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US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

nytimes.com

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Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#101

Post by sogen »

mariushn wrote: post #38
arcanus wrote: post #2

Real title was, 'Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart'. Despite some of the recent coverage, this chart indicates that gains are not going to the top 20%: they are going to top 1%, and particularly To be clear, this is not many programmers: "In 1980, the top 1% of adult earners in the U.S. made $420,000 a year, on average (before taxes and measured in 2014 dollars) — 27 times as much as the average for the bottom…

Personal opinion: it's also harder to grow or get investment on a startup which competes or might compete with a big corporation in future, just because bigCorp might go into that area as well, or add a "feature" which represents your entire business. How do you tackle this?

I can't hear you over my free banana

http://nypost.com/2017/05/23/amazon-gave-away-too-many-free-...

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#102

Post by watecmascript »

Poverty is a problem. But is inequality bad? It doesn't bother me that when billionaires have private jets and I don't. I'm not rich, but I can live comfortably, especially if you look at history. The average american has at least one air conditioned car. I'm sure that would make the pharaoh of ancient egypt jealous. He would call inequality on us.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#103

Post by watecmascript »

mariushn wrote: post #38
arcanus wrote: post #2

Real title was, 'Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart'. Despite some of the recent coverage, this chart indicates that gains are not going to the top 20%: they are going to top 1%, and particularly To be clear, this is not many programmers: "In 1980, the top 1% of adult earners in the U.S. made $420,000 a year, on average (before taxes and measured in 2014 dollars) — 27 times as much as the average for the bottom…

Personal opinion: it's also harder to grow or get investment on a startup which competes or might compete with a big corporation in future, just because bigCorp might go into that area as well, or add a "feature" which represents your entire business. How do you tackle this?

There are several advantages to being a small company. The biggest is you can offer 1-on-1 individualized support. Another big advantage is small companies have less mass and can adapt to customer/market needs quicker.

Jason Cohen has a lot of good advice on the competitive advantage of small companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rMPbAN6i7s

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#104

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

dsacco wrote: post #82
mattmanser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your view point. You could argue that the process was never really "yours" in the first place. Society, our laws, our armies and natural resources, our roads, bridges, power lines, telecoms structure, are 99% of that process and you added 1%. You simply took advantage of a lot of luck, a little bit of hard work and probably a bunch of your parents' money to end up owning it. Maybe you should get a chunk of…

How would you propose we make a more meritocratic system that doesn't allow for as much luck-based success?

Tax the wealthy and use that money to invest in infrastructure, education, and economic growth across the entire country, not just the big cities. Combine that with limiting trade with countries that have abysmal minimum wages and standard of living, and you'd have a fantastic recipe for economic growth for the lower and middle classes.

Luck is always involved, but by increasing opportunities while giving workers more leverage, it is definitely doable.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#105

Post by logicchains »

js8 wrote: post #90
logicchains wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In the real world, people are not getting 1000000x higher income just because they do 1000000x more of the same work. You could argue that they get 1000x (1000000x is disingenuous; 1000000x the minimum wage is around $15,000,000,000 per year, practically nobody makes that) higher income because they do something that people value 1000x more. If we assume people pay others for doing this they value, if a developer ca…

> If we assume people pay others for doing this they value That's a strong assumption and as a matter of fact, they don't. For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them. > How does it deny we cooperate? So you can see that in the above examp…

>For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them.

The mechanism is the same; it's transitive. You pay the ticket seller, the ticket seller pays the distribution company, the distribution company pays the production company, something along those lines. If we assume nobody's going around stealing or printing money, then that's the only way the people producing the move could be getting money.

If you don't like all those middle-men, that's why things like Kickstarter are appealing to many people. I wanted the people who made Planescape Torment, one of my favourite games, to make a sequel. I paid them in advance directly, via Kickstarter, as did many others. They made an excellent (at least in my view) game.

>And it gets even worse! Some people cannot be paid for what valuable they are doing for me, because they are already dead. For example, I am not paying to Beethoven. There are even things that produce things of value without any human intervention; who do I pay then?

Payment motivates somebody to give up something and give it to you. If something can be taken without depriving anybody of it, why is payment needed? Some people oppose intellectual property laws for this reason, because unlike physical property, using intellectual property doesn't deprive the creator of it due to text being practically free to reproduce.

Re: US Income Inequality: All for the Top 1%

#106

Post by js8 »

logicchains wrote: post #105
js8 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we assume people pay others for doing this they value That's a strong assumption and as a matter of fact, they don't. For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them. > How does it deny we cooperate? So you can see that in the above examp…

>For example, when I go to cinema, I pay to the ticket seller. I don't pay to the people who actually produced the movie. I rely on some (unknown to me) mechanism according to which those people get paid, but I don't pay them. The mechanism is the same; it's transitive. You pay the ticket seller, the ticket seller pays the distribution company, the distribution company pays the production company, something along tho…

I didn't say I didn't like the middle-men; they are useful. What I object to is trying to model this as if there is no structure of middle-men, when it is actually there.

The problem is, how you ensure all these people get paid? Contracts, law, government.. it gets very complicated very quickly. It's not just a series of independent transactions between two parties, as the neoclassicals like to portray it. It's also the whole social system, which ensures, as you say, nobody is going around stealing and printing money.

You cannot just ignore this structure because it is this structure which determines, if say a film director gets paid say 2x than film cutter. It's not you as a viewer who determines this. That's the main contradiction - this cannot be objectively determined (if we want fairness by any reasonable definition), yet it somehow must be determined for those people to be paid.

> If something can be taken without depriving anybody of it, why is payment needed?

That's a good question. Unfortunately, if you answer it positively, then you are effectively against all property rights, not just intellectual property. For example, let's say I have two houses but I need only one. Why shouldn't you use my otherwise empty house for free, if you keep it in the same order?

Ultimately, again, you will get a contradiction within any sort of moral framework, some people who provide value will not get paid, some will get paid.

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