8 ms·

The focus on inequality is a massive mistake. The focus needs to be on absolute living standards. I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless

by roenxi 2y ago

The focus on inequality is a massive mistake. The focus needs to be on absolute living standards. I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. In point fact, I don't see how that second world is better for anyone. Literally nobody is better off in that scenario even if inequality has dropped. There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off. Inequality is an interesting indicator but gets far more airplay than it is worth.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
> I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. It would be nice if those were the only two options.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  It isn’t very charitable if you to purposefully misread an obvious rhetorical device. It made perfect sense to me. One POV is you’re proving the point: people feel much more strongly about exacting vengeance against antagonist celebrities than helping people generally. They’ll of course say the opposite in worthless Internet comments.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    > purposefully misread You may want to follow your own advice in reading my first response. People feel strongly about inequality period. It's well established social fact that people's happiness and stress are tied to relative measure of success/status/access to resources etc. It also historically true that greater inequality leads to social instability. Partly because of the first point, but mostly because this top cadre of people are over-powered and will, human nature being what it is, use that power to exploit those with the least power until we're back to a point where there are a whole bunch of very poor people struggling to survive. So it may be nice to think there could be an option of having supersized inequality (e.g. a bunch of 10x Elons) AND have everyone above the poverty line but the fundamentals of people and society mean that super-inequality is simply incapable with a state in which all of worlds poorest can thrive.
panarky 2y ago
> focus needs to be on absolute living standards Living standards of who, exactly? Are you talking about aggregate GDP regardless of how it's distributed? Is it okay if the top 5 deciles do better, while the bottom decile does worse? > a 10x Musk and no homeless people That doesn't seem to be how it works, as the population of unsheltered people appears to be positively correlated with the population of billionaires.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Living standards of who, exactly? Everyone. There isn't some group we should wish ill on in the abstract. The best way forward is one where everyone is better off. That is how the big leaps forward tend to work - the wealthy get insanely more wealthy, the middle gets more wealthy and the lower end of the wealth spectrum stays where it is but shrinks as a relative share of society [0]. I'd rather that than one of the big equalisation pushes like what we saw in Russia or China last century. The problem with the excessive focus on inequality is it is an easy way to lead people away from approaches where everyone wins. [0] Due to mental health and rare people with unusual personal preferences, the poorest person in society will always have basically nothing. I don't think that is theoretically possible to improve on. And the mechanical reason why I think "reducing inequality" is a really bad idea - the only reliable way to do that is drag people towards being impoverished.
- smeej 2y ago
  As a percentage of the population? Or does total population growth account for this? (Genuinely asking; I know very little about this and would like to become more familiar with what people know about it.)
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
You don't get to be Musk level without reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people and taking it for yourself. All you have to do is look at the propaganda surrounding "PPP loans" versus the money given out to stretch people's paychecks during the pandemic. Most businesses weren't affected in any substantial way, but governments still gave away trillions, and the companies got to keep the money. Meanwhile, we're supposed to hate ole Jimbob because he's poor, his hours were cut, and he received a $1200 check.
- m463 2y ago
  > reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people I think you're right, but not in that way. Tesla charged wealthy people a lot for the original tesla roadster. Then they took what they learned and charged wealthy people a lot for a better car, the original model S. Then the X. He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people for further updates to the model S/X, updating the motor, then motors. Now the model 3 and Y are available for less wealthy people. I'm sure the next generation of tesla cars will be more affordable, maybe even Jimbob.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    And most important: Wealthy people invested into Tesla stock hype, that is where most of Musks money comes from.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    If you want to understand the problems, spend less time worrying about the parts of the economy where over time you pay less and get more, and spend more time worrying about the parts of the economy where over time you pay more and get less. That's where it's broken. Health care, housing, education.
  - swaginator 2y ago
    > He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people I'd argue he used subsidies from the government, both direct and indirect. Buyers get a tax credit for electric cars. SolarCity received hundreds of millions of dollars in direct grants from different state governments, I believe this all went to Tesla. Tesla's high curb weight causes more damage to roads. Tesla's lack of unionization means that it relies on mistreatment of workers to get its cars made. There are a lot of examples of Musk taking money both directly and indirectly from those who are not in his customer base. I won't argue whether or not Tesla has been a net benefit or not for the USA, but the result of this is that Musk can point to his company's success and marketing to pump the share price-- and he is now attempting to dump it. The sneaky thing about inequality is that a lot of the direct costs are externalized. Musk can still appear "self-made" when he has externalized so many of his costs to the taxpayer and his workers.
mc32 2y ago
Sometimes it’s crab mentality that gets people thinking it’s better everyone be equal but less better off on average so long as there aren’t egregious examples of people getting on really, really well.
