The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The author champions Adam Smith, but can not possibly have read him. He did in fact speak at length about the dangers of inequality. He specifically said that poverty was not an absolute phenomenon. It is not about how many calories you get per day and the size of your dwelling. He understood hundreds of years ago that poverty is a relative phenomenon.
The author also mentioned Picketty but elegantly ignored his reasoning for why inequality is a big problem. One of the things Picketty pointed out is that with rising inequality, inherited wealth starts dominating the economy. This means the ability to get rich fast will most efficiently be accomplished with strategic marriages rather than starting your own businesses. This is what the world of Jane Austin was about. Everything came down to strategic marriage. That was the obsession of the day. A society of high inequality over a long time can not be a society of "the self made man".
That ought to be recognized as a problem.
Also, 85% of American millionaires are self-made (not inherited). See the book "The Millionaire Next Door".
Before, when people thought about 'monopolies' they thought about Microsoft (there wasn't that many)... Now practically every company is a monopoly.
And taken together, they form a sort of oligopoly. Companies today are more cooperative than they are competitive (and this helps them maintain their positions).
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...
It's easy to cherry pick a fact like "85% of millionaires are self-made" and ignore the background of those millionaires.
How many come from secure middle class homes, or grew up in families in areas which happened to benefit from a property boom?
It's a meaningless statistic unless you look at the bigger picture - which is where you find a persistent pattern of research proving that the one single most significant factor determining the wealth of an individual is the wealth of his/her parents.
Worse, the US does far worse on objective social mobility than most other Western countries.
The fact that a few individuals can still work their way up against all the odds doesn't alter the fact it's an unreachable goal for most of the population.
Your comment is discussing something completely unrelated. Facebook and Salesforce were not inherited or constructed via a strategic marriage, they were built. The fact that they were built by high human capital individuals with good parents does not change this fact.
The fact that child earnings are correlated with parental earnings suggests that inheritance of wealth is NOT the cause at all and that Piketty's scary story is wrong. Rather, it suggests that US social mobility is low because rich parents pass good work habits, intelligence and similar traits on to their children while poor parents do not.
The fact that a few individuals can still work their way up against all the odds doesn't alter the fact it's an unreachable goal for most of the population.
It's tautologically true that being in the top 0.1% is unreachable for 99.9% of the population. So what?
I currently live around a bunch of upper middle income Americans (>$200k annual household income), and I have family and friends in poor rural America (<$10k annual household income). Both groups are struggling much more today than they were 10 years ago. Maybe the higher-income ones are still living well, but their work environments have become so extreme that I rarely see them around anymore. I can see that many are being are pushed to their limits just to maintain what they have.
There's a reason why Donald Trump even has a chance at winning the presidency. Many of both of these groups want to see the whole system crash and burn. The media personalities like to think that only the poorer ones are supporting him. But, when I talk around my neighborhood, as much as my neighbors dislike him, they'd also secretly like to see him win.
There has been some frightening instability rising in the US, and it had a lot to do with inequality and unfairness. Many people are realizing that working hard doesn't matter as much as they were taught.
Anyway, package up what you're selling as a solution to the above crisis, and I'll try it out at least. Otherwise, it just sounds like you're complaining that the billionaires are being treated unfairly.
Not how much they did or did not inherit.
Of course, having sensible attitudes about finance corresponds with having more money, but RDPD suggests the attitudes produce the money, rather than the other way around.
It's hard to find good statistical evidence one way or the other, but there's anecdotal evidence that suddenly dropping large quantities of money on a poor person does not automatically confer an ability to manage it effectively, and that they revert to being poor.
Nowadays all we have are some internet Hitlerites who make Pepe the Frog memes and watch tentacle porn.
One of the things Picketty pointed out is that with rising inequality, inherited wealth starts dominating the economy...A society of high inequality over a long time can not be a society of "the self made man".
As the contemporary US demonstrates, this is false. We have a higher proportion of self made billionaires than ever before. For example:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...
Picketty even acknowledges that all the official statistics go against this claim, he just postulates that there are secret inherited fortunes that the statistics don't capture.
In any case, if you really believe inequality rather than poverty is the problem, I invite you to come to India. Way less inequality than the US. Granted, there's a 50% chance you won't have a flush toilet, but that's not a problem if no one else has one either, right?
Maybe they're both problems. You're arguing a straw man here.
The comment you replied to simply says poverty was not the cause of French Revolution. It does not say poverty is not a problem.
If you're a regular person:
- You have no free time because you have to work non stop just to pay the bills (especially rent)
- You have no free speech because if you say the wrong thing at work, you might get fired. Workplaces tend to severely limit individuals' ability to express themselves freely (because people have their livelihoods at stake). It's usually a very tense environment.
- For a lot of whitecollar jobs, you don't even have freedom of thought. You can't do your work while thinking about other stuff; your mind has to be focused 100% on the work (and in a lot of industries, the work is increasingly mechanical and repetitive).
The problem is not lack of money itself, it's lack of freedom. The only way to get freedom is through having a lot of money.
