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> inequality probably hurts society overall This suggests that if I find a gold nugget while hiking, somehow that hurts society? Inequality benefits society o

• jowiar 8y ago
  The problem with this mentality is feedback loops. If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things, society will be heavily stratified despite any individual efforts to improve one’s lot.
  • loco5niner 8y ago
    Easy fix. Earn money by doing things(wages), then buy things that make you money (retirement account, etc).
    • throwaway2048 8y ago
      Except the people that have lots of money already will always outearn you on average.
      • skookumchuck 8y ago
        Most people in Germany lost everything in WW2, I mean everything. They were reduced to beggars. But it wasn't long after the war ended that the people who had money before the war had money again, and the people who didn't before, didn't again. I.e. some people know how to make money. They make their own luck.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • tathougies 8y ago
    Well, I mean the government insists on only allowing rich people to invest and prevent poor people from doing the same, so the claim that his mentality is what's concentrating wealth while the government's own policies get away scot free is rather silly.
    • skookumchuck 8y ago
      Anyone can invest. At robinhood.com, you can even buy just one share of stock for no commission. I know a person who scrimps enough to be able to buy one share of stock per month.
      • tathougies 8y ago
        That's not what I'm referring to at all. I mean if your friend has a company and wants to take his company public, he can only sell the stock before the IPO to 'accredited investors', thus concentrating the bulk of the profit potential to those who are already rich. It's not just pre-IPO sales but many other investments. For example, if you live in a poor neighborhood and your friend owns a successful restaurant in your neighborhood, he cannot seek investment from you. Instead, he has to seek investment from a rich person, because the government does not think you are smart enough to invest in your friend's business. this again literally takes money from the poor and hands it to the rich. The restrictions are completely onerous. Someone I know was soliciting investments of $25k for a business he owned in the community. I had the money in cash, and I was perfectly happy to lose it all (but hopefully I'd make some money). I believed in the business and wanted in. However, since I did not make $200k / yr, and I didn't already have $1m in wealth, I was not allowed. Why? At the time I was taking monthly vacations to Hawaii, New Orleans, skiing, etc. I was eating out every day. I was basically living a life of luxury. But, because of the amount of money in my pocket book, I was barred from taking one potential leap from the working class to the wealthy class. On the other hand, an already wealthy man would be more than allowed to invest. Of course, I could invest in the public stock market, but the fact is that the public stock market forces people to only invest in certain companies. Many people feel skeptical towards companies over which they cannot directly observe. Obviously, I understand the stock market exists, but if you think stocks are the most lucrative investments, you have a lot to learn about the financial systems.
  • r_smart 8y ago
    The Pareto Principle is a bitch. There's no way to remove inequality without trampling on the rights of the few lucky people. |If money flows to those who own things more easily/readily than those who do things The vast majority of people with a lot of money are doing things. They are not idle, and it is not through idleness they wound up in their position. At least in the US. This is doubly true for their money. It's not in a big swimming pool for them to paddle around in Scrooge McDuck style. Well, at least, most of it isn't.
    • zdw 8y ago
      Is luck a good criteria for some people having more and other less? At the very high end (top 10, 1, 0.1 percent of incomes), is progressive taxation on income a tax on lucky breaks more than any other factors? (other factors = intelligence, hard work, lack of bad luck like disasters, unexpected medical bills, etc.)
      • r_smart 8y ago
        |other factors = intelligence, hard work, lack of bad luck like disasters, unexpected medical bills, etc How many of those can you attribute to luck? Winning the genetic lottery is one of the best things you can hope for. You have no control over it, and it greatly influences your outcomes. Born stupid and ugly? Tough luck, maybe in another life.
        • skookumchuck 8y ago
          If you want to be the best cyclist in the world, training for it isn't enough, you need that extra 1% advantage genetics. But for most everything else in life, you can be plenty good at what you want to do if you're willing to train for it. You don't have to be the best programmer in the world to make quite a good living by programming. It's hardly necessary to be the best businessman ever to run a good business. Etc. Oh, and on the internet, you can be ugly as a mud brick and it won't have one iota of influence over your success or failure. Maybe take inventory and look at what you can do, rather than obsessing about not looking like Keanu Reeves. Even so, Peter Dinklage, Danny DeVito, Kathy Bates, Bette Davis, are not the beautiful people. I've met a few movie actors in person, and without the makeup, lighting, and director, they look like ordinary schmucks.
