Is Inequality Inevitable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#191

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #185

eberkund wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it seems clever, but also it seems like it wouldn't make any sense. I mean an obvious comparison would be some of the things on this list http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html but how does it even work - what things on that list have actually remained unchanged? Is a chicken in medieval times really the same as chicken today, and that's just in the last 800 years, not in the last 5000. And in what direc…

for example there might be some theory somewhere that the way to measure the growth of the economy is to take something relatively unchanged since ancient times, like a chicken and then calculate the amount of biomass change taken up by chickens since that time (this is a spur of the moment wrong idea here) but some animals have increased in biomass and then decreased because the demand for them has not continuously risen over time - for example: horses. If one used the biomass idea then it would see the economy increased steadily from ancient times to near modern and then there was a startling depression that wiped out several hundred years of economic progress.

Of course nobody is doing this silly thing, but trying to think about how the way it is being done works seems to be equally as silly to me.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#192

Post by tammet » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

A simple demo of the algorithm described in the article: http://dijkstra.cs.ttu.ee/~tammet/oligarch.html

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#193

Post by SiVal » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

There is a popular political perspective that rules on campus these days that treats wealth as something that just magically exists and is simply "redistributed" by one means or another like, say, a phase change in physics where no magnetism/charge/energy/etc. is ever created or consumed. I waited for a point in their model where people actually produced wealth and consumed it, made something or ate it, in addition to redistributing it. Not part of the model.

And the idea that things have a "true" value, the one put on them by enlightened campus philosophers, so a transaction not controlled by the wise and just will have a winner and a loser. I waited for the idea that I, shoeless but with ten loaves of bread, and you, hungry but with ten pairs of shoes, might reasonably value bread and shoes differently and BOTH win from the "redistribution" of bread and shoes, but it was not part of the model.

But their model (which they claim "reproduces inequality with unprecedented accuracy") could also (they claim) be fitted to a variety of different observed power law distributions when its parameters were adjusted, and the more parameters, the better the fit became. Yes, and they could probably get their model to describe the frequency distribution of English vocabulary (also a power law), with remarkable accuracy which probably does say something about economics but maybe not as much as they seem to think.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#194

Post by zacharytelschow » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #16

zacharytelschow wrote: post #6

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

Do you believe that that's the system we have? What did Adam Neumann "produce" that merited his $1.7B exit package?

Do you believe imperfections in a system inherently mean the entire thing is flawed? What system would you prefer?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#195

Post by WalterBright » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

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…

Note that the effect of steeply progressive income taxes is making it much more difficult for people to move up the economic ladder.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#196

Post by mehrdadn » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #173

mehrdadn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In fairness, I have more wealth than 33% of the USA combined, given that something like a third have zero or negative wealth.

Oh that's an interesting point I hadn't considered, thanks for mentioning that!

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#197

Post by ameister14 » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

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…

>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.

You're completely correct here. Unfortunately, neither the current levels of income inequality nor the acceleration of said inequality is unique or historically high. It's not even unique in the last hundred years.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#198

Post by gnopgnip » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #125

lmilcin wrote: 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…

> Inequality does not mean we need to have people who can't satisfy their most basic things. It is possible for people to be allowed to compete for wealth and at the same time ensure those that don't want or can't compete have their basic needs like food, shelter and medical care satisfied. How? I get that there's a lot of waste and inefficiency in those industries. Whenever zoning laws prevent a developer from build…

Progressive taxes, a safety net of social services.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#199

Post by turc1656 » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #165

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. B…

I would argue not to include SS benefits as savings purely because SS payments are a tax levied upon the rest of society rather than any sort of fund, trust, etc. that actually has money allotted to someone. It's basically just an IOU from Uncle Sam that they will tax other people to pay you.

Therefore, that is subject to change at the whim of those in charge of changing the laws. Sure, it's politically ugly to reduce/eliminate, but a severe recession could easily change that.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#200

Post by _7fvc » Wed, Nov 06, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

I come from Eastern/Asian culture. I'm surprised to see Western culture swings. When I first got to live in Western culture, everyone was talking about equality as truth. There was equality everywhere: gender, income, race, marriage, geography. Now we talk about inequality as, maybe, the accepted truth. People talk about tail, asymmetric risk taking.

I think Eastern philosophy has a balanced view on this. There're Yin & Yang. The system eventually needs to find a balance. Stop swinging, start living.