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To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

nytimes.com

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Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#441

Post by posguy »

trapperkeeper74 wrote: post #351
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we accept the need for people to be janitors, we must accept that becoming a janitor is not a "mistake", it's a useful thing that we all want to see happen for some people. We can't on the one hand say, that we need people to do this job and on the other hand say, "tough luck" to those that do it.

Robots aren't capable of doing everything people can do yet, but as they become more capable, what and how are displaced unskilled workers supposed to do if they can't get any job at all? Starve to death under a bridge? Not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor. I think this is why UBI is essential: prevent riots and meet people's basic needs so they're not pennyless and sleeping rough.

UBI is a bad attempt to patch a broken capitalist system that has no regard for the humans within it. It may delay riots, but people's basic needs still won't be met.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#442

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

conanbatt wrote: post #424
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually forcing people to spend their money before death would be really good for the economy (despite you picking illegal activities for the negative connotation.) And the real solution isn't a 100% tax but 100% tax over some lower amount, say $50,000 along with lowering the yearly gift tax exemption. Inherited wealth is anathema to meritocracies.

> Actually forcing people to spend their money before death would be really good for the economy (despite you picking illegal activities for the negative connotation.) Well, this is were we clearly disagree. I am very certain that if i knew that i was going to die in 6 months, id be burning all my money into some kickass 6 months with "Burguers" and "Premium Tinder accounts". Consumption vs Investment is a core battl…

I'm no Friedman acolyte. Are you actually opposed to meritocracy?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#443

Post by posguy »

glhaynes wrote: post #431
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your statement "not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor" is a larger sociological problem. If we insist that the only people allowed to participate in the labor market are college educated white guys, maybe; I don't see that statusquo continuing. The hoops some members of this forum will jump through to convince themselves that building CRUD apps is some zenith of intellectual might just continues to ast…

Seems a strange complaint when janitorial positions (which aren’t often held by college educated white guys) are under discussion. Presuming we want people to have good lives who aren’t able or inclined to do jobs requiring much higher intellectual demands than janitorial ones (and I certainly do want us to presume that!), we need to figure out how to in the short term allow people doing those jobs to have good lives…

There are massive economic upheavals occurring right now, and we as a society have decided that most people get to live a hardscrabble existence where an unexpected $500 expense will ruin a person or family financially.

This economic system isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, hence the support for Bernie and Trump.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#444

Post by gasof »

humanrebar wrote: post #368
choxi wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I should have stated my assumption: there will always be inequality in a capitalist economy. But you can have varying levels of inequality and the extremes are probably not healthy. My suggestion above wouldn't create perfect equality, it just fixes the broken incentives we currently have that reward us for hoarding wealth and penalize us for earning it.

> ...there will always be inequality in a capitalist economy What economy doesn't have inequality?

One with a single AI in place of Stalin and every non-prisoner?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#445

Post by averagewall »

This sounds negative from an America-centric view. Seen globally, poverty has plummeted and countries have become more equal. If you care about people suffering, the cleaner at Apple is probably much better off than the farmer in China who could easily be dead from famine by now if it wasn't for the global economy - driven by companies like Apple.

It may also be misleading to compare a contractor cleaner today to an employee cleaner 30 years ago. I don't know the industry but perhaps the modern job is easier to get and seen as lower status than it was in the past? Maybe someone who's a cleaner today would have been unemployed in the 1980s? In that case, the article is comparing lower socioeconomic status (SES) people to higher SES people and complaining that the lower one is worse off, which is a tautology.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#446

Post by humanrebar »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #405
humanrebar wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not confident enough to make a definite prediction, but it seems plausible that it could make some forms of inequality worse. Attempts to level out education, for example, have resulted in the truly wealthy finding other outlets (private schools, expensive zip codes) to create the educational experience they want for their children.

In education we never actually integrated though. A few locations were integrated but only for a little while. It seems more like that the truly wealthy found those outlets regardless of what else was happening in education. It also seems strange to say: we shouldn't tax rich people because somehow, through a plausible method that I can't explain or predict, it will make rich people better off and poor people worse o…

I was referring to public schooling in general, not racial integration specifically. Integration among social classes is arguably getting worse now. You only go to school with the kids of bank vice presidents if you can afford to live in the same neighborhood.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#447

Post by weirdstuff »

whack wrote: post #305
choxi wrote: post #180

We should tax wealth, not income. [1] The majority of income the top 0.1% make is from investments and gets taxed as capital gains, only about 15% of their income is taxed as ordinary income. [2][3] We have an economic system where it's dramatically easier to make money the more money you already have. If you have $50M, you can park it in an index fund to get 4% returns and make $2M every year just off of your invest…

The real problem though isn't wealth inequality, it's income inequality. If someone has a billion dollars that's invested in various stocks, and never tries to withdraw that money, leave him alone. The day he decides to sell his investments and start buying private jets, that's the time to tax him on his income. The argument against a wealth tax, is that it penalizes savers, and rewards spenders. Which is not what we…

Small nit, but I'm not sure I'd prefer one (or a few) investor(s) over a larger, decentralized group of investors. Those are two very different power dynamics.

A world with a few super-heavy investors may not be as effective as a world with a more distributed (democratic) investor base. Fewer investing eyeballs, more tunnel vision.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#448

Post by Nomentatus »

0xbear wrote: post #439
fasquoika wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

I am a multimillionaire. Came here with a negative net worth, by way of skilled immigration. Born and raised in the USSR. Don't bother trying to convince me about the virtues of socialism. Unlike you, I actually lived it.

Sometimes the exact opposite of a profound error is also a profound error. We certainly have established that socialism can be implemented in a catastrophic fashion; it's harder to prove a negative (that nothing resembling socialism can work.) I share your skepticism, though.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#449

Post by AdrianB1 »

fasquoika wrote: post #419
AdrianB1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, USA is socialist. Looks at the taxation in the past 150 years and you will understand why, if you want to. Easy way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...

Is your implication that the US is socialist simply for having an income tax? If not, you're going to have to quit the snide remarks and actually explain your opinion...

No, it is the way it is set. It is a very long discussion, but the extremely simplified version should be: if there is a cost to run the state, split the cost equally to the voting citizens and ask them to pay. The state is not the owner (full or share) of the citizen to raise a percentage of the income as tax, one vote means one tax (in dollars) - that is equal rights and equal burden. The "rich people can afford to pay" is just the way to communism.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#450

Post by stale2002 »

barrkel wrote: post #400
Sniffnoy wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What strikes me the most when looking at many of the comments here is the blatant disregard for human suffering that extreme inequality and the resulting poverty cause. Apologies to pick on you without addressing your main point, but this sentence is an example of an error I see a lot yet I rarely see addressed. Specifically, you're claiming a chain of causation where by inequality causes poverty. But in fact the r…

If poverty is a relative measure - and as a child who grew up poor, I can assure you that the lived perception of poverty is relative, not absolute - then large inequality implies substantial poverty, for usual income distributions. This is relating to your parenthetical, not your quibble with causation, of course. But inequality of income is different to inequality of wealth, and there can be a causal link there.

The point is that solving "inequality" is easy. Just find all the houses of rich people and burn them all down.

That doesn't mean that this would make the world a better place.

The world should absolutely try and help the poor and solve their problems, but this has nothing at all to do with inequality".

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