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I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'. The Great American Dream is

I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'. The Great American Dream is about someone seizing an opportunity; equality means we all have an opportunity to seize an opportunity. Economic Inequality means there is a disproportionate number of opportunities at the top, and very few at the bottom. Not everyone takes those chances, but we want to make sure those who do have the shots to gamble the take, so that there is a churn that allows the cream to rise to the top. That, to me, is the meaning of the message of equality, and I suspect it's what people like Sanders are talking about.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
some-guy 11y ago
When I think of inequality and opportunity in the US, I think about the education system. Sadly, the quality of K-12 education in the United States is too strongly tied to economic output / wealth / income of a region, which seems regressive to me.
- ars 11y ago
  I've felt the same, and it's because schools are mostly funded by real estate taxes. Changing that model would help - even if it was something as simple as pooling all the taxes for an entire state. The difficulty with doing that is that real estate values, and thus taxes, is a very local thing, it's quite hard to set them universally.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  it certainly isn't confined to the US. You simply have to read the right sites to see that that is a world wide phenomenon. What isn't talked about is that a lot of what keeps people from success also affects their local schools, as in they don't participate because they don't have the drive to do it. The same lack of drive to push ahead.
- secstate 11y ago
  Having worked as an education beat reporter in a number of really small, really wealth-divided communities for many years, I can tell you that state education is unlikely to ever be the solution to the wealth gap. Honestly, from my time in the trenches of listening to trite, small, yet passionate people discussing some of the harder parts of educating children (i.e. hard to educate when they're coming to school having eaten 3000+ calories from horribly un-nutritious sources), I've learned that there's no easy solution. You can't bus those kids out of the low-tax neighborhoods into good schools if they're still going home to a shit environment. The best you can do is stand up and try to mentor one or two kids in your neighborhood in small ways, and encourage others to do the same. Distributed cultural-standard building. That's the best I've got.
  - CaptSpify 11y ago
    This is just one part of the equation though. Yes, bad home-environments are worse than bad schools, but we can try to eliminate both
  - mc32 11y ago
    But that has a strong cultural component. So we're implicitly talking about changing 'poor people in the us culture'. I say "in the US" because I have been to other countries where even poor people put all their extra (over sustenance) resources into educating their children. Yes, it happens a tiny bit in the US, but not as much as in other places.
- stvswn 11y ago
  Organizing school districts by geography, and then enforcing that children attend the school nearest them, is a bureaucratic convenience that a) makes it easy to centrally plan resources by forecasting student population, b) eliminates competition for the families' business. In New Orleans they simply started allowing students to attend any school in the city, and the schools' budgets were adjusted for the enrolled population they accepted. The outcomes jumped substantially (there were other reforms as well).
vinhboy 11y ago
Bingo. And most people knows this. But conservatives wants everyone to think it means "wealth redistribution".
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  Then why be so specific by saying income inequality?
  - vinhboy 11y ago
    Same reason why we call "sea stars", "starfish", when it's not a fish. At this point it's just a name. It's a phrase a lot of people recognize and has become a rallying cry liberals. You can't change it anymore. TL;DR Because marketing.
    - stvswn 11y ago
      Or, another explanation: they really are talking about income inequality, and you don't agree.
    - atom-morgan 11y ago
      The issue is that they aren't just using the term starfish - they're usually giving more details about what they mean by "income inequality" and it usually has to do with the 1% literally having more money than most people.
- stvswn 11y ago
  But Bernie Sanders IS talking about wealth distribution. "There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans." - Bernie Sanders (Also a really misleading stat. If you have a $1 net worth, you have more wealth than the bottom 25% of Americans combined.)
  - stvswn 11y ago
    And I'd add -- the Waltons would be a weird example to key on if you were concerned mainly with punishing Wall St. speculators but keeping dynamism and entrepreneurship alive. Regardless of how you feel about WalMart, the Waltons are rich because they built a big, successful business. Not sure why they're first among the villains for ol' Bernie.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'. The features which provide access to economic opportunities are, themselves, economic goods, and wealth is largely (though not entirely) fungible, so the two things are not entirely separable. You can't provide an equality of access that meets some common standards of fairness without finding some way to reduce the degree and circumstances in which the current system produces inequality in things.
- dnautics 11y ago
  I would argue the opposite. You can't provide an equality of access that meets any given standard of fairness without creating inequality, because now you are favoring those who happen to conform to/ or be better suited to/ or have a better temperament for the new standard over the old.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    But, this begs the question, as it assumes equality or fairness in the old standard. The point seems to be that this is not the case, thus provisions are required as a means of correction.
    - dnautics 11y ago
      no such assumption. The statement at the end is that there in inequality created at the end. I.E. there will be winners and losers. Now you could argue that the 'right correction' would create the 'right winners and right losers' but I think historically, almost all of the best-intentioned corrections applied by the states have ultimately hurt the dispossessed.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    You may say that's the opposite, but to me, its two sides of the same coin -- and its a fairly significant problem in achieving anything satisfying the common desire for fairness. If equality of access is fair, it produces inequality of outcome, but inequality of outcome itself destroys equality of access. There's no stable equilibrium that is fair, achieving fairness, to the degree that is possible, requires constant monitoring and active balancing.
stvswn 11y ago
You're talking about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome? This is specifically not what Sanders is talking about. He's saying that the basic fact that the rich have become richer than they used to be, relative to everyone else, is wrong and must change. How do you read this differently?: https://berniesanders.com/issues/income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/income-and-wealth-inequalit...
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  Really? Every single point there is about increasing taxes on the rich and reducing taxes/burdens or increasing pay for the poor, leading to one thing: more opportunity for the poor to pursue life decisions that aren't mandated by position or need (e.g., not going to school because you cant afford it or dont have the time when not working your two jobs). The rich being richer and the poor being poorer is an indication of the disparity of opportunity. This disparity is being used to illustrate the difference -- it is the cough caused by the cold; the cough is not the root cause, but a signal. Income inequality growth is not the root cause, it is the outcome of policies that affect access to opportunities and why all of the points that he proposes are goals to alleviate that access imbalance.
  - stvswn 11y ago
    Oh -- so income inequality is evidence of disparity of opportunity, so you are actually concerned with income inequality. You'd prefer incomes to be more equal. If opportunity were perfectly equal (your ideal state), what would you imagine income distribution to look like? Would that be acceptable then? In other words, at what distribution would you not argue that the distribution itself is evidence of unfairness?
    - mmanfrin 11y ago
      You'd prefer incomes to be more equal The way you've worded your questions you are trying to lead me in to a talk of wealth redistribution. Incomes being more equal is not about distributing, but in countering things that are naturally regressive by: Establishign a more progressive tax rate, ending on the cap of social security payments (which is the literal definition of a regressive tax), a livable minimum wage, equal access to education (education being generally a flat cost, and so affects the poor a lot harder than the wealthy), a singlepayer healthcare system which will put a much larger portion of income for the poor (than the rich) back in to their pockets ($300/mo for insurance is a lot more to someone who earns $1k a month than to someone earning $10k a month). These happen to be points 1, 8, 2, 7, and 9 on the page you linked. See? You can make income (and thus opportunity) more fair without redistributing.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

