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People like to talk about inequality but absolute poverty seems like a more important target. Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse

• oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  The Spirit Level [1] makes a good argument for why more equal societies benefit everyone within them. At the very least, I think it's fair to say that "Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse" is not definitively true. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)
  • amelius 3y ago
    I'm ok with people working hard and getting paid for it. I'm not ok with those people using their money against me in any way, which is what still happens and nobody talks about.
    • digging 3y ago
      > I'm ok with people working hard and getting paid for it Is that an accurate description of CEOs worth billions of dollars though? How hard are they supposedly working? I'm probably lazier than most of them as an IC with disabilities and non-work interests... but it's not humanly possible that they get ~40,000 times as much done in a day as I do.
      • Snow_Falls 3y ago
        If hard work were accurately linked to monetary benefit, poor African substinamce farmers would be some of the richest people on earth. Clearly that isn't the case, money come from more thanjust hard work. Luck has a lot to do with it, such as not being born an African substinamce farmer.
        • Pyrobyte 3y ago
          But isn't there a great deal of skill involved, depending on the skill level and how rare a certain skills is. People will be payed a lot more. It must take a great deal of stress and difficulty to get a business to a scale where their CEO is making billions.
      • nec4b 3y ago
        >> but it's not humanly possible that they get ~40,000 times as much done in a day as I do. But you do understand why a popular singer or a football player get that much more than you?
  • margalabargala 3y ago
    I think you and the person you replied to are talking about two different things here. OP is saying "in terms of goals, the end goal should be reduction of poverty, not reduction of rich people". You're saying "in reality, data says that reduction of rich people tends to correlate with reduction of poverty", thus opening up reduction of rich people as one potential path towards the reduction of poverty. I don't think it's been definitively demonstrated that the existence of rich people necessitates the existence of poverty. I would agree that, in reality, the creation of rich people tends to also lead to the creation of poverty.
    • NegativeLatency 3y ago
      There's rich people, and then there's the ultra rich people. It just doesn't seem possible to become a billionaire through ethical means.
      • renewiltord 3y ago
        James Patterson just wrote books people like and he’s a billionaire. Are murder stories unethical or something?
        • Philpax 3y ago
          Does he write his own books, though? [0] [1] [2] It's his name on the front of the book, but he is not necessarily the primary author. That sounds a little unethical to me. [0] https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/380231/James-Patterson-the-best-seller-who-doesn-t-write-his-own-books https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/books/380231/James-P... [1] https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-to-be-the-worlds-bestselling-author-75261 https://theconversation.com/why-you-dont-need-to-write-much-... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/james-patterson-a7665576.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/featu...
          • renewiltord 3y ago
            Stephen King then? Or J K Rowling? They became billionaires off their work and wrote all their own work if image rights are unethical to you. Taylor Swift, perhaps? Paul McCartney. You only need one example to disprove the case. It doesn’t seem ridiculous that if you make something and charge $10 and 100 million people pay you that you’re necessarily doing something unethical.
  • NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Even if any singular ultra wealthy person is doing nice things, you'll still have bad actors like the Koch brothers who are actively trying (and succeeding) to subvert our government systems to their own benefit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers#The_Koch_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Ko... Which is why we need governmental solutions, laws, taxes, etc and can't rely on just good will. I havent read the book you recomended, but I will check it out. I'd also recomend the book "On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake" as it's a great description of how global elites have largely captured government for their own ends since the gilded age.
    • EnigmaFlare 3y ago
      That's just political campaigning, isn't it? How is that "subverting" or "bad actors"?
      • scottyah 3y ago
        Because they're the bad guys
      • Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
        Because the rule of law democratic processes are being tossed aside to accommodate said bad actors hence the apt moniker.
        • EnigmaFlare 3y ago
          I didn't pick that up from the referenced page. This work was illegal?
    • flandish 3y ago
      Anyone ultra wealthy has obtained it through active or past exploitation. Profit, dividends, and buybacks are unpaid wage.
    • codegrappler 3y ago
      Yet you think government corruption wouldn’t become an equal (or worse) problem?
  • jdietrich 3y ago
    The "Re-analyses and alleged failures to replicate" section of that Wikipedia article is really rather important - the idea that inequality causes problems independent of poverty relies on a lot of questionable assumptions and analyses.
• AlexandrB 3y ago
  > Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse; Are you sure about that? What if he spends that money supporting political figures and economic policies that make your life worse?
  • kurisufag 3y ago
    following this line of logic would mean that /anyone/ having more capital than you is evidence of wrongness, including social capital.
    • AlexandrB 3y ago
      It's not evidence of wrongness, but money is power. Especially in a post "Citizens United" world. My point is that saying that the vast income inequality being discussed does no harm to those at the bottom is inaccurate. At the very least it reduces the ability of the average person to influence their own government.
    • Shacklz 3y ago
      There's a difference between 'having more capital' and 'having absolutely absurd amounts of capitals'. If you look at income distribution graphs of the last few decades and the political influence those in the highest percentiles wielded, it's not entirely unfair to question whether this might make the life of the average citizen "worse".
    • digging 3y ago
      Yeah, pretty much, it's wrong to hand disproportionate power to individuals without checks on how that power is used to influence society, and we have very few such checks on extremely large amounts of money.
    • bparsons 3y ago
      You are getting close.
