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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

What does 'Income Equality' look like?

The opposite of income inequality isn’t income equality. It’s less inequality and more integration. My wife grew up in small town Iowa. There were rich people (doctors and some farmers) and poor people, but everyone’s kids went to the same school (there was only one), went to the same cornfield parties (apparently a real thing), etc. The millionaire farmers still worked for a living—they weren’t making passive income.

tl;dr: The opposite of New York.

I grew up in a town with a high per capita income, but fairly low inequality. There were a few tiny religious and Montessori schools, but pretty much everyone's kids went to the public schools. Home prices probably varied by a factor of 10 or 20; there were both crappy old duplexes and McMansions, but no genuine slums or palaces with car elevators. No one commuted by helicopter. The richest and poorest had shared interests.

That's still income inequality, though, when you boil it down to the numbers as we are here. I completely agree that it is what is desirable, and would like people to talk more about wealth inequality rather than income inequality, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

I think this comic illustrates your point.

Equality vs Equity.

https://scontent.flas1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/23331456_17...

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

The way I see it is income inequality is just the derivative of wealth inequality. Opportunity inequality is the derivative of income inequality. Opportunity equality is the idea of a level playing field. When people complain about income inequality, they're really complaining about opportunity inequality, which I believe drives the bulk of income inequality. All that people are asking for is real opportunity equality.

My opportunity to succeed (which drives my potential income, which drives my potential wealth) is not equal to that of a guy whose parents are billionaires, went to private school and an Ivy League college, and has a contact list full of CEOs and high up politicians. My opportunity to succeed is also not equal to that of a guy whose parents are divorced and poor, lives in a gang-ridden neighborhood, and is stuck in the school-to-prison pipeline. The playing field is not level.

The government can't give you two married parents that love you in a stable household, the best education money can buy, or social connections with powerful people.

It can minimize the value of those things for the people that have them... at least within its borders. I'm not convinced that's in anyone's best interests, though.

> The government can't give you two married parents that love you in a stable household, the best education money can buy, or social connections with powerful people.

It can do the second, and it can create opportunities for the third. And it can help (or hinder) the first. (As a purely hypothetical illustration of that, it could implement a systematically racially biased criminal justice system and engage in a pattern of racially-suitable violence against a specific segment of the adult population, decreasing the number of two-parent present families in that segment.)

How do we get everyone through Ivy League without lowering the bar? How do you propose the government manage social connections to powerful people?

You're right about it affecting the first, though. Also as a purely hypothetical illustration, it might create a multiple generation-spanning dependency on social programs, make single parent households more economically feasible and socially acceptable as a lifestyle, and foster class warfare that downplays the importance of one's own choices by blaming only others for one's own outcomes.

I don't think most people are looking for actual income equality, just lower income inequality.

Bingo! But it seems a lot of people are die-hard anti-everything that smells even vaguely of socialism, no doubt due to decades of US political brainwashing.

Milton Friedman's three categories for human equality: equality before God, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome - the second is compatible with liberty, and the third is socialism.

I’m not sure the second is compatible with liberty either, unless you water it down to mean nothing. Do you stop parents from passing on good genes, education, values, and money? If not you’ve got a very impoverished version of equality of opportunity. If so you’re impinging on some very fundamental freedoms.

It's equality of opportunity, not equality of ability.

Equality of opportunity is one of the hardest things to define. Milton talks about the opportunity to pursue your talents. But your talent could be really expensive, so what does that actually mean? The son of a wealthy man might have the funds to become a rocket engineer, wasn't that an unequal opportunity to develop talents?

And is there a point to prevent that rocket engineer from existing?

If we want to get into zinger rhetoric I might reply that the 1st is theocracy and the 2nd is a lie, or also socialism.

If not, we might say consider all 3 (excluding the one that doesn't exist) relative. We never have absolute equality of opportunity or outcome, but we can have more or less equality.

zinger point taken, but consider:

1 - compared to a rock, all humans are equal (note: this is not a political statement and has no relationship to theocracy)

2 - if a unit of food sits on the ground between two people, they are free to behave however they want, either can choose to pick up the food or not - this is liberty

3 - given that a unit of food when found will be split evenly (by some process out of an individual's control) their behavior no longer matters - this is not liberty

2 -- since when is "might makes right" == liberty? I find this position odd especially considering the build and gym habits of most tech Libertarians I have met.

Shouldn't, for it to be true liberty, one of those people own that food by virtue of a piece of paper stating a government granted monopoly over it because his ancestors enslaved the ancestors of the other, and be allowed to call an army of police with guns to take it no matter how small and weak he is? And perhaps, if he sees fit and deems the other person worthy, the owner will rent a fraction of it to the other to plant as a seed and keep the yield for himself, divvying out exactly enough food for the other to barely survive and continue working?

This is exactly liberty, no?

I have a lot of time for liberal philosophy including even those like Milton Friedman and others from his (and our) era, where I tend to disagree with many of their conclusions. But, most liberal thought tends towards very hard definitions, of things that are (IMO) not that hard (objectively true in all cases) in reality.

It's an obvious problem in moral philosophy. You start from benign definitions of good and bad, like "greatest good for the greatest number." Then liberal philosophers push that to the extreme, usually weird moral dilemma scenarios. Killing fat men with mining carts to save skinny people. Infanticide. Involuntary euthanasia. Instead of admitting that your "moral maxim" or whatnot is really more of an approximation or a guideline really, they conclude that all this stuff which seems really bad and immoral is actually good.

