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It's frustrating, not a single critique I've seen of PG's essay (including this one) seem to understand what he is actually saying. This essay supports PG's po

It's frustrating, not a single critique I've seen of PG's essay (including this one) seem to understand what he is actually saying. This essay supports PG's point, it doesn't contradict it. PG's essay calls out "kids with no chance of reaching their potential" as "very bad" aspect of inequality in the fourth paragraph! What essay did you read?

jeremynixon 11y ago
I completely agree with this frustration - the bulk of my review of the responses revealed that people reacted to what they felt like PG said (or what others felt like he said), not what he actually said. My other frustration was that some of what PG actually did saw was indeed flawed, and there's only one response [1] that I could find that spoke to it. Regardless, writing about political domains riles the most base, tribal instincts in all of us. I expect him to be more careful about how he frames his arguments so that they're not overcome by readers' emotion, but can actually have a positive impact. [1] https://medium.com/@sethbannon/how-paul-graham-gets-it-wrong-in-economic-inequality-6cdb71c45136#.ac90x7i9v https://medium.com/@sethbannon/how-paul-graham-gets-it-wrong...
carc 11y ago
Glad I'm not the only person who felt this frustration..
mikestew 11y ago
It's frustrating, not a single critique I've seen of PG's essay (including this one) seem to understand what he is actually saying. It's time to start considering that either PG made his point poorly, or that maybe you're the one that didn't understand it. I don't know what other reasonable options there are.
- haberman 11y ago
  If by "PG made his point poorly" you mean "PG didn't communicate in a way that was misunderstanding-proof", I can agree with you. Inequality is an emotionally-charged subject that is prone to misunderstanding. I think PG underestimated how thoroughly the intellectual basis of his argument would be missed once he uttered the words "I've been helping to increase economic inequality." Most of the critiques of PG accuse him of not caring about poor people. And yet his essay specifically attacks poverty and lack of social mobility: > Let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.
  - pavornyoh 11y ago
    I think PG underestimated how thoroughly the intellectual basis of his argument would be missed once he uttered the words "I've been helping to increase economic inequality." Most of the critiques of PG accuse him of not caring about poor people. And yet his essay specifically attacks poverty and lack of social mobility: I have to agree with you. I am actually surprised PG tried to even write a second essay to explain the first one and some people still didn't understand it and it led me to this conclusion and points me to Dale Carnegie's " You can't win an argument".. Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right. You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Why? Well, suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have made him feel inferior. You have hurt his pride. He will resent your triumph. And - "A man convinced against his will "Is of the same opinion still."
    - haberman 11y ago
      Agreed. People are downvoting my other comments in this thread too -- on a visceral level, people seem to really want to believe that PG doesn't care about poor people.
  - vasilipupkin 11y ago
    the problem with PGs essay was that it is full of strawmen and non sequiturs made up by him. For example, the sentence you just described. Let's attack poverty - what does that mean in practice? in practice, that means spending money on solutions to poverty, ala Sweden. Where does that money come from? from taxes. So, the conversation about raising taxes on the wealthy ( or "attacking wealth" as he says ), outside of a very small fringe, is just really a conversation about raising funds to attack poverty. And PG made it sound as if the conversation is about attacking wealth for its own sake, which nobody but the fringe is having
    - haberman 11y ago
