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20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

businessinsider.com

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Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#431

Post by ace_of_spades »

mrjangles wrote: post #93

God this article is bad on so many levels I don't know where to start. First, income inequality doesn't measure income mobility. Places like the US that have a huge number of unskilled illegal and legal immigrants constantly entering at the bottom level will always have high income inequality. The question is, what happens to each individual over the course of their lives? 83% of Americans will earn more than their p…

Clearly investment doesn’t depend on actual work being done… /s

What makes people’s lives better is services being rendered for mutual benefit.

Investment does play a role in facilitating this but mostly because our monetary system is set up in a way that investment is necessary to service outstanding debt. It could be different.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#432

Post by hypertele-Xii »

cies wrote: post #428
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Interweb's dictionaries disagree with you. Wages are not mentioned in any definition of labor. It is simply synonymous with work, particularily the physically exhausting kind, which sitting in front of a computer shuffling numbers all day long arguably is.

It also means birthing a child. Economically there is the distinction. If you do not agree there is you, IMHO, have fallen for the capitalist's propaganda that they "do labor", "add value" and "you can be one too if you work hard and do not spend money on useless things". Lol.

So what do you think they do all day? Assets don't move by themselves. First of all, where do you even move them? You have to research. Research takes time. Then you gotta figure out how to move them there. More research. And then you gotta move them at the right time, yet more research.

It's not like they have an AI that just makes optimal asset moves automatically...

What do you do for work, huh? Sit in front of a computer all day? I bet a lot of people think you're just cheating your way to wages too. Imagine how someone literally laying bricks feels about your 100k comfy office salary.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#433

Post by dang »

romwell wrote: post #10

Ahh, the good old trickle-down, aka "piss in my eyes and tell me it's raining" (which is the only way trickle-down actually works). It was pure mythology from the start; there's never been any basis for it to begin with. It's a pity we even have to debunk it like that. Go figure, give a million hungry people $20 each, and see $20M return to the economy the next day as they spend it on food. Give a billionaire $20M, s…

Please don't fulminate in HN comments, please don't start flamewars, and please don't perpetuate them. All this makes for discussion that is tedious, repetitive, and eventually nasty. We're trying for the opposite here.

What you did in this thread (dozens of flamewar comments) was egregious. We ban accounts that do that. We've had to ask you not to do it in the past. Please don't do it again.

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

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#434

Post by mrjangles »

eeronen wrote: post #429
mrjangles wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>homeless person now stuck on the streets lives better than Rockefeller did, Ok good point, not the absolute lowest, but someone in the bottom 10% has access to food from all over the world that Rockefeller did not. They are usually overweight, which poor people back then were not. They have access to medicine the Rockerfeller couldn't dream of. >Do not conflate general human progress of what's available with more kn…

> China stole every single thing it had from the US. They have developed almost zero technology. (You could very nearly say the same for Europe, though they are less socialist than China and so have developed some things on their own - barely). What the hell are you talking about? Are you really saying all that R&D spending in other countries is going towards copy-pasting stuff made in the US? https://data.oecd.org/c…

>Are you really saying all that R&D spending in other countries is going towards copy-pasting stuff made in the US?

Yes. I can barely think of any examples to the contrary. 90% of technology being used around the world today was developed in the US. More importantly, R&D money spent by governments usually amounts to absolutely nothing. R&D spent by private companies can be ground breaking, or it can just be a nonsense tax break, or it can be spent learning to reproduce what others have already invented.

So simply looking at R&D spending is pretty useless. Instead look at the results.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#435

Post by romwell »

syndacks wrote: post #135
bottled_poe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I want to agree with you, you’re comment is just hyperbole/rhetoric and no substance.

I actually think this is a great comment, with more substance than your typical HN nit. They are introducing the concept of marginal propensity to consume( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consu... ), an economic idea that has everything to do with why trickle down is bogus. AND, it's funny. So extra points for that.

Just wanted to say thanks for your response.

I feel somewhat attacked by some of the other comments, being flagged, and a threat of ban from the admins; it felt as if people were ignoring the words I was saying, and were responding to something else entirely.

Thank you.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#436

Post by alphabettsy »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #387
alphabettsy wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t those professions listed be uppper-middle class or something else? I’ve never thought of doctors and lawyers as middle-class professions or income.

