Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Joseph Stiglitz Says American Inequality Didn’t Just Happen

evonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 222 posts

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

#51

Post by lajhsdfkl »

api wrote: post #41
lajhsdfkl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should be obvious that you won't get rich unless you sell something... None of those people sold things or seemed to be interested in the process of selling things (except Shockley and that point is moot since the coinventors/creators reaped the rewards). Is it really that surprising to people that you wont become rich unless you convince thousands upon thousands of people to hand you money? What our syste…

Your last paragraph is no longer really correct. The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes. You don't build a company for customers but for the next round of investors, and your product is its stock. In the extreme these can be highly clever and polished versions of the "big store" scam where nearly all actual value is flimsy or illusory. This is because all the money is…

> The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes

The largest rewards are going to people using their money to finance the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy? Yeah that makes sense to me.

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

#52

Post by ComradeTaco »

UncleEntity wrote: post #43
ItsMe000001 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it. Money moves the real world each time it changes hands (except for in purely financial transactions), so why would only the two tax paying and the getting-interest-from-government-debt steps have a real world impact? The cycle of money is far larger than that. It's certainly possible I'm overlooking some larger aggregate effect because I'm not taking a far enough step back. I also don't think it is all…

> It's certainly possible I'm overlooking some larger aggregate effect because I'm not taking a far enough step back. Inflation has a large aggregate effect, the people who first get the newly minted dollars can spend them at the current dollar value before their distribution dilutes the value of the dollar as a whole. The effect of each newly created dollar may be immeasurably small but over time may result in thing…

High inflation benefits those who have high debts and little savings. Low inflation benefits wealthy people with minimal debt and large savings.

The federal reserve driving limited inflation has occurred for around 100 years, and the time in America with the least income inequality fell squarely in the middle during the 1950s and 1960s.

The Federal Reserve and it's monterary policies aren't the issue.

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

#54

Post by lajhsdfkl »

InitialLastName wrote: post #35
mailxplorer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBL is worth over $50 million.

What's the economic value of the World Wide Web? How tiny a portion of that should we really allocate to the innovators who create the concepts our economy is built on?

So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people?

Your rhetorical question provides no value. I want to know how we should decide who should be rewarded, how we can obtain the money to reward them and what benefit does rewarding them in this fashion provide to society.

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

#55

Post by amarkov »

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #51
api wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last paragraph is no longer really correct. The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes. You don't build a company for customers but for the next round of investors, and your product is its stock. In the extreme these can be highly clever and polished versions of the "big store" scam where nearly all actual value is flimsy or illusory. This is because all the money is…

> The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes The largest rewards are going to people using their money to finance the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy? Yeah that makes sense to me.

You're mixing up levels of indirection. Financing the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy isn't itself an example of "practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on".

You can say that what our system rewards is always derived from practical products the average person wants, but that doesn't seem like a useful way to think about things.

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

#56

Post by UncleEntity »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #28
gaius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 econom…

> Did you notice, looking at history, that whenever there was a crisis humans discovered that "money" is not an obstacle?

If this were true humans wouldn't even have a concept of "hyper-inflation". The Venusualian government could just print up all the money they need instead of trying to get people to eat their pets[0].

Money, as an "idea", serves two purposes -- as a store of value and a means of trade. Without money trade would be so inconvenient (ie the coincidence of wants problem) complex societies probably couldn't even function as you would have to go out and perform multi-party trades for everything you needed. By solving the coincidence of wants problem money also allows you to delay consumption of current production since it, historically speaking, is generally based upon a non-perishable good.

[0]https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/09/14/551026492/...

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

#57

Post by dmoy »

Retric wrote: post #42
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…

Top 0.1% has more than 3x what it used to as a share of the total economy. It's not really that the top 1% has more money it's mostly that the top 0.1% has vastly more money. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i... PS: People often think of themselves as middle class but frankly 5million is far from it. 5 million means you can pull 250k per year safely and really should consider retiring becau…

Agree with your general point, though note a 5% withdrawal rate is likely not safe for very long term (especially if this hypothetical millionaire is not yet at normal retirement age).

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

#58

Post by lobster_johnson »

jessaustin wrote: post #45

I suspect this is covered in greater detail in the book from which TFA is excerpted, but this description of rent-seeking through control of the government is incomplete. In addition to one-sided transactions with the government, large firms benefit from their regulatory control of the commercial environment, enforced by the government. Smaller firms and individual people will always negotiate and compete from a disa…

I can see that happening in cases of regulatory capture (e.g. present-day EPA and FCC), but how would it happen otherwise?

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

#59

Post by lajhsdfkl »

amarkov wrote: post #55
lajhsdfkl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The largest rewards have for some time been going to equity plays and financial schemes The largest rewards are going to people using their money to finance the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy? Yeah that makes sense to me.

You're mixing up levels of indirection. Financing the creation of businesses that create products people want to buy isn't itself an example of "practical products that provide value that the average working class person would want to spend money on". You can say that what our system rewards is always derived from practical products the average person wants, but that doesn't seem like a useful way to think about thin…

Can you explain to me in simple words what you are refuting in your comment?

Nowhere did I suggest that the only way to become rich was to sell practical products. I will state that this is the primary way people acquire vast amounts of money and that whether people become rich via second order and abstract systems such as financing makes no difference. Ultimately the products would not exist without the financial system that was in place.

Post reply on HN