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Comment by aje403 | Hacker News Reader

This is a distortion.

Young men see rich men with beautiful women flying to anywhere they want on the planet. Only a few of them will get that when they're older, and it oftens boils down to intelligence, work ethic, cleverness, other abilities like athletics and looks, and a few lucky breaks that they take advantage of. Exceptions being inherited wealth. Law of averages, those who do make it are hard working and intelligent. Law of averages, those who do not are often less so. However, everyone still wants the hot girl and the jet. So what's the right thing to do? Take "power" from [Hard working and intelligent]U[Scott Disick, Donald JR] to normalize influence across everyone? Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say? And then the issue becomes more nuanced when you take into account inheritance and things of that nature.

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However, everyone still wants the hot girl and the jet.

I'd settle for decent healthcare and enough stable income to raise a family.

Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say?

1) They haven't and 2) no. You appear to be advocating plutocracy.

I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that.

You're reading things into what I'm saying - if Elon Musk raises a campaign fundraiser for his favorite candidate, do I mind that? Do I mind him having more "power" in that people listen to his twitter account over joe schmo? Not at all. Is he colluding with other executives to fix automative prices and then pressuring his candidate to change regulations as a favor when they're elected? Yes. That makes me a "plutocracy supporter"?

>I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that.

A very large portion of those people have contributed more suffering to the world, and continue to do so through the continued exploitation of the worker class and lower classes.

Should probably bow out after this one; I don't think there is much room for rational discussion for my viewpoints here.

I agree that walmart is a piece of crap, but you don't really know what suffering is. Please ask your grandparents what options their grandparents had in life.

If you have some notion that corporations that try to profit are a blight on society and that their abolition will lead to some dream world, then by all means. Please knock over all the establishments, nationalize all corporations and divy profits amongst the workers, redivide the wealth of every millionaire, publish a list of banned words like 'wealth', and so on, and then point me to the nearest democracy.

> I don't think there is much room for rational discussion for my viewpoints here.

I agree, you refuse to address the arguments people bring up in favor of attacking straw men and relying on sarcastic hyperbole.

Funny, your comment is self referencing

Wow, that's one hell of a strawman.

I am absolutely not against people wanting to run a business for profit. In that sense, I am a rather pragmatic socialist libertarian, if you will.

However, I am strongly against businesses that exploit their workers by underpaying and overworking them.

"I'm not sure what to tell you, people who have built organizations that employee thousands of people have contributed more to society than average. If that needs further justification then I'm not even sure how to respond to that."

I hear that often but is it really true? Maybe they just have found a way to funnel money to themselves instead of it going to other businesses. For example has Walmart created anything or did they just take the money that would otherwise have gone to a lot of small businesses? For sure they were very smart but did they make the country better? I am not so sure.

They sold things more cheaply than other businesses could do. That's almost the purest example of benefiting others you can come up with, it's only one step short of literally putting money in their customer's pockets.

In the end they took money out of the pockets of a lot of small bushiness, put a lot of it into their own pockets and also a lot benefited customers. Maybe it's an overall benefit but I don't think it's that clear. It's not like they developed some new technology that opened totally new markets.

What, so the other businesses should be allowed to remain profitable while screwing over their customers on price even after a competitor comes along who can do a better job? Please, this is what markets are all about.

> 1) They haven't

I'm a bit confused by this statement. In the vast majority of cases where an individual purchases something, they do it because they want it (food is purchased because the body desires food, phones are purchased because the brain likes communication and connectedness, medical care is purchased because people realize it helps them, etc). Therefore, for someone to have accumulated a large amount of profit, enough people must have decided that whatever they are offering is beneficial.

Simply put, if a person has a large amount of money earned through a truly free market, then they must have provided a benefit to society.

