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Is Inequality Inevitable?

scientificamerican.com

81–90 of 628 posts

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#81
post #66

A lot of it misses the point. Equality is unavoidable as long as people are allowed to compete for stuff. If people are allowed to compete for property then those that are better at competing will have more property. It might be possible to have property equality when people have access to same things but compete for different things, for example status, choice of partners, etc. And the most important point people se…

The most important point you seem to forget:

When success in competition increases success in competition (e.g. compound interest), the game tends to extreme inequality. And when extreme success gives you power to change the rules of the game, people start to lose their basic needs.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#82
post #3

Wrong question. Better question: why is the scale of inequality acceptable?

Who would care about the scale of inequality in a world where the poor were fed and comfortable? I don't think that inequality is a base problem, although I have heard arguments that (due to things like money in politics for example) it can lead to things that actually are problems. But that doesn't mean inequality is itself a problem, as the side-effects could go away if the right efforts were made to control them. It wouldn't bother me if Jeff Bezos owned entire planets, as long as my own finances were secure and his planetary ownership didn't result in any undue limitations of my own rights on Earth.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#83
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because capitalism and free enterprise are predicated on fair competition and equal access. In theory, the best and most innovative ideas thrive and lead to economic growth. Extreme inequality undermines this by allowing those who already have significant wealth to put their finger on the scales (lobbying, anticompetitive practices, etc.)

The thing that always irks me about this is that we keep talking about the individuals even though that's not the real issue. Sure, Jeff Bezos has a lot of wealth, but really what he has is a lot of shares of Amazon. It's Amazon that really has the money. Even if Bezos is the CEO, he has a duty to the other shareholders to act in their interests. He can't just donate all the company's assets to charity even if he wan…

>The real problem is that corporations are too big. //

How about if all the workers in Amazon eco-system shared the money equally (according to the retail price index in their locality, perhaps), and reduced the cost of goods to ensure that the per-employee share matched the median societal wage (or something similar)? Still a big fat corp, but not contributing to societal inequality or unfairness (but still a problem for over-use of resources and such); how would that fit with your analysis, would it still be "these corps are too big"?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#84
post #51

Absolutely - and that's a good thing. Those who produce more should earn more as well.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They lead reliably to flamewars, which we don't want here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This comment is similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465940

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#85

Absolutely - and that's a good thing. Those who produce more should earn more as well.

It's a fair statement. Can HN provide a logical response instead of downvotes?

I think the downvotes are due to the fact that the article is unrelated to production. The article is about that inequality arises naturally even in simple economies where everything is fair.

Unless your socialist, most people agree that more productive people should earn more. I think most discussions today around inequality center around the top 0.001% where earnings and production seem unrelated. I am not of the following opinion, but some people take issue that one can "own" a corporation and your return be greater than any individual producer for that corporation for effectively doing nothing.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#86
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t accurate. Amazon doesn’t ‘have the money’ that counts as Bezo’s wealth. It is the value of Amazon to others that produces his wealth. Bezos may not be able to donate Amazon’s assets to charity, but he can donate his assets - in this case his shares of Amazon. He can equally well sell his Amazon shares and buy something else with the proceeds, so the wealth that is attributed to him really his his. Of cours…

The problem with your theory is that somebody would have to buy the shares from him. At scale that's zero sum, and the money can't come from people who don't have any. Think about it this way. Alphabet owns Google. When that happened, did it create an additional company out of whole cloth with the value of Google, on top of the value of Alphabet? No. That's double counting. The value only exists once. Moreover, unles…

>that somebody would have to buy the shares from him //

He could decide $N Billion was enough and give the shares away to all employees tomorrow. Or, we could go mediaeval and have a revolution and violently rest control of that wealth from him, and others.

I guess the trick with oligarchy is to keep things just the right side of violent revolt, just enough sharing of benefit to give hope to the great unwashed [amongst whom I count myself, in case you think I'm being pejorative].

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#87
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more reflecting the general consensus. That's communism, which is generally seen as a failed economic system, and difficult to practically enforce. Although maybe that all changes in a post-scarcity economy, like is Star Trek technically communist? Should the goal actually be GINI-0?

I think a system where one persons gets literally all the wealth would also be difficult to enforce or sustain. However, without getting bogged down in the details of the implementation, I think GINI-1 would result in a society where no one has incentive to work because one person gets all of the benefit of that work. Whereas with GINI-0 everyone benefits from their work, and anyone who produces more value than most…

How much extra effort would you personally put in if I guaranteed that you got your “fair share” which just happened to be 4/350,000,000 assuming you had a family of four?

If you worked really hard to create an extra $1,000,000 in value, where shall we send your family literally the additional penny?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#88
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like GINI because it does not show the most important parameter. It is possible for two countries to have same GINI but one have people who can't satisfy their basic needs (food, shelter, medical care) and the other where all people are given access to basics. I would prefer a measure that describes general level of satisfiability of peoples' basic needs, the measure of peoples' suffering. Are people sufferin…

That's a little bit like saying you don't like air temperature as a measure because it doesn't show humidity, which is also important. Sure, overall GDP per capita + GINI might make sense as a measure of overall/median/average/something standard of living, but GINI isn't a standard of living measure, just one component of that. Edit: I think parent edited their post to add a few more clarifying statements, so this po…

This is obviously wrong. You can have uniformly poor country (theoretically) that has very good GINI.

Look at the table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

You have Ukraine which has fantastic GINI of 25%, much better than 41% of US.

Other countries that have GINI in neighborhood of US? Senegal, Madagascar, Angola?

