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Is Inequality Inevitable?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#281

Post by tropo »

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…

That graph shows productivity and compensation growing together, then diverging right in the 1970s. This would be expected if we suddenly got a large supply of labor. You can see exactly that on this other graph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chart_of_foreign_born_in_...

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#282

Post by sachdevap »

SI_Rob wrote: post #268
dre54673 wrote: post #189

Earlier 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".

This is the one tic that makes it grating for me to listen to anything spoken by Noam Chomsky (interviews, discussions, monologues etc. - his written material not so much), regardless of how persuasive I may find his arguments. Add "you can look it up" to the list, a frequent Chomskyism which sounds like a casual declaration of confidence in his sources but in effect functions as a rhetorical control device, in that…

I would suggest that your perception of his use of the phrase is just your perception. I have listened to him often, and never found him to be arrogant. He is not passively asserting that the listener is uninformed. He is just saying that the sources are abundant and easily available. Not to mention, he often cites people whose work he is referring to. If you are familiar with the work he is referring to, he is clearly not assigning homework to you. If you are not familiar, I don't see how it is arrogant to ask someone to familiarize themselves with a given perspective on the subject matter where sources are easily available.

And to assume that he does not have authority as an expert in a myriad of topics seems to be giving him little credit.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#283

Post by sachdevap »

Empact wrote: post #232
dre54673 wrote: post #189

Earlier 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.

> "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader

I don't think that is the reason for it being inappropriate. In my opinion, such phrases are a result intellectual laziness, of which I am also guilty at times.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#284

Post by clairity »

noonespecial wrote: post #271
ihm wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A funny thing happened on the way to the worker's paradise. It turns out that technology allows for capital to be substituted directly for labor. Its starting to look like so much so that labor may become altogether unnecessary (and so without any value at all). That leaves us in a pretty tight spot under the current orthodoxy.

in such cases, labor is being leveraged, not obviated. the labor shifts to those who build, monitor, and maintain the machines doing the work that used to be done directly by laborers. capital is the accumulation of the fruits of our (leveraged) labor. that we privilege capital is why we’re in a tight spot, rather than labor not being the basis of value.

the miracle is that we can build more while doing less, but nothing gets built if we do nothing at all (e.g., wealth concentration).

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#285

Post by viburnum »

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…

Sugarscape is probably what you want.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#286

Post by fzeroracer »

wang_li wrote: post #276
fzeroracer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't see why you think I'm not educated on the topic. I, at least, can discern what's relevant to the question of which way wealth is transferred. I am aware of the complaints about how banks process transactions in and out of customer accounts. It's a moot point for two reasons. First, the complaint boils down to whether a bank making a checking account available is also an agreement to extend small value, short…

First, I can tell that you've never experienced poverty in your life because saying it's 'as simple as that' ignores the times when poor people need to purchase something right away. They deposit a check into their account, then go shopping because that money SHOULD BE IN THEIR ACCOUNT and they desperately need things like food or basic amenities. Then they get pinged with overdraft fees because the bank decided not to cash that check right away, instead delaying it so they can collect overdraft fees.

As for your second point, calling 'profit and productivity irrelevant' is ridiculously flippant because profit and productivity doesn't come from the void. It's generated by people. So let me illustrate:

Person A is 'creating' $1000/year in value.

Person B is 'short' $300/year in order to survive.

Person A employs Person B. The reason why Person B is short of funds is because Person A is earning their value from Person B and not properly distributing that wealth down through labor to Person B. Ergo, the situation isn't some sort of 'wealth transfer', it's the result of someone not being fairly compensated for their work.

What you're calling 'wealth transfer' is the result of money accumulating towards the top, which results in the wealthy having to either pay more to support the bottom percent or let them die. Software engineers generate many more times their income in value to the companies that employ them. Which means money floats to the top as companies try to depress wages to maximize profit margins.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#287

Post by dre54673 »

Empact wrote: post #232
dre54673 wrote: post #189

Earlier 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.

I'll add that I think your comment was interesting which is part of why I commented on it. My comment was meant to be generic and the only reason I commented here was that I saw this thread was popular and your comment was near the top. So it is not a critique of the information and it was a bit unfair to call you out. I am hoping others consider not using those phrases so often. I've noticed very smart people use it a lot, probably because these things are indeed trivial to them. But it does not help anyone understand their arguments. Many times just removing the statement makes the argument more understandable as there is less noise.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#288

Post by thayne »

Why is this surprising? Wealth provides the means to acquire more wealth, so of course any initial inequality will tend to intensify without some mechanism to redistribute wealth among those with less wealth.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#289

Post by ajross »

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…

That seems like a giant strawman to me. What "enlightened campus philosphers" (or "the wise", if those people are different) specifically are you arguing with? Does it include any actual academic economists? I mean, you're talking about stuff that sounds specific, but for the life of me I can't see exactly what opinions you're arguing against.

Inequality isn't magic. It goes up and down in response to both economic cycles and public policy. It's been set all all sorts of levels over history, and right now is at a post-industrial zenith and getting higher rapidly. And some of us think that's bad, for reasons of simple fairness.

And lots of actual academics agree with this, and have pretty solid numerate arguments that might convince you if you were willing to read them.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#290

Post by pasquinelli »

chongli wrote: post #270
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…

The Earth has finite resources: finite land, finite minerals, finite water, finite energy. When people accumulate vast amounts of wealth, they place a large portion of these finite resources under their own control. If we allow people and families to accumulate wealth indefinitely, it’s not hard to imagine a future whereby a very small elite control a vast majority of the resources. In this future, people can still c…

That's a fair description of the past too.
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