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Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the

Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. The rich do have the power to extract rents and "rig the system" to cement their wealth and power. Those are things Graham is clearly against. But an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology deserves our praise. They're not causing the "poor to get poorer". And comparing the wealth distribution of today to that of 1980 is pretty silly. We're in a global economy now, so if you want to be fair, you need to look at it from a global perspective. Almost all Americans are going to fall in the top 10% of earners globally. And global poverty has collapsed since 1980. Yes, you no longer get a comfy middle class life just by virtue of being born in the US (regardless of skills) anymore. I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here.

o_p 6y ago
Economy is closer to a zero-sum game, after all theres limited resources in a period of time. We cannot be all rich because we cannot all own the capital, if we did, who does the work? To invest you need workers, to produce you need consumers, to rent you need renter, etc. Then the rich class exist because theres a poor class, a zero-sum game.
- seibelj 6y ago
  You can be rich, invest, and still work. You don’t magically putter around all day once you make money. Or at least all the self-made wealthy I know are still actively productive.
  - o_p 6y ago
    That completly misses the point, first, rich people earnings come mostly from their investments, not their work. Second, the money earned through investment necesarily comes from the work produced by other people and thats completly independent if the rich person works or not. The person who "earns by investing and working in both nearly equal proportion" doesnt really exist beyond outliers, this is empirical, the 1% owns as much wealth as the entire middle class, this is where their yearly income comes from,they get money because they own stuff, not by being superworkers, otherwise the inequality wouldnt be growing.
    - tjs8rj 6y ago
      I get the sense that you’ve read a lot of theory without any observational facts. The vast majority of the 1% and 0.1% get most of their income from labor nowadays. This is a phenomenon called “The Rise of the Working Rich”. This looks like CEO compensation, top athletes, too musicians, business owners, and so on. On average, the 0.1% gets about 20% of their income from investments and 60%+ from their actual labor. 70% of the Forbes 400 are self-made, the vast majority of millionaires receive $10k or less in total inheritance, 11% of Americans will be in the 1% for at least 1 year in their lifetime, and the majority of Americans will be in the top 20% for at least 1 year in their lifetime. If you chop off the top 1% in developed countries, their Gini coefficients are very similar, implying that the US doesn’t have exceptional levels of suffering from inequality, it just produces a lot of rich people.
- adwn 6y ago
  > Economy is closer to a zero-sum game, after all theres limited resources in a period of time. The "economy" is so much more than just the extraction of natural resources, and it's not a zero-sum game in general. Maybe you're conflating "money" with "wealth"?
- janeroe 6y ago
  Will the communism page be finally closed when it's implemented in the USA and the country fails, eventually falling apart? Or will it be "not a real communism" once again? I mean we're trying this experiment again and again expecting to get a new outcome. But so far it only lead to poverty, famines, mass killings, slavery camps.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    The pro-communist argument really is founded on two points: a) it's impossible for everyone to be a (successful) businessman: somebody has to be an employee and do the actual work, y'know? b) to be "actually rich" -- which is not just "being on the level of personally comfortable standard of living", it's more of "having certain level of personal influence" -- you have to own a share in a commercial enterprise and get the dividends from it; rare exceptions like a prominent lawyer or a genius surgeon notwithstanding. These two are mostly empirical observations, and you can frame it very differently depending on your liking; the "exploitation of the worker class" is only one such frame, there are many other.
    - nec4b 6y ago
      Also not everyone can be good looking, a great singer or a professional basketball player. But you are right communism solves all equality problems by making everybody (except a few select and their families) miserly poor, prevents people (again except a select few) with talent to stand out and kills everyone else who is too unhappy with how things are.
      - Joker_vD 6y ago
        The most hilarious thing about "a few select and their families" being rich is that it's not even true. Having a roomish (1 room per person + a living ropm) flat, a car with the personal driver, a small villa, and access to "closed for others" food and clothing stores was pretty much the most one could achieve -- and non of those things could be bought by money. Heck, that car and the villa? State-owned and attached to the position, you lose your place -- your successor gets them. Money simply could not buy one a lot: there was either nothing to buy, or the thing you wanted wasn't being sold. And yeah, the common populace did object to the higher-ranking party members and bureaucrats having those privileges. One of the slogans of perestroika was "away with privileges", I kid you not -- people would rather elites be as poor as them. Well, the irony is palpable: thirty years later, the common populace is not much richer than it used to be (teachers used to be able to easily travel by plane on their wage, not anymore), but the top-level government officials are way, way better off than they used to be.
atweiden 6y ago
> Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game The French Revolution disproves this.
- jb775 6y ago
  What's the over/under in years til the next French Revolution?
dignick 6y ago
> If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. You are looking at this from a world where that isn’t the case. Money would be worth less in that scenario, and that 10% owns 99% of the wealth, which is still going to cause problems.
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
  Yes but OP meant the 90% of people would get access to opportunities like the millionaires today. So even if inequality would be wild, nobody would worry about “issues of the poor”, like food or healthcare bills.
  - dignick 6y ago
    In this fictitious world I'm sure there would be other problems, perhaps some we can't foresee and might look like privilege to us today. We don't complain about "issues of the poor" from the past such as child labour (with some exceptions) today. Significant inequality will cause problems regardless of the baseline standard of living.
  - gmadsen 6y ago
    that hypothetical can't exist though, so what is the point in entertaining it. The world have finite resources, money (no matter the inflation) is a way to ration this to people. Not every single person can have a mansion in SF.
    - cloverich 6y ago
      Not a mansion in SF, but a super computer in their pocket? Point being, only some resources are limited, but wealth in general is not.
      - gmadsen 6y ago
        the things that matter are. Land, housing, access to others labor. Natural resources.
jay_kyburz 6y ago
I agree, and would go further and argue that the lives of most middle class is perfectly fine right now. I think the lives of the bottom 20% could be improved, and I think that we should ask those at the top 10% to help them out. I think there are other more specific things we could worry about, like house prices out of control, nobody is paying to clean up the waste they produce, governments baling out rich people etc. Talking about "inequality" in the abstract is not worthwhile.
- janeroe 6y ago
  >> governments baling out rich people >> the lives of the bottom 20% could be improved, and I think that we should ask those at the top 10% to help them out Governments are taking money out of people's pockets by running a printing press / increasing taxes and using them for personal gains. Solution? Ask the government to take even more money. They will be ashamed and start working in the interests of every citizen.