What kind of measure is that?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#89

Inequality is inevitable. It is baked into everything in nature, from the stars to ocean depths. When was the last time you looked up at the night sky and saw a uniformly spaced and evenly lit field of stars? Evolution itself would not exist without inequality. Yes, some animals were better than others at certain tasks and evolutionary pressure did it's thing over time. I suck as a dancer. I suck as a painter. I suck…

I think most people promoting redistribution would agree on the benefits of equality of opportunity over outcome (obviously not all). They would simply argue that equality of opportunity is not there yet and the Gini coefficient can perhaps be used to measure that. For example if the Nordic countries operate well and have better equality of opportunity in the 30s as opposed to the US's 40s and we have seen in the past that the 30s worked well for the US then perhaps it's the 30s we should be shooting for with our efforts.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#90
post #5

Of course it is...it's a natural consequence of compound interest. One's ability to accumulate additional wealth scales exponentially with their level of existing wealth.

If course it is...it's a natural consequence of compound interest. One's ability to accumulate additional wealth scales exponentially with their level OF EFFORT. Even a wealthy person can lose their money if they don't make an effort investing it properly. How do people build wealth from the ground up? They work hard each and every day and that effort COMPOUNDS. They get smarter, more opportunities present themselves…

The "Just World" fallacy written into a single comment.

It starts with "effort leads to results", and then mixes that with "effort is virtue" and concludes "people who have results, must be virtuous". Then turns it around and says "people who don't have results must not be virtuous, and therefore deserve their lack of results".

"Effort leads to results" is based on the Just World idea that if you do what the winners do, you must get the results the winners got. It's only fair! If you invest "properly" then you must get good results. If you don't get what the winners got, you must not have been doing what they did well enough, and you only have yourself to blame. Nevermind the post-hoc definition of "properly" where, if it worked it was proper, and if it didn't work, it must have been improper.

Reinforced by Survivor Bias - you can't see how many people invested like Warren Buffet, but didn't get results, so somehow their effort doesn't count. Same reasoning as "proper" earlier - if it worked, it counts, if it didn't work, it doesn't count. Just World where successful people deserve it, and unsuccessful people deserve it too.

It falls apart again when you look at lottery winners - their results were disconnected from their initial effort. That single counterexample is enough, the problem is not that they got money unfairly, the problem is that you or I cannot do what they did - choose a winnint ticket - and get the same results they got. For the mindset to work, there must be a path going from effort to success, but here there is not one. You can't defend the way they got success as any kind of virtue, so it has to be put down to luck, and luck has to be outside the system, so the Just World can be upheld.

It must be true that rich people were hard working, people who got smarter and created value for others, because if it was luck, we can no longer sell people the pipe dream "you can do what they did, and achieve what they achieved", and use it to manipulate and guilt and shame them.

It must have been hard work that made Amazon successful (survivor bias: don't look at any other internet company, any other shop, any other investor choices, they clearly didn't deserve success because they didn't get success, by definition). It can't have been luck that Jeff Bezos was born who he was, where he was, had the ideas he had, got the investors he got, in the dotcom boom he was in... all that was effort.

But in a fatalist, determinist view, there's no place for luck or effort. He got what he got, because he was who he was, in the place he was in, in that part of universe configuration space. You can't have what he had, because you can't do what he did, because you aren't him, in his environment, in his area of spacetime, anymore than you picked the right lottery ticket.

I don't know what room there is for free will in this view, whether people can still choose to add effort to things, but:

"investing it properly" - there is no properly. Some investments work, some don't. Whether they work after the fact can't be the determining factor in whether they were proper.

"How do people build wealth from the ground up?" // "They work hard each and every day and that effort COMPOUNDS." - those two can both happen, but correlation is not causation.

"They get smarter" - disconnected virtuous thinking. People generally don't consider there is any way to "get smarter". Because they got wealthy post-hoc, doesn't mean they must have become smarter (read: better) people.

"they get better creating value for others" - logically inaccurate; they might get better at extracting value not creating it, they might get better at manipulating people to see value where there is none, they might get wealth through large groups of people speculating others will see value where none ends up existing.

"When you make strangers happy, they reward you with their money" - sometimes yes, sometimes no, correlation isn't causation, sometimes the two aren't even correlated. I have made strangers happy and received no monetary benefit on many occasions.

"a fair exchange" - in the sense that you want wealth and wealth creation to be seen as virtue, maybe.

"This is how wealth is made - compound effort" - wealth is made by magicking money into existence through debt, and giving it to someone. Almost all "wealth" in the global economy is fictional credit, not backed by material anything, not directly correlated with creating human happiness. Holding wealth isn't virtue and is disconnected from compound effort and largeyl disconnected from doing useful things for others. With so many trillions of dollars in the global economy, you'd think everyone would be ecstatic 24/7 now!

"One's ability to accumulate additional wealth scales exponentially with their level OF EFFORT.*" - How much EFFORT did Warren Buffet put into Berkshire Hathaway compared to a coal miner or a partner in a law firm working 16 hour days, or a startup founder working 16 hour days but being squashed by a bad faith third party? How much EFFORT did Elon Musk put into Tesla and SpaceX compared to the other smart, hardworking, long-hours-pulling engineers designing Tesla cars and SpaceX rocket engines? Did Betsy DeVos put into marrying rich?

Then, accept this, and one "must wnat to reward the poor and lazy", which is bad because they're clearly digusting inferior humans who must be lazy because they are poor, and therefore deserve what they have. But that isn't the only conclusion of accepting this reasoning is awful, another is that if wealth doesn't reliably, repeatably, come from effort, people without wealth can't be labelled untouchables and exploited by their betters, and need to be seen as equally deserving humans in disadvantaged situations - including familially, educationally, genetically, nutritionally, and other ways - as well as geographically.

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