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If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening: Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, the
by abuob 4mo ago
If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening:
Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequality comes to be, why it's not good for society and how it could be adressed
- WalterBright 4mo agoHow about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?
- rileymat2 4mo agoIt’s a rather public example but DOGE did immense damage and was facilitated by the ability to leverage wealth into power. There is a dangerous feedback cycle.
- WalterBright 4mo ago[flagged]
- fragmede 4mo agohttps://muskdeathcount.com/ https://muskdeathcount.com/
- WalterBright 4mo agoI've seen these figures all over the map. The deaths of people in other countries are the result of their corrupt and evil governments, not Musk. > 1,045,803 people Amazing how specific it is! Come on, dude.
- crummy 4mo agoI have not read Piketty. But I could imagine a society where the poor are 10% better off and the rich are 1000% better off to be a less stable society that ends up falling apart.
- WalterBright 4mo ago[flagged]
- antiframe 4mo agoCitation Needed (that they actually made everyone equal and it wasn't just a talking point). You may want to read a history book that talks about how Stalin denounced uravnilovka and about the existence of the nomenklatura.
- WalterBright 4mo agoWell, the Party members were more equal.
- crummy 4mo agoso... they made a society with a lot of inequality and it fell apart?
- antiframe 4mo agoThere were a multitude of reasons that USSR collapsed, and reasonable people can argue which were more or less important. I don't think it's reasonable to argue it was due to equality (which wasn't even a thing). Inequality certainly was a thing and one of the reasons, in addition to the Afghan War, Perestroika, Glasnost, the coup attempt, the independence movements of member states. I personally think inequality and structured economic collapse was the biggest culprit.
- sevenzero 4mo ago[flagged]
- WalterBright 4mo agoRead my responses here.
- sevenzero 4mo agoI did, which made me come to this conclusion. You seem to think value is created by extracting money from a product, while value actually is created by the work it takes to create said product. How much money one does extract has nothing to do with a products value. In your Tailor Swift example earlier, the value was created by her recording the music, not by her selling tours.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoThe value is absolutely in how much you can sell it. Otherwise every startup that subscribes to the "build it and they will come" philosophy would've been successful, which is obviously not the case and is a common problem that YC specifically tells founders to look out for. There is no value in building anything if you cannot convince others it is valuable. The labor theory of value is not valid.
- sevenzero 4mo ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 4mo agoAn obviously flaggable comment will get flagged. If you can't say anything other than that then I'm not sure why you'd reply. And anyway, if you can't understand why digging ditches all day is not valuable (after all, look at all the hard work they're doing!) then I'm not sure what to tell you. It's a shame, 4 month old account but still succumbs to comments like this, not sure how HN moderation can fix that.
- srean 4mo agoLet me address the second part. If we define wealth as it's often used colloquially -- the amount of liquid cash one has -- then your potential share of the pie of goods and services shrinks. This is true unless the pie itself grows proportionately. Without agreeing or disagreeing with parent comment, the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some. Historically one usually amassed monetary wealth in exchange of providing goods and services. Stock markets, high frequency arbitrage markets have broken this. Yes there is liquidity insertion, but is that liquidity worth so much ? At microsecond scale ? I don't think so. Stock market let's one encash a perception of promised future delivery of goods and services without the need to actually deliver it. Yes the market will eventually, hopefully, price it correctly, but by then some other retail sucker is holding that bag. When people complain about others getting disproportionately wealthy they are talking about the shrinking share of the pie.
- WalterBright 4mo agoCreating wealth means the pie gets bigger by that amount. And no, wealth is not the amount of liquid cash you have. If that were true, I'd be dead broke. > the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some. Wealth creators will be growing the pie at a higher rate than those who do not create wealth.
- srean 4mo agoI agree that's the theory. It used to be mostly true in the past, but given current valuations it does not look true at all. My worry is that we are not creating enough new wealth but just distributing it lopsidedly.
