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Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

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Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#31

Post by bilbo0s »

sokoloff wrote: post #7

I 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…

I know this will sound provincial to the HN crowd since it's very Silicon Valley oriented, but a thought occurred to me while reading this comment. The thought that it's pretty amazing that there are places in the US where, say, 5 million in assets is "middle class". I understand the thinking, it's just that where I come from all of the guys with 5 million in assets are considered to be pretty F'n rich. I don't know anyone in the town I grew up in who would say that 5 million was "middle class". We wouldn't even call that "UPPER middle class". In my hometown they, (we? cognitive dissonance, sorry), would say that guy is LOADED.

It's that existence of these two completely different economic realities that makes the inequality issue at once so intractable, and so critical to address.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#32

Post by ghaff »

mieseratte wrote: post #22
eaenki wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA. Actually, a woman did. Not only she hasn't been rewarded economically but even culturally-wise.

> What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA I thought Watson, Crick, and Franklin were working on a team and that she was left uncredited?

She was not left uncredited but is less well known. She didn’t share the Nobel Prize mostly because she had died and rightly or wrongly it’s not awarded posthumously.

Photograph 51 is a good play about Rosalind Franklin BTW.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#33

Post by mailxplorer »

api wrote: post #30
ppereira wrote: post #10

The 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 D…

You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention. Our system rewards value extraction (rent, fin…

TBL is worth over $50 million.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#34

Post by pygy_ »

gaius wrote: post #19
quantumofmalice wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you aren't alone: most professional economists ignore banking and debt entirely. To paraphrase Paul Krugman: "It's just money we owe ourselves." Historically, however, debt has been social nitroglycerine, which is why Christianity outlawed usury and Judaism had a 50-year debt jubilee built into it. We will relearn this lesson eventually, but in the meantime our bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.

It's just money we owe ourselves Not quite true: it’s the money we owe our future selves. So you can arrive in the future and find that the pension that should have been waiting for you there was borrowed by past-people and they never paid it back. And you can’t go back in time to demand it back.

Yup... in other words, it is a gigantic Ponzi scheme.

The economy won't grow forever.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#35

Post by InitialLastName »

mailxplorer wrote: post #33
api wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention. Our system rewards value extraction (rent, fin…

TBL is worth over $50 million.

What's the economic value of the World Wide Web? How tiny a portion of that should we really allocate to the innovators who create the concepts our economy is built on?

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#36

Post by api »

mailxplorer wrote: post #33
api wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention. Our system rewards value extraction (rent, fin…

TBL is worth over $50 million.

Good, and thanks for correcting, but he poor compared to Zuckerberg. All the latter did was riff successfully on the already established social media concept and then sell out his user base more brazenly than competitors.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#37

Post by lajhsdfkl »

ppereira wrote: post #10

The 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 D…

I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things (except Shockley and that point is moot since the coinventors/creators reaped the rewards).

Is it really that surprising to people that you wont become rich unless you convince thousands upon thousands of people to hand you money?

What our system rewards are practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#38

Post by Alex3917 »

ppereira wrote: post #10

The 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 D…

While it's certainly unfair that innovation is more rewarded than invention, the idea that this is a significant driver of economic inequality is pretty dubious. Also given that academia has already gotten in bed with Reaganism and Bayh Dole, asking government to bail them out now is basically just wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#39

Post by leetcrew »

quantumofmalice wrote: post #18
hshehehjdjdjd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure the idiosyncratic tenets of Christianity or Judaism can serve as the foundation of sound economic (or other) policy. I need something more compelling than “a myth invented more than two thousand years ago says it’s a bad idea” to make me believe that there is something wrong with T-bills. For that matter, this seems like not such a great argument, because substantially all other countries also have their…

If you'd like a more technical explanation why the older systems were right, you can read Steve Keen's work. On the other hand, if you enjoy the surprise of financial crises every decade and major currency crises every five decades, you can continue listening to modern economists.

forgive me if my ignorance is showing, but it doesn't entirely seem useful to talk about particular systems being "right" or "wrong". to me it just looks like a fairly typical risk-reward tradeoff. if you want wealth to grow fast, you need to accept high variance in the market. if you want low variance, you need to resign yourself to a low rate of return. one of the main ways that we enter into this tradeoff is through leverage.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#40

Post by paulryanrogers »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #28
gaius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just money we owe ourselves Not quite true: it’s the money we owe our future selves. So you can arrive in the future and find that the pension that should have been waiting for you there was borrowed by past-people and they never paid it back. And you can’t go back in time to demand it back.

We don't have a time machine. Everything consumed today is produced today (disregarding short term storing in warehouses, that only goes so far). I don't buy the argument "but... future generations!" Future generations have to deal with whatever their situation is at their future time. They don't have to send anything back through time to us. If they are so impressed by abstract numbers in computers that their econom…

Resources processed into consumables (soon to be waste) and waste byproducts will have a meaningful impact on future people. And with fewer easily processable resources available they'll be less equipped to clean up our messes.

Economics and money are tools that could help mitigate the consumption-at-all-costs problems we have today.

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