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> There are plenty of people in the world who would think that anything over $500/month is way more than enough for one person. Should your compensation be redu

> There are plenty of people in the world who would think that anything over $500/month is way more than enough for one person. Should your compensation be reduced to that amount? Disclaimer: I live in a 3rd world country and my salary is 1/3 of what the standard US salary is. YES, I do believe that everybody's compensation (including mine) who are in the top 10% of the population should be decreased/limited. Provided that their living costs are adjusted so that the $500/month get you similar standard of living to other nice places (say, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, etc). The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. How the 90% of the population haven't turned on us is just sheer luck and a political, security system that is rigged in our favor. I would be happy to be part of a "pay cut initiative" for all the top 10% earners, if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody. I had the opportunity to grow up and be friends with poor people who just did not have the chance to succeed, so I don't believe the "poor people are just lazy" narrative. There's good hard working people that just never had a chance. Similarly how there is bad rich people that just want to leech from others.

chrisseaton 4y ago
> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.
- criley2 4y ago
  Historically it was much, much worse. The only way you can make an argument for saying inequality is greater now (when global poverty/subsistence farming is at the lowest % since human settlement 12000 years ago) is to point to the sheer amount of wealth we generate compared to any other period and nit pick about it's allocation. That's fine, but if you want to go back to farming for your life, like most humans for most of history, you'll probably find it a worse life than being in a developed country middle class, even if "your wealth is technically more equal to a king than a middle class to a ceo"
  - RyanHamilton 4y ago
    What source are you basing that on? You can find countless sources that show the 0.1% owning an ever greater share: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-01-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i... "Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%."
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - criley2 4y ago
      I'm basing that on global numbers, not national numbers. Sure, I don't doubt that in developed economies inequality is getting worse. But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.
      - owisd 4y ago
        There's a good video on how that $1.90 is arbitrary and too low, and if you try to come up with a poverty line from first principles, you end up more in the $5-$12 range, where it doesn't paint such a great picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s
      - RyanHamilton 4y ago
        Inequality is about the ratio of high earners to low earners. What you have linked to is a different concept, i.e. absolute income. Income inequality in china also increased, see figure 5: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-ine... Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.
- dylan604 4y ago
  with minor blips where the peasants revolt and take out those above them only to settle back under the rule of someone new. it is a minor annoyance to those amassing wealth to keep in mind.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Never really happened in my country. The second tier complained at one point, and peacefully reached an agreement with the top tier (Magna Carta.) Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Uh, what about the time that Parliament decapitated the king and established a Puritan dictatorship for a minute
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        > for a minute Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)
    - jjulius 4y ago
      >Never really happened in my country. >Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years. So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        > So we've shifted the goalposts No... why do you think that? > The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there. Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question. > "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years" I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.
- FabHK 4y ago
  I am fairly sure inequality is more extreme than that (top 10% hold 70%) at the moment, and it was less bad in the second half of the 20th century. The top US marginal income tax rate was 90% in the 1960s, and 70% in the 1970s, and it did not seem to discourage GDP growth or innovation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...
  - kansface 4y ago
    No one actually paid those rates, so it goes. The narrative is that part of lowering the rates was closing the loop holes...
  - Aarostotle 4y ago
    We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago. Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials? Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money. Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly. Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.
    - 4y ago
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  Might want to check your history books, because mine are full of failed empires and revolutions.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    When they failed... did wealth redistribute, or was the bulk immediately claimed by someone else? What examples of civilisations without unequal wealth distribution are you thinking of?
- Grustaf 4y ago
  That particular ratio, if true, is not the issue. Someone being one order of magnitude richer than someone else does not necessarily damage society, the problem is how much the richest 0.1% control.
- ggpsv 4y ago
  Quite the opposite actually. "all of human history" spans at least 160,000 years and the inequality that you and the parent comment to are alluding to is a rather modern artifact. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  very untrue. It is well documented that income equality is more extreme now (by an order of magnitude) than it was at any point in recorded human history. The inequality is something like 100x that of french revolution times where terms like bourgeois came from. The fact that we haven't broken out in revolution yet is just a testament to how powerful the media state, corporations, and lobbying have become.
criley2 4y ago
The problem isn't the 91% to the 99% in my opinion. In the United States, the 99th percentile for income is ~$300,000, which is a ton of money in a low cost of living (rural) area and a decent amount of money in a high cost of living (urban) area. But these are not the "capitalist class". They don't own significant portions of a company unless they started a small business (a lawyer or doctor running their own practice). They also generally had to go through an enormous burden to get there. A doctor for example might be nearly 40 years old with $500,000+ in debt before they're making $300k, and many doctors will never make that much, period. The funny part of "limiting income" is that it only affects the working rich, not the capitalist class. Steve Job's salary was $1 and many CEO's famously have basically no salary and compensation in stock. So what do you do? Tax their stock sales? We do and should do more. Force them to sell their stock for the benefit of the taxpayer? Ban them from even owning large amounts of the company? Have the government automatically own part of the company? All of these sound yikes to me.
- Phenomenit 4y ago
  The same limits can be applied to organizations and constellations of organizations.
toephu2 4y ago
> if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities. If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?
- corrral 4y ago
  > It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities. > If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization? How are these two passages connected? If there's one efficiently-run government organization (there are, even in the US—benefits programs tend to be quite efficient, contrary to "common knowledge") then that proves... what? That taxing the rich would equalize opportunities? The two things have practically nothing to do with one another.
- dlp211 4y ago
  > If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization? Please let this trope die. The US government is generally, and especially when it comes to welfare programs, efficient.
  - toephu2 4y ago
    Welfare is one of the least efficient government programs in the U.S. It's rife with corruption. What makes you think it's efficient? "It currently stands at about 25 percent, as did in the 1970s. This means the ability of the poor to sustain a higher level of income independently of transfers has not changed over time." [1] https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2021/eb_21-15 https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    All of my experience dealing with the government says the exact opposite.
- Johnny555 4y ago
its_ethan 4y ago
Just curious, if 10% of people holding 70% of wealth is unreasonable, how do you reconcile 1% of Spotify artists getting 90% of all "streams"? Basically, you're saying that the current distribution is crazy/unsustainable (and maybe it is) but the distribution is actually not totally out of whack with the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle). Just wondering where your confidence comes from that a functioning society doesn't actually depend somewhat on that distribution? i.e. that the general populace's sense of "fair" isn't actually correctly calibrated at this distribution?
- wwarner 4y ago
  Actually, it's not simply the proportion, but the fact that over time the proportion of wealth held by the richest has been growing really fast. So, to use your analogy, I agree that a small number artists commanding the lion's share of attention can be fair, but if over time, an ever smaller number commanded an ever greater share, very soon every one would be listening to one artist and one song, and fair or not I don't think that would be good for Spotify, audiences, artists or anyone else.
  - its_ethan 4y ago
    I think there's a valid point here, but I also think (at least anecdotally) that we are trending in the direction of more people listening to fewer songs. (Would love to see some Spotify data on that front lol) I would argue that it's not going to collapse to 1 artist or 1 song for a similar reason that all wealth will never be in the hands of 1 person. If the rate of change (or just raw distribution) in wealth is unhealthy, that will present itself in the form of a less healthy economy. That will likely cause a bit of a churn and redistribution to sort of self correct. There's also the fact that wealth typically doesn't survive through generations all that well. If this didn't happen, the Rockafeller's/ Vanderbilt's/ Carnagie's from the past would still have the top wealth holdings - sure they are still incredibly well off and have a huge advantage from family name, but per a Forbes list none of them are in the top 2500 wealthiest.
  - dh2022 4y ago
    90% of the customers voted with their "ears" to listen to 1% of music producers. Nothing wrong with that.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.

