101–110 of 368 posts
Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense. Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been a…
Top 1% Global Income - $32,500/year Top 1% Global Wealth - $770,000 assets via https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
Steven Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now, has a pretty compelling section on wealth/income inequality. The basic position - and I think the data supports this - is that it really doesn't matter what the top 1% are doing so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions. Furthermore, wealth isn't a static I win/you lose proposition - much of that wealth has been created in recent history. People spen…
I've lived in several places in the last few years and this couldn't be further away from truth. I spend the same or more % of my income in housing than my parents did, and I get much less for it. They were able to buy a 4 bedroom flat in town working blue collar jobs, and me, with an engineering degree, probably could aspire to a 2 bedroom out of town at best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It couldn't possibly not matter, because wealth is not only standard of living, but also power. At the highest level, the wealthy are not simply comfortable. They have the power to shape and organize aspects of the economy, supply chain, and the laws. That has to matter in some way beyond having one's material needs met or not.
It matters, and it might be ok if the wealthy were being nice about it. Unfortunately a very active subset seems to be bringing back feudalism. In the 20s-70s rich people were conveniently afraid of communist revolution and thus inclined to distributed gains. Without another credible threat of global revolution I don’t know how this gets fixed. Of course, communism did have downsides for the people who actually lived…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It couldn't possibly not matter, because wealth is not only standard of living, but also power. At the highest level, the wealthy are not simply comfortable. They have the power to shape and organize aspects of the economy, supply chain, and the laws. That has to matter in some way beyond having one's material needs met or not.
That's a good argument, and to many it's an argument for wealth redistribution. I prefer to look at it instead as an argument for limiting the powers of government in order to limit its susceptibility to corruption.
The follow-on question is: what do we do about it? Attempts to artificially "correct" inequality for the sake of correction are universally disastrous. Progressive taxation and redistribution are, I think, reasonable, as is universal basic income, and sound government has a huge role to play. But the goal should be to provide basic services and create opportunity for the bottom 50%, not wrest control of wealth from the top 1%.
The goal of actually stamping out inequality is a fool's errand.
Communism went away. It's not that communism was better. It's that it was competition. There was, for half a century, a competitive threat - do better than the USSR, or face a revolution. That threat was taken quite seriously in the US for decades. Industrialists (the US economy was mostly manufacturing back then) were careful not to get too greedy or power-hungry. They feared expropriation. Britain nationalized many…
Capitalism is so ingrained now, nobody can even imagine that alternative system could exist. In the minds of most, communism is a synonym of authoritarianism. Communist governments tended to be authoritarian, but it's not clear to me if it's a natural consequence of communism. It's more likely that authoritarianism is a consequence of violent revolutions. Is it possible to combine communism with democracy?
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison, Federalist #51.
Communism has a problem with coordination: once the economy grows complex enough that someone must decide who produces what, the central planner becomes a power structure in its own right (what is power other than the ability to control what other people do, after all?). That happened with disastrous results under both Stalinism and Maoism. If you disperse that power democratically (i.e. by majority vote, perhaps using technology to instantly tally votes for a proposal), most people only have a limited amount of time and context to evaluate each proposal, and so a charismatic strongman can easily sway the vote. (This frequently happens with California ballot propositions, for example.)
Anarcho-communism has worked on a small scale with many hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies - for example, the idea of private ownership of land was nonsensical to most Native American tribes. However, these societies tend to be conquered by ones that have attained industrialization, because the higher complexity of those economies lets them build much more effective weapons of war.
Communism went away. It's not that communism was better. It's that it was competition. There was, for half a century, a competitive threat - do better than the USSR, or face a revolution. That threat was taken quite seriously in the US for decades. Industrialists (the US economy was mostly manufacturing back then) were careful not to get too greedy or power-hungry. They feared expropriation. Britain nationalized many…
I think the next iteration of the being known now as capitalism, which is actually just trying to be a collection of principles for resource allocation, must take into account the impact that currently isn't tracked or quantified by money. It's imperative that the government or some superior structure (preferably decentralised) that doesn't exist yet enforces this improvement of economical performance tracking.
Success stories include food production, household goods, and many kinds of media.
Failures include addictive drugs, gambling, global warming, and healthcare.
As a civilization we’re crushing it on problems solvable by capitalism. The solution to other problems is not new ways of measuring things to make them fungible (sounds like Wuffie). The solution is other forms of collective action and decision making, like functional governments and NGOs.
Communism went away. It's not that communism was better. It's that it was competition. There was, for half a century, a competitive threat - do better than the USSR, or face a revolution. That threat was taken quite seriously in the US for decades. Industrialists (the US economy was mostly manufacturing back then) were careful not to get too greedy or power-hungry. They feared expropriation. Britain nationalized many…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It couldn't possibly not matter, because wealth is not only standard of living, but also power. At the highest level, the wealthy are not simply comfortable. They have the power to shape and organize aspects of the economy, supply chain, and the laws. That has to matter in some way beyond having one's material needs met or not.
That's a good argument, and to many it's an argument for wealth redistribution. I prefer to look at it instead as an argument for limiting the powers of government in order to limit its susceptibility to corruption.
Top 1% of composers are most of all classical music played ( probably over two-thirds ). Of their music, maybe 1% of their songs are the ones that get most of that playing. Celestial bodies also have exponential inequality. Get a little mass, get more gravity, get more mass. Inequality is within nature itself. Actors in hollywood. They release one movie, now they get 50 offers for other movies. They quickly get more…