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> I believe income inequality is bad because many people don't have enough to live comfortably and my parents taught me sharing is important. The "living comfo

> I believe income inequality is bad because many people don't have enough to live comfortably and my parents taught me sharing is important. The "living comfortably" metric is useful. It rules out the "hunter gatherer" argument where we're back in stone age, presumably not comfortable but as equal as can be. If everyone had enough to live comfortably but inequality increased, would that be OK?

jfengel 3y ago
Pretty much, yeah, with the priviso that "comfortable" is relative to the times. These days, "comfortable" would include a place to live that is clean and fairly safe, food that is more than just enough calories, ordinary medical care, and access to the Internet. This is a lot more than a century ago, but they're widespread and cheap enough that we can easily afford to provide it for every (Western) citizen. It's costly, but we could provide it, and the super-wealthy could still be incredibly wealthy. Shy of that, there's going to be a lot of tension. I can't predict what that will look like in the future, and I can't say what to do about the non-Western majority of the world who can't afford to do this. But at least for the here-and-near-future-now, it's something that would allow people to live without desperation. We now have so much unnecessary desperation, and that's what I find offensive. We'll still be faced with problems of meaning, but at least we're avoiding the hypocrisy of wealthy people saying, "Go find your meaning by working for me, while I take the vast majority of the profits just because I'm already rich."
slg 3y ago
"Living comfortably" is obviously a subjective metric, but that is the general goal. Most people don't want equality of outcome in which everyone's life is exactly the same. Some range of wealth inequality is permissible in many people's minds, including mine. I think the problem with your hypothetical is that increasing wealth inequality generally comes at the expense of someone. It isn't simply that the billionaires' wealth grows faster than the wealth of the poorest. Often the billionaire is a billionaire because they have taken advantage of an unequal system which has real victims. Wealth inequality also leads to other issues of fairness that go beyond living conditions. For example, impact on the environment is one. That $100m yacht you mention will have a huge carbon cost. There is also a concern of political power in a democracy with free speech. If a billionaire can afford to plaster their political message on every TV network, radio station, and social media site, will that give them an outsized role in a democracy that is meant to grant political equality to all? This unequal distribution of political power can easily create a feedback loop that allows these billionaires to use their wealth to capture more wealth and political power.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Aren't you assuming a zero sum economy without growth? The four men in the article all created their own wealth, they didn't steal it, so this seems like a pretty poor situation to try and make the argument that wealth inequality must always create "real victims".
  - slg 3y ago
    The economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. The easiest way to prove that is to look at a company like Tesla. Do you think their entire market cap is newly created value? For that to be the case, everyone who purchased a Tesla wouldn't have purchased any other car if Tesla didn't exist. As soon as we acknowledge that Tesla has siphoned off customers from other companies, we acknowledge that there is at least some zero-sum nature to the economy. Then you just have to start looking for other places that this partial zero-sum situation exists such as employeer-employee relationships at Musk's companies and that brings us back to wealth inequality.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      I don't follow. Let's presume the rational markets hypothesis for now (dubious in the case of Tesla but it's not important here). Then the value created by Tesla is not people owning cars who previously didn't, but the increased quality or value of the cars vs what they otherwise would have had. Whilst individual purchasing decisions are zero-sum in the moment i.e. if someone spends X on a Tesla they can't then spend X on anything else, that doesn't mean Tesla siphons customers from every other company in the world (why restrict to cars?). Rather, in the long term other companies get more competitive, increasing the value of all cars, and people get "richer" because now they can drive more/better/their air is cleaner/whatever, and Tesla also get richer, so wealth has been created. An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth.
      - slg 3y ago
        >An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth. As I said, the economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. It exists somewhere in between. If you can recognize that individual microeconomic situations can be zero-sum, you should be able to recognize that some macroeconomic situations are zero-sum. I'm not arguing that these guys didn't create any wealth. I am arguing that their wealth is not equal to the value they created. Some of their wealth is wealth they captured from other people. I think it is pretty obvious that stockholders of other automakers would have more wealth in a world without Tesla. Musk now captures that wealth for Tesla stockholders. The same situation plays out for other people in Musk's orbit. The rest of the automakers are now producing fewer cars due to the presence of Tesla, therefore they are employing fewer people. Musk is extremely anti-union while many of his competitors have a unionized workforce. This allows him to treat his employees worse off. His wealth is therefore effectively coming from workers who are now in a worse situation than they were if Tesla didn't exist and those employees were working for another automakers.

