101–110 of 189 posts
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A political solution that doesn’t involve politicians or the government will just create its own politicians and government to sustain it. Look what happened during the American and French revolutions, or the Russian revolution. It always starts out as “we don’t need that” and in the end you simply recreate that.
See also: Bitcoin
Is the Hacker News community open to alternative viewpoints on this subject? It would be informative to read a wide spectrum of opinions, like we get for things like microprocessor design and code libraries.
Generally you get downvoted for doing so, but people still try to argue. I have a lot to say on the subject, but one thing I still need an argument for is why inequality is bad intrinsically. I'd love to hear a cogent argument that addresses that fundamental point, but what I end up seeing in the wild is camps of people who think inequality is some intrinsic evil, and those that don't think it's relevant to anything.
(2) Most current politico-economic systems across the world have the feature that any given rich person has much more say in the political process than a poor person.
(3) It doesn't take much of a study of history to ascertain that, at least in the last century, rich people have used the additional power they have over the political process to make decisions that make them yet richer. Which then increases their political power even more. And the cycle repeats.
(4) There are at least two obvious solutions to (2) and (3), and which a lot of people subscribe to:
* Either, pass laws and pursue policies within the current system that make it very hard for anyone to become too rich or too poor relative to the average. This is what you will usually see a lot of regular people espousing.
* Or, redesign the politico-economic system so that rich people don't have a disproportionate influence on the political process. This is, perhaps, the motivation of some people working on crypto-currencies, even if they are misguided in their efforts.
The reason you find people who think "inequality is some intrinsic evil" is because many people believe that the second solution is not possible, i.e. it is human nature to exploit others and they will exploit in any unequal system and, hence, inequality is always an undesirable state.
I see people throwing ideas and most of these ideas rely on politicians and/or govt doing something. Is there a non govt or non politician dependent way of solving inequality? facebook connected the world not govt or politicians. Google made knowledge and information available to the whole world not a politician or a govt. (I understand there are down sides to these companies products but so is there to govts/politic…
'Scaling large organizations' is a hard problem.
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Very true, in terms of poverty the world was never as equal as today. My guess is that Free Software had the consequence of providing a lot of value to people for free, taking part of the cost of the supply chain. This is the real equaliser, it is not tax and it's not the market. In all honesty even in their example, the 1% in the US is not stable .. it's more like a game of chair, if you blink you can loose your sea…
Free Software is a miniscule part of that process, if it even is a part at all. The main reason is reduced transport and communication costs making it feasible to outsource work across continents.
As much as in theory inheritance tax is a solution for the problem, I don't think in practice it works well. The ultra rich will always have avenues to escape tax. The middle class instead, trying to secure a better future for the family, will get hit the hardest. I am conflicted about this way of trying to solve the problem. Also, this is assuming the tax money gets used efficiently and not to the advantage of the t…
The inevitability of people trying to beat the system isn't a reason to abandon the principle.
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>If you look only within rich nations, yes inequality has increased, because the poor and blue collar middle class have lost a lot of jobs to poorer countries. But that phenomenon is actually reducing inequality as measured from a global view. How is that reducing inequality worldwide situation? Those foreign workers may be closer to the middle classes in rich nations, but the rich are getting further ahead
It's reducing inequality by volume, as in the bottom 20-50th%iles are seeing their incomes rise closer to the 50-90%ile incomes. But yes the super rich are getting richer than ever before
Implementation may be politically difficult, but the solution isn't rocket science: substantially raise the inheritance tax and abolish all trust loopholes.
I see people throwing ideas and most of these ideas rely on politicians and/or govt doing something. Is there a non govt or non politician dependent way of solving inequality? facebook connected the world not govt or politicians. Google made knowledge and information available to the whole world not a politician or a govt. (I understand there are down sides to these companies products but so is there to govts/politic…
If you think the existing politicians are worthless then your Facebook post should be about replacing them with ones that are worth something. Our political process is the only way we set the ground rules for this game and if someone else sets the rules you can't win if they don't want to let you.
You have already given up the only actual power you have. Take it back.
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Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable? More envy and less feeling of being part of a group? It is good that poverty in the world is much less and there are more people in the middle class but it is also a problem that wages in the US are stagnant for large swath of the population that feels like it isn’t part of the group anymore and makes trouble because of it.
> Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable? Yes. However, too much equality also makes society too static, because no one is incentivized to innovate anymore. The problem, as always, is maintaining the right balance.
Sorry if this is a naive question, but is that really true? What's the evidence for believing that, much less treating it as fact?
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See also: Bitcoin
Bitcoin seems a tool for increasing inequality rather than the other way around.