Serious question: if technology makes everyone better off but increases inequality, is that a bad outcome? Why or why not?
Fancy new technology is not of much comfort to people who back in the day could buy a house and send their kids to college with a single blue collar income-earner and now can hardly find a job (and can't even dream of sending their kids to college with their puny earnings).
>if technology makes everyone better off but increases inequality, is that a bad outcome? Why or why not?
Also, humans are not animals to just need food and shelter. For humans it's not just what you have, it's also what you have relative to others. That's why nobody in the US considers a "trailer park" person fortunate just because they don't live in a third world slum or in a cave like people did in 10.000 B.C. -- we consider their position relative to a current baseline. If that gets too out of balance, people have issues.
Who said they were "better than [me]"?
You seem to presuppose what in fact needs proving: that if someone ended richer than someone else, they were better to begin with. Except if you mean "better at getting rich" which is a tautology.
Between inheritance and class status of parents, and between connections and lucky chances (including geography and color), there are so many ways to undeservingly be more wealthy than someone else and so many ways the "starting conditions" are not the same that this is not even wrong.
Now, two types of people usually have difficulty seeing this: those that played life in 'easy mode' (well off parents, good education, etc) and can't see how it's not as easy for everybody, and people who managed to overcome bad chances and who, due to confirmation bias, can't see that the chances for what they did were slim for others in the same boat but attribute it all to their hard work and smarts (and the lack of those in others).
http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
* I dropped out of high school, got my GED
* Worked for a call center doing Verizon Wireless tech support, got customer service experience for my resume
* Worked for Support.com, got desktop support experience for my resume
* Worked on Taos' service desk, was there at the right time for a Salesforce.com Developer opening and was lucky enough that the people interviewing me decided to take a chance on me
* While working at Taos there was a co-worker in the NOC working on a little C# WinForms app that I helped out on occasion, he thought highly enough of me that he gave my information to a friend of his
* Said friend of my former co-worker decided to interview me, I've now been working at my current employer for three years and have been promoted twice
My abilities were a key component of my journey from a low-paying call center worker to a "Sr. DevOps Engineer" making twice the median household income in my area, but they wouldn't have mattered at all without a tremendous amount of luck.
If I hadn't decided to quit working at the call center to try and go to college I wouldn't have ended up working for Support.com, since I applied there over winter break as required by the state unemployment office.
If I hadn't started working at Support.com my resume may have been tossed in the bin when I applied at Taos due to having no documented desktop support experience.
If I hadn't started working at Taos when I did I wouldn't have networked with the people that led to my current employer, they got a government contract when I was leaving that required help desk personnel to get security clearance and I would have never applied in the first place. Not to mention they gave me an opportunity to prove myself as a high-school dropout with no degree, one which I probably only got because I was already an employee with positive references from others I interacted with.
I think it's easy for many people to underestimate where pure chance plays a part in their lives and careers, but I know I could have easily wound up doing menial low-paying customer service work forever without it. I merely had the means to take advantage of opportunities when they came up, but nobody gets anywhere without the opportunity to do so in the first place.
People shouldn't be left to die, because they weren't naturally blessed with an adaptability that allows them to be retrained into software engineers. There are a huge number of reasons why someone might not be able to "keep up" in todays world. To write that off as 'being better' is disgusting.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...
1. Are you willing to leave behind, say, 40-50% of the population? Especially since that group could include people such as your parents or your partner or your kids.
2. If you're willing to leave them behind, what are you going to do with them?
You're also welcome to donate to (or even work for!) charities that provide for them.
But it's not OK to force everyone else to provide for them.
Contrary to what other comments have suggested, welfare isn't about being a nice civilized society that doesn't leave people behind. Welfare is a bribe. It's a tribute ("danegeld"[2]) we pay to the poor so they don't burn down the city or murder anyone between them and food/shelter. Arresting that class of people would be more expensive as it still pays for their food and shelter.
Do you really want to give up the cheapest and safest option for defending yourself against the bottom ~quarter of the population? Recent events at Ferguson and Baltimor are warning. Ignoring them is not recommended if you value maintaining your current standard of living.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzl4B3mrKQE
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danegeld
[3] Exact amount and the scope of what is mean by "national defense" is off topic.
