Never mind the 1 percent Let's talk about the 0.01 percent (2017)

I also have a big problem with the reasoning of the quoted argument, at least from a United States point of view.

Our poor do have modern conveniences, because that’s what the world does; it evolves with current technology. They have access to emergency healthcare, which will almost inevitably bankrupt them when they need treatment. “Generally safe food” is not good enough in what is supposed to be one of the top first world countries. Infrastructure? Sure. Depending on how poor you are you’ll have varying access to infrastructure.

This hasn’t happened out of concern for our poor. The poor are getting society’s leftovers.

I don’t particularly care if we’ve “thrown tons of money at schooling and healthcare and the like” when we spend exponentially more money on the US military. Teachers across our country are still underpaid, and our education system is still not taken seriously enough. The US is not in the top 10 most educated countries (K-12), despite being a top first world country. Admittedly, money wouldn’t fix all the problems with our education system, but it would make a big difference.

It sounds like this was written by someone with a limited frame of reference.

Here’s a counter-argument I’d like to try out. I don’t know how good this one is, but…

The value that you add depends on what you do.

First example: someone who manufactures useful widgets is useful to society roughly in proportion to the number of widgets they make — this is probably non-linear diminishing return of usefulness with more production, but I think in practice we can ignore that most of the time for simple manufacturing jobs.

The range here is small, perhaps only a factor of 2-10.

Second example: an inventor who makes a machine that makes it easier to make those widgets. Their value to society could be as much as “difference in number of widgets produced by everyone combined, totalled over a period which is hard to even estimate”, unless that number is so large that diminishing returns is relevant. Unlike the people who actually make the widget, it’s reasonably likely for the person who invents a widget-making-machine to reqch this point. You might even get some extra problems from technological unemployment - short term or long term, it’s still a problem - or the waste of overproduction.

It isn’t as simple as saying “Tim Berners-Lee is as valuable as the entire internet”, because of all the work of other people that built on his, but even a single invention can benefit society to the tune of billions.

Third example: an entrepreneur who recognises a problem in the world and creates a solution. A new type of widget, or whatever. In an optimistic case, they might hire people that would otherwise be unemployed.

I’m not saying this always happens - and “wealth creator” as a term seems to be used to describe people that get rich by moving money around rather than just those who get rich by doing what I describe here - but that it could happen means it’s worth keeping track of.

I would argue that creating a thousand new jobs is at least as valuable to society as the cost of a thousand unemployed people, though almost certainly not as valuable as the wages those thousand earn in the new jobs, because that would be double-counting.

This could still easily be worth millions per year.

Fourth example: Management. Most work is done by teams, and a manager who can make their team 10% more productive is worth as much to society as that productivity boost, summed over the entire team.

I will acknowledge that management can be bad as well as good, so the sort of manager which makes everyone in the team resign (a friend mine recently left such a team because of such a manager) is worth negative their combined productivity.

I can easily believe that Bezos has been an enormous force multiplier because of all the other retailers that have not grown like Amazon. I can believe that Musk is great for SpaceX and entirely average for Tesla, because of how well SpaceX is doing and how averagely Tesla is doing.

How much is SpaceX worth? How much is reducing launch costs by a factor of three worth? I’m not sure, but it’s a lot, and SpaceX succeeded where all the other launch providers — and their, I assume, equally smart engineers — failed.

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As a separate point, I totally agree with your implicit claim that productivity != income.

> This really doesn't come off as a problem

It doesn't "come off as" a problem, because that is how you have personally interpreted the situation.

> that needs solving

It doesn't in fact "need" solving - life will go on, one way or another, regardless of whether policies are changed or not.

> and instead sounds like a purely political war cry.

In may in fact be "a political war cry", but is it purely that, or might there actually be something here that deserves attention?

> These aren't lords abusing powerless peasants

This is true, but colorful, rhetorical characterizations like this are an excellent way to persuade people without sticking to cold hard facts.