      > PG made it sound as if the conversation is about attacking wealth for its own sake, which nobody but the fringe is having Let us test this claim. I Googled "inequality in the us" and clicked the first several results. If your claim is true, these will only discuss attacking poverty, and not attacking wealth. (I am assuming that top Google hits do not constitute "the fringe"). The first result is: "20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know from The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality." (http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php). The first two "facts" concern wage inequality and CEO pay, neither of which say anything a priori about poverty. Many of the other "facts" on the page do address poverty more directly. The Wikipedia page on Income Inequality is next (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...). It primarily discusses actual inequality, mentioning poverty only in one specific section. One of the policy proposals it describes is one of a maximum wage, which has nothing to do with decreasing poverty. The third result is a Salon.com piece, "35 soul-crushing facts about American income inequality" (http://www.salon.com/2015/07/15/35_soul_crushing_facts_about_american_income_inequality_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2015/07/15/35_soul_crushing_facts_about...). Many of them are again facts that do not say anything about poverty, like "The poorest half of the Earth’s population owns 1% of the Earth’s wealth. The richest 1% of the Earth’s population owns 46% of the Earth’s wealth." Facts like these are directly pitting the poor against the rich, without saying anything about whether the lower earners actually have their needs met and/or have social mobility. So I disagree that this is a "strawman." I think a core part of the conversation about inequality is that is it horrifying how much the rich have compared with everyone else. That is the attitude that PG is arguing against.
- gozur88 11y ago
  The other possibility is people see what they want to see.
  - Retra 11y ago
    ...And down that road lies helplessness and cynicism.
spangry 11y ago
I just read the PG essay and have to agree with the parent post. From what I can see, his argument boils down to this: increasing wealth concentration is caused by many things. Some of these things are 'bad' (e.g. rent-seeking, bribing politicians) in and of themselves, and should be addressed. Some of these things are 'good' (e.g. economic productivity varies from person to person, all other things equal), and it would be ill-advised to do away with these things by blindly optimising towards 'less wealth inequality' (as it would make everyone worse off, in an absolute sense). Obviously an oversimplification, as the essay also hints at a 'undetermined' category. On this, the essay touches on two issues I've been thinking about for the past 5 years: 1) As capital (i.e. the means of production) becomes increasingly digital, it becomes cheaper to acquire and production can occur at a marginal cost of near 0 (e.g. it costs facebook virtually nothing when a person makes a new account). Cheaper to acquire means fewer people needed to pool money to attain capital. And marginal cost near 0 means more 'winner-takes-all' markets (e.g. natural monopolies, network monopolies etc.). All this will result in more wealth concentrated in fewer hands. 2) Digital capital is highly mobile. AWS instances can be moved to another country almost instantaneously and without cost. This makes it hard for governments to tax returns to digital capital, barring some global tax agreement. So governments have very little scope for redistributing this increasingly concentrated wealth. We badly need to have a public (and probably global) conversation along similar lines as PG's essay: do we consider these good or bad things? are we ok with the resulting society? what should we do (if anything) about this? Instead the conversation seems to be dominated by people who are fixated on remedying the symptoms, rather than the underlying disease(s). Supremely frustrating, and will eventually result in more extreme policy outcomes (i.e. expropriation vs. free-for-all).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

