Earlier quoted context omitted.
Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions: The richest people should destroy productive resources But destroying productive resources (efficient water purifiers, better solar panels, computers that do more computations using less energy) would have been wrong in almost all of history - so why would we adopt beliefs now which make it right? I think it makes more sense to focus on getting everyo…
> The richest people should destroy productive resources No. Focusing on inequality would lead to the conclusion that the richest should hand over some of their capital resources to the middle classes and the poor, ie: to the working class.
The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#62> England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries... England isn't a country. Constantly referring to it as one, was a distraction from the contents for me.
Not sure why you were downvoted. England certainly isn't a country in the sense that's important in the article, i.e. a self-governing entity with control over its own economic system.
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#63Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#64Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…
> 1. Climate Change Unless the group think around nuclear power changes climate change doesnt stand a chance in hell. EDIT: I would be interested hearing from peoples points of view for those who are downvoting.
If you believe solar installation is increasing exponentially a la Kurzweil then we'll soon have enough solar
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power...
You can argue solar / wind is already cheaper and the differential is only going to grow
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-...
Fair enough at the moment wind/solar don't work all the time but they are working on that. The cleantechnia article for example looks at natural gas powered generation for backup and we may get better at storage tech, who knows?
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#65I am increasingly worried about the state of the world each year. However, I was discussing this with a friend recently and we were talking about how much of it was simple the result of more reports about the trouble in the world. I realized something: if there was, say, ten reports of really bad, violent crime in Denmark (where I am from -- population: 5 million people) per year, that would be very little. But even…
http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-eboo...
Or to save the cost and hassle of getting his book, watch Pinker talking about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X2-i_poNU&feature=youtu.be...
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#66This point of an increasingly peaceful world has come up repeatedly over the years, but I think there is an inherent problem in the way it is viewed. The rise of the internet and social media has facilitated glimpses into the terrible acts which humans are capable of perpetrating against one another. That combined with a biased media who thrives on shock and outrage, it's no wonder we find this data difficult to dige…
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#67Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#68Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…
4. World is more armed than ever. Ability to destroy life any times over.
5. Tech is in the hands of a few corporations, mass surveillance and political repression, censorship is a fact of life in many countries. As it grows more powerful, it'll give bad people more power to control, suppress and oppress.
6. Pollution, urbanisation, exploitation of nature - a lot of species face extinction within the next 50 years. Disconnect from nature grows worldwide, that leads to all sorts of physical and psychological ailments in people.
[4]: http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/2014/nuclear_May_20...
[5]: ?
[6]: http://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-life-a-status-report...
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#69Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…
In the US, wealth inequality correlates strongly with median age over time. In a regression, raising median age can explain 89% of the raise in wealth inequality of the top 10% (my own calculation, using Picketty data, not online yet). The hypothesis behind this is that inequality tends to grow with age. Among 20 year olds, there is much less inequality than among 60 year olds. In fact, the richest even grow in wealt…
According to payscale.com, among those with college degrees or higher, pay for men stops growing about age 48; for women, about 39. (See http://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap )
In your defence, there is this: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/20... ; in which Joseph Mason, Moyse/LBA Chair of Banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the demographics of income and wealth inequality will go away with the Baby Boomers. However, that article doesn't go into or cite any real analysis.
A contrary opinion by Phillip Longman in 2008 (at http://newamerica.net/files/Longman-Remarks.pdf) actually goes into more detail on baby boomers and money: Could it really be that a typical household headed by a person in their 50s has disposable income of over $85,000 dollars? ... [Sure] enough, [the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey] shows average household income numbers for that cohort in the range of $85,000. ... The medium income numbers were much, much lower. For example, in 2006, according the Census Bureau, households headed by a person 45-54 had an average income $85,812. But the medium income of such households was some $20,000 less. The difference between average and medium works out to about 25 percent. ... Income inequality, let alone wealth inequality, in this generation is extremely high. Its average income includes the earnings of Bill Gates and countless other baby boom billionaires, plus a very large new class of McMansion-owning minor millionaires. Because of very high income inequality within the baby boom generation, medium income statistics tell us a much more accurate story than do average income stats about how the “typical” baby boomer lives.
Age could easily explain the apparent "wealth inequality", but not so much in regards to "income inequality". Yet "income inequality" can easily be shown to be a factor towards "wealth inequality". According to Pew Research (see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-u...): The wealth gap between America’s high income group and everyone else has reached record high levels since the economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-09, with a clear trajectory of increasing wealth for the upper-income families and no wealth growth for the middle- and lower-income families. In 2013, the median wealth of the nation’s upper-income families ($639,400) was nearly seven times the median wealth of middle-income families ($96,500) - the widest wealth gap seen in 30 years when the Federal Reserve began collecting these data.
My suggestion: Let's stop conflating the issues of "wealth inequality" and "income inequality". The real crux of the matter is in the "income inequality". There's been wage stagnation for decades despite productivity gains. In America anyway, the tax code is rigged against earned income in favor of unearned income. Overall, it is better to be "wealthy" than to be "gainfully employed".
Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if it is not broken, but inevitable?
There's nothing economically inevitable about spending public subsidy on the rich instead of the poor.
I have posted a simple question. What if large asset control inequality is inevitable? Is bringing down the wealthy, so that a new class of wealthy takes over and possibly destroying large means of the assets in process benefit society?
Thus far that is the biggest outcome generated by previous attempts at decreasing inequality.