> they're contributing members of society being disproportionately rewarded for their disproportionate contributions

This rhetorical device is effective in that it persuades readers to logically think of the issue as a binary rather than a continuum.

The proper question is: is their disproportionate reward proportional to their disproportionate contribution? And even this improved statement of the situation is flawed in that is kind of implicitly assumes that the relationship between contribution and reward should be linear, which is inconsistent with the general societal decision that taxes should be progressive (the tax rate(!) increases as the taxable amount increases).

And to be clear, I'm making no absolute claim that progressive taxes are "right", I am only stating that this is what society generally deems "proper". This aspect of the situation seems absent from your analysis, so it seems appropriate to point it out.

> despite the fearmongering you see online

This style of rhetoric is persuasive, and it may even have some truth to it, but it is orthogonal to a proper logical analysis of the actual issue and should therefore be avoided.

> ...most Americans are doing well. Even our poor have modern conveniences, access to emergency healthcare, generally safe food and infrastructure

This style of rhetoric is persuasive in that it frames the issue according to one specific perspective (a subset of dimensions) on the overall (the entire subset of dimensions) issue.

A loose (and uncharitable) restatement of this might go something like: "Because most people are "doing well", then therefore there is nothing to see here." I will note that this isn't actually what you are saying, I'm just pointing out the beauty of rhetoric - when done well, it invokes a style of thinking, which results in real-time generation of certain "facts", without actually having to explicitly say certain things (ex: dog whistling). It can cause the reader to change the way they conceptualize the situation, and therefore change their conclusion from that which it would be if they were to engage in a purely factual analysis of the situation in its entirety.

This isn't to say that you are doing any of the above consciously and with intent to deceive, I'm simply pointing out some of the flaws that are ever-present in the way modern society, politicians, advocates, etc engage in communication. It's no wonder we've made such a mess of things.

People believe they think logically, based on facts, because this is how it seems to each of us. Bu in such matters what people actually do is think in narratives, that are very loosely (and often incorrectly) based on "facts" (most of which are also narratives), and then only a subset of the entirety. This is by necessity, because outside of the hard sciences, systems are far too complex and interconnected to think about using pure logic and facts. However, it's not a necessity to think we think in facts - this we are capable of realizing, and many philosophers and psychologists have amply demonstrated this, but the realization of the importance of this has not made it's way into widespread knowledge, and certainly not into behavior in discourse, even that between highly intelligent people.

I wonder if awareness of such complexities in communication was widespread throughout society, if we could improve the outcomes of our political process. I suspect we'll never know.

This post reminds me of my leadership at a former employer who were insisting on releasing a game console that requires customers to download all content and games, regardless of the fact that unlike gigabit internet offered in our city, many Americans don’t have access to or cannot afford broadband. That leadership team only hanged course because the negative perception spread like wildfire and made them look extremely incompetent. They didn’t care about the customer - they only even changed course to manage their own careers but I digress.

In some cases, these people are lords abusing powerless peasants. Most of America isn’t Seattle, Austin, NYC, or the Silicon Valley. People can work for WalMart in the town I grew up in or go unemployed because WalMart swallowed competition. They’re literally at the mercy of whatever WalMart wants to pay them.

Our poor have emergency healthcare but will get bankrupted in the process.

They have safe food insofar as they won’t die of typhoid or hepatitis like in the developing world, but they don’t have healthy food. They have access to various forms of packaged, refined sugars. A diet based on cheap access to these goods will only lead to longer term health problems - there’s scientific data backing that claim.

Interesting how you frame your argument - that the poor aren’t as horribly off as perhaps in another century or in the developing world, and so it’s good enough. The same argument can and should be used to call out the endless greed, especially of the 0.1%. Don’t have they have enough? Are they they some of the richest folks in human history?

The questions you ask are effectively asking that the markets use the Labor Theory of Value [1] to price labor (and this goods) rather than the way labor is priced currently which is a form of Supply and Demand [2].

The current form of global capitalism doesn't really have a direct corollary to the LTV pricing mechanism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand