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Is Inequality Inevitable?

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#611

Post by jlawson »

arcticbull wrote: post #381
jlawson wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

CI doesn't have to be 0. That's total nonsense. You think if you eat one grape per day suddenly you won't lose weight, or something? Who said anything about 0?

CI-CO is accurate if CIThat's the beauty of it. It always works. If COEven fasting, which you mentioned, only works as a means to an end. And that end is CISo many people try to follow your path, and figure out a way to manipulate complex metabolic systems they don't understand to try to wheedle the body into dropping pounds. It works only rarity, and 98% of people on this path are just deluding themselves to avoid facing the fact that they need to get CI down under CO. So they take refuge in complexity, endlessly finding ways to rationalize away the need to do the actual work.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#612

Post by ctdonath »

tsimionescu wrote: post #603
ctdonath wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would refuse a starving person your food? You have enough, why the compulsion to steal from others to “redistribute”?

I didn't talk about redistribution. I'm describing how a system could work from the ground up with a market economy but without any capitalists. How to get there is another discussion that is far more thorny. I wouldn't deny a starving person my food, though the reality is that I rarely come into contact with someone who is starving. On the other hand, a lot of restaurants and super markets do regularly deny starving…

They give away lots of excess food. Every week I take bushels of gourmet bread to food charities. I go out of my way to do so, maybe you should to rather than agitating to compel strangers out of ignorance.

The well off do far more for the poor than you think - without gov't compulsion.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#613

Post by kamaal »

vannevar wrote: post #602
kamaal wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 lo…

Note that the statement is that the two people are identical other than their wealth, so that in this case the difference in probability is independent of how the original million was acquired. That's the point.

>>Note that the statement is that the two people are identical other than their wealth

That kind of thing exists in my example too. The real problem is people are similar but not the same.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#614

Post by ctdonath »

tsimionescu wrote: post #601
ctdonath wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an ideal world. People may negotiate for whatever they see fit. It takes two to come to an agreement. It only one agrees to terms offered, how is it fair to compel the other?

A 'negotiated agreement' between a company or state and a person that would starve if they don't accept the agreement is nothing more than coercion with a nice layer of paint. Remember that we actually depend on some people literally not having a chance to eat unless they agree to collect our garbage, clean our floors etc. Do you think that a cleaning person in a contract with Google or with the city of LA had any ki…

Minimum wage is ~$7.25/hr. All one need do is work 25 minutes mundane labor a day to afford 3 square meals per day (see Twitter's @ABuckAPlate). (Corollary: min wage law prohibits anyone earning anything if they can't produce at least $7.25 value per hour.)

Collecting garbage, cleaning floors, etc has value - that's why we pay people to do it. Is it really worth more than ~$7.25/hr? would you pay someone $20/hr to do it?

A thing is worth what another will give for it. People are willing to trade $7.25 for an hour of mundane labor.

And yes, there is real negotiation power. Businesses are having to pay more, or find alternatives, for services because not enough people are willing to do those jobs. That's negotiation, in context of large numbers of people being willing to do a job.

BTW: if you're working where Google is, or in LA or the like in general, you MUST provide above-min-wage value because the carrying capacity of those areas has been reached - there are people making >$37/hr wanting to live in the same place, and $MinWage/hr can't compete with $37/hr productivity. I threw my stuff in a truck and permanently moved 1000 miles on short notice - so can others who likewise seek economically viable conditions.

I've lived off the land. Most of humanity did. If you don't want to plant seeds and build cabins (always a viable option), get busy doing something others will pay enough for.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#615

Post by vannevar »

kamaal wrote: post #613
vannevar wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the statement is that the two people are identical other than their wealth, so that in this case the difference in probability is independent of how the original million was acquired. That's the point.

>>Note that the statement is that the two people are identical other than their wealth That kind of thing exists in my example too. The real problem is people are similar but not the same.

Of course they're not the same. The point of the experiment was to show that the differences don't need to be taken into account to replicate in a model the inequality we see in reality. The implication is that, while differences between people clearly exist, they aren't necessary to explain inequality.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#616

Post by [deleted] »

tropo wrote: post #317
HammockWarrior wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illegal immigration and what happens in other countries are at best a red herring here because illegal immigrants aren't typically eligible for benefits and are typically working off the books. The US government has responsibility for its citizens, not those of Mexico or Latin America. Also keep in mind many of the proposed redistribution efforts fall squarely in the "equality of opportunity" column which you claim t…

It is misleading to say that "illegal immigrants aren't typically eligible for benefits". Eligibility for benefits happens via children and partners. The group of people thus receives benefits that are then shared. Via this mechanism, families containing non-citizens consume more benefits than families composed purely of citizens.