eli_gottlieb 2y ago
Please just read the article. Would you like to cut to a much more direct measure? What is the price of labor? By this is your society's wealth or poverty measured. >Or as Adam Smith would later put it, in what Milanovic stresses was a Copernican shift in perspective: “The high price of labor is to be considered not merely as the proof of the general opulence of society which can afford to pay well all those whom it employs; it is to be regarded as what constitutes the very essence of public opulence, or as the very thing in which public opulence properly consists.”
dventimi 2y ago
I couldn't agree less. Wealth depends on poverty because poverty creates wealth. You'll never get 10x Musk's without creating homeless people. We compete with each other for resources using wealth and power, which at the highest levels are the same.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  No, poverty does not create wealth. The wealthiest people tend to come from affluent countries with low poverty. This comment is prototypical of a zero-sum mindset.
  - dventimi 2y ago
    > The wealthiest people tend to come from affluent countries with low poverty. How do you think the less-affluent countries became that way? By enriching the affluent countries, that's how.
    - knome 2y ago
      Less affluent is the default state of things. It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it. You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year. Unfortunately, aid is a short term fix for problems. The only real way to help them is to properly invest in them, which requires a stability that less affluent countries often lack.
      - dventimi 2y ago
        > Less affluent is the default state of things. No it isn't. > It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it. I never said anything about a conspiracy. > You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year. I suspect the less affluent countries wouldn't object to less aid and investment from the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iran_coup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iran_coup https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html
cool_dude85 2y ago
>I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. Fair. And I think in fact most people probably would agree with you as a hypothetical. Where I think we would disagree is whether we think an economic system that produces 10x the Musks is an economic system that could also eliminate homelessness. Would the political leaders in such a system want to spend money eliminating homelessness, or spend money on the Musks who e.g. finance their elections, or provide them with well paying jobs?
throwaway22032 2y ago
I agree with you for what it's worth. I'd rather live in a world in which I can dream my dreams than one in which Soviet Cube #77385 and a dingy metro are and will always be my life. Playing devil's advocate though, I'm not sure that most people are really that bothered about billionaires, to me it's always felt like a stereotypical lefty trust fund kid thing. Most of the issues surrounding inequality seem to come about with things like e.g. transit vs driving, big house vs apartment, good diet vs bad diet, etc. Basically just living next door to people that you* will never be, because I'm not sure that realistically we can give everyone a house on an acre with two cars on the drive. you*: Not literally you or any individual, it's not that hard to make it out of poverty, but collectively not everyone can/will.
rqtwteye 2y ago
" I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires." Right now we live in a world with a growing number of super billionaires and we have tons of homelessness. Especially San Francisco and LA have tons of super rich people but also many homeless. So it seems to me that breeding more billionaires is not going to solve anything.
- Jensson 2y ago
  California proves that even extreme level of tax income from taxing rich people doesn't help solve these social problems. The solution is to have a competent government, no amount of taxing or punishing the rich will help otherwise. So voting on people just because they say they will punish the rich is a good way to not solve the problem. Vote on competent people, not people looking to assign blame.
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    I agree. I was more pointing out that the previous comment stated that we basically have a choice of 10x more Musks and no homeless people or equality with lots of homelessness. I think there is zero evidence that increasing the number of rich people will help the issue at all.
jayd16 2y ago
We have 1x Musk and still have homelessness. Why would 9 more help exactly?
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  Have you seen what just one did?
specialist 2y ago
What is the relationship between governance and inequity?
llamaimperative 2y ago
There literally is reason to believe that. “Logical” by your assessment or not, inequality is a far stronger contributor to unhappiness than absolute wealth. The premise of your argument is absurd. If we were to accept it, we’d have to expect that people in the 1100s were all just depressed/angry/anxious — including the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet — to a degree that is literally unfathomable to a modern first-worlder. Brains just don’t work that way not because other people are fickle emotional messes, but because a brain like that wouldn’t work. (Yes, obviously poverty sucks and higher standards of living are preferable to lower, just to head off some strawmen)
- roenxi 2y ago
  I like your comment because it was logically consistent and there is actually an argument in there that I respect. However, you appear to be saying that the 1100s (where people were, I note, substantially more equal than today in absolute terms) are comparable to 2000s. I disagree - I would be unfathomably depressed/angry/anxious if my living standards reverted to my social equivalent in the 1100s, conditions were basically inhumane. We should be aiming to get society as far from 1100s as possible, both temporally and in terms of absolute living standards. I don't care if the wealthy are much better off than they were in 1100 if I get functional plumbing, air conditioning, reliable food, an electric car, Amazon and improved medical care out of the bargain. And I get much more than that [0]. Their wealth seems to be to my benefit. The wealthy got wealthy because my life got better along the way. [0] This is rhetorical, I don't own a car. But since I've already mentioned Musk ...