some-guy 11y ago

When I think of inequality and opportunity in the US, I think about the education system. Sadly, the quality of K-12 education in the United States is too strongly tied to economic output / wealth / income of a region, which seems regressive to me.

ars 11y ago
I've felt the same, and it's because schools are mostly funded by real estate taxes. Changing that model would help - even if it was something as simple as pooling all the taxes for an entire state. The difficulty with doing that is that real estate values, and thus taxes, is a very local thing, it's quite hard to set them universally.
Shivetya 11y ago
it certainly isn't confined to the US. You simply have to read the right sites to see that that is a world wide phenomenon. What isn't talked about is that a lot of what keeps people from success also affects their local schools, as in they don't participate because they don't have the drive to do it. The same lack of drive to push ahead.
secstate 11y ago
Having worked as an education beat reporter in a number of really small, really wealth-divided communities for many years, I can tell you that state education is unlikely to ever be the solution to the wealth gap. Honestly, from my time in the trenches of listening to trite, small, yet passionate people discussing some of the harder parts of educating children (i.e. hard to educate when they're coming to school having eaten 3000+ calories from horribly un-nutritious sources), I've learned that there's no easy solution. You can't bus those kids out of the low-tax neighborhoods into good schools if they're still going home to a shit environment. The best you can do is stand up and try to mentor one or two kids in your neighborhood in small ways, and encourage others to do the same. Distributed cultural-standard building. That's the best I've got.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  This is just one part of the equation though. Yes, bad home-environments are worse than bad schools, but we can try to eliminate both
- mc32 11y ago
  But that has a strong cultural component. So we're implicitly talking about changing 'poor people in the us culture'. I say "in the US" because I have been to other countries where even poor people put all their extra (over sustenance) resources into educating their children. Yes, it happens a tiny bit in the US, but not as much as in other places.
stvswn 11y ago
Organizing school districts by geography, and then enforcing that children attend the school nearest them, is a bureaucratic convenience that a) makes it easy to centrally plan resources by forecasting student population, b) eliminates competition for the families' business. In New Orleans they simply started allowing students to attend any school in the city, and the schools' budgets were adjusted for the enrolled population they accepted. The outcomes jumped substantially (there were other reforms as well).

