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A reply to Russell Okung

lackbeard 11y ago
> you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality. I get the impression, reading a lot of the responses to pg's essays on this topic that this is like dividing by zero according to most people's model of the world.
interesting_att 11y ago
PG's point is so obvious it is almost tautological. Of course we should get rid of negative causes + negative effects, while keeping the positive. That applies to literally anything (gambling, friendship, work, etc). Maybe people are interpreting this w/ the most controversy because PG has a history of controversial statements (remember his article on immigration which caused an uproar on HN?). A more interesting argument that PG could have made is that it is theoretically possible to have inherent wealth inequality in the system without negative results. At this point, I see very few believe that it is even possible.
barney54 11y ago
There is so much truth in this: "Quote the specific passages you disagree with. This forces you to calibrate your mental model of what someone said with what they actually said."
- bjterry 11y ago
  That's good advice to not to misunderstand other people, but it's much harder to figure out how to not have it done TO you.
- dangnabbit 11y ago
  I did that while criticizing pg's original essay. dang still deleted me as a troll, because god forbid somebody be moderately brusque towards the almighty always perfect pg. god forbid somebody even get near his bubble. to me the worst part of pg's essay is that he never actually provided ANY evidence that startups increase income inequality. He noted that founders get rich, but he didn't go through who else wins and loses because of those startups. He didn't note that they shift power from the old guard. The whole thing was just pg going 'oh god people hate rich people and i'm rich, FUCK THEM' It was dumb.
- digbyloftus 11y ago
  I'm glad he's brought this up and in a way sort of made it a challenge. I find PG's essays to be very precise in scope and to then try to back that point up with arguments. It's good writing. Seeing people "reply" to him and effectively just make a grand standing post against poverty with the occasional "and this rich guy thinks..." thrown in is imo disgusting. There's no way people have missed that he doesn't think economic inequality and poverty are synonymous (I kind of feel sorry for him because he sort of has to give them the benefit of the doubt and keep going as if they're just mistaken), it's a core point in his original argument, which means they're apparently fine taking him and effectively throwing him under the bus by making it sound like he's pro poverty. I'd love to see a reply to him that's intellectually honest and stays on point. Rebuts his arguments, doesn't put words in to his mouth, and acknowledges those that have already come out of it. Sadly amongst the pile I've read, none seem to have tried to do that and instead seem to just be aiming for audience approval with emotional statements.
- gammarator 11y ago
  I disagree. Much of rhetoric is about framing--choosing what to present, and how. An essay can be wrong because of what it omits or wrongly emphasizes. Everyone is quoting pg's passage "So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." That's true, in the abstract--but it's so far from the reality of US society today that it makes the whole essay tone deaf: "let them eat cake." pg could have written an essay saying "poverty and poor social mobility are the real scourges, here's how we could fix them." Instead he wrote a defense of inequality, and wonders why there's blowback. pg has a bit of a blind spot about this "quote a specific passage" business. idlewords wrote a brutal evisceration of "Hackers and Painters" called "Dabblers and Blowhards": http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm And here is pg, 8 years ago, demanding someone point out which specific passage was refuted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325
  - deleted 11y ago
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ChuckMcM 11y ago
Too many people have tied "economic inequality" to "poverty and lack of social mobility", it is like there is some sort of constant preamble on the definition. And in my experience (and I've only tried this twice so take it for what its worth :-) talking about opportunity inequality gets you the social justice discussion, talking about financial inequality gets you the unicorn/startup discussion. But is economics simply finance + opportunity? Or is it the first derivative of that expected value over time ? Then the whole conversation is sidetracked by aspirations of the whole population versus aspirations of the few.
jwildeboer 11y ago
So Paul Graham complains that Russell Okung seems to use a different definition of economic inequality. And leaves it at that instead of giving his definition. Nice try.
- geomark 11y ago
  I think he did give his definition. He said "It means the variation between different quantiles' wealth or income." Last line of the first paragraph of point 2.
  - tiles 11y ago
    I feel like the grandparent post demonstrates a flaw in the method of quoting passages you disagree with: you can just as easily claim the absence of information in the initial post and set it up as a strawman.
    - toolz 11y ago
      Of course, my grandparent comment demonstrates how much easier it is to correct someone claiming a lack of addressing the point, rather than the tedious nature of getting into trying to match someones rebuttal to a claim that may have only been partially made. Also, I don't think the claim that quoting the points your addressing solves all the problems in organizing a debate, just some of them.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  > Quote the specific passages you disagree with. This forces you to calibrate your mental model of what someone said with what they actually said." He also says this.
my_first_acct 11y ago
Quoting from PG's first essay on inequality: "The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy." This is where I disagree. The risk of dynastic wealth is that the wealthy can pay to change the system, in effect pulling up the ladder and shutting down all future disruptive startups. So we not only need to fix the problems at the bottom of the economic ladder (which is where I agree with PG); we need to make sure that those at the top don't capture the government. Cynical readers might suggest that this is already happening.
- apsec112 11y ago
  Google, one of the richest, most powerful companies in the world, can't get the city council of an 80,000-person town (where they own an eighth of the real estate) to let them build a small bridge: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on-google-bridge-idea http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on...
- aggieben 11y ago
  > we need to make sure that those at the top don't capture the government We should do this by reforming (limiting and distributing) the government, not by destroying wealth.
flubert 11y ago
>So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality. How much of our "discussion" on this issue is tangled up with the fact are that some people are greatly concerned with relative poverty and other are more concerned with absolute poverty?
tkiley 11y ago
I'm surprised at how primitive the response to pg's essay has been. None of it seems to respond to the central point of the essay (which is that economic inequality has many causes, and we should specifically attack the bad causes, not inequality itself). In spite of all the noise, I do disagree with the central point. Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad. Wealth is opportunity and political influence. Therefore economic inequality is inequality of opportunity and political influence. Persistent intergenerational economic inequality is pretty much bad by definition. Inequality - a bad thing - can be caused as a byproduct of good activity. It's still bad. It's a negative externality, like environmental pollution. In fact, there's some striking parallels - a buildup of inequality, like a buildup of pollution, can trigger the collapse of the ecosystem. We need to agree that inequality is categorically bad so we can have a real discussion of how to keep it under control. It would be crazy to argue that farming is good so farm-related pollution does not need to be controlled. Likewise with startups and inequality.
- apsec112 11y ago
  "Wealth is opportunity and political influence." Larry Page, net worth $29 billion, and Sergey Brin, net worth $34 billion, have so little political influence that they can't get a small city's government to approve a new bridge over a creek: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on-google-bridge-idea http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on...
  - lftl 11y ago
