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Yeah I'm sure CEOs had other perks in the past. This refutes precisely none of my criticism of the article. As to your other two questions, I completely fail t

by Sone7 10y ago

Yeah I'm sure CEOs had other perks in the past. This refutes precisely none of my criticism of the article. As to your other two questions, I completely fail to see how they affect my argument, and I don't want to get off track. To reiterate the criticism I was making - basing your entire article on the claim that the difference between average pay in companies is at fault for "the majority" of inequality, while making no attempt to account for or mention the fact that those firms average wages are likely grossly distorted by executive pay, is at best ignorant and more likely intentional. We live in a world where the 8 richest people own the wealth of 3.5 billion of the poorest. This is insane, it's dangerous, and it's :not: the fault of Google employees' wage packets; no matter how much CEOs in the 60s or in Asia are paid. For the HBR to suggest this is grossly irresponsible, I find it ghoulish.

dukeluke 10y ago
In a global economy, workers have no leverage. If a group tries to form a union, the work goes elsewhere. Globalism exploits the fact that there are people willing to work for $1/hr, and leads to many of the problems of capitalism predicted by Marx and friends in the early 1900s. As long as globalization is allowed to continue, inequality within the US will just grow worse.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  Small nit: Marx worked and predicted these issues in the mid-1800s. He died in 1883.
- Sone7 10y ago
  Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however. Protectionism is at best a short term solution that comes with a host of other problems. The major threats to our existence are global problems like climate change and nuclear arsenals. Fighting against all globalization will only divide us. I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. We have near instant communication, the ability to translate between languages is developing rapidly, and automation can potentially, realistically, make it so that work is truly optional. Fighting against all globalization and protecting US interests above all others is, I would think, very much not what 'Marx and friends' would have had in mind.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > Globalization is not the enemy. The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses. But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.
    - mantas 10y ago
      The classical one does quite a bit harm too. Western/1st/etc world (used to?) treat workers well. The rest of the world didn't. Once tariffs are eliminated, all countries join the rat race to the bottom. How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? Naturally the conditions equalise. The good ones get worse, while bad ones adopt a thing or two.
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        > How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? In theory the idea is that they're not supposed to -- if you have unskilled work with no geographical restrictions, you do it where there is the lowest labor cost, and then everyone benefits by paying lower prices. Meanwhile western countries do the higher paying jobs that require a skilled workforce and the unskilled workers in western countries either do service jobs that do have geographical requirements or go to school and become skilled workers. One of the things that's been killing us on that front is the broken welfare system that puts high marginal rates on lower income people through benefits phase outs, which makes it so that middle class people can't afford to hire lower income people to do service jobs, because 80% of the money goes to the government in benefits phase outs. Which means those people become unemployed, and the higher unemployment rate pushes down unskilled wages, erodes the tax base and increases the total cost government is paying out in benefits to the unemployed.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Meanwhile, global inequality has gone down, because desperately poor Indians and Chinese have grown significantly wealthier. https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-producers/062816carney-Elephant.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-... I feel so bad for those rich westerners with a house, running water, 24/7 electricity, free schools, etc.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Helping the less rich Americans does nothing for the 1% either. What's your point?
      - nercht12 10y ago
        I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        That's actually not true. The number of people living in absolute poverty (for various definitions of it) has gone down drastically. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworldindata_world-poverty-since-1820-in-absolute-numbers.png http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworl... http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-1179761045903/3798749-1330548119519/poverty_line_450x378.gif http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-11797610... https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20130601_FBC698.png https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/... Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners. (Non-white westerners seem to have improved their situation by quite a bit also.)
- simonh 10y ago
  In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West. So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization. The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union. The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.
hyperpape 10y ago
Please don't cite that 3.5 billion number, it's entirely based on total assets, which means that: My 16 year old self with $3000 in the bank saved up from summer jobs was also wealthier than a few billion or so people combined, because they were counted as having $0 or negative net worth. And if you don't think that's already a reductio, then bear in mind that you're also calling an 18 year old working minimum wage with a few dollars in their pocket richer than people making six figures who happen to have student debt. The income and wealth concentration in the hands of the 1% and .01% are sufficiently extreme that any choice of numbers will show them. This one just happens to be nearly meaningless.
- Sone7 10y ago
  I am aware what that 3.5 billion number means, but others may not be, so thanks for that. Only last year, the number was 62 people owning as much wealth as the poorest half the world, the year before that was around 87 I think. It's a good number to keep an eye on. In a discussion about inequality, the number is very relevant, and far from meaningless.
  - simonh 10y ago
    >...the number is very relevant, and far from meaningless How closely coupled are those numbers though? Do changes in the wealth of the richest few dozen people directly affect the wealth of the poorest few billion? If a new Mark Zuckerberg founds an internet company and becomes a billionaire what effect does that have on poverty in Africa? What changes in policy concerning the economics of billionaires do you think would benefit the poorest people in the world?

