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Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

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Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#51

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

thesausageking wrote: post #29
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Eve…

This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person... The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...

I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized...

Do the math. It's literally division.

When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is equal.

But the inequality is NOT the reason people are poor. And it's not the reason that you're not rich.

Is inequality a thing? Yes.

Is it causing problems? I think so. I think this is the interesting thing to talk about.

Is it the reason you don't have yacht or that we don't live in a utopia where no one has to work? Definitely no. Not worth considering when the smallest amount of math disproves it completely.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#53

Post by moffkalast »

sparrish wrote: post #32
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude. The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.

So stop giving the Trillionaires your money. They have that trillion because we buy things from them... from Amazon, from Tesla, etc. You don't like those things exist? Stop exchanging your money for their goods/services.

That is a problem when Amazon buys up everything that moves and integrates it into their product line. At some point it becomes impossible to avoid. Most of the snack and soft drink industry is owned by like what, 3 megacorps?

You don't like existing? Just die. Nobody's stopping you.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#54

Post by vladharbuz »

solar-ice wrote: post #48
vladharbuz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that people can absolutely form co-operatives. However, if I wanted to work on, say, World of Warcraft, I could hardly show up and demand Blizzard be turned into a co-operative. Maybe you meant “well, if people are so upset by the status quo, why don't they just all quit and form their own co-operatives to make Starcraft 3?”. This is a great point, and a really interesting question. I think we should al…

Part of the issue (in countries where you're not liable to be shot or accused by the police of running a cult or what-have-you) is that worker co-ops do not generally have access to significant capital or loans from VCs and banks which are scared of them, so cannot usually spend outside their means to grow - while companies that mesh well with current financialised society can. As a result, co-ops need to grow differ…

I'm very interested in this point! Do you think there is something about the structure of co-operatives that intrinsically makes them less attractive to investors? Or do you think that the fear you mentioned is just a result of them being currently unconventional, and this problem will be fixed once we culturally become more open to alternative ways of organising work?

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#55

Post by anm89 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Eve…

This has to be downvoted because people aren't writing things like this because they want to do any deep understanding or enact meaningful change, they are doing it because it makes them feel better to complain about how unfair it is.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#56

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

vladharbuz wrote: post #12
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #5

If you took all the income from the billionaires and distributed it evenly, the average person wouldn't even get a 2% raise. If you took all the wealth and distributed it evenly, the a average person wouldn't even get $500. In the US - Billionaires have $1.3T: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ That's ~$3880 per US person. Globally, there's a lot more people, and countries aren't as rich as the US. Eve…

This is true, but I have a slightly different question to ask. Imagine you work at, say, a game development company, along with 99 other developers. The only other member of the company is a CEO and shareholder, who decides how much to keep for himself and how much to pay the employees, but, importantly, does none of the actual work himself. Let's say the game is wildly successful and the employees are collectively p…

People always bitch about CEOs.

Do the math.

Intel employs 120k people. The CEO makes $10M per year.

Distribute his salary evenly to everyone at the company, it's not even a 0.2% increase to the average person's pay.

Let's say there's 10 execs like this. Still not even 2% (and there aren't 10 execs like that).

Most of the megacaps look the same. The salaries are massive. But they employ a LOT of people, and the average salaries at those companies are high.

You can find edge cases for sure with smaller startups that are wildly successful - or Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#57

Post by VictorPath »

snidane wrote: post #7

Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly. Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet. It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for…

> tak(x)ing away any raise and disposable income your employer gave you

An employer does not give a raise and disposable income to a worker. The worker is the creator of wealth, and the heirs collecting dividend profits are who are being given to. Your confusion about the directionality of created wealth within the relations of production is the whole point of the article.

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#59

Post by noughts »

refurb wrote: post #40
snidane wrote: post #7

Another Marxist in a new coat. Good analysis, wrong prescription. Been there, done that, ended up badly. Look into Georgism, that's where the cool kids are now. You don't need a revolution, you need a minor shift in tax code that you haven't thought of yet. It's not the problem of your employer that prices around you increase, so don't make them a villain that you can't pay your rent. Go complain to your slumlord for…

You got on the one hand, the Open Free Market System in America, you have on the other hand, the exact opposite, the closed, controlled, command economy of the Soviet Union… The Chinese tried the Communist model, with their own modifications, and it failed! And they have admitted that it failed. The kids today talk as if these things have never happened. They haven’t learned!

I agree that the last thing we should do is to go back to the Soviet Union, but its relationship to many of the alternatives available today is a common misunderstanding. The Soviet Union was described as "socialist" simply to cover up the awful inequality and abuse of power that was at the centre of it. The Soviet Union was basically the opposite of socialism, and this is easy to understand if you compare it to the most basic tenets of socialism, such as socioeconomic inequality.

I think that there are a lot of alternatives to both our current Western economic system and the Soviet Union, and I think that if you try to look a bit closer at many of the systems "the kids today" are talking about, in particular the principles and values behind them, without getting caught up in the labels, you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Perhaps you would find this list of books I compiled interesting? https://vladh.net/wage-labour-resources

Re: Work, Work, Work – So a Few Can Be Rich

#60

Post by badpun »

vladharbuz wrote: post #31
lr4444lr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing significant stops people from forming worker collectives. Maybe it's telling that they're so uncommon?

You are right that people can absolutely form co-operatives. However, if I wanted to work on, say, World of Warcraft, I could hardly show up and demand Blizzard be turned into a co-operative. Maybe you meant “well, if people are so upset by the status quo, why don't they just all quit and form their own co-operatives to make Starcraft 3?”. This is a great point, and a really interesting question. I think we should al…

> However, if I wanted to work on, say, World of Warcraft, I could hardly show up and demand Blizzard be turned into a co-operative.

You can always start a co-op which makes a WoW clone. Nothing stops people from that. The fact that it's practically never done says a lot about real-life applicability of co-ops.

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