241–250 of 355 posts
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That's rubbish. A lot of rich people suffer from depression, to the point of suicide.
Beyond the surface-level pithiness of the joke, the point is that having money may not guarantee happiness, but it makes it a lot easier to distract oneself with viscerally pleasant experiences and engage in new hobbies that may in fact lead to genuine happiness.
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This seems like an odd question. Obviously we should prefer accidental death among young people vs. that which is self-inflicted, while hoping that the overall number of deaths diminishes, regardless of circumstance. But I don’t think a spike in youth suicide is something we should hand waive away in any case.
We can have get accidental death up to second place by banning railings, air bags, helmets, and tire tread patterns. In other words, was there really a spike in youth suicide or did it just climb in rank because we reduced other causes of death? Something must be first, something must be second, and so on.
https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-suicide-rates-rising-...
So there’s unequivocally a spike.
The only argument you could really make is that suicide rates have been rising across the US since 1999, up in most states and up by 30% in half of all states, making youth suicide of a part with the broader trend. But I don’t think this is any less disheartening.
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% change in real mean wealth. https://psmag.com/economics/wealth-inequality-and-the-great-...
When you measure wealth as including home equity, as this article does, this is bound to happen in 2007. I'm not sure it tells us anything meaningful except that home prices were way out of whack and for many people their home is a substantial % of their wealth.
Perceptible gap widening since 2007:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
Why do we need to prevent suicide? Maybe we need to remove the stigma around it so that people who got dealt a shit hand, aren't further burdened by getting shamed by everyone around them for wanting to end it.
We have too many people, it'd be an improvement for those who want to live and those who don't, if those who do not, decided to spend a few months doing whatever they wanted that isn't harming anyone else, and proceeding to peacefully move on with it.
It'd force shit parents, shit communities and shit people in general, to re-examine their way of life, if those around them would rather cease to exist, than co-exist with them. It'd be a massive move in the direction of honesty, dignity and respect for one another - something humans rarely engage in.
I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings. Could this have to do with the mounting inequality? It seems the standard indicators for the health of the economy are breaking because wealth just keeps pooling near the top. So what this study could be saying is,…
This feels like the sort of thing that's really going to depend on the definition of mass shooting used. Inner city African American gang violence is the majority of "3+ killed by gun at once" incidents, and if your definition includes that then that's what you'll be measuring. And on the other hand if you use "2+ unrelated people killed or injured including shooter, not gang related" like some advocacy groups do you'll get different results, and if you use what most people would consider a mass shooting (3+ unrelated people killed in public place not including shooter excluding gang violence, or "something that shows up on national news") you'll have minimal data to go off of since those events happen <10x/yr.
I wonder what would happen to the suicide rate with medicare for all, and creating a max-wage that is (avg of contractors + employees * 150), or something similar, w/ additional 'bonus' multipliers for increasing # of U.S. hired. UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight. There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecu…
Have been reading Rutger Bregman’s book and UBI seems to be an incredible money saver and immense benefit. It would take however a big jump in consciousness to do something like this because who would take the shorty jobs paying 1/3 living wage if no one is afraid Of homelessness?
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I think a max wage totally makes sense, because nobody is more than a modest constant times more productive than anyone else, and anything created by a person is always built on existing knowledge and constructs created by society. Also, risk does not really exist anymore these days (with minimum wages, financial constructs around bankruptcy, etc.)
A lesson from history shows this not to be the case: hand-wrought nails were such a precious and militarily significant commodity in Roman England, that when the legion left, they painstakingly concealed their hoard to prevent the locals gaining access to them. Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human interve…
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Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments. [1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...
I really hope we do not get a UBI in any current forms. I know the second the stores realize that every person now has 'x' amount of dollars to spend, they will raise the prices to match the most they can extract. What I wish Canada would do instead is establish some sort of Universal Basic Rights like every man woman and child is entitled to 5lbs of potatoes a week, 1 gallon of milk, 1 pound of carrots, ect. I as a…
'Trading' is a complex little signalling display where the seller shows how hard it is to produce a good (represented in price) and the buyer signals that they have previously contributed enough of some sort of resource to justify the production of the good (represented by having the money to pay the price).
UBI messes with that by allowing everyone to signal they contributed economically even if they did not. This effectively redistributes resources contributed by someone who is economically productive to someone who is not.
The impacts of that are hard to nail down. It might cause some prices to rise and other prices to fall. It will likely cause less resources to be allocated to the future; because economically unproductive folks tend not to invest in the future. However it is much more efficient than the bureaucratic complexity of a modern welfare state and easier to reason about.
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I think 99% is an overkill. If you assume 7% ROI and 2% inflation then a 70% top marginal bracket (combined with unifying capital gains and income) would make it very hard to maintain wealth. To get rid of these high levels of inequality we don't need to make it impossible to be rich, just make it very hard to be rich and let nature take its course. Note that in my lifetime the top marginal tax bracket has been over…
What about those who are already rich? Wouldn't this simply impair income mobility? You would have to strip income inequality, then reduce income mobility - but inevitably someone would become wealthy, further cementing their lead.
At 2% inflation, it's not possible to maintain $100M of wealth without also having $2M in annual income. If every dollar over $1M in income were taxed at 70%, then you would need over $4M in annual income, plus more than twice your annual expenditures to maintain that level of wealth.
4% rent on $100M in assets is probably sustainable over a long time, so if you live frugally, you could likely self-sustain that level of wealth.
If you have $1B in assets and make a 7% return (which is my conservative estimate of the maximum long-term rent you could extract on a large fortune) then that's $70M return in income, essentially all of which is taxed at the 70% rate, leaving $21M remaining, $20M of which is "lost" due to inflation.
This means that if you have a billion dollars and want to live just off of rents, you would need to both invest prudently, and live on expenses of no more than $1M per year. Mess up either and you are on track to leave the billionaire's club.
In addition, consider an heir who gets a high-paying professional job with a rags-to-riches one. The one with no wealth isn't having unearned income to pad their tax bracket, so the marginal pay they get for working is much higher than the heir who is also collecting investment income, thus allowing them to grow their wealth faster if they have an identical savings rate.
The US right now has an income tax scheme that is regressive for wealth because wealthy people have a greater fraction of their income in the form of long-term capital gains. GP suggested making it extremely progressive vs wealth, and I'm merely pointing out that a properly implemented wealth-blind income tax will work out to be progressive vs wealth due to inflation.
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That's rubbish. A lot of rich people suffer from depression, to the point of suicide.
Beyond the surface-level pithiness of the joke, the point is that having money may not guarantee happiness, but it makes it a lot easier to distract oneself with viscerally pleasant experiences and engage in new hobbies that may in fact lead to genuine happiness.
Whether or not it generates happiness, money can make happiness more visible. That's worth a moment of reflection.