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Their would be no wealthy without the poor consuming their food, living in their buildings, or paying for the utilities they provide. This is not a "drain" on

by rprasad 14y ago

Their would be no wealthy without the poor consuming their food, living in their buildings, or paying for the utilities they provide. This is not a "drain" on society; it is on of the vital mechanisms which allows the wealthy to have their wealth in the first place. On the other hand, yequalsx, your characterization of the poor as a "drain on society" speaks volumes of how little you understand income disparity.

yequalsx 14y ago
I didn't refer to the poor as a drain on society. Yummyfajitas did. Perhaps you meant to critique some other aspect of what I wrote?
- anothermachine 14y ago
  rprasad was responding to yummyfajitas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182231, and misread the byline
  - rprasad 14y ago
    Yep, sorry. Ever since the crazy mods took over I've been having issues with reply links disappearing or linking to the wrong comments.
rdl 14y ago
There is some subset of the world's population who are a net negative in wealth creation, especially those living in expensive markets. (The very ill, mentally ill or drug addicted homeless people, most of the elderly.) Children also count if you're looking on a short time horizon, but you could do discounted future incomes to account for that. There are values other than pure economic utility, but from a pure economic utility function, a poor person consuming medical services doesn't help the economy. The money paid (via taxes to doctors, equipment vendors, etc.) would be more efficiently used for another purpose -- it's the broken window fallacy. It would be interesting to figure out where the net consumers stop and net producers begin, and maybe graph that over time and culture. There are a lot of good reasons to favor an economy which is slightly less productive than optimum, but where a larger percentage of people are net-contributors; redistributing income or wealth from the positive outliers to invest in making more people net-contributors, vs. trying to maximize the total contribution, is probably a good social choice. But it's not the purely efficient choice.

by rprasad 14y ago

yequalsx 14y ago

I didn't refer to the poor as a drain on society. Yummyfajitas did. Perhaps you meant to critique some other aspect of what I wrote?

anothermachine 14y ago
rprasad was responding to yummyfajitas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182231, and misread the byline
- rprasad 14y ago
  Yep, sorry. Ever since the crazy mods took over I've been having issues with reply links disappearing or linking to the wrong comments.

rdl 14y ago

There is some subset of the world's population who are a net negative in wealth creation, especially those living in expensive markets. (The very ill, mentally ill or drug addicted homeless people, most of the elderly.) Children also count if you're looking on a short time horizon, but you could do discounted future incomes to account for that. There are values other than pure economic utility, but from a pure economic utility function, a poor person consuming medical services doesn't help the economy. The money paid (via taxes to doctors, equipment vendors, etc.) would be more efficiently used for another purpose -- it's the broken window fallacy. It would be interesting to figure out where the net consumers stop and net producers begin, and maybe graph that over time and culture. There are a lot of good reasons to favor an economy which is slightly less productive than optimum, but where a larger percentage of people are net-contributors; redistributing income or wealth from the positive outliers to invest in making more people net-contributors, vs. trying to maximize the total contribution, is probably a good social choice. But it's not the purely efficient choice.