The american liberalism (or conservatism, libertarianism and other bad, illogical names for it) is rife with this sort of thing, IMO. The concept of liberty is defined using simple, made up examples. Platonic ideals. Then it's applied to the real world. At some point, using the term "liberty" to describe it becomes defensible only by very academic, long winded philosophical argument. To the person who's liberty is supposedly at stake, it seems odd that these philosophers are calling it liberty.

I suspect this is why only very academic, extremist or philosophical types (or australians) call it liberalism or libertarianism (this one carries its own ironies). Everyone else just calls it conservatism.

You shouldn't get your philosophy from economists.

nonsense. I don't agree with Milton's political positions, but he's entitled to them and they are valuable. He was a sharp thinker. As were Adam Smith, John Locke, Robert Malthus, Karl Marx.... Philosopher-economists isn't a new phenomenon. In fact, a lot of the best economists were both.

Ok, that's fair :) My pre-coffee take was a bit too spicy.

If we're being fair, nonsense is not a nice way of starting any kind of conversation.

I'm definitely going to have to disagree with that.

Everybody wants to live in a country with a reasonably low Gini index. The disagreement is only about what "reasonably low" means and how to achieve it.

In the way the term is used here, income equality is (the inverse of) income inequality. More equal, less equal... it's a measure, not a state.

This is like asking what does wealth look like.

If you have two popsicles, and I have one - we could achieve popsicle equality by throwing one of yours away. We have overall less popsicles but greater equality.

If you have billions of popsicles and other people have none you could easily give out millions of popsicles to help the less fortunate and still have vastly more popsicles than you could ever need.

But the relevant metric here is how many people have nothing. If everyone had nothing you solved the inequality but you're still poor.

Inequality is just a bad metric. I'd rather be a poor in America than equal in Venezuela.

Well, no-one answered your question directly, so here: https://ibb.co/dVDSDG

That is cumalative wealth up to 100%. The blue line is if everyone is equal (poorest 20% have 20% of the wealth). The red line is linear increase where the richest 20% have 5 times the wealth of the poorest 20%.

The yellow line is the actual wealth. These figures are just for the USA; the world one looks too much like a cliff.

Abolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production.

Exactly - and speaking of class here is further speculation on semantics of an equitable world system: as late as possible dynamic binding(real time adaptation for all actors), lexical scope (affinity groups), functions that provide utility for the masses rather than fragile hierarchies of turgid dominance(object oriented is the perfect description of our current economic and political structures. Beside how much cooler and arrogant does it sound to describe your political leaning as “functional”).

These days I don't see much production around.

It's probably somewhere in the industrial zones on the outskirts of cities, but it's not something many people do.

As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production? Will it involve lots of tin foil?

> As a software developer I produce code. How would you exert democratic control over means of such production?

Open source software is already a model that approximates such democratic production. If us developers didn't have to make a wage to survive, how would we develop software?

Class is much more than income (or wealth), and enforcing income equality won't get rid of classes.

No, but income equality with a class system would cause the system to destabilize. The long-term behavior of such a system would have to resolve the contradictions of capitalism.

Collective ownership of all MacBook Pros? Or of my efforts with the one I use? I suppose I wouldn't get to choose the terms with which I distribute my software, at the very least?

"Abolition of class. Democratic control over the means of production"

Oh wow, these people still exist.

We tried that in the last century and it ended up being the most horrific, mass-murdering, totalitarian, controlling era in all of history.

About half of my schoolmates growing up in Canada came from places like Cambodia, Vietnam, Ukraine, Russia, Czech, China, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Hungary ... see the common thread there? :)

> Cambodia

> Vietnam

Buddy. I've got some news for you.

The Communists were the root problem in that area, obviously they came about due to other forms of ostensible dysfunction, but they were the worst, possibly the worst ever ... and really the core of the problem.

And FYI Cambodians were not fleeing bombs dropped near their homes by Americans, they were fleeing Communists who murdered 3 of 8 million, making it one of the worst genocides in history, easily comparable (on the same scale as) the '6 million' who died at the hands of the Nazis.

Everyone from there hates the Communists, much like almost everyone fleeing Cuba hates Fidel, it seems their only supporters are those who are not from there , and who have a very academic view of it all.

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

bingo.

There's no revelation that geopolitics is complicated, nor is there any abnegation of blame which squarely upon the Communists for their mass murder of Cambodians, of their long war in Vietnam, and resulting totalitarian control and oppression of Vietnamese people for generations.

That sounds very much like "we the people have voted to take your factory". That is, it sounds like the "democratic" in "democratic people's republic".

Fortunately, we have this Constitution that places limits on the amount of democracy we have, partly to keep it from running amuck in exactly that way...

Democratic control? You mean that 51% can bar the other 49% from having access to the means of production?

Pigs flying

Roughly ten thousand dollars a year per person total spend including all government intervention as well as cash compensation. That is assuming everyone still is motivated to create as much under the new system.

For the downvoters, current global population is 7.6 billion[0], global GDP(GWP) is 78.28 trillion USD[1]. 78.28 trillion / 7.6 billion = ten thousand three hundred USD.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

Shared suffering, aka socialism.

Socialism :-(

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