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> [...] a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high. What economic inequality would you deem small enough? And why do you care a

• pazimzadeh 1y ago
  the healthcare situation sucks. provide universal healthcare and you might have a point
  • eru 1y ago
    I don't live in the US. We have a very different helthcare system where I live, and it's working well. But again: providing universal healthcare is all about giving (poor) people more prosperity. It has nothing to do with inequality by itself. If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse.
    • pazimzadeh 1y ago
      > If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse. No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare
      • eru 1y ago
        > Anyway, I would argue that having guaranteed healthcare is 10293762397697x better than not having guaranteed healthcare Sure, healthcare is nice. I see no disagreement. > > If tomorrow Mr Zuckerberg got 100x better healthcare, but everyone else only got 10x better healthcare, that would fix the problem you mentioned, but would technically make inequality worse. > No, because we outnumber Mark Zuckerberg by more than 10 fold Well, fix the numbers any way you feel like. Eg say Mr Zuckerberg gets better off by whatever amount the rest of us together get better (eg in terms of healthcare) plus 10% extra.
        • pazimzadeh 1y ago
          Mark Zuckerberg would in fact need to have 8 billion times better healthcare than me for your argument to matter I don't know anyone who really thinks that absolute inequality is the problem. people need a high floor - there is no inherent reason to want to lower the ceiling of wealth/benefits. but since there's no such thing as free lunch, we need to calculate by how much each % of ceiling that is lowered raises the floor. If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile. The hard part is calculating the benefits. There are non-linear effects when you try to predict the benefits of having a healthy and educated population, although the benefit should be enormous. On the other hand it is very easy to calculate the downside of people not being wage-slaves: not needing to accept bottom wages, having time to understand what's actually going on in the world, organizing for or against particular causes, etc..
          • eru 1y ago
            I'm saying that we need to be careful that our obsession to obstruct the rich doesn't leave the masses worse off. > If we can reduce the ceiling by 10% and raise the floor by 100%, then that's worthwhile. I'm afraid that lowering the ceiling by 10% might lower the floor by 10%, too.
            • pazimzadeh 1y ago
              > the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better that is completely wrong. purchasing power is at an all time low in real dollar terms https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R > we need to be careful that our obsession to obstruct the rich doesn't leave the masses worse off we need to be careful that the obsession with being mega rich doesn't leave the masses worse off you're not proposing anything. you don't even seem to think there's a problem. let me guess, the best thing to do is just keep things the way they are? what are you talking about?
• jstummbillig 1y ago
  > What economic inequality would you deem small enough? Economic inequality small enough to not be the root cause of the particular problem you are interested in.
  • eru 1y ago
    Well, that definition only makes sense to someone who thinks that economic inequality is a root cause of any problems.
• noelwelsh 1y ago
  There is so much research on the problems of inequality. "The Spirit Level" is one book. (e.g. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/ https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/) The problems of inequality go well beyond living standards. E.g. political control in a very unequal society gets concentrated in a few people.
  • eru 1y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(Wilkinson_and_Pickett_book)#Critical_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(Wilkinson_an... Especially the failures to replicate.
    • anon_e-moose 1y ago
      Good points, he seems to be in to something in the health field, but the analysis was incomplete and flawed. Given the importance of the health results, perhaps someone could build on top of that and build an improved study?
    • vixen99 1y ago
      See also 'The Spirit Level Delusion' by Christopher Snowdon. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-spirit-level-delusion.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th...
    • noelwelsh 1y ago
      1. Any research of any note will get criticism. (E.g. see responses to Picketty.) 2. From Wikipedia it appears they responded to all the substantial criticism. It also mentions an independent study largely agreeing with the results. 3. This is one book amongst a mountain of research, and there are problems with inequality that go beyond those the book mentions.
      • eru 1y ago
        I agree that Wikipedia wasn't the best source to go for criticism: Wikipedia is very sympathetic to the claims like in the book, so the criticism section is very weak sauce. It is indeed noble that the authors responded to the criticism, but unlike what Wikipedia seems to imply, they didn't manage to rescue their argument. See https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-spirit-level-delusion.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th... from another comment.
• WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > What economic inequality would you deem small enough? I'd like the one small enough that I won't die from my (treatable) first major medical event due to being unable to fund 100% of treatment costs. I'd also like one small enough that me and the kids didn't spend most of the 2010s in hunger-level poverty. That'd be a start.
  • eru 1y ago
    Nothing of what you said has anything to do with equality at all. It's about the absolute level of prosperity of yourself (and presumably everyone else). So if everyone got 10x richer overnight, but the top 1% got 1000x richer, that would increase inequality by any reasonable metric, but it would help with the benchmarks you mentioned.
    • ascorbic 1y ago
      If absolute prosperity is what matters, how is the US the richest country in the world, while being pretty much the only one where medical bankruptcy is a thing?
      • eru 1y ago
        The US isn't the richest country in the world (per capita). What makes you think so? However, Americans are on _average_ pretty rich per capita. And in any case, I'm saying absolute prosperity of individual people matters. Not the average per capita absolute prosperity of a country. So people who go into medical bankruptcy in the US are obviously not individually rich. And I hope you and me agree, that if you could find a way to make them better off, that would be a good thing? Whereas if you found a way to make them worse off by 20%, but make Mr Zuckerberg worse off by 50%, that would not be advisable, even if it technically decreases inequality.
        • ascorbic 1y ago
          It's the richest country in absolute terms, and the richest per-capita if you exclude small countries. As a side note, it really shouldn't be possible to edit comments two hours after they've been posted and after they've had replies. Particularly without showing any indication of that.
• weatherlite 1y ago
  > And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? The two are connected. You can either transfer more wealth to the poorer people without taxing the rich (lets say by helicopter money), or transfer it from the rich to the poor. In both cases the rich become less rich in relative terms. It should also make intuitive sense - if the rich (lets say top 5%) hold 95% of wealth it means there is less for everyone else - less wealth that is because the resources like land, apartments and good education are finite and not abundant.
  • Kinrany 1y ago
    You can of course create wealth in such a way that inequality stays the same. Not all types of wealth are finite for practical purposes.
    • psb217 1y ago
      But, if empirically our current system for net wealth creation tends to also produce wealth concentration, it makes sense to consider ways of modifying the system to mitigate some of the wealth concentration while maintaining as much of the wealth creation as possible.
      • eru 1y ago
        The target you should look for is how much wealth gets created for the least well-off (or for some low percentile representative person). Just don't worry about what the rich people doing at all. No need to punish them.
        • voidhorse 1y ago
          Where is the "wealth created for the least well off" going to come from? Necessarily, that must be wealth that did' go to the rich instead (it could have!). So, necessarily, you are "punishing" them by doing so. You mainly seem to be against some kind of hypothetical robinhoodesque style redistribution because you worry it's unfair to the rich. Any solution, though, will have to take this shape, whether it targets the existing wealth or wealth generated going forward. It's all about redistribution of access no matter how you slice You don't need to be so protective of the rich. They are doing just fine and they have plenty of resource and mechanisms in place to protect themselves. If the world's wealthiest people were made even just a tiny bit less wealth by redistribution of assets they would still be living like absolute kings.
• deleted 1y ago
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• voidhorse 1y ago
  The reason inequality is a problem is very simple. As inequality increases at scale it means that an increasingly concentrated group has more and more capital. What do they do with that capital? They buy assets, they are basically forced to do so by design. What happens when they buy assets? They capitalize those assets. An apartment unit now becomes a home others can rent but not purchase. Rinse and repeat until eventually wealth is so concentrated that the ability for any other individuals to access assets is basically zero. This means those individuals cannot build capital or ultimately wealth and it also means that, even if more resource become readily available, more people cannot afford them. They have to do 2x today what they did yesterday to an achieve the same amount of stability even if their "standard of living" has increased because of a wider swath of goods and services. Honestly at this point I think that anyone who doesn't see inequality as a major driver of contemporary problems is simply not paying attention to the USA or must not live there. Countries in which it is less of a problem basically only mitigate it by having a state that can provide essentials to effectively prevent the capitaled class from taking them away from people (eg healthcare, as you mention). Economics is all about the balance of who has access to what resources. We cannot just generate resources and capital out of thin air. One person getting more necessarily means another gets less. Period.
