16 ms·
Income inequality today may be higher today than in any other era
- jgalt212 10y agoThis is why "leave" won, not racism or xenophobia.
- burnitdown 10y agoAlso Trump in November
- malka 10y agorelevant username. I doubt he'll win the general election though. But it wont be an easy win for Hillary imo.
- oneloop 10y agoCareful. We also doubted the Brexit would win and the chavs used that to fuck us over.
- burnitdown 10y agoSo 51% of people in the UK are chavs?
- ced 10y agoNot following US politics, so honest question: is Trump campaigning against income inequality?
- adrenalinelol 10y agoIt goes something like: He's anti free-trade -> outsourcing stole your paycheck/politicians trying to screw you -> income inequality
- fche 10y agoThat is not a causal chain that Trump has campaigned on.
- burnitdown 10y agoYes it is. The people are not complaining about income inequality directly. They are complaining about jobs and wages. Increase those two and suddenly income inequality becomes less of an issues because people have enough to live on.
- chimeracoder 10y ago> is Trump campaigning against income inequality? You can't really answer the question "what are Trump's positions", because he contradicts himself all the time. Trump has had the most inconsistent campaign I could ever imagine. You name a political position, and he's had it. He's been pro-choice, except he also wants to punish women who have had abortions. He's been pro-gay, except now he's not. He wants to stop getting into wars overseas, except he also says he wants to increase military funding and engagements. He's advocated single-payer healthcare, but he wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a "free-market insurance system". The only thing that he's been pretty clear about the whole time is that he wants to "build a wall". (Though you could even argue he's been inconsistent on his immigration position in other ways).
- thomasfoster96 10y agoWell, it's the cause of the symptoms that many people took to be caused by migration, globalisation and federalism.
- k-mcgrady 10y agoIt's a mix. A lot of people voted that way for economic reasons BUT they think those problems are caused by 'foreigners taking our jobs'. A lot of people I saw interviewed were also trying to protect jobs that are unsustainable or wanted protection from competition. People who voted economically were thinking sort-term. A lot of people in their 50's who want to protect their job and don't want to retrain.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- crdoconnor 10y ago>protect jobs that are unsustainable or wanted protection from competition A) Everybody wants protection from competition. Where do you think profits come from? There's no shame in wanting protection, especially not as the social safety net is hollowed out. If they were not subjected to austerian measures / offshoring in the heartlands the "remain" vote probably would have won. B) The same economists who are absolutely certain that these people's jobs are unsustainable are the same economists who pushed for offshoring and were completely blindsided by the financial crisis in 2008. The experts thing rang true because economists have no credibility left any more. In fact, the only economist I know of who actually saw 2008 coming wanted brexit (though not for economic reasons).
- vacri 10y agoLeave won because of a variety of factors, including economics, racism/xenophobia, misinformation, youth apathy, belief that protest vote wouldn't win, so on and so forth. There isn't a single main reason it won, and it barely won anyway (and probably wouldn't have won if all voters showed)
- neximo64 10y agoAnd also that the highest court should be in the UK, often overlooked but main reason for many (sovereignty). The ones you mentioned were irrelevant to me and a lot of people I know. I watched in dismay a few years ago at the prospect of Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), it was delayed as a result of this referendum - it would practically a disaster for the City of London and nothing the UK could do to stop it, despite parliament having control of the law.
- neximo64 10y agoFor me, it was that the ECJ could overrule the UK parliament, the implications were too grandiose for the meagre 9.7% (and decreasing ever since the 1970s) representation to represent. Simple as that.
- carlosla 10y agoWell racism and xenophobia are often products of income inequality. Its what happens when you pair poor education with poor living standards. Your judgement becomes based on emotions that can be easily swayed by a political class ready to point the finger at anyone but themselves. Hitler's opportunity wasn't that germany was racist, but rather the brutal socioeconomic conditions of the weimar republic. One thing though makes way for the other. The sad thing is that brexit wont do a single thing to diminish austerity. On the contrary its the people who voted out who will be affected the most.