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    You’ve snuck in my own argument though. Correct, you’d be sad if you reverted to those conditions. That is because you will have a comparison point, i.e. you are acknowledging that the entire issue is one of relative wealth and standard of living as compared to some other comparator. In your just-provided example, the comparison is to your modern life. In a world without time travel, people can and do compare themselves to others living today because that is how brains work.
sleepydog 2y ago
> I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. This seems to imply that a reduction in inequality would not reduce homelessness. I don't follow the reasoning here, and I'm not aware of evidence for this reasoning. I can probably find evidence that affluent countries with stronger social safety nets and less inequality have less homelessness. If that meaning wasn't intended, then it must be implying that billionaires like Musk are linearly motivated by money -- that is, the more money they can make for themselves, the harder they will work to provide value. Or maybe you are implying that the potential of unlimited riches will attract the best talent? > There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off. There are plenty of reasons to believe that. Wealthy people don't just sit on their wealth -- they use it. To buy power. To have an outsized influence on government and the lives of other people. To employ financial advisors that let them enjoy the benefits of citizenship while evading or minimizing the taxes they pay. To lobby for tax laws that favor people who live off of wealth (assets, stock, etc) rather than income. To buy citizenship in other countries and evade international sanctions. To destroy, directly or indirectly through their influence, resources that are finite or very difficult to replace, like fossil fuels, rain forests, clean air. Did Putin make his wealth without harming others? I'll riff a bit here, too: even if the super-rich don't hurt anyone by becoming super-rich, you have to wonder if they wouldn't be better off just being kinda rich. Having billions seems like a very isolating experience. Would you still find it easy to trust other people? Would you have an outsized opinion of your abilities and importance? And what about your children, would they be valuable, upstanding members of society? Would they even be able to take care of themselves? Would they see themselves as intrinsically better than poor people?
MaysonL 2y ago
The thing is, of course, that being richer, beyond a certain wealth, does not, in fact, make you better off – it may well make you worse off (people will hate you because of it, your security costs go way up, etc.).
- thwarted 2y ago
  "Being richer beyond a certain wealth doesn't make you better off" is a common, and perhaps the standard, argument for aggressively taxing the wealthy. The logic being, which I think is sound, $1 given to a millionaire doesn't improve the millionaire's life at all, while $1 given to someone destitute impacts their life a lot. And related, $1 taken from a millionaire does not impact the millionaire's quality of life at the same way $1 taken from a waged employee. The comparative impact is very different for different levels of wealth. By that pattern, the more wealthy you are then the more risk, and higher risks, you can take on without impacting your quality of life, your better off-ness. A billionaire can take on more risk than a millionaire, and a millionaire can take on more risk than waged employee. And further in that pattern, wealth over a certain amount translates into increasing risk tolerance. And leveraging that tolerance to take on risk, and it paying off, leads to more wealth. But the only thing you can use the increased wealth, since it's beyond whatever the threshold for comparative impact is, for is taking on even more risk. I suppose we need to have an understanding of what "better off" is and how it is measured.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
You might think that, but many/most humans care more about relative differences than absolute. We are social creatures which calibrate our satisfaction to our circumstances. We can be happy with little, and equally happy with plenty. In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless, largely because it is not the absolute quantity, but relative amount that matters. For the most part, people have no measure for the material quality of their lives besides comparing it to others in they see. It doesnt matter if you have wealth and comforts beyond your grandparents wildest dreams, if it seems like you are worse off than 90% of the people on the street.
- roenxi 2y ago
  I agree with pretty much every word. But what those words are identifying is (1) there is an emotional response at play and (2) it is a heuristic for something else that in the modern age is no longer an reasonable heuristic (ie, your instincts don't understand capitalism and the benefits of having vast amounts of capital on hand, they are calibrated for a hunter-gatherer society with maybe some light farming and a few hundred people). The emotional response to inequality has led to some of the biggest government-sponsored mass murders in history [0]. It is perhaps the worst-scaling social response that evolution has cursed us with. Focusing on it is stupid, and we'd all be better off if we focused on absolute living standards instead. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll#Political_leaders_and_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disaster... - Communism was flat out worse than a Mongol invasion. Best case scenario it was the same ballpark. Best attempt ever made at solving inequality though.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I tend to agree with you in principle as an aspirational goal. I'm not sure people are ready from the practical sense. I hope we can navigate through this period of hyperfocus on inequality. In my opinion, attention on the monetary differences exagerates the difference in experience and comfort. That is to say, Wealth inequality is much less relevant than difference in consumption and utilization, to the degree that either matter. Musk might have 1,000,000x the net worth of the median American (200B vs 200K), but he is not eating one million times as many hamburgers, living in a house 1 million times larger, ect. People struggle to understand that "net worth" is simply a name on a paper associated with resources someone else is utilizing. It is not proportional to spending or consumption.
anemoiac 2y ago
A world with high levels of inequality is also a world where power is highly concentrated, which makes the focus of the majority largely irrelevant... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by roenxi 2y ago