  • eru 1y ago
    Compare and contrast https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-t...
    • voidhorse 1y ago
      lol. Like many of Scott Alexander's essays, this is bad argumentation in nice window dressing, as well as a slight apologia for racism. There are so many problems with this essay that it's hard to know where to begin, but two major ones are that (1) his reading comprehension sucks, (2) the major flaw in his line of argument is merely hand waved away—it relies on a fundamental premise that mobility of people in the south was zero after the civil war and that the civil war destroying an entire industry would have had zero effect (this is the part he hand waves away at the end of the article after making his idiotic apology for continued racism based on one solitary citation) As usual, it's an article making people unschooled in the actual practice of rigorous academic research to buy into bad ideas . Anyway, that's all beside the point. A specific article countering a single claim against reparations has basically very little to do with the topic at hand unless you can prove the very specific set of dynamics that is analyzed in that case (a) applies globally, and (b) still applies today. This style of argument is equivalent to saying "look i found one rock that was purple so all rocks must be purple". It has basically no relevance as far as I'm concerned.
• Devasta 1y ago
  To be clear, confiscating everything Musk, Theil, Zuckerberg and Bezos have absolutely would make my life better off. Think about the amount of political meddling by Musk in the past year alone, things he could never do if he weren't so rich.
  • eru 1y ago
    Trump isn't rich (or at least wasn't rich before he became president for the first time), and managed to do lots of meddling just fine. If anything, I'd like rich people (in general) to play more of a role. I'd take Bloomberg or Romney over the popular candidates any day.
    • vunderba 1y ago
      You might need a refresher in history. Trump has ALWAYS been wealthy. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/weve-been-trying-figure-out-how-much-trump-worth-20-years/349875/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/weve-be...
• andrepd 1y ago
  > What economic inequality would you deem small enough? > And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? Answer to both those questions, simplifying massively: the most prosperous period of capitalism in the past 200 years was also that where there was the smallest levels of inequality. The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!). The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever. Read Pikkety's books and you will understand.
  • eru 1y ago
    > Answer to both those questions, simplifying massively: the most prosperous period of capitalism in the past 200 years was also that where there was the smallest levels of inequality. You mean today? Today is the most prosperous period of all of world history. Or what period are you talking about? Global inequality is also near all-time lows, thanks to China, India and the rest of Asia mostly catching up to the rich western countries. Alas, Africa is still quite poor, but they are working on it. > The point of view that you must only look at the overall floor is terribly short-sighted (and even then, the lower and middle classes have become WORSE off in the past 40 years!). In what sense? > The massive increases in wealth have been going overwhelmingly to the pockets of the very rich; this is bad in itself, irrespective of the overall GDP growth or whatever. Why? > Read Pikkety's books and you will understand. See eg https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-spirit-level-delusion.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/th...
• FooBarBizBazz 1y ago
  The economy is not a static thing in which the same goods and services are offered independent of the wealth distribution. The same work is not done. When wealth is concentrated, prices cease to aggregate information and preferences from across the whole society. Instead they represent whatever stupid whim some clique of investors has developed. As a result you get massive malinvestments in speculative bullshit while basic things decay. It's the Politburo but dumber. This determines the physical environment you live in, the services offered on your street, and the stuff you do at your job.
  • eru 1y ago
    Has Bill Gates bought up all avocados on the market so far? Or anything ridiculous like what you seem to imply would happen with concentrated wealth?
    • grumpy_coder 1y ago
      Have you seen how much money we are shoveling into 'AI'
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  absolute living standards are very unequal
• metabagel 1y ago
  > We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have This is "all or nothing" fallacy thinking.