- BenoitEssiambre 10y agoI would say it not just inequality. It's inequality combined with a job market that has been in a gridlock in Europe since the financial crisis causing people outside of the experienced urban population to be unemployed or underemployed. Overly tight money from the ECB and too low inflation is destroying the young and the rural's career prospects (this will go on until the baby boom retires) and is forcing them to fund boomers' retirements even if they were excluded from good careers for so long. Even though the UK doesn't use the Euro, it is close enough to be impacted by its mismanagement. More thoughts here: http://bessiambre.tumblr.com/post/146561613022/the-euro-makes-the-unemployed-pay-to-destroy-their http://bessiambre.tumblr.com/post/146561613022/the-euro-make...
- xyzzy4 10y agoThe main problem is housing in my opinion. Everything else is affordable enough. It takes a few months to build a house, but decades for someone to pay it off, assuming they even have a job. Doesn't make sense.
- StavrosK 10y agoIt takes a few months for one person to build a house from raw materials? I'd like to meet this superman.
- xyzzy4 10y agoFrom a quick search: "The 2012 Survey of Construction (SOC) from the Census Bureau shows that on average it takes about 7 months from obtaining a building permit to completing a new single-family home."
- blablablame 10y agoYes, but it takes something like 30 people working on it (honestly no idea how many are required)? so 7 months * 30 and we are getting close to 18 man years.
- maxerickson 10y agoFor a modest house you wouldn't have much more than 5 people on site at any given time.
- bobwaycott 10y agoThat doesn't negate the parent's point, of course.
- StavrosK 10y agoYou aren't counting the work that went into creating bricks, tiles and two-by-fours. You have to start from trees, clay and marble.
- StavrosK 10y agoIncome inequality in the Revolutionary era was the lowest ever[1]. [1] If you don't count the Native Americans who were persecuted and slaughtered for their land. Plus, isn't it very easy to have low income inequality if you have a whole continent of land free for the taking[1]?
- riprowan 10y ago> Income inequality in the Revolutionary era was the lowest ever[1]. > [1] If you don't count the Native Americans who were persecuted and slaughtered for their land. Also [2] if you don't count the imported slaves who contributed much of the raw labor.
- Murkin 10y agoHonest question, can anyone explain WHY this is considered to be such a big problem? Really why, not just throwing slogans around. And why it should be treated before things like absolute poverty, etc.
- Havoc 10y agoCauses social tension. Source: Grew up in SA - one of the most unequal countries out there.
- Murkin 10y agoWouldn't it be more important to fight absolute poverty than inequality? Social tension is important and all, but food and medicine should trump that.
- teh 10y agoIt seems human nature complicates things. Perception of fairness trumps reason frequently [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
- conanbatt 10y agoIT would be hard to fight absolute poverty if the income of the bottom section never grows. You could theoretically tax higher and put welfare(or basic income?) but in practice that hasn't worked out very well, for both political and economic reasons. Also, even if you give everyone a basic living with for example, basic income, income inequality is still a problem, because to get a bit more of what you want you have to sell more of what you do. This unavoidable causes tension, because labor , value and price can get distorted. But not also that, because if you were to see that income inequality is a problem on how the value is captured, not created, this means that people with skills and capacity to create a lot of value are not getting rewarded for it, which is detrimental for all the members of society, except those that get the direct benefit of the value capture.
- coldtea 10y ago
- cs702 10y agoWhat matters is not so much the degree of income inequality, but whether the masses on the fat tail of the income distribution feel they are struggling to satisfy basic needs like food, shelter, and education. Societies in which the majority of people are struggling to satisfy such needs are probably not sustainable, regardless of the "fairness" of their economic and political systems. Put another way, the system 'must work' for a majority of people in it.
- conanbatt 10y agoI take it as the direction of income inequality is worse than wealth inequality. If 10U$S of new value are created, and only 1$ of it goes to the bottom 60% the bottom will stay there. In a way, the direction of where you are going matters more than where you are. Even if everyone had food and shelter, we would feel less anxious but inequality would still get more profound and unavoidably end up in some people owning others.
- breck 10y agoRelated: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html "How to (not) estimate Gini indices for fat tailed variables": https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/GINI-1.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/GINI-1.pdf
- mortehu 10y agoQuote from the summary of the article: Consider 10 separate countries, cities, or other units of equal size, with population 1000. Assume the wealth in each unit follows a power law distribution, say a ParetoLomax, all with the exact same parameters. Assume a tail exponent of 1.1. The average Gini index as obtained by direct measurement will be ≈ .71 per country. Now aggregate them into a single country. The composite Gini — as traditionally and currently measured — will be ≈ .75, that is 6% higher – for the same sample. This inconsistency implies not only that the Gini cannot lend itself to comparisons between units of different size but that intertemporal assessments are vitiated by the population changes.