jfengel 3y ago

Pretty much, yeah, with the priviso that "comfortable" is relative to the times. These days, "comfortable" would include a place to live that is clean and fairly safe, food that is more than just enough calories, ordinary medical care, and access to the Internet. This is a lot more than a century ago, but they're widespread and cheap enough that we can easily afford to provide it for every (Western) citizen. It's costly, but we could provide it, and the super-wealthy could still be incredibly wealthy. Shy of that, there's going to be a lot of tension. I can't predict what that will look like in the future, and I can't say what to do about the non-Western majority of the world who can't afford to do this. But at least for the here-and-near-future-now, it's something that would allow people to live without desperation. We now have so much unnecessary desperation, and that's what I find offensive. We'll still be faced with problems of meaning, but at least we're avoiding the hypocrisy of wealthy people saying, "Go find your meaning by working for me, while I take the vast majority of the profits just because I'm already rich."

slg 3y ago

"Living comfortably" is obviously a subjective metric, but that is the general goal. Most people don't want equality of outcome in which everyone's life is exactly the same. Some range of wealth inequality is permissible in many people's minds, including mine. I think the problem with your hypothetical is that increasing wealth inequality generally comes at the expense of someone. It isn't simply that the billionaires' wealth grows faster than the wealth of the poorest. Often the billionaire is a billionaire because they have taken advantage of an unequal system which has real victims. Wealth inequality also leads to other issues of fairness that go beyond living conditions. For example, impact on the environment is one. That $100m yacht you mention will have a huge carbon cost. There is also a concern of political power in a democracy with free speech. If a billionaire can afford to plaster their political message on every TV network, radio station, and social media site, will that give them an outsized role in a democracy that is meant to grant political equality to all? This unequal distribution of political power can easily create a feedback loop that allows these billionaires to use their wealth to capture more wealth and political power.

nvm0n2 3y ago
Aren't you assuming a zero sum economy without growth? The four men in the article all created their own wealth, they didn't steal it, so this seems like a pretty poor situation to try and make the argument that wealth inequality must always create "real victims".
- slg 3y ago
  The economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. The easiest way to prove that is to look at a company like Tesla. Do you think their entire market cap is newly created value? For that to be the case, everyone who purchased a Tesla wouldn't have purchased any other car if Tesla didn't exist. As soon as we acknowledge that Tesla has siphoned off customers from other companies, we acknowledge that there is at least some zero-sum nature to the economy. Then you just have to start looking for other places that this partial zero-sum situation exists such as employeer-employee relationships at Musk's companies and that brings us back to wealth inequality.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    I don't follow. Let's presume the rational markets hypothesis for now (dubious in the case of Tesla but it's not important here). Then the value created by Tesla is not people owning cars who previously didn't, but the increased quality or value of the cars vs what they otherwise would have had. Whilst individual purchasing decisions are zero-sum in the moment i.e. if someone spends X on a Tesla they can't then spend X on anything else, that doesn't mean Tesla siphons customers from every other company in the world (why restrict to cars?). Rather, in the long term other companies get more competitive, increasing the value of all cars, and people get "richer" because now they can drive more/better/their air is cleaner/whatever, and Tesla also get richer, so wealth has been created. An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth.
    - slg 3y ago
      >An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth. As I said, the economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. It exists somewhere in between. If you can recognize that individual microeconomic situations can be zero-sum, you should be able to recognize that some macroeconomic situations are zero-sum. I'm not arguing that these guys didn't create any wealth. I am arguing that their wealth is not equal to the value they created. Some of their wealth is wealth they captured from other people. I think it is pretty obvious that stockholders of other automakers would have more wealth in a world without Tesla. Musk now captures that wealth for Tesla stockholders. The same situation plays out for other people in Musk's orbit. The rest of the automakers are now producing fewer cars due to the presence of Tesla, therefore they are employing fewer people. Musk is extremely anti-union while many of his competitors have a unionized workforce. This allows him to treat his employees worse off. His wealth is therefore effectively coming from workers who are now in a worse situation than they were if Tesla didn't exist and those employees were working for another automakers.