5 ms·

i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth dispari

i'd say our political machine in the US has done a great job for the last 35 years at distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance. if recent political movements (tea party, the 99%) and national elections have taught us anything, it's that this is increasingly on the minds of americans (and seemingly others, but i won't speak for them), yet politicians seem to want to talk about anything but that, lest they lose the financial backing of the economic elite. at its core, this is about fairness, which is one of those fundamental psychological forces we can't and shouldn't ignore. game theory studies show time and again that we are willing to play into lose-lose situations if it means maintaining a semblance of fairness among participants. the trump election seems to be an example of that. the arab spring uprisings seem to be larger, more international examples. we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity every single time they try to distract us with something else (particularly terrorism, which has killed far fewer people in the last 15 years than a single year of car accidents has, yet we have sacrificed so much monetarily and psychologically trying to battle that phantom).

maxxxxx 10y ago
You are right. Unfortunately the american electorate is easy to manipulate so they will blame their problems on other groups that are suffering the same problems. Instead of asking why salaries don't go up anymore while the company makes record profits people start attacking each other. The last election was a classical example of distraction. there was almost no discussion of things that would make people's lifes better but instead the propaganda machine talked about e-mail servers, infidelity and "he said, she said".
- jmcgough 10y ago
  Plenty of people on the left were talking about it, but they live in highly populated states (CA, NY) where their vote counts for a lot less.
  - pdeuchler 10y ago
    I think more of it had to do with a systemic and institutional plan of action to prevent any politician who gave voice to those concerns from achieving success in the primaries
    - lobf 10y ago
      What plan is this?
      - maxxxxx 10y ago
        The treatment Sanders got could demonstrate that.
- basch 10y ago
  >the american electorate is easy to manipulate that is a feature of democracy not unique to America
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    It may not be unique to America (for example, the Brits seem equally easy to manipulate, based on the recent Brexit vote), but the populace being easy to manipulate is definitely not a "feature of democracy." The fact of the matter is that there are many democracies in the world where the level of discourse is much more advanced. There are many reasons for this, but the primary factor seems to be that the average level of education in those countries tends to be higher.
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      It's a little condescending to blame this on the educational level. I know plenty of very educated people in the US who are fanatics and don't listen to others. I think it has to do with the obsession with winning, competition and binary thinking the US has.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    It's pretty unique to America. I can't imagine any German to be as fervently for against Merkel or the CDU like Americans are for or against their party. In many countries I can have spirited political discussions over a wide range of topics without people feeling personally offended. That's simply not possible in the US.
    - jedikv 10y ago
      Tribalism is ingrained in the human psyche. If you're not noticing it, that's probably a bad sign.
      - maxxxxx 10y ago
        Like most things in life there is a wide range of levels of tribalism. American politics is on a very high level of tribalism, more than a lot of other countries. To quote you: If you are not noticing that, that's probably a bad sign (for what? Can you explain that?)
stcredzero 10y ago
distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance. Isn't health insurance a wealth disparity issue?
- vkou 10y ago
  It is, although the discussion of health insurance centers about various approaches to rearranging deckchairs (When, instead, the entire system should be torn up, and replaced with single player. It's not clear if even doing that will be enough to really save it.)
- clairity 10y ago
  it's certainly related, but the current political theater to repeal and replace the ACA seems to be an effort to take credit rather than make meaningful improvements. as citizens we shouldn't reward such unproductive behavior with our attention, much less our support.
throwawaywd4252 10y ago
This comment contains a couple of strong and unsubstantiated assertions. 1. Wealth disparity is an issue -- this needs to be justified beyond an appeal to fairness. Why is this an issue at all? Is the real issue the decline of the middle class? Is that necessarily connected to increasing wealth in the upper class? 2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?
- ishields 10y ago
  >2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence? There's more to a president than their proposed policies. Trump's bigoted rhetoric is already having a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for many minorities in the USA (and he's not even in office yet) https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656?lang=en https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656?lang=en
