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Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

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Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#101

Post by crimsonalucard »

PaulHoule wrote: post #80
tomp wrote: post #21

> It doesn't matter to me at all that Bill Gates has more money than God, because he's empathetic to people who aren't as rich and aren't as great as he is, I'm glad he learned empathy in his old age; but keep in mind that he was ruthless, manipulative, exploitative, and caused a lot of long-term damage throughout most of his working life. That's the problem I have with the "rich" - our system (and lack of government…

The empathy gap goes the other way too. Some rich guy was bitching on CNBC that he didn't feel appreciated. When I was in grad school and a Linux zealot he thought that Microsoft was a great company because it empowered him to make his business work. The political system is dominated by the 1%, but if you can really piss off 50% of voters you can cause a crisis. I think ordinary people in the U.S. are experiencing "f…

nah nothing goes wrong when voters are pissed off. Voters can only choose between two candidates who are basically proxies for quarrelling rich people.

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#102

Post by vixen99 »

twelvechairs wrote: post #63
twoquestions wrote: post #3

This guy put into much better words what I've been thinking for a while. It doesn't matter to me at all that Bill Gates has more money than God, because he's empathetic to people who aren't as rich and aren't as great as he is, and wants to continue to use his strength to lift people up instead of feathering his own nest even more. It's when people get the idea that "I'm better, so I deserve better than Them!" that r…

Its not the 'gap' or the 'upper end' which is important in itself though. Its the lower end - whether someone here has a reasonable life and ability to reach their potential. One way of raising this lower end is to redistribute from the rich which takes away very little of their potential for the above

It's a way but a lousy one. How can any system which depends on a flow of wealth from the efforts of A to support B, work in the long term? Ultimately people have to stand on their own feet.

The benefit system in Britain demonstrates this very well. About 20 million families receive some kind of benefit (64% of all families), about 8.7 million of them pensioners. For nearly 10 million families, benefits make up more than half of their income (30% of all families), around 5.3 million of them pensioners. Isn't it much the same in the US? Is this really the way forward? It’s certainly got impetus because Peter will always vote for Paul to pay more in tax when it benefits Peter. A drastic rethink of the whole way we organize ourselves is needed. We need to get smart and focus on how to stem the natural condition for most people - which is poverty - as history tells us. Only in the last few years has this trend been reversed to a great degree. Global capitalism is lifting people out of poverty at the fastest rate in human history because people are increasingly being enabled to dig their own way out of misery.

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#103

Post by dang »

tomp wrote: post #21

> It doesn't matter to me at all that Bill Gates has more money than God, because he's empathetic to people who aren't as rich and aren't as great as he is, I'm glad he learned empathy in his old age; but keep in mind that he was ruthless, manipulative, exploitative, and caused a lot of long-term damage throughout most of his working life. That's the problem I have with the "rich" - our system (and lack of government…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10975825 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#104

Post by totalrobe »

paulpauper wrote: post #54
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even leaving aside rich using their status to solidify their position, consider this: are the policies that maximize GDP and lead to high wealth inequality the same policies that maximize the prosperity of the middle 50% of the population? No economic rule I know of guarantees that to be the case. Wealth isn't created in a vacuum. Wealth can only be created in places with a high level of social order. That social ord…

I've heard of this argument. 'Why do the rich need so much money? Why not just create a 'wealth cap'? The problem is, capitalism is about incentives. When you create a negative incentives, it creates externalities, possibly in the form of companies moving overseas, job loss, and economic stagnation. Second, is it fair for someone or some entity to confiscate what is not theirs, beyond taxes? Third, capitalism is expe…

Venture capital is important, but don't forget that the recent private space ventures have piggybacked on 50 years of government funded technologies...same as pretty much the entire modern IT industry that developed out of military and publicly funded research.

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#105

Post by beat »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #77
beat wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read Peter Thiel. The perfect capitalism of frictionless competition and complete transparency is the enemy of its own intent. In highly competitive and transparent markets, profits are driven asymptotically to zero. Groceries, gasoline, airline tickets... these are extremely low-margin industries. Capitalism succeeds only when capitalism fails - when monopolies (global or local) appear that permit high-friction (and…

I thought Thiel was some kind of hardcore libertarian? But really he's just into some old skool robber Barron stuff?

