171–180 of 197 posts
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Careful when making that statement that you don't fall into the trap of believing that only physical labor counts as "hard work".
Front-end engineers who build widgets in React can make a $120,000 salary if they market themselves correctly. Not all software work is hard work.
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Fortunately, you can increase your skill through training, reading, etc. You can increase your opportunity just by trying when you fail. Someone who only applies to a single job is less likely to be employed than someone who keeps on applying until they are hired. But then that would mean that luck is greatly a matter of how hard you are willing to work and that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion these days.
Because it's not. Donald Trump has not worked hard a day in his life; nor have his offspring. Yet they have quite a privileged position.
America is a great place for people who want opportunities to succeed. It is a horrible place for people who are mainly focused on whether or not anyone else has more than them because the land is full of people taking advantage of those opportunities.
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> Plenty. Some have kids. Others are in grad school. Some are even dealing with both. Yes people who go out and have kids without thinking through how they will provide for them usually have to work pretty hard at first. Still most of the people I've seen in this situation aren't really as bad off as they think. If you didn't plan for having kids, you likely aren't in very good control of your budget either and a sma…
Then you're just not looking hard enough, or your moving your goalposts of what you count. You're also falling into the trap of believing that all children are planned. Pregnancy happens even if you take precautions to have safe sex, and in many parts of the country, a person's options for dealing with that are extremely limited.
I don't believe all children are planned. Is it harder to get started in life with kids? Of course. When you choose a hard path life is harder. Not impossible, but harder. As I said, I know families with a whole lot of kids and not much education that do just fine through hard work and very careful budgeting.
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It isn't the quality of the service or product that is being compared. It is the fact that when you buy from companies with really good/popular products you are doing so with a bunch of other people and that puts more money in the pockets of the people who made quality products. If you don't like them having lots of money, spend your money elsewhere.
Is that inequality though? I believe inequality is when differences are unjust or someone or something is being discriminated against based on other things than merit or quality.
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I think most people have no idea of what it was like living back in those time periods. Yes, you could get a job back then without a diploma. You might be digging ditches or loading hay in 100-degree weather. I really haven't run across someone willing to work hard like that today who can't get a job somewhere.
No, grandpa was selling shoes.
I'm pretty confident that agriculture, mining, and other work similar to what I described represented a much larger portion of the workforce than shoe salesmen did.
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I don't disagree that real estate is inflated due to cheap money, but I would challenge the idea that just because you were born in a city you have the right to expect to be able to own a home there. As for the $200K comment, I meant own a home , not rent an apartment.
200k annual income is enough to service the mortgage on a luxury apartment on Manhattan proper without straining the budget too much. This is about owning, not renting. If you meant 'detached house' by home that's another thing entirely.
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He was selling shoes. Their house has 4 bedrooms, 3 living rooms, 2 offices, a garden, a court, a garage, a basement, a 2 cellars, an attic, and 2 bathrooms. And yes, not in a big city. But his job paying the house was not in a big city either. While housing prices in is little town are indeed way lower than in most parts of the country, so are the wages. I agree for the food though. If you have somebody to do the sh…
>$4 for a salad is very expensive to me i would be extremely happy to eat a meal at $4. these days i end up spending >10$ on a meal, and I am not even living in a big city in US.
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By the market, do you mean the government? Because they set the budget for education, and that budget determines how much money is available to pay teachers with. Or do you mean the voters, who typically vote down attempts to increase the money for education budgets - typically because most taxpayers don't have children active in education. There are no market forces at work here whatsoever. > If we fully deregulated…
> The pay does increase slightly, but nowhere near proportionally to the value provided. Maybe it’s not as valuable as you think it is. If it was, people with means would pay more for it.
