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But this thought experiment has no connection to what causes most people to make more money than others. That's that they get jobs that pay different amounts o

But this thought experiment has no connection to what causes most people to make more money than others. That's that they get jobs that pay different amounts of money. There is no guaranteed 10% per year investment. The most significant structural factor that creates wealth inequality is personal conduct and talent, and the second is that some people have crappy parents. Third is location. None of it is society [1], unless you consider refraining from forcibly conscripting everybody into communist slavery to be a structural factor. [1] Except for all the laws I dislike.

bigcorp-slave 6y ago
Or they come from wealth. It does not require a massive inheritance to get ahead here - it requires enough to be exposed to the market, which most Americans don’t get. The 10% above is to make this example clear and easy, not a specific asset class. We can discuss to what extent people receive opportunities to gain significant personal income, but I strongly disagree that personal conduct and talent are the primary factor. The number one rule of the world is “people respond to incentives” - there are massive structural deltas in incentive landscape and opportunity exposure as a function of background. You can have amazing parents who do right by you, and grow up poor and stay poor for want of exposure to opportunities and the market. Because year-over-year growth is runaway, time in the market is of extreme importance too. In a very real sense - every second you don’t have more assets in the market than the next person, they are pulling away from you in literally exponential manner. A huge amount of it is society, and there’s a lot of light between “let’s try to make society better by preventing the gravity-like accumulation of capital entirely into a modern feudalist state” and “communist slavery”.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  There just aren't enough people who come from wealth for it to matter.
imtringued 6y ago
>The most significant structural factor that creates wealth inequality is personal conduct and talent, and the second is that some people have crappy parents. Third is location. If this is true then how come despite people being richer today than in the past they are still less wealthy from a relative perspective? Your statement is obviously incompatible with our current world and fails to explain why we had less inequality in the past where people had less talent and worse personal conduct. >None of it is society [1], unless you consider refraining from forcibly conscripting everybody into communist slavery to be a structural factor. I don't know where you get these crazy ideas but the conventional solution to high unemployment is to just increase consumer inflation which makes it lucrative for everyone to work and whatever inflation we have right now is clearly benefiting existing wealth holders at the expensive of workers. Decreasing wealth inequality is quite simple. Just increase wealth at the bottom. If poor people at the bottom have $100 to their name and Bill Gates has $100 billion then he is a billion times richer but if you made sure everyone at the bottom had $200 then Bill Gate's relative wealth would basically be cut in half and he would only be half a billion times richer. It's pretty obvious that there are fundamental problems in modern economies and a lot of them relate to government policy.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  If you're mad that Bill Gates is rich, you aren't really interested in helping the poor.

bigcorp-slave 6y ago

Or they come from wealth. It does not require a massive inheritance to get ahead here - it requires enough to be exposed to the market, which most Americans don’t get. The 10% above is to make this example clear and easy, not a specific asset class. We can discuss to what extent people receive opportunities to gain significant personal income, but I strongly disagree that personal conduct and talent are the primary factor. The number one rule of the world is “people respond to incentives” - there are massive structural deltas in incentive landscape and opportunity exposure as a function of background. You can have amazing parents who do right by you, and grow up poor and stay poor for want of exposure to opportunities and the market. Because year-over-year growth is runaway, time in the market is of extreme importance too. In a very real sense - every second you don’t have more assets in the market than the next person, they are pulling away from you in literally exponential manner. A huge amount of it is society, and there’s a lot of light between “let’s try to make society better by preventing the gravity-like accumulation of capital entirely into a modern feudalist state” and “communist slavery”.

SamReidHughes 6y ago
There just aren't enough people who come from wealth for it to matter.

imtringued 6y ago

>The most significant structural factor that creates wealth inequality is personal conduct and talent, and the second is that some people have crappy parents. Third is location. If this is true then how come despite people being richer today than in the past they are still less wealthy from a relative perspective? Your statement is obviously incompatible with our current world and fails to explain why we had less inequality in the past where people had less talent and worse personal conduct. >None of it is society [1], unless you consider refraining from forcibly conscripting everybody into communist slavery to be a structural factor. I don't know where you get these crazy ideas but the conventional solution to high unemployment is to just increase consumer inflation which makes it lucrative for everyone to work and whatever inflation we have right now is clearly benefiting existing wealth holders at the expensive of workers. Decreasing wealth inequality is quite simple. Just increase wealth at the bottom. If poor people at the bottom have $100 to their name and Bill Gates has $100 billion then he is a billion times richer but if you made sure everyone at the bottom had $200 then Bill Gate's relative wealth would basically be cut in half and he would only be half a billion times richer. It's pretty obvious that there are fundamental problems in modern economies and a lot of them relate to government policy.

SamReidHughes 6y ago
If you're mad that Bill Gates is rich, you aren't really interested in helping the poor.