[deleted]

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#617

Post by qnsi »

pytester wrote: post #501
username90 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since virtually all human traits follow a Gaussian distribution, it seems like whatever the wealth-building factor is, it would also follow a Gaussian distribution. But wealth follows more of a power law distribution. You never encounter anyone 1000 times taller than average, but there are many people 1000 times wealthier than average. This is nonsense. Lets take an easy example, books, people don't want to waste t…

If you look at the actual richest people in the world though, they largely make their wealth off the hard work of others (walmart family), through some kind of gamble (finance), some kind of parasitism (unearned income like interest) or by monopolizing that "magically existing wealth the OP doesn't believe in" (e.g. saudi arabian oil). For every JK Rowling or Steve Jobs there's maybe 100 who either fully or mostly ex…

More than half billionaires are self-made.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#618

Post by tsimionescu »

ctdonath wrote: post #614
tsimionescu wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'negotiated agreement' between a company or state and a person that would starve if they don't accept the agreement is nothing more than coercion with a nice layer of paint. Remember that we actually depend on some people literally not having a chance to eat unless they agree to collect our garbage, clean our floors etc. Do you think that a cleaning person in a contract with Google or with the city of LA had any ki…

Minimum wage is ~$7.25/hr. All one need do is work 25 minutes mundane labor a day to afford 3 square meals per day (see Twitter's @ABuckAPlate). (Corollary: min wage law prohibits anyone earning anything if they can't produce at least $7.25 value per hour.) Collecting garbage, cleaning floors, etc has value - that's why we pay people to do it. Is it really worth more than ~$7.25/hr? would you pay someone $20/hr to do…

> If you don't want to plant seeds and build cabins (always a viable option), get busy doing something others will pay enough for.

How will you buy the land to build your cabin and plant your seeds on? We live in a system where all of the land is already owned.

> All one need do is work 25 minutes mundane labor a day to afford 3 square meals per day

This is just so wrong... Again, you can't have a healthy diet with 3 dollars a day. You also can't keep a job if all you earn is food money - you also have to have a place to live and shower, you have to have clean, non-raggedy clothes, a car, gasoline, maintenance for the car and maybe washing machine, health insurance so your life doesn't crumble at the smallest sign of disease, and possibly others. These are all necessary in order to even have that job which you claim lets you eat for 25 minutes of work a day.

> Collecting garbage, cleaning floors, etc has value - that's why we pay people to do it. Is it really worth more than ~$7.25/hr? would you pay someone $20/hr to do it?

Your thinking about this the wrong way around. Nobody would be willing to collect garbage for 7.25 if they had some alternative. It is essentially a job of desperation. So, it is vital for us as a society that there are always enough people desperate enough that they are even willing to collect garbage to make some money.

And in a worker driven job market (by which I mean, a job market where employers compete for workers, instead of the current economy, where mostly workers compete to find employment), garbage collection would be a high-paying job, precisely because it is absolutely vital for any community, and no one really wants to do it.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#619

Post by zepto »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #593
zepto wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement you made about google issuing more shares has nothing to do with my logic and is completely irrelevant. You are right that Bezos selling shares does not change the amount of capital Amazon has. The fact that nobody has enough money to buy all of Amazon from Bezos is also completely irrelevant. You are right that Bezos exchanging stock for real estate doesn’t reduce his wealth unless the real estate is o…

> The statement you made about google issuing more shares has nothing to do with my logic and is completely irrelevant. Your logic is that shares are money, but companies can print shares, which would imply that they could print money. The shares are only valuable because they represent the company. The value in the shares isn't independent or duplicative of the value of the company. If the company burned to the grou…

“Your logic is that shares are money, but companies can print shares, which would imply that they could print money.”

That is not my logic. You have made that up our of nowhere.

Obviously printing more shares leads to dilution and doesn’t increase the overall value of the outstanding shares.

But that’s just like money too - printing more money leads to devaluation of the currency.

So you are wrong, and clearly shares can be used just like money.

I agree with you that selling AdTech/Google shares doesn’t anything to reduce the resources that Google can spend on targeting ads.

But that’s not what our conversation has been about.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#620

Post by pdonis »

Retric wrote: post #510
pdonis wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re just describing what makes up that ~100x growth. I don't think it's 100x; I think it's a lot more. I was giving reasons why I think that. > the basket of goods created back then is less valuable than what we create today. But, that does not somehow mean the value created back then is meaningless. I never said it was. > combine harvesters are more efficient than hand tools, but they both end up harvesting gai…

> I was giving reasons why I think that. I am not saying you’re being disingenuous, but you listed stuff without context. A 1% slice of a pie looks tiny, you need numbers to judge these things not lists. The context is farmers and ranchers still make up 1.3% of the labor force in the US, but globally 28% of the population are just farmers. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.agr.empl.zs Sure, more productive soci…

Everything you are saying is irrelevant to the argument I was making. My whole point is that the per capita GDP growth from then to now is not just a matter of us being more than 100x better at farming, or other things that we do now that they also did then; it is a matter of us being able to do things that did not event exist and were not even conceivable in the Stone Age.
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