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How about a summary of Piketty's argument? We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?
by WalterBright 5mo ago
How about a summary of Piketty's argument?
We could start off with how are you worse off because of people wealthier than you?
- rileymat2 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- fragmede 5mo agohttps://muskdeathcount.com/ https://muskdeathcount.com/
- WalterBright 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- antiframe 5mo 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 5mo agoWell, the Party members were more equal.
- crummy 5mo agoso... they made a society with a lot of inequality and it fell apart?
- antiframe 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- WalterBright 5mo agoRead my responses here.
- sevenzero 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoNorway seems to be doing swell.
- crossbody 5mo agoWell, if Norway managed to pull it off, we can just ignore all the countless counter examples
- srean 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoWealth is a positive not zero sum game. It is not transferred except in the most literal cases like lotteries and casinos.
- WalterBright 5mo 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 5mo agoIn casinos you transfer your money to the eventual winner, a 1:1 transfer minus the house's cut.
- crossbody 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoA lot of money was printed, but that is not wealth creation.
- stopping 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- stopping 5mo agoIs anyone else having trouble parsing this comment or is it just me?
- illiac786 5mo 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 5mo ago1 man, 1 vote.
- fragmede 5mo agoRich man, PAC advertising
- WalterBright 5mo ago
- andyferris 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- intended 5mo 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_ 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- intended 5mo 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 5mo ago[flagged]
- intended 5mo agoWhich would matter if you were even arguing markets correctly and the others were arguing marxist points.
- WalterBright 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoI already pointed out that housing shortages are caused by government policy. See Palisades, for example.