I feel valuing humanity, not productivity, could reduce inequality still further. Are disabled ("differently" abled) people to be starved because they are not productive enough?
Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#72I have a huge problem with someone who says, "We should just make compensation merit-based rather than based on accidents of birth", because it refuses to acknowledge that we already live in that system. It's just that the "merit" is stuff that happens to correlate strongly to accidents of birth (like IQ, speaking the "correct" dialect, being well-educated, and so forth).
It turns into, "our system is broken, we need to system _harder_", and is just as much nonsense.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
$30k/year is not a lot of money - definitely not enough to raise your own kids on
No, but it does mean that as a parent, if (in this canned example) you are paying $18k/year- while the number initially sounds crazy- nearly all of it is going directly to caretaker compensation, not bloat & largess.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s clearly not true, at least in the US. Total compensation has outpaced inflation significantly.
This seems like a non sequitur. Total compensation vs. inflation is not a measure of inequality.
Yes, but the grandparent claimed that
> and almost none of the gain has gone to those at the bottom of society
which is not true, since real compensation at the bottom of society has also gone up.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#75My 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…
> Instead of trying to figure out those factors and mitigate them so everyone has an equal chance, why don't we just say fuck it, and tax the winners more heavily?
Because it reduces the incentive to try to be a winner. The government might get a bigger piece of the pie, but the whole pie will be smaller. More importantly, since we live in regime of economic growth, this kind of policy can have extremely significant impact down the line: over 30 years, the difference between 2% and 3% economic growth is really, really large. Thus, increasing taxes today might result in money to redistribute today, but less money to redistribute 30 years from now.
Most governments fortunately understand it, and so in 1980s and 90s significantly reduced income tax rates in top brackets, and are in no mood for raising them. The tax rates for top earners in Sweden and Norway are about the same as they are in the US. The biggest difference between them and the US in terms of taxation is that Sweden, Norway, and other European welfare states typically tax the middle class much, much more than the US does. The welfare state in Germany, France, Norway or Sweden is not funded primarily by the "winners", it is funded by high taxes on people with incomes rather close to the median.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#76My 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),…
No, the Nordic countries don't really tax the winners more. The marginal tax rates for top earners there are about the same as in the US. The real difference is that they, along with most other European welfare states, tax the middle class much more than the US does.
> 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)
No, of course it is possible in other countries too. For example, people of Swedish ancestry in the US not only do better than average American, but in fact do much better than Swedes in Sweden.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#77My 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…
> Instead of trying to figure out those factors and mitigate them so everyone has an equal chance, why don't we just say fuck it, and tax the winners more heavily? Because it reduces the incentive to try to be a winner. The government might get a bigger piece of the pie, but the whole pie will be smaller. More importantly, since we live in regime of economic growth, this kind of policy can have extremely significant…
I see people make the argument that it will reduce 'incentives to do well' all the time... but why is that so accepted? The net gain for 'winning' is always going to be positive, so it will always be better to win than to not... most people who work really hard to 'win' have that drive in them to succeed regardless of the actual amount of money they make.
Really, after enough millions, the extra money isn't really changing their life... yet many still are driven to keep 'winning'... it clearly isn't about having the money to buy things at that point, it is about an internal drive. That won't change if we tax at a higher rate.
As for it hurting the economy, what evidence do you have of that? If we use the extra tax dollars to provide UBI, this will cause economic growth as there are more consumers with money to spend. While inflation would be a worry, our modern economy has shown that we have a lot of latent productive capacity (and a lot of goods that don't require more resources to produce, like digital goods) that mitigate the inflation risk.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Instead of trying to figure out those factors and mitigate them so everyone has an equal chance, why don't we just say fuck it, and tax the winners more heavily? Because it reduces the incentive to try to be a winner. The government might get a bigger piece of the pie, but the whole pie will be smaller. More importantly, since we live in regime of economic growth, this kind of policy can have extremely significant…
I see people make the argument that it will reduce 'incentives to do well' all the time... but why is that so accepted? The net gain for 'winning' is always going to be positive, so it will always be better to win than to not... most people who work really hard to 'win' have that drive in them to succeed regardless of the actual amount of money they make. Really, after enough millions, the extra money isn't really ch…
> I see people make the argument that it will reduce 'incentives to do well' all the time... but why is that so accepted?
Maybe insights from microeconomics 101 about what happens with supply curve when you drive a tax wedge into it, along with hundreds of papers published estimating the elasticity of labor supply have something to do with it. Yes, labor is elastic.
See for example this review from Congressional Budget Office, i.e. people who actually care a lot about what taxes are: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
> The net gain for 'winning' is always going to be positive, so it will always be better to win than to not...
Yes, but is it better than taking some time off to do some yacht sailing? If government takes most of your winnings, why not reduce your hours slightly and use it for more leisure instead?
> Really, after enough millions, the extra money isn't really changing their life... yet many still are driven to keep 'winning'... it clearly isn't about having the money to buy things at that point, it is about an internal drive. That won't change if we tax at a higher rate.
For some, it won't, but for others, it will. Lots of people in fact do give up after enough millions. You cannot only focus on things that are seen, like Elon Musk's drive, but you also have to think about things that are unseen, like that apartment building developer worth a few millions whose name nobody knows outside his local industry, who'll simply decide to retire early instead of putting effort into organizing construction of another apartment complex.
> As for it hurting the economy, what evidence do you have of that?
If you increase taxes, then, since labor supply is not perfectly inelastic, people will work less, so less work will be done. This is some basic economics. The discussion on this question in the field is not about whether taxes hurt the economy, but rather how much they do. Some people think that they don't hurt much, others think that they hurt a lot, but that they do is really a consensus view, and in fact common sense.
> If we use the extra tax dollars to provide UBI, this will cause economic growth as there are more consumers with money to spend.
No, this is just the broken window fallacy. At best, there's exactly the same amount of money to spend, you're simply moving the money around between people. If you tax some people to provide UBI for others, the same money is spent either way, it's just different people who spend it. In reality, since taxes have distortionary effects, there will be less money to spend overall: since redistribution is typically from more to less wealthy, and since less wealthy typically spend more on consumption than on investment than more wealthy people, reduced investment will in fact reduce the growth.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#79It 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…
Over the past 20 years, the amount of wealth has increased substansally, and almost none of the gain has gone to those at the bottom of society. Inequality is growing every year.
The top 1% has taken most of the growth. The top 10% have received some table-scraps. The bottom 90% have lost income.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#80Start taxing the very wealthy