6 ms·

> Is there any indication that people actually understand (and can mathematically demonstrate) how to fix this, or are all suggestions going to be based on econ

by door5 7y ago

> Is there any indication that people actually understand (and can mathematically demonstrate) how to fix this, or are all suggestions going to be based on economic or political ideologies? This is an engineer's mindset, but human society is not a purely logical system. Ideology has to be a part of the conversation, because wealth inequality is about our values. Do we want a world in which a small number of people control most of the economic and political power, or do we value a world in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly? This seems like a relatively obvious question for me.

wait_a_minute 7y ago
Do you believe that wealth has to be distributed equally or do you believe that some people earn more of the pie because of their own skills, efforts, and risk taking?
- door5 7y ago
  I do believe that -- in fact, I have no problem with a relatively modest income and wealth inequality. However, the wealth and income inequality that exists in the United States is far beyond that. In the United States, the top 1% controls 35% of the wealth in this country, while the bottom 40% controls less than 1%. This isn't just a difference in skills, effort, and risk-taking. This is flagrant exploitation and domination by the rich and powerful. Furthermore, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos or any CEO has a claim to their billions. I agree that "billionaires are a policy failure" -- no one person has any right to that much wealth. Amazon's success is not solely attributable to Jeff Bezos, it was the work of thousands of employees and built upon publicly-funded technology research. That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man. If you find yourself defending billionaires, I wonder, why? Do you think you will someday be a billionaire? If not, then billionaires are not your friend. Their money is money that is taken from your pocket, and the collective pockets of our society. The traditional argument for wealth inequality is "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that has been empirically false since the 70s -- despite a massive increase in wealth, most of it has gone to a very tiny portion of our population. And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > That wealth should be distributed to society at large Ok, let's say we do that--a 100% wealth tax on any personal wealth over $999,999,999. So Bezos forks over everything he has over that, and we distribute it. First, how do we distribute it? Let's say we just divide it up equally among all 325 million Americans. That's about $370 per person. Wow. But second, what happens once we finish distributing? What are most people going to do with that $370? Spend it on something. How many people are going to make that $370 grow? Not many. Which means, in practice, all that wealth will just concentrate again. If most of the people spend the $370 buying something on Amazon, a lot of that wealth will just end up back in Bezos' pocket. In other words, redistributing wealth can temporarily make things more equal, but they won't stay that way.
    - door5 7y ago
      First off, Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire, so your $370 number is off. Second off, there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society. The wealth from this tax could be used to fund a public bank, which re-invests it and pays dividends back to the community. I'm not advocating for a specific policy proposal -- there exist many -- I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed. Once you agree with that principle, you can work out exactly how best to do it, but that principle is necessarily an ideological one -- one that says that money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations.
      - pdonis 7y ago
        > Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire True. You might get it up to a few thousand per American if you counted all billionaires. > there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do? What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it. > I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed I don't agree with this principle. But I might if you added a qualifier; see below. > money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price. Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth. But lots of billionaires didn't get their billions that way. Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves. For example, investment banks transfer wealth to themselves by taking advantage of asymmetric information to get other parties to accept the wrong end of zero sum trades. (For that matter, the entire US banking and financial system transfer wealth to itself by getting the Federal Reserve to print money that they use for loans.) So if you were to modify your principle to say that concentration of wealth that does not involve wealth creation is unethical, I would agree with you. But that wouldn't be fixed by redistributing Jeff Bezos' wealth. It wouldn't even be fixed by redistributing the wealth of all the investment banker billionaires. You would have to shut down the Federal Reserve and re-engineer the entire US monetary, financial, and banking systems.
- colinyoung 7y ago
  "Earn" is not an accurate term, even if you don't agree with political analyses that define profit/rents as unearned. The fact is, over 60% of the 400 richest Americans were born wealthy. https://inequality.org/research/selfmade-myth-hallucinating-rich/ https://inequality.org/research/selfmade-myth-hallucinating-...
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    > The fact is, over 60% of the 400 richest Americans were born wealthy. Your propaganda piece does not state that. It quotes forbes stating that 70% of therichest 400 in the US made their entire fortunes from scratch, but then tries to put an ideological spin on the article by asserting that they were born "priviledged", without providing any definition.
- lsiebert 7y ago
  I think talking about earning is inherently talking about the creation of value, right? Wealth is arguably the proceeds of past value, work income, or income from a new enterprise the proceeds of current value. There are definitely benefits to rewarding creating new value, I'll grant that. The invisible hand of economics helps distribute value fairly between equals. But often the rewards of value are monetary, and are captured by those who already have money and power because of past value creation, rather then distributed according to the contributions of all individuals who participated in work. Power and money further distort the abilities of less fortunate individuals to gain just compensation for their efforts. I see that as exploitative and problematic. I think it also arguably undermines new enterprises and new value that might have been created had the work that people were doing been rewarded in an equitable manner. And it's not like this system of exploitation is new, so the wealth that has been accrued by families is itself suspect.