vinhboy 11y ago

Bingo. And most people knows this. But conservatives wants everyone to think it means "wealth redistribution".

atom-morgan 11y ago
Then why be so specific by saying income inequality?
- vinhboy 11y ago
  Same reason why we call "sea stars", "starfish", when it's not a fish. At this point it's just a name. It's a phrase a lot of people recognize and has become a rallying cry liberals. You can't change it anymore. TL;DR Because marketing.
  - stvswn 11y ago
    Or, another explanation: they really are talking about income inequality, and you don't agree.
  - atom-morgan 11y ago
    The issue is that they aren't just using the term starfish - they're usually giving more details about what they mean by "income inequality" and it usually has to do with the 1% literally having more money than most people.
stvswn 11y ago
But Bernie Sanders IS talking about wealth distribution. "There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans." - Bernie Sanders (Also a really misleading stat. If you have a $1 net worth, you have more wealth than the bottom 25% of Americans combined.)
- stvswn 11y ago
  And I'd add -- the Waltons would be a weird example to key on if you were concerned mainly with punishing Wall St. speculators but keeping dynamism and entrepreneurship alive. Regardless of how you feel about WalMart, the Waltons are rich because they built a big, successful business. Not sure why they're first among the villains for ol' Bernie.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'. The features which provide access to economic opportunities are, themselves, economic goods, and wealth is largely (though not entirely) fungible, so the two things are not entirely separable. You can't provide an equality of access that meets some common standards of fairness without finding some way to reduce the degree and circumstances in which the current system produces inequality in things.

dnautics 11y ago
I would argue the opposite. You can't provide an equality of access that meets any given standard of fairness without creating inequality, because now you are favoring those who happen to conform to/ or be better suited to/ or have a better temperament for the new standard over the old.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  But, this begs the question, as it assumes equality or fairness in the old standard. The point seems to be that this is not the case, thus provisions are required as a means of correction.
  - dnautics 11y ago
    no such assumption. The statement at the end is that there in inequality created at the end. I.E. there will be winners and losers. Now you could argue that the 'right correction' would create the 'right winners and right losers' but I think historically, almost all of the best-intentioned corrections applied by the states have ultimately hurt the dispossessed.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  You may say that's the opposite, but to me, its two sides of the same coin -- and its a fairly significant problem in achieving anything satisfying the common desire for fairness. If equality of access is fair, it produces inequality of outcome, but inequality of outcome itself destroys equality of access. There's no stable equilibrium that is fair, achieving fairness, to the degree that is possible, requires constant monitoring and active balancing.

stvswn 11y ago

You're talking about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome? This is specifically not what Sanders is talking about. He's saying that the basic fact that the rich have become richer than they used to be, relative to everyone else, is wrong and must change. How do you read this differently?: https://berniesanders.com/issues/income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://berniesanders.com/issues/income-and-wealth-inequalit...

mmanfrin 11y ago
Really? Every single point there is about increasing taxes on the rich and reducing taxes/burdens or increasing pay for the poor, leading to one thing: more opportunity for the poor to pursue life decisions that aren't mandated by position or need (e.g., not going to school because you cant afford it or dont have the time when not working your two jobs). The rich being richer and the poor being poorer is an indication of the disparity of opportunity. This disparity is being used to illustrate the difference -- it is the cough caused by the cold; the cough is not the root cause, but a signal. Income inequality growth is not the root cause, it is the outcome of policies that affect access to opportunities and why all of the points that he proposes are goals to alleviate that access imbalance.
- stvswn 11y ago
  Oh -- so income inequality is evidence of disparity of opportunity, so you are actually concerned with income inequality. You'd prefer incomes to be more equal. If opportunity were perfectly equal (your ideal state), what would you imagine income distribution to look like? Would that be acceptable then? In other words, at what distribution would you not argue that the distribution itself is evidence of unfairness?
  - mmanfrin 11y ago
    You'd prefer incomes to be more equal The way you've worded your questions you are trying to lead me in to a talk of wealth redistribution. Incomes being more equal is not about distributing, but in countering things that are naturally regressive by: Establishign a more progressive tax rate, ending on the cap of social security payments (which is the literal definition of a regressive tax), a livable minimum wage, equal access to education (education being generally a flat cost, and so affects the poor a lot harder than the wealthy), a singlepayer healthcare system which will put a much larger portion of income for the poor (than the rich) back in to their pockets ($300/mo for insurance is a lot more to someone who earns $1k a month than to someone earning $10k a month). These happen to be points 1, 8, 2, 7, and 9 on the page you linked. See? You can make income (and thus opportunity) more fair without redistributing.