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Is Inequality Inevitable?

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#561

Post by vannevar »

username90 wrote: post #516
tremon wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means that a small difference in skill leads to a large difference in sales That does not follow at all from your initial observation. You could just as easily state that a small difference in exposure leads to a large difference in sales, thereby taking skill out of the equation again, and thus supporting the GP's initial argument.

But exposure in the form of publishers costs money. Therefore publishers try to find authors whose work will sell, meaning that skill also makes exposure easier. And once your books sell your skills are validated, so you will have even more opportunities. But if the books doesn't sell enough then you are thrown away, and the publisher lost money. If you used your own money then you lost money betting on yourself, mon…

This is why people say "The first million was the hardest", because after you have used their skills to make a million others will trust your skills and thus give you more exposure and opportunities.

It is precisely advantages like this that drive the "trickle up" effect. To use your original example, let's say one author legitimately wrote a book that was 10% 'better' than the next best effort. As a result, many more people bought her book (let's leave aside for now the notion of winner-take-all markets, which is another factor in the skewed distribution), and now she (and her publisher) are enriched. On her next book, they can afford a lot more promotion, and with her name recognition, her next book is a huge success, even though it is 10% worse than her nearest competitor. Now they've both written two books, and they're both 1-1 in terms of quality. But the one with the first good book has two best-sellers, and the second is a failure who will probably drop out.

No one is saying that the first author is morally wrong, they're simply saying that if we, as a society, want to reward people according to their skill and effort, the current system fails in numerous cases because it is heavily biased in favor of existing wealth over talent.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#562

Post by knzhou »

anotherone15 wrote: post #550
knzhou wrote: post #435

I find the creation of physics-inspired sociological models distasteful. It's often a way of manufacturing certainty and authority through mathematical obsfucation. It always runs the same way. First, you think of some political opinion you want to support. Then you come up with a mathematically trivial toy model that throws away 99% of the structure of the problem, whose few dynamical rules are artificially chosen s…

Would you rather sociological models not contain any physics or math? What do you propose?

I would prefer an empirical approach, as some take in macroeconomics. Just parametrize things you care about in terms of measureable quantities, and go out and measure them.

Once you have that, there's no need to slap on some model that says, like people are a frustrated antiferromagnetic spin lattice on a random small world graph. It doesn't add anything. If you want to explain the results of the measurements, you can do it just as well with words.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#563

Post by snagglegaggle »

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…

Very good links, thank you. Unlike a lot of people I never really saw the inherent utility in an inflationary currency system (but admit it could have existed: just that I never saw it in practice). But criticize the fed or offshoring and you're a bigoted racist who just can't grasp the bigger picture.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#564

Post by ctdonath »

tsimionescu wrote: post #513
kortilla wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is anyone entitled to own food? If someone invests their resources to have something built (or help make it themselves), why wouldn’t they be entitled to own it? The rich daughter gets to own it because that’s what the owner wanted and the thing about owning something generally is deciding its fate. If someone builds themselves a house out of wood they chop from trees t…

My proposal is that no one person is entitled to own vastly expensive items that required the work of countless people to create. Those items should generally be collectively owned by the people who designed and built them. The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them (which includes marketing and sales people and whatever else is needed), in some democratically chosen percentage. I said not…

As one who is not involved in creation or operation of “vastly expensive” items, you have no say in the matter. Those involved do have a say, that being accepting or rejecting contracted providence of goods or services, which may or may not involve co-ownership. Distribution of profits occurs by contracting. Democracy doesn’t apply because those not involved have no say.

You are entitled to life insofar as nobody may actively take it from you. There is plenty opportunity in this country to earn; $1 per meal is enough for healthy comfort (thanks to capitalism, food is plentiful, varietal, and cheap).

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#565

Post by ctdonath »

imtringued wrote: post #540
tsimionescu wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My proposal is that no one person is entitled to own vastly expensive items that required the work of countless people to create. Those items should generally be collectively owned by the people who designed and built them. The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them (which includes marketing and sales people and whatever else is needed), in some democratically chosen percentage. I said not…

>The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them Well, economic theory says that the profits should approach zero as more and more competitors join the market and the provided goods or services become commodities. This effectively is a redistribution mechanism. The reality is a bit uglier. By the way, prevention of wealth accumulation doesn't require repossession of existing property. A simple…

Not yours to “not allow”.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#566

Post by murftown »

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…

Totally agree that wealth creation is a thing distinct from distribution, and that it matters.

