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What strikes me the most when looking at many of the comments here is the blatant disregard for human suffering that extreme inequality and the resulting povert

• solidsnack9000 9y ago
  As long as we accept the need for people to be janitors, we must accept that becoming a janitor is not a "mistake", it's a useful thing that we all want to see happen for some people. We can't on the one hand say, that we need people to do this job and on the other hand say, "tough luck" to those that do it.
  • jaggederest 9y ago
    Doing janitorial work is not a mistake, but being a janitor for 40 years certainly is. It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even possible that is the issue.
    • wavefunction 9y ago
      >It's not the core job, it's the fact that there's zero growth or mobility even possible that is the issue. Not everyone is a 'striver.' Some folks just want to pay their bills and enjoy what time they can with their family and friends.
      • jaggederest 9y ago
        Even those 'non-striver' people would prefer to have growth over time, in their position, wage, and skills. Humans are not static - we like to learn and we get very frustrated when we can't improve over time.
        • barrkel 9y ago
          Do you think everybody finds growth and meaning in their job? Many people find it in their family, in sport, in clubs, and work is just a wage.
          • philjohn 9y ago
            And yet, the Janitor in this piece can't afford to take a holiday, so is it a stretch to assume she doesn't have much free time either?!?
            • bb88 9y ago
              Yes, if she's hourly, because they probably won't pay overtime.
            • jiggunjer 9y ago
              Maybe the fact that she's a single mom with 4 kids is a factor too. I think a janitor with a single dependent would have a more acceptable standard of living.
              • jaggederest 9y ago
                Are you making a modest proposal that people should go from four kids to one, post facto? I think everyone deserves to be able to have vacation time, especially single parents.
                • jiggunjer 9y ago
                  I'm not proposing anything. Just suggesting that there are more factors than income that affect 'inequality'. An article that focusses on inequality due to low income should perhaps pick an example with a more typical family situation.
      • oarla 9y ago
        As a society, if we figure out an economic system which doesn't lead to inflation, then all would benefit by not having to grow their net worth, and in turn, have a job that doesn't have any growth prospects.
        • solomatov 9y ago
          How are growth prospect and inflation related? You can keep your net worth by investing into assets which have growth above the inflation level which isn't that hard.
          • oarla 9y ago
            By growth, I meant increase in wages to at least keep up with inflation. Janitorial jobs haven't kept up with inflation. Nowadays, rent increases by about 10% YoY. But wages don't increase by that much.
    • fiblye 9y ago
      Life isn't all about getting promoted. Loads of people get far more satisfaction from knowing they're carrying out an important duty than they do from knowing they got promoted from Javascript Ninja to Javascript Assassin.
      • jaggederest 9y ago
        I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not saying getting promoted. I'm saying getting better at being a janitor, or rotating between different properties, or learning to do a little light maintenance, or operate a lift or clean windows, or anything to break up the 100% identical routine. If you're a contracted employee, there's zero investment in you as an employee. You come in, do the task, and leave.
        • rrauenza 9y ago
          You're touching upon a little of something called 'The Growth Mindset' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth In the Bay Area schools my kids attend, they are working hard to emphasize this growth mindset. I think it's huge component in job mobility, whether it be upward or sideways.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      So, let's make growth and mobility possible for janitors. The whole point of the article is that it used to be, so we should be able to do it again.
      • jaggederest 9y ago
        That's exactly what I'm saying, and I'm not sure why people in this thread are misunderstanding it.
        • mikeash 9y ago
          I thought you were saying that growth or mobility was inherently impossible for a janitor. Maybe because you describe being a janitor for 40 years as a mistake rather than as a failure of the system. Anyway, if you meant it the other way around then consider my reply some extra support for the idea.
          • jaggederest 9y ago
            I was just using the parent comment verbiage. Perhaps I should have quoted it. I meant a mistake by society, i.e. it's a mistake to put people in a dead-end job, functionally ever.
            • mikeash 9y ago
              Gotcha. Maybe it could have been worded better but I understand what you mean now, so it's all good.
    • solidsnack9000 9y ago
      It is actually entirely fine, from the perspective of getting the job done, if someone is a janitor for forty years. There is no reason that being useful should net out to a bad life.