  • jl2718 8y ago
    I’m not sure that this is a natural state. Maintenance of capital is expensive. It must be defended, repaired, furnished access, etc. These costs are naturally distributive. Consider that in our society, somebody must be paying the maintenance costs of ownership. Who?
    • skookumchuck 8y ago
      It isn't a natural state. Rigid stratification needs to be maintained forcibly through laws. Free markets are a natural state, and not coincidentally free markets produce lot of mobility.
• burroisolator 8y ago
  > This suggests that if I find a gold nugget while hiking, somehow that hurts society? Yes, if they sell the gold nugget and purchase wasteful goods and services, assuming they would not have purchased those goods and services otherwise. If you use the money to purchase a tractor so that you can grow more food, then yes, you probably are increasing global productivity. At best, it is unclear whether private jets make you a more productive human and thus increase global productivity given their enormous costs - even if you include the motivational boost that it provides to non-private jet owners who look at the private jet and work harder as a result.
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    > if they sell the gold nugget and purchase wasteful goods and services That wasn't the premise. The premise was that Carol hurts Betty simply by having something Betty doesn't have.
    • the_gastropod 8y ago
      When those "things" are increasingly lobbying power, "freedom" to destroy the environment more (travel by private jet, large homes (multiple?) with always-on climate-control, large cars, etc.), Carol does hurt Betty by having these things Betty doesn't. Nobody is particularly upset by people owning lots of money in a bank account (few speak poorly of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet). It's when people put that capital to use that they get blowback. Koch brothers, Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and our benevolent President and much of his cabinet are wonderful examples of the absurdities the wealthy do get away with.
    • burroisolator 8y ago
      I apologize for inferring more than you said, but I do think that the average case of Betty finding a gold nugget or more commonly winning a lottery ticket leads to wasteful consumption. And so it spurred me to give the answer I gave.
      • skookumchuck 8y ago
• 50656E6973 8y ago
  >if I find a gold nugget while hiking, somehow that hurts society? If one person controls all the money in the world, would you consider that to be harmful to society? If so, to what degree would that money/wealth need to be shared for that harm to subside to acceptable levels?
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    > If one person controls all the money in the world Finding a gold nugget takes nothing away from anyone else. Wealth is not a fixed pie at all - wealth can be created, which is what free markets do.
    • asark 8y ago
      It's not about the gold, it's a reductio argument aimed at gaining your agreement that there's some line beyond which inequality is harmful, so the disagreement can move on to the topic of where the line is whether than is inequality even possibly bad.
  • burroisolator 8y ago
    > If one person controls all the money in the world, would you consider that to be harmful to society? Probably not since the money would be worthless: why would anyone want to use this money?
    • jandrese 8y ago
      The paradox of capitalism. Due to the positive feedback loop of capital it naturally gravitates towards a system where a single individual controls all of the capital, at which point the system has completely collapsed. In practice it would have collapsed before that point, but for basically the same reason. None of the capital is where it needs to be to be useful. This is why you need stuff like progressive taxes, public works projects, and social programs on top of capitalism, to pull money out of the top and re-inject it at the bottom lest the system get too top heavy.
• BariumBlue 8y ago
  Inequality, but also mobility. A society with one rich person, or even an oligopoly, isn't going to motivate many people since there are only so many spots. The height of wealth doesn't have much impact either - a person isn't going to work 1000x harder because someone has 1000x more money. There's also inefficiency - rich people tend spend personal money in inefficient ways that other people can't, such as on private jets, luxury yachts, etc., vs. poorer people, who spend a much larger fraction of their income investing into themselves with medical care and investing in efficient things such as public transport or biking, efficiently sized homes and apartments, or energy efficient appliances, for example. EDIT: the reason why you get a negative reaction is that you imply that it's good almost everyone to be poor - everyone is motivated to work hard, so that's the ideal society, right? People reacting negatively are thinking what's the point of wealth if practically nobody in society has access to it?
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    In a free market, everyone has choices. And those choices have consequences for better or worse. It's not about "access to wealth". It's about creating wealth. For example, it's never been less expensive to create a major business. You can start an internet company with a $100 pawn shop laptop. Getting a business license is mostly just filing the paperwork. Accessing the internet is free (from the public library). Accessing a worldwide market is free. Training materials in any subject you care to learn is free. You can take MIT courses for free. Advertising is free. What's stopping you? If you do really need startup capital, there's kickstarter.com, gofundme.com. (I've successfully used kickstarter.) You can invest in the stock market for $0 in commissions, even buying just one share. If you're an able-bodied adult in America, you can choose to get started creating wealth, or you can choose to complain about how unfair everything is and revel in your misery. YOU get to choose. And that's wonderful.