However, I'm not aware of any metrics or markers for wealth creation - other than revenue / profit. So in other words, most of our attempts to study economics ignore this, just like the model in TFA. They look at successful businesses and growing GDP and infer that wealth must have been created.

Another related concept - similarly murky and unaccounted for - is wealth destruction. If wealth is defined, say, as the capacity for people to live a good life, then how often is this capacity destroyed in the pursuit of growing business? We similarly have no markers for this factor in most of our economic models that I'm aware of.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#567

Post by vannevar »

username90 wrote: post #475
vannevar wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I'm not sure this is correct, at least not on average. Take two average persons, give one of them a million dollar, then watch what their net income is the next 10 years. I'd bet that the one you gave a million dollars will have used up a large pa…

I'm not sure this is correct, at least not on average.

I assure you it is true. It is not true only if there is a negative value to capital (ie, capital essentially destroys itself). That's what you seem to be saying with your link, but that link looks at only a narrow segment of people (lottery winners) and even then, appears to merely be observing that winners subsequently have less labor income, not less overall income. Which intuitively seems reasonable---winners would be more likely to take early retirement. The idea that, all else being equal, having money means your income will go down is absurd on its face.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#568

Post by anotherone15 »

knzhou wrote: post #562
anotherone15 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather sociological models not contain any physics or math? What do you propose?

I would prefer an empirical approach, as some take in macroeconomics. Just parametrize things you care about in terms of measureable quantities, and go out and measure them. Once you have that, there's no need to slap on some model that says, like people are a frustrated antiferromagnetic spin lattice on a random small world graph. It doesn't add anything. If you want to explain the results of the measurements, you c…

What about parameters that are hard to measure?

Take for instances infectious disease models, often a very simple set of ODEs that are capable of capturing the wide ranging dynamics that we observe. One of the crucial parameters in these models is the transmission parameter, which determines the rate at which susceptibles become infected upon contact with an infected. Transmission is a function of a long string of physical, chemical, biological, social and economic variables. I am not sure how feasible it is to determine from first principles this parameter and so it is obtained from fitting the model to data. So in this case, one does not directly measure the parameter, but infer it from the data conditional on the model.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#569

Post by Qwertystop »

whatshisface wrote: post #146
Qwertystop wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"modern city", maybe not, but there's a world of difference between, say, a shack in the woods and an apartment with aircon/heating/insulation (as appropriate) and easy access to groceries. I don't know where the line is, but if you say the basic right is just "house", and that gets enforced, someone's going to try to draw that line as low as they can. Probably a few developers try to argue that if everyone gets a ho…

Evicting Jeff Bezos from wherever he lives wouldn't help a shack-dweller unless you gave Bezos' old house to the woodsman. So, I would say that the woodsman doesn't care about inequality, instead any benefit he could get would come from an improvement in his own fortunes (irrespective of what happens to anyone else). If inequality was the problem, then bad things happening to someone would help everyone who was worse…

Assuming that Bezos lives in a fairly large house (and/or has several houses), evicting him could help quite a lot of people previously living in small shacks. I grew up in a NY suburb and you could probably fit two families (three in the larger ones) in any house in the neighborhood without anyone being particularly uncomfortable, and with no construction beyond the conversion of a half-bathroom to a full-bathroom. Given funding to more thoroughly renovate, you might be able to manage three. And that's just upper-middle-class suburbia, not billionaire mansions.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#570

Post by jki275 »

fzeroracer wrote: post #361
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can describe a person's life experience just because they don't react emotionally in a single online discussion board. That's horribly unfair and a bit out of line, to be honest.

As opposed to painting people in poverty with a broad brush, saying that they either destroy value or don't generate life-sustaining value? Considering I grew up in abject poverty, I'm sorry but I'm not going to let remarks like that fly. That doesn't deserve a pass.

Most of them don't.

And I grew up in poverty too. My first real paid job paid three dollars an hour for farmwork -- in the 90s, and I thought I was living like a king.

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