8 ms·

How is it that we live in a time in which more rich people is somehow a bad thing? People are always talking about wealth inequality, but why, exactly is it bad

• president 8y ago
  Rich people are usually spending their time trying to get richer or maintain their wealth, which is usually at the expense of people poorer than them. So yes, it's usually a bad thing.
  • buboard 8y ago
    > spending their time trying to get richer or maintain their wealth and poor people don't ?
    • Cyph0n 8y ago
      No, poor people are spending their time making money to ensure that their basic needs are met.
    • president 8y ago
      The difference is the poor does so in a struggle to survive. We could solve a whole host of issues in this country (crime, healthcare, housing, etc) if rich people decided to put their efforts towards the public good instead of being greedy.
      • restalis 8y ago
        The poor being in a struggle to survive may have a wealth of source reasons. Mismanagement (not necessarily limited to the financial aspect of their lives) is the first thing that comes to mind.
  • djcary 8y ago
    Can you expound on what you mean by "usually at the expense of people poorer than them"? I understand this sentiment when it comes to things like predatory lending, but would like to learn more about how it applies to non-exploitative areas. A couple possible examples to help with the discussion: 1. A new millionaire buys a house from someone in SF and lives there. 2. A new millionaire buys a rental property from someone in SF, renovates it, and raises the rent to make back their capital outlay. 3. A new millionaire buys a broken down classic car, invests capital into repairing it, and sells it to a collector for a profit.
• FreedomToCreate 8y ago
  Its bad when 10% if the population had the same wealth as the 90% and all of them live in the same 30km radius without enough homes to go around.
• SquirrelOnFire 8y ago
  More rich people in and of itself is not a bad thing, and as you say, having a baseline level of wealth in a nation leads to huge quality of life improvements. However, the increasing divergence between the rich and poor in wealthy nations causes all sorts of indirect harms - https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en
• metalliqaz 8y ago
  a normal curve would be nice. The problem is not that there are rich people. The problem is that the rich are so incredibly more rich than everyone else. I'm talking about wealth that exceeds human comprehension. I'm talking about one person consuming as much as 100,000 others. And of course, you may not consider that intrinsically bad, but it's not even the whole story. Once they become that wealthy, they go about tilting the entire system in their favor. So not only are they going to contribute a smaller relative portion of their treasure towards the common good, but they are going to actually acquire more wealth from those who are less well off. Even if you still don't see this as a moral problem, you should surely recognize that it isn't sustainable. Eventually, the guillotines come out. It would be better for everyone if that kind of violence was avoided.
  • bargl 8y ago
    Do you see the wealth inequality between you and the people in at Level 1 poverty as a moral issue and how do we as a society solve that? I pose this question because it's often overlooked how we might have wealth inequality in the USA but it's beginning to reflect that of the wealth inequality between the USA and other nations. https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Factfulness https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Factfulness I have not read this book, but Gate's Notes on it are very interesting to me. Of course this is coming from one of the wealthiest men on the planet, but it's interesting in how we break this topic down. This argument doesn't defer the fact that we have a pronounced problem in the USA, I am strictly pointing out that if we take this as an issue of morality we should probably apply our morality globally not locally. Politics isn't moral in it's nature. It's about a limited scope of morality (us). We do need much better migration from rich to poor in the USA but I think this article points to a ton of people changing from one class group to another, which is the "American Dream." The issue I think a lot of people can agree on that we need to break down is wealth hoarding, and generational wealth. That's a problem we need to address in the USA. If I get Bill Gates wealthy, that shouldn't mean my great grand kids are in the upper class. It might mean they have more opportunity to maintain their wealth, but not a guarantee of wealth. I think we should all focus on issues that attack entrenched wealth like automation, incoherence, etc. So we can establish a playing field that encourages people to go the extra mile for the extra payoff at the end. Edit: a curve is great but with wealth it's all about migration from one level to another.
• elmomle 8y ago
  The problem isn't wealth; it's segregation of the wealthy from the rest. There's a common social trend toward lowering the variance within groups and (as a natural consequence) increasing the variance between groups, and a host of studies assert that this is generally a bad thing by causing long-term instability in society. It certainly causes deep divides that are very easy for demagogues and authoritarians to exploit.
  • restalis 8y ago
    Then maybe let's try to take an active role against demagogues (and any other possible factors who's effect is taken for granted as damaging) and prevent in this way social destabilization, instead of this scorched-earth tactic in hope we'd leave them without doctrine fuel?
• econner 8y ago
  It's hard to reason about wealth inequality because it is so massively, massively skewed right as a distribution. I don't think humans are very good at reasoning about distributions that are not normally distributed. For example, the world's eight richest people have the same wealth as the poorest 50%. It feels to me like that's a little unfair.
  • restalis 8y ago
    "the world's eight richest people have the same wealth as the poorest 50%" What exactly is objectively bad about that? (I don't condone nor condemn that level of inequality in any way, just curious.)
