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Comment by josephjrobison | Hacker News Reader

True on the divide but at the same time the world has never been as rich, prosperous, or secure.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Goalkeepers?WT.mc_id=...

Obviously a very ironic source but the others were more political.

Also, the extreme divide between rich and poor has always existed. I’ve never seen a strong data-supported case that it’s any worse today than 100 or 1000 years ago.

It’s slightly ironic to have to state this point on HN; it was once considered the status quo which had to be disrupted.

I agree with this point, as I have a strong distaste for the premise the above poster used: "This is the way things have always been". Implying, why try to change them? Women regularly died in childbirth for thousands of years, but do we hear anyone complaining about knowledge of sterile fields and advances in modern medicine?

If anyone is looking for data-driven cases on the scale and negative consequences of the increasing divide between rich and poor, I've found some good resources in Robert McChesney's The Digital Disconnect, Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality, and probably most famously Thomas Piketty's 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First century which Gates himself even recommended, ironically enough. All these books come under criticism for supposed ideological undertones, but even skeptics generally respect the underlying economic data.

Thank you for the sources. I’ve read about the latter but not the others.

I don’t know if inequality can be reduced on a macro level, but I would not bet on it.

Some things can be changed and some can’t. Your example of maternal health is great—we should be focused more on those types of biological things we can change, imo. Who cares if someone is richer than you if you are healthy and happy?

But inequality seems to be something nature loves. The sun gets 99% of the matter in the solar system, for example. Humans decimated all other large predators—examples abound.

Concentrated freedom and decision making power (for which money is just a proxy), might be a necessary evil. I think barring a drastic black swan paradigm shift (world government, computer overlords, or maybe some undiscovered push to an equilibrium driven by globalization...), there’s not much that might change that.

The difference is that wealth concentration is increasing, and that as a society we aim for what sort of reality we want to live in. Society is not a physics experiment so we try and influence it to suit us, instead of being a mirror of the natural world.

Well sure, the reduction of inequality is not a smart bet to take in the morally impoverished social climate that we live in. The original Pareto principle itself was born out of observations of the natural distribution of wealth among populations, so changes to that distribution will require active effort and hard work to create a sustainable economic structure. I'm not saying people don't have good reason to be cynical about improvements in the Gini coefficient across the world.

But you must recognize that human society is simply the summation of many individual choices, and there is a big difference between saying something is unlikely to happen, and something cannot happen. Pragmatism and cowardly cynicism are two different positions with dramatically different possible outcomes. Instead of accepting Keynes over Polanyi as a foregone conclusion, try looking at the individual choices that were made to get us to this position. Repealing Glass-Steagall in the '90s was a choice. Deregulation in the '80s was a choice. 100 million Americans eligible to register choosing not to vote out politicians who make these decisions are 100 million choices. There may be systemic reasons for why those choices were made, but I am simply right now trying to get you to see that these outcomes are not foregone conclusions.

Your justifying logic for holding your beliefs is certainly not rigorous -- you can just as easily find examples of nature favoring equilibrium and balance in every conceivable force diagram or cell membrane as you can of the existence of inequality. If you are looking for a nature metaphor, why not try a chemical reaction? In an inert environment, oxygen molecules will not spontaneously transform into carbon dioxide, even though carbon dioxide is a more stable chemical state. But once the necessary conditions exist -- the presence of sufficient carbon and enough available activation energy to perform the reaction -- a single spark can cause a chain reaction to convert every single oxygen molecule present into carbon dioxide molecule. No matter if previously, every oxygen molecule was insisting, "But this is the way things have always been for us! Some things can be changed, and some things can't."

We have not yet reached the necessary conditions for our society to reach a more stable state, so you are not wrong in saying that it seems unlikely that the reduction in inequality can occur without certain tipping points being reached. But it is folly to conclude "...there's not much that might change that" without educating yourself on the missing conditions and realizing that it is possible to slowly work towards achieving those conditions or empower others who are taking steps to achieve those conditions. Conditions like political will, corporate regulations and safeguards against regulatory capture, fighting disinformation campaigns, and educating people on the harms of inequality, done very well by thinkers like Stiglitz, Varoufakis, McChesney, Chibber, Polanyi, Bernie Sanders, John Kay, Tim Wu, and many others who have considered the effects and are working on solutions. So that when that single spark comes along -- a great leader who can move the masses to rally behind a vision of a better world -- hopefully we will have done enough to move in the correct direction. We are closer than we think probably, if you look at how close the elections of Gore and Sanders were, for example.

But, I should say in the end I am encouraged by anyone who is willing to read and educate themselves on the matter and engage with differing viewpoints. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am optimistic for the future, but I will do whatever is in my power to create a fighting chance for those who have not yet given up in the face of difficult odds.

The whole inequality discussion we've been a few years now all started with this book from Thomas Piketty (a statistical analysis). Maybe start with reading that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Globally the pie has improved, there is traction in places where a penny was a healthy amount.

But overall, the gains of technology are being concentrated in a few hands.

The economists say that wealth is primarily created by tech change, everything else is just a functioning economy working as it would.

It seems that the low base effect makes every thing better off if you were terribly off. But if you were middle income you are worse off.

interesting idea that wealth is primarily created by tech innovation. Got a good source of reading on this? How would they address a few people concentrating wealth onto themselves?

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