    Ironically I think smaller local issues are often harder for the wealthy to influence than bigger national issues. As a concerned resident I can probably actually talk face to face with my city representative, and share my concerns about a project like this. I have pretty much no chance of meeting face to face with my state representative without cash or some other means of influence. The councilor probably also has significantly less need for campaign donations from rich benefactors than a national representative. And finally, local representative are most likely making decisions that affect them pretty directly as a resident, whereas national representatives may often be making decisions that have widely dispersed or no direct personal impact. These are all reasons regularly brought forth by Libertarians and Republicans who prefer that centralized government entities defer to local entities as much as possible.
sail 11y ago
I can't think of a bigger complement to a writer than to explain something clearly and yet that somehow turn into a controversy. Because if the writing is clear, which in this case it is, it means the problem is the audience. It means the writer found a genuinely confusing and probably undervalued topic. Good job, pg.
msvan 11y ago
It's interesting to note how the styles of Russell Okung's article and PG's response are so different. Okung draws analogies to sports, men on hills, uses rhetorical questions, and talks about dreams and compassion. It's impassioned. PG's response is a cold deconstruction. A implies B implies C, but B is not true hence the argument is false. Personally I love this style of argument and wish more people would argue in this way, but, anecdotally, people often think you're an asshole when you do. Maybe it's because you miss out on nuances that you find irrelevant to the central question, but that others feel are very important. Maybe it's just a generally unappealing way to be convinced of something.
obrero 11y ago
> If you attack economic inequality, you're indiscriminately attacking both the good and bad causes. Graham keeps returning to this point, which is a little silly. His class owns and controls the corporate media, which decided to frame this general issue as one of economic inequality. Then Graham castigates the strawman his class put up as being not focused on the right thing. There are those of us who work, and then there are the heirs who parasitically expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who do work. It's as simple as that. Workers periodically fix the problem - as they did with Charles I, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Nicholas II and his family. As there are still classes, the workers and the parasite heirs, this problem still exists, but I'm confident the problem will eventually be fixed permanently and the parasites will be eliminated as a class.
- apsec112 11y ago
  "Workers periodically fix the problem - as they did with Charles I, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Nicholas II and his family. As there are still classes, the workers and the parasite heirs, this problem still exists, but I'm confident the problem will eventually be fixed permanently and the parasites will be eliminated as a class." This sounds like you're advocating for a literal genocide. Is that really what you mean?
tmsh 11y ago
I think the confusion is around whether "like Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting the company you use to find things online" is a good thing. It's easy to read this as not just "[starting this company]", but "[starting this company] [and growing it into a huge success with mixed benefits for everyone]." I.e., Russell Okung or others might read that in terms of what it implies; but Google by itself neither furthers nor reduces global income inequality to my knowledge. That's not one of its priorities or missions. But starting it! Starting it was key. And "income equality" was key to starting it as it is to starting most companies. Is the original wording wrong in PG's essay wrong? No, but it's easy to misread unless it's emphasized. E.g., the desire for "economic inequality" as a catalyst for starting companies is great. It can be hugely successful and useful in many ways. But as soon as a large company has shareholders etc. one of its primary goals is to maintain capital for itself, which is generally speaking in favor of income inequality in more negative ways for the general public, one could argue. Russell Okung's point at the end is I think actually built on teasing apart this conflation: "I urge you, Graham, along with the rest of the community, to return to your first love. Build people up."
darawk 11y ago
I think the core of the issue isn't whether economic inequality is good or bad. I think most reasonable people can agree that some economic inequality is good and healthy and incentivizes innovation and productivity. I think we can also agree that absolute inequality (one person with everything, and everyone else with nothing) is also a bad thing. This means that the right answer is somewhere in between, and where we draw that line is where people disagree. Holding up either side as saying "inequality is bad" or "inequality is good" is, therefore, a straw-man. No reasonable person is saying either of those things. What we do have to ask ourselves is how much inequality should we tolerate in the name of progress? Would Larry and Sergei not have created Google had they made only 1/10th of the fortunes they have today? What about 1/100th, or 1/5th? My personal view on the subject is that that multiplier is set too high at the moment, and that society would churn out innovators just fine if there were extreme taxes at the ultra-high end of the income spectrum. I would be very surprised indeed if Larry and Sergei would have chosen to abandon their little search engine project if they only had the potential to make $100 million each. I think any positions taken on this subject that don't discuss it as a question of where to place this multiplier are disingenuous nonsense, to be perfectly frank. And this is my, and I think many people's issue with PG's essay: he seems to be taking the position that some types of economic inequality are good and some are bad. But it's not how someone made the money that's good or bad, it's whether or not it's really necessary that they have that much.
- joshcanhelp 11y ago
  Very, very well put. This is was what I've been thinking while watching this back-and-forth unfold (both this one involving PG and in general over the last few years). In my mind, whether wealth is zero sum or not is irrelevant. The discussion around income inequality is about the area under the curve. If that area increases again and again and again but the bottom, say, 90% remain in the same state, that's not progress.
- lotharbot 11y ago
  > "I think any positions taken on this subject that don't discuss it as a question of where to place this multiplier are disingenuous nonsense" Personally, I think "where to place this multiplier" is not anywhere close to the most relevant question. What matters isn't how big the multiplier is. What matters is what's causing it, and what problems it causes. If a big multiplier is caused by an atmosphere that promotes innovation, that's better than a small multiplier caused by a stagnant environment, which is better than a big multiplier caused by massive corruption and oppression. Norway, Sweden, and Finland have some of the lowest Gini coefficients in the world, way "better" than the US or the UK -- but so do Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Where to put the multiplier" is, at best, a secondary question after fixing all of the primary problems, and possibly a completely irrelevant question.
ronilan 11y ago
Russell Okung suffered a dislocated shoulder today and the whole team seemed distracted. They lost. So, PG for next year, just to be on the safe side, can you please choose another player to debate with. Maybe Brady? Thanks. A Seahawks fan.
tahssa 11y ago
The problem, as I see it, is that when wealth becomes too concentrated it in fact destroys opportunities and therefore social mobility. Some people want to believe that you can create a solution that fixes the opportunity/social-mobility problem without eroding the concentrations of wealth. Others believe that you have to attack those concentrations of wealth in order to bring back opportunity/social-mobility. I sit in the latter camp. To give an example. When house prices expand out of reach for the much of the local population many will object to any additional taxation that targets excessive ownership (landlords) or even foreign ownership. They all have the same argument, that it will cause house prices to go down and harm the economy. Instead they promote low income housing programs which are just handouts that only slightly offsets this gigantic problem. These people really don't seem to understand that house prices are abnormal and need to go down to sane levels that will on average align with normal incomes in order for the gentrification process to reverse course. In other words you can't really fix the problems that both Paul and Russell agree on without directly attacking the concentration of wealth problem. Everything else is just bullshit.
