Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
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Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#2His thesis is that changes in government policy are the cause of the increasing economic inequality in America. But a simple thought experiment is enough to disprove this: imagine what Larry Page would have done in 1950 vs 1998. In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. But it wasn't changes in government policy that made this possible. It was the rise of microcomputers and networks that made this possible. And Larry Page's case is the rule, not the exception.
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#3His thesis is that changes in government policy are the cause of the increasing economic inequality in America. But a simple thought experiment is enough to disprove this: imagine what Larry Page would have done in 1950 vs 1998. In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. But it wasn't changes in government policy that…
The meteoric rise of Google is pretty much the definition of "the exception".
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#4His thesis is that changes in government policy are the cause of the increasing economic inequality in America. But a simple thought experiment is enough to disprove this: imagine what Larry Page would have done in 1950 vs 1998. In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. But it wasn't changes in government policy that…
> In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs.
Why wouldn't he have started one of the numerous profitable companies of the 50s? It seems more likely that an entrepreneur would do that rather than work in another field.
> In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire.
This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th century, all without massive economic inequality.
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#5His thesis is that changes in government policy are the cause of the increasing economic inequality in America. But a simple thought experiment is enough to disprove this: imagine what Larry Page would have done in 1950 vs 1998. In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. But it wasn't changes in government policy that…
Larry Page is the rule not the exception? I think you vastly overestimate the number of possible professors who became Larry Pagesque in the U.S. and vastly underestimate the number of potential professors who work for very low wages in the hopes of becoming a professor.
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#6As is so often the case, the first comment explains more than the entire article:
"Economic division was built into USD: you either pay interest on Treasury bonds, or you live off it."
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#7I half wonder if the issue of inequality is that America may have a fatter right tail on the distribution rather than an ever-narrowing tail. Instead of only having the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, etc 0.001% wealthy, we have a 5-6% band of households who are millionaires[0] and that makes the wealth more visible when it’s a handful of people in your town or social circle than when it was only a handful of people in the nation.
In other words, things might be getting better for the upper middle class as compared to 150 years ago, while the lower and lower middle class remains similarly situated. (If you model their economic contributions as hours-of-labor, that’s not all that surprising an outcome.)
[0] Mere millionaire is nearly meaningless at this point IMO despite the political rhetoric against the “millionaires and billionaires”. A million bucks, half tied up in a house, provides a passive income stream of around $20K/yr. It’s the $10MM (maybe $7MM) mark where I start to think of unequal privilege being a possible concern.
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#8As is so often the case, the first comment explains more than the entire article: "Economic division was built into USD: you either pay interest on Treasury bonds, or you live off it."
I don't see it. Money moves the real world each time it changes hands (except for in purely financial transactions), so why would only the two tax paying and the getting-interest-from-government-debt steps have a real world impact? The cycle of money is far larger than that. It's certainly possible I'm overlooking some larger aggregate effect because I'm not taking a far enough step back.
I also don't think it is all so clear because I assume the distribution of entities holding gov. debt is not the same as " the top 0.1% vs the rest" (I found https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-33... but let's continue...). Don't banks, insurances and pension funds also hold a lot of it? Furthermore, we cannot simply look at who owns those entities, the funds they get directly and indirectly from holding government bonds don't go directly to the owners after all but are used in their business. So I don't think that one sentence helps all that much because no, I don't think it's that simple.
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#9His thesis is that changes in government policy are the cause of the increasing economic inequality in America. But a simple thought experiment is enough to disprove this: imagine what Larry Page would have done in 1950 vs 1998. In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. But it wasn't changes in government policy that…
"Tech Slowdown Threatens the American Dream"
"In a three-month period at the end of 1879, Thomas Edison tested the first practical electric lightbulb, Karl Benz invented a workable internal-combustion engine, and a British-American inventor named David Edward Hughes transmitted a wireless signal over a few hundred meters. These were just a few of the remarkable breakthroughs that Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon tells us led to a “special century” between 1870 and 1970, a period of unprecedented economic growth and improvements in health and standard of living for many Americans."
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601199/tech-slowdown-thre...
Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen
#10The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting.
“Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of DNA, upon which rests so much of modern medicine. None of them, who made such large contributions to our well-being, are among those most rewarded by our economic system.”