4 ms·

This is the fixed pie policy, which assumes there's a limited amount of wealth to go around. And therefore, any time somebody gets "too much" of it, the conclus

by csallen 11mo ago

This is the fixed pie policy, which assumes there's a limited amount of wealth to go around. And therefore, any time somebody gets "too much" of it, the conclusion is they must be why others have less. This is not true. And it's important to understand that it's not true, because understanding a problem is the key to helping solve it. In pre-agricultural times, the average person was lucky to own a few dozen items. Today, the average person in a developed Western country owns a few thousand goods. Western households possess over 100,000 goods on average. There's vastly more wealth than ever. Especially if you multiply these numbers by the massively expanded population of Earth compared to prehistoric times. Therefore, it's necessarily the case that wealth can be created and not merely stolen or shared.

neilv 11mo ago
You're responding to the words "grab" and "take", and leading up to an argument in which wealth is created, by a Great Man, who deserves the wealth and power that He created, or else He wouldn't have incentive to create wealth? People can collaborate to create wealth that they share. The problem is when someone says "I am so great, that I deserve more wealth and power than other people". Because of a bad experience in kindergarten, or because their parents told them that.
- csallen 11mo ago
  Everybody always takes this argument to the extreme, as if it has to be a 0 or a 1, black or white, either people deserve the wealth that they created or they don't. There is no such dichotomy. On one hand, markets and incentives work. When people can earn and gain more, by providing more value to their fellow man, people do work more + smarter + better + provide more value to their fellow man. This is not speculative or just a theory, this is an actual fact that has been observed for hundreds of years across dozens of societies. This has nothing to do with some moral imperative about what people "deserve". It's just pure incentive -- it's better for society as a whole if you incentivize people to work and provide services, to create new technology, to complete engineering projects, etc etc. We absolutely should give people more money if they create more value. On the flip side, of course these people aren't 100.000% responsible for their own success, and completely entitled to all the profits, or deserving of holding all the power in society. If you build a fortune in a capitalist, market-driven economy, that's almost certainly only possible because you are making good use of the economic and political "rails" that have been laid before you and that made this possible. For example, your country almost certainly has a police force and a military that can protect the safety of you and your business. It almost certainly has a judicial branch that have created legal frameworks to limit your liability and allow you to take entrepreneurial or scientific risks. Etc. Pretty much everybody agrees with this. Which is why every western country has a progressive taxation system that taxes the rich at higher rates than the poor or middle class. In the United States, for example, the top 1% of earners paid 40% of the nation's income tax.
ryandrake 11mo ago
OP is talking about "share of the world's wealth," not a fixed pie. While the raw amount of wealth (the pie) in the world does grow, the important measurement is what percentage of that pie is captured by the rich. And the rich are capturing an increasing percentage of the growing pie. That's where the inequality lies. In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off.
- csallen 11mo ago
  > the important measurement is what percentage of that pie is captured by the rich And this is where we fundamentally disagree. I think the important measurement is how much pie the average person has. I think the important measurement is how much pie the people with the least pie have. > In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off. If you think you're worse off in a world where you have twice as much stuff, just because your neighbor got more than you, to me, that speaks more to a psychological problem. I was lucky enough to grow up in a safe, happy, secure, abundant, middle-class environment in the 90's. Meanwhile, Bill Gates was accumulating billions of dollars, more than 10,000x what my parents made. Despite that, I was happy, I did not feel worse off than middle class kids from generations before me, and I would certainly not trade away 50% of the fortunate childhood I had just to see Bill Gates cut down to size.
TFYS 11mo ago
While that's true, there's still enough "fixed pies" that inceasing inequality does make people worse off. Land, attention, positions of power, etc. will all be taken by the wealthy, because only they can afford those things in an environment of high wealth inequality.
- csallen 11mo ago
  Partly this is a huge problem. But partly it's intentional. It's a huge problem for the obvious reasons. Nobody wants a country where only the rich people have a say, or have influence, or wield political power, or own all the land. Because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the rich then bend the rules to favor themselves. For example, I personally think it's ridiculous that we need a lower capital gains income tax rate to "spur investment." Investment was just fine back when capital gains rates were the same as normal income tax rates, and I see this as a way for the rich to just benefit themselves. That said, a system where the wealthy benefit is partly intentional. The whole idea of incentivizing people to earn wealth is that the wealth should be useful. It only works if it's useful. If extra wealth doesn't allow one to buy more land, or exert more power, or gain more attention, or live more comfortably, then it's pointless and does not serve its purposes as an incentive. This is literally the entire point of it. The issue is not that it happened, it's the degree to which it happens. My fear with #1 is that the degree of difference will be too much. This is absolutely something to keep in check. It's a tough problem to solve. But on the flip side, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Any political or financial system that we have is going to have some inefficiencies and some disadvantages. My fear with #2 is that people have lost the plot, and believe so firmly in "equality of outcomes" that they can't stomach any amount of inequality. Some inequality is okay! We're never going to have a completely equal world, and that's okay. I had a happy, safe, abundant middle-class upbringing, and it didn't bother me one bit that Bill Gates is a billionaire.
  - TFYS 11mo ago
    I think the problem with allowing even a moderate amount of inequality is that over time it'll always lead to large inequality, because after a certain level of comfort the only interesting thing you can do with with wealth is to attempt gain more power and influence, and are even forced to do it because if you don't someone else will. It's like the markets' tendency to consolidate. For example at the beginning we had "low inequlity" media where we had a lot of regional newspapers, but in a competitive system eventually the winners take it all, and now we have only a few large players left. Moderate inequality will be used to increase the inequality, because the people who don't do it will lose to the people who do. I believe the only way forward that won't always lead to large scale war and destruction is to come up with a system that does not allow any amount of concentrated power. That means as close to zero wealth inequality as we can get while keeping a functioning economy. But for that we'd first need better ways to make decisions collectively, as political power can't have any centralization either.
Gud 11mo ago
This counter argument always pop up and is getting stale. The comment you replied to made no such argument, that the pie is fixed. And you can look up how big slice of the pie the ultra rich are having… I don’t understand why you are bringing up pre agrarian society.
- csallen 11mo ago
  The comment I replied to said, verbatim, in its opening line, "Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth." That is literally the fixed pie fallacy. Nobody is arguing that extreme inequality is a good thing, but to say that child poverty exists due to other people literally taking their "share" of the wealth is untrue.
fragmede 11mo ago
the problem with your problem with the fixed pie theory, is that the people with the bigger pieces of the pie get even bigger pieces of the bigger pie and the people who didn't have enough pie to begin with still barely have enough to eat.
- csallen 11mo ago
  And what I'm saying is that these statements aren't related. Yes, some people don't have enough pie. Yes, other people are getting even bigger slices of the bigger pie. But the latter is not what's causing the former. In fact, it's generally the opposite. The forces that are allowing people to get bigger slices of a bigger pie (investments in science, engineering, and technology, driven by market competition) are also what are driving the pie to increase in size, and giving more pie to everyone. Global poverty has been decreasing at an incredible rate. Widespread famine has disappeared. There's more cheap access to transportation, medicine, food, and entertainment than ever before. Almost everyone's pie is increasing. I don't understand why you would prefer a world in which people have less pie, just so it could be more equal to others' pie.