- justsaysmthng 10y agoNote that it's not just a frozen fact, but a growing trend. Those charts go up up up, meaning that things are going to get even worse for more people if all parameters stay the same. This never ends well. Radical new ideas take hold in the minds of the frustrated lower classes and then everything explodes into revolutions, wars and rivers of blood. The reason for the violence is the frustration morphed into hatred on one side and feeling of superiority and entitlement morphed into fear on the other side. Nothing good can come out of clashing hatred against fear. Some "skilled" politicians channel the feelings of frustration-on-the-verge of hatred towards other nations or social classes, like immigrants, political unions (EU), etc and that's why you have the populists gaining traction all over the world. Technology was supposed to save us from this - yet it seems to have accelerated it. The cherry on this cake is the fact that the biosphere and climate are collapsing, while the population is growing, so something's got to give first. Interesting times ahead for sure.
- SixSigma 10y agoThe hon. Gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108256 http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp...
- jondubois 10y agoI don't understand why there is so much focus on income inequality. Income inequality doesn't matter. It's not the problem; it's only a symptom of the real problem which is wealth inequality. If you work REALLY HARD in an area which takes 20 years to master and after doing so you end up earning $200K per year, then you probably deserve it. It is hard getting to such point; you have to constantly plan your career, educate yourself and put yourself through a lot of emotional/psychological trauma for a very long time to get that stage. On the other hand, if you inherited $6 million worth of company stocks from your parents and you earn $200K in dividends each year from those shares and you don't work at all, then you probably don't deserve that income. ... And somewhere in between these two extremes, there are entrepreneurs; who work really hard and take huge risks to create a successful company (and often fail), but when they do succeed, they tend to get disproportional payouts.
- blahi 10y agoAnd why is it a problem? The "poor people" now live better than any other point in history. Everyone now lives better than any other point in history. More educated, less crime, better living conditions, better nutrition. The only problem I see is jealousy. Poor people are jealous of what rich people have and want to take it.
- Retra 10y agoThat is an extremely insulting thing to say. And even if it were true, if jealousy is a barrier to happiness, why shouldn't it be seriously addressed? What is the point of human society if you're just going to casually discard the concerns of the vast majority of people?
- blahi 10y agoBecause you should address the jealousy instead. You don't change because of somebody's jealousy. You don't study less because somebody else can't achieve the same results. Jealousy is a problem with the individual, not a problem with society. They are jealous because of their own shortcomings, not because someone else is successful. They just channel their self loathing into hating the successful. You can't cure that by taking away money from the rich.
- ascotan 10y agoThese studies are nothing but troll bait. 1. What is 'income'. Do you mean taxable income that is received through an employer? Because if you do, most of the 1% at the top probably don't receive 'income'. For example John Kerry is worth about 600mil but received $60K in 'income' for the year he was running for president. The rest of the money gets funneled into off shore bank accounts 503B organizations, shell companies, etc. I think the only reason that he had any 'income' at all was because he sold a few paintings that year. Most of the super wealthy don't have any 'income' at all. 2. Globalization effects. I've lived in some of the wealthiest places in the US and many very wealthily people in the US are foreigners that happen to live here or have many their money overseas. So if Jack Ma decided to live in Washington D.C. would he be part of the top 1% of the US graph? Splitting a graph into US vs UK for instance may no longer be realistic in the modern world. Most 1%ers are globalized. Couple of other ideas I had: >> Technological change and globalization have widened the gap between skilled workers and less-educated workers. Take a look at india. Tech workers do alot better than their peers. Is that bad? Isn't that raising the standard of living for indians? Should all indians all go back to poverty so that they can not have any 'income inequality' in their country? I feel like these pieces are written to justify tax increases by getting people to believe that there is someone out their that can be 'squeezed' for money because 'it's just not fair'. The reality is that most Americans that make above 50K a year are probably in the top 1% of the global population. So maybe in that sense all americans are part of the super rich 1%ers.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoTitle is misleading. Globally inequality is falling. The reason for this is primarily that the poor are getting richer. http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/ http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/ http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/477227-1142020443961/Module5_chap9_10.pdf http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/47722... Article means inequality within certain arbitrary borders.
