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The whole problem with these scaremongering articles about equality and the lack of it is that it doesn't matter. They promote this because it fits in to their

by pelle 16y ago

The whole problem with these scaremongering articles about equality and the lack of it is that it doesn't matter. They promote this because it fits in to their zero sum world view. A world where it is always someone-elses fault and where we as community must do something or we are selfish. This world view thats based on Dickensian stories of children living on the streets with coal dust on their cheeks. It just isn't true. I find it particularly disturbing that these thoughts even find an outlet on HN which is the antithesis of the zero sum world. You, yes you coder, entrepreneur are part of building wealth out of nothing. How can you possibly think that by doing so you are stealing food out of the mouthes of poor children in the inner city. You are helping them in the long run by growing the economy. To a poor person objectively speaking it doesn't matter on anything but an envy level if someone else is rich. What matters is their own life. And this is what Gini coefficients and graphs like this one doesn't show. Yes it's interesting that people have different views of this, but it is not important. Imagine we can put a number on quality of life. If the poor person starts out at say 1 and is at 10 after 10 years (as has happened in many developing countries). Does it matter that the rich person also is 10 times better off or even 100 times better off? I don't think so. That poor person now is healthier, has better opportunities etc than before. The children of this poor person will likely have a much better life while inequality might not have budged much in his country. See Hans Rosling who illustrates this very well: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o... America is a very unequal country that is true. Just not unequal in opportunities. The richest people in the US (the ones with 80% of the wealth) have probably in most cases earned it. Many of them have come from other parts of the world and created lots of jobs both here and abroad. Due to the fact that there are so many opportunities wealth distribution of course is skewed towards the rich. Another fact that simple populist statistics don't show is that many of the poor are new immigrants arriving here because of those same opportunities. Their kids will be considerably well off. Just by virtue of the HN community being who we are, we should keep doing our bit to increase the overall wealth of our world and countries, even if we may end up with more than our "fair" share.

ewjordan 16y ago
Imagine we can put a number on quality of life. If the poor person starts out at say 1 and is at 10 after 10 years (as has happened in many developing countries). Does it matter that the rich person also is 10 times better off or even 100 times better off? I don't think so. That poor person now is healthier, has better opportunities etc than before. The question on the table, though, is whether it's worth knocking the rich person (or maybe all rich people) down from (on some "quality of life" scale) a 100 to a 99.9 in order to lift the poor people from a 10 to a 20. If you just look at that wealth distribution, you'll realize how little the rich have to suffer in order to help the poor a huge amount. And that's even before taking into account logarithmic utility functions...for all the arguments about how taxation reduces the incentive to make money, it's oh so rare for libertarians to explain why the rich still keep trying to make money even though they derive far less utility from it due to logarithmic utility functions than they could ever lose from a modest taxation rate. In any case, here's where most of the disagreements stem from: most people that are against redistribution are concerned with optimizing the long term dollar value of the entire economy, so they want to keep wealth in the hands of those that are good at turning it into more wealth, even if the wealth that's created doesn't benefit those people directly at all (give $1 million to Bill Gates and he won't even notice; give it to someone on welfare, and it would change their life). People that are for redistribution are concerned with optimizing the short term utility value of the entire economy, so they'd rather put wealth in the hands of the people that would benefit from it the most rather than in the hands of the people that would create more of it. Taken to the extreme, each of these positions is absolutely indefensible and leads to a ridiculously inefficient and/or cruel economy. So we should always summarily discard any argument that does not promote some balance between the two sides. Sadly, it's been a long time since I've heard someone present an argument that actually supports a stable balancing point, most people just argue blindly to push in one direction or the other.
- pelle 16y ago
  It is true what you say when you are talking about the mega rich that they can do a lot to help and that is what people like Bill Gates etc are doing without anyone legislating them to do so. When it comes to wealth distribution, I can not see any better way of doing it than letting the markets manage it. Where the governments and charity's come in should be in efficient exception handling dealing with the various emergencies the real world raises. Don't misunderstand me though. "Rich" people are not necessarily nice people and often are not believers in free markets. They are often directly in cahoots with government and make lots of money being invested in the status quo. The problem with just about every single attempt at taxing this little tiny group of extremely rich people is that in the end it hardly affects them, but almost always harm the entrepreneurs who aren't yet at the Billionaire level. (Excuse my CS metaphors) My own country Denmark got rich by having an open economy with little redistribution but plenty of exception handling. Since the late 60s the focus shifted from exception handling to having a heavy handed kernel process maintaining resource sharing in realtime which now counts for over half the economy. This has stagnated the economy, which currently only looks better than Greece because of our oil resources. We are an extremely equal country, with only a small handful of outliers. End result to maintain our equality many of the smart coders/entrepreneurs now live abroad (eg. DHH, Rasmus Lerdorf) while more and more resources are being spent beating immigrants into being as equals as the rest of us to which we are now being rightly condemned throughout the world. A little thought experiment to which I do not know the answer: What part of Bill Gates deeds will over history have done more to multiply peoples quality of life in the developing world? The Bill and Melinda Gates foundations good work throughout the world or the millions of pirated Windows copies used throughout the developing world in everything from small businesses to internet cafe's to schools.

