall of the iron curtain made many people very rich. It also allowed many western capitalists to buy assets in this country for very cheep prices. Right next to my house there used to be a park. Now there is an office building there. T…

I suspect it depends on the kind of capitalist you are dealing with, industrial or financial. Because while it seems financial capitalists thrive on instability, because this allows them to extract arbitrage, industrial capitalists are more likely to have their supply lines and similar disrupted.

I actually don't think it is that bad for industrial capitalists either. Afterall, a disrupted supply line often just means higher prices once the goods come through. You may be right that there is a distinction here but I think that "industrial capitalists" are rather rare. Few factories are owned by individuals anymore, they are owned by corporations, and those corporations are owned by stock holders. Perhaps direct ownership of factories is bad in times of chaos and that has meant that financial capitalists have gotten richer while industrial capitalists have gone bankrupt. I think that financial capitalists probably thrive best when society is stable for a time, when the capitalists can gather cash, and then unstable for a time, when the capitalists can go on a buying spree, buying things that are not normally for sale such as national post offices, and buying things bellow price.

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#222

Post by metalliqaz » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

snappyTertle wrote: post #177

colefichter wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxes should not be a means to redistribute wealth. Isn't that more or less impossible? The whole point of a tax is that you take money from the broader population and spend it on something (a war, a road, libraries, public transit, food stamps, etc) that benefits only a subset of that population. Taxation is, by definition, wealth redistribution. Furthermore, > Why is it ok to tax profitable businesses/people for…

I absolutely agree with you. Taxation is, by definition, wealth redistribution..and theft by people in power! I think the more important question is what are we spending taxes on? and why does it have to be decided by a bureaucratic monopoly that is above the law a.k.a. government? Shouldn't we have a choice in how we allocate our own resources? Is it not our own time and labor that we use to produce? Why does that b…

I don't think you understood what he was actually saying...

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#223

Post by gmarx » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #127

gmarx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

". The perception by many is that immigration was causing a drag down on wages, but all the data suggests in fact immigration is net benefit to a population". That statement is the old switcheroo. In summary, the perception of many is correct and they care less about the fact that immigrants tend to, e.g., raise GDP, than the fact that they are depressing wages for people like them.

So in summary, people would rather vote to make their country poorer, than vote for their fair share of its wealth.

I think it's more like they would vote the country to grow a fraction of a percent more slowly in exchange for a more secure job in low skilled or unskilled labor

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#224

Post by lubesGordi » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

snappyTertle wrote: post #46

Inequality is not inherently a bad thing. People should be compensated for the value they produce. Profits are a signal of how much people value what is produced. For example, people love iPhones, it no surprise that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. What causes resentment between classes is lack of mobility. This, IMO, is caused by government regulations and a banking system that hurts the middle clas…

Not sure about the last part of your comment, but I agree that inequality probably isn't a bad thing per se. I'm guessing crime isn't increasing as a result of increasing inequality because the quality of life for the "99%" is actually increasing as well, even if their incomes are not drastically increasing. Supposedly the super rich are so much richer than the non-rich. But are they? In the US at least, rich people basically only have more expensive versions of everything middle class people can have. Is that really such a huge wealth gap? I guess I would say that the wealth gap between middle class people in developed countries and poor in undeveloped countries is much greater than the top 1% and the middle class. Really this is a subjective assessment, but I think it helps to put the quantitative assessment into perspective, and also put in check the notion that inequality itself is somehow bad.

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#225

Post by splawn » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

edblarney wrote: post #198

and0 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wildly revisionist view of US influence on the Middle East. For starters, you're assuming that the US government and it's intelligence agencies always understand the actual consequences of their actions and are always successful, which is hilariously false. So instability is a frequently unintended result of meddling in foreign affairs, despite our intentions. And the idea that all these nations would be "t…

"For starters, you're assuming that the US government and it's intelligence agencies always understand the actual consequences of their actions and are always successful" I didn't assume that at all. In fact, I'd agree with that assessment. But the purpose of US involvement in the M/E is not to 'destabilize' - it's the opposite. Even out of pure self-interest - the US gains from a stable M/E not a 'unstable one'. If…

"Terrorists (and their ideologies) are the cause of terrorism."

I think you might be incorrect there. IMO, Rhetorical tautology is the cause of terrorism.

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#226

Post by wfo » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

snappyTertle wrote: post #46

Inequality is not inherently a bad thing. People should be compensated for the value they produce. Profits are a signal of how much people value what is produced. For example, people love iPhones, it no surprise that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. What causes resentment between classes is lack of mobility. This, IMO, is caused by government regulations and a banking system that hurts the middle clas…

No, extreme inequality is inherently a bad thing, assuming there is no reasonable safety net provided primarily by the rich (a fairly good assumption if you're talking about the US). It always leads to unrest. Wealth is power and power is wealth in capitalism; the wealthy exert their influence to increase their wealth and inequality, once established, always increases. It is never stable.

