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> I lucked into money. The basic point is that he gets paid more whilst not doing more "work". For those whom "Work" is the only lever they use to convert into

• gitpusher 9y ago
  > I dont see it as unfair that a person making $1 a day is unlikely to become a deca-billionaire in their lifetime (total mobility); Do you see it as unfair that there are people stuck making $1 a day?
  • maerF0x0 9y ago
    If they literally are "stuck" . Here we get into a nasty debate about spectrum of probability vs effort and the multipliers that should be reachable by end of life. I definitely agree that a 0 probability despite maximum effort is unfair. In between is a grey area though.
    • ManFromUranus 9y ago
      Effort is irrelevant though, if they spend their effort on something that could never succeed or is useless or irrelevant to the market then their effort should obviously fail and it is not unfair. So it matters a lot what they choose to apply effort to. Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life.
      • patrickdavey 9y ago
        > Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life. Do you think that if you'd been born in a slum you would have a decent chance of winning in the IQ test & optimal choice events in your life? I would imagine that almost anyone reading these comments has been unbelievably fortunate to be born into relatively wealthy circumstances & had things like "books" around to help bolster their IQ.
        • nql 9y ago
          Being born in a slum more than likely means that your parents failed the IQ test, which is a strong signal about your IQ.
          • KSteffensen 9y ago
            I hope that was meant to be ironic. If not that was one of the most depressing statements I have seen in a while.
          • URSpider94 9y ago
            That is completely untrue. When researchers have actually taken the time to do IQ testing in poor communities, they find a similar distribution of high and low IQ's as in the general population. There are a lot of 130 IQ people living in the slums.
          • state_less 9y ago
            Americans went from riches to soup lines (living in slums/squalor) over various periods of time. Though their IQ did not vary over that same time period. A strong signal IQ is not, maybe a nice tailwind, but that doesn't help much if you are born in the bogs.
          • oh_sigh 9y ago
            This is just downright stupid. Slums are societal issues which ant individual has little control over. Perhaps you failed the IQ test too?
  • accountyaccount 9y ago
    I think it depends. Is $1 enough to grant you housing, food, healthcare, and free time to see your family?
    • taway_1212 9y ago
      It's enough to get a can of Coke (not everywhere though).
      • vilmosi 9y ago
        I think the point is that $1 a day is acceptable if it provides shelter/food etc.
        • hk__2 9y ago
          Which it doesn’t.
          • weberc2 9y ago
            It does in many very poor nations. What's the significance of the $1 figure anyway? Whose point hinges on this number?
            • hk__2 9y ago
              > What's the significance of the $1 figure anyway? This article gives a bit of background about that figure: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17312819 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17312819
          • vilmosi 9y ago
            It doesn't IF it doesn't provide for said things. That's the point.
            • hk__2 9y ago
              I got the parent’s point; you missed mine ;) I was talking about the second part of the comment: $1 doesn’t provide you shelter/food/etc.
  • alphonsegaston 9y ago
    When you get to the bottom of this kind of thinking, there's always some form of a just world fallacy. Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit, it's never "unfair" because of this foundational error. See also programmers thinking they're "highly paid" despite years of collusion by tech giants to reduce their salaries and capital owners eroding what they do earn through rent-seeking real estate investments.
    • uiri 9y ago
      The term "rent" in the phrase "rent-seeking" has nothing to do with the meaning of the term "rent" as payment pursuant to a lease. Rather, the phrase rent-seeking refers to seeking money without actually providing any economic value. It would be more accurate to view such payments as taxes (often levied by a private entity). Adam Smith categorizes income into profit, wages, and rent. Rent-seeking refers to the last one of these. In a traditional residential lease, the landlord is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property along with property taxes and, sometimes, some of the utility payments. Residential rent is based upon the value of the property as a residence, along with maintenance, taxes, etc that the landlord is responsible for. The income the landlord receive, according to Adam Smith's classification, is profit rather than rent. Capital owners typically receive profit by controlling profitable assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.
      • liuhenry 9y ago
        I might be misunderstanding, but it seems like the landlord's income would include economic rent as well as profit by this definition. You might imagine a residential lease where you agree to perform maintenance and upkeep and pay property taxes in return for a reduction in the lease cost. But this wouldn't reduce your lease cost to $0 - you're still paying for the privilege of being allowed to live there, so doesn't this fall under the traditional definition of "economic rent"?
    • flubert 9y ago
      >Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit Is there anything specifically you think the author has done to "keep the poor in their diminished condition"? Or is the act of owning rental property oppressing? What should the author do in his circumstance? He could stop investing in rental property, but would his investment in other areas be oppressive? Should he quit teaching rich people in Qatar so that he doesn't earn enough to engage in investments?