- shawndumas 10y agoTo the people that downvoted yummyfajitas' comment; can you maybe explain why it's wrong/not germane? Please and thanks.
- jondubois 10y agoThe reason why income inequality doesn't matter when compared to wealth inequality is this: If you're a high-income earner in a big city and you want to buy a house/apartment, you're going to have to take on massive debt and you will end up paying double what a wealthy person would pay for the same house/apartment (due to interests). In effect, prices on the housing market are not determined by income-earners; they are determined by wealth-owners. To buy a house (or anything which is in limited supply), income-earners are forced to compete with wealth-owners; and wealth owners can afford to drive market prices way up - This is in part because wealth owners, on average, do not value money as much as income-earners do. Also, as mentioned above, they don't have to factor in interest rates when making purchasing decisions.
- charlesdm 10y agoAs someone with a few very wealthy friends, this is not always true. It does however help to close a deal faster than someone who wants to purchase the same property using a mortgage. 1. Interest rates matter, because if they're low, they'll usually invest their money elsewhere / pay the interest / pocket the difference. They'll often do a deal "cash" (meaning, without debt) and refinance later. 2. Using debt to offset taxes matters too.
- jondubois 10y agoBut surely you must agree that wealthy people do drive up property prices more than mere high-income earners. Just look at the case of Mark Zuckerberg's purchases in Palo Alto (as an extreme example): First he bought a house for $7 million (which was widely regarded as massively overpriced at the time). Then he ended up buying all adjacent properties for $30 million. In a few short years, he single-handedly contributed to a massive increase in property prices in his entire neighbourhood. This is essentially the story of San Francisco's property market over the past 10 years.
- charlesdm 10y agoOf course, because high income != wealth. It's only the first step. It could become significant wealth if they saved + invested it well, but most high earners are excellent at spending it all. Just look at the amount of bigtime basketball / football players who remain with nothing a few years after they stop playing.
- massysett 10y ago"Incomes were more equally distributed in colonial America than in any other place that can be measured" If you weren't a slave. Stopped reading right there. hahahahahahahahaha.
- eksabajt 10y agoPerhaps you shouldn't comment when you haven't read the post then. If you had, you would have learned that Lindert and Williamson's analysis did account for the income of slaves. Five of the eighteen paragraphs of this short article about their work discusses that part of the analysis.
- massysett 10y agoComparing colonial America to today's free societies is laughable no matter how they "account" for the work of enslaved people.
- Bombthecat 10y agoI think 1200 and earlier was worse. But i also think we go back to that :)
- nstj 10y ago> We know, of course, that incomes are highly unequal today I pine for the day when journalists who make statements like this in defence of their own articles aren't taken seriously without hard data to support their argument.
- pwinnski 10y agoDo you earn minimum wage? Do you earn a million dollars or more per year? Given that there are people in both categories, I'm not sure more "hard data" is needed. If you actually dispute the claim, there's a Wikipedia page with many links. That's probably a better source than expecting every article on the topic to explain it again.
- Mz 10y agoAs the world gets wealthier, the ceiling goes up, the floor doesn't really change. So, duh, the Delta grows larger. This is not a problem per se. The problem is that people at the bottom cannot get their needs met, in part because we simply do not build affordable housing in anywhere near sufficient quantities. If we would remedy that, some people being crazy rich would not, per se, be an issue.
- mindcrime 10y agoI'd be more interested in "standard of living inequality", especially given two aspects which may be true: 1. It may be the case that everyone today has a higher standard of living overall, than in years past, due to a combination of technological advancement and an overall "a rising tide lifts all boats" phenomenon. 2. There may be a point of diminishing returns in terms of the relationship between income and standard of living. That is, if you double your income, maybe your standard of living doubles (this is all assuming we have a good, objective metric for this). However, if you quadruple your income, your standard of living may not quadruple in turn. And so on... I'm not saying that relative income disparities don't matter at all, but I think some notion of absolute standard of living might actually be more important in the grand scheme of things.