171–180 of 628 posts
Wrong question. Better question: why is the scale of inequality acceptable?
> "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?
> "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...
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. B…
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 cou…
The issue is that the scatter plot shows there are something like 30 countries with an inflation rate of 0-15% and no correlation between inflation+gini/inflation+growth and then 8 countries where there is.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming capitalism, which isn't listed as an assumption with the question posed.
The subtitle of the article is "Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model suggests." "Free-market economies" might not mean exactly the same thing as "capitalism," but it's pretty close, and it's pretty clear that the article is discussing the current world as it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest thing is that's not a very natural distribution for a parameter like wealth. You'd have a VERY hard time trying to maintain that given innate differences between individuals in terms of expense of effort and the like. There will always be ways to try to gain additional "wealth" that doesn't meet whatever definition you try to use to equate everything.
People grumble that luck has a lot to do with success. And that might seem unfair, but there's no removing it. Good luck trying to get people to avoid arranging themselves into a bell curve. Combined with what you'd outlined, differences in individuals / differences in efforts / and luck seem impossible to ever fully equalize. How can anyone hope to normalize these differences?
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 pas…
Estimates place the illegal immigrant population of the US somewhere in the 25 million range (as a conservative estimate). Assuming half of them are of working age, that is, in rough terms, over 10% of the portion of the US population that is working (about 108 million).
The vast majority of the people who enter the US in this manner do not have college degrees or high-value professions. Which means their earning potential will be severely reduced.
Take 10% of the workforce in any Nordic country, replace it with people who are educationally challenged and the numbers will look very different.
Please note: I am NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, arguing that we should not try to do better. However, certain things are simply inescapable realities that simply take tons of time and effort to improve. Not to go too far, the US is famous for spending more money per student than, dare I say, most nations in the world, and yet our educational results in mathematics, language and other areas don't rank very well at all when compared to nations with much less to spend.
Inequality at work. Money isn't the only variable.
Perhaps that's the real thing that bothers me about these discussions about inequality. These are complex multivariate problems and these discussions make it sound like the only variable worth considering is how much money the top 1% have. It isn't. In fact, I would venture to guess that this factor or variable might not even make the list of the top 100 factors if we were to make such a list from a framework of being brutally honest rather than political.
Simple example of this: Brutal dictatorial regimes hold back their population, cause misery, suffering and inequality. That's a big one. Places like Latin America, North Korea, the Middle East and a good deal of Africa are afflicted by this. Do we, the "civilized world" in the name of creating equal opportunity and access to better outcomes, invade all of these countries, depose all tyrants and institute one hundred years of external benevolent control?
This is crazy, of course, but it is also reality. As a single example, I researched the Paris Accord in great detail and learned that dictators were enriching themselves, their families and associates with the money put into the system by the US and Europe. Money that was supposed to be devoted towards these nations becoming "greener" ended-up buying the ruling class new jets, cars and other "energy efficient" luxuries. So, yeah, the "do we invade and rule" scenario isn't too far fetched if we truly care about creating equality of opportunity and elevating millions out of truly deplorable conditions.
Not an easy problem. Not a single variable problem. And the "richest 1%" thing is a complete red herring.
Earlier 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.
Low-income rental housing tends to be quite exploitative.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/housing-rent-landlord...