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Is Inequality Inevitable?

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#231

Post by wuliwong »

dre54673 wrote: post #189
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…

I've noticed an increasing trend in people using phrases such as "it is trivial", "it is obvious", "it is self evident" to defend their arguments. I have yet to encounter a case where it made their argument better. This might be off topic but it has become a pet peeve because I've even started to encounter it in real life. It is similar to starting a discussion with "if you disagree with me, you are stupid".

I agree and I also probably am an offender.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#232

Post by Empact »

dre54673 wrote: post #189
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…

I've noticed an increasing trend in people using phrases such as "it is trivial", "it is obvious", "it is self evident" to defend their arguments. I have yet to encounter a case where it made their argument better. This might be off topic but it has become a pet peeve because I've even started to encounter it in real life. It is similar to starting a discussion with "if you disagree with me, you are stupid".

IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia. Fair enough that "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader, but it's the coherence that I'm referring to.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#233

Post by eeZah7Ux »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #139
selfishgene wrote: post #103

Let's assume for sake of argument that "inequality" is in fact "inevitable." Then what policy conclusions are we supposed to draw?

Universal Basic Income to even it out a bit I assume!

...which would significantly decreasing inequality - immediacy disproving the belief that inequality is some sort of inevitable natural phenomenon.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#234

Post by lordnacho »

notahacker wrote: post #141
lordnacho wrote: post #31

This is a lot more satisfying than just r > g, which although seeming to be well supported in a rather large book somehow is dissatisfying. Specifically, I was looking for some kind of agent model like what this author is presenting here. I've often thought about the "it's expensive to be poor" adage. What's interesting is he takes in this risk preference idea, in which you naturally expect the poor to have to be ced…

r>g is broadly equivalent to the ζ parameter in this model I don't find the model itself especially compelling as a broad model of the economy myself, though it's nicely written exposition of how variance can wipe people out and largely agrees with my biases. The fact that a curve with three arbitrarily-set parameters can be made to fit empirical Lorenz curves doesn't particularly impress me, and the concept of rich…

I don't see zero sum as so important as much as risk preference. Or you could call it risk necessity. The game can be positive sum, but if you're poor you have to play it a certain way that keeps you poor.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#235

Post by w1nst0nsm1th »

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…

It cames to my mind that that constant 2% inflation, and the constent effort to limit it to such level said to be good for economy, was indeed slowly impovishering the working class by the fact than increase rate of salary was not as high as increase in price. In short the price of good increase constantly, but we stop the inflation before it reach also salary, leading to inequal raise of cost of work (null) and cost of good (2%).

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#236

Post by zajd »

ihm wrote: post #227
SiVal wrote: post #193

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 t…

I don't think your comment is a good faith engagement with leftist understandings of value. This is the starting point of Marx's whole theory of capitalism (it's in the first few chapters of Capital) which is the labor theory of value. Namely, his starting point is that labor is identified with value. Wealth is created when raw materials and the means of production are combined with labor. In the capitalist theory of…

[dead]

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#237

Post by Retric »

pdonis wrote: post #213
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.

> Though valuing ancient goods at equivalent modern prices is debatable, it seems like a reasonable metric. No, it's not a reasonable metric at all, because it ignores the fact that the vast majority of per capita GDP growth between the Stone Age and now is not that we have improved the quality of items that existed then. It's that we have invented a huge number of new items that Stone Age humans could not have even…

You’re just describing what makes up that ~100x growth.

We still create beef because beef has value to us. So, sure the basket of goods created back then is less valuable than what we create today. But, that does not somehow mean the value created back then is meaningless.

In the end combine harvesters are more efficient than hand tools, but they both end up harvesting gains.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#238

Post by Empact »

ameister14 wrote: post #197
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 uniqu…

I'm talking about measures like these, which granted, are only recorded back 100 years or so: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2015/demo/gini... https://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a5... https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mark-abdelnour/issues/abd-s-...

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#239

Post by Rapzid »

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.

And yet 1% of the worlds population owns half of the worlds wealth..

EDIT: And 40% of the wealth in the USA as of 2017.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#240

Post by lifty »

__max__ wrote: post #204
notahacker wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A _lot_ of US public policy changes and economic structural changes which favour the rich have happened since 1971. The problem with trying to pin everything on inflation is that inflation has been more stable and lower in recent years than much of the Bretton Woods era...

> inflation has been more stable and lower in recent years than much of the Bretton Woods era... That depends how you measure inflation. The government-published inflation rates use all kinds of creative accounting to make the number seem artificially low. It's in the government's interest to make it seem like that's the case. The reality is that housing prices (and rents) are increasing at a very high rate, and this…

As far as I know, the highest inflation since 2008 has been experienced by "financial assets", which is not really considered in the actual inflation numbers published by the government, because supposedly it's not important for the majority of people. Well, it turns out that when you have an increasingly financialized(is this a word?) economy, it becomes important.
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