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  1. Wealth disparity is an issue because wealth in America correlates very strongly with political power, which wealthy people in turn use to amass even more wealth and political power. 2. Oh man, where to even begin? a. Repeal of ACA is the most obvious one. According to the recently released report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office[1], 18 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the first year when ACA is repealed. Over ten years, this number will increase to 32 million. In other words, by 2026, one in ten Americans will be without health insurance. b. Trump wants to strip FCC of consumer protection laws[2]. It's pretty obvious why this will be horrendous for the average American. c. He proposed pulling out of NATO. This one should also be pretty obvious: NATO is the major force that is keeping Russia in check. Without America there would be a NATO, and without NATO, Russian geopolitical influence would expand massively, reducing America's influence as a result. d. His cabinet picks are a major disaster. Department of Labor headed by a guy who has fought against labor protection laws all his life. Department of Education headed by a woman who wants to abolish it. Department of Energy headed by a guy who has a degree in animal science. Department of Housing and Urban development headed by a guy whose only "qualification" for the job is having grown up in a poor neighborhood. Environmental Protection Agency headed by a guy who is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. It gets worse and worse. [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/17/18-million-would-lose-insurance-in-first-year-of-obamacare-repeal-without-replacement-cbo-report-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/17/... [2]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/trump-team-reportedly-wants-to-strip-fcc-of-consumer-protection-powers/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/trump-team-report...
malandrew 10y ago
why is wealth disparity the biggest social threat? Economic rent I can see being concern, especially when regulatory capture is involved, but there are many reasons for increasing wealth disparity that are completely fair. Many of those being rewarded with wealth have built and led companies that have improved productivity and allowed many of those on the other side of the wealth divide to do more with less. Is it not fair to compensate them accordingly for the ways they have improved general welfare?
- eevilspock 10y ago
  No. It may be fair to compensate people for greater effort. But the person who was born tall does not deserve a greater share of the coconuts just because only he can reach them. Our system not only greatly rewards/punishes circumstance of birth, it further rewards those who leverage their luck to secure more even advantage, while the unlucky are forced to compete with each other in a race to the bottom for the scraps.
cmurf 10y ago
George Carlin, the American dream (quite cynical) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ Hillbilly Elegy https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly-elegy-a-compassionate-analysis-of-the-poor-who-love-trump.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly... My version: Republican party platform does not believe in the "veil of ignorance" at all whatsoever. They support neo-feudalism and aristocracy. Equality is fake, people are in fact different, those differences should be rewarded and punished in a free market, it is considered unfair to force equality to be true. Even equality under the law is negotiable, where those who can afford better lawyers get better justice. Democrats are tone deaf, and suck at marketing their own policy successes. They'd rather convince people to vote for them on the basis of a smug liberalism which says if only people had the facts they'd vote Democrat. Ergo if you vote Republican you're either stupid or evil. This is not a winning strategy, obviously.
- xapata 10y ago
  Considering how much pulp fiction consists of a kid discovering (s)he is royalty, it's surprising so many people think the average person dislikes aristocrats. We love celebrities. Heck, the UK still has a monarchy.
alasdair_ 10y ago
>biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter? Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods? A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?
- dguest 10y ago
  Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10 times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or getting screwed. To maintain my faith in capitalist democracy in the face of large wealth inequality you have to convince me that one of these three options is acceptable. Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out. With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed them. Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the government's laws.
- Frondo 10y ago
  At some basic level, it depends on what you want to optimize for in society. If you want to optimize for "someone can own everything" then wealth disparity is not and will never be bad. If you want to optimize for a wide host of other things, such as the health of the people in a society, crime rates in a society, class mobility or personal freedom, or other stuff, then you're already motivated to keep wealth disparity in check, because enough of it negatively affects all the rest. There are some good thoughts here: https://www.quora.com/Is-wealth-inequality-bad https://www.quora.com/Is-wealth-inequality-bad But really, a google search for "why is wealth inequality bad" will give you a lot of stuff. Please, if you're genuinely curious, read some of that and decide what you think society should be optimized for.