For me, personally, a random town in Germany is more pleasant from the social aspect than San Francisco with all its riches and its hobos.
(n.b. incarcerating a criminal costs tens of thousands of dollars per year; whereas the summary execution of a deadly threat during a riot, costs at most $10 of ammunition per criminal)
If you're going to advocate for murdering the poor why not go whole hog and just herd them into camps for eradication? That would presumably be a lot more efficient since you're centralizing everything
So, to be clear, my overall point here is that bribing people from threatening deadly violence, is not as good as directly responding to such threats when and as they are made.
Come to think of it, I'm not even quite sure why you made the leap that "allow riots to occur then respond to them appropriately" means "murder all the poor people".
If >it's not OK to force everyone else to provide for them.
Along the same lines of thinking:
it's not OK to force everyone else to defend your assets/property/lifestyle
Or at least it's unlikely you will succeed in that effort
No need for such a thing; that is the job we expect of the police in exchange for paying our taxes, is it not?
> they form because the culture is broken
Have you ever actually met many poor people? "Culture" isn't the problem, and they are some of the hardest working people in the country. They are also some of the nicest people I've ever met and by far the most generous.
If you want to actually fix the problem so welfare isn't necessary, fix the things that are currently denying them the opportunity to improving their situation such as the prison-industrial complex, racist crap like "redlining", various predatory business practices, and regressive taxes. Find ways to increase labor's power such as unions or guilds, with the goal of increasing both available jobs and job stability.
> Arguably it's the welfare money that significantly led to the culture breakdown
That is pure nonsense. Seriously, try actually living[1] below the poverty line for a while, or talk to people that have had to live through a lifetime of denied opportunities.
[1] Due to an unfortunate medical situation, I currently live on less than $1500/month.
A cursory examination of the level of violent crime (particularly against property holders) in states where there is little or no welfare state compared with those in which there is a pretty comprehensive welfare state would suggest this isn't a very good argument...
Then it's the culture that needs fixing, not the welfare.
>Arguably it's the welfare money that significantly led to the culture breakdown in the first place by destroying economic and social structure.
Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, et al. have excellent welfare, but no "gangs" of that style. So it's not the welfare that causes that phenomena.
In contrast, most developing world hellholes have little to no welfare, and huge gangs, violence and destroyed economic structures issues.
In fact the "have the community provide for itself" is how you get support structures like the mafia, the cartels, etc, substituting a state that doesn't help its people.
If you want to try your hand at creating wealth without "forcing" others to provide for you, there are plenty of lawless regions in places like Somalia, Syria, and Afghanistan for you to test your mettle. Sound unappealing? There you go.
They don't start out rich. So, maybe some rich people inherit their wealth, but go back enough generations and everybody had to start non-rich.
It's not just that, though. Rich people don't live in a vacuum with their wealth. They interact with the economy. They employ people, they contract for services, they trade with people. All of the people they interact with need to be fed, clothed, educated, etc. However, thanks to the power of economic growth, they still get more out of society than they pay in taxes.
For some reason people are always reluctant to follow that advice.
Not the other way around.
In fact, it's important to remember that people do actually think what you wrote. They just don't say it aloud.
It's nobody's fault that they're garbage people. Luck of the lottery.
If "we" want to provide support to any group, it can be done through charity. I'd argue this way is more moral: it's more of a good deed to be generous with one's own money than with other peoples', and it's not much of a good deed to give money if one's only doing so due to threat of imprisonment for failing to comply.
There's also research suggesting that charitable behaviour makes the givers happier too: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/10-012.pdf.
Charity implies voluntarily providing support, leaving it to the benevolence (or lack thereof) of each individual. In the end, it teaches people that being uncharitable is OK and an acceptable trait, just like being charitable.
I want a society that mandates that support -- and even more so, one where everybody is OK with that.
In other words, instead of pushing out the disabled, in my society I'd rather push out (as useless scum) those that don't wont want society to help the disabled.
>I'd argue this way is more moral: it's more of a good deed to be generous with one's own money than with other peoples'
Then, since everybody will be using their own money to pay the "help the disabled" tax, it's a good deed to mandate by law that everybody has to fork out.
