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India has lower income inequality than the US. Your hypothesis seems falsified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.w

India has lower income inequality than the US. Your hypothesis seems falsified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

PeterisP 10y ago
This measure of inequality is mostly influenced by the distance between the mean income and the largest earners (who constitute a huge portion of the total GDP), however, I still maintain that in India there is a much larger distance between the mean income and the lowest wages of simple laborers/maids/walas/etc than the first world. It seems that you are from India, can you give an anecdotal example of how large is difference between the income of "typical" experienced white collar specialist and the income of cheapest maids, cooks or cigarette walas, the bottom part of the labor pool? E.g. in the UK the median hourly wage is roughly twice as much as the minimum; the very very lowest possible paying job pays half that of a "normal" average job; and statistics show that the median salary of a software engineer, considered a lucrative career, is 6 times that of the minimum. Obviously the average person can't buy much of services (no matter how unskilled and lowpaid) of others, since buying 40 hours/week of anyone costs at least half of their total income; and a software engineer could have a full-time (again, 40hr/week not the whole week) cook/maid/driver/whatever only if he paid him at least 1/6th of his total income.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I'm not from India but I spend a lot of time there. Most people don't have a full time maid. They have a maid who comes daily (or maybe 3x/week) and also works for others. This is quite feasible economically in the US - suppose cleaning a home takes 2 hours and a maid accepts $10/hour. That's $20/day or $430/month (assuming 5x/week). So in the US you could get comparable levels of service for maybe $1000/month. It's just not feasible right now because maids cost a lot more than $10/hour. A maid working 10 hours/day, 5 days/week would be earning $2150/month. For comparison, US GDP/capita works out to $4,400/month. (Mean wage/compensation is a bit lower than this.) But you don't even need to look at money to determine this is feasible. You just need to count. Take the number of people sitting around on welfare/disability fraud/etc, multiply by the number of houses they could clean each day, and you can determine how many maids the US could have.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    The thing is, there really isn't a market for a huge number of maids when it costs $1000/month, and you can't really go below that because, as you say, $10/hour.. about the minimum wage in many places. The middle class in USA definitelly can't afford to pay $12k/year (plus taxes!) for such a service. The most highly paid white collar professions would generally scoff at such an expense. At best, the top 1% could afford that, but they don't employ that much maids because there's not so many so rich people.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      The middle class in the USA is already paying for such a service! When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but... > All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something. The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count medical and contribution-qualified programs for the aged and disabled (which are the bulk of payments "to people who don't work".) I mean, this characterization is ludicrous unless your plan is to drag people out of nursing homes to serve in your Basic Job Army.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled? I've linked to this expose by NPR on disability fraud before: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
kamaal 10y ago
As an Indian. Let me tell you the kind of inequality you see in the US is very different compared to the kind of inequality you see in India. By many a definition, no one is poor in the US. Also US has better infrastructure and economic opportunities than India for everyone. By infrastructure I mean access to clean drinking water, sanitation and things like roads. US has more a problem of strict tax accountability for upper-middle-to-lower classes, while none for the rich. And lack of chances to breaking income ceilings. Swim lanes in US are decided in the first 20-25 years of life and things are pretty much set from there on. While in India we still have people eating rotis(Indian flat bread) made out wild grass with salt once/twice a day merely to stay alive.

PeterisP 10y ago

This measure of inequality is mostly influenced by the distance between the mean income and the largest earners (who constitute a huge portion of the total GDP), however, I still maintain that in India there is a much larger distance between the mean income and the lowest wages of simple laborers/maids/walas/etc than the first world. It seems that you are from India, can you give an anecdotal example of how large is difference between the income of "typical" experienced white collar specialist and the income of cheapest maids, cooks or cigarette walas, the bottom part of the labor pool? E.g. in the UK the median hourly wage is roughly twice as much as the minimum; the very very lowest possible paying job pays half that of a "normal" average job; and statistics show that the median salary of a software engineer, considered a lucrative career, is 6 times that of the minimum. Obviously the average person can't buy much of services (no matter how unskilled and lowpaid) of others, since buying 40 hours/week of anyone costs at least half of their total income; and a software engineer could have a full-time (again, 40hr/week not the whole week) cook/maid/driver/whatever only if he paid him at least 1/6th of his total income.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
I'm not from India but I spend a lot of time there. Most people don't have a full time maid. They have a maid who comes daily (or maybe 3x/week) and also works for others. This is quite feasible economically in the US - suppose cleaning a home takes 2 hours and a maid accepts $10/hour. That's $20/day or $430/month (assuming 5x/week). So in the US you could get comparable levels of service for maybe $1000/month. It's just not feasible right now because maids cost a lot more than $10/hour. A maid working 10 hours/day, 5 days/week would be earning $2150/month. For comparison, US GDP/capita works out to $4,400/month. (Mean wage/compensation is a bit lower than this.) But you don't even need to look at money to determine this is feasible. You just need to count. Take the number of people sitting around on welfare/disability fraud/etc, multiply by the number of houses they could clean each day, and you can determine how many maids the US could have.
- PeterisP 10y ago
  The thing is, there really isn't a market for a huge number of maids when it costs $1000/month, and you can't really go below that because, as you say, $10/hour.. about the minimum wage in many places. The middle class in USA definitelly can't afford to pay $12k/year (plus taxes!) for such a service. The most highly paid white collar professions would generally scoff at such an expense. At best, the top 1% could afford that, but they don't employ that much maids because there's not so many so rich people.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    The middle class in the USA is already paying for such a service! When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > When you pay taxes, the bulk of it is just redistributed to people who don't work. Okay, there's a sense in which that's true, but... > All I'm proposing is that we restructure things so that instead of getting nothing for your money you get something. The problem with that (aside from any other problems with the whole "basic job" idea) is that the only sense in which it the preceding claim is true is if you count medical and contribution-qualified programs for the aged and disabled (which are the bulk of payments "to people who don't work".) I mean, this characterization is ludicrous unless your plan is to drag people out of nursing homes to serve in your Basic Job Army.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        Are you seriously claiming that the only non-working government dependents are the elderly and disabled? I've linked to this expose by NPR on disability fraud before: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

kamaal 10y ago

As an Indian. Let me tell you the kind of inequality you see in the US is very different compared to the kind of inequality you see in India. By many a definition, no one is poor in the US. Also US has better infrastructure and economic opportunities than India for everyone. By infrastructure I mean access to clean drinking water, sanitation and things like roads. US has more a problem of strict tax accountability for upper-middle-to-lower classes, while none for the rich. And lack of chances to breaking income ceilings. Swim lanes in US are decided in the first 20-25 years of life and things are pretty much set from there on. While in India we still have people eating rotis(Indian flat bread) made out wild grass with salt once/twice a day merely to stay alive.