9 ms·

I think this attitude of, instead of raising the bottom, lowering the top comes from a desire to punish rich people rather than help poor people. I think these

I think this attitude of, instead of raising the bottom, lowering the top comes from a desire to punish rich people rather than help poor people. I think these people would prefer everyone sit on rocks rather than poor people sit in wooden chairs while rich people had leather couches.

kevmo314 4y ago
It's easier to take away than to give and help. So I don't blame them for that mentality, but it would definitely be great if society worked to lift the poor up more.
- xwdv 4y ago
  It’s great to lift up the poor, but up to what extent? Poor will still be poor, so what’s an acceptable amount of poor we should allow where they just have to deal with it?
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. One day, hopefully not too many days away, our descendants will wake up and discover that the last poor person has been lifted from poverty. To get there from here, we have to take it one day at a time, and focus on changing what we can.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      > It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. Is that actually true? I’m very curious if there’s any theoretical evidence that a society where everyone is at minimum “middle class” can exist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
      - parineum 4y ago
        Probably not technically due to poor being a relative term but we have a lot of discussion these days about housing for the poor which is obviously important but there's a lot less talk about the poor starving (and really, there's more talk about the poor having an unhealthy amount of calories). I think it's important to keep perspective that we are actually making great progress on providing a higher quality of life for the worst off.
      - kodah 4y ago
        It's true that there will always be a lowest class as long as there's income. Currently, in the US there's a percentage that skip meals, heat/A/C etc or work multiple jobs. OP might be referring to minimizing or eliminating the necessities those people go without.
        mantas 4y ago
        No A/C = poor is a damn weird definition. Does it mean everybody was poor 100 years ago?
        jl6 4y ago
        Yes. Standards change over time. The acceptable level of poverty is not something morally objective, but rather dependent on the available technology/energy/capital.
        lucumo 4y ago
        But then you're back to the original question: is eradicating all poverty even possible? A tech like AC is not available to everyone all at once. It starts out very expensive and gets cheaper over time. It may end up cheap enough that it can be ubiquitous, but before that point there must be a time that only most people can afford it. If you then include it in the must-have category before the point of ubiquitousness, you will never get rid of poverty. Whereas if you include it after the point it's a pointless exercise, because everyone that wants one already has it.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      I’m sure some people will find a way to be seen as poor even if they have an adequate supply of money. Poor just means they have less than most other people.
    - parineum 4y ago
      >Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. To illustrate this point, in our current era of the mega rich, we also have record low levels of poverty. Wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible (but not always the case) for a billionaire to create more than a billion dollars of wealth for other people.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Wealth is not a zero sum game. But it is not possible for one person to create a billion dollars of wealth for other people. What creates wealth is actual productive labor, not some kind of vision.
        parineum 4y ago
        If one person creates a new process to make $3 widgets cost $2 and sells a billion of them, while paying his manufacturers $1 per widget, he made $1 billion dollars and each of their 1 billion customers are $1 wealthier.
        int_19h 4y ago
        What happens in practice is that one guy in a lab invents a new process in exchange for his paycheck, and then some very different guy in a suit gets to collect the money off that invention.
    - mantas 4y ago
      Depends on your definition of poor. If bottom 20% is poor as per some definitions, then you’ll always have poor. If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.
      - auveair 4y ago
        > If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness. I mean if we are only using the most convenient definition it's easy to say we have few poor people. If you are eating only rice everyday in your rusting trailer somewhere in the Midwest, you're poor. And yeah, when that happens, your mental health is not going to be great.
        mantas 4y ago
        There’s no convenient or not definition. But we have to agree on one before we start discussing if we can fix it. If we define poverty as defining bellow median, we won’t ever get rid of it. Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.
    - yucky 4y ago