- jb775 6y ago
  Do you have any data to support anything you said here? The middle class has been getting decimated the past 20 years. They used to live comfortably on a single income, now both parents slave the week away and have even less purchasing power. Also, housing prices aren't "out of control" at all. Inflation is reducing the value of the dollar, and it's showing up in the real estate market. Inflation hurts anyone on a salary, not people with income dependent on assets that appreciate alongside inflation. Also, the they in the "waste they produce" is referencing the richest business owners. They are reaping the benefits of the production processes and leaving everyone else with the pollution. The root cause of all these things is the upper class either feeding on or taking advantage of the middle and lower classes. "Inequality" is just a term used as a window to look between the different classes.
  - cloverich 6y ago
    > and have even less purchasing power How does that account for items we have today which were unavailable 20-30 years ago? E.g. even if I were rich in 1990 I wouldn't have a super computer in my pocket with access to infinite knowledge and entertainment. > Inflation hurts anyone on a salary And anyone with savings. > They are reaping the benefits of the production processes and leaving everyone else with the pollution. A CO2 tax would be more burdensome the further you go down the chain. Everyone is reaping the benefits there. Sure, _some_ mega corp executives get extra benefits, but in general waste producing fossil fuel burning ecosystem destroying processes have been the literal thing that has lifted people out of poverty. (To be clear I am very pro environmental regulation, climate change, etc, but am skeptical the impacts won't be felt the greatest at the bottom of the income brackets)
Mulpze15 6y ago
If you did not need to pay when you need healthcare, if education was free with equal opportunity, and everybody had enough to eat and a half decent place to live, I would entertain discussing this. You could have this today in the US, it exists elsewhere. Yes, it would probably cost a bit more for the wealthiest people. Until then, I believe we should not try to justify inequality based on irrealistic theoretical arguments. I see just a ploy to preserve the current situation by people in a good situation. Because inequality and poverty is all too real. It hurts real people, unfairly. In the US. And it could change.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  > Yes, it would probably cost a bit more for the wealthiest people. No, at least in those places you mention, it costs more for the middle class. And I'm not sure it's just "a bit" - the difference in taxes between the US and the multiple European countries I've lived in is quite significant. It's fine if you believe that's part of a fair social contract. I'm European and I do, mostly - I certainly want everyone to have access to quality education and healthcare. (It's some of the other public expenditure I despise... Public TV in this day and age, seriously?) At any rate let's not pretend Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Bezos can shoulder everyone's education in the US.
- jiriknesl 6y ago
  When you are building wealth, you are likely to be young (so often healthy) and there is so much information online, libraries cost nothing. So I don't think this is a valid argument.
  - roytries 6y ago
    Note that when you're poor your surroundings are usually also poor. So even if you are young and not yet burdened by health care costs and maybe even have free/good education you might need to drop out or at least spend a lot of your time and money to take care for your relatives. Only when everybody you care about has a stable health/housing/food/(work) situation you get a chance to do something for yourself. Only if people around you are privileged enough to they have time to invest in you. You can start to build wealth. I don't mean with investing money. Maybe just by - Lending you their garage - Allowing you to work without income for a few months - Taking care of your kids while you work a few times a week - etc... TDLR: if all you and your surrounding is doing is directly aimed at surviving you cannot build wealth.
vishnugupta 6y ago
> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here. This is a crucial point that gets missed in these debates. Labour price inequality is a driving force of globalisation. That is how Nike pays 1$/day wage to Bangladeshi labourers to manufacture shoes and sell them at $500. And the reason people in Bangladesh are OK with it is because they don't have alternatives and the government is happy to flout all sorts of labour and environmental rules to retain Nike. To elaborate, there are two conditions under which globalisation works to generate massive profits. Low barrier for the international movement of goods and capital and huge barriers (insurmountable in most cases) for free movement of people across the border. If one follows international trade agreements and immigration policies over last 40-50 years a clear pattern emerges where trade/capital movements restrictions have been continuously whittled down and immigration criteria have been tightened. The net result being incredible profits for multinational corporations. For sure, the manufacturing countries have benefitted from the newly created jobs. India and China are good examples. China, in fact has been enormously benefitted to an extent where hundreds of millions have emerged out of poverty into middle class. To an extent where China's middle class now is a forced to be reckoned with and many believe the next wave of growth will be driven by Asian consumers. The flip side though is the divide between rich and poor has reached unheard of levels in, paradoxically, the richest country on earth. Not only that, the poor just don't have a community or governmental support to fall back on. It boggles my mind to see the richest nation's health infrastructure crumble in the wake of COVID-19.
- starfallg 6y ago
  I find it interesting that both you and the parent poster more or less agree on the same facts, but the framing is diametrically opposed. From my perspective globalisation is fundamentally broken. Restricting labour flow with unrestricted capital flows between countries is a destabilising force in both economics and politics. China is also a special case as they fully understood the game that America and the West was playing and hence had a good counterstrategy. The West would promote free trade resulting in investment in developing countries. In return they open up to capital flows and their internal markets, which is what China kept resisting. With the amount of trade deficit most western countries have with China in the past 2 decades, the Chinese market should be a lot more open than it is at the moment. By delaying this the Chinese hope to avoid the middle-income trap that many developing countries fall in to under the globalisation model.
saint_abroad 6y ago
> But an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology deserves our praise. They're not causing the "poor to get poorer". Extracting more work from the poor is often veiled under the guise of "improved productivity", so this measure of praise is not particularly helpful. When companies measure labour productivity by the bottom line "Revenue output per Wage input" rather than "GDP output per worker" this ignores a subtle distinction that has severe societal impact.
Vinnl 6y ago
> And global poverty has collapsed since 1980. IIRC it's only extreme poverty (i.e. living off $1.90 a day) that has collapsed; other poverty has seen more modest reductions.
- btilly 6y ago
  Yes..and no. The absolute rate of other kinds of poverty have not collapsed. But that statistic hides the fact that the population who are that poor has changed. People who were there moved up and out, while people who were poorer have moved up to that bracket. It is only after people stop moving out of extreme poverty to the tune of a quarter million per day that we can expect to see reductions in less severe poverty brackets.