      • jaggederest 9y ago
        Right. I'm saying there's no opportunity, not that there should be a requirement. I'm saying that we're trapping poor people in a world where they are totally powerless and that is fundamentally evil.
        • kakarot 9y ago
          As long as there are old, ugly men who want to have sex with young, beautiful women no matter the cost to either party, economic exploitation will remain at the heart of civilization, stunting our growth to the point of deformity.
          • jaggederest 9y ago
            Interestingly enough I don't think that's actually the warping factor any more. It used to be, certainly, but I think these days we've gone beyond "I would like to own people as chattel property", and all the way to "I want to be the biggest metaphorical genitalia in my particular subregion of the country"
            • kakarot 9y ago
              I see your point, though it does seem like these are both extensions of the same underlying instinctual desires present in males, mainly the need for dominance (expressed in only a small percentage of the population for evolutionary reasons) and the need for sexual gratification / production of offspring. Being the biggest metaphorical genitalia around will lead to fulfillment of both of those things.
  • trapperkeeper74 9y ago
    Robots aren't capable of doing everything people can do yet, but as they become more capable, what and how are displaced unskilled workers supposed to do if they can't get any job at all? Starve to death under a bridge? Not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor. I think this is why UBI is essential: prevent riots and meet people's basic needs so they're not pennyless and sleeping rough.
    • lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
      Your statement "not everyone can handle social or intellectual labor" is a larger sociological problem. If we insist that the only people allowed to participate in the labor market are college educated white guys, maybe; I don't see that statusquo continuing. The hoops some members of this forum will jump through to convince themselves that building CRUD apps is some zenith of intellectual might just continues to astound me.
      • glhaynes 9y ago
        Seems a strange complaint when janitorial positions (which aren’t often held by college educated white guys) are under discussion. Presuming we want people to have good lives who aren’t able or inclined to do jobs requiring much higher intellectual demands than janitorial ones (and I certainly do want us to presume that!), we need to figure out how to in the short term allow people doing those jobs to have good lives and in the long term allow them to have good lives while robots do those jobs. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment.
        • posguy 9y ago
          There are massive economic upheavals occurring right now, and we as a society have decided that most people get to live a hardscrabble existence where an unexpected $500 expense will ruin a person or family financially. This economic system isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, hence the support for Bernie and Trump.
        • lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
  • Chris2048 9y ago
    Becoming a janitor is not a mistake. Having so few options that janitor is all you can be, along with many other people (competition), is the mistake. If everyone had better options, fewer would be willing to be janitors, and the need for janitors would cause janitorial wages to increase. Basically, society is partly competitive.
    • solidsnack9000 9y ago
      In a vacuum, yes -- but societies can enter modalities where returns to labor are very low, relative to capital or real property. This was a phenomenon known to Smith in the 1770s. There are simply not enough alternatives to go around -- and you end up with societies where there is a massive (and unstable) gap between rich and poor. If a position does not pay well enough for someone to have a family and raise and educate two or three children, it can be said not to pay for itself: which is to say, not to pay for its renewal from generation to generation. This is the real standard by which we must consider the wages paid to those positions, like waiters and teachers and janitors, which are perennial.
      • Chris2048 9y ago
        > This is the real standard.. Why is it? A job is better than welfare, therefore it has value. The requirement that jobs are 'renewable' is only required of the average job, not every job.
        • solidsnack9000 9y ago
          It's worth asking what it means for it to be required by the average job. Being renewable doesn't seem to admit of a lot of variation -- things are or aren't (but we could discuss something more formal for this and that would affect the remaining analysis). Accepting the idea that renewability is either slightly more than 1.0 or slightly less, if the "average job" is renewable it suggests most of the common jobs have to be renewable in practice. We could argue this in another way, which is to say that the average "career life course" or let's just say "life course" has to be renewable. This is where we encounter the idea that people should be setting themselves up for promotions -- but most people don't get promotions. It's not how life works. Promotions don't address the concern for the average life course.
• jordanb 9y ago
  The article describes how contractor culture is creeping up from facilities into the white collar workforce near the end. I think that's a buried lead. You and I, maybe we made the right decisions. I'm doing pretty well for myself as a software engineer. But when I see the misfortune of others -- people who saw the bottoms fall out of their careers -- let's just say it makes me hesitant to whistle past graveyards.
