Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased? • Hacker News Board

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#31

Post by cryoshon » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:12 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #23

examancer wrote: post #12

This is a side show. Whether or not the statistics show rising or falling income inequality is irrelevant. There is massive income inequality. Its trajectory isn't nearly as large of an issue as the status quo, which is pretty dismal. Until that gini coefficient is much better, and we have no one living below the poverty line, we still have a ton of work to do. This article seems to be making a shallow point only to…

Institutionalized theft isn't an acceptable solution. Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well.

It's not theft so much as performing your fundamental human directive to be your brother's keeper.

In modern society, we have many brothers who we've never met, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be helping them prosper.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#32

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:13 PM UTC

keithwarren wrote: post #5

I have yet to see a solid discussion of wealth inequality that removes the outliers. Given that 85 people have half the worlds wealth, it would appear to me that a study which looks at the numbers without those people would be more interesting in helping us understand how our systems and markets are moving wealth for 99.999% of us. Even still, the goal should not be balanced wealth but continual upward mobility for a…

85 people have half the worlds wealth

I carelessly posted a story with a headline like this a week or two ago, but a more accurate statement would be that 85 people have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world's population.

that's still a pretty startling concept though - that you could make half the people in the world twice as well off as they are now by disenfranchising a mere 85 individuals, or that each of those on average holds as much wealth as 41 million very poor people. Of course there would be a knock-on effect that would hurt all the people who work for or do business with those 85. And as a statistic I'm not sure how valuable it is; even my averaging comment is misleading because the distribution of wealth within those 85 individuals likely has a rough Pareto distribution.

Like the author I'm not entirely convinced that this is bad, for the same reason that I don't consider elephants and whales to be in opposition to ants or plankton; Pareto distributions seem to be a fact of the natural world and so we shouldn't be too surprised to see them appear in distributions of wealth. Of course there are lots of natural things that are widely considered undesirable, so I anticipate increasing political pressure to alter such imbalances.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#33

Post by stretchwithme » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:15 PM UTC

Income inequality is not a bad thing. People are very different in what they are capable of producing.

If you want to produce paper napkins by hand 10 hours a week and someone else chooses to make them by machine 40 hours a week and its the same product, why should you both take home an equal income?

"Oh" they say "we just want to make it less unequal than it is, not equal." Isn't that why we pay all these taxes and have all these government programs?

It literally never ends.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#34

Post by splawn » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:16 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #23

examancer wrote: post #12

This is a side show. Whether or not the statistics show rising or falling income inequality is irrelevant. There is massive income inequality. Its trajectory isn't nearly as large of an issue as the status quo, which is pretty dismal. Until that gini coefficient is much better, and we have no one living below the poverty line, we still have a ton of work to do. This article seems to be making a shallow point only to…

Institutionalized theft isn't an acceptable solution. Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well.

"Institutionalized theft" could be used to describe both sides of the gap issue.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#35

Post by mjn » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #33

Income inequality is not a bad thing. People are very different in what they are capable of producing. If you want to produce paper napkins by hand 10 hours a week and someone else chooses to make them by machine 40 hours a week and its the same product, why should you both take home an equal income? "Oh" they say "we just want to make it less unequal than it is, not equal." Isn't that why we pay all these taxes and…

Why should you take home a different income? I don't feel that the fact that I'm a computer scientist, which at the moment happens to pay well, ethically entitles me to more resources than other people. If anything I feel a bit guilty taking home several times the income of the guy who's been showing up at 7am every morning to replace my roof; my job is a lot more pleasant and enjoyable, and yet that in itself isn't reward enough, but I get paid more too!

One plausible answer could be, "because there's no workable way of making it otherwise". I could buy that, although then we're arguing pragmatics, not ethics.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#36

Post by guscost » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

examancer wrote: post #25

ctdonath wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institutionalized theft isn't an acceptable solution. Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well.

Calling progressive tax systems institutionalized theft is incredibly clever, and incredibly false. No one who has wealth created it by themselves. You don't print your own money, you don't extract wealth from a vaccum. Wealth is built by extracting that wealth from a shared economy. Asking those who were able to extract the most wealth to help the most in paying to protect this shared system, and help those who were…

> Wealth is built by extracting that wealth from a shared economy.

This is a very old argument, but the economy is not a zero-sum game.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#37

Post by bluedino » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:18 PM UTC

Wouldn't any capitalistic economy simulation end up with a great inequality, once it's run for N amount of time?

You can't just do a 'reset' and re-allocate everything. And even if you did, the people who are smarter (sneakier?), work harder/more, and are luckier are going to end up winning out again.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#38

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:18 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #23

examancer wrote: post #12

This is a side show. Whether or not the statistics show rising or falling income inequality is irrelevant. There is massive income inequality. Its trajectory isn't nearly as large of an issue as the status quo, which is pretty dismal. Until that gini coefficient is much better, and we have no one living below the poverty line, we still have a ton of work to do. This article seems to be making a shallow point only to…

Institutionalized theft isn't an acceptable solution. Such class jealousy does not, historically, end well.

Neither is ignoring the fact of negative externalities. One could view income redistribution as a crude method for quantifying the latter.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#39

Post by pmorici » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:18 PM UTC

This isn't very convincing one way or the other. As the title suggests there are two components to the issue, 'income' and 'wealth'. This argument only looks at the income half and in the process conflates the two terms. Income can't tell the whole story by itself.

For example if you own your home outright, your living costs will be substantially lower than someone who has to rent or has a mortgage. In other words having wealth allows you to substantially lower the income you need for the same standard of living. This argument doesn't account for wealth at all as I'm reading it.

Re: Have US Income and Wealth Inequality Actually Increased?

#40

Post by stretchwithme » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #15

Lots of things are wrong with this article, not least of which is that the writing is so unclear that it's hard to make enough sense of his argument to point out what's wrong. That said, the main takeaway here is that the author doesn't consider growing income disparity to be a problem. Perhaps a better way to look at it is this: growing income disparity is a symptom of the real problem, which is that the economy has…

No, a marketplace where people are rewarded for what they produce yields more unequal incomes.

Because people in a free society with access to capital and mass production and distribution can be incredible productive.

And others can do manual work with no mastery of technology at all and not sell their work to the world.

Those two extremes are going to get more extreme over time, not less.