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Is Inequality Inevitable?

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#441

Post by arcticbull »

esyir wrote: post #436
arcticbull wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sugar and insulin response are critical to weight loss. The more overweight, the more you're insulin resistant, the harder it is to actually lose weight. Once you hit metabolic syndrome you've got a big problem on your hands. The CI-CO model is not sufficient to model weight loss effectively. Especially since with caloric restriction your BMR slows down to match your reduced intake (which doesn't happen with fasting,…

That's an extreme overgeneralization that's wrong in just the right places to be misleading. While there is a reduction in energy expenditure associated with the reduction of caloric intake, it is not equivalent to the reduction in caloric intake. For instance, in a study of obese women, a reduction of (4.3 +-(4.6) kcal/kg) was observed in a calorie restriction diet of 20kcal/kg Similarly, in a different study, a 30%…

> That's an extreme overgeneralization that's wrong in just the right places to be misleading. While there is a reduction in energy expenditure associated with the reduction of caloric intake, it is not equivalent to the reduction in caloric intake.

I didn't mean to imply that it was 1:1, just that the model doesn't hold entirely.

> CI-CO is not a perfect model, in that it doesn't perfectly estimate weight loss rates, but the general concept holds true.

In general, I suppose, however most people aren't trying to lose weight but rather fat. Consuming sugar causes a spike in insulin, and insulin triggers the uptake of sugar in the blood by adipose tissue as fat, and actively prevents the release of fats stored therein. [1]

So in the most literal sense, CI-CO works, in that (net of the 16% reduction in TEE relative to your reduction in CI per your data) you're going to need to get the calories from somewhere. However, if you eat 30% less calories than your BMR entirely as sugar, you're much more likely to be burning alcohol, glycogen and protein than fat, certainly in the near term.

If you combine that with the "eat 6 meals per day" fad and you're in for a seriously tough time losing fat. On the other hand if you at 30% less calories than your BMR entirely as sugar in one sitting over 20 minutes and fasted the remaining 23h30 you may actually lose fat, since that'll give your body time with low insulin levels.

Let me re-state: CI-CO is a very inadequate model for losing fat.

[1] https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2018/jan/drop-in-both-insuli...

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#442

Post by jancsika »

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.

> It turns out that technology allows for capital to be substituted directly for labor.

And which Capitalist Paradise Cruise ship do you picture yourself manning for this critique? Elsevier?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#443

Post by roenxi »

TomMckenny wrote: post #415
roenxi wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The GDP would be 10 times higher. It wouldn't be a lie. 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…

We seem to be in furious agreement on most points, but since you asked...

> I'd be interested in where one hears that printing money increases the GDP

That one is self evident. I'm talking about nominal GDP not real GDP.

> inequality is undetectable

Nobody in my building could order the people in my building by wealth or income. You can't order the commentators on this article by wealth or income. It is unlikely anyone you know could tell you how much wealthier the wealthiest person in your city is than they are. I'm much more clued in to the wealth & income statistics than most people, and I have no idea what the wealth gap is between me and the people in my social circle where the range is large.

The only way to detect wealth inequality is for someone to specifically go and survey it, using a somewhat artificial and abstract construct like GINI. Inequality doesn't have a measurable impact on anyone's daily life and cannot be detected without putting in a large and special effort. Compare that to crime, poverty or homelessness which are extremely easy to detect and potentially have a real everyday impact.

> and ending anti-trust enforcement et al makes a market healthier.

I'm pretty sure I didn't say that.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#444

Post by dv_dt »

vannevar wrote: post #397
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'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…

I think if you're studying the propagation of wealth distribution, how the wealth is produced matters, because there are threshholds below which it's more difficult for individual actors to start or expand productive economic activity. You see a hint of that in economic data where high-inequality economies show lower growth than more equal economies.

I think of it as something like a phase change, with insufficient energy applied equally enough across enough atoms you can't make it from solid to liquid and have a much lower mix rate in the economy.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#445

Post by tunesmith »

zjaffee wrote: post #98
tunesmith wrote: post #10

Have 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…

The least unequal countries from the time they started measuring GINI have had a value between 0.250 and 0.300, including the likes of the Soviet Union which was on the upper end of that range, and many former eastern block countries alongside Scandinavian countries who are currently at the lower end of that range. Note that these values are after taxes and transfers. I think the goal, especially within an economy mo…

Probably the most on-point answer in this subthread, thanks!

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#446

Post by dv_dt »

wuliwong wrote: post #230
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 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…

One of may favorite quotes about models is (paraphrased): All models are wrong, but some models are useful.

I see it most often attributed to George Box, a statistician, but it's not completely clear he was the originator. In physics you have a luxury of verifying models at many empiric touchpoints via data collected in controlled or precisely measurable conditions. Comparatively in economics it's difficult to establish you have a useful model because the empiric data is difficult, and with unmeasurable aspects around human choices.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#447

Post by tsimionescu »

taneq wrote: post #379
pmiller2 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you go about building your own means of production for creating modern computers?

It took a large part of modern industry working cooperatively for decades to build the tooling to make ICs. If your commune wants to make a similar effort then there’s nothing stopping you. If you don’t then you’re not entitled to own a chip fab.

Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is some rich daughter entitled to own a chip fab? Because she is in the current system, while anyone else would have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#448

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

Uhuhreally wrote: post #167
Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #153

What if there's a need for inequality? I.e. if everyone is about same as everyone else, how would the society organize any work that requires coordinated effort of many people? How would it maintain the required discipline?

what then is the optimum level of inequality ? What if 1 person owned all the money and everybody else worked for the promise of money ? Would that be enough inequality ?

Enough to get things going, I guess, but very inefficient, because he would have to make too many decisions himself and there would be no way to actually control the operations. This is the Soviet Union model where the recipe for a cake in Estonia had to be approved in Moscow and the level of falsifications in what should be reliable internal reports was unprecedented.

My point is that to organize coordinated work there must be some way to persuade people to comply and endure hardships, like working at nights. I see roughly three: slavery (inequality in offensive power?), "economic inequality" in capitalism, and spiritual leadership (inequality in wisdom). I like the latter the most, but it's hard to scale, and I prefer economic inequality to slavery any day.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#449

Post by taneq »

tsimionescu wrote: post #447
taneq wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took a large part of modern industry working cooperatively for decades to build the tooling to make ICs. If your commune wants to make a similar effort then there’s nothing stopping you. If you don’t then you’re not entitled to own a chip fab.

Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is some rich daughter entitled to own a chip fab? Because she is in the current system, while anyone else would have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one.

Ok so they do that, they organise people and get everyone working together (which, while it’s not generally acknowledged in this kind of conversation, IS work and DOES count as creating value) and by the time they’re old, they own a chip fab. That’s ok, right? It’s fair? If they build it, or pay other people to build it in a fair trade of money for services, then they own it?

So if they own it, they can do what they like with it.

Including give it to their daughter.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#450

Post by kamaal »

vannevar wrote: post #397
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'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…

>>someone with 1 million dollars is astronomically more likely to make another million dollars than someone with 100 dollars, even if the two people are otherwise identical, and it seems pretty unlikely that wealth creation has much to do with the distribution we see.

Someone who scores 85 marks in an exam is more likely to score 95 with a little more effort than some one who scores 35 is likely to score 85 with a lot of effort. This is for a very simple reason that to get to 85 requires a lot of effort, which builds a whole range of human qualities along the way.

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