    • BariumBlue 8y ago
      A lot of people aren't aware of their options. That starting a business is super simple is something that I had no idea about, and even the prospect of dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork can make the whole endeavour feel daunting and off putting. There's also financial safety / lack of a safety net - ideally you could fall back to family, but no one really wants to fall back to friends, or worse, no one. This means a lot of people choose shitty jobs over rewarding but risky jobs or endeavor. And for the stock market, working an average job means you should really be investing into a Roth 401k, though I know some people who invest into realty. It's kinda like telling a depressed person "just smile and don't let the small things bother you!" Progress can be hard for people for various reasons. That said, I agree with what some one else said else where, that I mostly actually care about is to make sure every one can afford what they NEED to without going to extremes - I know a person in the military who had to eat of dumpsters to survive as a kid, and someone who was living on the doorstep of their recruiter until they got in. There are places in the US that have third world living conditions: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-pov... As a side, I had brought this up with someone before, and they told me that maybe it's a good thing for children to be hungry and eat from dumpsters because then they'll be motivated and work hard as adults. Ah, thanks the comment back, I enjoy discussing things with purple who have a different opinion.
• jnbiche 8y ago
  > Inequality benefits society overall. The data suggests this is not the case. Particularly, when you look at the correlation between the gini coefficient and just about any measure of societal well-being available (life expectancy, child mortality, maternal mortality, suicide rates, many, many morbidities, WVS for happiness and life satisfaction, etc etc), it's quite clear that high level of inequality is inversely correlated with societal well-being[0]. Your argument about Microsoft is an argument about the benefits of capitalism, which I agree is very beneficial to society when channeled properly. However, capitalism is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. 0. Yes, correlation isn't causation, but even if you assume that high inequality isn't the cause of poor societal outcomes, it's at the very least an indicator that something is going wrong and has a fairly high predicative value.
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    > The data suggests this is not the case. Au contraire. The US went from a nation of scores of millions with nothing but a suitcase to the wealthiest nation in the world with the tallest, best fed, and healthiest people. All from inequality. (Of course, since WW2, the US has increasingly turned away from the free market towards socialism, and things have done correspondingly less well.)
    • idreyn 8y ago
      Nothing but a suitcase, centuries of slavery-generated wealth, and a swathe of the world's most resource-rich land ripped from its inhabitants by genocide and forced migration.
      • skookumchuck 8y ago
        Never mind that in the 1800s the northern economy prospered while the southern slave economy stagnated - a proximate cause of the Civil War was the south trying to economically protect itself from the booming north. The War then (literally) burned the slave generated wealth to the ground. The end of slavery ushered in another great boom in prosperity in the US. And, of course, attributing US wealth to stealing land from the natives doesn't explain why South America, which did the same thing, failed to prosper and remains a collection of countries people run away from on foot trying to get into the US.
• jgon 8y ago
  Why do you think it is sad? Negative comment scores on Hacker News provide a motivator for you to improve your comments, thereby indirectly improving the quality of discourse for many others. Votes on HN aren't totally random, you have choices on what sort of comments you make, and you can better your comments and yourself. Enjoy!
  • DelightOne 8y ago
    Surrender to the pressure, be a fish!
  • skookumchuck 8y ago
    It's sad because people view themselves as victims of chance with little to no power over their lives, and don't want to hear otherwise. When I look at my friends, none of them fall into that category. For example, I have a friend who is currently reduced to living in a trailer. He's a serial entrepreneur, alternating between mansions and trailers. I've never seen him discouraged, he just picks up and takes another go at it. He's also (unsurprisingly to me) a heluva lot of fun to be around, always excited about this new venture he's doing. People who believe their lives are run by (bad) luck never want to hear about the choices they've made, and the choices that are open to them to improve things for themselves. They're boring, sad people.
• mcv 8y ago
  Extreme inequality does not benefit society. It's a sign that people aren't able to improve their lot, at least not without access to money. In a society where the poor can realistically improve their lot, you don't get people stuck in poverty. Of course finding a gold nugget doesn't hurt society, but if you own the ground on which other people find gold nuggets, and that means they have to give half of their gold nuggets to you, then they benefit less from their luck, while you benefit from other people's luck. That's how you get extreme inequality. Of course there's always going to be some inequality. Perfect equality is not something that's realistically possible or desirable, but taken to extremes, it does become harmful.