Hacker News Reader

Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

>Without growth, he says, economic life becomes a zero-sum game. “As Martin Wolf, the Financial Times commentator has noted, the option for everybody to become better off—where one person’s gain needn’t require another’s loss—was critical for the development and spread of the consensual politics that underpin democratic rule.” In other words, the function of economic growth is to blunt the force of envy in a world with highly skewed distributions of income and wealth.

The answer lies right here but the author fails to consider it. We could evolve our economic systems to redistribute obscene wealth and build a more egalitarian society. The ones who give in this scenario only lose on paper but they wouldn't notice any difference in their day to day. This is especially true once automation becomes the norm. The article is too simplistic and fails to consider a host of important variables which are only now coming into play.

View on HN

> We could evolve our economic systems to redistribute obscene wealth and build a more egalitarian society.

There is not enough of what everyone wants. There's no way to get it. Let's take a trivial example. There are a number of companies out there making smartphones. What if everyone wanted iPhones? There may be enough iPhones out there to give one to everyone in, say, New York City. There is not enough, and there will never be enough iPhones to give to everyone in the entire world.

If you're just talking about money, then that's even worse. If you redistributed all the wealth in the entire world among 7 billion people, every person in the whole world would get a check for the princely sum of $8.57. (Obtained by dividing the entire world's money supply, found on Google, by 7 billion, roughly how many people there are in the world right now) Meanwhile every single organization, every single company doing anything useful for the world has been completely decapitalized.

There simply isn't enough wealth in the world. And making everyone equal is the best way I can think of to ensure that no one will ever have the ability to make more wealth. Like it or not, we're stuck with inequality for the foreseeable future. Either people are going to be unequal in purchasing power terms, or in the fact that production capacities for all possible luxuries people might want are not and will never be world-scale. You can't give everyone on the planet a NYC penthouse. And until you do, people will complain about inequality. We need another way of thinking about the problems of the world than that some people have lots and lots of things that other people don't.

> every person in the whole world would get a check for the princely sum of $8.57

This number is way off. That would mean there are only $60B in the entire world, whereas the Fed was until recently creating $85B per month to buy bonds.

Total worldwide wealth is around $241 trillion, which is $34k / person (which I don't think necessarily contradicts your actual point).

The number I found was $60T, I used the money supply as I don't think that the rest of the wealth will actually be worth anything once all the cash is distributed.

You're right though, I missed a few zeros, my figure comes out to $8571.42. Either way, nobody's really better off. Sure, we'd all have enough to build a mud hut, but the damage done to the world order would far outweigh any improvements.

USD 16,100 once you account for PPP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

GDP (or GWP) is a flow: how much stuff we produce each year. Wealth is a stock: how much total stuff we've already produced and not consumed.

Yes, you can't redistribute flows politically in any kind of a meaningful fashion. When you do that it's called a planned economy, and is generally inferior at raising living standards to market economies.

I'm sympathetic to your ideas, but you're really overstating your case here. Redistributing income is probably the primary activity of governments in rich countries today. Even in the US, transfer payments are about 14% of GDP: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=2Qi3

Oops, misread the original post.

There is a mistake in your calculation - the nominal DGP of the world is around $77.609 trillion which is $10,857 per capita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy. Rich people really own the majority of wealth and the rest really is the 99% (Please note I am not saying that communism or idiocracy is a solution)

I don't think GDP is the right number to use here. If you redistribute wealth, then you're greatly affecting the ability of individuals and businesses to produce and sell more things, meaning you're destroying GDP by redistributing liquid capital. You can't redistribute non-liquid capital. What are you going to do, cut train cars into redistributable pieces?

Rich people owning the majority of the wealth is a tautology. If they didn't, then they wouldn't be rich.

I disagree with calling the statement tautology. On the contrary. Imagine a scenario where 99 people own 1$ each and 1 person own 10$. The richest person does not own nowhere near majority of the wealth. This is how OP understood the situation, while the current situation is more like 99 people owning 1$each while 1 person owns 110$. Do you see my point?

> There is not enough of what everyone wants.

Well, that's right...

> What if everyone wanted iPhones? There may be enough iPhones out there to give one to everyone in, say, New York City.

But that's not. Bad example. iPhone production can increase as much as demand asks for. If we let anybody build one, there'll easily be an iPhone for everybody that wants one.

Yet, there are few islands, beachfront properties, waterfalls... The things not available for everybody fall mainly on the non-renewable natural resources, with some slowly renewable ones at the borderline.

We can't make capitalism go away. At least not until humanity changes completely into something that craves what's available at space (mostly energy), instead of what's available at Earth.

> iPhone production can increase as much as demand asks for. If we let anybody build one, there'll easily be an iPhone for everybody that wants one.