- T2_t2 11y ago
  Explain China? Or Japan? Or Vietnam? The world is not the USA. The world is 7 billion people, in countries and cities of varying economic outcomes. While income inequality is rising between inhabitants of the first world, global income inequality is shrinking. Specifically, the gap between Brooklyn, Beijing and Botswana is shrinking, even as the gap between individual citizens is rising. And the biggest gap of all - the gap between 21 meals a week and < 21, is shrinking rapidly. As much as we bemoan great wealth compared to middle-classness, this gap - the gap between the never-hungry and the sometimes hungry - is IMHO the single biggest gap of all.
  - tahssa 11y ago
    It was an example. An example that was on topic towards economic inequality. Just because you can find some examples where economic normalization is occurring doesn't mean that excessive wealth concentration isn't killing more opportunities than it creates.
LukaAl 11y ago
I don't really get what all this rebuttal targets. The original essay is poorly thought and full fallacies. Despite that none points them out. So, let see some of them. Ok, we shouldn't look at indicators of inequalities (the Gini Index for example), but we should look at inequality effects. Well, there's a lot of literature looking at it and finding that the Gini index is an acceptable proxy for the other measures (acceptable is kind of fuzzy here, bear with me). We also know that a Gini index of 1 doesn't mean perfect equality. This because it depends on the definition of equality and on what you measure. Also, we know that a little bit of inequality is not only acceptable but required to foster social mobility (and it is probably part of PG's argument). How much is the problem! But saying we shouldn't look at inequality index but at the underlying issues and the individual cases is as much a misguided suggestion as suggesting a startup to stop looking at DAU/MAU. But even if we discount this critique as futile. Do we really think that reducing a little bit the inequality will stop startups? If we setup the system in a way that Page make just 10 billion dollars instead of 15 billion out of Google (I'm making numbers up) he would have decided for a clerk work instead? Is he seriously saying that? And then, wasn't him (to be honest, could have been Sam Altman) that said that you shouldn't start a company to become reach but because you think you are the only one able to solve this issue? I know it sounds like a straw man argument. It is a sort of. But I believe in the law of diminishing return. I believe that I started a startup because I was determined to solve a hard problem, not for the upside (although it was important, but I was smart enough to know that the probability of making big money were really small and other investment had better returns). Then there's the point of variation in productivity that is so fuzzy my head exploded. What does he mean by that? Which his the definition of productivity he is using? Seriously, that's a problem. Because if he defines productivity by the ratio value individually produced/hours, I wonder how he estimates the value produced in the last week by Larry Page. By Google's value? And how he approportionate the value produced between Page and the thousands of people working for Google. Even for a simple example, how do you compare a productivity of a woodworker making chairs and a steelworker making swords? You could count the unit produced per day, but they are different products. You could assess the market values of their output, but I'm pretty sure the value of their output changes between peace time and war time without their productivity actually changing. Finally, it comes the last issue. He acknowledges that there's a small number of startup founders coming from poor backgrounds. I don't have data about that, so I believe him. Yet, I don't think determination is something lacking from poor people; it is the opposite! So, which is the problem here? Well, my little anecdotal experience tells me that when your parents could help you, you could go for the long shot, but if you need to eat, it is better to find something that give you the food quickly. It doesn't go against his argument, actually, kind of make it. But I wonder why it didn't make it explicit.
OopsCriticality 11y ago
I think it's time for pg to review the idea that there should be only one SV. Having only one startup center in the country contributes to limiting social mobility (how many can afford to move to and live in SV; amazingly, some don't want to live in SV; what about people with an "n-body problem"?) and deprives other areas of the country of the tax base in SV. It could be transformative for, say Detroit, to get even a fraction of the attention of SV. "Spreading the love" is also beneficial with respect to diversity, finding problems to solve, and to robustness (e.g., natural disasters).
kevinwang 11y ago
This style of response is ideal and we should all emulate it.
nhaehnle 11y ago
1. He says I say economic inequality is "a good thing." I didn't say that. What I said is that it has multiple causes, some bad (lack of social mobility) and some good (Larry and Sergey starting Google). It's interesting and probably important that he doesn't actually come out and say whether or not he believes economic inequality to be a bad thing, either. There is significant evidence that a high level or economic inequality has bad consequences for people - it can literally be bad for your health, via psychological mechanisms. This is important since if inequality is bad in itself, then you might want to eliminate some of the ostensibly good reasons as well, after having eliminated the bad reasons. So instead of taking a stance on the badness of economic inequality (yay or nay), he bangs on the drum that one should first go after the bad causes of economic inequality. I doubt anybody else in the discussion would disagree with that, which makes the whole first point rather pointless. On point 2, "So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." Does pg realize that perhaps somebody might not agree with that? This seeming lack of understanding makes the second point rather pointless as well. On point 3, "I called out lack of social mobility as one of the worst problems contributing to economic inequality" Is he aware of the argument that economic inequality can reduce social mobility? Since I doubt that pg is wilfully ignorant of the potential subtext that goes on in the heads of the people he responds to, I can't help but have the impression that people are talking past each other. I guess part of the problem is that the people he responds to aren't making their arguments very well (at least from the perspective of a highly technical mind), and another part of the problem is that pg seems to be insufficiently aware of the large body of work on the topic in disciplines outside his "home turf".
staunch 11y ago
> In fact I suspect much if not most of the angry reaction to it was a result of people not understanding what the term "economic inequality" means. Like "global warming", the term "economic inequality" has become something people use to refer to all of the related issues. PG's essay was controversial because he used a narrow definition. He says other people are confused, but in this case, I think he is. The fact that his essay necessarily strayed outside of his own definition proves the point. > ... and talked about how I had personally seen the effects of it in the relative scarcity of successful startup founders who grew up poor. And yet PG has never made any effort to help founders from poor backgrounds. In fact, YC has chosen to provide the majority of their help to people from the same elite backgrounds as themselves. Literally turning away thousands of people from poor backgrounds. It truly is "the Harvard of startup accelerators". It sure would be amazing if the most powerful person in Silicon Valley decided to help more poor people do startups. Nothing has the same potential to increase social mobility in the U.S. like thousands of new startups run by poor people solving problems they care about, like maybe helping more poor people do startups.
pfarnsworth 11y ago
To be blunt, if people are misunderstanding pg's essay, what it means is that his writing skills were not good enough to tackle a topic as complex as economic inequality. I read his essay and came across with a bad taste in my mouth as well. I think he has surrounded himself with too many yes-people that told him this was a great article to post, without being honest to him about the repercussions. It's fine because everyone makes mistakes. This is a life lesson that he needs to internalize.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  This was my biggest takeaway. Who does he have review these? No one told him how bad this was academically and optics wise? He needs to broaden the inner circle.