    • soledades 8y ago
      Moral judgements are by nature not objective. To most people it is subjectively obvious that it is a bad thing, in the same way that it is a bad thing to kill another. If you wanted an argument, we could say that dollars of wealth have decreasing marginal value in terms of individual well-being/happiness, so that, in order to maximize collective well-being/happiness, a more even distribution is desirable.
• EnFinlay 8y ago
  No one is saying that it would be better if everyone was dirt poor. The main criticism of wealth inequality (as I understand it being a developer and not an economist) is that with the systems currently in place in America (and other nations) rich people are given outsized ability to become wealthier without transferring any of the wealth to other people. Wealth inequality is bad because it leads to worse wealth inequality. Essentially everyone above a certain line gets richer, and everyone below a certain line gets poorer. This is bad for everyone except the rich. Most of us are on the "poor" side of this line. If something benefits a few at the expense of the many, most moral frameworks would call it bad. Again. Not an economist. Not an ethicist. Just some dude. Edit: Typo
• wil421 8y ago
  It takes a lot more to run a major city than the Tech elite. Think of all the teachers, firemen, police, sanitation and utility workers, cooks, childcare workers, grocery stores employees, and all the distributors who work behind the scenes to make it happen. Tech millionaires will push these lower income workers to the brink. I mentioned only a few types but they extremely vital to any major city.
  • arebop 8y ago
    There's a very strong narrative of the tech elite sitting at the top of an oppressive hierarchy in San Francisco, but there should be some critical thought about the mechanism of this oppression. Most of these tech workers are exchanging their millions for very typical dwellings. Much of the wealth created by technological development is passing through the tech workers to the land owners. It is the land owners and their political allies who insist that we must keep the housing scarce so that the land owners can continue to extract wealth from the labor of upper middle class. Tech-derived prosperity is not causing deprivation.
    • wil421 8y ago
      If SF allows high density condos to start being built, do you think developers will build “regular” housing or high end condos? Assuming the developers have a choice. What happens to the neighborhood if million dollar housing is built? I know what happens and I can see it around me. I’m priced out of my current area and I’m not in SF or a high cost city. I could afford it but I can buy 3x the house and property 20-30 mins away with better schools. Same commute. The weathly residents in my current area can afford private schools so there’s no incentive to improve the public schools.
• dimitrov 8y ago
  Some like to pretend that the economy is a zero-sum game, that in order for some people to get rich, they need to climb on the backs of the poor. In some cases this is true, but in most, wealth isn't transferred, it is created. This is certainly one of those examples.
  • wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 8y ago
    You did notice top of the list is Uber, right?
  • imtringued 8y ago
    >Some like to pretend that the economy is a zero-sum game, that in order for some people to get rich, they need to climb on the backs of the poor. This sounds familiar... It's SF's housing market!
• conception 8y ago
  Well, there are two things happening, and if you want sources, I can hunt them down later. 1) Wealth inequality is bad for social stability. People in general care less about how much they have as compared to how much they have compared to everyone else. When you are dirt poor but so is your neighbor, you care less. The Internet has magnified this effect as now it's very easy to see when you are dirt poor that lots and lots of other people are not. And they are not great people a lot of the time. So, populations are generally happier when things are more equal. 2) Money can generally translate to power in our world and so it creates absurdly uneven power distributions. The US for instance suffers from politicians generally listening to money over the people that they serve, and those people generally are listening to whatever the people with money are putting in front of them, etc etc. Laws are meaningless if you can afford the fine. This is also bad for society. 3) Generally, accumulating tremendous wealth is done on the backs of people and not on bringing them up as well. There are exceptions of course, but usually tremendous wealth creation at the individual level is not done through a series of actions with an equal social benefit. As to your other question, what should it look like? This of course is up to debate, but historically, when it starts to look as it does, people begin to get angry and violent. Which is bad for a stable society.
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    3) Generally, accumulating tremendous wealth is done on the backs of people and not on bringing them up as well. There are exceptions of course, but usually tremendous wealth creation at the individual level is not done through a series of actions with an equal social benefit. Yes, wealth uplift of the general public must be a rare exception. This is why everyone are still peasants who have dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing, and no Internet. You are technically correct that there isn't exactly equal social benefit. However, many poor people in industrialized nations in 2019 are better off in many ways than some rich people from centuries ago. Go back just a little in time, and even rich people had high infant mortality and no access to antibiotics.
  • restalis 8y ago
    1) "Wealth inequality is bad for social stability." That may be true only on a raw/natural level. People also have a lot of other traits that may naturally threaten the social stability. The solution was education, and enforcing social conventions and mechanisms that lead to improved social stability and society's operation capacity. Just as unacceptable is now discriminating against sex or race, can become prohibited also the discrimination (as merely having a different attitude) towards being rich or poor. 2) "Money can generally translate to power in our world and so it creates absurdly uneven power distributions." "Can" being he operative word here. We're talking about a possibility not a certainty. Each of us can be a potential criminal but we're not treating each others as such. We're innocent until proven otherwise. Money translating to power is just a phenomenon. Inherently it is neither good nor bad, it just is. Just as it may have bad results it can also have good ones. 3) "Generally, accumulating tremendous wealth is done on the backs of people and not on bringing them up as well." This is the basic assumption of Communist Doctrine and it was proven wrong. Wealth accumulation does not necessarily imply exploitation of others.
