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Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

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Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#41

Post by nugget »

noonespecial wrote: post #36
nugget wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.

>Great childcare and elder care is very expensive It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.

I agree there’s a sourcing/matching problem that leads the administrators in these markets to capture a disproportionately large share of any value premiums paid.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#42

Post by the_cat_kittles »

caseysoftware wrote: post #10

> I think we can have a society that rewards people for productive or otherwise socially valuable contributions while also taking care of the poor and those who can’t work. I find "socially valuable contributions" to be a disturbing phrase. First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Second, quite often society is wrong in what "it" values or finds po…

this comment is great because it is a good faith argument that reveals how blind many people are to the fact that theyve outsourced all their moral thinking to money. the things you are scared of all exist now. they are bad in large part because wealth distribution is historically bad. its amazing how readily you dismiss your own ability to identify good and bad things. you really dont think you could have figured out slavery was bad back in the day?

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#43

Post by ars »

michaelt wrote: post #21
caseysoftware wrote: post #10

> I think we can have a society that rewards people for productive or otherwise socially valuable contributions while also taking care of the poor and those who can’t work. I find "socially valuable contributions" to be a disturbing phrase. First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Second, quite often society is wrong in what "it" values or finds po…

> that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money. Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precise…

Money certainly has it's drawbacks, but it does not have any kind of central authority that values it. It's the most distributed system there is.

> Just a lot of people don’t like that system much

Any other system would be more centralized, and even more open to abuse.

As they say: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

It's the same with money.

> places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching

Those things have a completely different problem: Those benefiting from them are not those paying for them.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#44

Post by helen___keller »

roenxi wrote: post #33
smallnamespace wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to speak directly to your point, which is the claim that only absolute wealth matters, but relative wealth does not . Relative wealth buys you status, position, and power in society. That status protects you when things go wrong, when the system fails to measure or optimize for the things that you care about, or when the music suddenly stops and you find that you're the one left without a chair. People deep…

> Your contention that we should only care about minimum living standards requires a large amount of faith, not just in the system as it stands today, but that the system won't slowly erode those minimums over time because the poor lack the political and social power to keep their minimums. Without the power to protect your own interests, you're at the literal mercy of those who are better off than you to throw you a…

> The natural solution to inequality is to disenfranchise the wealthy, which doesn't put food on the table

To use an example from the leftmost mainstream politicians in the United States, a current proposal is to enact a wealth tax on fortunes over $X million to fund a larger social safety net.

You can argue that ideologically the focus should be on standards of living, not on inequality, but realistically a wealth tax fulfills both.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#45

Post by ip26 »

noonespecial wrote: post #36
nugget wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.

>Great childcare and elder care is very expensive It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.

I ran through the numbers when my kid started in childcare. It turned out there wasn't really a grand bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead, mainly labor is just really expensive.

When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#46

Post by joe_the_user »

caseysoftware wrote: post #10

> I think we can have a society that rewards people for productive or otherwise socially valuable contributions while also taking care of the poor and those who can’t work. I find "socially valuable contributions" to be a disturbing phrase. First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Second, quite often society is wrong in what "it" values or finds po…

First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."

Are literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values?

Right now, the justice system, the zoning system and the operations of private foundations, and beyond are engaging in leadership that makes value judgements about what is socially valuable. That is how society has worked historically and the US in earlier times made those judgements more explicit.

Point blank denying this is actually calling for even more social change than the article.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#47

Post by TulliusCicero »

roenxi wrote: post #11

It remains very frustrating watching people organise against inequality as the evil of this era. Inequality isn't worth railing against and the focus of all this attention should be on living standards. If everyone doubles their living standards over 10 years, absolute inequality rises (there is always going to be someone with no wealth/income because they want to live that way, so the absolute gap in wealth increase…

There's only so much power in society, and when inequality goes up, the power of the affluent rises, while the power of the poor and working class wanes.

This isn't an issue that can be fixed by a rising tide lifting all boats.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#48

Post by TulliusCicero »

cortesoft wrote: post #28

My feeling has always been that no matter how you decide to allocate resources, some people are going to be 'better' at winning the game we design than others; maybe they have some skill that is highly valued in the system we set up, or they are lucky, or have connections, or have a higher drive succeed, or whatever else might factor into success. Instead of trying to figure out those factors and mitigate them so eve…

This is essentially what social democracies do, like in the Nordic countries, and it seems to work great at achieving good results in a variety of societal dimensions.

The counter-arguments from fiscal conservatives generally take one of two tacks: either a plainly disingenuous one where they argue that this is somehow only possible in those specific countries (e.g. due to being small and/or relatively homogeneous), or an ideological one where they argue that even if this is beneficial to the society as a whole, they're against it because taxing the winners more is fundamentally wrong, taxation is theft etc.

Well, the Nordic countries don't do the UBI part, but taxing the winners heavily and funding policies that are effectively redistributionist because they treat everyone more or less equally (like public transportation or universal healthcare), yeah they do that for sure.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#49

Post by jyounker »

roenxi wrote: post #11

It remains very frustrating watching people organise against inequality as the evil of this era. Inequality isn't worth railing against and the focus of all this attention should be on living standards. If everyone doubles their living standards over 10 years, absolute inequality rises (there is always going to be someone with no wealth/income because they want to live that way, so the absolute gap in wealth increase…

Wealth translates to political influence. If most of the wealth in a society belongs to a few people, those people have outsized influence on the those in power. Conversely, the more distributed wealth is within the society, the more representative the government will be.

In a deep sense wealth distribution is about what form of government you want to have. If you want an oligopoly, then you let the majority if the wealth go to a few people. If you want a government that looks after most of the citizens, then you want a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

#50

Post by stevenwoo »

lordnacho wrote: post #29

There's a new book out by an econ prof with an Italian sounding name that is very relevant to this. It revisits economic ideas about value and reminds us that the path we're down, completely subjective utility value, is possibly not how we ought to think about it. Of course neither is eg labour theory of value, but it sounds like there's some in-depth discussion of the historical idea of value in there. Totally forgo…

Thomas Piketty? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
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