- lotharbot 11y ago
  > "it means is that his writing skills were not good enough" or, possibly, their listening/comprehension skills were not good enough. Communication requires solid effort and methodology by both the speaker and the listener. Either or both sides can be responsible for a breakdown.
  - pfarnsworth 11y ago
    There were a lot of people that burned him online for his essay, not just a football player. If a bunch of people accuse you of the same thing, at some point you have to start blaming yourself instead of blaming others.
    - lotharbot 11y ago
      pick any controversial topic in which people are emotionally invested, and any well-written argument made about that topic, and you'll find "a lot of people" who "burned" whoever wrote the argument -- some of which might even be good responses, but many of which are some variation of "heard what I wanted to hear".
      - 11y ago
hackaflocka 11y ago
These are great debates. It's difficult to keep emotion out of it. Thank you, PG, for your responses. They help remind me that "enlightened capitalism isn't perfect, but it's better than every other system that's been tried."
shadowsun7 11y ago
pg's central argument is that economic inequality in itself is not bad, but it has good causes and bad causes and those should be attacked instead of economic inequality. I think he's right: it's probably more productive in the near term to attack bad causes of economic inequality. [1] But his first assertion (that inequality is not bad) could still be wrong. I think his essay is built on the assumption that people care more about absolute values of wealth and not relative ones. Psychology indicates that relative measures of wealth more directly map to levels of happiness and unhappiness. People do care about relative levels of income as opposed to absolute levels of income, and social cohesion is affected directly by such resentment, even if there isn't extreme poverty and incomes are rising across the board! In Singapore, where I live, there is relatively strong meritocracy and little extreme poverty. GDP per capita is high, and rising; the government is directly incentivised to create economic growth (their bonuses are pegged to national GDP increases). But ostentatious displays of wealth - made easier, IMO, by social media - have led to rising resentment of the government's policies, as well as resentment against the globalised rich who chose to make Singapore their home. I also think economic literature and history is rich with the negative social effects of economic inequality (even if some of it is conflated with bad causes, as pg describes). Elsewhere in this thread tkiley talks about how economic inequality can be seen as a negative externality, which is a good way of describing it, and is, I think, the attitude economists seem to take. While pg's essay contains a fascinating call: to imagine a world where we have to chose to live with increasing economic inequality, I do not believe such a world would be easy to live in. [1] To paraphrase his argument, progressive taxation might bring down the Gini coefficient but not necessarily do anything to alleviate poverty if the systemic causes of poverty aren't attacked. Better to 'attack poverty and destroy wealth in the process, as opposed to attacking wealth and hoping it destroys poverty as a side effect'.
- puredemo 11y ago
  >While pg's essay contains a fascinating call: to imagine a world where we have to chose to live with increasing economic inequality, I do not believe such a world would be easy to live in. It's almost as if people will always find something to complain about.
newmana 11y ago
"So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." I think this is where the evidence is to the contrary - economic inequality predicts poverty and poor social mobility. "These results suggest that the takeoff in income inequality may account in part for the decline in mobility." http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mitnik-cumberworth-grusky_social-mobility-high-inequality.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mi...
alexashka 11y ago
Looking at it - I can't help but feel like he simply said everything he said in the original essay, except with quotes from that other guy sprinkled in. That is to say, the position hasn't changed at all. This is simply a reiteration, a response to the number of people filling HN with emotional comments on the topic. The potential problem that hasn't garnered much attention is that the issue of having a lifestyle you are not satisfied with goes far beyond the distribution of dollars. If we agree on that, then there can be room to discuss what's really bothering people. From an individualistic point of view, it is easy to say 'he has more than he knows what to do with, I'm struggling, I want some of that, just give it to me!' and anyone who says otherwise, is clearly not cool. It makes sense too. That point of view makes total sense - if someone has a billion, giving me personally a million would be real good right? Too bad there are just not enough billionaire people to make that work, not even close. So then what are we talking arguing about? The solution is elsewhere. That is to say, we have to pick our battles, we only have so much time and energy in a lifetime. Arguing about 'if we distribute it differently, I think it'd be better' back and forth if you are an economist, philosopher, or someone in a place where you can actually affect these things is totally fine. That's not the people here, so then maybe all that's happening is people venting their frustrations out on PG and if that's the case, no amount of responses is going to fix that. It's like arguing with a dude who believes the root of his problems is witchcraft. That's something each person has to fix for him/herself.
jgord 11y ago
yes PG, but .. Inequality is a pretty good proxy for all the 'evils' we really want to address - If we could turn one knob to fix things, we would turn down the big one marked "Inequality". I think the high emotion around the issue, that most of us feel, arises from a kind of pre-cognition that something is totally broken in our system of commerce and democracy... There are titanic demographic shifts even in the last few years [ for example, look at the graph on this page, showing a 10% shift in wealth from the 99% to the 1% in the last 5 years, if I read it correctly : http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-people-have-the-same-amount-of-wealth-as-half-the-world-says-oxfam-20160116-gm7h6y.html http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-peopl... ] This is a bit like a 3 degree change in global climate - we feel it viscerally without understanding whats going on, we get the sense old rules/intuitions don't apply anymore. Weather is more extreme, something is different in the economy. This may be a natural result of technology plus the magnifying effect of the internet to spread value out and gather X% of that Y value inwards to creators... which is fine and good, we all benefit from technology. Inequality may be even more extreme in future, and yet all boats may be lifted as that happens - so we all enjoy a better standard of living. But we are not seeing that now, there is a torrent up, but no trickle down. Right now, our rules for democracy have not caught up to this new norm, nor has our tax regime - and the current system is being gamed. I think there is justified rational anger, because most people feel somehow they have been stolen from and lied to, particularly post GFC/2008. While we are violently agreeing/disagreeing on whether != is intrinsically evil, lets drill down and discuss the real issues lying under the banner of inequality - poverty, tax, education/student debt, superPACs / campaign funding, influence of lobbyists, police abusing power when black lives matter, incarceration rates for petty crimes, carbon pricing / green energy incentives, minimum wage/basic income ... its a long damn list, and most politicians don't seem to be too serious about talking about this stuff - now is the time to demand that discussion of them. We need to drill down, explore the engineering of our capitalist democracy, then fix it.
sushirain 11y ago
Larry and Sergey started Google because they wanted to be rich? Even if they had known for sure that it wasn't the way to the 1%, but say to the 10%, would they not have started Google?
yarou 11y ago
pg never had to struggle too hard in his life. That's why he has skewed views on income inequality. He also has probably never read Piketty's book on income equality. There are empirical results that justify the narrative, people.
serge2k 11y ago
Another "you just don't understand!" Response.

