7 ms·
What does 'Income Equality' look like?
by 11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
What does 'Income Equality' look like?
- davidcbc 9y agoI don't think most people are looking for actual income equality, just lower income inequality.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoBingo! But it seems a lot of people are die-hard anti-everything that smells even vaguely of socialism, no doubt due to decades of US political brainwashing.
- danharaj 9y agoAbolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production.
- shaunxcode 9y agoExactly - and speaking of class here is further speculation on semantics of an equitable world system: as late as possible dynamic binding(real time adaptation for all actors), lexical scope (affinity groups), functions that provide utility for the masses rather than fragile hierarchies of turgid dominance(object oriented is the perfect description of our current economic and political structures. Beside how much cooler and arrogant does it sound to describe your political leaning as “functional”).
- thriftwy 9y agoThese days I don't see much production around. It's probably somewhere in the industrial zones on the outskirts of cities, but it's not something many people do. As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production? Will it involve lots of tin foil?
- hnaccount357 9y agoHistorically speaking you accept the governments unilateral offer and terms to produce code or men with guns come and place you in a camp.
- thriftwy 9y agoFrankly speaking, I would prefer a fair amout of income inequality to that.
- danharaj 9y ago> As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production? Open source software is already a model that approximates such democratic production. If us developers didn't have to make a wage to survive, how would we develop software?
- ptaipale 9y agoClass is much more than income (or wealth), and enforcing income equality won't get rid of classes.
- danharaj 9y agoNo, but income equality with a class system would cause the system to destabilize. The long-term behavior of such a system would have to resolve the contradictions of capitalism.
- ericd 9y agoCollective ownership of all MacBook Pros? Or of my efforts with the one I use? I suppose I wouldn't get to choose the terms with which I distribute my software, at the very least?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alexasmyths 9y ago"Abolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production" Oh wow, these people still exist. We tried that in the last century and it ended up being the most horrific, mass-murdering, totalitarian, controlling era in all of history. About half of my schoolmates growing up in Canada came from places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Ukraine, Russia, Czech, China, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Hungary ... see the common thread there? :)
- danharaj 9y ago> Cambodia > Vietnam Buddy. I've got some news for you.
- alexasmyths 9y agoThe Communists were the root problem in that area, obviously they came about due to other forms of ostensible dysfunction, but they were the worst, possibly the worst ever ... and really the core of the problem. And FYI Cambodians were not fleeing bombs dropped near their homes by Americans, they were fleeing Communists who murdered 3 of 8 million, making it one of the worst genocides in history, easily comparable (on the same scale as) the '6 million' who died at the hands of the Nazis. Everyone from there hates the Communists, much like almost everyone fleeing Cuba hates Fidel, it seems their only supporters are those who are not from there , and who have a very academic view of it all.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoThat sounds very much like "we the people have voted to take your factory". That is, it sounds like the "democratic" in "democratic people's republic". Fortunately, we have this Constitution that places limits on the amount of democracy we have, partly to keep it from running amuck in exactly that way...
- conanbatt 9y agoDemocratic control? You mean that 51% can bar the other 49% from having access to the means of production?
- dalbasal 9y agoIn the way the term is used here, income equality is (the inverse of) income inequality. More equal, less equal... it's a measure, not a state. This is like asking what does wealth look like.
- smokeyj 9y agoIf you have two popsicles, and I have one - we could achieve popsicle equality by throwing one of yours away. We have overall less popsicles but greater equality.
- davidcbc 9y agoIf you have billions of popsicles and other people have none you could easily give out millions of popsicles to help the less fortunate and still have vastly more popsicles than you could ever need.
- smokeyj 9y agoBut the relevant metric here is how many people have nothing. If everyone had nothing you solved the inequality but you're still poor. Inequality is just a bad metric. I'd rather be a poor in America than equal in Venezuela.
- gadders 9y agoSocialism :-(
- token_throwaway 9y agoPigs flying
- jpwagner 9y agoMilton Friedman's three categories for human equality: equality before God, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome - the second is compatible with liberty, and the third is socialism.
- rayiner 9y agoI’m not sure the second is compatible with liberty either, unless you water it down to mean nothing. Do you stop parents from passing on good genes, education, values, and money? If not you’ve got a very impoverished version of equality of opportunity. If so you’re impinging on some very fundamental freedoms.
- ssambros 9y agoIt's equality of opportunity, not equality of ability.
- conanbatt 9y agoEquality of opportunity is one of the hardest things to define. Milton talks about the opportunity to pursue your talents. But your talent could be really expensive, so what does that actually mean? The son of a wealthy man might have the funds to become a rocket engineer, wasn't that an unequal opportunity to develop talents? And is there a point to prevent that rocket engineer from existing?
- dalbasal 9y agoIf we want to get into zinger rhetoric I might reply that the 1st is theocracy and the 2nd is a lie, or also socialism. If not, we might say consider all 3 (excluding the one that doesn't exist) relative. We never have absolute equality of opportunity or outcome, but we can have more or less equality.
- jpwagner 9y agozinger point taken, but consider: 1 - compared to a rock, all humans are equal (note: this is not a political statement and has no relationship to theocracy) 2 - if a unit of food sits on the ground between two people, they are free to behave however they want, either can choose to pick up the food or not - this is liberty 3 - given that a unit of food when found will be split evenly (by some process out of an individual's control) their behavior no longer matters - this is not liberty
- hnaccount357 9y agoRoughly ten thousand dollars a year per person total spend including all government intervention as well as cash compensation. That is assuming everyone still is motivated to create as much under the new system. For the downvoters, current global population is 7.6 billion[0], global GDP(GWP) is 78.28 trillion USD[1]. 78.28 trillion / 7.6 billion = ten thousand three hundred USD. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
- rayiner 9y agoThe opposite of income inequality isn’t income equality. It’s less inequality and more integration. My wife grew up in small town Iowa. There were rich people (doctors and some farmers) and poor people, but everyone’s kids went to the same school (there was only one), went to the same cornfield parties (apparently a real thing), etc. The millionaire farmers still worked for a living—they weren’t making passive income.
- username223 9y agotl;dr: The opposite of New York. I grew up in a town with a high per capita income, but fairly low inequality. There were a few tiny religious and Montessori schools, but pretty much everyone's kids went to the public schools. Home prices probably varied by a factor of 10 or 20; there were both crappy old duplexes and McMansions, but no genuine slums or palaces with car elevators. No one commuted by helicopter. The richest and poorest had shared interests.
- ameister14 9y agoThat's still income inequality, though, when you boil it down to the numbers as we are here. I completely agree that it is what is desirable, and would like people to talk more about wealth inequality rather than income inequality, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoI think this comic illustrates your point. Equality vs Equity. https://scontent.flas1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/23331456_1749255225371234_5299669832795705179_o.jpg?oh=42b021eabfd4ca116996792d5ed3517b&oe=5A994485 https://scontent.flas1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/23331456_17...
- Idontknowmyuser 9y ago"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
- thrillgore 9y agoShared suffering, aka socialism.
- ryandrake 9y agoThe way I see it is income inequality is just the derivative of wealth inequality. Opportunity inequality is the derivative of income inequality. Opportunity equality is the idea of a level playing field. When people complain about income inequality, they're really complaining about opportunity inequality, which I believe drives the bulk of income inequality. All that people are asking for is real opportunity equality. My opportunity to succeed (which drives my potential income, which drives my potential wealth) is not equal to that of a guy whose parents are billionaires, went to private school and an Ivy League college, and has a contact list full of CEOs and high up politicians. My opportunity to succeed is also not equal to that of a guy whose parents are divorced and poor, lives in a gang-ridden neighborhood, and is stuck in the school-to-prison pipeline. The playing field is not level.
- moduspol 9y agoThe government can't give you two married parents that love you in a stable household, the best education money can buy, or social connections with powerful people. It can minimize the value of those things for the people that have them... at least within its borders. I'm not convinced that's in anyone's best interests, though.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> The government can't give you two married parents that love you in a stable household, the best education money can buy, or social connections with powerful people. It can do the second, and it can create opportunities for the third. And it can help (or hinder) the first. (As a purely hypothetical illustration of that, it could implement a systematically racially biased criminal justice system and engage in a pattern of racially-suitable violence against a specific segment of the adult population, decreasing the number of two-parent present families in that segment.)
- moduspol 9y agoHow do we get everyone through Ivy League without lowering the bar? How do you propose the government manage social connections to powerful people? You're right about it affecting the first, though. Also as a purely hypothetical illustration, it might create a multiple generation-spanning dependency on social programs, make single parent households more economically feasible and socially acceptable as a lifestyle, and foster class warfare that downplays the importance of one's own choices by blaming only others for one's own outcomes.
- phaemon 9y agoWell, no-one answered your question directly, so here: https://ibb.co/dVDSDG https://ibb.co/dVDSDG That is cumalative wealth up to 100%. The blue line is if everyone is equal (poorest 20% have 20% of the wealth). The red line is linear increase where the richest 20% have 5 times the wealth of the poorest 20%. The yellow line is the actual wealth. These figures are just for the USA; the world one looks too much like a cliff.