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I also think it's worth calling out that his follow-up, "Capital and Ideology" in its latter sections includes several suggestions for counteracting the trend t

• Fauntleroy 3y ago
  People whine about "wealth distribution" day and night, but at the end of the day what alternative is there to combat the (continually increasing) concentration of wealth at the top? At some point there will have to be redistribution, in some form, and the sooner society comes around to that the better off we'll all be.
  • theGnuMe 3y ago
    Death and taxes.
  • satellite2 3y ago
    Apparently he improved the conclusion in his second book. In the first one it was bittersweet as he only stuck to historical evidences and what he found was that the only periods of decreasing economic inequalities were wars.
  • Buttons840 3y ago
    Wealth redistribution and making it easier for new businesses to enter markets and compete. These often go hand-in-hand; safety nets allow people to take risks, and new competition prevents markets from colluding and ceasing competition.
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      Also letting legacy businesses die. It is more often than not that family firms in particular collapse after one or two generations, if not propped up.
  • pydry 3y ago
    I prefer to call it wealth re-re-distribution. The Walton family wealth, for example, is a capitalised stream of rents predicated on underpaying store staff and abusing market power with suppliers. That's a wealth transfer. That's redistribution. The Duke of Westminster is worth $11 billion because his ancestor was besties with William the Conqueror (not william the earner). These are wealth transfers and redistributions that, ideally, ought to be undone.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      Distribution implies few to many, concentration implies many to few. We could call it semantics or we could call it using words correctly.
      • pydry 3y ago
        It might imply few to many to you, but to other people it implies not earned. Implication is often a highly personal thing.
        • uoaei 3y ago
          https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribute https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribute Roughly, literally, "to give apart", i.e., to break up a resource from fewer to more owners. I'm a big fan of poststructuralism but social spaces generally require that people understand each other. We can't just go redefining words on personal whims unless the people you're communicating with have consented to be a part of that metatextual process. This isn't that kind of space.
          • abeppu 3y ago
            Literally nothing in the definitions you're linking to mentions anything about owners. And the definitions given at points just re-enforce the ambiguity. Definition 5 is "To apportion (more or less evenly)." I think one could reasonably read "more or less evenly" to mean "either more evenly or less evenly" or "relatively evenly". The definitions for "distribution" rather than "distribute" only weaken your narrow view further. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribution https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribution Definitions include "An apportionment by law (of funds, property)" and critically "The apportionment of income or wealth in a population" with the example usage "The wealth distribution became extremely skewed in the kleptocracy." I.e. becoming extremely skewed didn't mean it was no longer a "distribution" in virtue of being concentrated. And especially in a space where lots of people have a technical background, we're very likely to be thinking of the wealth distribution explicitly as a probability distribution (also listed as a separate definition), _especially_ we've already used the concept of quantiles on that distribution. Englishing flexibly, I think it's totally reasonable for "distribution" to refer to either the function assigning probability mass, _or_ to the act or process of making such a function true. People in this thread are mostly using this word in a reasonable way. You're the one seeking to redefine words by insisting that only an entropy-increasing change is a "distribution".
  • kelseyfrog 3y ago
    The alternative of last resort is always violent revolution[1]. Wealth redistribution is the olive branch. There seems to be an open question among the wealthy and political class of how far inequality can go given the modern police state and effectiveness of technology in accomplishing the goal of maintaining or exacerbating the current political economy. 1. See historical populist grivences against aristocracy that result in social restructuring.
    • sidewndr46 3y ago
      Overwhelmingly, violent revolution doesn't actually bring about the goals of the revolution. It just installs a new power structure with variations on all the old problems. Sometimes much worse. So it isn't really a "last resort". It's more of a "well you didn't compromise, so now our choice is to burn the whole system down"
      • kelseyfrog 3y ago
        Wholeheartedly agree. For the peasants, revolutionary goals are rarely fulfilled. For the previous elite though, they rarely find continuity of power post revolution. The sans-culottes didn't quite accomplish their goals(at least immediately), but Louis XVI among other elites didn't survive. Toussaint Louverture et al didn't accomplish their goals, but the French no longer controlled Haiti. Even Lenin and Trosky didn't accomplish their goals, but the Romanov didn't leave the Ipatiev House alive. Like many conflicts, one side doesn't have to win for one to lose.
        • EarthAmbassador 3y ago
          All true, which brings up the question how much better will the world be with a new elite. Also, maybe today’s generation of revolutionaries will do something different.
      • lostlogin 3y ago
        > Overwhelmingly, violent revolution doesn't actually bring about the goals of the revolution. It just installs a new power structure with variations on all the old problems. Sometimes much worse. There are examples either way, and sadly you seem right. I recently read but now can’t find a discussion around this that argued that extreme times promote extreme individuals. A violent revolution is clearly an extreme time and any leader that emerges is likely to have fought hard for their position.
  • _factor 3y ago
    How about we start with the largest wealth holding: property. One individual can own an entire town and charge people to live there indefinitely. This gets passed via inheritance and no longer equates to the initial building value. On a micro scale, the timeframe for owning investment properties should be limited. They provide a service, but over a long period of time the owner is simply a leech.
  • Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    For people against the wealth redistribution as a concept (whether it's UBI, better welfare programs, increased minimum wage, etc), what do you think the end-game looks like for continued growth in wealth inequality? The only answer I can see is that your customer base shrinks as fewer people are able to buy. Or you get violent revolution as the poor are sick and tired of being priced out of even being able to afford housing and they decide they have nothing left to lose.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• zozbot234 3y ago
  So he supports education vouchers and healthcare vouchers for everyone? Because that's what "wealth you can spend down for some specific purposes" is, in a practical sense. That's a welcome attitude, given that these things are often dismissed ideologically. (Also, we generally want people to have some retirement income in their old age when they can't work, and the goal of letting young folks spend down their "inheritance" seems to be in tension with that.)
  • abeppu 3y ago
    I think that muddies the water as much as saying that someone who supports UBI also must support foodstamps and housing vouchers. The point is pursuing greater _equality_. We are all heirs to a society that has produced enormous value; why should a small minority of kids get a huge extra unearned boost? Purpose-constrained assistance is not _equal_ to inheritance, in that heirs to private wealth aren't generally subject to those constraints. Money that the recipient can choose how to spend gives greater freedom than assistance in that dollar amount. E.g. my understanding is a perennial issue with housing vouchers is that landlords often don't want to accept vouchers, so they are less effective than their face-value in dollars would be.
    • zozbot234 3y ago
      > why should a small minority of kids get a huge extra unearned boost? That unearned boost is already available to anyone who manages to bequeath sufficient amounts of wealth to the next generation, and conversely becomes unavailable to those who squander that wealth instead. That doesn't really change all that much if you introduce redistribution: either way, there will always be plenty of kids who will spend the money foolishy, and forfeit that "extra boost". It's a very hard problem to solve because it involves people's culturally ingrained attitudes; but being bequeathed a sizeable inheritance in the first place at least implies that one's attitude to managing wealth has already stood the test of time.
      • alweirjt 3y ago
        > being bequeathed a sizeable inheritance in the first place at least implies that one's attitude to managing wealth has already stood the test of time. I don't believe so. At best it means perhaps your parents knew how to manage wealth. It doesn't imply the child inheritors will manage it well, or better than anyone else. At worst, it might simply mean the parents had so much wealth they were unable to spend it all before dying, and so some of it went to their offspring.
• uoaei 3y ago
  This technique is referred to as "baby bonds" in policy circles and has a number of advocates, lots of names you'd recognize.
  • abeppu 3y ago
    ... yes and no. E.g. some baby bonds proposals with backing from recognizable names would: - have benefits which scale inversely with family income, rather than being 'universal' - be accessible for specified purposes, like education, buying a home, etc https://socialequity.duke.edu/portfolio-item/baby-bonds-a-universal-path-to-ensure-the-next-generation-has-the-capital-to-thrive/ https://socialequity.duke.edu/portfolio-item/baby-bonds-a-un...
• AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > And naturally, this needs to be funded by taxes on the very wealthy. This is the part where the math never works out. If you look at the richest people, they have something like tens to low hundreds of billions of dollars. Which is less than the amount of money the federal government already spends every week. If you taxed the top 100 billionaires at a rate of 100%, it would fund the existing federal government (and no new programs) for about a year, and then there would be nothing left for next year. The funding for programs like that never comes from the "very wealthy" because there just aren't enough of them for that. It comes from the upper-middle class. Which is fine, but let's not delude ourselves that we can get there by only taxing Bill Gates and not your local cardiologist. Except that they already pay kind of high taxes. These are the people who make six figures but don't have a personal full-time tax accountant to engage in international tax avoidance shenanigans. They're how the state and federal governments in the US together spend around 50% of US GDP. So the problem isn't that we don't have enough tax revenue -- holy crap does the government have a large budget -- the problem is what we're spending it on. We should be spending less on the military and means-tested assistance programs and instead use the money for a UBI.
  • EarthAmbassador 3y ago
    Taxing the very wealthy heavily isn’t intended to fund the state. That argument is a red herring. It should be done to reduce the concentration of power that comes with dynastic wealth, which corrupts society. Arguments to maintain our status quo are typically ideological.
  • zozbot234 3y ago
    Note also that Bill Gates is giving away a vast majority of his wealth for philanthropic purposes. So if you tax Bill Gates, it turns out you're actually taking mostly every cent of that money from starving kids in Africa and elsewhere. That's something to think about for sure.
  • godelski 3y ago
    > This is the part where the math never works out. I think this is a bit naive because you're considering money to be fixed and treating the system as a zero sum game. In terms of revenue, the US government gets ~55% from individual income tax and 12% from corporate, with a total revenue of 403B/yr. But also turning the "dial" on tax doesn't only affect the revenue. Every "dial" turn turns other "dials" but this doesn't result in a constant value across the system, even in a fixed instance of time. There are dial configurations which dominate other dial configurations but the system is insanely coupled. Neither this argument nor the "just increase taxes" argument is great because they do not capture the nuance necessary for an effective strategy. What that is? I'm not an economist, but I can tell you the system is rather complex and there's good reason we're all talking past one another and that's because we're solving different optimization problems and even when we recognize that we generally don't recognize that we're not agreeing on coefficients of terms nor what variables are at play. I think we need to first recognize the complexity of these issues and most of he time should kinda just shut up unless we're being clear that we're discussing to learn rather than teach. [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/government-revenue/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...