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> So what's happening is this artificial grouping "college graduate" has massively expanded, whilst maintaining its average. That's a remarkable increase in wea

by skohan 6y ago

> So what's happening is this artificial grouping "college graduate" has massively expanded, whilst maintaining its average. That's a remarkable increase in wealth for the 40% "left out" three decades ago. You are leaving the cost of education out of the equation, which has increased massively over the past 30 years. Most Americans graduate under a mountain of debt. If salaries have remained stagnant, for the 10% who would have been that amounts to a net lower salary, at least for the first X years of employment until the debt is paid off. For the other 40%, they might have had the option to go work in a steel mill or an auto plant with a high-school degree, and now they have to go to university, and acquire a massive debt to have a hope of competing for a job outside the service industry. I'm not so convinced this is a net win for anyone involved. > Let's be clear. The top 1% in 1950 lived more differently than the rest of society in 1950; more so than the top 1% do of society today. Today the top 1% live much more like the top 10% who live much more like the top 50%, and so on. I'm also not so convinced this is the case. If you want to make the argument that I am living like Jeff Bezos because we can both have an LCD TV and and iPad, I think this is a very shallow argument. While the cost of consumer goods has not risen significantly in the past few decades, the cost of the markers of a middle-class existence absolutely have. For instance, due to the increased cost of housing, the rate of home ownership among millennials is much lower than that of previous generations. Due to student loan debt and the high cost of healthcare, many young people who might have risked leaving a 9-to-5 job to start a business don't feel safe to do so. Low cost consumer goods are nice, but the "American Dream" has always been about owning your own future, and being able climb into the next social class above your origins with hard work and ingenuity. Due to income inequality, the price of getting a seat at the table is what has increased out of the reach of almost everyone.

danaris 6y ago
To be fair, it is a net win for the overall education of our country. That's not something to just dismiss—but it doesn't have a great deal of easily-measurable economic value.
- blunte 6y ago
  Is an education un-exercised worth having? The experience of getting the education probably has some (hopefully positive) impact on the individual, but if there is no real opportunity to use that education later, there may also be some psychological downsides. Not entirely related, but also worth pondering is the brain drain of diverse intellectual talent into the world of finance, particularly private investment. What would the overall benefit been if the dozens of MIT physics and chemistry grads used their education to make things, make discoveries, etc. instead of making money for a limited group of beneficiaries in finance?
  - skohan 6y ago
    Finance and consulting.
  - danaris 6y ago
    > Is an education un-exercised worth having? I am glad to know many things that will (most likely) never help me earn more money. The value of an education cannot be measured entirely in economic terms. Two aspects of this that are very important, and have been sadly neglected and devalued in recent decades, are civics and critical thinking. > also worth pondering is the brain drain of diverse intellectual talent into the world of finance Yeah, that depresses me every time I think about it.
    - blunte 6y ago
      Let's say that an individual gets the recommended education and is given enough loans to leave school with 60+k in debt. Unless that person is able to get a _really_ good job, this debt will sap any momentum they might have otherwise developed by living wisely and saving/investing. Now since for better or worse, people are driven to form partnerships and create offspring, and this will likely occur before that student debt is paid off, what kind of start will the children have? Will the parents be saving for their children's college funds? The value of critical thinking and ability to learn is great, but for most people in the above situation it will not compensate for the financial situation they will find themselves in for many years after they've forgotten much of what they learned. Also, the stress of their financial situation will actually have a greater influence on how they think than what they learned in school.
mjburgess 6y ago
I was more addressing a common kind of a claim which analysis wealth without consider time/population differences. As if "college graduates" were a fixed group of people whose "wages have stagnated". They havent; the average is stable because the population has quintupled. Whether eductional policy here makes any sense is a seperate issue. It clearly doesn't. This is a side effect of how extraordinarily effective capitalism is also. People looked at the top 10% in the 70/80s and saw "they had degrees" and imagined that they could be in the top 10% if they got them too. This turned out to be "true" only if you mean the actual wealth of a 10%-er in the 70s/80s. Today, the top 10% have much different characteristics. My point here is that there is also another force at work creating this apparent "inequality panic" which is status envy. People thought that by imitating a 1%-er of 1970s they'd be a 1%-er today. Alas, no. You were going to be a bottom 40%-er, now you're a top 20%-er, well done. But you ain't getting that 1% you think you're owed. All this agit-prop is intra-elite warfare. People who've risen to the top 20% with their BScs, wondering where their mansions are.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > how extraordinarily effective capitalism is At transferring wealth from hard working well-intentioned individuals (and those who must compete with them) to hustlers, yes. You repeated your narrow point about the group of college educated individuals growing, but as far as I can tell that doesn't actually address skohan's much broader claims about healthcare, housing, and education. Can you address those as well? "Look over there!" isn't an argument.
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    Wealth isn't "transferred". Wealth is just a measure of "popularity * productivity". Besos is more wealthy than a nurse because amazon engages in billions of transactions which are each productive. A nurse engages in one. Your wealth, at a first approximation, is the rate at which you are productively transacting.
    - beckman466 6y ago
      > Besos is more wealthy than a nurse because amazon engages in billions of transactions which are each productive. Bezos is wealthy because he is a parasitic rentier capitalist. He's one of the major beneficiaries of the imperialist American intellectual property regime. That's it. That's the special sauce. "Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." Source: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