• Sniffnoy 9y ago
  > What strikes me the most when looking at many of the comments here is the blatant disregard for human suffering that extreme inequality and the resulting poverty cause. Apologies to pick on you without addressing your main point, but this sentence is an example of an error I see a lot yet I rarely see addressed. Specifically, you're claiming a chain of causation where by inequality causes poverty. But in fact the relation between these two isn't causal at all, but rather logical. (Well, not actually. Inequality is independent of poverty -- you could have no poverty but lots of inequality, or no inequality but lots of poverty. The assumption that inequality and poverty are so closely linked seems to me to be be basically assuming that we live in a zero-sum world. But let's just continue with that assumption right now, because that's not the point I want to address.) Point is, why put the arrow of causation that way? Why not the other way around? Of course either way you put it's still not actually a causal relation -- but I think putting it the other way around is a much more useful way of thinking (mathematicians still think in terms of things causing things, because it's a useful way of thinking, even though mathematics doesn't actually have causation). I think there's something wrong with the assumption that inequality is somehow primary, and poverty just an effect. You see this a lot in other contexts too -- people claiming "A causes B" when in fact the correct relation is "B is an example of A". (OK, that's not exactly the same error as here, but it's closely related -- mistaking a logical relation for a causal one, and putting the arrow of "virtual causation" in the wrong direction. As if someone said "all-cause mortality causes accidental deaths"; how silly would that be?) Watch out for this!
  • esarbe 9y ago
    Thanks for you thoughtful reply. >Apologies to pick on you without addressing your main point, but this sentence is an example of an error I see a lot yet I rarely see addressed. You're not picking on me - you're picking on something I wrote. This is perfectly fine! Would you think it more appropriate to talk of poverty and inequality being elements in a feedback loop?
  • barrkel 9y ago
    If poverty is a relative measure - and as a child who grew up poor, I can assure you that the lived perception of poverty is relative, not absolute - then large inequality implies substantial poverty, for usual income distributions. This is relating to your parenthetical, not your quibble with causation, of course. But inequality of income is different to inequality of wealth, and there can be a causal link there.
• jackmott 9y ago
  there are a lot of posters here who seem to be border line sociopaths, so maybe another thing they should conaider is that when inequality increases to much the proletariat will tend to kill the elite. nobody wins if we get there and there are signs we are headed there.
  • Bakary 9y ago
    How do you kill the elite if they have advanced weaponry and can monitor all communications? What happens if they have no use for servants or consumers by virtue of having automated all their production needs? This scenario may sound extreme but it's certainly not implausible.
    • jessaustin 9y ago
      This reminds me of a passage in a web serial I read the other day [0]: “Because, if you’re honest with yourself, if you step away and look at what this world is and what it’s becoming… we’re really not far from a reality where everyone is condemned to the pits. Everyone is lost. Maybe not this generation. Maybe not the next. But surely, somehow, if you cherish anyone, anything, any legacy at all, you can’t let them win, destroy it all, and erect some… mockery in its place. Rewritten history, modified, subjugated, and broken people.” [0] https://twigserial.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/crown-of-thorns-20-9/ https://twigserial.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/crown-of-thorns-...
    • gremlinsinc 9y ago
      This is why Trump is arming police force with military grade weapons--to protect the elite should the lower classes rise up.... That and he's using racism to divide and conquer us--make us hate and fight ourselves poor/middle class vs poor/middleclass -- if we're too busy infighting we'll never join forces and rise up against the elites...
      • ux-app 9y ago
        the police force is part of the proletariat. Those guns aren't going to be pointing the direction Trump wants for too long.
• throw2016 9y ago
  It's not surprising that those who have bought into Rand and her ego stroking 'superman' ideology are sociopaths. These highly individualist supermen don't need society or anyone else for their success. They stand alone. Celebrating themselves while seeing others suffer and blaming them for their suffering is simply the natural order of things. Empathy is completely absent in this impoverished binary world view of success and failure. But life and human beings cannot just be reduced to a primitive ideology of success and failure, especially when the successful are riding on generations of privilege. It's obscene for those starting a 100M race at 90M to lecture others on achievement. While these self centred achievers stroke their egos millions if not billions of human brains are wasted just trying to survive, their intellectual output never given the opportunity to shine. And its not just their loss but a social catastrophe because its only leisure and stability that allowed our tryst with science to begin.