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

> I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. It would be nice if those were the only two options.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
It isn’t very charitable if you to purposefully misread an obvious rhetorical device. It made perfect sense to me. One POV is you’re proving the point: people feel much more strongly about exacting vengeance against antagonist celebrities than helping people generally. They’ll of course say the opposite in worthless Internet comments.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  > purposefully misread You may want to follow your own advice in reading my first response. People feel strongly about inequality period. It's well established social fact that people's happiness and stress are tied to relative measure of success/status/access to resources etc. It also historically true that greater inequality leads to social instability. Partly because of the first point, but mostly because this top cadre of people are over-powered and will, human nature being what it is, use that power to exploit those with the least power until we're back to a point where there are a whole bunch of very poor people struggling to survive. So it may be nice to think there could be an option of having supersized inequality (e.g. a bunch of 10x Elons) AND have everyone above the poverty line but the fundamentals of people and society mean that super-inequality is simply incapable with a state in which all of worlds poorest can thrive.

panarky 2y ago

> focus needs to be on absolute living standards Living standards of who, exactly? Are you talking about aggregate GDP regardless of how it's distributed? Is it okay if the top 5 deciles do better, while the bottom decile does worse? > a 10x Musk and no homeless people That doesn't seem to be how it works, as the population of unsheltered people appears to be positively correlated with the population of billionaires.

roenxi 2y ago
> Living standards of who, exactly? Everyone. There isn't some group we should wish ill on in the abstract. The best way forward is one where everyone is better off. That is how the big leaps forward tend to work - the wealthy get insanely more wealthy, the middle gets more wealthy and the lower end of the wealth spectrum stays where it is but shrinks as a relative share of society [0]. I'd rather that than one of the big equalisation pushes like what we saw in Russia or China last century. The problem with the excessive focus on inequality is it is an easy way to lead people away from approaches where everyone wins. [0] Due to mental health and rare people with unusual personal preferences, the poorest person in society will always have basically nothing. I don't think that is theoretically possible to improve on. And the mechanical reason why I think "reducing inequality" is a really bad idea - the only reliable way to do that is drag people towards being impoverished.
smeej 2y ago
As a percentage of the population? Or does total population growth account for this? (Genuinely asking; I know very little about this and would like to become more familiar with what people know about it.)