> you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality. I get the impression, reading a lot of the responses to pg's essays on this topic that this is like dividing by zero according to most people's model of the world.

interesting_att 11y ago

PG's point is so obvious it is almost tautological. Of course we should get rid of negative causes + negative effects, while keeping the positive. That applies to literally anything (gambling, friendship, work, etc). Maybe people are interpreting this w/ the most controversy because PG has a history of controversial statements (remember his article on immigration which caused an uproar on HN?). A more interesting argument that PG could have made is that it is theoretically possible to have inherent wealth inequality in the system without negative results. At this point, I see very few believe that it is even possible.

barney54 11y ago

There is so much truth in this: "Quote the specific passages you disagree with. This forces you to calibrate your mental model of what someone said with what they actually said."

bjterry 11y ago
That's good advice to not to misunderstand other people, but it's much harder to figure out how to not have it done TO you.
dangnabbit 11y ago
I did that while criticizing pg's original essay. dang still deleted me as a troll, because god forbid somebody be moderately brusque towards the almighty always perfect pg. god forbid somebody even get near his bubble. to me the worst part of pg's essay is that he never actually provided ANY evidence that startups increase income inequality. He noted that founders get rich, but he didn't go through who else wins and loses because of those startups. He didn't note that they shift power from the old guard. The whole thing was just pg going 'oh god people hate rich people and i'm rich, FUCK THEM' It was dumb.
digbyloftus 11y ago
I'm glad he's brought this up and in a way sort of made it a challenge. I find PG's essays to be very precise in scope and to then try to back that point up with arguments. It's good writing. Seeing people "reply" to him and effectively just make a grand standing post against poverty with the occasional "and this rich guy thinks..." thrown in is imo disgusting. There's no way people have missed that he doesn't think economic inequality and poverty are synonymous (I kind of feel sorry for him because he sort of has to give them the benefit of the doubt and keep going as if they're just mistaken), it's a core point in his original argument, which means they're apparently fine taking him and effectively throwing him under the bus by making it sound like he's pro poverty. I'd love to see a reply to him that's intellectually honest and stays on point. Rebuts his arguments, doesn't put words in to his mouth, and acknowledges those that have already come out of it. Sadly amongst the pile I've read, none seem to have tried to do that and instead seem to just be aiming for audience approval with emotional statements.
gammarator 11y ago
I disagree. Much of rhetoric is about framing--choosing what to present, and how. An essay can be wrong because of what it omits or wrongly emphasizes. Everyone is quoting pg's passage "So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." That's true, in the abstract--but it's so far from the reality of US society today that it makes the whole essay tone deaf: "let them eat cake." pg could have written an essay saying "poverty and poor social mobility are the real scourges, here's how we could fix them." Instead he wrote a defense of inequality, and wonders why there's blowback. pg has a bit of a blind spot about this "quote a specific passage" business. idlewords wrote a brutal evisceration of "Hackers and Painters" called "Dabblers and Blowhards": http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm And here is pg, 8 years ago, demanding someone point out which specific passage was refuted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=238325
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Too many people have tied "economic inequality" to "poverty and lack of social mobility", it is like there is some sort of constant preamble on the definition. And in my experience (and I've only tried this twice so take it for what its worth :-) talking about opportunity inequality gets you the social justice discussion, talking about financial inequality gets you the unicorn/startup discussion. But is economics simply finance + opportunity? Or is it the first derivative of that expected value over time ? Then the whole conversation is sidetracked by aspirations of the whole population versus aspirations of the few.

jwildeboer 11y ago

So Paul Graham complains that Russell Okung seems to use a different definition of economic inequality. And leaves it at that instead of giving his definition. Nice try.

geomark 11y ago
I think he did give his definition. He said "It means the variation between different quantiles' wealth or income." Last line of the first paragraph of point 2.
- tiles 11y ago
  I feel like the grandparent post demonstrates a flaw in the method of quoting passages you disagree with: you can just as easily claim the absence of information in the initial post and set it up as a strawman.
  - toolz 11y ago
    Of course, my grandparent comment demonstrates how much easier it is to correct someone claiming a lack of addressing the point, rather than the tedious nature of getting into trying to match someones rebuttal to a claim that may have only been partially made. Also, I don't think the claim that quoting the points your addressing solves all the problems in organizing a debate, just some of them.
vonklaus 11y ago
> Quote the specific passages you disagree with. This forces you to calibrate your mental model of what someone said with what they actually said." He also says this.

my_first_acct 11y ago

Quoting from PG's first essay on inequality: "The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy." This is where I disagree. The risk of dynastic wealth is that the wealthy can pay to change the system, in effect pulling up the ladder and shutting down all future disruptive startups. So we not only need to fix the problems at the bottom of the economic ladder (which is where I agree with PG); we need to make sure that those at the top don't capture the government. Cynical readers might suggest that this is already happening.

apsec112 11y ago
Google, one of the richest, most powerful companies in the world, can't get the city council of an 80,000-person town (where they own an eighth of the real estate) to let them build a small bridge: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on-google-bridge-idea http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on...
aggieben 11y ago
> we need to make sure that those at the top don't capture the government We should do this by reforming (limiting and distributing) the government, not by destroying wealth.

flubert 11y ago

>So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality. How much of our "discussion" on this issue is tangled up with the fact are that some people are greatly concerned with relative poverty and other are more concerned with absolute poverty?

tkiley 11y ago

I'm surprised at how primitive the response to pg's essay has been. None of it seems to respond to the central point of the essay (which is that economic inequality has many causes, and we should specifically attack the bad causes, not inequality itself). In spite of all the noise, I do disagree with the central point. Economic inequality may be caused by good things, but it is still bad. Wealth is opportunity and political influence. Therefore economic inequality is inequality of opportunity and political influence. Persistent intergenerational economic inequality is pretty much bad by definition. Inequality - a bad thing - can be caused as a byproduct of good activity. It's still bad. It's a negative externality, like environmental pollution. In fact, there's some striking parallels - a buildup of inequality, like a buildup of pollution, can trigger the collapse of the ecosystem. We need to agree that inequality is categorically bad so we can have a real discussion of how to keep it under control. It would be crazy to argue that farming is good so farm-related pollution does not need to be controlled. Likewise with startups and inequality.

apsec112 11y ago
"Wealth is opportunity and political influence." Larry Page, net worth $29 billion, and Sergey Brin, net worth $34 billion, have so little political influence that they can't get a small city's government to approve a new bridge over a creek: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on-google-bridge-idea http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2013/12/12/council-deadlocks-on...
- lftl 11y ago
  Ironically I think smaller local issues are often harder for the wealthy to influence than bigger national issues. As a concerned resident I can probably actually talk face to face with my city representative, and share my concerns about a project like this. I have pretty much no chance of meeting face to face with my state representative without cash or some other means of influence. The councilor probably also has significantly less need for campaign donations from rich benefactors than a national representative. And finally, local representative are most likely making decisions that affect them pretty directly as a resident, whereas national representatives may often be making decisions that have widely dispersed or no direct personal impact. These are all reasons regularly brought forth by Libertarians and Republicans who prefer that centralized government entities defer to local entities as much as possible.

