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I have similar feelings whenever people point out that "tax break X favours the rich!" (today, X is 529 college saving plans).

I mean, duh. Half of the US federal income tax comes from 1% households. The rich disproportionately pay tax. If poor people had enough money to pay significant amounts of tax they wouldn't be poor; they only get charged anything to enforce a perception of fairness and give them some skin in the game.

Any tax break is going to favour the wealthy; because as a rule the median tax dollar came from someone wealthy.

Poor people do pay significant amounts of tax, just not "federal income tax". They do pay two other federal taxes on income (one is a fixed rate, the other actually decreases in rate at higher incomes). They also pay state and local taxes, which are usually much flatter than federal taxes and frequently the poor actually end up paying a larger portion of their income on state and local taxes.

Don’t most U.S. based poor still have housing, food, cable television, air conditioning, heat, cell phones, and access to public libraries with WiFi?

It’s not luxury but isn’t it major progress vs 100 years ago?

Is that a reasonable metric to use? (edit: ... to declare success?)

We can have major progress and still not have sufficient progress. We can make major improvements and still feel like we have a long way to go.

Just because we're better off than our grandparents doesn't erase that some of us are relatively badly off against today's standard, and we could be doing more to help those who are at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder.

> Is that a reasonable metric to use?

Yes, it is. There is hyperbole on both sides of this debate. Being able to show we've made historic progress makes future potential progress look more realistic. It shows our institutions are capable of solving this problem.

That's fair! Assuming you are making the argument that we are making progress.

I should amend my statement to say, "Is that a reasonable metric to use to declare success?" I regularly bump into folks who say, "Well, what more should we do? We're already better than we were 100 years ago."

> I should amend my statement to say, "Is that a reasonable metric to use to declare success?"

Got it. I think there may be confusion between a metric and a threshold. The metric being certain objective measures of quality of life. The thresholds being where we were 100 years ago, where we are today, and where we should be today.

More broadly, anyone "declaring success" on such a broad question is--at best--deluded. More common is people throwing their hands up at what looks like an insurmountable problem. I've found pointing out the often-unappreciated magnitude of recent historical performance to be useful in that respect.

> today's standard

If you keep moving the goal posts, you'll never get there.

Isn't moving the goal posts the whole point, though? If we didn't do that then we would declare "mission accomplished" as long as everyone wasn't sleeping on a dirt floor and dying of malaria. Social welfare success should always be a moving target relative to the ability of the society in which it exists to create it.

Not in California, for example, which has taken Dream Hoarding to the extreme.

AC, Heat, cell phones, internet are all easily achievable, sometimes with an RV or a car. But housing has been hoarded to an extreme, locking out all sorts of people.

And a grinding, dehumanizing bureaucracy to prove that you need access to assistance of various kinds, plus various disincentives to work as assistance drops off faster than your income grows.

USDA estimates that 12% of households qualify as "food insecure": https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

Adult Medicaid recipients often have only "emergency services", aka having your teeth pulled, as part of their benefits: https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/benefits/dental/index.html

All-in-all it's not pretty being poor in America, even if you have cable TV and heat to distract you from the mountain of paperwork where you have to repeatedly state how much help you need and the gaps in your teeth and the "joy" of paying with food stamps at the store.

All while hearing rhetoric from certain politicians saying how people "leech" from the system and actively try to remove these services.

Let’s not hold back. Mitch McConnell, wants to punish the poor for being poor.

Milton Friedman recognized this and proposed a solution half a century ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWcTMGaOHWA

There are plenty of people who would then politely point out that if the poorest Americans aren't poor enough for you, we can look at the problems of the poorest people on the planet and say that it's pretty fucked conditions they're living in considering how the top 20% of Americans are spending their money.

Or, tl;dr- "Better" still isn't good enough.

At the risk of being demeaning, this could only be a reply from someone with money who knows no one without it. Go travel around the poorest areas in the US and spend time talking to people, you'll learn really quickly how little access to cell phones or public libraries with WiFi are improving their life.

Sure almost everyone in this country has a computer in their pocket, they also very often have no access to fresh groceries at the same time. The town I grew up in is 60% below the poverty line and the nearest grocery store with fresh produce is a 30 minute drive away. That's over 800 people in one city who eat frozen gas station food on a daily basis. Do you think their wifi access and cable television is a good measure of their quality of life? They've also had to shutdown the local hospital recently. Meaning their already-terrible access to healthcare just got that much worse. Most people there only visit a doctor once every 5 years.

And I can already imagine the replies to this "well, times are changing, they're living in a dying region". Which... while true... doesn't come close to forgiving the systemic problems that put them in this situation. Systemic problems that by no measure had to come to fruition, if we had only had a stronger system of wealth distribution and thus physical and educational support for the people at the bottom of the pile.

Also, for the record, they're actually closing the library in my hometown.

