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A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

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Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#241

Post by collyw »

ptaipale wrote: post #216
efaref wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the common ways to get out of poverty in the past was indentured servitude. People would voluntarily sell themselves into slavery because it was preferable to their current "free" position. You can't eat freedom.

Yes, although indentured servants were not quite the same as slaves (again, there was of course variance depending on time and place). For instance, did the fugitive slave acts of colonial America cover white fugitive indentured servants? I'd presume no, although some other laws existed to cover them (I'm by no means an expert but some reading makes me think this.) Racism must have been a significant factor in making…

You should have a read of Gaerber's "Debt - the first 5000 years". It talks a lot about the the origins of slavery in different cultures. It doesn't seem as black and white as you seem to imagine.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#242

Post by meagain20000 »

ddingus wrote: post #238
meagain20000 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand by everything I said. You should really read my comment again and you will notice that I mention that there are situations where you should provide help. There are people that really do need help And it should be provided. Being poor myself as a you a young kid, parents that only had elementary education and working their asses off in minimum wage I didn't actually consider myself incapable of doing what I wa…

I too came up in poverty. It was extreme for a while. Like wondering about eating type extreme. Somehow, I have a great memory of my childhood. I've also remained connected to my peers well enough to get some data on this. The primary data point is luck. I know some really smart peers, who shared my circumstances. They didn't have the same outcome as I did, and my outcome was reasonable. Why? I got lucky. No joke. So…

The USA provides plenty of help: food stamps, medicaid, rent assistance, financial aid, student loan. I assume you did not grow up in the USA if you had to worry about food. My comments only apply to America.

If you need help take advantge of those services. That is why they exist.

I'm talking here about people that simply do not help themselves and then complain about it as if it was their god given right to live a middle class life without even trying.

Personal responsibility has to be a thing.

Seriously, a poor person in the USA is a rich person compared to any poor person in a third world country. The opportunities here are amazing.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#243

Post by ddingus »

meagain20000 wrote: post #242
ddingus wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too came up in poverty. It was extreme for a while. Like wondering about eating type extreme. Somehow, I have a great memory of my childhood. I've also remained connected to my peers well enough to get some data on this. The primary data point is luck. I know some really smart peers, who shared my circumstances. They didn't have the same outcome as I did, and my outcome was reasonable. Why? I got lucky. No joke. So…

The USA provides plenty of help: food stamps, medicaid, rent assistance, financial aid, student loan. I assume you did not grow up in the USA if you had to worry about food. My comments only apply to America. If you need help take advantge of those services. That is why they exist. I'm talking here about people that simply do not help themselves and then complain about it as if it was their god given right to live a…

Grew up in the USA.

I'm not opposing personal responsibility at all. Count me as a fan.

We do have opportunity here. I am a product of said opportunity. We also have a near insane cost and risk exposure here, and that has impacted way too many of us.

Way too many of us aren't making it. That's a problem.

Yes, other parts of the world are worse. That is their problem. The US needs provide for its own. [1] Those assistance programs are nice, but they are often diluted, or come with punitive implications. It can be very difficult to escape from many holes people fall into.

Just try getting sick here, or have a family member get sick. We have done a little good with the ACA, but years of building, doing it right, etc... can be undone with grave, lifelong implications through no fault of the person unlucky enough to encounter something like that.

The real dialog isn't to compare the US to the worst, or lesser places. It's about our own potential as a nation. It is also about the longer term implications associated with stunting that potential too.

One of those implications may just be our ongoing ability to help improve the third world, a cause I believe in. In order to do that, we need our own house to be in order first, or it all ends up a mess and unproductive.

That is not good for any of us in the long term, though it may be fantastic for some now.

[1] By that, I mean with appropriate policy, not a nanny state that owns our problems, whatever they may be.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#244

Post by clarkmoody »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #209
clarkmoody wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the individuals who act in their capacity as government employees affect all the outcomes of state action. You may be more of an Austrian than you think if you refuse to recognize "society" and "the state" as independent actors. > The assertion that taxation is legalized theft enforced through the threat of force is a popular one in certain circles, but it isn't the self-evident fact you believe it to be, e…

And there we have it. A mises.org citation. Good luck finding a country that doesn't engage in taxation. You won't find one with a functioning government, or utilities, or roads, or a military. Keep on with the "taxation is violence" meme. I'm sure that'll get you far.

