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A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

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Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

simias wrote: post #36
csallen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you talking about?

Karl Marx. And I see the point the parent is making, although that's probably more of an issue in the USA than in Europe for instance. And I do agree that it's a shame because the writings of Marx are extremely interesting and deserve to be studied and discussed even if you don't believe in socialism and communism, it's really about economy in general first and foremost. Dismissing this important ground-breaking work…

Cultural Marxism applies modes of analysis developed within the Marxist community with different presumed central conflicts than the economic class one addressed in Marxism (and a number of the early practitioners were former Marxists.) So there originally was an understandable genesis of the term.

Nowadays, it's sort of a generic derogatory epithet by the right for anything that they disagree with that can't be ascribed directly (even in a very loose view) to actual economic Marxism, because everything bad must have “Marxism” stamped on it somewhere.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#72

Post by djrobstep »

conanbatt wrote: post #52
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was sold to the middle class as "Trickle down economics". Basically, if you make the rich richer, your pie gets bigger too. Sadly, people bought that line.

Trickle down economics is a pejorative term from the 30's. As a proposition it is as naive as trickle-up, which is what the other spectrum usually sells. ('if you give poor people more resources, its good for everyone') Economics, as the expression of human beings exchanging with each other, accepts neither.

> Economics, as the expression of human beings exchanging with each other, accepts neither.

I will never understand how adults can believe that things like economics, journalism, central banking, and (especially) the US constitution can be non-political.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#73

Post by munk-a »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #2

What's the best solution to this - if wealthy and high-income individuals get more power via political lobbying, they can then gain more wealth and higher incomes, gaining even more lobbying power. They can also flood the media with advertising money and propagandist messaging to convince voters to care more about less impactful issues. It feels like an endless cycle to me. Other than war or complete societal upheava…

Societally we need to fix politics. There are some really easy things we can go after first in fact. To start with removing monied interests from politics by passing laws to counteract citizen's united would help, supporting proportional representation to invalidate any efforts to gerrymander maps and allow the expression of minority opinions would also help and, the big bad one, by adopting proportional representation (either via STV or some sort of mixed member balance) we could destroy America's two party system, this would discourage negative campaigning and ideally let in collation governance which is much more resistant to corruption.

After all that we could regroup and discuss how to ensure people in need get an appropriate amount of vital services.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#74

Post by RobertoG »

conanbatt wrote: post #52
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was sold to the middle class as "Trickle down economics". Basically, if you make the rich richer, your pie gets bigger too. Sadly, people bought that line.

Trickle down economics is a pejorative term from the 30's. As a proposition it is as naive as trickle-up, which is what the other spectrum usually sells. ('if you give poor people more resources, its good for everyone') Economics, as the expression of human beings exchanging with each other, accepts neither.

>>'if you give poor people more resources, its good for everyone')

It's not 'poor people' vs. 'rich people' but the majority vs. a minority.

>>"Economics, as the expression of human beings exchanging with each other, accepts neither."

Economics? what do you mean? There are theories that, in a less simplistic way, come to propose one and the other.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#75

Post by FabHK »

claudiawerner wrote: post #24
digitalmaster wrote: post #8

So looks like the 80s is when things start going south (increased income inequality) so I looked up who was president during that time, then looked at their wiki page to see their economic policy and found this gem of a quote: "Soon after taking office, Reagan began implementing sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated tax rate reduction to sp…

David Harvey has a fantastic book on this, "A Brief History of Neoliberalism", it's quite a read but it's very well structured and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to investigate the recent (by this I mean second half of the 20th c.) trends in global capitalism and society.

I think more pertinent are Economism by James Kwak (on the naive use of Econ 101), Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic (a better, or at least much more legible, analysis of inequality within and among countries than Piketty's tome), and maybe Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer (about campaign financing in the last two decades in the US).

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#76

Post by bluGill »

CryoLogic wrote: post #25

Another side of this to consider, is that low-skill many jobs today are literally not worth as much as they used to be. In labor economic there is a very well established understanding that jobs requiring high levels of skill are typically harder to fill hence corporations must pay more to get those individuals. But the reverse is true, low skill jobs are easy to fill so we don't have to pay as much. But here's the k…

Moral of this story: become high skilled. If you are high skilled not only do you make more money in absolute dollars, but also the things you want to buy are cheaper in absolute dollars.

There are plenty of things to automate for the foreseeable future. I don't know what the correct answer for kids 100 years from now will be: they have the figure out their own answers.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#77

Post by autokad »

i wish people would call out the fed.

their primary metric for increasing interest rates is wage inflation. so they play wack a mole when people start seeing income growth, a recession comes, and employers have all the bargaining rights again.

yet despite the fed's goal of smacking down wage growth ahem, inflation,, nobody points a finger at them.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#78

Post by rwcarlsen »

digitalmaster wrote: post #8

So looks like the 80s is when things start going south (increased income inequality) so I looked up who was president during that time, then looked at their wiki page to see their economic policy and found this gem of a quote: "Soon after taking office, Reagan began implementing sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated tax rate reduction to sp…

As an engineer and computational scientist, drawing conclusions from correlations like this is absurd. Maybe Reagan was good for income inequality or maybe he was bad for it. Did you control for the other variables before drawing your conclusions? What about:

* The governments' legislation and economic policies in countries like the USSR, China, etc. in the 80s

* Changing technology especially communication technology

* Changing levels of education in the world.

* Lingering/diminishing trends/effects from wars like: Cold War, Korean War, Vietnam War, etc.

* Changing age distribution of humans in western countries,

And on and on. The world economy is extremely complex with heavy nonlinear feedback effects. How can you possibly state things like Reagan caused X w.r.t. the world wealth distribution with such confidence?

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#79

Post by maxxxxx »

malandrew wrote: post #66
munk-a wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand why this scenario is worded this way, it seems like World 2 where everybody has .5x is just worse due to World 2 getting the shaft. Here's a setup: * World 1, where everybody has x except one person has 100x * World 2, where everybody has 1.2x I think World 2 pretty clearly wins but this is a bit of a strawman to begin with. I'd personally rather live in a world where the poor have x and the…

Well you actually do end up with 0.5x instead of 1.2x because in World 2 you have eliminated the profit motive that drives progress forward. Basically you forego all progress that would have happened with the opportunity to profit by creating and inventing things and then making those things faster, cheaper and better.

The question is how much profit should go to a few. I don't think many people would object to a world where most people get 1.5x and some get 10x. The 10x people should have enough profit motive in that world. I don't think today's CEOs are better than the ones in the 50s when they made it 20 times morw than their workers compared to them making several hundred times more today.

Re: A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality

#80

Post by enraged_camel »

conanbatt wrote: post #52
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was sold to the middle class as "Trickle down economics". Basically, if you make the rich richer, your pie gets bigger too. Sadly, people bought that line.

Trickle down economics is a pejorative term from the 30's. As a proposition it is as naive as trickle-up, which is what the other spectrum usually sells. ('if you give poor people more resources, its good for everyone') Economics, as the expression of human beings exchanging with each other, accepts neither.

>>As a proposition it is as naive as trickle-up, which is what the other spectrum usually sells. ('if you give poor people more resources, its good for everyone')

Incorrect. It has been well-documented that when people have more disposable income, their spending increases. This increase in economic activity grows the economy.

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