Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Inequality Inevitable?

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 628 posts

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#101

Post by zjaffee »

lmilcin wrote: post #73
tunesmith wrote: post #10

Have there been any efforts to quantify what level of inequality is reasonable? For instance, the GINI coefficient ranges between 0 and 1, where 0 means everyone has the same amount, and 1 means one person at the top has everything. Depending on how it's measured, the US is somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5. You don't want to be at either extreme, so some level of inequality is desirable. Is there an appropriate amount o…

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…

Comparing GINI among most OECD countries is usually how GINI is evaluated anyways, and largely makes sense in that context with the exception of maybe some Latin American countries.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#102

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #83
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

> would it still be "these corps are too big"?

Of course, because you'd still have a single entity in control of hundreds of billions of dollars in resources. The CEO still has the same amount of money to lobby the government to relax environmental rules or suppress wages or competition or fix prices or whatever problematic thing Abstract Evil Corp does when they're too powerful. They still have the same huge pile of cash to undercut competitors with until there are none left. The size of the company is problematic independent of where the profits go.

It's also somewhat of an implausible hypothetical, because paying significantly above market wages is uncompetitive. If Amazon pays market wages then nobody can undercut them on price because they have better logistics. If they paid significantly above market wages then someone else could pay market wages and undercut them. The only way out of that is to get market wages up and consumer prices down to the level you're talking about -- which is what happens when there are more employers competing for labor and customers.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#104

Post by billions »

mikepurvis wrote: post #79
billions wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sound like you got there exactly by the method described above.

Um, but the point is that most of that is stuff he had no control over. The Econ 101 fantasy of "work hard, get ahead" doesn't apply if being a straight white male born into a middle class western family means you're starting 80% of the way to the finish line.

Please keep your prejudices out of this. How did hunter-gatherers get ahead?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#105

Post by gojomo »

adamsb6 wrote: post #59
jlongr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't the coefficient be zero? I'm curious what your reasoning is.

That would require a whole lot of violence.

And not just once, to initially achieve exactly-equal distribution.

Due to the natural variety in persons' behavior, skills, and preferences, some will build or collect a different mix of things. Those things will then get valued as "wealth" or "income" of different magnitudes that violate the `gini=0` constraint.

So, you'd need constant additional violence to re-level the holdings against peoples' individual actions.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#106

Post by whatshisface »

harimau777 wrote: post #99
whatshisface wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Because for the foreseeable future there will be resources that are important to people and are limited. If inequality gets so severe that some people are unable to get the resources that are important to them then they tend to get upset. One of the most obvious examples in America right now is a house in a desirable part of the country. Buying a house has always been a major investment; however, housing prices are n…

Let's say that Jeff Bezos gets twice as rich while I stay the same. Inequality increases, but I'm not unhappy. Now, let's say that Jeff Bezos loses half his money on the same day I lose half of mine. Inequality stays the same, but I'm unhappy. Therefore I conclude that inequality doesn't bother me, and its absence is no comfort. (I'm using money as a stand-in for goods and services, of course. If inflation doubled the number of dollars we had, I wouldn't be any happier.)

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#107

Post by Zyst »

beefman wrote: post #84
dang wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Snitch

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#108

Post by jlongr »

stronglikedan wrote: post #72
jlongr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't the coefficient be zero? I'm curious what your reasoning is.

Because some people are naturally lazier than others, and, while the most lazy still deserve a bare minimum social support system, they definitely don't deserve the same amount as the least lazy.

Does the dollar amount of additional wealth given to the least-lazy person matter? Or is it only significant that they earn some marginal amount more than the second least-lazy person?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#109

Post by bhupy »

harimau777 wrote: post #99
whatshisface wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Because for the foreseeable future there will be resources that are important to people and are limited. If inequality gets so severe that some people are unable to get the resources that are important to them then they tend to get upset. One of the most obvious examples in America right now is a house in a desirable part of the country. Buying a house has always been a major investment; however, housing prices are n…

Is “a house in a modern city” a basic right? Or just “a house”?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#110

Post by WaxProlix »

lmilcin wrote: post #88
WaxProlix wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think I may have worded that poorly, since it sounds like you're agreeing with me. GINI is a measure of relative distribution, but doesn't necessarily have anything to say about overall wealth. I was responding to someone who seemed to be saying that GINI is bad because it only measures one thing, which seems a lot like saying the centiliter is bad because it measures volume and not temperature, when sometimes you want to know both volume and temperature.
Post reply on HN