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Is Inequality Inevitable?

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Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#361

Post by fzeroracer »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #330
fzeroracer wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I can tell that you've never experienced poverty in your life because saying it's 'as simple as that' ignores the times when poor people need to purchase something right away. They deposit a check into their account, then go shopping because that money SHOULD BE IN THEIR ACCOUNT and they desperately need things like food or basic amenities. Then they get pinged with overdraft fees because the bank decided not…

I don't think you can describe a person's life experience just because they don't react emotionally in a single online discussion board. That's horribly unfair and a bit out of line, to be honest.

As opposed to painting people in poverty with a broad brush, saying that they either destroy value or don't generate life-sustaining value?

Considering I grew up in abject poverty, I'm sorry but I'm not going to let remarks like that fly. That doesn't deserve a pass.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#362

Post by jodrellblank »

billions wrote: post #273
jodrellblank wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Just World" fallacy written into a single comment. It starts with "effort leads to results", and then mixes that with "effort is virtue" and concludes "people who have results, must be virtuous". Then turns it around and says "people who don't have results must not be virtuous, and therefore deserve their lack of results". "Effort leads to results" is based on the Just World idea that if you do what the winners…

Communism is trading WORK without a measuring stick, aka money. People stop working because there is no output measurement. In successful countries, your feelings don't matter- your output does, aka help contributed to others. Talk is cheap. Get to work.

People stop working because there is no output measurement

This sounds like a delightful utopia. Let's have more of this.

your feelings don't matter- Get to work.

This sounds like an appalling dystopia. Let's have less of this.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#363

Post by sdfin »

defterGoose wrote: post #352
sdfin wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the trends of relative deprivation? I know it's not a defined and studied concept, but if the relative deprivation is in a decreasing trend, I believe that it would mean we are in a good direction. Anyway, if the problem is relative deprivation we should focus on that, instead of focusing in inequality. I believe it would be more productive to improve things. Is inequality the "cause" of relative deprivation…

See my comment above, but in response to this, doesn't "relative deprivation"=="inequality"?

Not necessarily, as in the case of a guy who has 800.000 dollars being inequal to another guy with 100.000.000 dollars.

edit: I mean, the cause of poverty is not that some people are rich, because if world trends of poverty are decreasing while the rich are getting richer, there isn't a correlation.

Of course if some rich people get their riches by corruption or some other harmful activity, yes, that may cause poverty. But I would not say that the existence of rich people in general is the cause of poverty. That would imply thinking about wealth as a fixed size cake, where some have to lose for others to win. But it may be that it's rather like increasing the amount of cakes. Nobody loses if we have more cakes.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#364

Post by jodrellblank »

billions wrote: post #273
jodrellblank wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Just World" fallacy written into a single comment. It starts with "effort leads to results", and then mixes that with "effort is virtue" and concludes "people who have results, must be virtuous". Then turns it around and says "people who don't have results must not be virtuous, and therefore deserve their lack of results". "Effort leads to results" is based on the Just World idea that if you do what the winners…

Communism is trading WORK without a measuring stick, aka money. People stop working because there is no output measurement. In successful countries, your feelings don't matter- your output does, aka help contributed to others. Talk is cheap. Get to work.

I'd be interested to hear what happens if you go to your local teacher's union, and tell everyone there that they aren't wealthy because they don't contribute enough to others and aren't working hard or putting enough effort in.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#365

Post by dcow »

deehouie wrote: post #305
trentnix wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. - GK Chesterton

Albert Einstein did much of his greatest work in isolation, and he was quite proud, too.

And, yet, in 200 years he may well be regarded as an idiot.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#366

Post by sdfin »

defterGoose wrote: post #350
sdfin wrote: post #334

I don't get why lately the trend it to focus in inequality instead of focusing in poverty. I mean, if the % of poverty decreases, then economy is moving in a good direction, in spite of inequality, right? Suppose you had one million, and somebody else has one thousand millions, there would be a large gap, but I wouldn't consider it as negative. If there are arguments against what I wrote I would gladly read them and…

I'll agree with your basic point that reduction of poverty is, in some sense, the correct measure to look at. However, the problem with applying your stated attitude to shaping policy is that society has a limited ability to innovate or grow productivity on a finite timescale. In other words, it makes some sense to think of economic productivity as relatively constant (it's unlikely, e.g., that someone will figure ou…

I agree that it's good to evaluate what's the best thing to do right now to reduce suffering. I don't believe that extreme forms of redistribution work, and we do have redistribution in the form of taxes right now.