I think independence research should compliment UBI as a strategy for the automation age. Give people the necessary means of production to provide for themselves absent wages.
While technology makes a self-sustaining community require less human labor for food, water, shelter, etc, there's still the issue of technical maintenance. 3d printer filament, machines parts and repair labor aren't free.
For another perspective, you could also look into the Seasteading movement. I can't say I'm too well versed in this field beyond a passing interest, but I think there should be quite a bit of information on the logistics of it. The governance (or lack thereof) would be the interesting part.
There are people that have done something like this, such as the various community buyouts in Scotland of which Eigg is the most prominent and successful. And they're "broken off" in a very literal sense - an island.
But they've not forsworn money, because you still need to buy things from off the island like electronics and oil products. And they still have to pay tax.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/image.php?g=d5P
Very few people work non-stop and those folks tend to earn a lot of money (e.g. bankers), which kind of goes against your narrative.
I'm not sure what you mean by free speech, can you clarify? Are you referring to various government restrictions on commercial speech?
A lot of software developers learn new tools outside of work to keep their skills up to date or they have side projects. Many developers (myself included) work 80 hours per week. The pay is typically good but not that good if you count it on an hourly basis.
Your dismissiveness illustrates your foolishness, and you clearly made no effort to understand my point; or perhaps you lack the mental capacity to read three posts down.
> They are related, but not completely determinitive of one another; it is a 'nature vs nurture' issue, as I describe in my comment on a lower post. Existing evidence shows that preferences and understandings are a result of nature and nurture; there are a number of interesting studies on the subject, which obtain differing results, but none agrees with Rawls' assumptions. You can find this evidence in a number of fields including psychology on moral reasoning, educational psychology, and studies on philosophy.
First off, it's a rather vacant argument to suggest one's preferences as they relate to one's material conditions and circumstances, are "nature v nurture". What preferences are you suggesting are natural, divorced from one's material conditions and circumstances? Which are you willing to agree to being informed, established, or perpetuated by one's material conditions and circumstances? What evidence are you specifically pointing to as differentiating natural preferences vs those which are learned within one's social space? Most importantly, what at all does this evidence have to do with the veil of ignorance or Rawls' arguments for justice, fairness, or equality—which isn't some Rawlsian invention, but has a long history in the works of Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other seminal political and social theorists?
You seem to have a conception that Rawls' ideas are somehow reducible to a single binary format of true/false. This is what I mean by pointing out your comments show no actual understanding of Rawls, or any other thinkers who discuss the veil of ignorance or equality. You don't realize that what you think you're disputing with relation to Rawls isn't something Rawls has suggested to be any different. What assumptions do you think Rawls makes that you believe you—and all this alleged evidence—disagrees with and proves to be incorrect assumptions?
Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean when you suggest a "'rule of law' paradigm of equality"? I have no doubt you mean something specific, but this combination of words suggests nothing about this paradigm of equality, nor about what role the "rule of law" plays in or has relationship to equality.
Rule of law provides a foundation for equality; having a system that treats everyone in a predictable, unbiased, and well-known fashion gives them something they can count on when they plan and engage in all the activities of life. The more your fate rests in the hands of officers acting capriciously, with the power of vague unpredictable rules that you were never aware of, the more difficult and terrifying your life becomes. When you don't have rule of law, who you are in relation to the powerful determines what you can do, and who you can be, thus depriving many (if not most) of opportunity, while subjecting them to the worst form of oppression, embodied by constant terror.
It is unfortunate that no country, province, state, or city fully follows the principles of 'rule of law' but there is definitely a spectrum, and some are much better than others.
You really didn't, except to offer some hand-waving nature v nurture nonsense and insults that don't elucidate or engage Rawls' ideas at all.
> Rule of law provides a foundation for equality; having a system that treats everyone in a predictable, unbiased, and well-known fashion gives them something they can count on when they plan and engage in all the activities of life. The more your fate rests in the hands of officers acting capriciously, with the power of vague unpredictable rules that you were never aware of, the more difficult and terrifying your life becomes. When you don't have rule of law, who you are in relation to the powerful determines what you can do, and who you can be, thus depriving many (if not most) of opportunity, while subjecting them to the worst form of oppression, embodied by constant terror.
You appear to assume that "rule of law" as an idea provides any guarantees at all that the laws themselves by which one is ruled are at all just, fair, or equitable. It is, at best, foolish to make such an assumption. People living under a lawful regime of unjust laws will find themselves in no better shape than those who toil under a less lawful society. History is replete with such circumstances, including:
- Jews under the rule of law of National Socialism
- former slaves and their descendants under the rule of law of the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South
- slaves under the rule of law in every Western colonial/imperial territory, and the pre-Civil War US
- interracial couples under the rule of law before Loving v Virginia
- women under the rule of law throughout Western nations before the advent of equal suffrage
The rule of law provides no innate or guaranteed protection from inequality or injustice. Who you are in relation to the powerful always determines what you can be and do, especially within the context of legally proscribed behaviors. Those who hold power typically make the laws. When the laws are unjust, inequitable, and unfair, the rule of law does nothing to alleviate such a condition.