Having a huge class of people begging and sleeping in the streets and another small class of people with extreme wealth is just begging for violence to occur. Then you get enormous private security firms, walled private communities with hired cops to keep the riff raff out and prevent theft/kidnapping for ransom.

What happens when the unwashed masses decide to vote to take some of the wealth society has generated back? Or, more's to the point, what happens once they do this and realize their vote doesn't matter because the political power structure is rigged to only cater to the interests of the wealthy by, e.g., doing nothing but banning physical force, the kind of force that's exclusive to the poor?

Mobility is a ridiculous red herring; who cares if a poor person here or there wins some sort of lottery and ascends to the elite class of super-rulers every so often, or an elite drops into brutal poverty and abuse? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Government regulations providing a safety net for the poorest and helping to protect the weak from the powerful is the only thing that makes inequality tenable for any amount of time. Minimum wage and taxes which go to pay for healthcare and infrastructure are the only thing keeping society civilized and livable for the poor. Without it, well, we'd see that violence is a very cheap solution that people turn to if they think they have very little to lose, or if they are hungry.

And profits do not represent value at all, profit is simply the difference between how much something is worth and how much you can force/trick someone else into paying for it.

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#227

Post by abiox » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

throwaway_374 wrote: post #126

sigmaprimus wrote: post #80

I love reading the comments on stories like this and consider these comments to be a bellwether as to the current state of inequality in our society. Unfortunately I tend to consider myself one who exists on the lower part of the wealth distribution logarithm within the western world, globally it's a different story. Just as anyone tweeting on their smart phone or tablet claiming to be part of the 99% might want to r…

The rise in terror is not caused by radical religious zealots. It's caused by bombs raining down everyday on your life from foreign occupation.

can it be both?

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#228

Post by ethbro » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

waqf wrote: post #199

ethbro wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point of interest: sometimes technical people forget that the law doesn't work the way that computers do. If you close all reasonable loopholes and make your intent clear when you write the law, a judge (at least here in the US, I know the UK has a slightly different system) is not going to say "Oh, that's undefined behavior, you get a free pass." He or she is going to say "That's undefined behavior, but you're tryin…

That's easy to apply to a common-sense law like "Don't cut other people's limbs off without their permission". It's not so easy to apply to a law written in terms of concepts like "two employees of the same company", because "company" is itself something that only exists as a legal construct and "employee" already has a specific legal meaning that's significantly different from its common-sense one.

True, but prosecution at the levels we're talking about is as much a political exercise as a legal one.

Wikipedia's background is weak, but Northern Securities Co. v. United States in 1903 [1], one of the first major anti-trust prosecutions, was equally novel by the fact that the US government was choosing to prosecute it at all.

The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) had been on the books for better than a decade. Under a unified government, applicability is rarely as much of a question as enforcement.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._U...

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#229

Post by Tomis02 » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 10:32 PM UTC

SixSigma wrote: post #142

BEEdwards wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what did you consider then? Because beside the immigration thing the Brexit camp seemed to be a cluster fuck of contradictory claims.

Daniel Hannan explains it better than I could This has a partial transcript of his presentation at Oxford Uni http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-17/daniel-hannan-right...

Daniel Hannan is an imbecile, and you were swayed by his "arguments". Unbelievable. He talks about UK regaining "independence", when UK's citizens are the least independent in the EU (mass surveillance wasn't introduced by some European directive). He talks about how Switzerland is thriving, when the brits and swiss have absolutely nothing in common. And people fall for this crap. But hey, it's your vote, let's see how well you fare post-Brexit, with businesses moving to mainland Europe. Make UK great again.

Re: Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

#230

Post by MaxfordAndSons » Thu, Jan 26, 2017, 10:38 PM UTC

Periodic wrote: post #156

snappyTertle wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher wages drive prices up, and price out less productive workers. Sure, the people who remain employed are better off. But what about everyone who has to pay higher prices, and workers who are now unable to find a job? Why is it ok to tax profitable businesses/people for the sake of equality? I get it if they don't earn their profits fairly. Why should we steal from top producers and redistribute? Taxes should not…

Why is it stealing? Didn't they earn their riches by taking advantage of a system that was put in place by everyone? When someone makes a fortune in a society they are benefiting from the society's trade laws, justice systems, military protection, financial systems, education systems, workforce laws, available workforce, etc. If the society helps you earn a fortune, shouldn't you proportionally pay back the society f…

I find it telling that GP hasn't responded to this counter argument. It seems like people/entities committed to the libertarian POV are stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge the extent to which their success was contingently enabled by pre-existing societal structures. It's the height of solipsism, refusing to see the historical context that led to your current situation, and it's exactly this solipsism as practiced by corporations and the mega-wealthy that has led to the crises of inequality and instability we face today.