      > It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. If it's a fallacy, then why has it always proven to be true, 100% of the time?
  - kodah 4y ago
    People up to middle class generally have money issues. There's probably some level of deeper assessment the court could do to determine impact if people are willing to share financials. At the end of the day, the goal is to create enough incentive for someone to stay and face justice. Anything that furthers that goal without marginalizing people is a good start.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    Unconditional food and shelter is acceptable level of poor. I don’t mean unlimited.
- z3c0 4y ago
  This chain so far is disdainfully reductive. Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game, so you can't give without taking. People aren't trying to punish rich people so much as force their hand into helping those that they rest so comfortably upon, given the total lack of meaningful initiative. The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    > Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game No, things (e.g. transactions in the economy, contracts that get signed, tax & transfer payments, etc) are almost never zero-sum. They are usually positive-sum, and sometimes very negative-sum. Almost never zero-sum. They appear to be zero-sum if you only focus on the raw dollars that change hands in a transaction. But they're not zero-sum in the utility that's created, which is what matters for any meaningful analysis.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- c22 4y ago
  It is absolutely not easier to take away than to help. When trying to take away you must fight the will of those you plan to deprive. Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Depends on whether you are giving people what they need, or what they want. If you ‘give’ an addict rehab they may fight you every step of the way, but if you give them heroin they’ll love you.
    - parineum 4y ago
      Forcing people into rehab doesn't work.
    - c22 4y ago
      If you're trying to "give" rehab to someone who does not want it you may in fact be "taking away". That said, there are other ways to help those with addiction beyond giving them heroin.
  - quacked 4y ago
    > Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation Yes, if the person you're helping has a calibrated moral compass and is mentally sound.
rolenthedeep 4y ago
It's difficult to share resources with the poor when the rich are hoarding the vast majority of those resources. We need both.
- rmk 4y ago
  What resources are the rich hoarding? Does Elon Musk own 500 pairs of pants that could otherwise have clothed other poor men? Is he hoarding 500 tons of grain that should be released to starving country? He burns tons of jet fuel, literally, but so do an equivalent load of 300 vacationers on a jet to a holiday destination (and they do not produce the same GDP increase, to boot). Is Jeff Bezos monopolizing the I-5 freeway, SeaTac airport, or clean air in Seattle? What are these resources that are being 'hoarded' by the rich and denied to poor people exactly? And how is an average American living in a 2000 sq ft house 'hoarding' a resource a homeless person could be living in? Should the average American take in a homeless person so that his 'hoarding' of resources is lessened or alleviated?
  - radicaldreamer 4y ago
    They’re hoarding capital instead of distributing it to their workers. Furthermore, they’re utilizing shared resources for their companies profit without paying proportionally.
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      >They’re hoarding capital This is GP's point, AFAICT. They're not hoarding grain or iron or silicon or network bandwidth - in fact the only reason they got rich in the first place is because they allocated these physical resources effectively to serve a wide group of people. (See AWS for example. The average computer runs at maybe 10% utilisation for 2 hours a day; whereas theirs are at a high utilisation 24/7.) As you rightly said, the things that Bezos, Musk and Gates are "hoarding" is capital in the literal sense. Their net worth isn't made of gold coins sitting in a swimming pool doing nothing, but car factories, server farms and massive logistics networks.
    - rmk 4y ago
fzeroracer 4y ago
The origin of the entire opioid epidemic comes from a company looking to enrich itself. You can't raise the bottom when the top is pushing the folks at the bottom, drowning them and taking the life vests from them to sell for pennies.
- lucumo 4y ago
  It's perfectly possible to think that some ways of generating wealth for yourself are immoral, without thinking that all such ways are immoral.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > It's perfectly possible to think that some ways of generating wealth for yourself are immoral, without thinking that all such ways are immoral. Ironically, SBF's mom wrote about that and even made a claim that if se has any sense self awareness would make her question her entire career given how her son and his colleagues turned out [0]: > The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways? 0: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/ https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...
- Melting_Harps 4y ago