sail 11y ago

I can't think of a bigger complement to a writer than to explain something clearly and yet that somehow turn into a controversy. Because if the writing is clear, which in this case it is, it means the problem is the audience. It means the writer found a genuinely confusing and probably undervalued topic. Good job, pg.

msvan 11y ago

It's interesting to note how the styles of Russell Okung's article and PG's response are so different. Okung draws analogies to sports, men on hills, uses rhetorical questions, and talks about dreams and compassion. It's impassioned. PG's response is a cold deconstruction. A implies B implies C, but B is not true hence the argument is false. Personally I love this style of argument and wish more people would argue in this way, but, anecdotally, people often think you're an asshole when you do. Maybe it's because you miss out on nuances that you find irrelevant to the central question, but that others feel are very important. Maybe it's just a generally unappealing way to be convinced of something.

obrero 11y ago

> If you attack economic inequality, you're indiscriminately attacking both the good and bad causes. Graham keeps returning to this point, which is a little silly. His class owns and controls the corporate media, which decided to frame this general issue as one of economic inequality. Then Graham castigates the strawman his class put up as being not focused on the right thing. There are those of us who work, and then there are the heirs who parasitically expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who do work. It's as simple as that. Workers periodically fix the problem - as they did with Charles I, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Nicholas II and his family. As there are still classes, the workers and the parasite heirs, this problem still exists, but I'm confident the problem will eventually be fixed permanently and the parasites will be eliminated as a class.

apsec112 11y ago
"Workers periodically fix the problem - as they did with Charles I, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Nicholas II and his family. As there are still classes, the workers and the parasite heirs, this problem still exists, but I'm confident the problem will eventually be fixed permanently and the parasites will be eliminated as a class." This sounds like you're advocating for a literal genocide. Is that really what you mean?

tmsh 11y ago

I think the confusion is around whether "like Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting the company you use to find things online" is a good thing. It's easy to read this as not just "[starting this company]", but "[starting this company] [and growing it into a huge success with mixed benefits for everyone]." I.e., Russell Okung or others might read that in terms of what it implies; but Google by itself neither furthers nor reduces global income inequality to my knowledge. That's not one of its priorities or missions. But starting it! Starting it was key. And "income equality" was key to starting it as it is to starting most companies. Is the original wording wrong in PG's essay wrong? No, but it's easy to misread unless it's emphasized. E.g., the desire for "economic inequality" as a catalyst for starting companies is great. It can be hugely successful and useful in many ways. But as soon as a large company has shareholders etc. one of its primary goals is to maintain capital for itself, which is generally speaking in favor of income inequality in more negative ways for the general public, one could argue. Russell Okung's point at the end is I think actually built on teasing apart this conflation: "I urge you, Graham, along with the rest of the community, to return to your first love. Build people up."

darawk 11y ago

I think the core of the issue isn't whether economic inequality is good or bad. I think most reasonable people can agree that some economic inequality is good and healthy and incentivizes innovation and productivity. I think we can also agree that absolute inequality (one person with everything, and everyone else with nothing) is also a bad thing. This means that the right answer is somewhere in between, and where we draw that line is where people disagree. Holding up either side as saying "inequality is bad" or "inequality is good" is, therefore, a straw-man. No reasonable person is saying either of those things. What we do have to ask ourselves is how much inequality should we tolerate in the name of progress? Would Larry and Sergei not have created Google had they made only 1/10th of the fortunes they have today? What about 1/100th, or 1/5th? My personal view on the subject is that that multiplier is set too high at the moment, and that society would churn out innovators just fine if there were extreme taxes at the ultra-high end of the income spectrum. I would be very surprised indeed if Larry and Sergei would have chosen to abandon their little search engine project if they only had the potential to make $100 million each. I think any positions taken on this subject that don't discuss it as a question of where to place this multiplier are disingenuous nonsense, to be perfectly frank. And this is my, and I think many people's issue with PG's essay: he seems to be taking the position that some types of economic inequality are good and some are bad. But it's not how someone made the money that's good or bad, it's whether or not it's really necessary that they have that much.

joshcanhelp 11y ago
Very, very well put. This is was what I've been thinking while watching this back-and-forth unfold (both this one involving PG and in general over the last few years). In my mind, whether wealth is zero sum or not is irrelevant. The discussion around income inequality is about the area under the curve. If that area increases again and again and again but the bottom, say, 90% remain in the same state, that's not progress.
lotharbot 11y ago
> "I think any positions taken on this subject that don't discuss it as a question of where to place this multiplier are disingenuous nonsense" Personally, I think "where to place this multiplier" is not anywhere close to the most relevant question. What matters isn't how big the multiplier is. What matters is what's causing it, and what problems it causes. If a big multiplier is caused by an atmosphere that promotes innovation, that's better than a small multiplier caused by a stagnant environment, which is better than a big multiplier caused by massive corruption and oppression. Norway, Sweden, and Finland have some of the lowest Gini coefficients in the world, way "better" than the US or the UK -- but so do Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Where to put the multiplier" is, at best, a secondary question after fixing all of the primary problems, and possibly a completely irrelevant question.

ronilan 11y ago

Russell Okung suffered a dislocated shoulder today and the whole team seemed distracted. They lost. So, PG for next year, just to be on the safe side, can you please choose another player to debate with. Maybe Brady? Thanks. A Seahawks fan.

tahssa 11y ago

The problem, as I see it, is that when wealth becomes too concentrated it in fact destroys opportunities and therefore social mobility. Some people want to believe that you can create a solution that fixes the opportunity/social-mobility problem without eroding the concentrations of wealth. Others believe that you have to attack those concentrations of wealth in order to bring back opportunity/social-mobility. I sit in the latter camp. To give an example. When house prices expand out of reach for the much of the local population many will object to any additional taxation that targets excessive ownership (landlords) or even foreign ownership. They all have the same argument, that it will cause house prices to go down and harm the economy. Instead they promote low income housing programs which are just handouts that only slightly offsets this gigantic problem. These people really don't seem to understand that house prices are abnormal and need to go down to sane levels that will on average align with normal incomes in order for the gentrification process to reverse course. In other words you can't really fix the problems that both Paul and Russell agree on without directly attacking the concentration of wealth problem. Everything else is just bullshit.

