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There's ten people in a room and you are tasked with distributing $1000 among them. The catch is you have to get everyone to vote on the distribution. Seems eas
by ben_jones 11y ago
There's ten people in a room and you are tasked with distributing $1000 among them. The catch is you have to get everyone to vote on the distribution. Seems easy right? Everyone get's $100. But wait somebody has a suggestion. Why don't we give $500 to the two handsomest people in the room? Everybody votes yes. Eight people leave shocked and angry.
Edit: this wasn't intended to be a 1:1 analogy of wealth distribution. It's just something interesting I think of about human nature when the topic is brought up. A lot of people outside the 1% will defend the 1%, there's nothing wrong with that, but I wonder if those people count themselves among the future 1% or even feel some connection to it for one reason or the other. I wonder if this skews our perception of wealth inequality and if wealth inequality is actually a graver threat because of such a shroud.
- Randgalt 11y agoThe better analogy is you have 10 people in a room and only a few of them are producing anything yet they are forced to give a portion of their production to everyone else in the room.
- ben_jones 11y agoYou're right. Thank god Mark Zuckerberg produced ~$40 billion dollars of value with his contributions to Facebook..
- Randgalt 11y agoFacebook wouldn't exist without Zuckerberg. He deserves every penny of it.
- p4bl0 11y agoFacebook wouldn't exist without the loads of engineers developing it. If it was only for Zuckerberg it may never have left his dorm room.
- twoodfin 11y agoAnd all of them got paid (often handsomely) for their contributions. Zuckerberg has "only" what he hasn't spent or sold of his creation.
- jcoffland 11y agoI wish he hadn't.
- p4bl0 11y agoYou can't equate earnings and production. First, when you earn so much money as the top 1% richer do, it is largely because you rely on (or exploit) the work of others. Secondly, not all "production" finishes as income. Making art, raising kids, etc. are examples of productive work for the society that people are not necessarily paid for.
- sp332 11y agoIn your model, unemployed people should starve to death in the streets? Or would they dig their own graves first?
- entee 11y agoThe Randian view of this is just not very productive. Let's take a Randian hero, a self-made man (and it seems to always be men in her world) who is super creative, independent and gets shit done. Maybe he runs a construction company. He's the 1 guy in the room. Now, he could build one house with his bare hands but then he would have one house to sell. OR he could hire another 4 people, build 5 houses and sell them all. Clearly in the second scenario he'd make far more money and create more. But in the second scenario, who are the "makers" and the "takers"? Maybe our hero had the creative drive so he deserves some extra credit, but surely the workers also did some making. The idea of "makers" and "takers" that animates the Randian world view doesn't really make practical sense. To make something at scale, no matter your personal genius, you need lots of others to join you in that enterprise. And to have what you made be worth anything, you need a lot of people to buy it. Bottom line: everyone is a maker and everyone is a taker, thinking about taxation in those terms doesn't hold up to moral or practical scrutiny.
- sp332 11y agoHer name is Ayn Rand, not Raynd.
- entee 11y agoFixed, thanks!
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoRand only used money as a scorecard and only when convenient. If you'll read "The Fountainhead", Howard Roark ran far and fast away from money. Rand was constructing ... essentially Russian novels against the concept of collectivism. It's not particularly complete work. It's essentially propaganda. And like it or not, her side in the debate mostly won. But that has nearly nothing to do with our present state of affairs - the headcount of Randians among SiVa is probably higher than in the economy at large.
- nkrisc 11y agoIf that's what it takes to maintain society, yes. I don't know about you, but living in a world where only people deemed "useful" deserve to live is not a world I want to live in. I'm happy to contribute to the well-being of others.
- aidenn0 11y agoMore like they pay the people who they order to produce things for their profit less than those people need for medical needs, education, and maintenance of the roads they commute on, then they are forced to give a portion of the profits they made by paying those people so little to the government to provide those things for them.
- solipsism 11y agoI'm sure most other people are just as tired of arguing against this kind of silly Randian nonsense as I am. I wish Thiel's braindead Seasteading Institute had succeeded in building their dream island in the middle of the ocean. Then we could all watch it collapse in utter failure and not have to have this tiresome conversation anymore -- we could just point at the seagull-shit-covered ruins and move onto different topics.
- themagician 11y agoYou only have to produce if you are poor. If you are wealthy you merely need to convince others that society owes you something. Many wealthy people produce nothing, but society owes them by virtue of who they are.
- poke111 11y agoWealth is not distributed by some wealth fairy. It is created by productive activity. One person's wealth does not come at the expense of another's.
- lotso 11y ago> One person's wealth does not come at the expense of another's. Not sure I agree with that. Even in the US, we can point to slavery or even more recently discriminatory housing/zoning laws. I'm sure someone with more knowledge than me can provide a better argument here.
- nugget 11y agoBingo. Housing and zoning laws are the definition of protecting incumbent wealth at the expense of new participants who would like to join the system.
- poke111 11y agoI don't mean that nobody can be harmed in the process of creating wealth - certainly they can. I mean that the process of accumulating wealth is not zero-sum: each dollar that I earn is not a dollar that somebody else lost. The economy is not some big pie that we split up unequally. The process of creating wealth increases the size of the pie.
- ebrenes 11y agoI would concede that yes, the process of creating wealth does increase the overall size of the pie, but it does not increase the size of this pie proportionally for all involved. That increase in pie, is the aggregate effect on the outstanding wealth. So, it could follow any such distribution that in the ends provides a net win. For example, automating some job will not increase the level of wealth of those who have now become jobless. It will undoubtedly increase the wealth of those who are now benefited by this automation, and in the end it will be a net win for the economy. However, those who were negatively affected see no benefit from this increase in the pie. I believe that wealth is sometimes increased through tactics and strategies that negatively affect the wealth of other through mechanisms such as slavery, indentured servitude, extremely low wages and other situations that take advantage of the less advantaged (usually in 3rd world countries). So yeah, the size of the pie increases, but those bigger slices are not appearing on everyone's plates, and often times people are ending up without any pie on their plate.
- mikeash 11y agoThere's ten people in a room. Nine of them have $1, one of them has $1,000. You need $10 for some shared project. You take 10 cents from each of the nine, and $9.10 from the last person. He looks at his remaining $990.90 and says, "I'm getting screwed!"