>it's not much of a good deed to give money if one's only doing so due to threat of imprisonment for failing to comply.
That would be irrelevant if the desired outcome is to effectively help the disabled, rather than to test honesty of people's charity.
Your use of "teaches" here implies that violence/imprisonment or the threat thereof teaches (if no mandatory charity teaches people that being uncharitable is okay, I assume you mean mandatory charity through taxation teaches people to be charitable?). That certainly isn't a given; how do you know whether people have been taught to be charitable by the threat of violence/imprisonment vs they're only paying taxes to avoid being imprisoned? If you beat a child for swearing, has the child learned that swearing is bad, or or has the child just learned to avoid swearing in front of the parent to avoid beating? I'd argue that one thing it definitely teaches is that violence is an acceptable means of making others do what you want, and to me a person who believes this is far more terrible than a person who's just too cheapskate to give charitably. Millions more people have been killed in the past century by people using violence to compel others and people supporting such ideas (e.g. Stalin, Mao, Hitler and their armies, even the politicians who forced people into the army via the draft) than have been killed from neglect (the 20th century war & genocide death toll far outstrips the death toll from starvation).
>Then, since everybody will be using their own money to pay the "help the disabled" tax, it's a good deed to mandate by law that everybody has to fork out.
Is a good deed a good deed if done unwillingly?
>That would be irrelevant if the desired outcome is to effectively help the disabled, rather than to test honesty of people's charity.
If people are free to donate as they choose and none chose to support the disabled, wouldn't that in fact show that society doesn't really care about helping the disabled anyway? In which case what's the justification for a law forcing something that few in society want? Conversely, given so many people do seem to care about the welfare of the disabled, why wouldn't they express this through charity?
It's not about knowing what each individual motives are though, it's about society setting X (we help the disabled) as a norm, rather as something that one may or may not decide to do.
In the end, some people might not like it, but more people will see it as a default/norm/baseline than in an opt-in society.
>Is a good deed a good deed if done unwillingly?
Yes, since again, the good is not in what it means for the one doing it, but in the good it does to the one receiving it.
>If people are free to donate as they choose and none chose to support the disabled, wouldn't that in fact show that society doesn't really care about helping the disabled anyway?
Yes, but there's nothing fatalistic about how a society "feels" (statistically) and what it cares about. Societies can be changed, and having helping as the default (and someone can always opt-in to help more), helps in establishing that kind of "help is good" change in my opinion.
>In which case what's the justification for a law forcing something that few in society want?
Well, what if few, including the black votes, (say, 10% of the 80% whites + 20% of blacks, so 70 vs 30) wanted the blacks to be free?
I would still justify such a law that goes again what the majority wants. Who gets to decide in general in such cases? That's a tricky question, but if it was up to my to decide, I'd decide in favor of that in that case.
>Conversely, given so many people do seem to care about the welfare of the disabled, why wouldn't they express this through charity?
Well, there's nothing stopping them to do so on top of state and structural assistance.
This is a supposition. I could suppose that (and I've certainly read this somewhere) actively giving to charity encourage people to give more; giving is like a skill, generosity is like a muscle, growing with practice. If giving is abstracted out to the state, if people think "I don't have to give to charity, my taxes give enough", people are deprived of that development. Who's supposition is more correct? I don't know, but it's not something that can be decided based on theory alone.
>Well, what if few, including the black votes, (say, 10% of the 80% whites + 20% of blacks, so 70 vs 30) wanted the blacks to be free?
>I would still justify such a law that goes again what the majority wants. Who gets to decide in general in such cases? That's a tricky question, but if it was up to my to decide, I'd decide in favor of that in that case.
The difference here is, if you have a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others, there'd be no mechanism for keeping people in slavery. A society rejecting violence in the absolute sense would barely even support notions of property, yet alone slavery. The difference stems from the fact that neglect is a passive harm; if the person doing the neglect didn't exist, the neglectee wouldn't be in a better situation. If the man watching the downing man didn't exist, the drowning man isn't more likely to be saved. Violence is an active harm: if the person doing the violence didn't exist, the victim would be better off (at least from the victim's perspective); if the slaver didn't exist, the slave would be better off.