• Sodman 9y ago
  The problem is for a lot of people, they'd need something more like a 10x multiplier or more. (Eg the folks he references trapped working as cheap labor that can't even leave without the company's permission, who likely can't even afford travel).
  • maerF0x0 9y ago
    for the record I'm speaking of a "Real" multiplier (taking in account inflation / standard of living) . IMO if every generation is 2x-ing their parent's lifestyle, its nearly instantaneous wealth in the scale of humanity. In the developed world today's poor live like kings of old. In 1000 yrs I would imagine that their poor will live better than our wealthy "Playboys" of today. I see nothing wrong with people being in different places, so long as they have the ability to better their circumstances. The ability (and actuality) of improving circumstances is more or less happiness, happy lives are definitionally worth living.
    • the_cat_kittles 9y ago
      i agree that improving your circumstances is the best thing. i also dont dismiss standard of living arguments, i think they are valid. but i think they aren't the whole picture. i think alot of how we feel depends on how we compare to those around us. 100 thirsty people in a desert are much more pissed off if you add 1 person with excess water standing right next to them not giving them any. so, some consideration to the overall shape of the distribution of wealth is necessary in my opinion.
      • vilmosi 9y ago
        > 100 thirsty people in a desert are much more pissed off if you add 1 person with excess water The analogy isn't entirely correct. If the thirsty people got all the water they could drink and a guy joined that owned a lake... They shouldn't really complain. It's literally better for everyone, even if the wealth distribution is worse.
    • dota_fanatic 9y ago
• the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  this seems thoughtful, but there are some absolutes that get in the way of this relativistic argument. one is that people who are really poor cant eat enough, and die sooner. to me, it is unfair that you would have a shorter life because you are not born into wealth.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    There is a large gap between "really poor" and "not born into wealth", though.
• opportune 9y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential. I don't mean that we should give everyone a million dollars to invest of their own. What I mean is that we should ensure that everyone gets provided with a good education and food/water/shelter, etc. The author specifically mentions the people making about $7 a day doing manual labor in Qatar, and that they were a lot shorter than he was primarily due to lack of nutrition. Do you believe that these people should only be able to aspire to making $14 a day? Maybe not all of these individuals are hard workers (by nature. I'm sure they are essentially forced to be hard workers to survive) or smart, but a lot probably are, and it's because of an unfair system that didn't give them access to food and education that they have to work in Qatar to make a living. You may see this is simple economics, but I see this as a modern form of slavery: keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor.
  • maerF0x0 9y ago
    Entrepreneurs have incentive to ensure everyone meets their maximum potential because this is the place where there is the most to extract. If my value is $10 per day and someone makes my value $20 per day, there is $10 per day worth of value for us to negotiate over. We _both_ have an incentive to maximize my potential. Also: >we should ... thats a morality statement but without a canonical source of ethics that some do not ascribe to. But, I would assume that "self interest" is more or less universal, and thus we can build systems that use self interest to ensure good outcomes for all.
    • opportune 9y ago
      Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. In this case, there are a lot of complex dynamics at play: will workers emigrate elsewhere if trained well (Basically the IIT problem)? Are constituents/subjects ok with reductions in their quality of life so that other people can be provided these resources. To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic. Also yes of course I used "should", as I am giving my opinion on this situation.
• z1mm32m4n 9y ago
  This echoes a lot of the same sentiments that Paul Graham puts forth in his essay "How to Make Wealth"[1]. Basically, the claim is "money is not wealth" (or as put above, money is not value). Money is a tool, used for three things: 1. making it easy to trade if you can't barter (i.e., be a medium of exchange) 2. store wealth (i.e., store value) 3. measure wealth (i.e., be a unit of account) Wealth on the other hand deals with actually making the economy better off. Creating a startup that makes widgets faster and cheaper then ships them out over the interwebs moves the needle forward. Both of these scenarios create wealth. I think there's still an argument to be made over the apparent inequality between how much work is required to create a certain amount of wealth. And certainly, owning wealth while doing no work is another story entirely. [1] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
• wmeredith 9y ago
  > Low placed people may not be able to "work" their way to upper echelons, but they can invent, intuit or otherwise create high value leverage of their's and others' work. How would you suggest slave-labor in Qatar, who's lives are literally disposable to our global society, create this leverage? [serious]
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    How have slaves ever historically created leverage?
    • wmeredith 9y ago
      Revolt? I think the only leverage any slave population has ever had is numbers over their oppressors.
