2 ms·

income inequality is really important for what someone's effective purchasing power is Not really. Bill Gates isn't bidding up the prices of homes or groceries

income inequality is really important for what someone's effective purchasing power is Not really. Bill Gates isn't bidding up the prices of homes or groceries in your neighborhood. Also, it's a huge factor in people's material living conditions, and a cost that has risen far faster than "inflation" Yes, housing is far too expensive. And the main reason for that is state and local governments forcibly preventing people from building more housing, which is hard to blame on free markets. most of the people who don't feel this way are pretty decidedly in the small portion of the population for whom this is working out The point of the "minor factual nitpick" that median incomes are increasing rather than decreasing is exactly that capitalism works out pretty well for lots of people other than the wealthy.

advael 2y ago
Groceries? Maybe not. Houses? Absolutely. I mean I don't know about Bill Gates in particular, but the overwhelming majority of wealthy people have diverse portfolios, including in real estate, which means that large companies or funds are making offers in cash for houses they're not planning to live in, which drives up prices in aggregate. It's not the only factor, but it's actually a significant one. Yes, housing stock is artificially limited for bad reasons. Also, the relative value of real estate near cities is, in an era where remote work is pretty feasible but a lot of companies don't allow it, artificially skewed toward the population centers people are forced to move to for work. That these are also factors does not imply that inequality isn't one Also, reducing the entire question of whether something has gone wrong and what and what one might do about it to a binary of "capitalism good" or "capitalism bad" is pretty pointless. Lots of things we could call capitalism have worked out really differently from each other, and looking at what the aggregate trends are and what policies might drive them and how they might be adjusted to better people's situations is a lot more useful than pretending that this is about "capitalism" versus "not capitalism", which so far as I can tell you are the first person in the thread to do, including the author of the linked article

advael 2y ago

Groceries? Maybe not. Houses? Absolutely. I mean I don't know about Bill Gates in particular, but the overwhelming majority of wealthy people have diverse portfolios, including in real estate, which means that large companies or funds are making offers in cash for houses they're not planning to live in, which drives up prices in aggregate. It's not the only factor, but it's actually a significant one. Yes, housing stock is artificially limited for bad reasons. Also, the relative value of real estate near cities is, in an era where remote work is pretty feasible but a lot of companies don't allow it, artificially skewed toward the population centers people are forced to move to for work. That these are also factors does not imply that inequality isn't one Also, reducing the entire question of whether something has gone wrong and what and what one might do about it to a binary of "capitalism good" or "capitalism bad" is pretty pointless. Lots of things we could call capitalism have worked out really differently from each other, and looking at what the aggregate trends are and what policies might drive them and how they might be adjusted to better people's situations is a lot more useful than pretending that this is about "capitalism" versus "not capitalism", which so far as I can tell you are the first person in the thread to do, including the author of the linked article