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The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

newyorker.com

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Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#131

Post by imtringued »

caconym_ wrote: post #87
nugget wrote: post #4

Implementation may be politically difficult, but the solution isn't rocket science: substantially raise the inheritance tax and abolish all trust loopholes.

100% tax on inheritance and other hereditary wealth-transfer schemes, eliminate loopholes, use the (substantial, I assume) takings to supplement existing funds and implement a universal basic income. Also do something about education and healthcare. You can work and compete as hard as you like during your life, and get as rich as you possibly can in that time, but you can't take it with you and your wealth is used to…

A 100% inheritance tax is destructive and the government doesn't know what to do with objects that are very valuable for their previous owner and their children but worthless on the general market. How do you liquidate a family business without shutting it down because you're removing the family that is working for it?

The way inheritance should be solved is by not allowing a single person to inherit more than 50% of the total net worth.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#132

Post by goldcd »

As a mind experiment, imagine money randomly appeared in your bank account.

$500 - Bank error in your favour and you move on with your life.

$5,000 - Maybe buy you some breathing space to look for a job you prefer. Pay off a debt?

$50,000 - Maybe you might quit and retrain in a new career.

$500,000 - Maybe you'd start looking to see whether you could jack it all in and live off investments.

$5,000,000 - Start that business you'd always fancied, without fear of failure. Or just invest and kick back.

$50,000,000 - Makes more sense to invest it, and do whatever you want with the interest.

Yes, I've just made up those sums and outcomes - but I think it's interesting how we look at "sizes of money" and would all do wildly different things depending on the size.

e.g. If you got 10x$50,000 you're not going to retrain ten times. But give $50,000 to ten people and ten people might.

Or 10x$5,000,000 and you might get 10 new businesses - but $50,000,000 is unlikely to create any viable ones.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#133

Post by ciconia »

> The United States was the world’s most egalitarian society.

Is this a joke? And slavery is mentioned indirectly, in passing, only once? You cannot discuss equality in America without discussing slavery. Not to mention the dispossession of native Americans.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#134

Post by fzeroracer »

mysterydip wrote: post #121
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything happening around us indicates the opposite: that the rich prefer to invest in that which gets them richer, not that which benefits society.

Don't some investments benefit society? For example: Invest in real estate that turns into housing or businesses that weren't there before, or investing into businesses so they have the money to grow to a larger building or hire more people to meet demand.

Well, sure. It's easy to say some investments benefit society, but most of the time they are solely for the benefit of the wealthy.

One just needs to look at the land stratification California has been going through to understand why. Most of the issues they face are a result of the wealthy doing everything in their power to prevent land from being upzoned or rebuilt because that devalues their property or ruins their view.

In this case there's no growth happening despite a desperate need for growth because the wealthy don't want it.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#135

Post by isostatic »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #15
isostatic wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually, society revolts, and 'the rich' end up owning a place for their head in a basket.

That is optimistic. The rich could also just get rid of all the poor people they don’t need. Armed drones even reduce the need for human soldiers to get that done. Anyways, let’s hope for much more peaceful solutions.

> The rich could also just get rid of all the poor people they don’t need

That still leaves the poor people they do need

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#136

Post by tim333 »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #129
tim333 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the rising inequality in the US is really a result of the poor countries getting richer. Lots of other developed countries have traded with the world with much less of that eg. Germany, Scandinavia. It's more a result of the kind of politics Fox News pushes.

Globalism was literally a concerted effort to off-shore blue collar work with the expectation that the population of richer countries would become more educated and work in information intensive jobs (also siphoning off value from said off-shored industries). Where it went somewhat awry is that computers and automation have meant that less jobs are actually required in those sectors that we envisioned people having,…

By Fox News politics I mean opposition to stuff like the robust welfare states and strong labour unions you mention.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#137

Post by rossdavidh »

opportune wrote: post #9

The article mentions globalization but doesn't view inequality through a global lens. 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. The biggest issue I have with the article is that it ignores the geopolitical trends that w…

Even if the Third World now had their own wealthy elite, such that the wealth of the Third World was closer to the richest countries, you could still have rising inequality in BOTH the richest and poorest countries.

Which, also, is what really matters most. Democracy and the rule of law both start to break down when a few people have orders of magnitude more money than the median for that country; they can use their wealth to influence their own government in a way that the masses of that country cannot. That the gap between countries might have narrowed, is no help, if the inequality of both rich and poor countries goes up.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#138

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

opportune wrote: post #9

The article mentions globalization but doesn't view inequality through a global lens. 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. The biggest issue I have with the article is that it ignores the geopolitical trends that w…

By that logic, once those developing countries develop, inequality will rise again. So we’re back to square 1.

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#139

Post by k__ »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92
barrkel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor is fractal from this perspective. Like stack ranking, rich people would have to invent poor people in order to save their own hides when their turn comes around.

Sure. They still need people to program the robots. So...uhm, we techies become the new poor...

So is this where the system breaks?

The skill needed to keep it going even on the lowest level is so hight that you can't trick the people working at the lowest anymore?

Re: The Rich Can't Get Richer Forever

#140

Post by james_s_tayler »

squirrelicus wrote: post #61
billions wrote: post #49

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.

I'm with you. Inequality seems to be baked into the natural world. Look at power law distributions and the preferential attachment model as one of the ways they arise. There is mathematics to suggest the notion of inequality is a fundamental part of life.

The Polya process is another thing that comes to mind. In that model, if you were picked in the past then you are more likely to be picked in the future. That's the classic competitive exclusion "rich get richer" at work.

But here's the equalizer: Every distribution of possible outcomes under the Polya process has an equal probability of happening.

That strikes me as very interesting. Basically, if you were to run history forwards from the same starting point again and again, in some of those iterations your life would turn out significanty better than others. So, there is equality for everyone in that sense, but on a case-by-case basis it's more of a better luck next time.

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