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

Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 367 posts

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#91

Post by drdec »

logicchains wrote: post #41
SamBam wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my wealth is in anything beyond cash -- say I own a huge hotel chain, or the largest retail company in the country -- how is inflation a tax on my wealth? My businesses will still be generating the same proportion of the economy as they were before.

If inflation causes the nominal value of your hotel chain to increase 2%, you have to pay capital gains tax on this nominal gain (at least in countries where capital gains tax is not adjusted for inflation), leaving you with less real value afterwards.

That only matters if you realize the gains. If you own a business like a hotel, car wash, etc. and intend to keep it, you are not affected by value increases of the business itself. In fact, for many privately held businesses, it is not even known what the value of the business is because there is no reason to calculate it.

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#92

Post by CharlesColeman »

bjornsing wrote: post #84
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new These are not nitpicks. What you measure drastically changes the results. Piketty and Saez presented their own revision to their data in 2018 that shows starkly different results than the 2013 data everyone cites: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf For examp…

INHO we should be looking much more at consumption and a lot less at income or (worst of all) assets. In what way does it matter that Warren Buffet has X times my income and Y times my assets, if he drives the same kind of car and lives in about the same kind of house? It means he has more power than me in a capitalistic system, sure. But is that really so wrong or unfair? I think it’s actually kind of a good thing:…

> It means [a billionaire] has more power than me in a capitalistic system, sure. But is that really so wrong or unfair?

Where does that leave democracy?

> I think it’s actually kind of a good thing: most people would just consume like crazy and ruin the planet if they came into that kind of money...

That bears a striking resemblance to some anti-democratic rhetoric I've seen. For instance, one of the rationales the CCP gives for the lack of multi-party democracy in China is that the Chinese people would use their political power irresponsibly, so it's better for everyone that the [insert positive adjectives here] party have a monopoly on political power.

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#93

Post by ianleeclark »

bjornsing wrote: post #84
rayiner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new These are not nitpicks. What you measure drastically changes the results. Piketty and Saez presented their own revision to their data in 2018 that shows starkly different results than the 2013 data everyone cites: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf For examp…

INHO we should be looking much more at consumption and a lot less at income or (worst of all) assets. In what way does it matter that Warren Buffet has X times my income and Y times my assets, if he drives the same kind of car and lives in about the same kind of house? It means he has more power than me in a capitalistic system, sure. But is that really so wrong or unfair? I think it’s actually kind of a good thing:…

> I think it’s actually kind of a good thing: most people would just consume like crazy and ruin the planet if they came into that kind of money...

Crazy to think we might consume ourselves into fundamentally altering our ecosystem and causing mass migrations and death if we didn't have all of those rich guys around.

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#94

Post by kofejnik »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #76
pksdjfikkkkdsff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, almost everybody in the Western world has gotten rich. Go visit a medieval castle sometime. The standards that now everybody has required an army of servants in the old days. It is just a hateful lie of the left to claim "being rich" is dependent on exploiting poor people.

That's silly - compared to cavemen, even workers in third world countries are "rich", being able to trade things for goods and services and not being required to hunt and gather. Inequality solved?

yes, exactly; to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low

Also, I don't see why exactly inequality is inherently bad. I'm poorer than Bezos, _and that is a good thing_. Pretty much like Steph Curry is better than me at basketball and so he should have a lot more ball possesion should we be playing on the same team, Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with.

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#95

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #35
60654 wrote: post #7

This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new. The major points of their work, and especially of Piketty's monumental _Capital for the 21st century_ still stand: that capital is a positive feedback loop in a way that labor is not; that mid-20th-century laws that put brakes on this feedback loop have been removed; th…

> This Economist article points out some of the many small academic works that quibble over details with Piketty and Saez. But that's not anything new These are not nitpicks. What you measure drastically changes the results. Piketty and Saez presented their own revision to their data in 2018 that shows starkly different results than the 2013 data everyone cites: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf For examp…

[deleted]

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#96

Post by airstrike »

giornogiovanna wrote: post #83
airstrike wrote: post #44

Measuring income inequality in the US without looking at outsized wage gains abroad feels remarkably inaccurate. I'll copy-paste my reply to another thread from earlier this year: > But, wages haven't improved in the last 40 years for the average person ...in the US. Growing inequality in the US is driven by the fact that capital gains domestically have improved dramatically alongside wage gains abroad , while wage h…

What kinds of service jobs do you have in mind?

R&D in general (but, in particular, engineering, innovative software development and other highly-trained CS-based roles, life sciences research), highly-trained managerial roles in finance, accounting, operations management

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#97

Post by ranie93 »

cjjuice wrote: post #74

Why when we talk about inequality we never talk about the tide of economic progress that capitalism produces. If the rich get richer but the middle class has a better quality of life than what the rich had 200 years ago, is strict inequality still the only thing that matters?

There is contention about what this supposed progress entails; if its as great as touted, if we could be doing much better, etc.

This open letter is a good starting point: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...

>There is nothing worth celebrating about a world where inequality is so extreme that 58% of people are in poverty, while a few dozen billionaires have more than all of their wealth combined

I also think the point about changing goalposts to focusing on proportions (the absolute number of people in poverty is increasing) is interesting

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#98

Post by js2 »

rayiner wrote: post #77
Marazan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is capital

But not the kind of capital people usually think about when railing about billionaires and wealth taxes.

Housing is already taxed. In the U.S., property taxes are about 17% of government revenue.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/06/29/l...

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#99

Post by leto_ii »

bhupy wrote: post #87
tsimionescu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, you can't have a real democracy with too high income inequality, and it is hard to reduce absolute poverty if the poor don't have a political voice.

This is an often used argument, but can you elaborate how exactly that's the case? In most western democracies (the US included), the only way to elect a politician is for a human being to go to the polls and check the box next to the candidate's name. This opportunity is present regardless of whether one is a billionaire, a millionaire, a member of the upper-middle class, or a blue collar worker. A real world exampl…

Well, in the US, as possibly in other places, elections are usually won by the candidate who receives the most corporate support. On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016). Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates.

Re: Economists Are Rethinking the Numbers on Inequality

#100

Post by sokoloff »

rayiner wrote: post #77
Marazan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is capital

But not the kind of capital people usually think about when railing about billionaires and wealth taxes.

Exactly. Tax the capital that those other bastards have. My house? Oh, that’s totally different.
Post reply on HN