criley2 4y ago
Historically it was much, much worse. The only way you can make an argument for saying inequality is greater now (when global poverty/subsistence farming is at the lowest % since human settlement 12000 years ago) is to point to the sheer amount of wealth we generate compared to any other period and nit pick about it's allocation. That's fine, but if you want to go back to farming for your life, like most humans for most of history, you'll probably find it a worse life than being in a developed country middle class, even if "your wealth is technically more equal to a king than a middle class to a ceo"
- RyanHamilton 4y ago
  What source are you basing that on? You can find countless sources that show the 0.1% owning an ever greater share: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-01-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i... "Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - criley2 4y ago
    I'm basing that on global numbers, not national numbers. Sure, I don't doubt that in developed economies inequality is getting worse. But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.
    - owisd 4y ago
      There's a good video on how that $1.90 is arbitrary and too low, and if you try to come up with a poverty line from first principles, you end up more in the $5-$12 range, where it doesn't paint such a great picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s
    - RyanHamilton 4y ago
      Inequality is about the ratio of high earners to low earners. What you have linked to is a different concept, i.e. absolute income. Income inequality in china also increased, see figure 5: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-ine... Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.
dylan604 4y ago
with minor blips where the peasants revolt and take out those above them only to settle back under the rule of someone new. it is a minor annoyance to those amassing wealth to keep in mind.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Never really happened in my country. The second tier complained at one point, and peacefully reached an agreement with the top tier (Magna Carta.) Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Uh, what about the time that Parliament decapitated the king and established a Puritan dictatorship for a minute
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > for a minute Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >Never really happened in my country. >Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years. So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > So we've shifted the goalposts No... why do you think that? > The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there. Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question. > "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years" I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.
FabHK 4y ago
I am fairly sure inequality is more extreme than that (top 10% hold 70%) at the moment, and it was less bad in the second half of the 20th century. The top US marginal income tax rate was 90% in the 1960s, and 70% in the 1970s, and it did not seem to discourage GDP growth or innovation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...
- kansface 4y ago
  No one actually paid those rates, so it goes. The narrative is that part of lowering the rates was closing the loop holes...
- Aarostotle 4y ago
  We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago. Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials? Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money. Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly. Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.
  - 4y ago
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Might want to check your history books, because mine are full of failed empires and revolutions.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  When they failed... did wealth redistribute, or was the bulk immediately claimed by someone else? What examples of civilisations without unequal wealth distribution are you thinking of?
Grustaf 4y ago
That particular ratio, if true, is not the issue. Someone being one order of magnitude richer than someone else does not necessarily damage society, the problem is how much the richest 0.1% control.
ggpsv 4y ago
Quite the opposite actually. "all of human history" spans at least 160,000 years and the inequality that you and the parent comment to are alluding to is a rather modern artifact. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
sam0x17 4y ago
very untrue. It is well documented that income equality is more extreme now (by an order of magnitude) than it was at any point in recorded human history. The inequality is something like 100x that of french revolution times where terms like bourgeois came from. The fact that we haven't broken out in revolution yet is just a testament to how powerful the media state, corporations, and lobbying have become.