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

You don't get to be Musk level without reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people and taking it for yourself. All you have to do is look at the propaganda surrounding "PPP loans" versus the money given out to stretch people's paychecks during the pandemic. Most businesses weren't affected in any substantial way, but governments still gave away trillions, and the companies got to keep the money. Meanwhile, we're supposed to hate ole Jimbob because he's poor, his hours were cut, and he received a $1200 check.

m463 2y ago
> reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people I think you're right, but not in that way. Tesla charged wealthy people a lot for the original tesla roadster. Then they took what they learned and charged wealthy people a lot for a better car, the original model S. Then the X. He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people for further updates to the model S/X, updating the motor, then motors. Now the model 3 and Y are available for less wealthy people. I'm sure the next generation of tesla cars will be more affordable, maybe even Jimbob.
- Jensson 2y ago
  And most important: Wealthy people invested into Tesla stock hype, that is where most of Musks money comes from.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  If you want to understand the problems, spend less time worrying about the parts of the economy where over time you pay less and get more, and spend more time worrying about the parts of the economy where over time you pay more and get less. That's where it's broken. Health care, housing, education.
- swaginator 2y ago
  > He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people I'd argue he used subsidies from the government, both direct and indirect. Buyers get a tax credit for electric cars. SolarCity received hundreds of millions of dollars in direct grants from different state governments, I believe this all went to Tesla. Tesla's high curb weight causes more damage to roads. Tesla's lack of unionization means that it relies on mistreatment of workers to get its cars made. There are a lot of examples of Musk taking money both directly and indirectly from those who are not in his customer base. I won't argue whether or not Tesla has been a net benefit or not for the USA, but the result of this is that Musk can point to his company's success and marketing to pump the share price-- and he is now attempting to dump it. The sneaky thing about inequality is that a lot of the direct costs are externalized. Musk can still appear "self-made" when he has externalized so many of his costs to the taxpayer and his workers.

mc32 2y ago

Sometimes it’s crab mentality that gets people thinking it’s better everyone be equal but less better off on average so long as there aren’t egregious examples of people getting on really, really well.

eli_gottlieb 2y ago

Please just read the article. Would you like to cut to a much more direct measure? What is the price of labor? By this is your society's wealth or poverty measured. >Or as Adam Smith would later put it, in what Milanovic stresses was a Copernican shift in perspective: “The high price of labor is to be considered not merely as the proof of the general opulence of society which can afford to pay well all those whom it employs; it is to be regarded as what constitutes the very essence of public opulence, or as the very thing in which public opulence properly consists.”

dventimi 2y ago

I couldn't agree less. Wealth depends on poverty because poverty creates wealth. You'll never get 10x Musk's without creating homeless people. We compete with each other for resources using wealth and power, which at the highest levels are the same.

Manuel_D 2y ago
No, poverty does not create wealth. The wealthiest people tend to come from affluent countries with low poverty. This comment is prototypical of a zero-sum mindset.
- dventimi 2y ago
  > The wealthiest people tend to come from affluent countries with low poverty. How do you think the less-affluent countries became that way? By enriching the affluent countries, that's how.
  - knome 2y ago
    Less affluent is the default state of things. It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it. You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year. Unfortunately, aid is a short term fix for problems. The only real way to help them is to properly invest in them, which requires a stability that less affluent countries often lack.
    - dventimi 2y ago
      > Less affluent is the default state of things. No it isn't. > It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it. I never said anything about a conspiracy. > You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year. I suspect the less affluent countries wouldn't object to less aid and investment from the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iran_coup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iran_coup https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html

cool_dude85 2y ago

>I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. Fair. And I think in fact most people probably would agree with you as a hypothetical. Where I think we would disagree is whether we think an economic system that produces 10x the Musks is an economic system that could also eliminate homelessness. Would the political leaders in such a system want to spend money eliminating homelessness, or spend money on the Musks who e.g. finance their elections, or provide them with well paying jobs?

