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There are two primary reasons for this, in my mind. The first is that income inequality trivially produces wealth inequality. We measure income instead becaus

by amalcon 10y ago

There are two primary reasons for this, in my mind. The first is that income inequality trivially produces wealth inequality. We measure income instead because direct measures of wealth inequality can be misleading. If we define wealth as abstracted resources available, this seems obviously problematic: it reduces the size of the coalition needed to make decisions for society. To pick a crazy example, there are two ways for someone to prohibit serving falafel in their city. They can either get enough voters together to prohibit that (difficult for obvious reasons). Alternatively, they can get enough wealth together to buy or bribe all of the restaurants (or suppliers, or commercial property, etc). Naturally, we're nowhere close to my crazy example, but there are smaller examples of this effect that we're starting to see. Try going down to the store and buying a Blu-Ray player that doesn't encrypt its HDMI output. You can't, even though the majority of people who care one way or the other would like one. The other problem is that it's rather detrimental to the narrative that one's income is purely the result of the work one puts in. It's hard to explain rising income inequality if that is true. Are rich people systematically working harder (and poor people systematically working less hard) than they used to? That's implausible on its face, so what's causing the inequality to increase? There are some plausible explanations for this, which still work within the narrative that income results from work. Occam's Razor would seem to point in other directions, though.

drivingmenuts 10y ago
> You can't, even though the majority of people who care one way or the other would like one. The number of people who care is very small, though, which makes it economically inefficient to manufacture. While a machine could be manufactured with the feature as an add-on, that defeats the purpose of the feature in the first place.
- amalcon 10y ago
  This would make sense if it were less expensive to manufacture a Blu-Ray player with HDCP than without, or if there were a significant number of consumers who explicitly prefer HDCP. Neither of these is true, so not using HDCP makes the device more valuable for the exact same cost (or maybe slightly less).
Rylinks 10y ago
>Naturally, we're nowhere close to my crazy example, but there are smaller examples of this effect that we're starting to see. Try going down to the store and buying a Blu-Ray player that doesn't encrypt its HDMI output. You can't, even though the majority of people who care one way or the other would like one This is accomplished not by bribing everyone, but by the ordinary legal system[0]. In general, bribing everyone without legal enforcement has coordination problems that are difficult to solve. Once you pay off all the falafel suppliers, JP morgan or someone will come up with the bright idea of either a) creating a new falafel supplier that rejects the bribe and sells at a price premium or b) creating a new falafel supplier, accepting the bribe, and then closing down. With enough obfuscation, b) can be repeated until the person giving out bribes runs out of money. [0]e.g. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/warner-bros-sues-hd-fury-over-boxes-that-can-copy-4k-video/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/warner-bros-sues-...
- amalcon 10y ago
  > This is accomplished not by bribing everyone, but by the ordinary legal system[0]. Those are still for sale: https://www.hdfury.com/ https://www.hdfury.com/ You just can't buy them from Best Buy or Micro Center or what have you, and nobody will make a player that obviates the need for those. > Once you pay off all the falafel suppliers, JP morgan or someone will come up with the bright idea of either a) creating a new falafel supplier that rejects the bribe and sells at a price premium or b) creating a new falafel supplier, accepting the bribe, and then closing down. This is part of why my example is crazy, yes. It's not that hard to grow chickpeas, so it's in turn very hard to monopolize falafel.

by amalcon 10y ago

drivingmenuts 10y ago

> You can't, even though the majority of people who care one way or the other would like one. The number of people who care is very small, though, which makes it economically inefficient to manufacture. While a machine could be manufactured with the feature as an add-on, that defeats the purpose of the feature in the first place.

amalcon 10y ago
This would make sense if it were less expensive to manufacture a Blu-Ray player with HDCP than without, or if there were a significant number of consumers who explicitly prefer HDCP. Neither of these is true, so not using HDCP makes the device more valuable for the exact same cost (or maybe slightly less).

Rylinks 10y ago

>Naturally, we're nowhere close to my crazy example, but there are smaller examples of this effect that we're starting to see. Try going down to the store and buying a Blu-Ray player that doesn't encrypt its HDMI output. You can't, even though the majority of people who care one way or the other would like one This is accomplished not by bribing everyone, but by the ordinary legal system[0]. In general, bribing everyone without legal enforcement has coordination problems that are difficult to solve. Once you pay off all the falafel suppliers, JP morgan or someone will come up with the bright idea of either a) creating a new falafel supplier that rejects the bribe and sells at a price premium or b) creating a new falafel supplier, accepting the bribe, and then closing down. With enough obfuscation, b) can be repeated until the person giving out bribes runs out of money. [0]e.g. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/warner-bros-sues-hd-fury-over-boxes-that-can-copy-4k-video/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/warner-bros-sues-...

amalcon 10y ago
> This is accomplished not by bribing everyone, but by the ordinary legal system[0]. Those are still for sale: https://www.hdfury.com/ https://www.hdfury.com/ You just can't buy them from Best Buy or Micro Center or what have you, and nobody will make a player that obviates the need for those. > Once you pay off all the falafel suppliers, JP morgan or someone will come up with the bright idea of either a) creating a new falafel supplier that rejects the bribe and sells at a price premium or b) creating a new falafel supplier, accepting the bribe, and then closing down. This is part of why my example is crazy, yes. It's not that hard to grow chickpeas, so it's in turn very hard to monopolize falafel.