by Sone7 10y ago

dukeluke 10y ago

In a global economy, workers have no leverage. If a group tries to form a union, the work goes elsewhere. Globalism exploits the fact that there are people willing to work for $1/hr, and leads to many of the problems of capitalism predicted by Marx and friends in the early 1900s. As long as globalization is allowed to continue, inequality within the US will just grow worse.

bobwaycott 10y ago
Small nit: Marx worked and predicted these issues in the mid-1800s. He died in 1883.
Sone7 10y ago
Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however. Protectionism is at best a short term solution that comes with a host of other problems. The major threats to our existence are global problems like climate change and nuclear arsenals. Fighting against all globalization will only divide us. I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. We have near instant communication, the ability to translate between languages is developing rapidly, and automation can potentially, realistically, make it so that work is truly optional. Fighting against all globalization and protecting US interests above all others is, I would think, very much not what 'Marx and friends' would have had in mind.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Globalization is not the enemy. The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses. But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.
  - mantas 10y ago
    The classical one does quite a bit harm too. Western/1st/etc world (used to?) treat workers well. The rest of the world didn't. Once tariffs are eliminated, all countries join the rat race to the bottom. How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? Naturally the conditions equalise. The good ones get worse, while bad ones adopt a thing or two.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? In theory the idea is that they're not supposed to -- if you have unskilled work with no geographical restrictions, you do it where there is the lowest labor cost, and then everyone benefits by paying lower prices. Meanwhile western countries do the higher paying jobs that require a skilled workforce and the unskilled workers in western countries either do service jobs that do have geographical requirements or go to school and become skilled workers. One of the things that's been killing us on that front is the broken welfare system that puts high marginal rates on lower income people through benefits phase outs, which makes it so that middle class people can't afford to hire lower income people to do service jobs, because 80% of the money goes to the government in benefits phase outs. Which means those people become unemployed, and the higher unemployment rate pushes down unskilled wages, erodes the tax base and increases the total cost government is paying out in benefits to the unemployed.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Meanwhile, global inequality has gone down, because desperately poor Indians and Chinese have grown significantly wealthier. https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-producers/062816carney-Elephant.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-... I feel so bad for those rich westerners with a house, running water, 24/7 electricity, free schools, etc.
- mistermann 10y ago
  The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Helping the less rich Americans does nothing for the 1% either. What's your point?
    - nercht12 10y ago
      I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        That's actually not true. The number of people living in absolute poverty (for various definitions of it) has gone down drastically. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworldindata_world-poverty-since-1820-in-absolute-numbers.png http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworl... http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-1179761045903/3798749-1330548119519/poverty_line_450x378.gif http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-11797610... https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20130601_FBC698.png https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/... Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners. (Non-white westerners seem to have improved their situation by quite a bit also.)
simonh 10y ago
In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West. So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization. The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union. The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.

hyperpape 10y ago

Please don't cite that 3.5 billion number, it's entirely based on total assets, which means that: My 16 year old self with $3000 in the bank saved up from summer jobs was also wealthier than a few billion or so people combined, because they were counted as having $0 or negative net worth. And if you don't think that's already a reductio, then bear in mind that you're also calling an 18 year old working minimum wage with a few dollars in their pocket richer than people making six figures who happen to have student debt. The income and wealth concentration in the hands of the 1% and .01% are sufficiently extreme that any choice of numbers will show them. This one just happens to be nearly meaningless.

Sone7 10y ago
I am aware what that 3.5 billion number means, but others may not be, so thanks for that. Only last year, the number was 62 people owning as much wealth as the poorest half the world, the year before that was around 87 I think. It's a good number to keep an eye on. In a discussion about inequality, the number is very relevant, and far from meaningless.
- simonh 10y ago
  >...the number is very relevant, and far from meaningless How closely coupled are those numbers though? Do changes in the wealth of the richest few dozen people directly affect the wealth of the poorest few billion? If a new Mark Zuckerberg founds an internet company and becomes a billionaire what effect does that have on poverty in Africa? What changes in policy concerning the economics of billionaires do you think would benefit the poorest people in the world?