throwaway22032 2y ago

I agree with you for what it's worth. I'd rather live in a world in which I can dream my dreams than one in which Soviet Cube #77385 and a dingy metro are and will always be my life. Playing devil's advocate though, I'm not sure that most people are really that bothered about billionaires, to me it's always felt like a stereotypical lefty trust fund kid thing. Most of the issues surrounding inequality seem to come about with things like e.g. transit vs driving, big house vs apartment, good diet vs bad diet, etc. Basically just living next door to people that you* will never be, because I'm not sure that realistically we can give everyone a house on an acre with two cars on the drive. you*: Not literally you or any individual, it's not that hard to make it out of poverty, but collectively not everyone can/will.

rqtwteye 2y ago

" I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires." Right now we live in a world with a growing number of super billionaires and we have tons of homelessness. Especially San Francisco and LA have tons of super rich people but also many homeless. So it seems to me that breeding more billionaires is not going to solve anything.

Jensson 2y ago
California proves that even extreme level of tax income from taxing rich people doesn't help solve these social problems. The solution is to have a competent government, no amount of taxing or punishing the rich will help otherwise. So voting on people just because they say they will punish the rich is a good way to not solve the problem. Vote on competent people, not people looking to assign blame.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  I agree. I was more pointing out that the previous comment stated that we basically have a choice of 10x more Musks and no homeless people or equality with lots of homelessness. I think there is zero evidence that increasing the number of rich people will help the issue at all.

jayd16 2y ago

We have 1x Musk and still have homelessness. Why would 9 more help exactly?

snapplebobapple 2y ago
Have you seen what just one did?

specialist 2y ago

What is the relationship between governance and inequity?

llamaimperative 2y ago

There literally is reason to believe that. “Logical” by your assessment or not, inequality is a far stronger contributor to unhappiness than absolute wealth. The premise of your argument is absurd. If we were to accept it, we’d have to expect that people in the 1100s were all just depressed/angry/anxious — including the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet — to a degree that is literally unfathomable to a modern first-worlder. Brains just don’t work that way not because other people are fickle emotional messes, but because a brain like that wouldn’t work. (Yes, obviously poverty sucks and higher standards of living are preferable to lower, just to head off some strawmen)

roenxi 2y ago
I like your comment because it was logically consistent and there is actually an argument in there that I respect. However, you appear to be saying that the 1100s (where people were, I note, substantially more equal than today in absolute terms) are comparable to 2000s. I disagree - I would be unfathomably depressed/angry/anxious if my living standards reverted to my social equivalent in the 1100s, conditions were basically inhumane. We should be aiming to get society as far from 1100s as possible, both temporally and in terms of absolute living standards. I don't care if the wealthy are much better off than they were in 1100 if I get functional plumbing, air conditioning, reliable food, an electric car, Amazon and improved medical care out of the bargain. And I get much more than that [0]. Their wealth seems to be to my benefit. The wealthy got wealthy because my life got better along the way. [0] This is rhetorical, I don't own a car. But since I've already mentioned Musk ...
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  You’ve snuck in my own argument though. Correct, you’d be sad if you reverted to those conditions. That is because you will have a comparison point, i.e. you are acknowledging that the entire issue is one of relative wealth and standard of living as compared to some other comparator. In your just-provided example, the comparison is to your modern life. In a world without time travel, people can and do compare themselves to others living today because that is how brains work.