Your average lawyer isn't a partner at a prestigious firm that prints money. Your average manager isn't a PM making 250k+ at FAANG. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000 I probably shouldn't have included doctors though. I always forget how grossly overpaid they are.

Afaik middle income in most places is like $60-75k so even $120k is upper-middle income in most of the country.

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#437

Post by romwell »

dang wrote: post #433
romwell wrote: post #10

Ahh, the good old trickle-down, aka "piss in my eyes and tell me it's raining" (which is the only way trickle-down actually works). It was pure mythology from the start; there's never been any basis for it to begin with. It's a pity we even have to debunk it like that. Go figure, give a million hungry people $20 each, and see $20M return to the economy the next day as they spend it on food. Give a billionaire $20M, s…

Please don't fulminate in HN comments, please don't start flamewars, and please don't perpetuate them. All this makes for discussion that is tedious, repetitive, and eventually nasty. We're trying for the opposite here. What you did in this thread (dozens of flamewar comments) was egregious. We ban accounts that do that. We've had to ask you not to do it in the past. Please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator…

First, thank you for moderating HackerNews, and keeping the discussions civil. I will do my best to avoid feeding flamewars in the future. I've been enjoying being a part of the community for over a decade in no small part thanks to your work in establishing and enforcing the guidelines you linked.

My goal with this comment - as at least one other commenter understood - was to introduce the concept of Marginal Propensity to Consume[1] in a simple way, and with a bit of humor.

One thing I have learned from many years of teaching and giving conference talks is that when a new concept is introduced to someone with a dry language, it will, in most likelihood, will be ignore, or immediately forgotten. This applies to college freshmen as well as tenured mathematics professors.

My goal was to get responses like[2].

Alas, in my attempt to write thought-provoking comments, I ended up writing simply provoking ones. Note taken.

I'm not writing this to disagree with you assessment of the thread, but to clarify the intent and put my account history in context.

Thank you again, -r

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488150

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#438

Post by effingwewt »

bluGill wrote: post #176
UncleMeat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A manager is a laborer like any other. A CEO being paid a wage is not bad. They are doing labor too. The problem is when people are obtaining a large amount of their wealth through means other than labor.

A CEO is doing very hard labor. It isn't easy figuring out that the future will be and positioning the company to be there. Everyone would like the salary of a CEO, few would actually like that work (it isn't as easy as it sound), and even fewer are good at it. Many companies have failed after a bad CEO took over, or improved greatly when a good one took over. If a good CEO wants millions to do the job they are well…

Please. This conveniently leaves out all the CEOs who run companies into the ground and get golden parachutes.

CEOs are not special, they are not a different breed, and they most definitely do not in any way deserve to sit at the top and be paid more than 1000% the earnings of the people who make their businesses run (ie laborers).

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#439

Post by romwell »

benreesman wrote: post #223

Anyone who knows with any sophistication how economics works isn’t telling: they’re pocketing the difference working at RenTec or Jump or whatever. A child knows that privatizing profits and socializing losses is only good for rich people, but a Nobel laureate can’t prove it. So what we get is a bunch of “those who can’t, teach” social science economics. Greenspan in front of Congress talking about “flaws in conceptu…

HN might be such a place even if most people here agree with you.

My snarky comment critical of trickle-down[1] has been flagged and hidden when it reaches a score of 66; and the admins have threatened me with a ban.

I don't mind this strict adherence to the "be kind, don't be snarky" rule, but I haven't seen it so vigilantly enforced on fumigation from fiscal conservatives, which I routinely see here.

I feel like it reflects a dynamic in which flagging is used to steer a discussion, instead of improving its quality.

I would be curious to see the stats on people to flag comments. Do they comment themselves? Do people agree with them?

But I digress. I'm surprised your comment is still here, but that's a good sign.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29483790

Re: 20 year study of global wealth demolishes the myth of ‘trickle-down’

#440

Post by nouveaux »

flavius29663 wrote: post #430
nouveaux wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Can you explain to me what the ROI would be if the pension fund invested their money into public infrastructure?

Not sure how to calculate ROI on infrastructure. There is a limited amount of infrastructure a country needs, once that is built the government can decide to keep pumping money into the economy (say state operated oil machinery factories, armament factories, furniture factories etc.) or they can do what the Norway government did and just dump the money in the stock market, letting the market decide what works and wha…

So you're saying that we should take all the money the government spends and put it in stocks? What about infrastructure and public works? Schools? Research?
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