An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
nytimes.com
An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#2It's amazing to me just how well some political factions in the US have indoctrinated the public to believe that the defense of the common good is some sort of threat to American values, which include, in theory the support and participation in your community.
It's gotten to the point where not even poor people are willing to listen or support many of the policies that promote their well being while not being a significant burden to anyone.
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#3I didn't know income inequality harms the top 0.1% too. This is giving me hope that this issue will be fixed in the United States.
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#4"Oxfam estimates that the richest 85 people in the world own half of all wealth."
This is not what Oxfam's estimates say, it contradicts them. Here is the original quote:
"The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world."
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#5There are always a lot of confident assertions (on all sides) when it comes to this issue, but not a lot of hard facts. It's really difficult to know what to believe, and it's almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion because people get so emotional about it.
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#6All you need to need to know is that Piketty did his voluminous analysis in Excel.
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#7i grew up in a poor family around a lot of poor people. i'm not rich, but definitely out of the poor category. even as a child, i was amazed at the plethora of bad decisions (or simple refusal to give important things a second thought) of the poor people around me, family included. an example was a couple years ago when i mentioned how wonderful it is that we can take free online classes from institutions like harvard, stanford, wharton, etc, and its absolutely free! how wonderful!! their response 'what do i get out of it'.
its not just anecdotal either, numbers have shown that those that already have educations are the ones that are mostly uses these resources. for a very large amount of the poor, i feel its them, not 'us'. the opportunities are there, and america may have disadvantages for those not well off, but we certainly have more poor people than whats justified by those disadvantages.
we created a system where people who are smart and ambitious can thrive. we also created many opportunities in that system, and those same people are the ones that take advantage of them. I think thats a huge part of this 'gap'.
the 2nd part happens to be with the time that we are in. most of this 'wealth' has been either inflated up by the fed's massive additions to the money supply (which does only help the rich but it is fully implemented and endorsed by democrats) and annother reason for the gap is the internet barons of the present age.
back in the late 1990s, bill gates was worth more than the bottom 50% of the country. if figures like that are still withstanding, how do you think its distorted now that we have brin/page, zuckerberg, bezos, etc etc?
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#8"Likewise, if you’re a pharmaceutical executive, one way to create profits is to generate new products. Another is to lobby Congress to bar the government’s Medicare program from bargaining for drug prices. That amounts to a $50 billion annual gift to pharmaceutical companies."
This "fact" always annoys me. Yes, Medicare can't directly negotiate with drug companies. However, there are two mechanisms that provide substantial discounts for drugs that Medicare buys.
1. All drug manufacturers must report the price they sell their drugs for to the government every quarter. That data is used to create the ASP (average selling price). This is the price Medicare pays. If a drug company starts offering discounts on their sales to private insurers, that get added to the ASP.
2. For drugs covered under Medicare Part D (pharmacy benefits), there is something called the "donut hole" where a patient has to pay the full costs of the drug. That is being phased out by 2020. Drug companies will have to pay for the donut hole themselves. The discount varies with the drug price, but for example, if a drug costs $5000 in a year, drug companies will have to pay $1300 of that back to the government.
So yes, Medicare doesn't directly negotiate with drug companies, rather they legislate big discounts.
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#9"Oxfam estimates that the richest 85 people in the world own half of all wealth." This is not what Oxfam's estimates say, it contradicts them. Here is the original quote: "The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world."
What point are you trying to make? Those two statements are the same.
Re: An Idiot's Guide to Inequality
#10i grew up in a poor family around a lot of poor people. i'm not rich, but definitely out of the poor category. even as a child, i was amazed at the plethora of bad decisions (or simple refusal to give important things a second thought) of the poor people around me, family included. an example was a couple years ago when i mentioned how wonderful it is that we can take free online classes from institutions like harvar…
If you have no experience of good education, how are you supposed to know what good education can do for you?
America used to have first-rate public schools. So did many other Western countries. A lot of the early computer pioneers from the late 40s to the late 60s came up through that system, and it's a fair bet that technology would have developed more slowly without it.
But for some reason teaching the proles to think and improve themselves doesn't meet with universal approval, and public education now is much less generous than it used to be.
At the same time there's been a constant propaganda onslaught from low-information media that shapes perceptions about what's interesting and important, and that media menu doesn't include learning cool stuff for fun or for profit.
So people end up educationally damaged and demotivated for a reason. Pigeon-holing them as 'lazy and unmotivated' is a very lazy way to misunderstand what's happened to them.