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Who cares about socialist propaganda like this? There is no evidence that "equality" in the distribution of wealth is good for middle class and low income perso

• jayvanguard 11y ago
  Most normal countries aren't aiming for equality, they are just aiming for not-massive-inequality.
  • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Equality and massive inequality are both bad because working harder doesn't help one get ahead. You want enough inequality so that those who work harder are awarded more, but enough equality so that everyone has a chance to work harder and get ahead (compared to current day where some of the hardest workers are barely hanging on).
    • afsina 11y ago
      `compared to current day where some of the hardest workers are barely hanging on` I am not sure if I agree. A software developer and a waitress at a restaurant perhaps works equally hard. However one job can be done by a thousand, other can be done by a million different people. One requires mastery, another may not. To me, only people does not work `that` hard are government workers and most academia. And boy they are a lot.
• unfunco 11y ago
  The lower-classes care about it now, and the middle classes are beginning to care more about it; and many of them don't care about the type of evidence you have mentioned. This is why left-wing politics is seeing a resurgence with Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Sanders in the United States. The happiest countries in the world are those where income equality between the residents of the country is more evenly distributed, people want fairness. The greater concentration of wealth to fewer people and businesses will likely in the near future cause further social upheaval amongst the masses, i.e. those that consider the current system unfair.
• Diamons 11y ago
  The wealth distribution is remarkably skewed. Today it might not mean anything but give it a few years of people having no money yet having bills, loans, mortgages, etc. to pay with no possibility of retirement and you have yourself a prime situation for another French revolution or oppressive police state. It's not something that you can just let sit, it's going to get bloody if it is not addressed soon. We have seen this everytime in history. It is not possible to sustain such levels of income inequality.
  • vlehto 11y ago
    It wont happen. Both parties are just waiting for the right price to buy those votes. Democracy exists for stability on national and international levels. Everything else is just a side effect.
    • Diamons 11y ago
      Everyone thinks that until it's too late.
      • vlehto 11y ago
        Has democratic nation ever been overruled by the people? Or even the poor part of the people?
• Mimick 11y ago
  It's fine for some to own nothing in order to have bigger economy on the whole world? Who are we competing with Mars? What a billionaire need more than billion for anything? You comment just funny since it's the perfect billionaire's first world problem.
  • manigandham 11y ago
    I'm all for less inequality but putting in artificial caps doesn't do any good either.
  • elcct 11y ago
    Who are you to decide who needs what?
    • wavefunction 11y ago
      The point is that we should all be deciding what we all need. To your point, who are the very wealthy to decide who needs what all on their lonesome?
      • 13thLetter 11y ago
        I just decided you don't need your car. Could you have it boxed up and shipped over to me? Thanks.
      • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        > The point is that we should all be deciding what we all need. Gently, there. There's a big difference in practical outcome between "we've all decided that we need fairer rules" and "we've all decided that we need your stuff". That's part of why the US isn't actually a democracy. There is wisdom in limiting people's ability to "decide what we all need".
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      The majority of citizens in a democracy decide what the economic rules are.
• llamataboot 11y ago
  It is actually, because we know that relative equality is a bigger contributor to happiness than any sort of absolute growth. Put simply, people would rather be poorer and in the "same boat" as others than be slightly wealthier but face massive inequality. So if you think part of the job of the economy is to maximize human happiness it absolutely matters. http://inequality.org/happiness-and-inequality-study/ http://inequality.org/happiness-and-inequality-study/
• manigandham 11y ago
  I don't think it's ever been about perfect equality. That would never work. Rather it's more about having less inequality. There will still be a hierarchy and it's not a bad thing but we need to reduce the leverage and power being concentrated in a few hands that have the potential to change everyone else's lives (for better or worse). I'm a big supporter of capitalism and believe in everyone being able to do what they want and to succeed to whatever levels they can, but we need to have checks and balances when it comes to how wealth can affect the rest of society.
• tveita 11y ago
  People who work hard and contribute to the economy but still live paycheck to paycheck due to stagnant wages care. It's an extraordinary proposition that sifting more money to the top instead of paying people fair wages would somehow help the economy. Turning your example on the head: what if making the distribution more equal would in the long term give all brackets more money, even the very rich ones? Would you then support distributing the wealth for the common good?
  • prostoalex 11y ago
    Well, according to this report, if you have two families both earning exactly the same (by contributing to the economy in the same manner), but one has $50,000 in the bank, while another has used that $50,000 to put a down payment on a house (perhaps by assuming a $200,000 mortgage), the wealth disparity between the two is enormous. Debt (when used prudently) is a useful financial instrument and an enabler. In low-rate environment are we really that surprised it's being used extensively?