kevmo314 4y ago

It's easier to take away than to give and help. So I don't blame them for that mentality, but it would definitely be great if society worked to lift the poor up more.

xwdv 4y ago
It’s great to lift up the poor, but up to what extent? Poor will still be poor, so what’s an acceptable amount of poor we should allow where they just have to deal with it?
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. One day, hopefully not too many days away, our descendants will wake up and discover that the last poor person has been lifted from poverty. To get there from here, we have to take it one day at a time, and focus on changing what we can.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    > It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. Is that actually true? I’m very curious if there’s any theoretical evidence that a society where everyone is at minimum “middle class” can exist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
    - parineum 4y ago
      Probably not technically due to poor being a relative term but we have a lot of discussion these days about housing for the poor which is obviously important but there's a lot less talk about the poor starving (and really, there's more talk about the poor having an unhealthy amount of calories). I think it's important to keep perspective that we are actually making great progress on providing a higher quality of life for the worst off.
    - kodah 4y ago
      It's true that there will always be a lowest class as long as there's income. Currently, in the US there's a percentage that skip meals, heat/A/C etc or work multiple jobs. OP might be referring to minimizing or eliminating the necessities those people go without.
      - mantas 4y ago
        No A/C = poor is a damn weird definition. Does it mean everybody was poor 100 years ago?
        jl6 4y ago
        Yes. Standards change over time. The acceptable level of poverty is not something morally objective, but rather dependent on the available technology/energy/capital.
        lucumo 4y ago
        But then you're back to the original question: is eradicating all poverty even possible? A tech like AC is not available to everyone all at once. It starts out very expensive and gets cheaper over time. It may end up cheap enough that it can be ubiquitous, but before that point there must be a time that only most people can afford it. If you then include it in the must-have category before the point of ubiquitousness, you will never get rid of poverty. Whereas if you include it after the point it's a pointless exercise, because everyone that wants one already has it.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I’m sure some people will find a way to be seen as poor even if they have an adequate supply of money. Poor just means they have less than most other people.
  - parineum 4y ago
    >Lift up as many people as possible. It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. To illustrate this point, in our current era of the mega rich, we also have record low levels of poverty. Wealth isn't a zero sum game. It's possible (but not always the case) for a billionaire to create more than a billion dollars of wealth for other people.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Wealth is not a zero sum game. But it is not possible for one person to create a billion dollars of wealth for other people. What creates wealth is actual productive labor, not some kind of vision.
      - parineum 4y ago
        If one person creates a new process to make $3 widgets cost $2 and sells a billion of them, while paying his manufacturers $1 per widget, he made $1 billion dollars and each of their 1 billion customers are $1 wealthier.
        int_19h 4y ago
        What happens in practice is that one guy in a lab invents a new process in exchange for his paycheck, and then some very different guy in a suit gets to collect the money off that invention.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Depends on your definition of poor. If bottom 20% is poor as per some definitions, then you’ll always have poor. If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness.
    - auveair 4y ago
      > If it’s enough calories and roof other your head… Then we have very few true poor. Especially if we don’t include those who are there due to choice and/or mental illness. I mean if we are only using the most convenient definition it's easy to say we have few poor people. If you are eating only rice everyday in your rusting trailer somewhere in the Midwest, you're poor. And yeah, when that happens, your mental health is not going to be great.
      - mantas 4y ago
        There’s no convenient or not definition. But we have to agree on one before we start discussing if we can fix it. If we define poverty as defining bellow median, we won’t ever get rid of it. Mental health as in mental health issues making people make decisions where they end up on the streets. Many homeless people were living normal lives when their mental health deteriorated.
  - yucky 4y ago
    > It’s a fallacy to think that there must be poor people. If it's a fallacy, then why has it always proven to be true, 100% of the time?
- kodah 4y ago
  People up to middle class generally have money issues. There's probably some level of deeper assessment the court could do to determine impact if people are willing to share financials. At the end of the day, the goal is to create enough incentive for someone to stay and face justice. Anything that furthers that goal without marginalizing people is a good start.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  Unconditional food and shelter is acceptable level of poor. I don’t mean unlimited.
z3c0 4y ago
This chain so far is disdainfully reductive. Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game, so you can't give without taking. People aren't trying to punish rich people so much as force their hand into helping those that they rest so comfortably upon, given the total lack of meaningful initiative. The best we get is this "effective altruism" bullshit, which is just regular billionaire puppetry with a shiny new coat.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  > Resource scarcity creates a zero-sum game No, things (e.g. transactions in the economy, contracts that get signed, tax & transfer payments, etc) are almost never zero-sum. They are usually positive-sum, and sometimes very negative-sum. Almost never zero-sum. They appear to be zero-sum if you only focus on the raw dollars that change hands in a transaction. But they're not zero-sum in the utility that's created, which is what matters for any meaningful analysis.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
c22 4y ago
It is absolutely not easier to take away than to help. When trying to take away you must fight the will of those you plan to deprive. Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Depends on whether you are giving people what they need, or what they want. If you ‘give’ an addict rehab they may fight you every step of the way, but if you give them heroin they’ll love you.
  - parineum 4y ago
    Forcing people into rehab doesn't work.
  - c22 4y ago
    If you're trying to "give" rehab to someone who does not want it you may in fact be "taking away". That said, there are other ways to help those with addiction beyond giving them heroin.
- quacked 4y ago
  > Whereas while helping you can often expect cooperation Yes, if the person you're helping has a calibrated moral compass and is mentally sound.

