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Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

wsj.com

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Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#71

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

willmadden wrote: post #21
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of communism, but that ideology produced two of the major world powers. Entire generations of illiterate peasants were educated, entire economies were completely reconstructed in a way that is pretty much unprecedented. There was immense repression, the human cost of Stalinism for example is uncountable. But capitalism has caused immense suffering as well. It's better to simply speak plainly of the effe…

[flagged]

it's hard to give capitalism a lower death tole. India and Ireland under the British had entirely preventable famines also, and all the cia backed coups had quite high numbers of deaths themselves

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#72

Post by kristopolous »

zozbot234 wrote: post #59
kristopolous wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The focus on the ultra rich is mostly just a political ploy No, it's about the power asymmetry that breaks the promises of democracy that comes with it.

This is pure conspiracy thinking, it sounds just like those people who obsess over Bill Gates and George Soros. Please explain how the ultra-wealthy can be so powerful if they aren't spending down much of any wealth, and a lot of what they do spend is on charitable grants made in the public interest to 501(c)3 organizations, which must be politically neutral as a matter of law.

Really?

They use 501s as kobashi schemes for tax dodges through donor advised funds. It's a shell game. That's why they take the $1 salary as well.

As far as the other one, if you think, say, Peter Thiel or Jamie Dimon has the exact same access to the political process to influence policy as the guy fishing for bottles in the recycling dumpster out in my alley, I don't know what to say.

Money doesn't "buy" power and influence, power and influence is an ancillary structural artefact of the money. It comes with rights and privileges. We'd call them oligarchs if they lived in any other country.

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#73

Post by TheDudeMan »

xedrac wrote: post #55
TheDudeMan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No issue with the pay. But the US sucks at taxing rich people.

Not that it seems to matter. Congress will spend way more than they receive in taxes, regardless of the tax rate on rich people.

I agree that that is a problem. But it is a separate problem. If two problems depend on each other, should we fix neither because that fix won't matter in isolation?

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#74

Post by dang »

willmadden wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're predictable/repetitive and eventually turn nasty.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34192054.

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#75

Post by quantified »

zozbot234 wrote: post #37
quantified wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it can be. The boards that set it are made up of executives, and it's good for all that the bar for average pay gets ratcheted up. While a good CEO may be worth a multiple of any line worker, the notion that a CEO will leave for some other pursuit only holds water if the other pursuits hold higher multiples and are readily attained. They would all work for one-quarter the comp if that is all they were offered…

CEO's have a lot of influence on the value of firms they manage, as we're surely all aware of. CEO compensation is generally about aligning interests between the CEO and the firm itself.

All comp is about aligning interests. Nothing special about CEO comp unless it's to overcome pathologies in the CEO's makeup.

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#76

Post by AstralStorm »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #25
pilsetnieks wrote: post #11

Wages or income? Two different things. Steve Jobs had a $1 salary, many notable others did, too [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

"Income" and "wage" are used interchangeably in this context - income derived from labour, ie salary, bonuses etc. That's what "income inequality" generally refers to. "Wealth inequality" is what's relevant if you're concerned about the mega-rich like Jobs. If your assets are big enough you can live off of them without any labour - through rents, dividends, sale of assets etc. It's interesting if income inequality is…

Easily explained, the assets became unavailable to whole chunk of population, and the relatively tiny increase of wages does barely dent the increased cost of living for them.

The remaining assets are purchased by the rich who can afford them.

Easiest way to present this problem would be to measure in PPP adjusted dollars the time it takes to save to purchase a basic asset (usually living space) subtracting living costs. Make sure to also consider the asset price long term trend while at it.

If you cannot save, the time is infinity, if you cannot buy it in a lifetime, better also count your (ever poorer) kids in.

This is only the most basic estimate, remember that over time any health issue or other catastrophe is likely to happen, and the response to these often depends the savings you have... (You can count a flat buffer or a percentage.)

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#77

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #74
willmadden wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They're predictable/repetitive and eventually turn nasty. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34192054 .

[deleted]

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#78

Post by danaris »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #61
tracerbulletx wrote: post #17

The premise of this article is absolutely disgusting. The inequality that matters isn't the difference between blue collar workers and college grads with marketing and tech jobs. This is just propaganda to destroy the middle class.

Why is idea of decreasing inequality between the lower and middle classes so offensive? This isn't a zero-sum game. The college-educated middle class aren't losing anything here - their wages went up too . All that's happening is that the wages of low income workers increased more . This is great if you actually care about the quality of life of low income people. The difference between middle class people like me an…

The problem isn't "trying to decrease the inequality between lower and middle classes".

It's painting the middle classes as the source of the inequality. That's what leads to the zero-sum thinking that lets the upper classes sit back and laugh while we fight.

Was the purpose of this article to paint that picture? Hard to say. But when you read a lot about smug Silicon Valley programmers and their six-figure salaries and how different that is from the poor people who have to root through their garbage (whoops, no, they made that illegal), and rather less about the very unsexy carried interest loophole and other means by which the billionaires of the world grow and maintain their wealth, the intention behind that disparity becomes less important than the impact.

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#79

Post by danaris »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #33
willmadden wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Dogma makes for good rhetoric, but it doesn't stand up to daylight. The Soviet Union advanced the technology of not just itself, but many of its vassal states such as Cuba. China has long since abandoned communism-in-practice, but it is still one of the most advanced nations in the world. If the success of those countries cannot be accounted to communism, then the success of the U.S. cannot be attributed to capitalis…

Note, also, that "communism" isn't the opposite of "democracy". "Authoritarianism" is.

Conflating the two is part of the propaganda we've been sold for nearly a century now.

Re: Wage inequality may be starting to reverse

#80

Post by kristopolous »

marcusverus wrote: post #70
kristopolous wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The focus on the ultra rich is mostly just a political ploy No, it's about the power asymmetry that breaks the promises of democracy that comes with it.

Nah. Have you ever heard a mainstream progressive offer up a concrete plan to actually address the existing power asymmetry? All you get is impotent platitudes about reversing Citizens United , or the implied belief that tax-and-spend policies (i.e. the progressive platform) will naturally solve the problem over time. In other words, the pitch is something like, "The ultra rich are have too much influence. How do we…

"mainstream progressive" does all the lifting in that sentence.

You knew for a fact that I could point to dozens of people so you guarded it with something you could move the goalposts on and then be "dude that's not mainstream enough".

Cool. Not playing that stupid game. The entire internet is so fed up with all of these stupid right wing negging games. Nobody cares any more.

You're liars frauds and scoundrels. Everyone's on to it

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