Animals on both ends of the bell curve. Serial Killer avg. 10 deaths? Last billionaire I met killed 17 and poisoned 30,000. Silicon Valley is essential viewing at the moment on that subject.
Downvotes? At least explain.
Is Inequality Inevitable?
251–260 of 628 posts
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#252Of course it is...it's a natural consequence of compound interest. One's ability to accumulate additional wealth scales exponentially with their level of existing wealth.
It scales linearly. If you have 3 (or 10) times as much as I have, and we both invest all our money in the same interest bearing account, then after N years you will still have 3 (or 10) times as much as I have. So, according to your model, the initial wealth distribution should not change. (Of course, you can argue that those with more wealth consume a smaller part of it, and that gives rise to inequality, but that'…
Sure, it may not completely be a corollary of compound interest, but the fact that there are people that can live entirely off of the passive income generated by their assets and have some left over to invest further illustrates that the game is fundamentally different at higher levels of wealth.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#253There 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…
As John von Neumann said: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Are you advocating for people to not have enough to satisfy their most basic needs?
I'm advocating for not providing it to them.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#255It 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.
Income taxes are much less progressive than they were half a century ago.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#256It 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…
Exactly so. For evidence and details there is the weighty and data packed book "Capital in the Twenty-First_Century" by Thomas Piketty
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#257Have there been any efforts to quantify what level of inequality is reasonable? For instance, the GINI coefficient ranges between 0 and 1, where 0 means everyone has the same amount, and 1 means one person at the top has everything. Depending on how it's measured, the US is somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5. You don't want to be at either extreme, so some level of inequality is desirable. Is there an appropriate amount o…
I don't like GINI because it does not show the most important parameter. It is possible for two countries to have same GINI but one have people who can't satisfy their basic needs (food, shelter, medical care) and the other where all people are given access to basics. I would prefer a measure that describes general level of satisfiability of peoples' basic needs, the measure of peoples' suffering. Are people sufferin…
That sounds great, is there a numerical metric for this that can be compared to other countries and tracked over time?
I wonder how this could be tracked - it's not quite like the cost of a "bundle of goods" because some parts of that bundle might be automatically supplied by the government.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#258Earlier 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.
One example is housing rent. A lot of landowners through regulatory capture or just obstruction make it too expensive to build houses, making it harder for poor people to afford to buy, hence being forced to rent.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 organ…
>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. You could go on at length about…
No, I'd be right and if you're going to dismiss me, you should at least prove you're actually educated in the topic.
Chase has had to settle class action lawsuits due to the predatory way they handled overdraft fees [1] so don't feed me that bullshit. It was something I personally experienced and saw my parents struggle through due to the way they were paid and Chases scummy behavior.
As for pre-existing conditions that is literally how they worked before and is something that insurance companies constant lobby to go back to. Because when my mother had her stroke her insurance denied her immediately because they determined the stroke was somehow a pre-existing condition.
And ultimately your logic is incredibly flawed because profits and productivity has gone up while pay for the workers has not kept up. This isn't wealth transfer, this is the rich deciding to underpay their workers to the point that they can't survive working for them, which then gets billed to the government. Your logic also offers zero explanation why wealth is concentrating towards the wealthy because wealth transfer would imply that, you know, it's actually going to the poor people.
[1] https://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/chase-agrees-to-s...
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Um, why would it be incoherent? By all observations of perfectly coherent physics, the universe itself is currently the largest it has ever been and is growing at an ever faster pace. While perhaps your opinion is that such things should not be possible, it is clearly non-sensical to say that such a thing is incoherent when it actually seems to be the basis of the entire universe.