by door5 7y ago

wait_a_minute 7y ago

Do you believe that wealth has to be distributed equally or do you believe that some people earn more of the pie because of their own skills, efforts, and risk taking?

door5 7y ago
I do believe that -- in fact, I have no problem with a relatively modest income and wealth inequality. However, the wealth and income inequality that exists in the United States is far beyond that. In the United States, the top 1% controls 35% of the wealth in this country, while the bottom 40% controls less than 1%. This isn't just a difference in skills, effort, and risk-taking. This is flagrant exploitation and domination by the rich and powerful. Furthermore, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos or any CEO has a claim to their billions. I agree that "billionaires are a policy failure" -- no one person has any right to that much wealth. Amazon's success is not solely attributable to Jeff Bezos, it was the work of thousands of employees and built upon publicly-funded technology research. That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man. If you find yourself defending billionaires, I wonder, why? Do you think you will someday be a billionaire? If not, then billionaires are not your friend. Their money is money that is taken from your pocket, and the collective pockets of our society. The traditional argument for wealth inequality is "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that has been empirically false since the 70s -- despite a massive increase in wealth, most of it has gone to a very tiny portion of our population. And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?
- pdonis 7y ago
  > That wealth should be distributed to society at large Ok, let's say we do that--a 100% wealth tax on any personal wealth over $999,999,999. So Bezos forks over everything he has over that, and we distribute it. First, how do we distribute it? Let's say we just divide it up equally among all 325 million Americans. That's about $370 per person. Wow. But second, what happens once we finish distributing? What are most people going to do with that $370? Spend it on something. How many people are going to make that $370 grow? Not many. Which means, in practice, all that wealth will just concentrate again. If most of the people spend the $370 buying something on Amazon, a lot of that wealth will just end up back in Bezos' pocket. In other words, redistributing wealth can temporarily make things more equal, but they won't stay that way.
  - door5 7y ago
    First off, Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire, so your $370 number is off. Second off, there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society. The wealth from this tax could be used to fund a public bank, which re-invests it and pays dividends back to the community. I'm not advocating for a specific policy proposal -- there exist many -- I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed. Once you agree with that principle, you can work out exactly how best to do it, but that principle is necessarily an ideological one -- one that says that money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire True. You might get it up to a few thousand per American if you counted all billionaires. > there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do? What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it. > I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed I don't agree with this principle. But I might if you added a qualifier; see below. > money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price. Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth. But lots of billionaires didn't get their billions that way. Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves. For example, investment banks transfer wealth to themselves by taking advantage of asymmetric information to get other parties to accept the wrong end of zero sum trades. (For that matter, the entire US banking and financial system transfer wealth to itself by getting the Federal Reserve to print money that they use for loans.) So if you were to modify your principle to say that concentration of wealth that does not involve wealth creation is unethical, I would agree with you. But that wouldn't be fixed by redistributing Jeff Bezos' wealth. It wouldn't even be fixed by redistributing the wealth of all the investment banker billionaires. You would have to shut down the Federal Reserve and re-engineer the entire US monetary, financial, and banking systems.
colinyoung 7y ago
"Earn" is not an accurate term, even if you don't agree with political analyses that define profit/rents as unearned. The fact is, over 60% of the 400 richest Americans were born wealthy. https://inequality.org/research/selfmade-myth-hallucinating-rich/ https://inequality.org/research/selfmade-myth-hallucinating-...
- geezerjay 7y ago
  > The fact is, over 60% of the 400 richest Americans were born wealthy. Your propaganda piece does not state that. It quotes forbes stating that 70% of therichest 400 in the US made their entire fortunes from scratch, but then tries to put an ideological spin on the article by asserting that they were born "priviledged", without providing any definition.
lsiebert 7y ago
I think talking about earning is inherently talking about the creation of value, right? Wealth is arguably the proceeds of past value, work income, or income from a new enterprise the proceeds of current value. There are definitely benefits to rewarding creating new value, I'll grant that. The invisible hand of economics helps distribute value fairly between equals. But often the rewards of value are monetary, and are captured by those who already have money and power because of past value creation, rather then distributed according to the contributions of all individuals who participated in work. Power and money further distort the abilities of less fortunate individuals to gain just compensation for their efforts. I see that as exploitative and problematic. I think it also arguably undermines new enterprises and new value that might have been created had the work that people were doing been rewarded in an equitable manner. And it's not like this system of exploitation is new, so the wealth that has been accrued by families is itself suspect.