- crossbody 4mo agoIs your worry based on vibes? Because statistics clearly show median real wealth growing rapidly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
- shric 4mo agoWalter, I believe the idea against wealth inequality is not purely that there are wealthier people but that their wealth should be redistributed such that the wealthier people are less wealthy (but still wealthier) and the poorer people are less poor (but still poorer).
- WalterBright 4mo agoThere have been many attempts at taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and the result was always everybody was worse off except the people who ran the government.
- srean 4mo agoNorway seems to be doing swell.
- crossbody 4mo agoWell, if Norway managed to pull it off, we can just ignore all the countless counter examples
- srean 4mo agoAnother way is to learn from what Norway is doing right and see what can be replicated. Norway is not a sole example though, just a prominent one.
- crossbody 4mo agoCan we? Do we even know the counterfactual? Perhaps Norway would have been 2x richer (incl. their poorest people) if they implemented ultra aggressive libertarian policies. The best we can do is learn from natural expriments like Finland and Estonia being about as rich before ww2, then by 90s the gap got massive since one was forced adopt more redistributive policies. Same with North / South Korea. Here we have at least some hope of extracting causality
- thothless 4mo agoyour first question was better. "how does creating wealth hurt others?" most of this "wealth" is not "created" out of thin air. nor created at all. more like, transferred.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoWealth is a positive not zero sum game. It is not transferred except in the most literal cases like lotteries and casinos.
- WalterBright 4mo agoGambling is not a transference. The gambler is buying a chance to win money. It's an equal value for equal value. Zero sum are things like taxes, where the government just takes it, or robberies.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoIn casinos you transfer your money to the eventual winner, a 1:1 transfer minus the house's cut.
- crossbody 4mo agoIf your logic is right, people back in the Stone Age were all like Jeff Bezos with mega yachts and stuff... It all went downhill from then - the population has increased so much and everyone has gotten so much poorer :(
- demritocracy 4mo agolooks like a lot of wealth was created out of thin air about 6 years ago https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
- WalterBright 4mo agoA lot of money was printed, but that is not wealth creation.
- stopping 4mo agoIf the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources to preserve the status quo by preventing desperately-needed housing from being built. Those with wealth will tend to steer the economic system more towards their own interests in a runaway feedback loop, often in ways which create no overall net welfare for society.
- WalterBright 4mo ago[flagged]
- stopping 4mo agoIs anyone else having trouble parsing this comment or is it just me?
- illiac786 4mo agoWealth inequality leads to lots and lots of power concentrated in a few people. That’s the problem. It’s a money aristocratic system, and that’s really bad for anyone not belonging to the aristocracy. And if they continue on this path, we might see heads roll.
- WalterBright 4mo ago1 man, 1 vote.
- fragmede 4mo agoRich man, PAC advertising
- WalterBright 4mo ago
- andyferris 4mo agoThat depends how they got wealthy. Did they steal everything outright? Someone is worse off in that transaction. (Or everyone a little bit worse off if it’s government grift). Did they create all that value themselves? Might be fine - positive sum games do exist. Did they create some system where a bunch of money flows just to them based on the labour of others? Maybe it depends on the details, like how much the labour is paid. I think Piketty’s point was around capital and wealth tending to accumulate unless something forces it to disperse. This can get worse over time. The last couple hundred years were relatively “good” due to the way revolutions and WWI and WWII basically eliminated many of the wealthy families in the west, a couple times, and the post-war societies were “reset” with good equality that has slowly eroded since (due to insufficient “friction” to prevent accumulating extreme wealth over time, such as high loophole-free wealth and inheritance taxes). Or so the theory goes. Building on that, when you get extreme wealth you get individuals with power to affect policy for their personal good. Some will choose to be selfish (it’s human nature). Policy shifts in their favour. We end up going in the opposite direction to that since the Great Depression - which really was a collectivist culture of everyone getting a share of the wealth of the nation, rather than being screwed over by rich and powerful folks. (McCarthyism somewhat put the brakes on that in the US in particular, though, which is why you can get e.g. free health care elsewhere in the west).
