Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

If everyone doubles their living standards over 10 years, absolute inequality rises (there is always going to be someone with no wealth/income because they want to live that way, so the absolute gap in wealth increases as the wealthiest member of society gets wealthier).

If the amount of wealth is doubled due to some center of extreme productivity (eg, a Silicon Valley) then that center is going to get preferential access to new wealth. Relative inequality rises.

In both of these scenarios, wealth inequality and living standards can raise in tandem. These are perfectly fine outcomes. Inequality is only interesting as a symptom of deeper issues affecting living standards. Should workers be rewarded according to their productivity? That would be nice, but then we would need to be very careful how we decided who got what job. There are jobs that are rare, highly productive and easy to do where the people holding them would be unfairly rewarded. That would be similar to what we have now. Focusing on median & minimum living standards will get much better results. If those are rising, inequality is not an issue.

Not necessarily. I agree that having values dictated by fiat is a recipe for disaster - such arrangements are bound to get corrupted over time. But on the other end of the spectrum, there is some sense of social value - a sense in which e.g. garbage collectors, firemen and doctors do more socially valuable jobs than athletes and entertainers. A sense that's easy to convey - imagine if suddenly, any one of the former three occupations disappeared; the death toll and suffering would quickly overshadow the largest of wars. Meanwhile, even if both of the latter occupations disappeared, the culture would be a bit poorer, but the society would function just fine.

Unfortunately, it seems that this concept of social value is very hard to robustly define. And if we can't define it, effectively optimizing for it is pretty much out of the question.

The resulting state of prospering areas filled with poverty has been called the paradox of progress and poverty because the more prosperous area you have the more homelessness and disgusting living conditions you find. Whether it is San Francisco with their smelly homeless neighborhoods, Hong Kong with 4sqft apartments or London during industrial revolution as described by Dickens in Oliver Twist.

Sadly the 'absolute living standard' fairy tale is perpetuated by people on the economical right which makes anyone on the left dismiss anything further they say. (I'm on the right myself, but this crap infuriates me).

The relevant items to study in order to understand this effect 1. Law of Rent by David Ricardo 2. Henry George theorem

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the nuanced discourse of groups tackling these problems directly at the political level, instead of taking textbook definitions of words and none of the context of the broader social movements behind the effort.

“Wealth” is a measure of relative living standards. You’re talking about the same damn thing these groups do but somehow seem annoyed at your own lack of experience with the political conversation.

DRY can apply to more than code. No reason to reinvent definitions and quantify problems when people have already spent a lifetime discussing these things.

Get off HN and engage directly maybe, rather than getting circle and repetitive.

Humanity built bridges and roads and trade before it had any answers like we do about physics and math. We do not need or rely on the uptight definitions in academia. Language is mushed up as needed.

STEM headed nerds would be wise to forget their academia a bit and their propensity for falling into functional fixedness when it comes to language