by csallen 11mo ago

neilv 11mo ago

You're responding to the words "grab" and "take", and leading up to an argument in which wealth is created, by a Great Man, who deserves the wealth and power that He created, or else He wouldn't have incentive to create wealth? People can collaborate to create wealth that they share. The problem is when someone says "I am so great, that I deserve more wealth and power than other people". Because of a bad experience in kindergarten, or because their parents told them that.

csallen 11mo ago
Everybody always takes this argument to the extreme, as if it has to be a 0 or a 1, black or white, either people deserve the wealth that they created or they don't. There is no such dichotomy. On one hand, markets and incentives work. When people can earn and gain more, by providing more value to their fellow man, people do work more + smarter + better + provide more value to their fellow man. This is not speculative or just a theory, this is an actual fact that has been observed for hundreds of years across dozens of societies. This has nothing to do with some moral imperative about what people "deserve". It's just pure incentive -- it's better for society as a whole if you incentivize people to work and provide services, to create new technology, to complete engineering projects, etc etc. We absolutely should give people more money if they create more value. On the flip side, of course these people aren't 100.000% responsible for their own success, and completely entitled to all the profits, or deserving of holding all the power in society. If you build a fortune in a capitalist, market-driven economy, that's almost certainly only possible because you are making good use of the economic and political "rails" that have been laid before you and that made this possible. For example, your country almost certainly has a police force and a military that can protect the safety of you and your business. It almost certainly has a judicial branch that have created legal frameworks to limit your liability and allow you to take entrepreneurial or scientific risks. Etc. Pretty much everybody agrees with this. Which is why every western country has a progressive taxation system that taxes the rich at higher rates than the poor or middle class. In the United States, for example, the top 1% of earners paid 40% of the nation's income tax.

ryandrake 11mo ago

OP is talking about "share of the world's wealth," not a fixed pie. While the raw amount of wealth (the pie) in the world does grow, the important measurement is what percentage of that pie is captured by the rich. And the rich are capturing an increasing percentage of the growing pie. That's where the inequality lies. In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off.