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      > Debt (when used prudently) is a useful financial instrument and an enabler. In low-rate environment are we really that surprised it's being used extensively? Not surprising, of course. I think the difference is, central banks expected the ZIRP to be a chainsaw used to clear enough space for a village, not tear down the entire forest.
    • jacalata 11y ago
      What gives you that impression? The second family now has a $250k asset and a $200k debt, so they're worth the same. If you wait ten years and one of them collects 1% interest and the other gets their house value doubled then there's a difference.
      • prostoalex 11y ago
        This specific report doesn't count that $200k debt.
• randomsearch 11y ago
  > There is no evidence that "equality" in the distribution of wealth is good for middle class and low income persons. There is a vast amount of evidence. For example, much of it is cited in the famous book "The Spirit Level".
  • vlehto 11y ago
    It only shows lots of correlations. The real problem might just as well be obesity, teenage births, imprisonment, educational performance or drug use. If inequality is just one of the symptoms and not the real devil, then eradicating inequality would probably be rather destructive. Just like eradicating drug use seems to be destructive, because the underlying cause is mental problems.
    • Retra 11y ago
      Correlations are evidence.
      • dollar 11y ago
        Correlation is not causation.
        • randomsearch 11y ago
          That is true, but the book does not just provide correlations.
          • vlehto 11y ago
            What does it provide?
            • randomsearch 11y ago
              It provides explanations for the correlations, and then backs up these explanations with references that support the effect they're implying. Taking a quick glance at the book, they are over 400 such references made in the text.
• personomas 11y ago
  Large wealth inequality causes greed, and where there's greed there's corruption. Furthermore, rich people are powerful and influential. As a result, rules and regulations and choices and decisions are made for them first, then maybe the poor. When it should be the other way around, also known as the [1] option for the poor. Yes, this negatively effects society. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_for_the_poor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_for_the_poor.
• mikeash 11y ago
  Wealth means power. Let's take an extreme case: every person in the world has their wealth increased by 10% over what they have today, except for one person who has his wealth increased by $1 quadrillion. Everybody is better off, right? Except that wealthy person is going to rule the world, and stack the deck to help himself, and there's nothing that says he's only going to do it in such a way that everybody else keeps increasing their wealth too, or even keeps their wealth at all. We can see this at work in the US where the political process has become pretty corrupted, to the point that half the politicians act like wealthy people in the US suffer under a tremendously high tax burden when they actually pay less as a percentage than the average person, and the other half pays lip service to getting the wealthy to pay more but only proposes weak measures that never go anywhere, and where systematic lawbreaking in the financial sector that led to a gigantic financial crises went completely unpunished, except for the one guy who made the mistake of ripping off wealthy people.
  • dollar 11y ago
    I agree, wealth and power are closely related right now. But why? We could focus our energies on the distribution of power instead of the distribution of wealth. We could create a world where power and wealth were not so closely correlated. Arguably, our original constitutional government was a lot closer to that than we are today. That was when we had apportionment of 1:100000 in the U.S. House. That was when State governments elected their senators. That was when it was assumed that any State could withdraw from the Union, that any county could withdraw from a State. It was before a massive, centralized federal government.
    • mikeash 11y ago
      Wealth is ultimately the codification of power. A dollar is the representation of the power to get somebody else to give you a dollar's worth of value, or do a dollar's worth of stuff for you. They are not perfectly linked, but I think they tend to come together. If someone has a lot of economic power, which they can use to get a bunch of people to give them things or do things for them, that's an avenue to political power. If someone has a lot of political power, they can leverage that to get economic power. Your statement about how the original US government was closer to this than today doesn't sound right to me. Weren't only people^H^H^H^H^H^men^H^H^Hwhite men who owned land allowed to vote?
• ThomPete 11y ago
  No but thats not the only outcome and it's disingenuous to try and cherry pick one just so that you can make a overly simplistic point. The Scandinavian countries re-distribute their wealth quite heavily and yet are still some of the richest countries in the world. I.e. everyone is better off.
  • afsina 11y ago
    So do you think this can be applied to say, D.R.Congo, Peru or India? There is a reason Scandinavian countries can have semi-socialistic governments. I have repeatedly say this: it is easy to play Socialism when your population is 1-10 million (All Scandinavian) , when you have natural resources (Norway) or high profit strong liberalized private industry (All). Clearly they will be tested by the coming crises such as emigration, declining prices of production and declining oil prices.