atq2119 6y ago
> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Isn't it? Even when taken to extremes? Wealth inequality is in direct conflict with a core value of democracy: one person one vote is reduced to a bit of a joke when there are people who can easily afford to pay an army of hundreds of political operatives to flood public discourse with their opinion. A little inequality doesn't hurt, but the existence of billionaires (even 100 millionaires, really) is a problem for democracy.
- eevilspock 6y ago
  Exactly. 90% millionaires and 10% billionaires means the billionaires have 99.1% of the monetary power.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    Very astute. Even if you have 99% millionaires and 1% billionaires, the billionaires still have 91% of the wealth.
- solipsism 6y ago
  The problem of money purchasing political power can probably be solved without eliminating the concept of a yacht.
- nybble41 6y ago
  That sounds like a systemic problem with democracy, not wealth inequality. You want to put people in charge of making decisions both for themselves and for others, but you don't trust them to make those decisions properly. The issue here isn't so much the influence of money on public discourse as the ever-increasing divergence between the myriad things the government involves itself in and the naturally limited qualifications (and standing) of the average voter regarding each of those complex issues.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Land use is inherently zero sum. There are ways to mitigate the negative effects there, but you can't get rid of it entirely; there's only ever so much land around. The more money the affluent have, the worse off the working class are, even if the working class' wealth itself stays constant. You tend to see this with home prices in booming areas: if your income stays constant as the metro's economy booms, you'll end up worse off than you were before, unless you managed to buy a house before the boom.
csomar 6y ago
Inequality is a good theme to buy and rally voters, however. Also, what's better than stealing some stuff from rich people instead of figuring out how to fix the economy and create new wealth. Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq... Inequality has nothing to do with standards of living, freedom and human rights, or how well developed a country is. It's a completely irrelevant thing. Sweden has more inequality than the Ukraine and most of the world; however, many people will vote to live in Sweden than anywhere else.
AlexandrB 6y ago
> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here. So you're saying we need a 100% estate tax? Because the same applies to those lucky enough to be born into rich families.
- greyhair 6y ago
  Bingo. Rich people deserve the riches of their birth, but poor people be damned.
- JohnPrine 6y ago
  As someone who generally agrees with the poster you're replying to, yes I would be in favor of a 100% estate tax
- llamataboot 6y ago
  Yes, without getting into all the practicalities (and there are many deep dives into all of them), the general argument is go ahead and get rich off a mixture of your luck, work, and all the benefits that society collectively owns (well-educated workers, roads, etc etc etc) and enjoy it. Be a multi-millionaire. But after you die, whatever is left goes back into the common pool for all kids to have, for example, savings accounts that they access when they are 18
  - science4sail 6y ago
    What about non-monetary inheritance? Even if rich kids don't inherit anything, they can still get advantages from parental connections, educational opportunities, genetics, etc.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
    I think zero inheritance is probably not gonna work. You'll just incentivize a black market (think jewels, cash in mattresses, gold, whatever...people will get creative). You want to find the level where the benefits outweigh the costs. That's probably some significant amount of inheritance, but also a very hefty tax. I don't know where exactly it is, and it'll probably vary with a lot of factors.
dougmwne 6y ago
> If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. I strongly disagree with this and I think it runs counter to human nature. You're looking at quality of life as if there were some kind of absolute measure of it, but it really doesn't work like that. Quality of life is always measured relative to the people around us or to whom we are exposed in media or social media. If you look at modern Americans they have fabulously lavish quality of life in comparison to 19th century factory workers or 11th century peasants. Even people in the poorest quintile have access to safety, food, housing and entertainment that would have made people from centuries past gasp in awe. Antibiotics! Virtual reality! Same day shipping! But what really counts is how we perceive we are doing versus people we can compare ourselves to. That's where the suffering comes from. You have running hot water but your neighbor has a spa tub. You have the iPhone 6 but a friend just got the 12. You have a safe job that pays your bills but a classmate vacations in Portugal. I've been in other countries where the average quality of life was much lower than the US, and no one knew the difference or had any shame or sadness in their smaller cars, smaller bathrooms or lower square footage. If there were trillionaires but they all lived on Mars or some faraway continent and we knew nothing about them then they wouldn't cause us social suffering.
- esyir 6y ago
  Basically, crab in pot. Fuck having overall better conditions, I'm screwing myself over if it means I can be king of the dirt mound.
  - llamataboot 6y ago
    No, not at all. Read The Spirit Level and also a bunch of happiness psychology. Relative equality and perception of fairness matter quite a lot to humans.
    - esyir 6y ago
      I'm fully aware of that. I also think it's something unfortunate that we have to figure out a way to route around. We should choose a system that gives one guy a billion dollars and everyone else a million, if the alternative is one that gives everyone 100k. This is an analogy for lifestyle, the actual implications of supply demand are being ignored here.
evrydayhustling 6y ago
Agreed that a rising-but-unequal quality of life is better than a falling-but-level, and also re: the global perspective on wealth distribution. But that doesn't account for the decline of opportunity in the USA. As the article points out at the end, just because the rich aren't directly inheriting their wealth doesn't mean that they aren't inheriting opportunities that are restricted to a narrow class, and there's a lot of data showing that to be the case [1]. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...
camgunz 6y ago
It's not just about QoL, income inequality corrupts political systems, which unravels everything else. It's also worth saying that a very easy way of increasing the QoL of those at the bottom is to take a tiny fraction from those at the top. And generally, people aren't talking about the average small business owner who makes $200k/yr profit. We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. It's a straw man to replace people like pg with like, the people who run email octopus or your local credit union.
- nybble41 6y ago
  > We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. "Those at the top" don't generally have that much cash. They have shares in companies, often ones they started themselves, which happen to be worth a large amount on paper. If you wanted to distribute that in a form people could actually spend (not just moving shares around) you would have to liquidate the companies those shares represent. In the process you would destroy far more wealth than you distributed and eliminate services and production capacity which were previously working for the benefit of the very people you're claiming to help. People like to complain about public companies and their alleged focus on short-term gains, but that's exactly what this proposal represents: a short-lived and highly diffuse gain in short-term consumption for the masses at the expense of long-term capital investment and productivity.
  - camgunz 6y ago
    This is the whole thing I wrote: > And generally, people aren't talking about the average small business owner who makes $200k/yr profit. We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. It's a straw man to replace people like pg with like, the people who run email octopus or your local credit union. If you have a "small business" in your assets worth $49m, no worries! If you have one worth $50m, that'll be 2% please. This affects something like the richest 100,000 Americans, and they're not going to have to like, sell bricks out of the family's car wash business in order to pay it. They may spitefully lay people off or raise prices rather than pay out of their personal/business assets, but that's capitalism for you. I wouldn't blame taxes, I would blame jerks. The amount of catastrophizing and backseat economizing around a wealth tax is super strange. Income and wealth inequality in the US is by all measures extremely high. 66% of Americans support a wealth tax, including 55% of Republicans. Does anyone really think it's better to have billionaires than universal health care?
paxys 6y ago
Is there a global economy for basic healthcare? For rent? Home services? Insurance? Most people are still at the mercy of the zip code they live in. The "global" economy has pushed wages down and made cheap goods cheaper, but claiming that a bottom 10% American has a good life because they are still the top 10% globally is idiotic.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It maybe have done that in a few countries but in general the world, particularly the 3rd world is a lot "richer" than it was 30 or even 20 years ago.
joshuamorton 6y ago
> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. You're correct, but inequality would be far, far lower than it is today.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X... A full-time worker deserves to be paid enough to live, period. Unskilled or not. They deserve a roof over their head, food on the table, and basic healthcare. Cost of living varies greatly based on locale, and comparing that number to the poverty wage in Bangladesh is what the invisible hand does, yes, but it's absolutely not what's fair or what's deserved.
- TearsInTheRain 6y ago
  > A full-time worker deserves to be paid enough to live, period. Even if "enough to live" is greater than the value they generate?
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    No - that type of job shouldn't exist. Automate them, offshore them, let the business models that depend on this type of exploitive labor fail. Eventually, this sort of job is going to disappear anyway. If paired with robust social safety nets, we can absolutely require jobs to pay a living wage.
    - TearsInTheRain 6y ago
      There are people willing to take those jobs. You would be taking a job away from a willing worker and doing what? Tell them to take welfare? Not everyone in the workforce is a sole breadwinner for their family. Regulating those jobs makes all of those workers worse off and is an economic loss to the system.
      - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
        They're willing to take the jobs because that's (presumably) all they can do now. The social safety safety nets I'm proposing would include robust access to quality education for the economically displaced. I firmly believe that any currently "unskilled" worker can re-tool and become much more productive if given the opportunity.
yellowapple 6y ago
> Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. Which we are, because inequality enables advantages in grabbing pieces of various natural monopolies. Land is a prime example; real estate is a zero-sum game (the oblate spheroid we call "Earth" has a finite geographical area, and therefore so does any portion thereof), and rich people are able to play it by "investing" in real estate (read: hoarding land with the understanding that its value will increase perpetually on average due to the fixed supply and population-scaled demand). This is inherently exploitative of anyone lacking such an ability, and inherently results in the transfer of wealth from the working class to the ownership class - both directly (via rent) and indirectly (via opportunity costs).
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It's if you consider X,Y dimensions. Z axis is controlled by law as well so we can't build up to alleviate the congestion in X,Y plane. Furthermore, parking lots and accessibility laws take up a lot of space in cities which take up the free-available X,Y supply. IMO the biggest problem is Z axis and the infrastructure enabling it (public transportation) for example. However, since Z axis is stuck, we choose to suburbanize and infinitely expand beyond reasonable sized cities effectively making unlimited supply of real estate. Look at Phoenix and Houston. So, what you're talking about is real-estate in places like Bay Area and New York cities. Which is not a general argument.
derbOac 6y ago
You're sort of subtly changing the argument to a utilitarian one, about whether allowing the status quo is good from a systemic perspective. This is a different argument about whether or not the current circumstances are justified, or what might be better. These sorts of discussions also always seem to skim over the surface in many ways. For example, you make statements like this -- "an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology" -- as if the reasons someone got rich are by reducing waste and improving productivity, in a way that is clearly demonstrable, when the validity of this assumption is the very thing in question. There's a circularity to these kinds of assumptions that is of the form Person A is rich by virtue of their position at X, which has been associated with an increase in efficiency; therefore Person A caused the increase in efficiency at X, and therefore deserve to be rich. The problem with this argument is that not only is the "do they deserve such wealth given the other assumptions?" complex, it's also the case that the "did they cause these desirable things" and "did they alone cause these things?" is in question. I agree inequality isn't necessarily a problem in itself. What is a problem is inequity, or lack of correspondence between income and "true merit" in a idealized sense (including one with true competition). My sense is that this is the real argument: is it fair that someone like Bezos has the wealth he does, even as one of his workers is struggling to make ends meet? (Consider what would happen if all Amazon workers left their positions simultaneously and permanently, and could not be replaced. Is Bezos responsible for Amazon's operations?) The inequality per se is one level of argument, but the real argument is something more like "is Amazon a good or bad thing? Should Bezos as an individual deserve the credit for whatever net goodness Amazon has accrued? Is it the case that whatever credit he does deserve, do to his actions per se, or the circumstances he found himself in?" I suspect that in a fair world, incomes would be much less disparate, even globally, and there would be much more movement up and down, and back again. There's too much idolizing of the individual, as a static unchanging thing, one way or another. I think a lot of societal ills stem from this sort of perniciousness, including "cancel culture" and many other things: the fruit you see beneath the tree is due to that tree, and will never change one way or another, and cannot be changed.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I personally don't mind "rich, middle class poor" what I do mind is the vast difference in that spectrum and how bad the bottom 20% of the USA really do have it. You shouldn't have to work 12-16 hours a day of unskilled labor to have a car and decent place to live. No to mention the few million homeless that we have. While the upper 0.1% are grotesquely richer than the rest of us and continue to only enlarge that gap. I can't agree with you at all. With technology improvements we should have a decent spread in wealth and it should be diminishing not increasing. This is indeed where the government should come in with wealth distribution. For a human being it doesn't matter if you have 1 billion or 100 billion you really still have far more than enough money.

o_p 6y ago

Economy is closer to a zero-sum game, after all theres limited resources in a period of time. We cannot be all rich because we cannot all own the capital, if we did, who does the work? To invest you need workers, to produce you need consumers, to rent you need renter, etc. Then the rich class exist because theres a poor class, a zero-sum game.

seibelj 6y ago
You can be rich, invest, and still work. You don’t magically putter around all day once you make money. Or at least all the self-made wealthy I know are still actively productive.
- o_p 6y ago
  That completly misses the point, first, rich people earnings come mostly from their investments, not their work. Second, the money earned through investment necesarily comes from the work produced by other people and thats completly independent if the rich person works or not. The person who "earns by investing and working in both nearly equal proportion" doesnt really exist beyond outliers, this is empirical, the 1% owns as much wealth as the entire middle class, this is where their yearly income comes from,they get money because they own stuff, not by being superworkers, otherwise the inequality wouldnt be growing.
  - tjs8rj 6y ago
    I get the sense that you’ve read a lot of theory without any observational facts. The vast majority of the 1% and 0.1% get most of their income from labor nowadays. This is a phenomenon called “The Rise of the Working Rich”. This looks like CEO compensation, top athletes, too musicians, business owners, and so on. On average, the 0.1% gets about 20% of their income from investments and 60%+ from their actual labor. 70% of the Forbes 400 are self-made, the vast majority of millionaires receive $10k or less in total inheritance, 11% of Americans will be in the 1% for at least 1 year in their lifetime, and the majority of Americans will be in the top 20% for at least 1 year in their lifetime. If you chop off the top 1% in developed countries, their Gini coefficients are very similar, implying that the US doesn’t have exceptional levels of suffering from inequality, it just produces a lot of rich people.
adwn 6y ago
> Economy is closer to a zero-sum game, after all theres limited resources in a period of time. The "economy" is so much more than just the extraction of natural resources, and it's not a zero-sum game in general. Maybe you're conflating "money" with "wealth"?
janeroe 6y ago
Will the communism page be finally closed when it's implemented in the USA and the country fails, eventually falling apart? Or will it be "not a real communism" once again? I mean we're trying this experiment again and again expecting to get a new outcome. But so far it only lead to poverty, famines, mass killings, slavery camps.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  The pro-communist argument really is founded on two points: a) it's impossible for everyone to be a (successful) businessman: somebody has to be an employee and do the actual work, y'know? b) to be "actually rich" -- which is not just "being on the level of personally comfortable standard of living", it's more of "having certain level of personal influence" -- you have to own a share in a commercial enterprise and get the dividends from it; rare exceptions like a prominent lawyer or a genius surgeon notwithstanding. These two are mostly empirical observations, and you can frame it very differently depending on your liking; the "exploitation of the worker class" is only one such frame, there are many other.
  - nec4b 6y ago
    Also not everyone can be good looking, a great singer or a professional basketball player. But you are right communism solves all equality problems by making everybody (except a few select and their families) miserly poor, prevents people (again except a select few) with talent to stand out and kills everyone else who is too unhappy with how things are.
    - Joker_vD 6y ago
      The most hilarious thing about "a few select and their families" being rich is that it's not even true. Having a roomish (1 room per person + a living ropm) flat, a car with the personal driver, a small villa, and access to "closed for others" food and clothing stores was pretty much the most one could achieve -- and non of those things could be bought by money. Heck, that car and the villa? State-owned and attached to the position, you lose your place -- your successor gets them. Money simply could not buy one a lot: there was either nothing to buy, or the thing you wanted wasn't being sold. And yeah, the common populace did object to the higher-ranking party members and bureaucrats having those privileges. One of the slogans of perestroika was "away with privileges", I kid you not -- people would rather elites be as poor as them. Well, the irony is palpable: thirty years later, the common populace is not much richer than it used to be (teachers used to be able to easily travel by plane on their wage, not anymore), but the top-level government officials are way, way better off than they used to be.

atweiden 6y ago

> Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game The French Revolution disproves this.

jb775 6y ago
What's the over/under in years til the next French Revolution?

dignick 6y ago

> If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. You are looking at this from a world where that isn’t the case. Money would be worth less in that scenario, and that 10% owns 99% of the wealth, which is still going to cause problems.

faeyanpiraat 6y ago
Yes but OP meant the 90% of people would get access to opportunities like the millionaires today. So even if inequality would be wild, nobody would worry about “issues of the poor”, like food or healthcare bills.
- dignick 6y ago
  In this fictitious world I'm sure there would be other problems, perhaps some we can't foresee and might look like privilege to us today. We don't complain about "issues of the poor" from the past such as child labour (with some exceptions) today. Significant inequality will cause problems regardless of the baseline standard of living.
- gmadsen 6y ago
  that hypothetical can't exist though, so what is the point in entertaining it. The world have finite resources, money (no matter the inflation) is a way to ration this to people. Not every single person can have a mansion in SF.
  - cloverich 6y ago
    Not a mansion in SF, but a super computer in their pocket? Point being, only some resources are limited, but wealth in general is not.
    - gmadsen 6y ago
      the things that matter are. Land, housing, access to others labor. Natural resources.

jay_kyburz 6y ago

I agree, and would go further and argue that the lives of most middle class is perfectly fine right now. I think the lives of the bottom 20% could be improved, and I think that we should ask those at the top 10% to help them out. I think there are other more specific things we could worry about, like house prices out of control, nobody is paying to clean up the waste they produce, governments baling out rich people etc. Talking about "inequality" in the abstract is not worthwhile.

janeroe 6y ago
>> governments baling out rich people >> the lives of the bottom 20% could be improved, and I think that we should ask those at the top 10% to help them out Governments are taking money out of people's pockets by running a printing press / increasing taxes and using them for personal gains. Solution? Ask the government to take even more money. They will be ashamed and start working in the interests of every citizen.
jb775 6y ago
Do you have any data to support anything you said here? The middle class has been getting decimated the past 20 years. They used to live comfortably on a single income, now both parents slave the week away and have even less purchasing power. Also, housing prices aren't "out of control" at all. Inflation is reducing the value of the dollar, and it's showing up in the real estate market. Inflation hurts anyone on a salary, not people with income dependent on assets that appreciate alongside inflation. Also, the they in the "waste they produce" is referencing the richest business owners. They are reaping the benefits of the production processes and leaving everyone else with the pollution. The root cause of all these things is the upper class either feeding on or taking advantage of the middle and lower classes. "Inequality" is just a term used as a window to look between the different classes.
- cloverich 6y ago
  > and have even less purchasing power How does that account for items we have today which were unavailable 20-30 years ago? E.g. even if I were rich in 1990 I wouldn't have a super computer in my pocket with access to infinite knowledge and entertainment. > Inflation hurts anyone on a salary And anyone with savings. > They are reaping the benefits of the production processes and leaving everyone else with the pollution. A CO2 tax would be more burdensome the further you go down the chain. Everyone is reaping the benefits there. Sure, _some_ mega corp executives get extra benefits, but in general waste producing fossil fuel burning ecosystem destroying processes have been the literal thing that has lifted people out of poverty. (To be clear I am very pro environmental regulation, climate change, etc, but am skeptical the impacts won't be felt the greatest at the bottom of the income brackets)

Mulpze15 6y ago

If you did not need to pay when you need healthcare, if education was free with equal opportunity, and everybody had enough to eat and a half decent place to live, I would entertain discussing this. You could have this today in the US, it exists elsewhere. Yes, it would probably cost a bit more for the wealthiest people. Until then, I believe we should not try to justify inequality based on irrealistic theoretical arguments. I see just a ploy to preserve the current situation by people in a good situation. Because inequality and poverty is all too real. It hurts real people, unfairly. In the US. And it could change.

arcturus17 6y ago
> Yes, it would probably cost a bit more for the wealthiest people. No, at least in those places you mention, it costs more for the middle class. And I'm not sure it's just "a bit" - the difference in taxes between the US and the multiple European countries I've lived in is quite significant. It's fine if you believe that's part of a fair social contract. I'm European and I do, mostly - I certainly want everyone to have access to quality education and healthcare. (It's some of the other public expenditure I despise... Public TV in this day and age, seriously?) At any rate let's not pretend Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Bezos can shoulder everyone's education in the US.
jiriknesl 6y ago
When you are building wealth, you are likely to be young (so often healthy) and there is so much information online, libraries cost nothing. So I don't think this is a valid argument.
- roytries 6y ago
  Note that when you're poor your surroundings are usually also poor. So even if you are young and not yet burdened by health care costs and maybe even have free/good education you might need to drop out or at least spend a lot of your time and money to take care for your relatives. Only when everybody you care about has a stable health/housing/food/(work) situation you get a chance to do something for yourself. Only if people around you are privileged enough to they have time to invest in you. You can start to build wealth. I don't mean with investing money. Maybe just by - Lending you their garage - Allowing you to work without income for a few months - Taking care of your kids while you work a few times a week - etc... TDLR: if all you and your surrounding is doing is directly aimed at surviving you cannot build wealth.

vishnugupta 6y ago

> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X what an equivalent worker in Bangladesh makes just because they were lucky enough to be born here. This is a crucial point that gets missed in these debates. Labour price inequality is a driving force of globalisation. That is how Nike pays 1$/day wage to Bangladeshi labourers to manufacture shoes and sell them at $500. And the reason people in Bangladesh are OK with it is because they don't have alternatives and the government is happy to flout all sorts of labour and environmental rules to retain Nike. To elaborate, there are two conditions under which globalisation works to generate massive profits. Low barrier for the international movement of goods and capital and huge barriers (insurmountable in most cases) for free movement of people across the border. If one follows international trade agreements and immigration policies over last 40-50 years a clear pattern emerges where trade/capital movements restrictions have been continuously whittled down and immigration criteria have been tightened. The net result being incredible profits for multinational corporations. For sure, the manufacturing countries have benefitted from the newly created jobs. India and China are good examples. China, in fact has been enormously benefitted to an extent where hundreds of millions have emerged out of poverty into middle class. To an extent where China's middle class now is a forced to be reckoned with and many believe the next wave of growth will be driven by Asian consumers. The flip side though is the divide between rich and poor has reached unheard of levels in, paradoxically, the richest country on earth. Not only that, the poor just don't have a community or governmental support to fall back on. It boggles my mind to see the richest nation's health infrastructure crumble in the wake of COVID-19.

starfallg 6y ago
I find it interesting that both you and the parent poster more or less agree on the same facts, but the framing is diametrically opposed. From my perspective globalisation is fundamentally broken. Restricting labour flow with unrestricted capital flows between countries is a destabilising force in both economics and politics. China is also a special case as they fully understood the game that America and the West was playing and hence had a good counterstrategy. The West would promote free trade resulting in investment in developing countries. In return they open up to capital flows and their internal markets, which is what China kept resisting. With the amount of trade deficit most western countries have with China in the past 2 decades, the Chinese market should be a lot more open than it is at the moment. By delaying this the Chinese hope to avoid the middle-income trap that many developing countries fall in to under the globalisation model.

saint_abroad 6y ago

> But an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology deserves our praise. They're not causing the "poor to get poorer". Extracting more work from the poor is often veiled under the guise of "improved productivity", so this measure of praise is not particularly helpful. When companies measure labour productivity by the bottom line "Revenue output per Wage input" rather than "GDP output per worker" this ignores a subtle distinction that has severe societal impact.