T2_t2 11y ago
Explain China? Or Japan? Or Vietnam? The world is not the USA. The world is 7 billion people, in countries and cities of varying economic outcomes. While income inequality is rising between inhabitants of the first world, global income inequality is shrinking. Specifically, the gap between Brooklyn, Beijing and Botswana is shrinking, even as the gap between individual citizens is rising. And the biggest gap of all - the gap between 21 meals a week and < 21, is shrinking rapidly. As much as we bemoan great wealth compared to middle-classness, this gap - the gap between the never-hungry and the sometimes hungry - is IMHO the single biggest gap of all.
- tahssa 11y ago
  It was an example. An example that was on topic towards economic inequality. Just because you can find some examples where economic normalization is occurring doesn't mean that excessive wealth concentration isn't killing more opportunities than it creates.

LukaAl 11y ago

I don't really get what all this rebuttal targets. The original essay is poorly thought and full fallacies. Despite that none points them out. So, let see some of them. Ok, we shouldn't look at indicators of inequalities (the Gini Index for example), but we should look at inequality effects. Well, there's a lot of literature looking at it and finding that the Gini index is an acceptable proxy for the other measures (acceptable is kind of fuzzy here, bear with me). We also know that a Gini index of 1 doesn't mean perfect equality. This because it depends on the definition of equality and on what you measure. Also, we know that a little bit of inequality is not only acceptable but required to foster social mobility (and it is probably part of PG's argument). How much is the problem! But saying we shouldn't look at inequality index but at the underlying issues and the individual cases is as much a misguided suggestion as suggesting a startup to stop looking at DAU/MAU. But even if we discount this critique as futile. Do we really think that reducing a little bit the inequality will stop startups? If we setup the system in a way that Page make just 10 billion dollars instead of 15 billion out of Google (I'm making numbers up) he would have decided for a clerk work instead? Is he seriously saying that? And then, wasn't him (to be honest, could have been Sam Altman) that said that you shouldn't start a company to become reach but because you think you are the only one able to solve this issue? I know it sounds like a straw man argument. It is a sort of. But I believe in the law of diminishing return. I believe that I started a startup because I was determined to solve a hard problem, not for the upside (although it was important, but I was smart enough to know that the probability of making big money were really small and other investment had better returns). Then there's the point of variation in productivity that is so fuzzy my head exploded. What does he mean by that? Which his the definition of productivity he is using? Seriously, that's a problem. Because if he defines productivity by the ratio value individually produced/hours, I wonder how he estimates the value produced in the last week by Larry Page. By Google's value? And how he approportionate the value produced between Page and the thousands of people working for Google. Even for a simple example, how do you compare a productivity of a woodworker making chairs and a steelworker making swords? You could count the unit produced per day, but they are different products. You could assess the market values of their output, but I'm pretty sure the value of their output changes between peace time and war time without their productivity actually changing. Finally, it comes the last issue. He acknowledges that there's a small number of startup founders coming from poor backgrounds. I don't have data about that, so I believe him. Yet, I don't think determination is something lacking from poor people; it is the opposite! So, which is the problem here? Well, my little anecdotal experience tells me that when your parents could help you, you could go for the long shot, but if you need to eat, it is better to find something that give you the food quickly. It doesn't go against his argument, actually, kind of make it. But I wonder why it didn't make it explicit.

OopsCriticality 11y ago

I think it's time for pg to review the idea that there should be only one SV. Having only one startup center in the country contributes to limiting social mobility (how many can afford to move to and live in SV; amazingly, some don't want to live in SV; what about people with an "n-body problem"?) and deprives other areas of the country of the tax base in SV. It could be transformative for, say Detroit, to get even a fraction of the attention of SV. "Spreading the love" is also beneficial with respect to diversity, finding problems to solve, and to robustness (e.g., natural disasters).

kevinwang 11y ago

This style of response is ideal and we should all emulate it.

nhaehnle 11y ago

1. He says I say economic inequality is "a good thing." I didn't say that. What I said is that it has multiple causes, some bad (lack of social mobility) and some good (Larry and Sergey starting Google). It's interesting and probably important that he doesn't actually come out and say whether or not he believes economic inequality to be a bad thing, either. There is significant evidence that a high level or economic inequality has bad consequences for people - it can literally be bad for your health, via psychological mechanisms. This is important since if inequality is bad in itself, then you might want to eliminate some of the ostensibly good reasons as well, after having eliminated the bad reasons. So instead of taking a stance on the badness of economic inequality (yay or nay), he bangs on the drum that one should first go after the bad causes of economic inequality. I doubt anybody else in the discussion would disagree with that, which makes the whole first point rather pointless. On point 2, "So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." Does pg realize that perhaps somebody might not agree with that? This seeming lack of understanding makes the second point rather pointless as well. On point 3, "I called out lack of social mobility as one of the worst problems contributing to economic inequality" Is he aware of the argument that economic inequality can reduce social mobility? Since I doubt that pg is wilfully ignorant of the potential subtext that goes on in the heads of the people he responds to, I can't help but have the impression that people are talking past each other. I guess part of the problem is that the people he responds to aren't making their arguments very well (at least from the perspective of a highly technical mind), and another part of the problem is that pg seems to be insufficiently aware of the large body of work on the topic in disciplines outside his "home turf".

staunch 11y ago

> In fact I suspect much if not most of the angry reaction to it was a result of people not understanding what the term "economic inequality" means. Like "global warming", the term "economic inequality" has become something people use to refer to all of the related issues. PG's essay was controversial because he used a narrow definition. He says other people are confused, but in this case, I think he is. The fact that his essay necessarily strayed outside of his own definition proves the point. > ... and talked about how I had personally seen the effects of it in the relative scarcity of successful startup founders who grew up poor. And yet PG has never made any effort to help founders from poor backgrounds. In fact, YC has chosen to provide the majority of their help to people from the same elite backgrounds as themselves. Literally turning away thousands of people from poor backgrounds. It truly is "the Harvard of startup accelerators". It sure would be amazing if the most powerful person in Silicon Valley decided to help more poor people do startups. Nothing has the same potential to increase social mobility in the U.S. like thousands of new startups run by poor people solving problems they care about, like maybe helping more poor people do startups.

pfarnsworth 11y ago

To be blunt, if people are misunderstanding pg's essay, what it means is that his writing skills were not good enough to tackle a topic as complex as economic inequality. I read his essay and came across with a bad taste in my mouth as well. I think he has surrounded himself with too many yes-people that told him this was a great article to post, without being honest to him about the repercussions. It's fine because everyone makes mistakes. This is a life lesson that he needs to internalize.

