101–110 of 114 posts
I think a lot of this has to do with perception. The violence and suffering in the world, particularly overseas, feels more inescapable in the digital, high definition, always connected age. This age has gifted us perception, but not perspective.
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Say there's someone who wants to reduce inequality, and we ask them whether they approve of various scenarios: Situation: "People living on a certain well-off island discover a way to farm more efficiently, which means they produce 10% more food, but that technology only works on their island. Is this good or bad?" Inequality reducer: "This is bad, because that island's average income will go up while the rest of the…
You make inequality out as the result of purely economic factors, when it is as much the result of political decisions. If congress passes a tax cut for the top 1%, that increases inequality, not because some group has suddenly "found a way to farm more efficiently" or discovered a cure to Alzheimer's, but because we decided it that way. And as matthewmacleod has stated, you have constructed a complete straw man for…
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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…
>Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions: > > The richest people should destroy productive resources Where does that come from ? I can't find that quote in the linked articles.
I'm suggesting we should use numbers like the absolute # of people in poverty, or national health, or access to education - those numbers aren't gameable and allow better solutions to rise to the top naturally (and we don't care how they go up, as long as they go up)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say there's someone who wants to reduce inequality, and we ask them whether they approve of various scenarios: Situation: "People living on a certain well-off island discover a way to farm more efficiently, which means they produce 10% more food, but that technology only works on their island. Is this good or bad?" Inequality reducer: "This is bad, because that island's average income will go up while the rest of the…
That's an absolute straw man - someone wanting to reduce inequality doesn't want to do it at the expense of all other considerations, which is the assumption you've made. Complaining about an increasing wealth gap does not mean that the only other option is perfect equality of wealth. Have you seen the breakdown of wealth in America? The gap between, say, the top 1% and the rest of society is staggering. The top 0.1%…
Great! 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…
Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?
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There's nothing economically inevitable about spending public subsidy on the rich instead of the poor.
How did you get public subsidy into discussion anyway? 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.
Consider all the wealth that comes from natural resources, often extracted from state-owned lands. Consider the intellectual property policies that create wealth out of ideas by state fiat. Consider fiscal and monetary policies deliberately aimed at ensuring the health of the financial, insurance, and real-estate sector.
That is how.
Great! 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…
Surely you mean that the amount of poor people is rising. This isn't the case. Instead various political interest groups even had to fiddle a lot to produce few relative, always variable poverty definitions to keep the "poverty is rising" claim valid.
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You make inequality out as the result of purely economic factors, when it is as much the result of political decisions. If congress passes a tax cut for the top 1%, that increases inequality, not because some group has suddenly "found a way to farm more efficiently" or discovered a cure to Alzheimer's, but because we decided it that way. And as matthewmacleod has stated, you have constructed a complete straw man for…
At the margin, I think we both mainly want to help poor people, right? I'm just pointing out that using measures like the Gini coefficient can inadvertently reward bad behavior. Of course neither side directly wants to destroy resources, but if we're comparing national Gini numbers & policies, there's no good way to distinguish between good vs bad ways to lower it. i.e. China's Gini has been going up, but they also a…
Great, duly noted. When you make grand assertions about the inequality movement in the future, I suggest you do some background research and actually understand their claims first.
> just pointing out that historically the things that have moved people out of poverty have been market based innovation (the world since 1800), not direct assaults on inequality (USSR, Chinese revolutions, cuba etc.)
You need a history lesson. First of all, reducing inequality is not the same as moving a nation out of poverty (remember, technically, the US is the richest nation in the world). And secondly, look at the US in the 1930s-40s, when JFK's New Deal and WWII – not "market based innovation" – led to the largest expansion of the middle class yet. See http://spot.colorado.edu/~kaplan/econ3080/Krugman-middle.htm...
Inequality in the US is a result of decisions we have made, not because the rich have suddenly become more innovative.
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> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening In the US, yes. Globally, no. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/upshot/income-inequality-i...
Simpson's Paradox: within almost every country it's widening, but between countries it's shrinking.
The local increases in income inequality don't contradict global decreases because populations are mixing between countries. If an average American moves to Zambia and an average Zambian moves to America, the result is that the income gap of both nations increases, while the worldwide income gap remains the same.