sleepydog 2y ago

> I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. This seems to imply that a reduction in inequality would not reduce homelessness. I don't follow the reasoning here, and I'm not aware of evidence for this reasoning. I can probably find evidence that affluent countries with stronger social safety nets and less inequality have less homelessness. If that meaning wasn't intended, then it must be implying that billionaires like Musk are linearly motivated by money -- that is, the more money they can make for themselves, the harder they will work to provide value. Or maybe you are implying that the potential of unlimited riches will attract the best talent? > There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off. There are plenty of reasons to believe that. Wealthy people don't just sit on their wealth -- they use it. To buy power. To have an outsized influence on government and the lives of other people. To employ financial advisors that let them enjoy the benefits of citizenship while evading or minimizing the taxes they pay. To lobby for tax laws that favor people who live off of wealth (assets, stock, etc) rather than income. To buy citizenship in other countries and evade international sanctions. To destroy, directly or indirectly through their influence, resources that are finite or very difficult to replace, like fossil fuels, rain forests, clean air. Did Putin make his wealth without harming others? I'll riff a bit here, too: even if the super-rich don't hurt anyone by becoming super-rich, you have to wonder if they wouldn't be better off just being kinda rich. Having billions seems like a very isolating experience. Would you still find it easy to trust other people? Would you have an outsized opinion of your abilities and importance? And what about your children, would they be valuable, upstanding members of society? Would they even be able to take care of themselves? Would they see themselves as intrinsically better than poor people?

MaysonL 2y ago

The thing is, of course, that being richer, beyond a certain wealth, does not, in fact, make you better off – it may well make you worse off (people will hate you because of it, your security costs go way up, etc.).

thwarted 2y ago
"Being richer beyond a certain wealth doesn't make you better off" is a common, and perhaps the standard, argument for aggressively taxing the wealthy. The logic being, which I think is sound, $1 given to a millionaire doesn't improve the millionaire's life at all, while $1 given to someone destitute impacts their life a lot. And related, $1 taken from a millionaire does not impact the millionaire's quality of life at the same way $1 taken from a waged employee. The comparative impact is very different for different levels of wealth. By that pattern, the more wealthy you are then the more risk, and higher risks, you can take on without impacting your quality of life, your better off-ness. A billionaire can take on more risk than a millionaire, and a millionaire can take on more risk than waged employee. And further in that pattern, wealth over a certain amount translates into increasing risk tolerance. And leveraging that tolerance to take on risk, and it paying off, leads to more wealth. But the only thing you can use the increased wealth, since it's beyond whatever the threshold for comparative impact is, for is taking on even more risk. I suppose we need to have an understanding of what "better off" is and how it is measured.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

You might think that, but many/most humans care more about relative differences than absolute. We are social creatures which calibrate our satisfaction to our circumstances. We can be happy with little, and equally happy with plenty. In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless, largely because it is not the absolute quantity, but relative amount that matters. For the most part, people have no measure for the material quality of their lives besides comparing it to others in they see. It doesnt matter if you have wealth and comforts beyond your grandparents wildest dreams, if it seems like you are worse off than 90% of the people on the street.

roenxi 2y ago
I agree with pretty much every word. But what those words are identifying is (1) there is an emotional response at play and (2) it is a heuristic for something else that in the modern age is no longer an reasonable heuristic (ie, your instincts don't understand capitalism and the benefits of having vast amounts of capital on hand, they are calibrated for a hunter-gatherer society with maybe some light farming and a few hundred people). The emotional response to inequality has led to some of the biggest government-sponsored mass murders in history [0]. It is perhaps the worst-scaling social response that evolution has cursed us with. Focusing on it is stupid, and we'd all be better off if we focused on absolute living standards instead. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll#Political_leaders_and_regimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disaster... - Communism was flat out worse than a Mongol invasion. Best case scenario it was the same ballpark. Best attempt ever made at solving inequality though.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I tend to agree with you in principle as an aspirational goal. I'm not sure people are ready from the practical sense. I hope we can navigate through this period of hyperfocus on inequality. In my opinion, attention on the monetary differences exagerates the difference in experience and comfort. That is to say, Wealth inequality is much less relevant than difference in consumption and utilization, to the degree that either matter. Musk might have 1,000,000x the net worth of the median American (200B vs 200K), but he is not eating one million times as many hamburgers, living in a house 1 million times larger, ect. People struggle to understand that "net worth" is simply a name on a paper associated with resources someone else is utilizing. It is not proportional to spending or consumption.

anemoiac 2y ago

A world with high levels of inequality is also a world where power is highly concentrated, which makes the focus of the majority largely irrelevant... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