csallen 11mo ago
> the important measurement is what percentage of that pie is captured by the rich And this is where we fundamentally disagree. I think the important measurement is how much pie the average person has. I think the important measurement is how much pie the people with the least pie have. > In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off. If you think you're worse off in a world where you have twice as much stuff, just because your neighbor got more than you, to me, that speaks more to a psychological problem. I was lucky enough to grow up in a safe, happy, secure, abundant, middle-class environment in the 90's. Meanwhile, Bill Gates was accumulating billions of dollars, more than 10,000x what my parents made. Despite that, I was happy, I did not feel worse off than middle class kids from generations before me, and I would certainly not trade away 50% of the fortunate childhood I had just to see Bill Gates cut down to size.

TFYS 11mo ago

While that's true, there's still enough "fixed pies" that inceasing inequality does make people worse off. Land, attention, positions of power, etc. will all be taken by the wealthy, because only they can afford those things in an environment of high wealth inequality.

csallen 11mo ago
Partly this is a huge problem. But partly it's intentional. It's a huge problem for the obvious reasons. Nobody wants a country where only the rich people have a say, or have influence, or wield political power, or own all the land. Because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the rich then bend the rules to favor themselves. For example, I personally think it's ridiculous that we need a lower capital gains income tax rate to "spur investment." Investment was just fine back when capital gains rates were the same as normal income tax rates, and I see this as a way for the rich to just benefit themselves. That said, a system where the wealthy benefit is partly intentional. The whole idea of incentivizing people to earn wealth is that the wealth should be useful. It only works if it's useful. If extra wealth doesn't allow one to buy more land, or exert more power, or gain more attention, or live more comfortably, then it's pointless and does not serve its purposes as an incentive. This is literally the entire point of it. The issue is not that it happened, it's the degree to which it happens. My fear with #1 is that the degree of difference will be too much. This is absolutely something to keep in check. It's a tough problem to solve. But on the flip side, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Any political or financial system that we have is going to have some inefficiencies and some disadvantages. My fear with #2 is that people have lost the plot, and believe so firmly in "equality of outcomes" that they can't stomach any amount of inequality. Some inequality is okay! We're never going to have a completely equal world, and that's okay. I had a happy, safe, abundant middle-class upbringing, and it didn't bother me one bit that Bill Gates is a billionaire.
- TFYS 11mo ago
  I think the problem with allowing even a moderate amount of inequality is that over time it'll always lead to large inequality, because after a certain level of comfort the only interesting thing you can do with with wealth is to attempt gain more power and influence, and are even forced to do it because if you don't someone else will. It's like the markets' tendency to consolidate. For example at the beginning we had "low inequlity" media where we had a lot of regional newspapers, but in a competitive system eventually the winners take it all, and now we have only a few large players left. Moderate inequality will be used to increase the inequality, because the people who don't do it will lose to the people who do. I believe the only way forward that won't always lead to large scale war and destruction is to come up with a system that does not allow any amount of concentrated power. That means as close to zero wealth inequality as we can get while keeping a functioning economy. But for that we'd first need better ways to make decisions collectively, as political power can't have any centralization either.

Gud 11mo ago

This counter argument always pop up and is getting stale. The comment you replied to made no such argument, that the pie is fixed. And you can look up how big slice of the pie the ultra rich are having… I don’t understand why you are bringing up pre agrarian society.

csallen 11mo ago
The comment I replied to said, verbatim, in its opening line, "Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth." That is literally the fixed pie fallacy. Nobody is arguing that extreme inequality is a good thing, but to say that child poverty exists due to other people literally taking their "share" of the wealth is untrue.

fragmede 11mo ago

the problem with your problem with the fixed pie theory, is that the people with the bigger pieces of the pie get even bigger pieces of the bigger pie and the people who didn't have enough pie to begin with still barely have enough to eat.

csallen 11mo ago
And what I'm saying is that these statements aren't related. Yes, some people don't have enough pie. Yes, other people are getting even bigger slices of the bigger pie. But the latter is not what's causing the former. In fact, it's generally the opposite. The forces that are allowing people to get bigger slices of a bigger pie (investments in science, engineering, and technology, driven by market competition) are also what are driving the pie to increase in size, and giving more pie to everyone. Global poverty has been decreasing at an incredible rate. Widespread famine has disappeared. There's more cheap access to transportation, medicine, food, and entertainment than ever before. Almost everyone's pie is increasing. I don't understand why you would prefer a world in which people have less pie, just so it could be more equal to others' pie.