  • wavefunction 9y ago
    Also, the Randian superman does not exist and is a juvenile fantasy.
    • rsync 9y ago
      "Also, the Randian superman does not exist and is a juvenile fantasy." I am not a follower or a fan of Ayn Rand but I really don't see any other category within which to place: Steve Jobs, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elon Musk ... perhaps even Donald Trump ? George Lucas ? They seem to fit the archetype ...
      • ikeyany 9y ago
        Are they actually super? Do you really think they would have amounted to anything if they happened to grow up in poverty or with a poor education?
        • vt100 9y ago
          Would Superman have amounted to anything if he hadn't been from Krypton, and if his father hadn't been a scientist who was able to put him on a spaceship and send him to Earth?
• conanbatt 9y ago
  The current status quo did amazing in attacking extreme poverty. Don't get deluded into thinking the world has growing poverty and that everything is going into the can, because it isn't.
  • chii 9y ago
    I think the lament is that the rich is growing richer faster then the l poor is growing out of poverty. I think this is a structural problem. When your only source of wealth is your own time and labour, there's a limit to wealth creation and accumulation. The rich isn't limited to just their own time or labour, but is able to take many people's time and labour as part of their own.
• trumpownsyou420 9y ago
  i did not come from educated elite and i did something with my life. cry me a river, fuckboy.
• oh_sigh 9y ago
  How does inequality in itself cause suffering? If all super rich people were magically erased from the earth, would the poor have it any better?
  • point78 9y ago
    And their wealth was distributed evenly? Hell yeah the poor would have it better, is this a trick question?
    • user5994461 9y ago
      The rents would increase everywhere the next year to capture all that new cash.
      • ryanbrunner 9y ago
        If the hypothetical we're discussing is "kill all the rich", assuming the year after takes place in a capitalist economy doesn't seem like a sure thing.
      • aoeusnth1 9y ago
        Then construction would increase, causing rents to fall.
        • user5994461 9y ago
          Constructions cannot increase indefinitely. Land is a limited resources.
          • namarie 9y ago
            Neither can human population. At some point everyone would have houses.
    • aoeusnth1 9y ago
      No, the hypothetical was if the wealthiest disappeared, along with all their wealth.
• sp527 9y ago
  There's a fascinating argument in 'The Lessons of History' that suggests we simply haven't accepted, as a species, that inequality is an inherent characteristic. We are quite purposely endowed with varying capabilities. One of the essential patterns of history is the vacillation between freedom and equality as societal ideals. A freer society is a more unequal society, and vice versa. It's a fairly paradoxical and nuanced idea because we (particularly Americans) don't tend to think of those principles as existing in tension with one another. Furthermore, once a civilization reaches a certain threshold, it follows that a great majority of people become unproductive deadweight. Technology accelerates that deterioration. These aren't terribly inspiring human truths, but I find they do hint at the futility of bemoaning the condition or hoping for emergent and sweeping policy solutions. Better to empathize where possible, feel eminently thankful for our good fortune, and donate whatever surplus of time and capital we might have to a helpful cause.
  • lovich 9y ago
    Might as well give up trying to earthquake proof buildings as well because earthquakes are just an inherent fact of life. That's doing some reductio ad absurdum on your argument but you are saying we should just give up trying to fight something that bad and give some minor help when possible, correct? We can try to do better
    • sp527 9y ago
      I'm not saying we shouldn't try. Each individual person willing to help should do so. I'm saying more broadly that we're all probably at the mercy of an inescapable cycle that may not end until humanity is willing to cooperate perfectly at the global/species level of abstraction. 'The Lessons of History' also comments that competition is also inherent to our biological nature. There's a passage about how we usually only cooperate in order to compete at plural granularities (e.g. families, corporations, nations, religions). This has obvious implications for the tradeoff between freedom and equality.