What? This statement makes no sense. Here, let me demonstrate by quoting an ancient islander who likes to build statues:

> Tree production can increase as much as demand asks for. If we let anybody grow one, there'll easily be a Tree for everybody that wants to cut one down.

It's absurd! and exactly the thinking that will lead to people cutting down the last tree. iPhones depend on resources just as much as those trees, if not more.

But replicators are just around the corner!

I never said make everyone equal. I said redistribute obscene wealth. There is a whole greyscale between black and white.

Where does that get us? Some small number of people get more wealth. Redistribution is not a solution for anything, all it does is destroy stuff.

I'm all for the expansion of classes that aren't ultra-rich and ultra-poor. But that process is already happening as fast as it really can happen, it's what globalization is if you can look at it with a rational eye. Through capitalism and markets. Big political solutions are sledgehammers that tend to only wreck things.

Globalization is a big political solution that favours only the ultra-wealthy. Ensuring people have purchasing power is the only way to ensure the economy doesn't become a zero-sum game. The way things are going, companies with only a handful of employees can be worth billions. Where does that leave the rest of us?

> Ensuring people have purchasing power is the only way to ensure the economy doesn't become a zero-sum game.

How are you going to do this? You can't just print money and give it to them. If you do that, then you're either just creating another, tiny, class of people, or if you do it for everyone, then you're just devaluing your currency through mass inflation. If you take it from people that do have it, then you either have a huge management problem, how are you going to decide which wealth is worth redistributing and which is worth leaving alone, or you'll have mass chaos.

> The way things are going, companies with only a handful of employees can be worth billions.

That's just, like, your opinion man. Mine is that the living standards of the poor have markedly improved in the last 50 years and continue to improve. Purchasing power is only one thing. There's access to food, political stability, access to a social ladder. All of these things are more important than how many dollars are in their pocket. Even the most autocratic nations have in the past few years had to open up.

> Globalization is a big political solution that favours only the ultra-wealthy.

Nonsense. Globalization is why Walmart can feed the hungry and clothe the naked with cheap food and clothing. Globalization is why Apple, Samsung, LG, OnePlus and other phone manufacturers can produce supercomputers that fit in our pockets.

Globalization benefits us all.

Non-sarcastic question: Who determines how to redistribute the obscene wealth?

If the ultra-rich were smart they would do it before being forced to. Chances are, in the current system, lawmakers would do it just as they always have.

> The ones who give in this scenario only lose on paper but they wouldn't notice any difference in their day to day.

Not losing anything noticeable doesn't stop the super-rich avoiding taxes today. Why would that be different in the future?

The system is designed by us. We can change it if there is the political will.

You seemed to be implying that there wouldn't be violent objections to such redistribution. There will be. And even assuming you succeed in that redistribution, the original point remains: in a zero-growth world, people who want to get ahead will try to do so by taking from others, ultimately through violence.

There cannot possibly be social institutions devised to prevent violent people from disrupting everyone else's life, right?

Such institutions didn't stop Genghis Khan. In a time of growth people are willing to pay taxes to support social institutions, but will that still be true in a zero-growth world?

> ...build a more egalitarian society

Except nobody knows how and so far all attempts at this failed. I think we have better chances in hoping for fusion power than working model of communism.

No one ever flew to space until we did. I don't think previous failures are a good indicator of future success. Also fusion power would be a game changer, another variable in the equation so to speak.

Germany is a more egalitarian society than the US so the failure idea is overblown.

We can treat food, housing, and basic healthcare as public goods without going full communist. In fact due to the concentration of state power historical communist society's are less egalitarian than Germany is today.

PS: We also know a lot of things that don't work. Price controls for example cause lot's of problems, so free markets are really useful. The problem is when power is concentrated into the hands of a few you end up with what is effectively a planned economy. ex: Intel's on CPU GPU is good for them, but not the wider economy.

There have been several examples of anarchocommunist societies that failed because of external forces, i.e. they were conquered, rather than internal forces.

Catalonia in Spain and the Free Territory in Ukraine are the big ones. They lasted for a few years each. Catalonia failed because the Stalinists in Spain betrayed them and that allowed the fascists, backed by Nazi Germany of course to win the civil war. George Orwell fought with the anarchists in Spain. It's very enlightening to read about the social institutions they developed before they were defeated militarily.

The Free Territory was a model of extreme democracy where power was decentralized to an extremely fine-grained level. It was defeated by the Bolsheviks after Trotsky invited anarchist leaders to a joint meeting and then summarily executed them.

Implementing communism does not seem impossible due to internal factors. After a few decades of build-up, both Ukraine and Spain saw the birth of egalitarian communist societies that flourished in the brief time that they were allowed to exist. They were crushed by external authoritarian conquerors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com