    • ThomPete 11y ago
      Thats not the point. The point is that re-distribution does not mean that you can't increase the wealth of everyone which was that intended claim my OP. Germany has a pretty big welfare state and are 80million people and they even had to take on eastern germany.
      • ptaipale 11y ago
        There are quite huge challenges in keeping the wealth of the nation with current redistribution systems in Nordic countries. Of course, Norway has oil, so selling it gives money. And Sweden has lots of old money, from the time when ball bearings were selling for good money while everyone else was at war, but it has fallen from the top place of the wealthiest nations where it was decades ago. Finland, on the other hand, is in deep trouble with the same model.
        • fulafel 11y ago
          So does it follow that they would be doing better with less redistribution? Finland has slow growth but still doing relatively well. And low (by EU standards) debt.
• fsloth 11y ago
  There are some statistical studies that show that in completely free market most of the wealth gets accrued on a few individuals. I.e. the population generates the wealth but only a few gain maximum benefits for a statistical fluke and no specific high performance input of their own. The question is - do we want to modify the free rules with income balancing or not. It's not about in the larger context about should a few pay money from their own pockets for the many - with the statistical view it all never was theirs in the first place. Economies which redistribute all wealth are probably quite inefficient. Economiea which do not redistribute are quite unfair. There's a sweet spot between these two extremes.
  • afsina 11y ago
    I do not think there is a sweet spot, or better to say you cannot stop in the sweet spot. Once you start redistribution, it never stops growing. Governments use social welfare as a bribe for votes. Every election new and larger benefits are introduced to overcome the overly generous competition. Taxes goes higher with different forms. Government hires more and more people. The more nationalization you make the more taxes you collect. Investment, profit and culture of entrepreneurship diminishes So you deviate from the hypothetical sweet spot quite fast. What comes sure next is economical depression.
    • fsloth 11y ago
      "Once you start..." I don't think there is any civilized government that does not perform redistribution. Taxes are a form of redistribution. Any government functions such as free schooling, are a one way to redistribute the wealth back to society.
      • afsina 11y ago
        My claim is that all governments tend to grow by social means and populism. This may be slow or fast. After a point, prosperity disappears and slowly impoverishment starts.
        • 11y ago
• nommm-nommm 11y ago
  Nick Hanauer (first non-family investor in Amazon and self-described zillionaire who sold one of his companies for $6.4 billion in cash) believes if current income inequality continues then the pitchforks will come because there is no long term stability in such a society. The middle class are essential to growth and prosperity. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfork... But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution. And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last. If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when. --- The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better.
  • vixen99 11y ago
    You sure enjoy your massive generalizations. Just one point: the minimum wage ensures that the disabled, the incompetent, the inexperienced, the frankly semi-useless, the old and a few other losers - anyone beaten to the post by a smart productive young blade - will never ever get a job but can be thankful to subsist, courtesy of the taxpayer, until he or she fades away.
• specialist 11y ago
  The creation of the middle class has always been a deliberate policy decision. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Democracy-Political-History-American/dp/0767905342 http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Democracy-Political-History-Ame... http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_phillips.html http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_phillips.html
• fweespeech 11y ago
  While the study in the OP is poorly done.. > Who cares about socialist propaganda like this? Discussing inequality in society isn't "socialist propaganda". > There is no evidence that "equality" in the distribution of wealth is good for middle class and low income persons. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/BerensteinInequality.pdf https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/... > The evidence suggests that the channel through which inequality hurts growth is asset bubbles and financial-market instability, so policies that impose adequate oversight in that sector also flow from this research http://www.oecd.org/social/Focus-Inequality-and-Growth-2014.pdf http://www.oecd.org/social/Focus-Inequality-and-Growth-2014.... > The evidence is strongly in favour of one particular theory for how inequality affects growth: by hindering human capital accumulation income inequality undermines education opportunities for disadvantaged individuals, lowering social mobility and hampering skills development. There is evidence that the current level of inequality contributes to toxic asset bubbles and the quality of human labor available to industry. I'm not sure how improving both those situations are "bad" for the average person? > For example, if the distribution were more equal on a relative basis, but all brackets had less money than before, is that supposed to be an improvement? Yeah, that isn't how it works. Hint: The biggest gains are via education subsidization & shifting the tax burden. Hell, it can be done with just shifting money from Defense -> Education and removing clauses in the tax code that primarily benefit those making 6 figures. [i.e. Capital gains tricks for multiple residences, mortgage interest exemptions] No one says "get rid of inequality at any cost" but rather "How can we improve growth by reducing inequality?" http://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/49421421.pdf http://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/49421421.pdf > Reforms to increase human capital are important for improving living standards, and are also likely to reduce labour income inequality. New analysis shows that a rise in the share of workers with upper secondary education is associated with a decline in labour earnings inequality (Fournier and Koske, 2012). Examples of policy initiatives to raise upper secondary education attainment include inter alia enhanced accountability for schools, better teacher recruitment and training, and special support for pupils at risk of dropping out. > Raising social mobility by making educational outcomes less dependent on personal and social circumstances should boost GDP per capita by enhancing entrepreneurship, the overall quality and allocation of human capital and, ultimately, productivity. > Taxes do not only affect the distribution of income; they also affect GDP per capita by influencing labour use and productivity, or both (Johansson et al., 2008). Some tax reforms appear to be win-win options – improving growth prospects while narrowing the distribution of income. Many, however, may imply trade-offs between these objectives. Following the same approach as for labour market, product market and education policies discussed above (Table 5.2), these complementarities and trade-offs are drawn out in > Reduce distortions in taxing capital income. Tax relief – such as reduced taxation for capital gains from the sale of a principal or secondary residence – often distorts resource allocation without boosting aggregate savings and growth, and benefits mainly high-income groups. Specific tax relief may also provide tax avoidance instruments for top-income earners. In particular, there is little justification for tax breaks for stock options and carried interest. Raising such taxes would increase equity and allow a growth-enhancing cut in marginal labour income tax rates. > Re-assess tax expenditures that benefit mainly high-income groups (e.g. tax relief on mortgage interest). Cutting back such tax expenditures is likely to be beneficial both for long-term GDP per capita, allowing a reduction in marginal tax rates, and for a more equitable distribution of income. Lowering tax expenditures would also reduce the complexity of the tax system, and thus tax compliance and collection costs.
• hfourm 11y ago
  I would prefer HN to be a place where things like "socialist propaganda" aren't thrown around so loosely. Thanks.
  • dollar 11y ago
    I'd prefer a world where propaganda wasn't mistaken for journalism. I think it's important to label things what they are. Why is this piece propaganda? Because it presupposes a solution for a perceived problem and appeals to the popular. The problem is that the middle class and poor feel like they are struggling. But that's not what this piece says, it simply says that some people have more. Some people have too much. Way too much. It implies that the solution is to "fix" the income of the people that have "too much". See?
    • chad_walters 11y ago
      Please point out where in the article a solution is discussed at all.
    • hfourm 11y ago
      As the other response said, this isn't really a propaganda piece. Unless you are reallllly overanalyzing it, which it seems you are. Based on your comment it seems like your own beliefs and opinions were also hard at work projecting themselves on the intentions of the author. Maybe income inequality pieces are appealing so some populist yearning of the middle and lower class. But it is also frustrating because your comment seems to be linked with some underlying belief that socialism is an inherently bad thing. Which, IMO, belongs on a facebook thread of the uneducated and unthoughtful.
• Natanael_L 11y ago
  Yeah, except for like every single study showing how equal societies perform better in almost every meaningful metric
• Aloisius 11y ago
  Hear, hear! Let them eat cake!
  • hwstar 11y ago
    Someone might get "shortened a little bit". Apologies to Alan Sherman
• dollar 11y ago
  Everyone gets mad at me when I say propaganda. But just take a step back for one moment to consider the preposterousness of this wealth inequality meme. A San Franciscan has a cost of living index that is ten times higher than a resident of Flint Michigan for the same standard of living. Read that statement twice, then realize that the San Franciscan _must_ pay more than twice as much in taxes as a percentage of income just to afford the _same_ standard of living. The hypothetical San Franciscan working an identical job as the Michiganite will not be able to afford the same standard of living. In what world is this "equality"? This is the problem with drawing arbitrary numbers out of thin air and labeling one number "rich" and one number "poor". Granted, all things diminish on a relative scale in the extremes. A billionaire is rich in San Franciso or Flint Michigan. But how about a millionaire? Who gets to decide to draw the line between them, the citizens of Flint or the citizens of San Francisco! If you just said popular vote you fail. The problem is again with scale, you can't have millions of people voting on the fate of a minority. This is why a centralized Federal government will never be equitable or fair. The Federal must necessarily be subordinate to the State, and the State subordinate to the municipality.