rolenthedeep 4y ago

It's difficult to share resources with the poor when the rich are hoarding the vast majority of those resources. We need both.

rmk 4y ago
What resources are the rich hoarding? Does Elon Musk own 500 pairs of pants that could otherwise have clothed other poor men? Is he hoarding 500 tons of grain that should be released to starving country? He burns tons of jet fuel, literally, but so do an equivalent load of 300 vacationers on a jet to a holiday destination (and they do not produce the same GDP increase, to boot). Is Jeff Bezos monopolizing the I-5 freeway, SeaTac airport, or clean air in Seattle? What are these resources that are being 'hoarded' by the rich and denied to poor people exactly? And how is an average American living in a 2000 sq ft house 'hoarding' a resource a homeless person could be living in? Should the average American take in a homeless person so that his 'hoarding' of resources is lessened or alleviated?
- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  They’re hoarding capital instead of distributing it to their workers. Furthermore, they’re utilizing shared resources for their companies profit without paying proportionally.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    >They’re hoarding capital This is GP's point, AFAICT. They're not hoarding grain or iron or silicon or network bandwidth - in fact the only reason they got rich in the first place is because they allocated these physical resources effectively to serve a wide group of people. (See AWS for example. The average computer runs at maybe 10% utilisation for 2 hours a day; whereas theirs are at a high utilisation 24/7.) As you rightly said, the things that Bezos, Musk and Gates are "hoarding" is capital in the literal sense. Their net worth isn't made of gold coins sitting in a swimming pool doing nothing, but car factories, server farms and massive logistics networks.
  - rmk 4y ago

fzeroracer 4y ago

The origin of the entire opioid epidemic comes from a company looking to enrich itself. You can't raise the bottom when the top is pushing the folks at the bottom, drowning them and taking the life vests from them to sell for pennies.

lucumo 4y ago
It's perfectly possible to think that some ways of generating wealth for yourself are immoral, without thinking that all such ways are immoral.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > It's perfectly possible to think that some ways of generating wealth for yourself are immoral, without thinking that all such ways are immoral. Ironically, SBF's mom wrote about that and even made a claim that if se has any sense self awareness would make her question her entire career given how her son and his colleagues turned out [0]: > The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents, whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal. A morally serious inquiry into the requisite meaning of free will needs to face some basic facts about this society—for starters, that in the United States parental income and education are the most powerful predictors of whether a three-year-old will end up in the boardroom or in prison; that most abusive parents were themselves victims of abuse and neglect; that the norms of one’s peer group when growing up are powerful determinants of behavior; and that traits of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness, which have a large genetic component, are among the more robust predictors of criminal behavior. Such an inquiry would also need to address what evidence would suffice to conclude that Smith could have behaved differently. Is it enough that someone in a similar situation once pulled herself up by her own bootstraps? That the average person does? And how can we be sure that the situations are in fact similar in relevant ways? 0: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/ https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blam...
Melting_Harps 4y ago