Now, this can be confused by things like regulation. Regulatory capture, corruption, and many other things can all force people to purchase things they do not desire or do not provide as much benefit as a different product, but this is not an issue that can be solved by more regulation or taxation. Instead, it is an issue with interference in the market which causes the inequalities that I would agree, very much do exist.

Your second paragraph is problematic. First, truly free markets are unlikely to be an accurate statement of where someone earned their money (e.g. the US is nowhere near that, so that excludes every wealthy American). Second, the use of earn -- does that exclude people who extract a large amount of money, like Martin Shrekli? Finally, it does not address the elephant in the room, that most people who have lots of money have inherited it, not necessarily earned it themselves.

1) I agree that free markets are not where most people earn there money, but to me it seems like that is something we should strive for by reducing and stopping interference in the market by government regulation.

2) Martin Shkreli is an interesting statement (assuming you are referring to his raising of drug prices, not what he was prosecuted for). I strongly believe that the only reason he was able to raise prices so exorbitantly is because of interference in the market place both on the grounds of copyright laws and the stringent drug testing that is required. If something like google were to suddenly start charging five thousand dollars to use the site, people would quickly move to a competitor (or, if there was no competitor, someone would create one). This is not possible in the drug industry due to government regulation, so although what he did was wrong, it is not something I think can be solved with more laws.

3) Sure, most people have inherited there money, but in a free market someone up the line most certainly earned it. Assuming you don't believe that there is something that makes one person more special than another, who is holding money is irrelevant to whether or not it is fairly earned.

You are distorting the argument as well.

The correlation between money earned for work and the relative value of that work is rather low. There is no "group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society". There is only "society", nothing exists in a vacuum.

Do you think Steve Jobs could have achieved what he did had there not been any firefighters, primary school teachers, steelworkers, lumberjacks, bus drivers, janitors, soldiers, etc to indirectly or directly support his liberty to achieve his dreams? Do you think factory workers in China have had any impact on Jobs' success? All of them earn less than he did. Are they somehow lazy and deserving of their situation?

The reduction of income/power inequality isn't a bad thing that the poor, lazy masses want in order to get rich doing nothing. Quite the contrary. The point is to raise the standard of living of people doing jobs that, if some part of society had their say, would probably not even be paid. Reducing the wealth gap doesn't mean you can't be successful anymore.

What specifically are you suggesting happen? Did I say anywhere in my post that tax rates should not be raised for the wealthy, or that the estate tax should not be raised?

I am making a specific counterargument to a post arguing that wealth correlates with power, power is the true measure of inequality, and that it should thus be normalized instead.

I am thoroughly questioning the reading comprehension skills of virtually everybody responding to me.

If you think that the problem that we have with inequality is that some people have jets and hot couples you are missing the point of the parent's post.

I couldn't care less that Mr.Rich have a jet, I care that Mr.Rich decide to mess with the political process in order to get more jets. I care that in the more advances societies of the world in the most rich period of history, there are people that struggle to get necessary health-care or a roof over their heads (probably because Mr.Rich is messing with the political process).

>>"Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say?"

Of course they should. It's only that, probably, we have different views about who that group is.

On the contrary: experiments show that even in a completely merit-less, artificial environment, we still get a power-law distribution of wealth (there is just no specific agent who'll be the one ultra-wealthy one).

More relevantly, you can manipulate this model in various ways to create either a less exponential curve with no completely poor agents, or undifferentiated equalness. You can code in things like income tax and so on.

The single most effective way to make the curve (on completely meritless income, remember) cease to impoverish anyone without cause, is to apply an incredibly tiny WEALTH tax. Then it takes care of itself, and you can jack up your 'income' all you want, and hey if you spend it all then you don't pay wealth tax! It requires about three percent each cycle. Not 50%, not 95%: 3%.

This is in the total absence of effort, merit, or indeed quality of labor or thought. If you would like more income and you're a special snowflake, by all means work harder and smarter and have more income. If you spend it, you'll have a lot of fun, and if you hoard it, it will eventually dwindle, but you'll be in a society where you can easily make more.

