61–70 of 280 posts
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> Low placed people may not be able to "work" their way to upper echelons, but they can invent, intuit or otherwise create high value leverage of their's and others' work. How would you suggest slave-labor in Qatar, who's lives are literally disposable to our global society, create this leverage? [serious]
How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
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for the record I'm speaking of a "Real" multiplier (taking in account inflation / standard of living) . IMO if every generation is 2x-ing their parent's lifestyle, its nearly instantaneous wealth in the scale of humanity. In the developed world today's poor live like kings of old. In 1000 yrs I would imagine that their poor will live better than our wealthy "Playboys" of today. I see nothing wrong with people being i…
i agree that improving your circumstances is the best thing. i also dont dismiss standard of living arguments, i think they are valid. but i think they aren't the whole picture. i think alot of how we feel depends on how we compare to those around us. 100 thirsty people in a desert are much more pissed off if you add 1 person with excess water standing right next to them not giving them any. so, some consideration to…
The analogy isn't entirely correct. If the thirsty people got all the water they could drink and a guy joined that owned a lake... They shouldn't really complain.
It's literally better for everyone, even if the wealth distribution is worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Low placed people may not be able to "work" their way to upper echelons, but they can invent, intuit or otherwise create high value leverage of their's and others' work. How would you suggest slave-labor in Qatar, who's lives are literally disposable to our global society, create this leverage? [serious]
How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
The slave who manages an important man's affairs is himself an important man.
Concubines frequently wield power through their well-placed lovers. At the historical extreme, Wu Zetian was a concubine who worked her way up to being formally crowned emperor.
The Mamluk Turks were slaves. This didn't stop them from taking control of the government and even enacting a requirement that the Sultan be a Mamluk (children of Mamluks, not being slaves, were not eligible).
Chinese eunuchs were also slaves, and also took control of the government on multiple occasions.
> My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar Apparently going to high school, studying and passing the SAT, applying and being accepted into university, studying, passing, and graduating university is just luck. Have we we reached peak luck yet? Is there nothing ever we can do to improve our circumstances and our lives? This is like…
I genuinely thought you were sarcastic. Being born in circumstances that allow you to do that is luck, even in the developed world.
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Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. In this case, there are a lot of complex dynamics at play: will workers emigrate elsewhere if trained well (Basically the IIT problem)? Are constituents/subjects ok with reductions in their quality of life so that other people can be provided these resources. To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic. Also yes of course I…
> Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. Well, yeah; for one thing, given that Austrian economics is more normative than predictive, I'm not sure what such a simulation would do .
Ignoring the logical fallacies the author makes, one thing jumped out at me. He's not buying the average home in South Bend. If he's only paying $180/year in property tax, the assessed value of his average home is around $9K. A quick look at Google shows the median price (from Zillow, so a grain of salt is recommended) of $65K. If he and his brother are buying up $9K homes, his average mortgage is under $50/month. I'…
> My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar Apparently going to high school, studying and passing the SAT, applying and being accepted into university, studying, passing, and graduating university is just luck. Have we we reached peak luck yet? Is there nothing ever we can do to improve our circumstances and our lives? This is like…
On the subject of the article, I thought this was going to be someone with a large capital surplus providing a basic income to someone "unluckier" than them to argue the benefits of basic income, rather than advocating to increase taxes (but probably still not on them since he made a point of saying how he hardly pays any).
0 - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,801396,...
> [in the US] people who don’t need their income are taxed less than people who do I'm not American; I don't know the tax structure. But I can't even imagine that this could possibly be true, or what is true that is meant. Without looking it up, I would assume that the USA subscribes to progressive taxation, under which the richer pay more tax in both absolute and relative terms. Even if it has a flat rate of tax, (a…
Person A is a football player and makes $1 million in salary per year. This is all taxed progressively, meaning that Uncle Sam takes off 39.6% of most of his income. As a result, he pays close to $400k in taxes.
Person B is an investor. He invests in Applied Materials, and they have a very good year. His stock is now worth $1 million more than it was at the beginning of the year. Some of it, he sells - he's gotta eat, after all. That sold stock is taxed like income. Note that as long as he isn't living like a rockstar, he probably didn't sell enough to put him into the top tax bracket; he's just paying his expenses.
The remainder is taxed at about 20% - capital gains is taxed at a lower rate. Thus, because he can control how much of the stock he sells, Person B ends up paying somewhere around 60% of the tax that Person A pays.
This system screws over people who make most of their income through salary and benefits those who make most of their "income" through investments.
> [in the US] people who don’t need their income are taxed less than people who do I'm not American; I don't know the tax structure. But I can't even imagine that this could possibly be true, or what is true that is meant. Without looking it up, I would assume that the USA subscribes to progressive taxation, under which the richer pay more tax in both absolute and relative terms. Even if it has a flat rate of tax, (a…
I got where I am today due to luck. I did work hard. But I know other people who work hard too. Who are just as capable. They just didn't get assigned to the class with the really awesome, motivating teacher. Or randomly picked out of the pile by a recruiter for a call. Or happen to wind up working somewhere where they made friends with a guy who was well connected. Etc.
To discount luck's role in how people get successful is a huge blind spot.