by skohan 6y ago

danaris 6y ago

To be fair, it is a net win for the overall education of our country. That's not something to just dismiss—but it doesn't have a great deal of easily-measurable economic value.

blunte 6y ago
Is an education un-exercised worth having? The experience of getting the education probably has some (hopefully positive) impact on the individual, but if there is no real opportunity to use that education later, there may also be some psychological downsides. Not entirely related, but also worth pondering is the brain drain of diverse intellectual talent into the world of finance, particularly private investment. What would the overall benefit been if the dozens of MIT physics and chemistry grads used their education to make things, make discoveries, etc. instead of making money for a limited group of beneficiaries in finance?
- skohan 6y ago
  Finance and consulting.
- danaris 6y ago
  > Is an education un-exercised worth having? I am glad to know many things that will (most likely) never help me earn more money. The value of an education cannot be measured entirely in economic terms. Two aspects of this that are very important, and have been sadly neglected and devalued in recent decades, are civics and critical thinking. > also worth pondering is the brain drain of diverse intellectual talent into the world of finance Yeah, that depresses me every time I think about it.
  - blunte 6y ago
    Let's say that an individual gets the recommended education and is given enough loans to leave school with 60+k in debt. Unless that person is able to get a _really_ good job, this debt will sap any momentum they might have otherwise developed by living wisely and saving/investing. Now since for better or worse, people are driven to form partnerships and create offspring, and this will likely occur before that student debt is paid off, what kind of start will the children have? Will the parents be saving for their children's college funds? The value of critical thinking and ability to learn is great, but for most people in the above situation it will not compensate for the financial situation they will find themselves in for many years after they've forgotten much of what they learned. Also, the stress of their financial situation will actually have a greater influence on how they think than what they learned in school.

mjburgess 6y ago

I was more addressing a common kind of a claim which analysis wealth without consider time/population differences. As if "college graduates" were a fixed group of people whose "wages have stagnated". They havent; the average is stable because the population has quintupled. Whether eductional policy here makes any sense is a seperate issue. It clearly doesn't. This is a side effect of how extraordinarily effective capitalism is also. People looked at the top 10% in the 70/80s and saw "they had degrees" and imagined that they could be in the top 10% if they got them too. This turned out to be "true" only if you mean the actual wealth of a 10%-er in the 70s/80s. Today, the top 10% have much different characteristics. My point here is that there is also another force at work creating this apparent "inequality panic" which is status envy. People thought that by imitating a 1%-er of 1970s they'd be a 1%-er today. Alas, no. You were going to be a bottom 40%-er, now you're a top 20%-er, well done. But you ain't getting that 1% you think you're owed. All this agit-prop is intra-elite warfare. People who've risen to the top 20% with their BScs, wondering where their mansions are.

jjoonathan 6y ago
> how extraordinarily effective capitalism is At transferring wealth from hard working well-intentioned individuals (and those who must compete with them) to hustlers, yes. You repeated your narrow point about the group of college educated individuals growing, but as far as I can tell that doesn't actually address skohan's much broader claims about healthcare, housing, and education. Can you address those as well? "Look over there!" isn't an argument.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  Wealth isn't "transferred". Wealth is just a measure of "popularity * productivity". Besos is more wealthy than a nurse because amazon engages in billions of transactions which are each productive. A nurse engages in one. Your wealth, at a first approximation, is the rate at which you are productively transacting.
  - beckman466 6y ago
    > Besos is more wealthy than a nurse because amazon engages in billions of transactions which are each productive. Bezos is wealthy because he is a parasitic rentier capitalist. He's one of the major beneficiaries of the imperialist American intellectual property regime. That's it. That's the special sauce. "Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." Source: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley