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Primarily because their unique value add to society has been growing (due to technology), and the unique value add of the bottom 50 percent has been decreasing

Primarily because their unique value add to society has been growing (due to technology), and the unique value add of the bottom 50 percent has been decreasing (due to technology and globalization). Take JK Rowling as an example. Her work added significant value to the lives of hundreds of millions, and she got a slice of all that value creation (say, 30 percent of it). Nobody is worse off. Everyone is better off. Her value proposition was magnified by the scale afforded to her by modern day distribution and movie deals, which is why she got so fabulously wealthy compared to what an author could've achieved (relative to their surrounding population) 100 years ago. The poorest people inside developed countries on the other hand have had a decreasing value add to society. This is partly because of automation and partly because of globalization and the fact they now have to compete with 1 billion Chinese who work harder than them and for less.

coldcode 5y ago
Why not just kill all the poor people then, or let them starve to death. Leave the land for Gates and Bezos and Musk, clearly they are worth more than me because they have more money. The value of a human is not measured by how much money they "earned" or how cheaply they can be "worked". You could bring back slavery so that poor people work for free and the rich get more rich and thus more valuable.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  I expect more from them - I think it's less than ideal that there are people who take from public goods and contribute nothing or very little. They're effectively leeching off the backs of others. That doesn't mean I want them dead, they're contributing what society has demanded from them (nothing) and that's the fault of society's low expectations.
mahogany 5y ago
Do you think monetary wealth is gained only when someone adds value to society (and in proportion to the value added)? If so, what is your definition of value?
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  I think money earned through voluntary exchange is highly correlated and generally in proportion with value add to society. If we zoom in to particular examples, most of them fit into this category. You pay Netflix $15/month because you think it adds more than that much value to your life. Netflix earning that income is a consequence of your judgement of the value add of that service to your life. If Netflix makes billions in profits, it's because people like you thought that it added that much value (and more) to their lives. The same reasoning applies to most things (groceries, personal trainer, hairdresser, etc). There are ways that people can get rich that definitely aren't proportionate to their value add. Cronyism, externalities, hijacking people's dopamine systems, and so on. That's why we need a government that can implement the right policies that maximize the correlation between money earned and value add. There's also things that add large value through positive externalities that don't result in getting rich, such as scientific research, where it's very hard to privatize the benefits. A big problem we have in this discourse is the conflation of the two ways of making money (value add vs extraction) into a single bucket (on the far-left it's all extraction and on the economic-right it's all value-add), which is having a terrible impact on our ability to think clearly about policy and is making regular people resentful and jealous instead of thankful towards the most productive people in our society.
  - modo_mario 5y ago
    >I think money earned through voluntary exchange is highly correlated and generally in proportion with value add to society. If we zoom in to particular examples, most of them fit into this category. When I think of the richest that gained a disproportionate amount of that wealth that left the bottom i generally think of rentseekers, people using anticompetitive practices,(near) monopolies, duopolies or monopsonies, etc Reaching that position has been made easier for many of them due to technological advances indeed but that they're in those and that they're incredibly unhealthy for capitalism is the case none the less. Also definitely cronyism and so on as you mentioned. When we look closely most companies and the people pulling profit from them fit into this category of utilising a form of capitalism that can't be considered healthy for society at large. For example everything from intel and amd artificially extending their IP into perpetuity by strategically extending the standards with new IP every x years to microsoft simply waiting out a competitors bankruptcy in court and abusing their clout for competitive advantage in new markets, apple and google using their duopoly/monopsony positions to charge high rates in their app stores to google dictating webstandards in their favour due to their clout and fucking over competitors, solarcity pulling shady contracts, supermarkt chains pulling a larger share of profit from farmers and other producers despite reducing their value to the distribution chain as their marketshare grows,etc When i think of these i think of people who have gathered value worth countless lifetimes of hard work to a point where it should be impossible becaused it is impossible to be proportionate. People who are generally wayyyyy further away from anyone in this thread wealth wise than we are from a bum on the street. > and is making regular people resentful and jealous Might have something to do with things like social mobility and such declining for so long. Capitalism should not be allowed to devolve into an oligarchy.

coldcode 5y ago

Why not just kill all the poor people then, or let them starve to death. Leave the land for Gates and Bezos and Musk, clearly they are worth more than me because they have more money. The value of a human is not measured by how much money they "earned" or how cheaply they can be "worked". You could bring back slavery so that poor people work for free and the rich get more rich and thus more valuable.

fighterpilot 5y ago
I expect more from them - I think it's less than ideal that there are people who take from public goods and contribute nothing or very little. They're effectively leeching off the backs of others. That doesn't mean I want them dead, they're contributing what society has demanded from them (nothing) and that's the fault of society's low expectations.

mahogany 5y ago

Do you think monetary wealth is gained only when someone adds value to society (and in proportion to the value added)? If so, what is your definition of value?

fighterpilot 5y ago
I think money earned through voluntary exchange is highly correlated and generally in proportion with value add to society. If we zoom in to particular examples, most of them fit into this category. You pay Netflix $15/month because you think it adds more than that much value to your life. Netflix earning that income is a consequence of your judgement of the value add of that service to your life. If Netflix makes billions in profits, it's because people like you thought that it added that much value (and more) to their lives. The same reasoning applies to most things (groceries, personal trainer, hairdresser, etc). There are ways that people can get rich that definitely aren't proportionate to their value add. Cronyism, externalities, hijacking people's dopamine systems, and so on. That's why we need a government that can implement the right policies that maximize the correlation between money earned and value add. There's also things that add large value through positive externalities that don't result in getting rich, such as scientific research, where it's very hard to privatize the benefits. A big problem we have in this discourse is the conflation of the two ways of making money (value add vs extraction) into a single bucket (on the far-left it's all extraction and on the economic-right it's all value-add), which is having a terrible impact on our ability to think clearly about policy and is making regular people resentful and jealous instead of thankful towards the most productive people in our society.
- modo_mario 5y ago
  >I think money earned through voluntary exchange is highly correlated and generally in proportion with value add to society. If we zoom in to particular examples, most of them fit into this category. When I think of the richest that gained a disproportionate amount of that wealth that left the bottom i generally think of rentseekers, people using anticompetitive practices,(near) monopolies, duopolies or monopsonies, etc Reaching that position has been made easier for many of them due to technological advances indeed but that they're in those and that they're incredibly unhealthy for capitalism is the case none the less. Also definitely cronyism and so on as you mentioned. When we look closely most companies and the people pulling profit from them fit into this category of utilising a form of capitalism that can't be considered healthy for society at large. For example everything from intel and amd artificially extending their IP into perpetuity by strategically extending the standards with new IP every x years to microsoft simply waiting out a competitors bankruptcy in court and abusing their clout for competitive advantage in new markets, apple and google using their duopoly/monopsony positions to charge high rates in their app stores to google dictating webstandards in their favour due to their clout and fucking over competitors, solarcity pulling shady contracts, supermarkt chains pulling a larger share of profit from farmers and other producers despite reducing their value to the distribution chain as their marketshare grows,etc When i think of these i think of people who have gathered value worth countless lifetimes of hard work to a point where it should be impossible becaused it is impossible to be proportionate. People who are generally wayyyyy further away from anyone in this thread wealth wise than we are from a bum on the street. > and is making regular people resentful and jealous Might have something to do with things like social mobility and such declining for so long. Capitalism should not be allowed to devolve into an oligarchy.