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Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

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Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#41

Post by dang »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #18
mcntsh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am still unable to fathom why he thinks inequality is a problem in and of itself. Hunger, famine, war, disease, we all understand are bad because they have negative consequences on real human lives. Jeff Bezos owning 12% of Amazon does not make me any worse off and if he owned 11% instead it would not make my life any better. Massive income inequality impacts social and economic mobility within a society. If 1% o…

Labor doesn’t create all value.

That's not what the GP said. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note this one:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Also the ones about substantive commenting and ideological battle. The last thing we need is another Marxism flamewar.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#42

Post by dang »

grandridge wrote: post #31

Piketty is a fool. End central banking and lender of last resort. That is it. There will still be a natural order of poor and rich just like every other natural system but it will not be as extreme and it will not reward the wrong people

Please make your points without calling names. Maybe you don't owe Piketty better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#43

Post by dang »

norgie wrote: post #5
missedthecue wrote: post #2

I am still unable to fathom why he thinks inequality is a problem in and of itself. Hunger, famine, war, disease, we all understand are bad because they have negative consequences on real human lives. Jeff Bezos owning 12% of Amazon does not make me any worse off and if he owned 11% instead it would not make my life any better. Now there are certain things that can that can contribute to people accumulating excessive…

Pretty sure this just makes you a fucking moron.

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how ignorant someone else is or you feel they are.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN as intended, we'd be grateful.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#44

Post by supercanuck »

missedthecue wrote: post #39
supercanuck wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem in, and of itself, is not that Jeff Bozos has 100B, it is that by Jeff Bezos having 100M, he is able to bend the political environment to benefit him. creating more wealth and reducing the wealth of others. The tax code is a great example of that. Piketty's book, clearly demonstrates that. By the way, for every "Bezos", there is a Walmart Heiress who simply chose the right womb to come out of, and while B…

Then the solution should not be to take Bezos share in this business. Like I said earlier, there is no clear point where someone's wealth stops giving them influence. The solution should be to increase the rigidity of government. But Piketty does not advocate that.

You don’t seem the type to be persuaded to a progressive tax system or a change to property rights. So unless you have a different proposal to fix the system, assuming you even recognize it as a problem, their really isn’t anywhere to go from here.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#45

Post by mcv »

missedthecue wrote: post #36
mcv wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in Washington (or elsewhere) who wield a lot of power without being rich, wield that power because it has been delegated to them. They are accountable for that power. Rich people are not, but probably should be. The problem isn't merely the concentration of power, it's the concentration of unaccountable power. This is also why people are upset about secret courts and lack of congressional oversight over secret…

>People in Washington (or elsewhere) who wield a lot of power without being rich, wield that power because it has been delegated to them. They are accountable for that power. Rich people are not, but probably should be. I specified the qualifier "unelected"

There are more kinds of delegated power, though.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#46

Post by grandridge »

dang wrote: post #42
grandridge wrote: post #31

Piketty is a fool. End central banking and lender of last resort. That is it. There will still be a natural order of poor and rich just like every other natural system but it will not be as extreme and it will not reward the wrong people

Please make your points without calling names. Maybe you don't owe Piketty better, but you owe this community better if you're posting to it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No thanks, I'm good

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#47

Post by [deleted] »

credit_guy wrote: post #20
missedthecue wrote: post #2

I am still unable to fathom why he thinks inequality is a problem in and of itself. Hunger, famine, war, disease, we all understand are bad because they have negative consequences on real human lives. Jeff Bezos owning 12% of Amazon does not make me any worse off and if he owned 11% instead it would not make my life any better. Now there are certain things that can that can contribute to people accumulating excessive…

It's very easy to make the logical leap that increasing inequality is equivalent to "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". And most people don't necessarily have a problem with "the rich get richer" part, but they do object to "the poor get poorer". It is a leap though. Bezos, Gates, Musk, Buffet, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg all started as regular people and became ultra-rich through their work and ideas. But it's…

[deleted]

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#48

Post by kdtsh »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #38
kdtsh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does value come from besides labour? If gold was everywhere, it wouldn’t be as valuable as it is - but it’s not, you have to dig it out of the ground and it can be hard to find; the labour input into the process of producing gold is what gives gold its value. A silicon rock is about as useful as any other rock, but the labour which goes into fabricating it into useful components is what gives it its value. A ha…

You can actually "reduce" any expense entirely to several things if you think reductionistically enough: energy costs, material scarcity, etc. Labor is one possible resource bottleneck, and because it can be intuitively converted into most other resources with some imagination, it is often mistaken as transcending other resources. Labor Theory of Value has been broadly discredited for this reason among many others.

Each of those things ultimately reduce to human labour though. Energy because it requires human labour to produce; material scarcity because of the human labour required to extract certain rare materials. It’s very easy to say that this is mental gymnastics, but do you honestly disagree and think that these disparate things are categories into themselves? - how can we then determine the relative value of things, it becomes a matter of comparing apples and oranges. You can look at the utility of some commodity, but that will only ultimately tell us what a person will pay for it, and value does not always correlate to cost.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#49

Post by kdtsh »

slawekrewaj wrote: post #30
kdtsh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does value come from besides labour? If gold was everywhere, it wouldn’t be as valuable as it is - but it’s not, you have to dig it out of the ground and it can be hard to find; the labour input into the process of producing gold is what gives gold its value. A silicon rock is about as useful as any other rock, but the labour which goes into fabricating it into useful components is what gives it its value. A ha…

As a resident of a former communist country I can tell you, from my country experience, that labor is definitely not enough to create any value. You need two other things: 1. Savings which you can use as a capital to improve the efficiency of labor - think buying tools before you start working. 2. Proper organization of work, which is the task of entrepreneurs. Without them people can work hard and produce no value a…

These things reduce the input human labour required to produce some good. They are inputs to the process of production, but do not themselves produce value. In fact, as I mentioned, they may well diminish the value of some product, because they reduce the abstract human labour required to produce it.

Your second question isn’t really helpful ... the simple answer is sustained famine in the 90s, poorly maintained land, and market forces.

Re: Thomas Piketty’s plan to fix the economy

#50

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

kdtsh wrote: post #48
lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually "reduce" any expense entirely to several things if you think reductionistically enough: energy costs, material scarcity, etc. Labor is one possible resource bottleneck, and because it can be intuitively converted into most other resources with some imagination, it is often mistaken as transcending other resources. Labor Theory of Value has been broadly discredited for this reason among many others.

Each of those things ultimately reduce to human labour though. Energy because it requires human labour to produce; material scarcity because of the human labour required to extract certain rare materials. It’s very easy to say that this is mental gymnastics, but do you honestly disagree and think that these disparate things are categories into themselves? - how can we then determine the relative value of things, it b…

Yes, we can reduce energy needs to human labor; we can also reduce human labor to energy needs. I invite you to try out the exercise. Since both are substitutes for one another to a significant degree much of the time, it's easy to get trapped into the thinking that they're always substitutes. The reality is that despite their fungibility, you tend to reach the limits at an extreme (think like a Cobb-Douglas function).

And yes, the disjunction between market value and cost is well-known. They only converge under certain market assumptions, an interesting subject of study in itself.

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