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Is Inequality Inevitable?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#161

Post by ska »

eej71 wrote: post #127
Retric wrote: post #121

Earlier 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.

The core point remains which is - wealth is not static. It is _created_.

More specifically, it can be created, destroyed, and moved around.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#162

Post by zepto »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #75
zepto wrote: 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…

Your alphabet / google analogy has zero connection to what we are talking.

There doesn’t need to be anyone with the cash available to pay the entire price of Amazon.

If Jeff Bezos wants to purchase something, he can trade Amazon stock for it.

The corporation doesn’t have any control over whether he does that or not.

It is exactly equivalent to money.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#163

Post by mamon »

sokoloff wrote: post #87
jlongr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And that's exactly why perfect GINI score is not 0, but around 0.25 - it balances those two goals: ensuring that everyone has their needs met and still has motivation to put in extra effort.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#164

Post by fzeroracer »

wang_li wrote: post #157
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is nonsense and ignores that the rich and wealthy can actively destroy value on a far more massive scale. The damage fracking has done to the environment for example is far more than any homeless encampment and that's just one example.

Most of the wealth from the poor is stolen through increasing rent seeking behaviors from landlords, insurance companies and lobbying. I could speak at length the ways banks organized things as to punish the poor by organizing deposits to occur after transactions so that they can charge overdraft fees or insurance companies deciding not to cover you because of pre-existing conditions.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#165

Post by AnimalMuppet »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #136

My 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…

Hmm. If they depend on Social Security for 90% of their income, should Social Security be included in their savings? It's not conventional savings, and yet it's funding their retirement.

In the same way, should pensions be counted as part of savings?

And if you run the calculations that way, what does it do to the distribution of wealth?

Note well: I am not saying that this is the right way to run the calculations. But I think it could be a somewhat informative alternate way to do them.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#166

Post by devcpp »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #150

> "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?

Please don't automatically turn to socialism as the solution to this. Over-regulation is in part responsible for the crony capitalism we're in. You will find that most of these 388 individuals are heavily invested in lobbying to make sure regulations are on their side and hindering their competitors.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#167

Post by Uhuhreally »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #153

What 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?

what then is the optimum level of inequality ?

What if 1 person owned all the money and everybody else worked for the promise of money ? Would that be enough inequality ?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#168

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Empact wrote: post #144

It should be self-evident that the accelerating inequality we’re witnessing is not the natural inequality of competition and the power law, easily explained by simple arithmetic. An accelerating and historically high broad societal effect is naturally a product of broad and unique properties of the current regime, rather than fundamentally consistent properties, which would naturally be seen across all time. What is…

> We have found that inflation (1) worsens income distribution

This is an interesting question, but that's [1] a terrible study.

It compares "data averaged over 5-year periods" across different countries. It's effectively a scatter plot of income inequality versus inflation.

The study's findings are better stated as "countries with high inflation have worse income distributions." Which makes sense. High-inflation countries tend to have low-quality institutions and low economic growth, factors which make being middle class difficult and poor miserable.

The right way to do this is longitudinally, studying populations over time. Even that's hard, given the number of interceding factors. At a minimum, an input must be the distribution of credit and debt, given inflation transfers wealth from the former to the latter.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.295...

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#169

Post by dang »

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

I was about to say that, although similar, it doesn't quite ring the same Pavlovian bells. But to judge by the subthread, you're right. I've posted a moderation comment there.

That touches on an important principle actually. The value of a comment on HN is the expected value of its subthread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21347871

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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