jusben1369 11y ago
This was my biggest takeaway. Who does he have review these? No one told him how bad this was academically and optics wise? He needs to broaden the inner circle.
lotharbot 11y ago
> "it means is that his writing skills were not good enough" or, possibly, their listening/comprehension skills were not good enough. Communication requires solid effort and methodology by both the speaker and the listener. Either or both sides can be responsible for a breakdown.
- pfarnsworth 11y ago
  There were a lot of people that burned him online for his essay, not just a football player. If a bunch of people accuse you of the same thing, at some point you have to start blaming yourself instead of blaming others.
  - lotharbot 11y ago
    pick any controversial topic in which people are emotionally invested, and any well-written argument made about that topic, and you'll find "a lot of people" who "burned" whoever wrote the argument -- some of which might even be good responses, but many of which are some variation of "heard what I wanted to hear".
    - 11y ago

hackaflocka 11y ago

These are great debates. It's difficult to keep emotion out of it. Thank you, PG, for your responses. They help remind me that "enlightened capitalism isn't perfect, but it's better than every other system that's been tried."

shadowsun7 11y ago

pg's central argument is that economic inequality in itself is not bad, but it has good causes and bad causes and those should be attacked instead of economic inequality. I think he's right: it's probably more productive in the near term to attack bad causes of economic inequality. [1] But his first assertion (that inequality is not bad) could still be wrong. I think his essay is built on the assumption that people care more about absolute values of wealth and not relative ones. Psychology indicates that relative measures of wealth more directly map to levels of happiness and unhappiness. People do care about relative levels of income as opposed to absolute levels of income, and social cohesion is affected directly by such resentment, even if there isn't extreme poverty and incomes are rising across the board! In Singapore, where I live, there is relatively strong meritocracy and little extreme poverty. GDP per capita is high, and rising; the government is directly incentivised to create economic growth (their bonuses are pegged to national GDP increases). But ostentatious displays of wealth - made easier, IMO, by social media - have led to rising resentment of the government's policies, as well as resentment against the globalised rich who chose to make Singapore their home. I also think economic literature and history is rich with the negative social effects of economic inequality (even if some of it is conflated with bad causes, as pg describes). Elsewhere in this thread tkiley talks about how economic inequality can be seen as a negative externality, which is a good way of describing it, and is, I think, the attitude economists seem to take. While pg's essay contains a fascinating call: to imagine a world where we have to chose to live with increasing economic inequality, I do not believe such a world would be easy to live in. [1] To paraphrase his argument, progressive taxation might bring down the Gini coefficient but not necessarily do anything to alleviate poverty if the systemic causes of poverty aren't attacked. Better to 'attack poverty and destroy wealth in the process, as opposed to attacking wealth and hoping it destroys poverty as a side effect'.

puredemo 11y ago
>While pg's essay contains a fascinating call: to imagine a world where we have to chose to live with increasing economic inequality, I do not believe such a world would be easy to live in. It's almost as if people will always find something to complain about.

newmana 11y ago

"So you could for example have no poverty and perfect social mobility, and still have great economic inequality." I think this is where the evidence is to the contrary - economic inequality predicts poverty and poor social mobility. "These results suggest that the takeoff in income inequality may account in part for the decline in mobility." http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mitnik-cumberworth-grusky_social-mobility-high-inequality.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/mi...

alexashka 11y ago

Looking at it - I can't help but feel like he simply said everything he said in the original essay, except with quotes from that other guy sprinkled in. That is to say, the position hasn't changed at all. This is simply a reiteration, a response to the number of people filling HN with emotional comments on the topic. The potential problem that hasn't garnered much attention is that the issue of having a lifestyle you are not satisfied with goes far beyond the distribution of dollars. If we agree on that, then there can be room to discuss what's really bothering people. From an individualistic point of view, it is easy to say 'he has more than he knows what to do with, I'm struggling, I want some of that, just give it to me!' and anyone who says otherwise, is clearly not cool. It makes sense too. That point of view makes total sense - if someone has a billion, giving me personally a million would be real good right? Too bad there are just not enough billionaire people to make that work, not even close. So then what are we talking arguing about? The solution is elsewhere. That is to say, we have to pick our battles, we only have so much time and energy in a lifetime. Arguing about 'if we distribute it differently, I think it'd be better' back and forth if you are an economist, philosopher, or someone in a place where you can actually affect these things is totally fine. That's not the people here, so then maybe all that's happening is people venting their frustrations out on PG and if that's the case, no amount of responses is going to fix that. It's like arguing with a dude who believes the root of his problems is witchcraft. That's something each person has to fix for him/herself.

jgord 11y ago

yes PG, but .. Inequality is a pretty good proxy for all the 'evils' we really want to address - If we could turn one knob to fix things, we would turn down the big one marked "Inequality". I think the high emotion around the issue, that most of us feel, arises from a kind of pre-cognition that something is totally broken in our system of commerce and democracy... There are titanic demographic shifts even in the last few years [ for example, look at the graph on this page, showing a 10% shift in wealth from the 99% to the 1% in the last 5 years, if I read it correctly : http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-people-have-the-same-amount-of-wealth-as-half-the-world-says-oxfam-20160116-gm7h6y.html http://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/sixtytwo-peopl... ] This is a bit like a 3 degree change in global climate - we feel it viscerally without understanding whats going on, we get the sense old rules/intuitions don't apply anymore. Weather is more extreme, something is different in the economy. This may be a natural result of technology plus the magnifying effect of the internet to spread value out and gather X% of that Y value inwards to creators... which is fine and good, we all benefit from technology. Inequality may be even more extreme in future, and yet all boats may be lifted as that happens - so we all enjoy a better standard of living. But we are not seeing that now, there is a torrent up, but no trickle down. Right now, our rules for democracy have not caught up to this new norm, nor has our tax regime - and the current system is being gamed. I think there is justified rational anger, because most people feel somehow they have been stolen from and lied to, particularly post GFC/2008. While we are violently agreeing/disagreeing on whether != is intrinsically evil, lets drill down and discuss the real issues lying under the banner of inequality - poverty, tax, education/student debt, superPACs / campaign funding, influence of lobbyists, police abusing power when black lives matter, incarceration rates for petty crimes, carbon pricing / green energy incentives, minimum wage/basic income ... its a long damn list, and most politicians don't seem to be too serious about talking about this stuff - now is the time to demand that discussion of them. We need to drill down, explore the engineering of our capitalist democracy, then fix it.

sushirain 11y ago

Larry and Sergey started Google because they wanted to be rich? Even if they had known for sure that it wasn't the way to the 1%, but say to the 10%, would they not have started Google?

yarou 11y ago

pg never had to struggle too hard in his life. That's why he has skewed views on income inequality. He also has probably never read Piketty's book on income equality. There are empirical results that justify the narrative, people.

serge2k 11y ago

Another "you just don't understand!" Response.