411–420 of 628 posts
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Economic growth is the art of producing more value using the same amount of finite resources.
...by extracting more and more of those resources until they're gone.
Here are some facts showing the opposite:
https://reason.com/2019/10/09/the-economy-keeps-growing-but-...
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".
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With organisation and efficiency, providing basic needs to people is way easier than you think. With the wealth of a single rich country, food water and shelter (which are already in excess in rich areas) can be distributed to them. So given how possible it is without any real downside to you, your argument for not helping people essentially boils down to "i don't care about them".
> So given how possible it is without any real downside to you I would lose money. > boils down to "i don't care about them". Exactly, I don't care about the poor. The only reason we fetishize them is because of Christian influence on society. You go to Japan and Singapore and we always praise them for clean streets. They don't treat the poor well. If we raise taxes I don't think the people I would be giving money to…
I disagree. I'd argue the amount of money you "lose" due to redistribution is actually MUCH less than the additional value you are able to output due to social stability. You cannot be entirely decoupled from your environment - and that environment is rapidly globalizing. That's not to say that balance can't become skewed in the future, or that other communities haven't had bad balances elsewhere otherwise. But, its not a one or the other, its more of a balancing act. Some redistribution is likely good - too much is definitely bad.
Specifically, sister comments are arguing redistribution is likely net-positive for everyone at least up to the point of providing basic needs (food, water, shelter) exactly because without those things people become disruptive. To argue that "I/we can fight anyone becoming disruptive" ignores the fact that that fighting takes away from other productive ventures (and not to mention is a wee arrogant).
EG: I can make 100$ of value a day if I don't have to constantly fight for me and mine. Forfeiting 30$ of it makes sure that everyone around me is happy enough not to threaten me. If they were starving and began threatening me (or my tools), my output drops to 10$ because i spend most of my efforts in looking out for myself/mine rather than collaborating. I'm now MUCH worse off than if i participated in some well-moderated redistribution.
If you disagree with the $100-$10 output reduction, i recommend you go try to do the same job you do now in a war-torn or economically repressed country (odds are you won't be able to find it, or it'll pay much, much less). I believe every developed nation has social safety nets precisely because of the economic sweet spot it enables.
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It's not part of the model because, if you're studying how wealth gets distributed rather than how it is produced, it doesn't matter. I'm guessing that your disquiet at this notion comes from the possibility that everyone is creating their own wealth, and to some extent that is no doubt true. But if you start with the simplifying assumption that everyone's wealth creation ability is equal, and you just look at distri…
> if you're studying how wealth gets distributed rather than how it is produced, it doesn't matter. I know nothing of this, but how can distribution be understood without the forces that drive it?
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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…
The GDP would be 10 times higher. It wouldn't be a lie. If the government wasn't completely blatant about it maybe store owners would only raise their prices by 9.95x and there might be a real GDP boost as well. Is it stupid? Yes. Is it a straw man? Not so much compared to what is done in practice. When people seriously say that the policy is to "stimulate the economy" they mean incentivising people to consume rather…
That would mean Venezuela, top in the world for printing money, has the highest GDP growth. Zimbawe and Argentina would be next.[1] In the event one might claim they are, here[2] is the actuall GDP growth rate by country.
>As for GDP it is generally accepted that setting up a free market and leaving it alone maximises the GDP.
The highest per-capita GDPs are in exactly those countries which monitor and adjust the market, for example the Scandaniavn countries. And in the US, the period 1945-1980 saw vastly more regulation and taxation than 1980-today yet vastly greater growth. So evidentilly, modest regulation and taxition and zealous anti-trust enforcemnt are actually good for an economy. Far from generally accepted, very few economist disregard all evidence and assert zero regulation means maximum growth.
> Inequality is not a problem - people can't even detect inequality!
The existence of inequality is not remotely controversial and is trivial to measure, for example with the GINI and even the absurdly blunt Elephant Curve. And indeed, vast swathes of the population very much feel the decline in their quality of life and say so loudly and are electing lunatic politicians as a consequence.
Actually, if you happen to have a reference, I'd be interested in where one hears that printing money increases the GDP, inequality is undetectable and ending anti-trust enforcement et al makes a market healthier.
>doesn't involve confiscation and redistribution of some form or another
One could call gasoline tax "confiscation" bridges toll "redistribution" and, on the other side, call rent "theft". Calling stimulus spending "confiscation" is as extreme as saying that wealth was "stolen from the proletariat in the first place". I humbly suggest it is not helpful. At any rate, as further proven by this paper, the solution to both QoL declines created by inequality as well as a stagant GDP is a wealth tax used to increase consumer spending power.
> the elephant curve can reasonably be interpreted as a massive success story that we can all be proud of as millions are lifted up to a better standard of living.
Then how is ridiculing its reality a refutation of this paper? And the rise of devolping countires is not in dispute. The problem at hand is the preciptous decline for those who lost out and who are still loosing. And who, as it turns out, are the middle and lowerclass members of the richest countries which also contain the people that benefited by far the most.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inflation...
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I don't know what the statistic for this was 50 years ago, but today 38% of federal income tax revenues come from the 1%.
And the top 1% earn 2x as much of the income as they did 50 years ago, but don't pay 2x more of the share of income tax. Meaning that income tax is less progressive now. Also the 38% number that right wing groups like to throw around is very carefully crafted to avoid FICA taxes, which account for a much larger percentage of the tax burden for lower income earners. And the social security component goes away after th…
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I don't know what the statistic for this was 50 years ago, but today 38% of federal income tax revenues come from the 1%.
Maybe it should be more like 50% because doesn't the 1% have 50% of all assets?
Wealth is less equally distributed than income or Tinder likes, because it's an antiderivative of income distribution, also completely natural. And also because of the generational factor: you are very unlikely to get swiped right because of who your dad was, but your dad could have left you some cash or connections.
And yes, income is less equally distributed now than in 2008 exactly for the same reason as millenials having less sex on average than X-ers had in 2008: because we now have Tinder and it makes picking best partners a lot easier, resulting in top 1% best having sex with everyone with just scaps left for others. Money follows the same way due to the same factor of the smartphones and the Internet in general: success has become infinitely scalable.
It's extremely hard to do anything at all about it. Maybe we just need to know about this as a fact of life and build social constructs to contain the resulting pressures.
[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
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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…
I think you're a bit burnt out from physics, thus this rather cynical view of physicists' approach to an important economic problem. The mathematical models you find in the works of many highly regarded economists are even more simplistic, more vulnerable to criticism. "When you have such hubris and make such simple mistakes..." that pronoun "you" should be the economists!
That's why econometrics is a thing, that's why most economists nowadays are taught statistics, computer programming, advanced maths, etc... It's why there's a different process used to describe why things happen in a paper vs. predicting real world numbers.
Let's pose the opposite: Is it possible to enforce that 8 billion people be and have exactly the same? Seems pretty obviously absurd.
Is it not worth trying to get as close to that as possible, though?
The answer to all is you can't because it's inherently utopian. You can set a legal framework and follow and that's the best you can do. That can involve programs that are designed to help the poor or redistribute but the notion of trying to micromanage everyone into being equal or even close is absurd.