Vinnl 6y ago

> And global poverty has collapsed since 1980. IIRC it's only extreme poverty (i.e. living off $1.90 a day) that has collapsed; other poverty has seen more modest reductions.

btilly 6y ago
Yes..and no. The absolute rate of other kinds of poverty have not collapsed. But that statistic hides the fact that the population who are that poor has changed. People who were there moved up and out, while people who were poorer have moved up to that bracket. It is only after people stop moving out of extreme poverty to the tune of a quarter million per day that we can expect to see reductions in less severe poverty brackets.

atq2119 6y ago

> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Isn't it? Even when taken to extremes? Wealth inequality is in direct conflict with a core value of democracy: one person one vote is reduced to a bit of a joke when there are people who can easily afford to pay an army of hundreds of political operatives to flood public discourse with their opinion. A little inequality doesn't hurt, but the existence of billionaires (even 100 millionaires, really) is a problem for democracy.

eevilspock 6y ago
Exactly. 90% millionaires and 10% billionaires means the billionaires have 99.1% of the monetary power.
- jfengel 6y ago
  Very astute. Even if you have 99% millionaires and 1% billionaires, the billionaires still have 91% of the wealth.
solipsism 6y ago
The problem of money purchasing political power can probably be solved without eliminating the concept of a yacht.
nybble41 6y ago
That sounds like a systemic problem with democracy, not wealth inequality. You want to put people in charge of making decisions both for themselves and for others, but you don't trust them to make those decisions properly. The issue here isn't so much the influence of money on public discourse as the ever-increasing divergence between the myriad things the government involves itself in and the naturally limited qualifications (and standing) of the average voter regarding each of those complex issues.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

Land use is inherently zero sum. There are ways to mitigate the negative effects there, but you can't get rid of it entirely; there's only ever so much land around. The more money the affluent have, the worse off the working class are, even if the working class' wealth itself stays constant. You tend to see this with home prices in booming areas: if your income stays constant as the metro's economy booms, you'll end up worse off than you were before, unless you managed to buy a house before the boom.

csomar 6y ago

Inequality is a good theme to buy and rally voters, however. Also, what's better than stealing some stuff from rich people instead of figuring out how to fix the economy and create new wealth. Check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_eq... Inequality has nothing to do with standards of living, freedom and human rights, or how well developed a country is. It's a completely irrelevant thing. Sweden has more inequality than the Ukraine and most of the world; however, many people will vote to live in Sweden than anywhere else.

AlexandrB 6y ago

greyhair 6y ago
Bingo. Rich people deserve the riches of their birth, but poor people be damned.
JohnPrine 6y ago
As someone who generally agrees with the poster you're replying to, yes I would be in favor of a 100% estate tax
llamataboot 6y ago
Yes, without getting into all the practicalities (and there are many deep dives into all of them), the general argument is go ahead and get rich off a mixture of your luck, work, and all the benefits that society collectively owns (well-educated workers, roads, etc etc etc) and enjoy it. Be a multi-millionaire. But after you die, whatever is left goes back into the common pool for all kids to have, for example, savings accounts that they access when they are 18
- science4sail 6y ago
  What about non-monetary inheritance? Even if rich kids don't inherit anything, they can still get advantages from parental connections, educational opportunities, genetics, etc.
- NoImmatureAdHom 6y ago
  I think zero inheritance is probably not gonna work. You'll just incentivize a black market (think jewels, cash in mattresses, gold, whatever...people will get creative). You want to find the level where the benefits outweigh the costs. That's probably some significant amount of inheritance, but also a very hefty tax. I don't know where exactly it is, and it'll probably vary with a lot of factors.

dougmwne 6y ago

> If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. I strongly disagree with this and I think it runs counter to human nature. You're looking at quality of life as if there were some kind of absolute measure of it, but it really doesn't work like that. Quality of life is always measured relative to the people around us or to whom we are exposed in media or social media. If you look at modern Americans they have fabulously lavish quality of life in comparison to 19th century factory workers or 11th century peasants. Even people in the poorest quintile have access to safety, food, housing and entertainment that would have made people from centuries past gasp in awe. Antibiotics! Virtual reality! Same day shipping! But what really counts is how we perceive we are doing versus people we can compare ourselves to. That's where the suffering comes from. You have running hot water but your neighbor has a spa tub. You have the iPhone 6 but a friend just got the 12. You have a safe job that pays your bills but a classmate vacations in Portugal. I've been in other countries where the average quality of life was much lower than the US, and no one knew the difference or had any shame or sadness in their smaller cars, smaller bathrooms or lower square footage. If there were trillionaires but they all lived on Mars or some faraway continent and we knew nothing about them then they wouldn't cause us social suffering.

esyir 6y ago
Basically, crab in pot. Fuck having overall better conditions, I'm screwing myself over if it means I can be king of the dirt mound.
- llamataboot 6y ago
  No, not at all. Read The Spirit Level and also a bunch of happiness psychology. Relative equality and perception of fairness matter quite a lot to humans.
  - esyir 6y ago
    I'm fully aware of that. I also think it's something unfortunate that we have to figure out a way to route around. We should choose a system that gives one guy a billion dollars and everyone else a million, if the alternative is one that gives everyone 100k. This is an analogy for lifestyle, the actual implications of supply demand are being ignored here.

evrydayhustling 6y ago

Agreed that a rising-but-unequal quality of life is better than a falling-but-level, and also re: the global perspective on wealth distribution. But that doesn't account for the decline of opportunity in the USA. As the article points out at the end, just because the rich aren't directly inheriting their wealth doesn't mean that they aren't inheriting opportunities that are restricted to a narrow class, and there's a lot of data showing that to be the case [1]. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

camgunz 6y ago

It's not just about QoL, income inequality corrupts political systems, which unravels everything else. It's also worth saying that a very easy way of increasing the QoL of those at the bottom is to take a tiny fraction from those at the top. And generally, people aren't talking about the average small business owner who makes $200k/yr profit. We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. It's a straw man to replace people like pg with like, the people who run email octopus or your local credit union.

nybble41 6y ago
> We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. "Those at the top" don't generally have that much cash. They have shares in companies, often ones they started themselves, which happen to be worth a large amount on paper. If you wanted to distribute that in a form people could actually spend (not just moving shares around) you would have to liquidate the companies those shares represent. In the process you would destroy far more wealth than you distributed and eliminate services and production capacity which were previously working for the benefit of the very people you're claiming to help. People like to complain about public companies and their alleged focus on short-term gains, but that's exactly what this proposal represents: a short-lived and highly diffuse gain in short-term consumption for the masses at the expense of long-term capital investment and productivity.
- camgunz 6y ago
  This is the whole thing I wrote: > And generally, people aren't talking about the average small business owner who makes $200k/yr profit. We're talking about people who have more than $50m in a big money vault. It's a straw man to replace people like pg with like, the people who run email octopus or your local credit union. If you have a "small business" in your assets worth $49m, no worries! If you have one worth $50m, that'll be 2% please. This affects something like the richest 100,000 Americans, and they're not going to have to like, sell bricks out of the family's car wash business in order to pay it. They may spitefully lay people off or raise prices rather than pay out of their personal/business assets, but that's capitalism for you. I wouldn't blame taxes, I would blame jerks. The amount of catastrophizing and backseat economizing around a wealth tax is super strange. Income and wealth inequality in the US is by all measures extremely high. 66% of Americans support a wealth tax, including 55% of Republicans. Does anyone really think it's better to have billionaires than universal health care?