Yeah don't worry about challenging any of my ideas in actual intellectual debate. That'll get you far.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#245

Post by lhh »

"..the standard of living for the rich has risen and the standard of living for everyone else has dropped"

Really, standard of living has dropped? Just to pick one counter-example, something like 500 million iphones have been sold in the past 10 years, and over 1 billion android devices were sold last year. Compared to 10 years ago, we've given half of the planet 24/7 access to the sum of human knowledge. Seems like a pretty good step up to me.

I think what you mean is wages have fallen, but standard of living has risen dramatically and only shows signs of accelerating.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#246

Post by PhasmaFelis »

paulddraper wrote: post #192
hitekker wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point was not about blacks, whites, or even the Civil War. > Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It is a pejorative term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. There is a difference between "slaves" in the popular sense (ch…

The quote was from Frederick Douglass, a black man living during the Civil War. Impossible to know for certain, but I suspect he wouldn't be terribly pleased with a comparison of the current "lower class" to real slaves.

Comparing the lower class to real slaves was exactly and explicitly what he did do. Or are your scare quotes meant to imply that the modern lower class isn't a "real" lower class?

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#247

Post by bzbarsky »

mtarnovan wrote: post #128
jazzyk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth distribution is a big problem, because the richest can essentially buy the government (and that's exactly what they have been doing) [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/20... ] But if you took the money from the 1% and distributed it to everyone, it would probably amount to a few thousand dollars each, at best. The reason for lack of jobs is the they all went to India, China, etc. As fo…

> But if you took the money from the 1% and distributed it to everyone, it would probably amount to a few thousand dollars each, at best. That's patently absurd, given that the top 1% own 90%+ of the wealth.

> given that the top 1% own 90%+ of the wealth.

Citation, please? https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... page 24 claims that globally the top 8.1% own 84.6% of the wealth, while the top 0.7% own 45.2%. So the top 1% owns something between those two numbers.

Within the US, the top 1% owns an even smaller fraction (of a bigger per-capita pie), because there are many fewer poor people.

That said, the top 1% do own quite a bit of wealth. Same report, page 15, figure 2, looks to me like total global wealth is about $260 trillion as of 2015. World population is 7.3 billion. That comes out to $35000 per person or so. So globally this number would in fact come out higher than a few thousand dollars; per our calculations above it's about 0.5 to 0.85 times $35k (but note that this is including the the "1%" quite a large number of US retirees, for example; the threshold for 1% global wealth is not that high).

If you look at the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States#We... has numbers for 2007 saying that the top 1% owned 34.6% of the total wealth but that grew to 37.1% after the Great Recession. Total wealth in the US according to the above Credit Suisse report is about $86 trillion; that gives about $100,000 per person if you redistribute the wealth of the top 1%.

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#248

Post by boona »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #191
boona wrote: post #153

Let's be clear that Thomas Piketty's book has been thoroughly refuted, not in some minor way, but Thomas claimed that all he did was objectively looked at the data, and that the conclusion simply showed itself. Unfortunately he cherry picked data, and fabricated bits of history to make it fit his claim. The following paper does a great job of completely dismantling it. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_…

So, just to be clear here, the refutation to Piketty was published in the Journal of Private Enterprise by a policy professor from George Mason University and another author from the Institute for Energy Research? Or in other words, it was published in the Libertarian Journal of Libertarianism by a libertarian academic and a libertarian think-tanker at a libertarian think-tank, funded by the Koch Brothers[1]? This re…

Instead of smelling it, it may make more sense to actually read the arguments. ;)

Re: A Response to Paul Graham’s Article on Income Inequality

#249

Post by quxbar »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #94
quxbar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd take options 1 in a heartbeat, my student debt would vanish and my rent in NYC would be almost nothing.

Are you sure? You wouldn't have a personal computer, a cell phone, or the Internet. You'd have a rotary telephone in your house only. You'd have a TV that looks something like this: http://www.rewindmuseum.com/images3/hmv2647side.gif On that TV you can watch 1970s programming only. A 25" TV in 1970 cost $850 dollars ('77 Sylvania), which is equivalent to $5200 dollars today. I can hardly even find a TV that costs $5k…

Yeah, really okay with that. Assuming I'm still paid a Software Engineer salary, I'd have enough disposable income for a then-new sports car (Corvette Stingray, thank you).
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