5 ms·

He's not just saying inequality is rising, he's also pointing out how: it is because in our time, capital grows at a faster rate than labour output (this is my

He's not just saying inequality is rising, he's also pointing out how: it is because in our time, capital grows at a faster rate than labour output (this is my lay person's reduction, please do correct me if needed). Is the latter a bad thing? It depends what kind of world you'd favour. Let me put it this way: if people whose great-grandparents were innovators but who are now simply in the business of owning stuff get greater rewards in life than people who take risks, innovate and work hard to build new things, is that a bad world?

dnautics 13y ago
It's not clear to me how one would measure 'labor output'. What constitutes 'labor'? Is sitting at home playing a video game 'labor'? What if you're beta-testing for a games company? So fundamentally this thesis is flawed because there is no well-defined concept of 'labor'. You could take the value theory of labor, which states that 'labor is any non-property that you're willing to pay for', but in that case capital cannot grow at a faster rate. Really inequality is growing because we have legions of administrator working to redistribute wealth. These are usually well-intentioned ideas that are designed to elevate the less fortunate, but result in corruption and redirection of those funds to the already-rich (who are generally more adept at lobbying for those funds, perversely, especially under the regime of stronger campaign finance laws) Consider the case of Bell, California, a city with a median income below ~40k, where the city administrators took it upon themselves to line their own pocketbooks (to the tunes of half a million dollars in annual salaries) with city funds. 5 out of 6 administrators were convicted of corruption. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/09/local/la-me-1210-angela-spaccia-20131210 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/09/local/la-me-1210-ang... Or, the case of the centinela valley school district, again, a low-income area, where SCHOOL officials lined themselves with money (600,000 salaries, interest-free loans on property, etc etc), and awarded very lucrative construction contracts to their cronies. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-centinela-probe-20140417,0,2448891.story http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-centinela-probe-20140417,... Meanwhile the teachers are underpaid and the kids are not getting educated in failing-grade schools. When the poor get screwed, it's often not the free market that's screwing them. It's the people with authority that are warping the bureaucracy and taking advantage of the fact that they are spending 50-60 hours a week on tenuous employment and have little time to concern themselves with arduous bureaucracy and regulatory minutiae, that we 'vote' people in to handle.
- dnautics 13y ago
  what's even more amazing is that in the US, us as voters seem to insist on our higher level elected officials to have had 'experience' as a prerequisite for advancement to higher office. Are these really the people we want to elevate to have broader authority? And there is a bootstrapping? The country is really 'federalizing'; giving more authority to the federal government, so there is less of a 'filter' against local officials, because there's just simply less to do, and less incentive for voters to look carefully at who their, say state and local level representatives are.

dnautics 13y ago

It's not clear to me how one would measure 'labor output'. What constitutes 'labor'? Is sitting at home playing a video game 'labor'? What if you're beta-testing for a games company? So fundamentally this thesis is flawed because there is no well-defined concept of 'labor'. You could take the value theory of labor, which states that 'labor is any non-property that you're willing to pay for', but in that case capital cannot grow at a faster rate. Really inequality is growing because we have legions of administrator working to redistribute wealth. These are usually well-intentioned ideas that are designed to elevate the less fortunate, but result in corruption and redirection of those funds to the already-rich (who are generally more adept at lobbying for those funds, perversely, especially under the regime of stronger campaign finance laws) Consider the case of Bell, California, a city with a median income below ~40k, where the city administrators took it upon themselves to line their own pocketbooks (to the tunes of half a million dollars in annual salaries) with city funds. 5 out of 6 administrators were convicted of corruption. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/09/local/la-me-1210-angela-spaccia-20131210 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/09/local/la-me-1210-ang... Or, the case of the centinela valley school district, again, a low-income area, where SCHOOL officials lined themselves with money (600,000 salaries, interest-free loans on property, etc etc), and awarded very lucrative construction contracts to their cronies. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-centinela-probe-20140417,0,2448891.story http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-centinela-probe-20140417,... Meanwhile the teachers are underpaid and the kids are not getting educated in failing-grade schools. When the poor get screwed, it's often not the free market that's screwing them. It's the people with authority that are warping the bureaucracy and taking advantage of the fact that they are spending 50-60 hours a week on tenuous employment and have little time to concern themselves with arduous bureaucracy and regulatory minutiae, that we 'vote' people in to handle.

dnautics 13y ago
what's even more amazing is that in the US, us as voters seem to insist on our higher level elected officials to have had 'experience' as a prerequisite for advancement to higher office. Are these really the people we want to elevate to have broader authority? And there is a bootstrapping? The country is really 'federalizing'; giving more authority to the federal government, so there is less of a 'filter' against local officials, because there's just simply less to do, and less incentive for voters to look carefully at who their, say state and local level representatives are.