>Conversely, given so many people do seem to care about the welfare of the disabled, why wouldn't they express this through charity?
>Well, there's nothing stopping them to do so on top of state and structural assistance.
And people do give quite a lot. According to https://givingusa.org/giving-usa-2016/, Americans gave 373 billion in 2015. With a lower tax burden, people would have even more to give. https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/discretionary_s... shows that in 2015, 54% of American government spending was military spending. Do you think if individuals had more choice over precisely how to spend that money, they'd put so much into the military?
Slavery is based on using force to have others do your work, serve your interests -- not in enforcing certain beliefs in others. So it's not enough to have a "a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others", but also to have a society that it or individuals also don't use force to serve their private interests.
While looks unlikely. How would such a society would enforce no slavery if people still profited from having slaves? It should punish those that do to prevent that (and thus it couldn't fully embrace the non-violence thing).
>(A society rejecting violence in the absolute sense would barely even support notions of property, yet alone slavery.*
Is such a society possible? Only if it has everybody's agreement (not to be violent, use violence when it suits them, etc). Else the society would have to use violence itself (that is, some kind of police) to maintain the non-violence in its members.
>The difference stems from the fact that neglect is a passive harm; if the person doing the neglect didn't exist, the neglectee wouldn't be in a better situation. If the man watching the downing man didn't exist, the drowning man isn't more likely to be saved. Violence is an active harm: if the person doing the violence didn't exist, the victim would be better off (at least from the victim's perspective); if the slaver didn't exist, the slave would be better off.
Well, if the "man watching the drowning man" was punished for his non-involvement, then future drowning men would be better off. So it might seem like it's a totally passive harm, but it actually affects the future of what's acceptable.
(Not to mention that the drowning man, assuming he eventually managed to escape, would probably rejoice in seeing the "man watching him" getting punished for not trying to help him).
>While looks unlikely. How would such a society would enforce no slavery if people still profited from having slaves? It should punish those that do to prevent that (and thus it couldn't fully embrace the non-violence thing).
I probably didn't make the best choice of words, but by "a society/governance structure that rejects the notion of using violence to enforce certain beliefs on others", I meant a society where violence is rejected in general; slavery is the slaver enforcing their beliefs on how the slave should behave on the slave, and they have to use violence for this, or else the slave would escape.
You're right though that maybe this would only work if every member in the society agreed not to use violence. There could be alternatives though, e.g. ostracising the violent person - if nobody else in society interacted with them, they'd starve. Or building a literal wall around the community and not letting the violent person in. Allowing people some degree of violence in direct self defence, e.g. restraining the violent person and pushing them out of the community.
>Well, if the "man watching the drowning man" was punished for his non-involvement, then future drowning men would be better off. So it might seem like it's a totally passive harm, but it actually affects the future of what's acceptable.
This only works if there's somebody who sees the person letting the drowning man drown (and if there's somebody else there, why didn't they save the drowning man themselves?). Even then there's no guarantee: maybe if such a law existed against not helping downing people, people who didn't like helping others would just stay away from rivers more, to reduce their chance of ever being in that situation in the first place.
Amen to that.
I was merely taking the original comment to one of its logical conclusion. Seems like there are those who would like to bring back charitable almshouses and asylums to replace state institutions, how quaint but also how despicable.
After all: If you can't keep up (even if you're disabled), that's not other people's fault for being better than you.
It's funny. Propertiarians frequently use the argument against Socialism that it's "human nature" to be greedy, while simultaneously relegating social support to charity, supposedly out of the goodness of human hearts :)
I believe that utility is logarithmic with rate of expenditure. Hence doubling your spending rate gets you a constant increment in utility. This is why we measure pay rises in percent rather than absolute value. Another $100/week would make a huge difference to someone on the breadline, but is lost in the noise for a millionaire.
This means that money transferred from a rich person to a poor person will increase utility, because the decrement in the rich person's utility is more than outweighed by the incremenent in the poor person's utility. This difference can also accomodate the transaction costs (i.e. running the IRS) and the "deadweight cost" of decreasing the rich person's incentive to earn more.