No, he opposes the robber baron approach. He prefers indirect monopolies, built on technical advantage rather than force. His canonical example is Google. They have a monopoly - on search. Do they charge for search? No. They make money indirectly off their monopoly. And they maintain that monopoly by technical superiority. Anyone could write a search engine, and some have tried (Microsoft!). But the monopoly is natural, not a product of force.

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#106

Post by mercer »

browseatwork wrote: post #55

Some studies showing effects of higher wealth on people below. Not perfect, and e.g. the simple correlation between unethical and law breaking is naive, but it's some data. tl;dr: "Abtract: Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law whil…

> One weird thing- these and some other studies I have read support poorer people have more empathy/make more eye contact in conversation and pay more attention to conversation partners/etc. Why then does that group seem on the whole to have more antagonism towards wealthier people (than vice versa)?

Could be because they have reasons to be angry at the wealthier class as a whole, but do not necessarily apply this on an interpersonal level. It reminds me of the experiments done where a wallet left on the streets is returned more often in poorer areas of town than in richer areas.

I suppose it makes sense. The poorer you are, the more dependent you are on the people around you, and the worse your experiences, the easier it might be to empathize with others (as you 'know' what it is like). On the other hand, the richer you are, the easier it is to get what you want or need without relying on others, and the more difficult it is to empathize with the plight of the 'common man'.

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#107

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #35
white-flame wrote: post #11

If the poor end of the wealth gap are still better off than 90% of the rest of the world, why does the wealth gap matter? That was my thinking for quite a while. However, the one thing that happens here in the US is that the wealthy have more representation and power in the legal system. Be it federal or local, the systems tend to get slanted against the not-wealthy because the wealthy take over the communications ch…

Even leaving aside rich using their status to solidify their position, consider this: are the policies that maximize GDP and lead to high wealth inequality the same policies that maximize the prosperity of the middle 50% of the population? No economic rule I know of guarantees that to be the case. Wealth isn't created in a vacuum. Wealth can only be created in places with a high level of social order. That social ord…

> Wealth isn't created in a vacuum. Wealth can only be created in places with a high level of social order. That social order isn't created by exceptional individuals, it's created by the behavior and attitudes of ordinary people. Given that, why should societies not structure themselves to maximize the prosperity of the majority?

This is a brilliantly-succinct summary of something that conservative politicians should shout from the house tops. It's reminiscent of Elizabeth Warren's famous remarks on fairness during the 2012 campaign. [1] Rayiner, I continue to be bowled over by your socio-political acumen.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs

Re: Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

#108

Post by daodedickinson »

flubert wrote: post #53
daodedickinson wrote: post #20

Is it bad that we don't empathize with the Sentinelese? If they knew about us they would feel worse because all of their comparisons, all of their sensations and evaluations would change. The problem is that the poor cannot sense the presence of the rich without immense pain. Neither redistribution, nor empathy are as palliative as ignorance in this case.

What if we went in the opposite direction. Let's say we discovered another more advanced civilization on a relatively nearby star. I wonder how bad would people on earth would now feel, and how the feelings would be distributed. Would rich people be more affected or poor people? Would some people find excitement in trying to attain what the aliens had? Would others become despondent? Would it be a complete non-event…

I think that civilization might pop like a bubble and mass despondency would occur as it seems to have occured when "low" discovers "high" on earth. There is a feeling of superfluousness when one realizes they cannot contribute to the forefront of culture, as I feel depressed when I feel I will never have enough programming skill to get a job on this planet and will just be a human pet my whole life. Nevertheless, I don't think aliens will ever show up. Human desires are ultimately illogical and if "cultures" "advance" enough I think they will disappear like the Dwemer, they will no longer be able to cross the is-ought divide except perhaps to desire survival - perfect adaptation to the environment. But perfect adaptation to the environment implies the antithesis of power: it means your being is completely determined not from anything inside but the outside. This means becoming invisible, becoming at one with the universe, becoming the laws of physics themselves. Just imagine if we got the technology to install into the brain like "whoa I know kung-fu" in The Matrix. People could be backed up on github. Individuality would die out and most people would feel horrifically superfluous. "Civilization" might have drastically reduced desire for human bodies, especially combined with desire engineering (one could remove survival instincts and bring world population down to the 500 million many elites already want [including an editorial in my local paper today]). But what is the end of such a society? I think space exploration would be pointless if one had the computational ability to imagine whole worlds and keep population down to a steady state except maybe one nearby planet in case of an asteroid. One might engineer away the wanderlust when trying to abolish pain and depression and all suffering.
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