As long as regulation stands in between producers and consumers, regulators will always amass power.
Is Inequality Inevitable?
151–160 of 628 posts
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#152> "388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined" My goodness! This completely shocked me. I wonder if we are all complicit in allowing this to happen. I know wealth buys power and vice versa, so it likely would be hard to change but aren't we all indirectly allowing this to happen?
For reference, the 3 richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#153What if there's a need for inequality? I.e. if everyone is about same as everyone else, how would the society organize any work that requires coordinated effort of many people? How would it maintain the required discipline?
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Per capita GDP increased less from the Stone Age to now than you might think. Even if you discount all goods other than food to zero, it’s less than 100x growth in the last ~5-10,000 years. That’s less than 0.1% per year growth over that timeframe. Though valuing ancient goods at equivalent modern prices is debatable, it seems like a reasonable metric.
Where do you get the less than 100X growth from? And if it is less than that, what is the exact amount of growth - since if you know it is less than 100x it seems reasonable to assume that you know exactly what amount it is?
I am not claiming to know any exact value. But previous comparisons I've seen do it by looking at some good or asset which has remained relatively unchanged since ancient time and then using the modern day price of that good to extrapolate the growth of the economy since then.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Star Trek isn't communist; capitalism and communism are both approaches to the allocation of resources. Neither really applies in a post-scarcity society.
Which Star Trek is post-scarcity. They all [within the Federation] have trading and limitations of resources, no? They're entirely egalitarian either, perhaps that's why you say they're not communist, see for example the luxuries that a captain has that crew do not and the preferences (larger quarters) that accrue with seniority.
Next Generation is post-scarcity. Replicators make fighting over a slice of pizza pointless. Just replicate another slice.
It's both a story-telling crutch and obstacle. It's a crutch in that they never have to explain how they provide for the entire crew while out in space. They just transform energy into matter.
It's an obstacle as they can't really tell a story that involves a limited resource unless they explain why it can't be simply replicated. Now, sometimes, they say just that. But it's always something they have to acknowledge.
And we have to bow to the fact that Star Trek is entirely fiction. We don't really know how a post-scarcity society will function. So we will wind up still projecting contemporary mores on them. So the captain gets a special office and larger quarters.
DS9 has replicators, but they're also trying to be the "wild west frontier" Star Trek, so they're not available to everyone and there are non-Federation societies present. And those societies aren't post-scarcity, so money exists. (And then there are the societies that are both technically post-scarcity, yet still materialistic which is just weird)
Voyager has replicators on the ship, but their solution is to remove the ship from the Federation and handwave the fact that for the most part, starships don't require fuel in a traditional sense. I think the fuel for starships would be antimatter, but it's never an issue on the show unless it needs to be.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#156> "388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined" My goodness! This completely shocked me. I wonder if we are all complicit in allowing this to happen. I know wealth buys power and vice versa, so it likely would be hard to change but aren't we all indirectly allowing this to happen?
We are.
Everytime we shut up in meetings when dumb sleezy managers come up with dumb ideas.
Everytime we implement those ideas. And let someone else sell them and use them.
Everytime when we pretend that our jobs are just a paycheck.
So yeh if we don't throw them under the buss no one will.
#underthebuss
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Equality is unavoidable as long as people are allowed to compete for stuff. The kind of inequality that is perceived as problematic is something different though. It's the rent collection that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.
Can you give some examples of that? Most of the poor have no wealth in the first place.
>Most of the poor have no wealth in the first place.
Plenty of the poor actively destroy value, see the sanitation nightmares that are homeless encampments in the Seattle area. And the rest of the poor don't produce life sustaining value. Wealth transfers in the US are exclusively from the middle class and wealthy to the poor. To say otherwise is simple demagoguery.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
If the least lazy person earns some marginal amount more than the second least lazy person, the Gini coefficient isn't zero.
And if the laziest [or unluckiest] person is reliant to some degree on receiving byproducts of the less lazy people's output, then they might be better off in absolute terms from that non-zero Gini coefficient incentivising the less lazy people to work harder.
[the magnitude of the amount likely matters in real world situations too. The answer to whether you'd consider working as hard as people in your company who are less lazy than you probably depends on whether you're being offered an extra dollar or extra million dollars to do so]
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#159A 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…
> when people have access to same things but compete for different things, for example status, choice of partners, etc.
People are already complaining about inequality of status and partners. Why is inequality of wealth less just than those other things?
> Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things
I honestly don't understand why and moral arguments are not convincing.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#160My perspective on this might be too naive; but it seems wealth inequality (which is the topic of this article) is inevitable since a significant proportion of the population will spend their entire income and therefore never save. It seems like about 19% of all Americans have zero net worth, and something like 44% of single American retirees are dependent on Social Security for 90% or more of their income, implying t…
Yeh but there is a difference between saving for retirement and being "filthy rich"
Some people have other interests that gathering power and money. So why is it fair we build a world only for the powerfull and wealthy?