> now more than ever, a lot of the productive capacity of money is being needlessly accrued by relatively few people who, on average, don't possess the the knowledge or will to apply that capacity to society's problems. Under those conditions, the potential for growth and productivity in the future is needlessly limited.

The people who accrue a lot of money is able to do that because either they profit by selling some useful product or service that others desire and buy, or because they invest some land or form of private property they bought or inherited, or because they steal or acquire by illegal means that harm others (like corruption). I don't believe that we should consider equally the rich businessmen who became rich providing something useful to the world, and the corrupts. If the good businessman is punished with taxes or confiscatory laws he would be less able to produce something useful and demanded by society. If the corrupts are punished, everyone wins.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#367

Post by zamfi »

deehouie wrote: post #303
wuliwong wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I received a Ph.D. in physics in 2010, throughout my training, my anecdotal experience was that of an echo chamber. I didn't fully realize it until I left academia. Although, it was slowly becoming apparent as the years passed. My experience was of a relatively small and closed group of physicists who reaffirmed each other's assumption that they were at the absolute peak of intellectual thought. Most of the professor…

I think you're a bit burnt out from physics, thus this rather cynical view of physicists' approach to an important economic problem. The mathematical models you find in the works of many highly regarded economists are even more simplistic, more vulnerable to criticism. "When you have such hubris and make such simple mistakes..." that pronoun "you" should be the economists!

That economists make mistakes, and that even well-regarded economists espouse simplistic models, is not evidence that physicists might be any better at it.

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#368

Post by chongli »

jlawson wrote: post #359
chongli wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At no time in the past were we in danger of reaching the limits of our planetary resources. There was always somewhere else to go, some other resources untapped. In the future that will no longer be the case, unless we manage to settle among the stars. Past performance does not guarantee future results. The story of our society was not written with a fairytale ending. Whether we succeed and create a better future for…

Medieval and previous people were always at the limits of the resources they had the technology to access. The past was a Malthusian world. No economic growth and no population growth for thousands of years, in a world without birth control. The difference was paid by death. This is life when you're at ecological carrying capacity. We managed to find new ways to tap resources better, more efficiently, deeper, and so…

However, spreading past Earth or transcending to entirely new ways of existing (e.g. computational life) are also possible

The leap to another planet is far, far greater than to a new continent. It is an open question whether or not we could achieve it at all before a crisis destroys our civilization to an extent we may never recover from. There can be no second fossil fuel revolution, that was a onetime event in Earth’s history.

But setting aside the challenge, with new possibilities come new opportunities for inequality. In the case of the former, it’s not difficult to imagine a wealthy person owning an entire planet. In the case of the latter, might I suggest the short story Incarnation Day [1] by Walter Jon Williams. In a world of finite resources and computational life, perhaps only the wealthy and privileged can afford to be incarnated.

[1] http://www.sfsfss.com/stories/incarnation-day.html

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#369

Post by Empact »

tathougies wrote: post #260
Empact wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia. Fair enough that "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader, but it's the coherence that I'm referring to.

> IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia. Um, why would it be incoherent? By all observations of perfectly coherent physics, the universe itself is currently the largest it has ever been and is growing at an ever faster pace. While perhaps your opinion is that such things should not be…

Fair enough, it’s possible, but I maintain: the model proposed would have been operative always and everywhere, so would we not expect this to be occurring all of the time? Would history not be very different, with no middle class (our middle class has only recently declined)? Wouldn’t extended periods of broad prosperity would be an aberration, rather than the broad stroke of history?

Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?

#370

Post by Empact »

sachdevap wrote: post #283
Empact wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia. Fair enough that "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader, but it's the coherence that I'm referring to.

> "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader I don't think that is the reason for it being inappropriate. In my opinion, such phrases are a result intellectual laziness, of which I am also guilty at times.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” - intellectually lazy, or a claim whose verification or refutation is left to the reader?
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