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Is Inequality Inevitable?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#351

Post by solveit »

amelius wrote: post #212
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One counter-example would be the cost of health-care.

That's a terrible example in the context of economic growth over millenia for the simple reason that anything resembling modern healthcare basically didn't exist as recently as a hundred years ago.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#352

Post by defterGoose »

sdfin wrote: post #341
dragonwriter wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get why lately the trend it to focus in inequality instead of focusing in poverty. Because outside of extreme poverty that is rare in the West, relative deprivation seems to be a more significant source of experienced disutility and other social dysfunction than absolute deprivation.

What are the trends of relative deprivation? I know it's not a defined and studied concept, but if the relative deprivation is in a decreasing trend, I believe that it would mean we are in a good direction. Anyway, if the problem is relative deprivation we should focus on that, instead of focusing in inequality. I believe it would be more productive to improve things. Is inequality the "cause" of relative deprivation…

See my comment above, but in response to this, doesn't "relative deprivation"=="inequality"?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#353

Post by Klinky »

tathougies wrote: post #307
WilliamEdward wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first place, hence the 'seizing' part.

But all humans of sufficient ability (except those with extreme mental handicap) have innate means of production. Even those who have lost use of their limbs have an innate means of production via their minds in the form of intellectual property. Honestly, even many with mental disability but physically capable are capable of producing value from relatively little.

Your bar is too low if you think that things are okay because "you can always become a starving artist".

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#354

Post by killjoywashere »

deehouie wrote: post #305
trentnix wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. - GK Chesterton

Albert Einstein did much of his greatest work in isolation, and he was quite proud, too.

If you read Isaacson's biography, it's hard to come away without feeling like Einstein's insights were a product of his time, that he was in some sense no more a vessel than each of us, and that vessel was continuously exchanging contents with others: his father, the family's weekly dinner guest (a local student), the classmates he cribbed notes from, the professors who found him frustrating, the playboy he tutored (and learned to smoke cigars from), his wife, the patent applications on time-keeping devices he read as a Swiss patent clerk (and his train-time-keeping metaphor), his many collaborators (Lorenz perhaps most of all), the early conferences in Paris, etc.

I am no Einstein, to be sure, but I do particularly recognize the experience he had as a teen, learning the math and engineering of his father from his father. His father and uncle, it's worth noting, built electric power generators. Mentally building an effective model of fields was surely something Einstein had to learn early, and perhaps without the math first.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#355

Post by TomMckenny »

roenxi wrote: post #301
TomMckenny wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no philosopher involved, in this case there is the wealth expended to produce an item. In your idealized example both parties are better off but the one that traded the item and took less effort to make it is comparatively better off. He will have advantages in future trades which will further increase. Not to mention a bigger voice in societal structure. (which is a tldr; of the article) Anecdotally you met…

Increasing the GDP is really easy, the government can pass a law adding a zero to all measures of money (so $10 becomes $100). Reducing inequality is also easy, confiscate people's wealth. The real problem is "people are not secure in their lifestyle" which is not addressed by the first solution and is probably exacerbated by the second. People getting antsy about inequality as a final problem instead of a symptom of…

How would printing money improve the GDP anymore than just lying about the figures? And since no one is suggesting that, I think it's kind of a straw-man.

But surely these can't seriously be the best rebuttals to the paper: that straw-man, anecdotal opinion about college campuses and physics professors and a statistics joke about, but certainly not refuting, the elephant curve. I really can't tell if these arguments are genuinely considered valid or is this just a semi-polite troll technique to shout down unpleasant information.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#356

Post by nine_k »

notJim wrote: post #336
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…

It seems like a huge distraction to claim that this study is somehow an exemplar of problems on "campuses." There are apparently 1.6 million faculty on campuses and 76 million students [hastily-googled statistics], so to claim that they have uniform beliefs about the nature of the economy seems like an extraordinary claim to make, which I'd like to see substantiated more than this.

I suspect that beliefs are also distributed non-uniformly, and 1-2 beliefs dominate the discourse, while the widely varied rest is seen as minority / fringe.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#357

Post by jlawson »

emmelaich wrote: post #274
wuliwong wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I received a Ph.D. in physics in 2010, throughout my training, my anecdotal experience was that of an echo chamber. I didn't fully realize it until I left academia. Although, it was slowly becoming apparent as the years passed. My experience was of a relatively small and closed group of physicists who reaffirmed each other's assumption that they were at the absolute peak of intellectual thought. Most of the professor…

It's analogous to weight-loss arguments. It is true that calories = calories-in - calories-out. It cannot not be true. It just isn't helpful.

I found it helpful. In a world where a million distracting influences are promising cheats, shortcuts, and easy ways to get to the goal, a single true statement to focus attention and wipe away the bullshit is incredibly useful.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#358

Post by WalterBright »

Without inequality we would not have airplanes, transatlantic cables, jet engines, electric cars, SpaceX, cloud computing, radar, internet phones, steel, automobiles, the textile industry, fuel, plentiful food, fresh fruit year round, etc.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#359

Post by jlawson »

chongli wrote: post #306
pasquinelli wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair description of the past too.

At no time in the past were we in danger of reaching the limits of our planetary resources. There was always somewhere else to go, some other resources untapped. In the future that will no longer be the case, unless we manage to settle among the stars. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The story of our society was not written with a fairytale ending. Whether we succeed and create a better future for…

Medieval and previous people were always at the limits of the resources they had the technology to access. The past was a Malthusian world. No economic growth and no population growth for thousands of years, in a world without birth control. The difference was paid by death. This is life when you're at ecological carrying capacity.

We managed to find new ways to tap resources better, more efficiently, deeper, and so on, so we revealed new carrying capacity which we haven't reached yet.

If we don't advance again the way we did before, a return the Malthusianism is possible. That should be your null hypothesis. However, spreading past Earth or transcending to entirely new ways of existing (e.g. computational life) are also possible. The future resists past-based analysis because the rules are always changing.

But there's no reason in principle that we can't tap extraplanetary resources, any more than a Roman-era tribe in Britain couldn't pump for oil in Texas. It just took a lot of steps to get there.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#360

Post by [deleted] »

ajross wrote: post #289
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 c…

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