      • lovich 9y ago
        I agree that there is a trade-off between freedom and equality but the better our technology gets the better we can draw that line. We already have decided that both extremes aren't good so you can't for instance buy someone just because you are rich, and if you become successful we don't take all of your money until you are back to the national average. We have to try and figure out what a good balance is otherwise you are just going to capitulate to whichever group pushes their viewpoint through
• kromem 9y ago
  Not just that, but it's incredibly shortsighted as well. Human life has positive ROI, as evidenced by the fact that our species has done better in the world over time. The largest returns are highly unpredictable too - the majority of "origin" stories for the greatest contributors to moving our species forward have come from modest beginnings. So disadvantaging large swaths of the population with poor access to quality education or healthcare biases the system against the masses, and as a result, reduces the productive potential of that population segment. A janitor today may not be the next Steve Jobs. But his kid might, if given access to a good education and not burdened by needing to accept a "safe" work choice to support his parents. In addition, that janitor is likely putting a much larger portion of his wealth back into the economy directly by purchasing "things." And in a global economy that revolves around mass production, it would make sense that economic policies favoring the spending power of the masses would be a key factor in the pace of innovation and moving industry at large forward. If only Wall Street can afford 4k TVs, they'll be watching a lot of upscaled 1080p content. It's not until the janitors, electricians, etc (i.e. the masses) can afford the sets that they'll see the majority of content switch over to 4k. (This is a knowingly superficial but illustrative example of a larger principle). Even in my own case - I have a pre-existing medical condition. If it weren't for Obamacare, I wouldn't have been able to co-found my startup, which last year (first operational year) did $350k in sales, and this year looks like it may hit $700k. I'd have needed a job that provided good group health insurance, and our company simply wouldn't exist. We like to talk in the entrepreneur community about the need to take risks to be successful. But too often the community turns a blind eye to the fact that if you cut away enough of the public safety nets, the only people that will be taking risks are the people that either (a) have a personal safety net already, or (b) have such poor judgement in risk assessment that they are destined to fail. Social programs and policies aren't "entitlements" or things we should be doing from simply a moral standpoint - they are economic "growth" programs and make a great deal of sense if you look at the broader picture and with a perspective of 10, 50, 100 years instead of fiscal quarters. Income inequality unchecked is going to destroy our national competitiveness the same way an executive cutting themselves a massive salary and underfunding corporate reinvestment is going to drive that company into the ground. We're cutting national reinvestment in order to further advantage the previously successful (several generations past in many cases), at the cost of the potentially future successful.
• ux-app 9y ago
  I agree and it disgusts me. The "fuck you I got mine" attitude is a) sociopathic and b) illogical. It's illogical because someone else getting a leg up doesn't mean you'll be losing ground (the pie is mostly imaginary and we can continue growing it for a long time) and additionally, a society with greater inequality is going to hurt everyone. There's only so long this can go on for. How long will your gated community hold back the rioting horde?
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• ryan-allen 9y ago
  > as if requiring everyone to be a member of the educated elite just to be able earn a decent living The sad reality is that this is not actually possible. This kind of inequality is a constant and cannot be changed. There is a segment of society that cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps so to speak, and the way a society treats and cares for these people is the true yardstick of compassion and fairness.
  • ikeyany 9y ago
    Maybe it isn't so sad. I'm not necessarily saying that we live in the best of all possible worlds. But human existence has been much more brutal for thousands of years.
• fzeroracer 9y ago
  Part of the issue seems to be that in America people simply don't understand inequality. I've had a fair amount of conversations with coworkers that simply didn't 'get' being poor or living in poverty because they never had that experience. At the same time they had a strong belief that they earned everything and that we live in a meritocracy. As you said it essentially comes down to 'they should've made better choices and got a better career path!' while having everything handed to them at birth. It's the sort of thing that really made it apparent how different my upbringing was from my coworkers because I experienced that sort of deep poverty.
  • vwcx 9y ago
    I agree with you. I see two threads of meritocracy in American life: 1. The meritocracy tied into Christian belief - that person has sinned (whatever you interpret sin to be), therefore of course their life is like that. 2. The ignorance of never having experienced a life where your merit doesn't influence your personal success. One sickness, accident, etc, usually starts to 'cure' this mindset.
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• drunkenmonkey 9y ago
  If you articulate this point loud enough, and gain enough support, you will suffer evil. To phrase it from a theological standpoint, "God doesn't have the discipline to overthrow Satan".