    • thaumasiotes 9y ago
      Slaves have frequently been among the most high-status, most powerful people in their society. The slave who manages an important man's affairs is himself an important man. Concubines frequently wield power through their well-placed lovers. At the historical extreme, Wu Zetian was a concubine who worked her way up to being formally crowned emperor. The Mamluk Turks were slaves. This didn't stop them from taking control of the government and even enacting a requirement that the Sultan be a Mamluk (children of Mamluks, not being slaves, were not eligible). Chinese eunuchs were also slaves, and also took control of the government on multiple occasions.
      • defined 9y ago
        These are, IMO, exceptions. Most slaves probably got worked half to death, beaten, and generally abused. Certainly history tells us that many slaves simply died en route from where they were captured. I can't prove this, but it's much more likely than the fate of high-status slaves.
        • thaumasiotes 9y ago
• cortesoft 9y ago
  You are totally ignoring the crux of his argument, which is centered on ownership; how we decide who owns what, how we tax owned things versus earned-through-work things, and how we tax the things people do with what they own. Yes, a piece of property earns rent because it has 'value' to someone else; however, who gets to earn that value? At some point, this piece of land was 'unowned', and then someone came along and said 'I own this'. Do we let them keep that forever? Do they have to pay society a fee for being able to claim it as their own? Can they give it to their kids for perpetuity? Can they do anything they want with it? What about the air above it, or the ground below? These are all very important questions, and there isn't some 'true' moral answer to them that is the right way to govern property rights. There are easier moral arguments to make about ownership of property I produce, but not about land or natural resources.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    There aren't many people earning money as rentiers of unimproved land. But it turns out that people are much more willing to make improvements when they have secure title to the land. But who gets to rent out the apartment building? Well, the one who put an apartment building there, that's who. Why should anyone else get to?
    • cortesoft 9y ago
      In many places, unimproved land has a TON of value. In those places, in fact, many people buy a home just to tear it down and rebuild on the lot. They would pay MORE if the house wasn't there. There is a reason the saying in real estate is 'location, location, location' and not 'build quality, build quality, build quality'. The reason you can buy much larger homes for less money in other parts of the country isn't because the building materials or labor are cheaper, but because the land itself is cheaper. Now, I am not saying that the building itself doesn't have value, or that the person who built and owns the building shouldn't be compensated for that investment and work, but it is disingenuous to pretend that the majority of the value is from the building and not the land itself (at least for most places where rent is high) I am not in any way, shape, or form arguing that we should seize all private property in some kind of communist revolution; I am simply saying we need to think about how we divide up the value of something like real estate to fairly compensate and encourage development without promoting unfair and ineffecient rent seeking.
• wturner 9y ago
  The world "value" is always confusing. Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire presumably because she is valued for her ability to interview people (she basically talks into a microphone for large sums of money). If she left society and shacked up in the woods tomorrow it wouldn't impact my life in the least. On the other hand, my garbage pickup person does harder work and makes a lot less, but if there was a garbage collector strike I would not be happy. I value my garbage collector more than Oprah Winfrey and I would assume the average citizen does as well. Using the phrase "They provide more value" as an umbrella phrase for why people get rich is understandable, but something just doesn't seem quite right about it.
  • mod 9y ago
    The average citizen values YOUR garbage collector far less than they value Oprah. They value their own, certainly, but that value is reflected by the enormous sums we collectively pay to have our garbage removed. The garbage industry is worth a lot more than Oprah. You also pay (indirectly) your garbage worker a lot more than you pay (indirectly) Oprah, so things might be working out closer to how you value them than you'd expect.
    • wturner 9y ago
      I still can't get my head around the logic that a garbage collector gets paid next to nothing relative to someone who is paid millions to talk into a microphone and the reasoning is that the latter "provides more value". "They provide more value" just seems like a very partial catch phrase to make this all look less absurd than it actually is.
      • j2bax 9y ago
        I think the difference is Oprah provides a little value to a lot of people (whether it be therapeutic, entertainment or what have you). Collectively, she is providing a lot more "value" because of the platform and distribution she has achieved. Your garbage collector provides great value to you, but no value to the grand majority of people.
• twic 9y ago
  > Market economies do not function on work, but on value. That's the whole point of the article. "Those rules are not some natural feature of the universe. People made them. People can change them."