sametmax 10y ago
They didn't manage to do anything. We did that for ourself. Often I'm told "I know about issue x, but I can't do anything". To which I reply "well, yes you can. First dump your TV. Use the spare time to read books and choose a hobby than make you gather with others. Start trying to spend your money like every note is a voting buletin. Then get involved in any social/political activity at your local level". Of course this has no impact. Most people do want TV. They want drama. They don't want to spend time and energy learning, thinking or taking responsibilities of their life. If you let a cookie jar open in your garden and ants come to eat it, it's not the ants fault. ants are just ants. They see sugar, they try to get it. It's sucks, but you are the giant and they are the ants. You are responsible to understand the situation and make proper choices.
xapata 10y ago
Last 35 years? The US has been arguing about and getting distracted from inequality since it was just colonies. In 1773, Boston merchants (smugglers) started complaining about liberty when all they really wanted was to keep the price of tea a bit higher. [0] If you're serious about wanting change, you should appeal to the values of the capitalists. Don't complain about inequality, complain about inefficiency. A capitalist economy is supposedly (and probably) more efficient than a command economy, because a centralized bureaucracy is worse at allocating resources than a decentralized market. The central tenet of the free market is that decentralization is more efficient. So what happens when a capitalist accrues more wealth, as is natural for some to do with luck or skill? Eventually, the most skilled or most lucky have most of the wealth. Wealth forms a log-normal or power-law distribution. It's natural and nothing to whine about. Unfortunately, this is an unstable system. As the wealth distribution becomes ever more long-tailed, what once was a free market becomes more and more like a centralized bureaucracy with a handfull of capitalists allocating resources instead of a handfull of bureaucrats. Redistributing wealth, fairness aside, is simply the most efficient way to keep the market growing. It closes the loop of decentralization. Think of a Bayesian Meta-Bandit, a Bayesian Bandit [1] that selects a Bandit according to the probability that Bandit is best. No matter the history we've observed, the probability of our best Bandit in fact being best never reaches 100% and we always choose the lesser (according to our observations) with some non-zero probability. In the same way, the best societal strategy is to redistribute according to the probability that our best allocators (our wealthiest capitalists) might make a mistake or get unlucky. Too much redistribution and we lose efficiency, because we're not giving the bulk of our resources to our best allocators. Too little redistribution and we lose efficiency, because our observed-best might either (1) just have gotten lucky in the past and aren't actually better or (2) might get unlucky in the future and we need a hedge against random failure. Aaaanyway. Anyone who argues against redistribution needs to do some thinking about why capitalism works. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Resisting_the_Tea_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Resisting_the... "Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Probability_matching_strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Probability... A Bayesian Bandit chooses actions according to the Bayesian probability that the action is best.
thisnotmyacc 10y ago
> distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity That's not the biggest threat, any more than Diarrhea is a bigger threat than other health issues, despite Diarrhea killing more people: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html By that I mean the two - wealth disparity and Diarrhea - are outcomes, not causes. Diarrhea is the outcome of poor infrastructure (food and water) and poverty that lead to weaker, susceptible immune systems. Wealth disparity is the outcome of a bunch of things, like automation, a better ability to detect good workers, a greater desire to be rewarded for good work (if two people provide X and 10X performance and are rewarded as such... disparity), the DECREASE in wealth distribution globally (China is richer than in 1980, as is all of Asia), that geographically set people have global wealth, e.g. Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin et al are top not of the US, but a world economy, whereas many people still earn a percentage of local money (trades people, waitresses etc) and probably many more elements I don't know about. The problem is we live locally, so the disparity looks worse, even as globally it is coming down. That is why there is more LOCAL choice than ever - in say beers - as we get imports, but LESS global variety, as we all get the best X of something, rather than having a vast array of isolated areas with their own unique elements. It is why Sydney, Australia is home to some of the best Thai food in the world, and the UK home to some of the best Indian. > we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity But towards what policy? Basic Income? Higher taxes? Less automation? Open borders? What is the policy prescription for this issue?