paxys 6y ago

Is there a global economy for basic healthcare? For rent? Home services? Insurance? Most people are still at the mercy of the zip code they live in. The "global" economy has pushed wages down and made cheap goods cheaper, but claiming that a bottom 10% American has a good life because they are still the top 10% globally is idiotic.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
It maybe have done that in a few countries but in general the world, particularly the 3rd world is a lot "richer" than it was 30 or even 20 years ago.

joshuamorton 6y ago

> Inequality by itself is not a bad thing. Let's start from there. If 90% of the population had a (sustainable) lifestyle of current dollar millionaires, and the remaining 10% had a (sustainable) lifestyle of dollar billionaires, there would be lots of inequality, but it wouldn't be problematic. You're correct, but inequality would be far, far lower than it is today.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

> I personally don't believe that an unskilled worker in the US deserves to be paid 10X... A full-time worker deserves to be paid enough to live, period. Unskilled or not. They deserve a roof over their head, food on the table, and basic healthcare. Cost of living varies greatly based on locale, and comparing that number to the poverty wage in Bangladesh is what the invisible hand does, yes, but it's absolutely not what's fair or what's deserved.

TearsInTheRain 6y ago
> A full-time worker deserves to be paid enough to live, period. Even if "enough to live" is greater than the value they generate?
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  No - that type of job shouldn't exist. Automate them, offshore them, let the business models that depend on this type of exploitive labor fail. Eventually, this sort of job is going to disappear anyway. If paired with robust social safety nets, we can absolutely require jobs to pay a living wage.
  - TearsInTheRain 6y ago
    There are people willing to take those jobs. You would be taking a job away from a willing worker and doing what? Tell them to take welfare? Not everyone in the workforce is a sole breadwinner for their family. Regulating those jobs makes all of those workers worse off and is an economic loss to the system.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
      They're willing to take the jobs because that's (presumably) all they can do now. The social safety safety nets I'm proposing would include robust access to quality education for the economically displaced. I firmly believe that any currently "unskilled" worker can re-tool and become much more productive if given the opportunity.

yellowapple 6y ago

> Inequality is only bad if you're in a zero-sum game. Which we are, because inequality enables advantages in grabbing pieces of various natural monopolies. Land is a prime example; real estate is a zero-sum game (the oblate spheroid we call "Earth" has a finite geographical area, and therefore so does any portion thereof), and rich people are able to play it by "investing" in real estate (read: hoarding land with the understanding that its value will increase perpetually on average due to the fixed supply and population-scaled demand). This is inherently exploitative of anyone lacking such an ability, and inherently results in the transfer of wealth from the working class to the ownership class - both directly (via rent) and indirectly (via opportunity costs).

systemvoltage 6y ago
It's if you consider X,Y dimensions. Z axis is controlled by law as well so we can't build up to alleviate the congestion in X,Y plane. Furthermore, parking lots and accessibility laws take up a lot of space in cities which take up the free-available X,Y supply. IMO the biggest problem is Z axis and the infrastructure enabling it (public transportation) for example. However, since Z axis is stuck, we choose to suburbanize and infinitely expand beyond reasonable sized cities effectively making unlimited supply of real estate. Look at Phoenix and Houston. So, what you're talking about is real-estate in places like Bay Area and New York cities. Which is not a general argument.

derbOac 6y ago

You're sort of subtly changing the argument to a utilitarian one, about whether allowing the status quo is good from a systemic perspective. This is a different argument about whether or not the current circumstances are justified, or what might be better. These sorts of discussions also always seem to skim over the surface in many ways. For example, you make statements like this -- "an entrepreneur who gets rich by reducing waste and improving productivity by harnessing technology" -- as if the reasons someone got rich are by reducing waste and improving productivity, in a way that is clearly demonstrable, when the validity of this assumption is the very thing in question. There's a circularity to these kinds of assumptions that is of the form Person A is rich by virtue of their position at X, which has been associated with an increase in efficiency; therefore Person A caused the increase in efficiency at X, and therefore deserve to be rich. The problem with this argument is that not only is the "do they deserve such wealth given the other assumptions?" complex, it's also the case that the "did they cause these desirable things" and "did they alone cause these things?" is in question. I agree inequality isn't necessarily a problem in itself. What is a problem is inequity, or lack of correspondence between income and "true merit" in a idealized sense (including one with true competition). My sense is that this is the real argument: is it fair that someone like Bezos has the wealth he does, even as one of his workers is struggling to make ends meet? (Consider what would happen if all Amazon workers left their positions simultaneously and permanently, and could not be replaced. Is Bezos responsible for Amazon's operations?) The inequality per se is one level of argument, but the real argument is something more like "is Amazon a good or bad thing? Should Bezos as an individual deserve the credit for whatever net goodness Amazon has accrued? Is it the case that whatever credit he does deserve, do to his actions per se, or the circumstances he found himself in?" I suspect that in a fair world, incomes would be much less disparate, even globally, and there would be much more movement up and down, and back again. There's too much idolizing of the individual, as a static unchanging thing, one way or another. I think a lot of societal ills stem from this sort of perniciousness, including "cancel culture" and many other things: the fruit you see beneath the tree is due to that tree, and will never change one way or another, and cannot be changed.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I personally don't mind "rich, middle class poor" what I do mind is the vast difference in that spectrum and how bad the bottom 20% of the USA really do have it. You shouldn't have to work 12-16 hours a day of unskilled labor to have a car and decent place to live. No to mention the few million homeless that we have. While the upper 0.1% are grotesquely richer than the rest of us and continue to only enlarge that gap. I can't agree with you at all. With technology improvements we should have a decent spread in wealth and it should be diminishing not increasing. This is indeed where the government should come in with wealth distribution. For a human being it doesn't matter if you have 1 billion or 100 billion you really still have far more than enough money.