• egwynn 8y ago
  I’m not an expert at all, but I think I know how to answer your question in the somewhat mathy terms you’ve framed your it in. I think the main argument is to get rid of a bi- (or multi-) modal distribution and move to a unimodal normal distribution that’s taller and narrower. That way you wouldn’t have a few people with tons of money while most people have no money. You’d instead of a lot of people who mostly have comparable spending power.
  • snappyTertle 8y ago
    That's assuming the area under the curve remains constant, when it doesn't. Redistribution will make the total wealth shrink.
    • egwynn 8y ago
      What sort of graph were you picturing? I was imagining wealth x population, in which case “area under the curve” would be “total population”, and wouldn’t change under a redistribution operation. I don’t know whether your claim about total wealth is true or not, but it seems like it relates to a slightly different idea than I was expressing.
• ATsch 8y ago
  I'm confused why you're treating large income inequality as prerequisite to general societal wealthiness. Rich people are, after all, by definition rich at the cost of the poorer people. Tanzania and Africa in general is a great example, actually. Colonial powers became and are still getting a lot more rich from it, very much at the cost of the future and health of the local population. The Wealth and excess of the west, even more so of the rich people in the west, would not be possible without child slaves mining for precious metals in Africa and workers driven to suicide in China.
• tom_ 8y ago
  A sudden influx of liquidity! What could possibly go wrong? (This stuff does pretty much always end up balancing out over time, though...)
• 3into10power5 8y ago
  Day to day life is not bad here in USA. Its just human nature to compare with others. And all these newspapers feed on it.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  People are always talking about wealth inequality, but why, exactly is it bad? Here's what the psychological research says about wealth inequality. There will be a certain number of young men who will make the calculation, "There's no way I can compete for mates in the current social order. So there's no reason why I should subscribe to it." Then they become law breakers or revolutionaries. This isn't an absolute comparison. It's a relative one. So even though the poor might all have a home, refrigerators, and TV sets, the relative status calculation still applies. Also, the best guess, is that this has been part of our evolutionary heritage for awhile now, and so is wired into Homo sapiens at an unconscious level. My conclusion is that any society needs some form of wealth redistribution, even if it's in the form of some sort of noble "everyman" and "everywoman" pastime that's provided by markets for a cheap price. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3XYHPAwBzE
  • mruts 8y ago
    Your points might be valid a polygamist society, but otherwise, it will always be pretty simple for males to get reproductive access.
• phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
  Look at all the HNers already complaining they can't afford to live in SF on $150-$200k/yr. Once the [mb]illionaires come in and push them out of places they can afford, it's going to be really hard going on the housekeeping staff and baristas and waitresses in the area. On the other hand, though, they might finally have enough sway with the local government that they will actually push the homeless problem into someone else's jurisdiction /s
• rchaud 8y ago
  I would think life is pretty good for Tanzania's richest. Just as it is for America's richest. But my real income growth trajectory has looked like a flat line for decades now, while the cost of housing and education (the biggest wealth-builders in the West) have continued to increase. After 2008, banks borrowed from the Fed at near-zero rates for years, while I get to borrow at "market rates". Corporate profits are higher than ever thanks to the Trump tax cuts. But when the impact on the national debt is felt, it will be I who'll be told to tighten my belts.
• clairity 8y ago
  "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." --verbal kint, the usual suspects (paraphrasing baudelaire, apparently) wealth worship (underlying certain strains of capitalism, but not all) relies on an economic misdirection that disassociates people's labor from money (and therefore wealth) and instead associates money/wealth with things. this way, we don't feel nearly as bad when a person accumulates wealth, because it's just things they're accumulating. but really, they're accumulating (the value created by people through their) labor. for example, you could say that gold is intrinsically valuable, but that value derives from our desire to put it to use (via human labor) and its relative scarcity. if a person never unlocks that value with their labor by digging the gold up, then it effectively has no value. so we should remember that money represents someone's labor (in many cases, it just represents our own labor). accumulating money is accumulating people's labor. (with enough force behind the this, and it becomes slavery.) that isn't to argue entirely against wealth. some people (but not as many as the wealth disparity might indicate) are truly capable of being more productive with our labor than we ourselves can be. it's reasonable to let them accumulate some of that additional production unlocked by their labor investing in us. it's why we look to, and follow, leaders. (tangentially, this is why legacy wealth through inheritance is generally a net negative because it's almost never as productive as it initially was.) but underlying a stable social structure is a delicate balance between our own freedom to apply our labor to create value and giving up some freedom by lending our labor to others. wealth disparity increasingly takes away that choice. backing people into a corner is dangerous indeed.