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> This is precisely the arbitrary value judgement that we do not have to accept. Sure, I agree. Neither of us made the case for particular cruelty / non-cruelty because it's not really the point. My intention was only to broaden the scope and perspective of the reader to view the economic system in its macro-level historical and global context, and compare in reference to the natural forces and conditions that cause…
> The point is that whether you think our system is great or terrible, you can't change it by dictum. > "We'll just demand things change" is not a serious approach to anything. > ...neither of us would take someone seriously who showed up and said "We have to just write 'STOP CRASHING' at the top of each file". You're arguing (at great length) with straw men. (I think you feel like you're being reasonable, but having…
Here's the original comment I replied to:
> That's a choice that society has made, through laws and institutions which benefit the wealthy -- such as treating corporations as people. It doesn't have to be that way. [from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619025 ]
The implication I took away from this is that economic conditions are the direct result of "a choice that society has made". This is, IMO, far too simplistic. That's what I'm arguing against.
Because economies are living natural systems, policies, dicta, and regulations may be issued with the intent to cause a direct economic outcome, and in fact cause the exact opposite response. The reason economics is an independent field of study is because it is not at all simple to determine how individual choices, let alone far-reaching policy decisions, will ultimately impact economic conditions. No one disagrees that social values and choices can influence economies. It's just not a simple matter to make sure you're getting the desired result, or to establish reliable causal links.
Just as in all but the most dramatic instances, you can't definitively say one way or the other "I have cancer today because I accidentally swallowed a piece of astroturf 21 years ago", you can't definitively say "Policy X resulted in the [prosperity/bankruptcy] of the relevant economy".
The work of trying to model, understand, and yes, ultimately learn how to influence, the operation of this complex system is economics. It cannot be trivially dismissed.
Let me note here that I am not claiming any specific thing is an inevitable outcome of any economic system, nor have I made that claim elsewhere in this thread. In principle, you and I could be in complete agreement about the things that need to be fixed and corrected. But because I made a tangential comment that I don't think we're in such a bad way at the macro scale, you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, including forgoing any opportunity to expound on the specifics that underlie your POV.
I also addressed your assertion that "corporations as people" is an example of such a choice. Corporate personhood is a technical legal topic and it's what allows, e.g., corporations to enter into contracts, and to have their assets protected by due process. There is not really a separate legal conception of corporate non-personhood as far as I know (I'm not a lawyer). So saying this is an example of a social choice that creates economic inequality and leaving it at that is tantamount to simply saying we shouldn't have corporations at all. More exposition is needed for that statement to have any value.
You are correct that you've never said verbatim "the economy can be changed by dicta", but the implication I took from your post is that you believe it can, by, e.g., saying "corporations are no longer people" and expecting this to mean something.
> That's the crux.
No, I've spent about two lines expressing my personal sentiments about that. You are dismissing everything else I'm saying based on what you assume is a difference in judgment. That's not how substantive disagreements work -- it's how blind tribalism works.
Why should we trust someone who claims an interest in making society more equal when they're so flippant with someone whom they believe may have a different conclusion than themselves? That doesn't portend equality, it portends fascism.
> It's your value judgement, and it is not legitimized by the rest of your rhetoric.
Correct. I just said this in my last post. This isn't an argument about the relative fairness of the system as it stands. I'm merely making the case that changing economies is not just a matter of issuing dicta and expecting everyone to willingly comply or conditions to magically shift (e.g., corporations are no longer people anymore, and therefore ... ???). That is a highly simplistic view.
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It’s not arbitrary at all. The market sets pricing, it’s not magic. If we fully deregulated education I bet you’d see teacher’s salaries rise. Of course then only the wealthy would get an education but it’s disingenuous to suggest demand and its impact on price is “arbitrary”.
Saying "The market sets pricing" is admitting that it's arbitrary. "If we fully deregulated education I bet you’d see teacher’s salaries rise." I don't, not by a long shot. "it’s disingenuous to suggest demand and its impact on price is “arbitrary”." But that's not what I'm suggesting. Demand for teachers is pretty high. Pay has not risen to meet that demand, however. Demand for software engineers is also high, but o…