>However, everyone still wants the hot girl and the jet.

No. Just give me a functioning society with a solid safety net and adequately funded social services in place, and a life of reasonable means that will allow me to grow old in peace and comfort, and which guarantees my children and grandchildren and their grandchildren's grandchildren the same benefits.

Research suggests that intelligence (which is difficult to define) is not better than being born into wealth.

Exhibit 1:

"intelligence is a powerful predictor of success but, on the whole, not an overwhelmingly better predictor than parental SES or grades."

https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2007-strenze.pdf

Exhibit 2:

You can also look at measures of class mobility, which suggest that the rich are staying rich, and the poor poor, more so than they have in recent history.

In no way am I supporting or agreeing with unfettered inherited wealth and you're making an obvious statement. With that being said, someone with high intelligence and a strong work ethic does have opportunity for success, especially in the US, more so than someone with average intelligence and a strong work ethic. Of course other factors come into play. That is basic common sense.

Er, the quote for exhibit 1 actually suggests that intelligence is a better (but not "overwhelmingly" better) predictor than parental SES ("being born into wealth")--and reading the paper, that's in fact the correct interpretation:

> Meta-analysis demonstrated that parental SES and academic performance are indeed positively related to career success but the predictive power of these variables is not stronger than that of intelligence (see Table 1). In fact, intelligence exhibited several correlations with the measures of success that were larger than the respective correlations for other predictors suggesting that intelligence is, after all, a better predictor of success.

Since intelligence is just one of many personality factors that might increase productivity (e.g. diligence or conscientiousness are important for a successful career) the fact that intelligence alone is a better predictor of SES than parental SES is actually kind of surprising in the other direction.

(This is especially striking since "high parental SES" means not only "being born into wealth," but also "having the genes of people with high SES." If SES is correlated with things that are heritable--it is--we should absolutely expect parental SES to have a large effect on outcomes no matter what.)

If you've read it in depth, did the paper look at causality at all?

There is evidence that poverty causes a drop in intelligence (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/poverty-intelligen...) If this is the case then a correlation between intelligence and wealth is not necessarily indicating that intelligence causes wealth.

> Law of averages, those who do make it are hard working and intelligent. Law of averages, those who do not are often less so.

I don't know how you came up with this "law of averages" but I do know that you haven't seen the paper's results.

> Take "power" from [Hard working and intelligent]U[Scott Disick, Donald JR] to normalize influence across everyone?

Limiting the creation of powerful feudal lords that are close to matching in power a democratic society's government is not the same as normalizing influence across everyone. Our choices aren't limited to feudalism and communism.

> Should the group, who by and large, has contributed more to the society not have proportionally more say?

That is a question of values, and you may have different ones, but the values on which democracies are founded say no (whether or not those values are actually realized is a different question). Less democratic societies say yes. I am not saying that a democracy is absolutely superior to an oligarchy, but you must understand where your values lie. All things considered, I value democracy more.

What makes you think that often it boils down to intelligence and work ethic and the exceptions are inherited wealth. The law of averages is just as likely to support the idea that those who are born into high class families will stay high class as it is what you're proposing.

I did not write a lengthy thesis to explicate every idea, but I would associate inherited wealth with high class and would certainly not consider that a slight stretch.

It's a classic example of the just world fallacy.

You contradict yourself. You say that "those who do make it are hard working and intelligent", while also acknowledging that there are people who "made it" who aren't "hard working and intelligent" (Scott Disick, Donald JR).

I mentioned there are exceptions to that and explicitly mentioned it is a law of averages rather than an absolute rule...which is basically your comment.

you said it yourself: "a few lucky breaks".

if we affirm the existing power rather than redistribute it, we're exaggerating the impact of luck by affirming that those who are lucky are by definition those who are more deserving of luck and power. even though the major differentiating factor between them and legions of identical people was luck.

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