Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Inequality Inevitable?

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–628 of 628 posts

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#621

Post by michelinman »

anm89 wrote: post #554
michelinman wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the public versions, I promise it's much worse; A little light reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glencore , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura . Claude died.

Ok, so someone was indicted for fraud.He's in jail as he should be. Many janitors have committed felonies. No one tries to shut down janitoring. You seem to have a very simplistic worldview.

Back at you? You've never worked in finance or you are a shill. Bye, bye. Good Luck.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#623

Post by joeblow9999 »

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…

so?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#624

Post by learc83 »

WalterBright wrote: post #609
learc83 wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't get to be a billionaire by being bad at managing your money, nor do you get to be a billionaire by investing in less productive investments. Since close to half of America's billionaires inherited their fortunes, that's not really something you can prove. And that fact that it makes money doesn't necessarily mean it's beneficial to society, nor does it even mean it's the most economically productive possib…

You're going to have a tough row to hoe convincing anyone that the people who make the most money from their investments aren't the best at productively investing money.

1. There's no way to prove that. We aren't a pure meritocracy. There's a huge element of luck to becoming a billionaire. So it's very likely that there are > 600 people out of the 330 million non billionaires who are at least as good or better at investing than the current billionaires.

2. Even if we do assume that the current billionaires are better at making money individually, there are still advantages to collective action. That is to say that taking 10% from the most individually productive members of society and building an interstate system likely produces more societal and economic benefit than whatever they would have done with the that money individually.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#625

Post by Retric »

pdonis wrote: post #620
Retric wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In what way is it irrelevant?

If more than 6% of current GDP is from farming, which it is, then everything else adds up to less than 20x the value farming provides. That’s just simple math.

So, we can just compare agricultural production and absolutely ignore everything else because it’s already included in the above calculation.

PS: Now you can argue that you care more about the internet or healthcare than a meal. But, I guarantee you would quickly change your mind if you had not eaten in several months. Food is an absolutely required and unlike air and water not naturally available for free in vast quantities.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#627

Post by ctdonath »

tsimionescu wrote: post #618
ctdonath wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you don't want a solution, then you will fail.

I frequently make healthy meals for $1/plate; don't tell me I can't when I do. Covering meals in 25 minutes or less means time earn for other needs. Give me specifics, and a willingness to make money work, and I'll give you good inexpensive solutions to all needs.

The notion of a "worker driven job market", where menial tasks make enormous salaries, or "there should be some alternative", is pure fantasy. Of course everyone has alternatives: anyone can pick a preferred job, find an open position for it, and apply. Supply-and-demand is an economic law: garbage collection is not a high-paying job, because there's always someone willing to do it for less. You think GC should be high-paying, but you're not willing to pay someone high to do it; concocting (and forcing on others) a society inclined as you indicate would quickly devolve back to what we have now, precisely because easy & widely-available jobs are not worth high pay.

Bottom line: it takes a certain amount of effort to live off the land (go watch Primitive Technology on YouTube); everything else is an alternative because we contract for better options, and wishing for better doesn't work.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#628

Post by pietrovismara »

sdfin wrote: post #585
pietrovismara wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because both inequality and poverty matter. Solving poverty is a matter of decency for all humanity and it would greatly improve our society. Solving inequality is as important, why? Because in a society where greed and profit motive trump any other ethic, we can't have individuals as powerful as states, thanks to the wealth they accumulated, partly, stealing from states. Earning billions and finding ways to not pay…

You say that individuals with power may do bad things and states with power do good things. Yes, that can happen. But also there may be individuals with power that do very good things and states with power that do very bad things.

True, but states have rules, and in a democracy we as people determine the rules (in theory). Individuals as powerful as a state on the other hand have no rule. I want to have a say on what our resources are used for, not leave the decision to an individual who by the way has very probably got rich through morally questionable business practices.
Post reply on HN