• samstave 9y ago
  >instead I want to ensure they have some mobility so that they can always better their situation and tis is why I feel that there is an active oppression of access to quality education. The sentiment you share above is NOT shared by MANY and likely most of the deca-billionaire class... Keeping people stupid has value to those who would benefit from stupidity (governments, institutions, corporations and entrenched wealth) -- thus platitudes and "foundations" with very very slow if any progressive impact are the true status quo... The trick is to keep people holding themselves down by providing them the baggage to keep their minds off the unlimited and focused on the limitations. /tinfoil
• dredmorbius 9y ago
  Market economies don't function on value but on price. There are plenty of high-value activities that go undervalued -- a general class of these are termed public goods. There's also the confusion of financial value with economic value. If a good cannot either capture the value it creates (nonrivalousness, non-excludability), or if it creates economic value, but not to a class of direct users who have what Adam Smith called "expressed demand", that is, discretionary or available liquidity, then it produces no financial value, and, in a market system, is underprovisioned. At the micro level, your decisionmaking is going to be determined by financial aspects. At a macro level, we should focus far more on overall economic value. Alternatively, structuring the micro world to reflect the macro more appropriately (basic income, employer of last resort, generalised support of public goods) might work. Both are exceedingly difficult politically.
  • aninhumer 9y ago
    >There are plenty of high-value activities that go undervalued I think given the distinction you're making, it would be better to say these activities are underpriced. But I agree with your point. Far too many proponents of capitalism seem to believe the economy is somehow inherently fair because all prices reflect utility creation. Another factor here is that demand is distorted by wealth. Things that provide value to rich people will be priced higher than things that provide equivalent value to poor people. A yacht seems unlikely to be as valuable to its individual owner as an equivalently priced amount of food is to many different people.
    • dredmorbius 9y ago
      "Underrewarded" would probably be better wording, though "priced" fits with the terminology I've used elsewhere (I try to be consistent, I'm not always). Some of these are underpriced, in the sense that the price doesn't repay the contribution. Some are overpriced, in the sense that those who would benefit highly from access cannot afford them. (Though that might also be considered an inssuficient provision of income or spending power.) The overall outcome is that a resource allocation which would improve net social common weal isn't made, that is, the goods or services are underprovisioned as a whole.
• antisthenes 9y ago
  I'll echo the disagreement of some other posters: despite your good intentions, your post misses the point of the article entirely and focuses on one specific thing that's only tangentially relevant. The point being made that the rentier class, usually applauded for their success, in many cases does not take the risks so widely ascribed to it, and creates wealth for select few beneficiaries simply by having more wealth. Surely you will agree that in a given locale, the amount of land is a fixed amount. A single entity is able to extract more value from land simply by denying others use of it, which is of dubious value to the society at large. I won't go so far as to declare property = theft, but you can't help but wonder about the negative externalities of a few parties owning the vast majority of land and developments in a given area. Without ill intentions, people are forced to pay rent, allowing the rentier class to accumulate more and more wealth by simply doing nothing. This is in contrast to innovative companies that provide real value to customers and create wealth for all involved (e.g. a farmer buying a piece of machinery to produce more food) The article is mainly about a subset of capitalism where money is produced for the owner class without the tangible value exchange for the people from whom that money is extracted, and about how surprisingly well it scales.
• jlg23 9y ago
  > A glass of water provided at the right time in a desert is invaluable and thus expensive. If you travel a real desert, you'll realize that water is always offered for free[1] to people in need. As is bread. And that is the very idea of basic income: Provide essentials for free. [1] Disclaimer: I did about 20k miles by car in Western Sahara and the south of Morocco in the last 4 years.
  • ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
    And what happens if a thousand people show up and there is not enough of that limited resource in the desert for all of them? We live on a planet of finite resources, without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system, this and human nature are fundamental issues with the idea of Universal Basic Income
    • jlg23 9y ago
      > And what happens if a thousand people show up and there is not enough of that limited resource in the desert for all of them? By the time water and bread are this rare you have long stopped thinking in economic terms, armed yourself and probably got killed. If it is a temporary outage, you can count on people to help each other. > Without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system From an economic point of view we don't have to worry about food and water, just about its distribution. Realizing that I'm going halfway Godwin on you here: "Controlling the number of people drawing from said resources" is a very.. weird thing to say when the resources in question are water and bread. You are over-generalizing the "basic necessities/basic income" to "resources". People who only have their "basic income" won't be able to purchase rare resources, they just won't have to worry about a roof over their head, water and bread. Why does everyone assume that people don't want more? You want to go on a holiday? You work. You want that bigger TV, a car or just a new game? You work.
      • ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
        >Realizing that I'm going halfway Godwin on you here: "Controlling the number of people drawing from said resources" is a very.. weird thing to say when the resources in question are water and bread. That's an asinine assumption, UBI is never restricted to simply bread and water, you ignore the reality that UBI is free to be used, however. Arguing for a basic sustenance program is entirely different than UBI models. No reason to bother delving deeper into demographic issues