• underbluewaters 3y ago
  This is very not true since many (most) things we spend money on are in limited supply. I can make what I think is good money, but if remote FAANG workers decide to settle nearby then I suddenly can't afford a house. Same for automobiles after COVID, meat at the market, etc.
  • warner25 3y ago
    Yes, I've lived in Hawaii and coastal California where the availability of housing does seem to be heavily impacted by very wealthy people being able to buy up second and third (multi-million dollar) homes. A lot of regular wage earners (including professionals with six-figure incomes) are priced out of the market and these homes sit empty for most of the year; the owners are so wealthy that they don't even bother to rent them out when they aren't using them. Jobs are available, but people can't afford to live near their jobs.
    • beaeglebeached 3y ago
      Hawaii has an abundance of underutilized land through a combination of bad zoning/regulation (anti-market violence) and civil rights violations ( Hawaiian 'homelands' which reserves much public state owned lands to only people 'of the blood of the [right] races'). The housing issues are at best partially caused by the rich; plenty of places to put a cheap tar paper shack but for whatever non-market reason you cannot.
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    Thanks for this comment. I was going to make a similar one, but you beat me to it. Standard of living tends to be relative because of gentrification. Say you're making $X/yr and spend $Y/yr on groceries, gas, housing, and so on. Then a bunch of people making $5X start moving in to your neighborhood, slowly prices for everything are going to rise and now you're still making $X/yr but costs are approaching $5Y/yr on all your stuff. Also, at least in the USA, money is efficiently convertible to and from political power. So outsized wealth translates into outsized political power. Satya Nadella having far more money than I means he also has far more political clout than I have.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  > Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse; I'm more concerned about the availability of jobs, food, housing, etc. Does Satya Nadella not giving all of his extra monies to better causes and instead keeping it for himself make the lives of others (those in poverty) worse? Or "not better"? aka "billionaires choose to retain some portion of their earnings/wealth instead of dedicating it to poverty" Then the question becomes "why do we expect those with a lot of money to selflessly not want to keep the money for themselves and instead give back/give it away"
• COGlory 3y ago
  This logic only applies when the economy is growing faster than inflation. As soon as it levels off (or dips below) as it has since the 70s, this becomes patently false.
• izzydata 3y ago
  Having some amount of more money than you doesn't make your life worse, but eventually it does. I don't mind people having millions upon millions of dollars and having lots of houses and cars and things. However, once you have enough money to start affecting politics than it can very easily make your life worse.
• rhplus 3y ago
  Who needs 8 million per year + stock? Two words: generational wealth. Such CEO salaries are legacy builders. That's why no-one in their right mind would turn it down.
• DonnyV 3y ago
  Reducing the wealth of the ultra rich is not just about resource allocation. Its also about how much power a single person should have within the community they live in. With that kind of money people can buy off regulators, politicians, law enforcement, whole towns, financial intuitions , etc. You really don't want a person or group of people to have that much power over a community.
• madsbuch 3y ago
  > Satya Nadella having more money than me doesn't make my life worse; That is simply not true. Money is not an absolut good, but relative. When a few people own a large portion of money, that affords them the power to decide what people do and usually makes their life worse.
  • engineer_22 3y ago
    Well except when they have gained such wealth by providing goods or services in an open competitive market which customers have decided to spend their own wealth on. We must assume people spend their wealth on things that make their lives better. Fortunately the people living in the United States of America have a society of laws and have been to bat against the monopolistic tendencies of unfettered capitalism at least once before.
    • madsbuch 3y ago
      Well, surely you also calculate that companies pay the true cost of offering those services? As long as Facebook has not paid for their true use of the internet infrastructure, they have been subsidised by the (public) entities who did pay form them. Maybe a lot of companies (erhm, platform-companies) use unfair market dynamics that should be regulated to yield a fair market place (Eg. European platform directives)? For an ideal marketplace it should never be possible to accrue extreme wealth as other providers should swoop in when they discover that there are profit opportunities. If the marketplace does not work like that, then regulation should ensure that we go towards an ideal marketplace. This is, btw, why all industrialised countries have rules against monopolies. Ie. extreme wealth inequality is a sign of a dysfunctional capitalistic system.
  • LargeTomato 3y ago
    By your logic the following argument holds. > Any income differential that results in a power imbalance makes the world worse. And that might be true but I think it misses the point of the argument. Increasing the quality of life for the global poor is much more important than capping Satya's wealth. There's no equivalence here.
• wise_young_man 3y ago
  Money is power and the supply is finite. The disproportionate amount of money that CEOs make compared to the average worker is basically enabling modern day kings when you factor in political influence of money. It’s what is fueling continuous wealth inequality levels which keep being broken.
• HumblyTossed 3y ago
  Those things are not separate. People with money have influence. You think it’s some mean politician who doesn’t want kids to have school lunches? No it’s wealthy people with grown kids who don’t want it and are able to spend $20k per plate at a dinner to tell their puppet politicians they don’t want it. And I doubt any of them would take a pay cut.
• bparsons 3y ago
  The political power associated with having tens of billions of dollars is what ends up becoming the reinforcing structural problem with the economy. Accumulated capital is a type of artificial intelligence. Its goal is to defend its existence and accumulate more. When it accumulates more, it needs to defend itself more. This means tax laws and interpretations that benefit a very certain type of citizen. It means international treaties that allow the movement of capital when the local laws become inconvenient. It means business regulations that protects investor instead of consumer interests. If you let this go on for a certain amount of time, the structure of the economy starts to make no sense to the vast majority of the participants.