criley2 4y ago

The problem isn't the 91% to the 99% in my opinion. In the United States, the 99th percentile for income is ~$300,000, which is a ton of money in a low cost of living (rural) area and a decent amount of money in a high cost of living (urban) area. But these are not the "capitalist class". They don't own significant portions of a company unless they started a small business (a lawyer or doctor running their own practice). They also generally had to go through an enormous burden to get there. A doctor for example might be nearly 40 years old with $500,000+ in debt before they're making $300k, and many doctors will never make that much, period. The funny part of "limiting income" is that it only affects the working rich, not the capitalist class. Steve Job's salary was $1 and many CEO's famously have basically no salary and compensation in stock. So what do you do? Tax their stock sales? We do and should do more. Force them to sell their stock for the benefit of the taxpayer? Ban them from even owning large amounts of the company? Have the government automatically own part of the company? All of these sound yikes to me.

Phenomenit 4y ago
The same limits can be applied to organizations and constellations of organizations.

toephu2 4y ago

> if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities. If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

corrral 4y ago
> It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities. > If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization? How are these two passages connected? If there's one efficiently-run government organization (there are, even in the US—benefits programs tend to be quite efficient, contrary to "common knowledge") then that proves... what? That taxing the rich would equalize opportunities? The two things have practically nothing to do with one another.
dlp211 4y ago
> If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization? Please let this trope die. The US government is generally, and especially when it comes to welfare programs, efficient.
- toephu2 4y ago
  Welfare is one of the least efficient government programs in the U.S. It's rife with corruption. What makes you think it's efficient? "It currently stands at about 25 percent, as did in the 1970s. This means the ability of the poor to sustain a higher level of income independently of transfers has not changed over time." [1] https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2021/eb_21-15 https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
- fallingknife 4y ago
  All of my experience dealing with the government says the exact opposite.
Johnny555 4y ago

its_ethan 4y ago

Just curious, if 10% of people holding 70% of wealth is unreasonable, how do you reconcile 1% of Spotify artists getting 90% of all "streams"? Basically, you're saying that the current distribution is crazy/unsustainable (and maybe it is) but the distribution is actually not totally out of whack with the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle). Just wondering where your confidence comes from that a functioning society doesn't actually depend somewhat on that distribution? i.e. that the general populace's sense of "fair" isn't actually correctly calibrated at this distribution?

wwarner 4y ago
Actually, it's not simply the proportion, but the fact that over time the proportion of wealth held by the richest has been growing really fast. So, to use your analogy, I agree that a small number artists commanding the lion's share of attention can be fair, but if over time, an ever smaller number commanded an ever greater share, very soon every one would be listening to one artist and one song, and fair or not I don't think that would be good for Spotify, audiences, artists or anyone else.
- its_ethan 4y ago
  I think there's a valid point here, but I also think (at least anecdotally) that we are trending in the direction of more people listening to fewer songs. (Would love to see some Spotify data on that front lol) I would argue that it's not going to collapse to 1 artist or 1 song for a similar reason that all wealth will never be in the hands of 1 person. If the rate of change (or just raw distribution) in wealth is unhealthy, that will present itself in the form of a less healthy economy. That will likely cause a bit of a churn and redistribution to sort of self correct. There's also the fact that wealth typically doesn't survive through generations all that well. If this didn't happen, the Rockafeller's/ Vanderbilt's/ Carnagie's from the past would still have the top wealth holdings - sure they are still incredibly well off and have a huge advantage from family name, but per a Forbes list none of them are in the top 2500 wealthiest.
- dh2022 4y ago
  90% of the customers voted with their "ears" to listen to 1% of music producers. Nothing wrong with that.