maxxxxx 10y ago

You are right. Unfortunately the american electorate is easy to manipulate so they will blame their problems on other groups that are suffering the same problems. Instead of asking why salaries don't go up anymore while the company makes record profits people start attacking each other. The last election was a classical example of distraction. there was almost no discussion of things that would make people's lifes better but instead the propaganda machine talked about e-mail servers, infidelity and "he said, she said".

jmcgough 10y ago
Plenty of people on the left were talking about it, but they live in highly populated states (CA, NY) where their vote counts for a lot less.
- pdeuchler 10y ago
  I think more of it had to do with a systemic and institutional plan of action to prevent any politician who gave voice to those concerns from achieving success in the primaries
  - lobf 10y ago
    What plan is this?
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      The treatment Sanders got could demonstrate that.
basch 10y ago
>the american electorate is easy to manipulate that is a feature of democracy not unique to America
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  It may not be unique to America (for example, the Brits seem equally easy to manipulate, based on the recent Brexit vote), but the populace being easy to manipulate is definitely not a "feature of democracy." The fact of the matter is that there are many democracies in the world where the level of discourse is much more advanced. There are many reasons for this, but the primary factor seems to be that the average level of education in those countries tends to be higher.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    It's a little condescending to blame this on the educational level. I know plenty of very educated people in the US who are fanatics and don't listen to others. I think it has to do with the obsession with winning, competition and binary thinking the US has.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  It's pretty unique to America. I can't imagine any German to be as fervently for against Merkel or the CDU like Americans are for or against their party. In many countries I can have spirited political discussions over a wide range of topics without people feeling personally offended. That's simply not possible in the US.
  - jedikv 10y ago
    Tribalism is ingrained in the human psyche. If you're not noticing it, that's probably a bad sign.
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      Like most things in life there is a wide range of levels of tribalism. American politics is on a very high level of tribalism, more than a lot of other countries. To quote you: If you are not noticing that, that's probably a bad sign (for what? Can you explain that?)

stcredzero 10y ago

distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity. instead, the public conversations revolve around terrorism, who uses which bathroom, twitter, celebrities, and even health insurance. Isn't health insurance a wealth disparity issue?

vkou 10y ago
It is, although the discussion of health insurance centers about various approaches to rearranging deckchairs (When, instead, the entire system should be torn up, and replaced with single player. It's not clear if even doing that will be enough to really save it.)
clairity 10y ago
it's certainly related, but the current political theater to repeal and replace the ACA seems to be an effort to take credit rather than make meaningful improvements. as citizens we shouldn't reward such unproductive behavior with our attention, much less our support.

throwawaywd4252 10y ago

This comment contains a couple of strong and unsubstantiated assertions. 1. Wealth disparity is an issue -- this needs to be justified beyond an appeal to fairness. Why is this an issue at all? Is the real issue the decline of the middle class? Is that necessarily connected to increasing wealth in the upper class? 2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?

ishields 10y ago
>2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence? There's more to a president than their proposed policies. Trump's bigoted rhetoric is already having a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for many minorities in the USA (and he's not even in office yet) https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656?lang=en https://twitter.com/i/moments/796417517157830656?lang=en
enraged_camel 10y ago
1. Wealth disparity is an issue because wealth in America correlates very strongly with political power, which wealthy people in turn use to amass even more wealth and political power. 2. Oh man, where to even begin? a. Repeal of ACA is the most obvious one. According to the recently released report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office[1], 18 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the first year when ACA is repealed. Over ten years, this number will increase to 32 million. In other words, by 2026, one in ten Americans will be without health insurance. b. Trump wants to strip FCC of consumer protection laws[2]. It's pretty obvious why this will be horrendous for the average American. c. He proposed pulling out of NATO. This one should also be pretty obvious: NATO is the major force that is keeping Russia in check. Without America there would be a NATO, and without NATO, Russian geopolitical influence would expand massively, reducing America's influence as a result. d. His cabinet picks are a major disaster. Department of Labor headed by a guy who has fought against labor protection laws all his life. Department of Education headed by a woman who wants to abolish it. Department of Energy headed by a guy who has a degree in animal science. Department of Housing and Urban development headed by a guy whose only "qualification" for the job is having grown up in a poor neighborhood. Environmental Protection Agency headed by a guy who is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry. It gets worse and worse. [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/17/18-million-would-lose-insurance-in-first-year-of-obamacare-repeal-without-replacement-cbo-report-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/17/... [2]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/trump-team-reportedly-wants-to-strip-fcc-of-consumer-protection-powers/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/trump-team-report...