by pelle 16y ago

ewjordan 16y ago

Imagine we can put a number on quality of life. If the poor person starts out at say 1 and is at 10 after 10 years (as has happened in many developing countries). Does it matter that the rich person also is 10 times better off or even 100 times better off? I don't think so. That poor person now is healthier, has better opportunities etc than before. The question on the table, though, is whether it's worth knocking the rich person (or maybe all rich people) down from (on some "quality of life" scale) a 100 to a 99.9 in order to lift the poor people from a 10 to a 20. If you just look at that wealth distribution, you'll realize how little the rich have to suffer in order to help the poor a huge amount. And that's even before taking into account logarithmic utility functions...for all the arguments about how taxation reduces the incentive to make money, it's oh so rare for libertarians to explain why the rich still keep trying to make money even though they derive far less utility from it due to logarithmic utility functions than they could ever lose from a modest taxation rate. In any case, here's where most of the disagreements stem from: most people that are against redistribution are concerned with optimizing the long term dollar value of the entire economy, so they want to keep wealth in the hands of those that are good at turning it into more wealth, even if the wealth that's created doesn't benefit those people directly at all (give $1 million to Bill Gates and he won't even notice; give it to someone on welfare, and it would change their life). People that are for redistribution are concerned with optimizing the short term utility value of the entire economy, so they'd rather put wealth in the hands of the people that would benefit from it the most rather than in the hands of the people that would create more of it. Taken to the extreme, each of these positions is absolutely indefensible and leads to a ridiculously inefficient and/or cruel economy. So we should always summarily discard any argument that does not promote some balance between the two sides. Sadly, it's been a long time since I've heard someone present an argument that actually supports a stable balancing point, most people just argue blindly to push in one direction or the other.

pelle 16y ago
It is true what you say when you are talking about the mega rich that they can do a lot to help and that is what people like Bill Gates etc are doing without anyone legislating them to do so. When it comes to wealth distribution, I can not see any better way of doing it than letting the markets manage it. Where the governments and charity's come in should be in efficient exception handling dealing with the various emergencies the real world raises. Don't misunderstand me though. "Rich" people are not necessarily nice people and often are not believers in free markets. They are often directly in cahoots with government and make lots of money being invested in the status quo. The problem with just about every single attempt at taxing this little tiny group of extremely rich people is that in the end it hardly affects them, but almost always harm the entrepreneurs who aren't yet at the Billionaire level. (Excuse my CS metaphors) My own country Denmark got rich by having an open economy with little redistribution but plenty of exception handling. Since the late 60s the focus shifted from exception handling to having a heavy handed kernel process maintaining resource sharing in realtime which now counts for over half the economy. This has stagnated the economy, which currently only looks better than Greece because of our oil resources. We are an extremely equal country, with only a small handful of outliers. End result to maintain our equality many of the smart coders/entrepreneurs now live abroad (eg. DHH, Rasmus Lerdorf) while more and more resources are being spent beating immigrants into being as equals as the rest of us to which we are now being rightly condemned throughout the world. A little thought experiment to which I do not know the answer: What part of Bill Gates deeds will over history have done more to multiply peoples quality of life in the developing world? The Bill and Melinda Gates foundations good work throughout the world or the millions of pirated Windows copies used throughout the developing world in everything from small businesses to internet cafe's to schools.