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Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

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Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#21

Post by lordnacho »

aphextron wrote: post #17
alex_young wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. Why wouldn't he have started one of the numerous profitable companies of the 50s? It seems more likely that an entrepreneur would do that rather than work in another field. > In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th…

>This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th century, all without massive economic inequality. The main argument of Keynesianism always comes down to the baseline of wealth for all people though. The average person today is far wealthier than the average person in 1950, and that's the real goal. Not necessarily equality of outcomes for each individual.

> The average person today is far wealthier than the average person in 1950, and that's the real goal.

I'm not sure human beings really think like that. I suspect many people would be happy to freeze the economy at its current size, so long as they stay near the top. How many people would swap places for a historical monarch, even when most such monarchs didn't have a flushing toilet?

I think relative status looms large in many peoples minds.

There needs to be a reckoning about what the goals of economic control are, because the current thought, "as long as it's going up for most people", doesn't seem to square with what people actually feel.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#22

Post by mieseratte »

eaenki wrote: post #20
ppereira wrote: post #10

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting. “Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of D…

What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA. Actually, a woman did. Not only she hasn't been rewarded economically but even culturally-wise.

> What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA

I thought Watson, Crick, and Franklin were working on a team and that she was left uncredited?

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#23

Post by ianai »

ebbv wrote: post #15
sokoloff wrote: post #7

I half wonder if the issue of inequality is that America may have a fatter right tail on the distribution rather than an ever-narrowing tail. Instead of only having the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, etc 0.001% wealthy, we have a 5-6% band of households who are millionaires[0] and that makes the wealth more visible when it’s a handful of people in your town or social circle than when it was only a handful of people in the…

You don’t have to wonder. The data is out there. While there are “more millionaires” than before, that’s a bogus metric due to inflation. You have to look at concentration of wealth as a percentage and a ratio between. Wealthy and poor and “middle class”. If you do that it’s obvious what the issue is; wages have stayed very flat for the poor and middle class and almost all wealth gain has been concentrated in the top…

I personally experienced this recently. I spent 2009-2014 unemployed. Anything I purchased was a painful life choice. Now that I’ve been employed for years, that feeling persists mostly. Much of what I earn is soaked up by financial obligations to financial institutions. That includes rent, utilities, and insurances. Insurance is even taken out of my pay before I’m paid! I lump utilizes into that as they’re often finances with bonds and amount to an obligation I simply cannot do without. Add to that the opportunity cost of working 80 hrs per paycheck. I’m simply on the wrong side of the finance industry.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#24

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

aphextron wrote: post #17
alex_young wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. Why wouldn't he have started one of the numerous profitable companies of the 50s? It seems more likely that an entrepreneur would do that rather than work in another field. > In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th…

>This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th century, all without massive economic inequality. The main argument of Keynesianism always comes down to the baseline of wealth for all people though. The average person today is far wealthier than the average person in 1950, and that's the real goal. Not necessarily equality of outcomes for each individual.

I make less today than my entry level junior engineer salary 20 years ago after adjusting for inflation and cost of living. All ships do not necessarily rise.

Wage and salary suppression is a real thing and will eventually bring our society to the breaking point. We are just beginning to feel the first tremors.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#25

Post by [deleted] »

eaenki wrote: post #20
ppereira wrote: post #10

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting. “Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of D…

What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA. Actually, a woman did. Not only she hasn't been rewarded economically but even culturally-wise.

[deleted]

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#26

Post by SidiousL »

eaenki wrote: post #20
ppereira wrote: post #10

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting. “Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of D…

What's even more ironic is that Watson and Crick did NOT discover the DNA. Actually, a woman did. Not only she hasn't been rewarded economically but even culturally-wise.

No, she most certainly did not discover the DNA. The DNA (which was not named like that) had been around since Friedrich Miescher's work in the 19th century.

Your statement is at least[#] as ignorant as saying that J.J. Thompson discovered electricity since he discovered the electron. Of course, the electricity had been discovered long before that.

[#] What I have in mind here is that even the statement that she discovered the molecular structure of the DNA is not strictly speaking accurate.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#27

Post by [deleted] »

aphextron wrote: post #17
alex_young wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 1950 he would have become a professor or gone to work for Bell Labs. Why wouldn't he have started one of the numerous profitable companies of the 50s? It seems more likely that an entrepreneur would do that rather than work in another field. > In 1998 he was able to start his own company and become a billionaire. This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th…

>This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th century, all without massive economic inequality. The main argument of Keynesianism always comes down to the baseline of wealth for all people though. The average person today is far wealthier than the average person in 1950, and that's the real goal. Not necessarily equality of outcomes for each individual.

[deleted]

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#28

Post by ItsMe000001 »

gaius wrote: post #19
quantumofmalice wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you aren't alone: most professional economists ignore banking and debt entirely. To paraphrase Paul Krugman: "It's just money we owe ourselves." Historically, however, debt has been social nitroglycerine, which is why Christianity outlawed usury and Judaism had a 50-year debt jubilee built into it. We will relearn this lesson eventually, but in the meantime our bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.

It's just money we owe ourselves Not quite true: it’s the money we owe our future selves. So you can arrive in the future and find that the pension that should have been waiting for you there was borrowed by past-people and they never paid it back. And you can’t go back in time to demand it back.

We don't have a time machine. Everything consumed today is produced today (disregarding short term storing in warehouses, that only goes so far). I don't buy the argument "but... future generations!" Future generations have to deal with whatever their situation is at their future time. They don't have to send anything back through time to us. If they are so impressed by abstract numbers in computers that their economy crashes and they become unable to feed themselves something else is wrong - it's not the fault of those abstract numbers, and I would think they are either pretty stupid (unlikely, unless heavy metal poisoning becomes a global phenomenon and global IQ relative to today goes the path shown in "Idiocracy"), or their system of a society is extremely dysfunctional.

Money is an idea, nothing more. It is incredibly flexible, humans can do with it whatever they want, whenever they want. Did you notice, looking at history, that whenever there was a crisis humans discovered that "money" is not an obstacle? For example, financing wars (WWII especially), or the recent crisis.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#29

Post by wbl »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #24
aphextron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This appears to prove Stiglitz' point doesn't it? There was no deficit of innovation in the mid 20th century, all without massive economic inequality. The main argument of Keynesianism always comes down to the baseline of wealth for all people though. The average person today is far wealthier than the average person in 1950, and that's the real goal. Not necessarily equality of outcomes for each individual.

I make less today than my entry level junior engineer salary 20 years ago after adjusting for inflation and cost of living. All ships do not necessarily rise. Wage and salary suppression is a real thing and will eventually bring our society to the breaking point. We are just beginning to feel the first tremors.

Mostly due to increases in the cost of services and housing since we decided not to build more homes.

Re: Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

#30

Post by api »

ppereira wrote: post #10

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting. “Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of D…

You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention.

Our system rewards value extraction (rent, financial hacks) far more than value creation.

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