malandrew 10y ago

why is wealth disparity the biggest social threat? Economic rent I can see being concern, especially when regulatory capture is involved, but there are many reasons for increasing wealth disparity that are completely fair. Many of those being rewarded with wealth have built and led companies that have improved productivity and allowed many of those on the other side of the wealth divide to do more with less. Is it not fair to compensate them accordingly for the ways they have improved general welfare?

eevilspock 10y ago
No. It may be fair to compensate people for greater effort. But the person who was born tall does not deserve a greater share of the coconuts just because only he can reach them. Our system not only greatly rewards/punishes circumstance of birth, it further rewards those who leverage their luck to secure more even advantage, while the unlucky are forced to compete with each other in a race to the bottom for the scraps.

cmurf 10y ago

George Carlin, the American dream (quite cynical) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ Hillbilly Elegy https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly-elegy-a-compassionate-analysis-of-the-poor-who-love-trump.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/books/review-in-hillbilly... My version: Republican party platform does not believe in the "veil of ignorance" at all whatsoever. They support neo-feudalism and aristocracy. Equality is fake, people are in fact different, those differences should be rewarded and punished in a free market, it is considered unfair to force equality to be true. Even equality under the law is negotiable, where those who can afford better lawyers get better justice. Democrats are tone deaf, and suck at marketing their own policy successes. They'd rather convince people to vote for them on the basis of a smug liberalism which says if only people had the facts they'd vote Democrat. Ergo if you vote Republican you're either stupid or evil. This is not a winning strategy, obviously.

xapata 10y ago
Considering how much pulp fiction consists of a kid discovering (s)he is royalty, it's surprising so many people think the average person dislikes aristocrats. We love celebrities. Heck, the UK still has a monarchy.

alasdair_ 10y ago

>biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity Serious question, not trolling: why does wealth disparity matter? Let's say you start the year barely having enough to eat and are living in a cardboard box and you end the year with plenty of food and a small house, why would it matter if your neighbor gets to eat steak once a week and has a slightly nicer house? Surely the absolute fact that your are better off than you were previously is more important than the relative distribution of goods? A quick way to reduce wealth disparity is to burn down every home that costs more than the median house price. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. So why is relative wealth more important than absolute wealth again?

dguest 10y ago
Maybe a slightly bigger house is tolerable, but if my neighbor is making 10 times more than me and is able to buy his way out of legal trouble while I have to abide by the rule of law, I'm one of three things: lazy, inferior, or getting screwed. To maintain my faith in capitalist democracy in the face of large wealth inequality you have to convince me that one of these three options is acceptable. Most poor people I know wouldn't consider themselves lazy, so that one is out. With some serious social engineering and propaganda you may be able to convince the poor that they are inherently inferior, but the trend in most of the world seems to be against this sticking. So in most cases wealth disparity means that the poor people feel like they are getting screwed, i.e. they feel entitled to a better life, and they feel that their institutions have failed them. Look at any country with a high Gini Coefficient and you can see what this leads to. The rich end up corralled into compounds surrounded by razor wire and electric fences, kidnapping runs rampant, political corruption is the rule. With no reason to believe that the government is working for the underclass, you can't really expect the underclass to abide by the government's laws.
Frondo 10y ago
At some basic level, it depends on what you want to optimize for in society. If you want to optimize for "someone can own everything" then wealth disparity is not and will never be bad. If you want to optimize for a wide host of other things, such as the health of the people in a society, crime rates in a society, class mobility or personal freedom, or other stuff, then you're already motivated to keep wealth disparity in check, because enough of it negatively affects all the rest. There are some good thoughts here: https://www.quora.com/Is-wealth-inequality-bad https://www.quora.com/Is-wealth-inequality-bad But really, a google search for "why is wealth inequality bad" will give you a lot of stuff. Please, if you're genuinely curious, read some of that and decide what you think society should be optimized for.