- WalterBright 4mo ago[flagged]
- intended 4mo agoYet theft occurs. Coercion occurs. The market is held up by the enforcement of rules, and the US has spent several decades loosening the rules and defanging its watchdogs.
- sam_lowry_ 4mo ago> WW2 was not caused by rich people, nor by inequality. Read the Three Comarades by Erich Maria Remarque. Inequality was rampant in-between wars as Germany suffered from industrial collapse and reparations.
- mlsu 4mo agoPiketty argues that if r > g, wealth will accumulate into fewer and fewer hands over time. R is the rate of return of capital (rents, stocks, bonds, etc) and g is the growth of the economy over time. If the economy grows at a higher rate than the rate of return, the pie gets bigger at a higher rate than wealth can concentrates. If the rate of return accumulates capital at a higher rate than the growth of the economy, wealth will inevitably concentrate over time. He uses a lot of examples and economic history to argue that r > g, except for a few small periods. I think given the amount of wealth concentration we are seeing, and the political effects thereof, it is a compelling argument. Taxation (of wealth) is the proposed solution.
- WalterBright 4mo ago[flagged]
- intended 4mo agoThen you are using terms in a manner that is effective for semantic victory, but not the spirit of actual discussion the other users are engaging in.
- WalterBright 4mo ago[flagged]
- intended 4mo agoWhich would matter if you were even arguing markets correctly and the others were arguing marxist points.
- WalterBright 4mo agoWell, we've seen the Labor Theory of Value here, and the idea that people get wealthy by stealing from others, and it is bad that some people have more money than others, and so on.
- norir 4mo ago> We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you? You are smart enough to come up with some answers of your own. It's rude to demand others to do your own thinking for you.
- fragmede 4mo agoI'm not worse off, just because some chucklefuck has a yacht or a jet. I'm worse off when their wealth lets them out bid me for things that are scarce. Housing is currently in short supply in in-demand areas. Access to doctors is another one. The rich still only get one vote, but let's be real, being rich means buying tons of ads pushing a rich person's agenda in the run up to an election. Also tax codes. The rich get to put their kids in private schools, rather than having better public schools. That goes for other public goods too.
- WalterBright 4mo agoI already pointed out that housing shortages are caused by government policy. See Palisades, for example.
- galaxyLogic 4mo agoI was just thinking about it, rich people have money to spend in elections to get their representatives elected. When they do they make laws, or remove existing laws, to help rich get richer, so they have more money to spend in the next election. And so it goes. Solution might be legislation that puts limits on how much money each person can spend on elections. But it may be too late, there are so many rich people in the congress that such laws can not pass. The rich not only want to get richer they also want the lower classes to get poorer so they will work for less and will have to work longer hours so they will have less time and money to educate themselves, and thus will remain clueless about what is going on.
- WalterBright 4mo agoI'd prefer term limits.
- galaxyLogic 4mo agoDefinitetly, except people to which the term-limits would apply really don't like term-limits. And they are in power. But I don't want to souond too pessimistic, there are lots of good people and progress is inevitable. AI gets put down a lot but I think it will make people much smarter.
- euio757 4mo ago[dead]
- sam_lowry_ 4mo agoAbsurd to you here and now. Going to the Moon felt absurd to the contemporaries of Cyrano de Bergerac some 400 years ago. This did not stop him dreaming about it. P.S. If anyone is interested, the Global Justice Report has been published today: https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/ https://globaljusticeproject.wid.world/
- 28304283409234 4mo agoAnd also check "Escape from capitalism" by Mattei. https://youtu.be/9M_dq_0ljsc?si=xkqtCs4YRor-NTyz https://youtu.be/9M_dq_0ljsc?si=xkqtCs4YRor-NTyz