I like the idea but it seems the author is just slicing the normal distribution at a point of interest and calling it bifurcated? e.g. with the phone example. "good enough android" or "iphone / flagship android" all the actual phone models are hidden under two higher level labels. Isn't every decision making process with buying essentially try to get the best for your money?
The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
111–120 of 160 posts
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#112> We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality. It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and t…
> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a signle-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on. And living in NY or the Bay are was still very affordable (to the point that both areas had large artistic / bohemian communities living there, and not of the latte sipping urban wealth variety, but the penny pinching / stick it to the man / junky variety). Houses are very affordable i…
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Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#113> We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality. It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and t…
500 years ago, only 1-2% could afford "whatever" and the rest had to scrap by and pinch pennies. I'm not sure we're moving to a world of less evenly distributed wealth.
What do you think our society's Gini Coefficient should be?
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#114> We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality. It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and t…
> To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality. > Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a single-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on. Is the right word inequality? There aren't less college places, houses in NY/the Bay, etc in the worl…
The resource they consume is wealth. It's disingenuous to claim that a wealthy person does not consume more resources. Houses are a particularly poor example.
A wealthy person may have a 2. 5 million mansion and a quarter million dollar vacation home and own 3 rental homes.
They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost of the mortgage while fighting to maximize the value of investment by limiting the supply of new housing.
With 40% of their neighbors paying rent to people like them and some living on the street it's hard not to qualify the situation as unequal.
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#115> We can see, too, that these bifurcations are driven by a shift from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality. It's a world where a 10-20% can afford the "whatever" (e.g. best phone, live in NY/Bay area, university degree, etc) and t…
500 years ago, only 1-2% could afford "whatever" and the rest had to scrap by and pinch pennies. I'm not sure we're moving to a world of less evenly distributed wealth.
Better than 500 years ago but worse than 50 years ago seems like a bad standard to strive for.
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now compare 60 years ago with now.
Statins, anti-retrovirals, common availability of antibiotics, treatment for TB, vaccines for many population-decimating (in the traditional sense of the word) viruses. Everyone has a super computer in their pocket, the vast majority of human knowledge is available in your hand for free all the time, you can video chat anyone you want anywhere in the world in HD for free, world-leading educators post hundreds of hour…
At current trajectory I won't be able to afford medication to keep breathing in 5 years with all due respect FUCK YouTube, coursera, and Spotify.
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Statins, anti-retrovirals, common availability of antibiotics, treatment for TB, vaccines for many population-decimating (in the traditional sense of the word) viruses. Those are technological innovations, not really relevant. We could have had smartphones and anti-retrovirals AND affordable education/housing/healthcare/job prospects. Like how people in the 50s and 60s could enjoy all kinds of technological and soc…
You don't think what you get for your money is important in a discussion of economic advancement? It sounds like you decided on an answer, then went looking for a question which fits it. > We could have had smartphones and anti-retrovirals AND affordable education/housing/healthcare/job prospects. How can you possibly know that's true? Where are these example economies that have US-level innovation but also has the w…
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Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
USSR was run by a party elite, devastated with millions dead/imprisoned in their purges, devastated with millions of dead in WWII, and starting from an agrarian economic base much behind the US of the time (1917) to begin with. Without those aspects (but keeping equality more or less same, e.g. like Swedish style democratic socialism) it could be a very different story. It's not like inequality produced them. If anyt…
I think a better comparison is East and West Germany. You might also want to revisit your assumption that the US in 1917 wasn't an agrarian economy, given that the majority of Americans worked on farms between the World Wars. Also, Baku (joined the USSR into 1920) produced over half the world's oil at that time.
> given that the majority of Americans worked on farms between the World Wars.
About 30% at the start of that period through 15% at the end.[1]
[1] https://www.ncci.com/Articles/Pages/II_Insights_QEB_Impact-A... first chart. And that's workforce, not "people"
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality. > Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a single-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on. Is the right word inequality? There aren't less college places, houses in NY/the Bay, etc in the worl…
The resource they consume is wealth. It's disingenuous to claim that a wealthy person does not consume more resources. Houses are a particularly poor example. A wealthy person may have a 2. 5 million mansion and a quarter million dollar vacation home and own 3 rental homes. They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost…
> They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost of the mortgage while fighting to maximize the value of investment by limiting the supply of new housing.
You're focusing on accounting, which is fine and all, but there are two scenarios here:
(1) There are 10 houses, 10 people live in them. Everyone owns their own house.
(2) There are 10 houses. 10 people live in them. All the houses are owned by 1 person. 9 people rent.
From an inequality perspective, obviously one scenario here is grossly less equal than the other. From a what-is-phyiscally-happening perspective, these situations are roughly identical.
The $2.5 million mansion you mention is potentially a nice house that is the same physical size as a $700k house in the country. My point here is although the situation may be grossly unequal, but part of the issue here is what actual, physical resources do we want the rich not to be using?
Eg, do we want to take away vacation homes from people and subdivide it into government housing? How much stock does that create? Is that going to solve housing affordability in, say, SF?
This isn't me being disingenous, I'm just genuinely curious why people think inequality is the problem since I personally favor that wealth creation is being strangled by hostile political forces.
Inequality is a problem; it is a symptom of things going badly wrong. But that doesn't mean that reducing inequality cures the disease - it is easy to reduce inequality by forcing everyone to have nothing. We all want to reduce inequality be creating more wealth. Houses, stuff, fun experiences, etc, etc. Is that possible? Is redistribution a valid route? Maybe. It does work sometimes.
Re: The Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution Is Vanishing (2015)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software engineers follow for the same reason as footballers or doctors. In football, there's only a market for the best. Nobody likes a loser. It's the same in health. There's no market for mediocre or bad doctors. Similarly, there's not really a market for software that doesn't work. Writing novel software that solves real problems isn't yet trivial. So there's not a huge market for bad software engineers. And ther…
Few markets have a market for "bad" employees, surely? What matters in the tournament situation is that the number #2 employee isn't as good as the #1 employee, regardless of what absolute quality level we're talking about.
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