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(I submitted this) - don't agree with all their stats and the article could be better, but thought it would be interesting to hear HN community's views on the i

by nir 16y ago

(I submitted this) - don't agree with all their stats and the article could be better, but thought it would be interesting to hear HN community's views on the issue.

anigbrowl 16y ago
The text is hysterical bullshit, and a lot of the examples are cherry-picked, or don't show what they purport to (eg the first graph about the concentration of wealth suggests stock holdings have diluted rather than concentrated over time. But yes, our economy has some serious problems, and inequality is one of them. Not because I believe in socialism, but because above a certain level we waste a lot of money on guarding the current distribution of wealth, and that has a considerable opportunity cost. See this small but rather influential economics article: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teaching/Ec%20222/Garrison%20America.pdf http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teac... My personal hunch is that free economies are never destined for pure equality, but if they drift too far from a Pareto distribution the fiscal disparities will result in sharply increased political polarization. statisticians of the future are going to have a whale of a time with the combination of the census, an unusually severe recession, election data and a massive lexical analysis dataset.
- nir 16y ago
  I definitely don't believe in Socialism, having personally witnessed its failures, but I've begun to think the free market beliefs I hold don't always benefit most people either. Seems like the majority of people are more suited for holding a job rather than building a company, by optimizing for entrepreneurship we're benefiting a very small part of society, and as we lose the promise of belonging to a strong, stable middle class with certain amount of effort we're creating a serious risk for democracy. I think we're already seeing political fringe movements creeping into the mainstream as result.
  - ams6110 16y ago
    But optimizing for entrepreneurship and building companies results in a lot more opportunity for those who just want a job, right?

by nir 16y ago

(I submitted this) - don't agree with all their stats and the article could be better, but thought it would be interesting to hear HN community's views on the issue.

anigbrowl 16y ago

The text is hysterical bullshit, and a lot of the examples are cherry-picked, or don't show what they purport to (eg the first graph about the concentration of wealth suggests stock holdings have diluted rather than concentrated over time. But yes, our economy has some serious problems, and inequality is one of them. Not because I believe in socialism, but because above a certain level we waste a lot of money on guarding the current distribution of wealth, and that has a considerable opportunity cost. See this small but rather influential economics article: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teaching/Ec%20222/Garrison%20America.pdf http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teac... My personal hunch is that free economies are never destined for pure equality, but if they drift too far from a Pareto distribution the fiscal disparities will result in sharply increased political polarization. statisticians of the future are going to have a whale of a time with the combination of the census, an unusually severe recession, election data and a massive lexical analysis dataset.

nir 16y ago
I definitely don't believe in Socialism, having personally witnessed its failures, but I've begun to think the free market beliefs I hold don't always benefit most people either. Seems like the majority of people are more suited for holding a job rather than building a company, by optimizing for entrepreneurship we're benefiting a very small part of society, and as we lose the promise of belonging to a strong, stable middle class with certain amount of effort we're creating a serious risk for democracy. I think we're already seeing political fringe movements creeping into the mainstream as result.
- ams6110 16y ago
  But optimizing for entrepreneurship and building companies results in a lot more opportunity for those who just want a job, right?