jeremynixon 11y ago

I completely agree with this frustration - the bulk of my review of the responses revealed that people reacted to what they felt like PG said (or what others felt like he said), not what he actually said. My other frustration was that some of what PG actually did saw was indeed flawed, and there's only one response [1] that I could find that spoke to it. Regardless, writing about political domains riles the most base, tribal instincts in all of us. I expect him to be more careful about how he frames his arguments so that they're not overcome by readers' emotion, but can actually have a positive impact. [1] https://medium.com/@sethbannon/how-paul-graham-gets-it-wrong-in-economic-inequality-6cdb71c45136#.ac90x7i9v https://medium.com/@sethbannon/how-paul-graham-gets-it-wrong...

carc 11y ago

Glad I'm not the only person who felt this frustration..

mikestew 11y ago

It's frustrating, not a single critique I've seen of PG's essay (including this one) seem to understand what he is actually saying. It's time to start considering that either PG made his point poorly, or that maybe you're the one that didn't understand it. I don't know what other reasonable options there are.

haberman 11y ago
If by "PG made his point poorly" you mean "PG didn't communicate in a way that was misunderstanding-proof", I can agree with you. Inequality is an emotionally-charged subject that is prone to misunderstanding. I think PG underestimated how thoroughly the intellectual basis of his argument would be missed once he uttered the words "I've been helping to increase economic inequality." Most of the critiques of PG accuse him of not caring about poor people. And yet his essay specifically attacks poverty and lack of social mobility: > Let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process. That's much more likely to work than attacking wealth in the hope that you will thereby fix poverty.
- pavornyoh 11y ago
  I think PG underestimated how thoroughly the intellectual basis of his argument would be missed once he uttered the words "I've been helping to increase economic inequality." Most of the critiques of PG accuse him of not caring about poor people. And yet his essay specifically attacks poverty and lack of social mobility: I have to agree with you. I am actually surprised PG tried to even write a second essay to explain the first one and some people still didn't understand it and it led me to this conclusion and points me to Dale Carnegie's " You can't win an argument".. Nine times out of ten, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that he is absolutely right. You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Why? Well, suppose you triumph over the other man and shoot his argument full of holes and prove that he is non compos mentis. Then what? You will feel fine. But what about him? You have made him feel inferior. You have hurt his pride. He will resent your triumph. And - "A man convinced against his will "Is of the same opinion still."
  - haberman 11y ago
    Agreed. People are downvoting my other comments in this thread too -- on a visceral level, people seem to really want to believe that PG doesn't care about poor people.
- vasilipupkin 11y ago
  the problem with PGs essay was that it is full of strawmen and non sequiturs made up by him. For example, the sentence you just described. Let's attack poverty - what does that mean in practice? in practice, that means spending money on solutions to poverty, ala Sweden. Where does that money come from? from taxes. So, the conversation about raising taxes on the wealthy ( or "attacking wealth" as he says ), outside of a very small fringe, is just really a conversation about raising funds to attack poverty. And PG made it sound as if the conversation is about attacking wealth for its own sake, which nobody but the fringe is having
  - haberman 11y ago
    > PG made it sound as if the conversation is about attacking wealth for its own sake, which nobody but the fringe is having Let us test this claim. I Googled "inequality in the us" and clicked the first several results. If your claim is true, these will only discuss attacking poverty, and not attacking wealth. (I am assuming that top Google hits do not constitute "the fringe"). The first result is: "20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know from The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality." (http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php). The first two "facts" concern wage inequality and CEO pay, neither of which say anything a priori about poverty. Many of the other "facts" on the page do address poverty more directly. The Wikipedia page on Income Inequality is next (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...). It primarily discusses actual inequality, mentioning poverty only in one specific section. One of the policy proposals it describes is one of a maximum wage, which has nothing to do with decreasing poverty. The third result is a Salon.com piece, "35 soul-crushing facts about American income inequality" (http://www.salon.com/2015/07/15/35_soul_crushing_facts_about_american_income_inequality_partner/ http://www.salon.com/2015/07/15/35_soul_crushing_facts_about...). Many of them are again facts that do not say anything about poverty, like "The poorest half of the Earth’s population owns 1% of the Earth’s wealth. The richest 1% of the Earth’s population owns 46% of the Earth’s wealth." Facts like these are directly pitting the poor against the rich, without saying anything about whether the lower earners actually have their needs met and/or have social mobility. So I disagree that this is a "strawman." I think a core part of the conversation about inequality is that is it horrifying how much the rich have compared with everyone else. That is the attitude that PG is arguing against.
gozur88 11y ago
The other possibility is people see what they want to see.
- Retra 11y ago
  ...And down that road lies helplessness and cynicism.

spangry 11y ago

I just read the PG essay and have to agree with the parent post. From what I can see, his argument boils down to this: increasing wealth concentration is caused by many things. Some of these things are 'bad' (e.g. rent-seeking, bribing politicians) in and of themselves, and should be addressed. Some of these things are 'good' (e.g. economic productivity varies from person to person, all other things equal), and it would be ill-advised to do away with these things by blindly optimising towards 'less wealth inequality' (as it would make everyone worse off, in an absolute sense). Obviously an oversimplification, as the essay also hints at a 'undetermined' category. On this, the essay touches on two issues I've been thinking about for the past 5 years: 1) As capital (i.e. the means of production) becomes increasingly digital, it becomes cheaper to acquire and production can occur at a marginal cost of near 0 (e.g. it costs facebook virtually nothing when a person makes a new account). Cheaper to acquire means fewer people needed to pool money to attain capital. And marginal cost near 0 means more 'winner-takes-all' markets (e.g. natural monopolies, network monopolies etc.). All this will result in more wealth concentrated in fewer hands. 2) Digital capital is highly mobile. AWS instances can be moved to another country almost instantaneously and without cost. This makes it hard for governments to tax returns to digital capital, barring some global tax agreement. So governments have very little scope for redistributing this increasingly concentrated wealth. We badly need to have a public (and probably global) conversation along similar lines as PG's essay: do we consider these good or bad things? are we ok with the resulting society? what should we do (if anything) about this? Instead the conversation seems to be dominated by people who are fixated on remedying the symptoms, rather than the underlying disease(s). Supremely frustrating, and will eventually result in more extreme policy outcomes (i.e. expropriation vs. free-for-all).

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]