sametmax 10y ago

They didn't manage to do anything. We did that for ourself. Often I'm told "I know about issue x, but I can't do anything". To which I reply "well, yes you can. First dump your TV. Use the spare time to read books and choose a hobby than make you gather with others. Start trying to spend your money like every note is a voting buletin. Then get involved in any social/political activity at your local level". Of course this has no impact. Most people do want TV. They want drama. They don't want to spend time and energy learning, thinking or taking responsibilities of their life. If you let a cookie jar open in your garden and ants come to eat it, it's not the ants fault. ants are just ants. They see sugar, they try to get it. It's sucks, but you are the giant and they are the ants. You are responsible to understand the situation and make proper choices.

xapata 10y ago

Last 35 years? The US has been arguing about and getting distracted from inequality since it was just colonies. In 1773, Boston merchants (smugglers) started complaining about liberty when all they really wanted was to keep the price of tea a bit higher. [0] If you're serious about wanting change, you should appeal to the values of the capitalists. Don't complain about inequality, complain about inefficiency. A capitalist economy is supposedly (and probably) more efficient than a command economy, because a centralized bureaucracy is worse at allocating resources than a decentralized market. The central tenet of the free market is that decentralization is more efficient. So what happens when a capitalist accrues more wealth, as is natural for some to do with luck or skill? Eventually, the most skilled or most lucky have most of the wealth. Wealth forms a log-normal or power-law distribution. It's natural and nothing to whine about. Unfortunately, this is an unstable system. As the wealth distribution becomes ever more long-tailed, what once was a free market becomes more and more like a centralized bureaucracy with a handfull of capitalists allocating resources instead of a handfull of bureaucrats. Redistributing wealth, fairness aside, is simply the most efficient way to keep the market growing. It closes the loop of decentralization. Think of a Bayesian Meta-Bandit, a Bayesian Bandit [1] that selects a Bandit according to the probability that Bandit is best. No matter the history we've observed, the probability of our best Bandit in fact being best never reaches 100% and we always choose the lesser (according to our observations) with some non-zero probability. In the same way, the best societal strategy is to redistribute according to the probability that our best allocators (our wealthiest capitalists) might make a mistake or get unlucky. Too much redistribution and we lose efficiency, because we're not giving the bulk of our resources to our best allocators. Too little redistribution and we lose efficiency, because our observed-best might either (1) just have gotten lucky in the past and aren't actually better or (2) might get unlucky in the future and we need a hedge against random failure. Aaaanyway. Anyone who argues against redistribution needs to do some thinking about why capitalism works. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Resisting_the_Tea_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party#Resisting_the... "Colonial merchants, some of them smugglers, played a significant role in the protests. Because the Tea Act made legally imported tea cheaper, it threatened to put smugglers of Dutch tea out of business." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Probability_matching_strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Probability... A Bayesian Bandit chooses actions according to the Bayesian probability that the action is best.

thisnotmyacc 10y ago

> distracting us from the biggest social threat of our times: wealth disparity That's not the biggest threat, any more than Diarrhea is a bigger threat than other health issues, despite Diarrhea killing more people: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/diarrhea-burden.html By that I mean the two - wealth disparity and Diarrhea - are outcomes, not causes. Diarrhea is the outcome of poor infrastructure (food and water) and poverty that lead to weaker, susceptible immune systems. Wealth disparity is the outcome of a bunch of things, like automation, a better ability to detect good workers, a greater desire to be rewarded for good work (if two people provide X and 10X performance and are rewarded as such... disparity), the DECREASE in wealth distribution globally (China is richer than in 1980, as is all of Asia), that geographically set people have global wealth, e.g. Gates, Zuckerberg, Page, Brin et al are top not of the US, but a world economy, whereas many people still earn a percentage of local money (trades people, waitresses etc) and probably many more elements I don't know about. The problem is we live locally, so the disparity looks worse, even as globally it is coming down. That is why there is more LOCAL choice than ever - in say beers - as we get imports, but LESS global variety, as we all get the best X of something, rather than having a vast array of isolated areas with their own unique elements. It is why Sydney, Australia is home to some of the best Thai food in the world, and the UK home to some of the best Indian. > we should be relentless about leading our politicians back to the topic of wealth disparity But towards what policy? Basic Income? Higher taxes? Less automation? Open borders? What is the policy prescription for this issue?