Even if the services are good enough, there will always be segregation in the presence of huge income disparities between sizable portions of the population. Wealthy overambitious parents wouldn't want their kids to have any contact whatsoever with the "lower class".
It's crazy, we do push for better for our kids and our selves within the bounds of whatever equality we have set.
There can be only one best heart surgeon. How would you go about deciding who gets the best one, and who gets second best, on down to who gets the bottom of the class?
Venezuela?
That smells strongly of the same kind of delusion that fuels capitalism, infinite growth.
> What, then, caused this Great Enrichment? Not exploitation of the poor,
Apparently, none of our clothes or electronics are being fabricated by (economic) slaves.
While I do mostly agree with the article's conclusion,
> But the modern world came from treating more and more people with respect.
it all looks terribly cherry-picked to me in order to make a certain point: "The current system is fine, we can all feel good" or thereabouts.
You know the full argument as well as I do, I'd think?
For a country to get rich, it walks up a staircase. It starts with simple industry, investments in education and at the top after two-three generations are Japan or South Korea? What to do to walk the staircase is known today, there are examples. It mainly needs lack of conflicts, little corruption and good (capitalist) governance.
If you have good counter arguments, other than that China has one generation left of stairclimbing, I'm interested?
This was what changed my world view regarding this:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
The thing about capitalism, though, is that it's an apparently reliable way of doing things in such situations. Apart from the odd crisis, it has worked fabulously for the west during the 20th century. With the internet, however, a lot has changed. I'm not old enough to quantify exactly how much or what, but what's certain is that it has created an entirely new ground to explore and 'colonize', and I don't think capitalism is at all well suited for stable humanist development in both the physical and the new virtual grounds.
I've seen the argument that as the general economy increases for an industrialized society, democracy becomes a necessity?
(What seems scary is that with increasing 1984 Big Brother technological capabilities, it seems more possible for e.g. China to combine economic freedom and harsh political oppression.)
So, it is not like that?
It is not explained why it helps only a little or why it has to be a one-time trick.
And why is the author talking about "expropriation" instead of "taxing"?
The process of expropriation usually occurs suddenly and forcefully in the name of the public interest and are focused on one specific group. Taxes on the other hand, are taken regularly and are applied to everyone (although at a different rate).
That said, I think the overall message has a lot of truth. The reason this is so is that industrialization produces vast, orders-of-magnitude increases in the total wealth of a society, and free market regimes, over the long term, are better than any other at both producing the technological innovation involved, and also putting it into efficient use.
That is why the Soviet Union and Mao's China both stalled out in economic growth. It is also why crony capitalism economies, where the road to wealth is based on governmental connections, as in Putin's Russia and the whole Arab Middle East, don't have successful economies.
That in turn ties to democracy. If you have an authoritarian regime, then probably it is going to try to enrich its members and control the economy for its own benefit, rather than that of its citizens. With a democracy it is much more likely the market will be free enough to have real, sustained growth.
Anyway, the big improvements in the standard of living came from the industrial revolution, not the Reformation.
Liberty: positive or negative liberty?
Freedom: freedom from or for what? Obligation, morality, ethics, work, or responsibility?
Justice: is this rule of law, or some type of social justice?
Basically, birth control leads to a slow death of civilization. The most tragic thing about it is that you can't do anything about it, as denying women the choice would be violation of their human rights.
Therefore, advanced societies are doomed to die out and be replaced by more primitive ones. Which happened few times in history (e.g. Roman Empire) and is already happening again in some part of the world (e.g. EU immigration crisis)
Also, the Romans died out because they fell into decadence, which is exactly what the west is doing right now.
No historian on earth believes this. That's a myth from Gibbon.
The fall of Rome is probably the most overdetermined overinvestigated event in history; everyone has their pet theory. It's usually marked as the crossing of the Rhine by various 'barbarians' and the inability to mount an effective defence.
Don't feed the trolls
So does overpopulation. Your argument applies to a society that requires and assumes constant growth, for which it's certainly true, but that model has its own innate limitations, like overpopulation outstripping available land and resources.
> The most tragic thing about it is that you can't do anything about it, as denying women the choice would be violation of their human rights.
There's a myth implicit in this argument, that women would have more children if they could. But surveys reveal that women want to be able to choose, and if they could choose, they would have fewer children.
Wait ... men don't have the sovereign right not to get pregnant? I'm not sure that's a persuasive argument for or against anything.
> ... but society is doing just fine.
Yes, all except the part about being way overpopulated.
But then why live?
You don't need machine learning to automatically spot social democrats (they have almost the same rhetoric as socialists), a simple python script is more than enough.
By the way, what this article is doing on HN?
"Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class."
Till recently, I spent time and actually read articles on NYT (or similar) even if they had some keywords in title. And almost always, I found that author is supporter of labour party or Bernie Sanders or something like this.
This time, I was probably mistaken.