This would seem to suggest that money should be redistributed so that everyone has the same amount, as that would maximise utility if the total amount of money is constant. But of course that condition isn't true: in a world with zero economic incentives there would be no economic activity. In reality of course such a world would go horribly wrong in any number of ways.
So there would seem to be an optimum amount of inequality in a society. Too little, and you destroy incentives to create new stuff, thereby making everyone poorer than they would have been. Too much and you are wasting valuable resources on gold plated baths that would be better spent giving poor people a tolerable standard of living, education, health care etc.
In other words, if there were no way to reduce inequality without reversing the gains that everybody made, then reducing inequality in that situation would be harmful.
At the low end, at some point you can afford to have a roof over your head, and an extra $20 might mean that you're eating much better for a whole week, or you can buy new shoes, or whatever. But if you're homeless, $20 won't feed you for very long or get you out of the rain for very long.
At the mid range, a salary bump from $30k to $50k might make a world of difference if you're trying to raise a family. It might mean that you're not worrying about how you're going to pay for groceries, or it might mean that your kids are always wearing reasonable, well-fitting clothing.
A few years ago, I met a beggar at a bus stop, who said that the store across the street had a sleeping bag for 50% off until the end of the week, and he was hoping that he would be able to buy it for the winter. I didn't have much money on me myself (basically just the bus fare), but I gave him what I had and walked home instead. To him, those five-ish euros meant not freezing in his sleep, while to me, they only meant a bit of unplanned exercise.
If you have nothing at all, every little bit of money gives you access to some tangible improvement of your situation. But if you have much less than nothing, and every cent of additional income just serves to lower a gigantic debt, there isn't really much incentive to earn more when it makes no significant difference in the end. This is probably one of the reasons bankruptcy law allows discharging unpayable debts, because otherwise debtors might not be motivated to do something about the debts they could repay.
Wealth inequality is often the basis for social revolution, so you have to be careful not to let it get too out of control for too long. In relation to dead cultures who went through this process, we've only just begun the initial stages of intolerance toward it. Occupy, bernie 2017, etc have largely been unsuccessful in motivating political or even social change. This was one outcome that was considered in the formation of the Union (an eventual defacto oligarchy) that was meant to be managed by the US political process. The conflict has already been escalated by flawed judgement in the judicial (citizens united).
Capitalism attempts to distribute the wealth produced by the nation according to the value each individual (and that individual's property) contributes to the economy. There are false positives and false negatives there (people who make more money than their contribution is worth and vice versa), but that's the theory.
A fundamental assumption of that system is that almost everyone (apart from the sick or handicapped) can produce enough value to sustain themselves. Even if someone has no capital or no education, we assume that they can trade unskilled labor and that the value of that labor suffices to buy them, at least, the things they need to satisfy their most basic needs.
That assumption might become untrue in the future. If that happens, the problem won't be that we don't produce enough value to support these people, but that the current system for distributing that wealth will no longer work.
Where are you getting this from? I am aware of no such attempt. I thought that, in idealized capitalism, everyone gets as much as they are able to convince or legally force others to pay them, and 'value' produced is irrelevant.
I think this question is really just asking if inequality is bad. It seems to me that inequality is an inherent part of nature in general and the human condition in particular. "Would you really want equality, or are you ok with inequality at some level?" Another way to say equal is homogeneous. To rephrase it, "Would you want everyone to be the same, or do you value diversity instead?"
I would propose a different question. If some cause (technology in this case) has the effect of helping everyone but helps some substantially more, is this situation sustainable? Then consider, will everyone's fortunes continue to improve forever? Will some equilibrium in the inequality be established? Will the inequality eventually reach an extreme such that the situation will be worse for certain people or society as a whole?
I don't propose answers to these questions. However, I think we can look through history to find examples of how similar scenarios played out in the past.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614...
If you could demonstrate it made 'everyone' better off, I think it'd be an interesting question to consider. But I suspect many of those at the bottom ends of our actually existing inequality are not so "better off".
Take a look at Greece today and see how IMF policies are working out. Actually you can take a look at the entire Southern Europe which is the end result of policies of IMF/ECB/Council, the so called Troika.