Something many people may be unaware of, is that one cannot receive food stamps without a physical street address. Meaning that the numbers on food stamps and the numbers of homeless are for the most part 2 separate groups of people. Combined, they easily represent half the population. And I insist that census statisticians constantly downplay homeless stats, for two reasons. Because the real numbers are embarrassing, and because you cannot hit a moving target.

About 9% of US households use food stamps at some point in the year [0]. About 0.17% of US people are homeless on a given night [1]. Nowhere near half.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

And by my years in the streets do I insist that such figures are full-on lies, lies told to comfort the masses away from throwing trashcans through shop windows and burning down city hall and the like. Most of said masses don't look away from their screens long enough to see the real picture.

I suppose if a business has a desk, printer, phone, and employee, we can count it as successful too.

Today's middle class fair better than medieval royalty. So what?

We're not comparing today's poor to yesteryear's.

We're comparing today's poor to today's robber barons.

This is such a great analogy.

The poor can afford food, but of what quality? Looking at the pricing of shitty food vs quality food, it's pretty obvious that the poor are disproportionately consuming crap, with all the attendant health problems that brings. Health problems that they are unlikely to be able to afford to effectively treat.

Yes, by many measures, life for the poorest in the first world is far less miserable than it was 100 years ago. But still pretty miserable as anyone who has been poor - really poor - knows. Dickensian quality of life shouldn't be used as a the baseline against which we measure ourselves in the 21st century.

>relies on investors whose capital comes entirely from the concentration of wealth

Not entirely. A lot of the VCs (and also hedge funds, private equity) get money from regular people like us in the form of pension funds. Think of retired teachers, firemen, grandmothers, etc. E.g. the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund was one of the investors in Union Square Ventures.

Yes, some money does come from wealthy family offices like the Vanderbilts but the huge pension funds trying to meet their obligations have even more money to invest.

Not for much longer.

Pensions were eliminated in most employers in favor of 401k or other types of investment vehicles, and so Pension funds will get more rare and smaller over time.

The day of the Pension Fund is largely over.

The modern alternative to Pension Funds are Hedge Funds.

The difference is that Hedge Funds are created by the ultra-wealthy, for the ultra-wealthy. And their only purpose is to generate massive amounts of more wealth, for the ultra-wealthy.

You be seriously claiming that? It's literally an easily provable falsehood. Just because there are some pension funds investing in stocks and VCs doesn't mean it's a meaningful component, they are one of the smallest pieces of the pie.

Your comment is quite literally just wrong. Your average American has relatively no direct stake in financial systems. Notice the word "average". Most people on HN tend to mistake that for meaning them. You are not average if you have enough wealth to think that investing money is normal, even in pensions. Estimates of the percent market investment tied up in pensions is something between 5% and 15%

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted_20130103.htm https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/13/heres-how-many-americans-hav... https://protectpensions.org/2018/01/02/united-states-without...

>some pension funds investing in stocks and VCs doesn't mean it's a meaningful component, they are one of the smallest pieces of the pie.

In the case of Union Square Ventures, the majority of the money in their 2004 fund came from pension funds. It's all public information.

>Estimates of the percent market investment tied up in pensions is something between 5% and 15%

Your 3 links and the "5 to 15%" math are not relevant to my point. Let my try to put it another way. Let's say you looked at the LPs (investors) of a VC fund that raised $400 million. The list of wouldn't be filled with just the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. The money sources do not entirely from the concentration of wealth.

Instead, a lot of the money comes from retirement pension funds, charities trying to stretch out their donations, university endowments, etc. And it's not just the public & private pension funds in the USA. Canada and Europe pensions also invest in VC funds.

And yes, pretty much every pension fund[0] invests in a mix of alternative assets including private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital. Pension fund managers can't meet their financial obligations by only parking their billions in T-Bills or only investing in a passive index. They need the higher returns of those alternative investment vehicles.

[0] examples of public pension funds with funding shortfalls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_employee_pension_plans_...

>And whenever someone makes the point I'm making in this post, people rush in to point out that you can do so much good with lots of money. As if that somehow runs in opposition to hoarding it from being used by the broader population in the first place. It's as if you caused the collapse of an entire economic structure and then said 'but look what I'm going to do with all these resources!'.

Right, but that is sort of the point I think. Sure you may have collapsed the economic structure for the moment, but when you say "but look at what I'm going to do with all these resources!" its because you (assuming good faith) intend to use the hoarded resources to make some lasting improvement. You have the resources, so you can make a discovery or something that leads to not as many resources needed for the future. Its obviously not the best methodology, but it is one.

I mean, I suppose that's comforting in the long term. In 500 years I think everyone alive will be just fine that it happened. But as a human alive and on the planet today, I find it painfully lacking. I mean, I even mentioned in my first post that it would probably be just fine if the consequences for specific subsets of our society weren't so dire.

As an analogy: if you were living in an isolated tribe of 300 people and the smartest 5 people got together and said: "we have an idea! if you give us 50% of the tribe wealth we can make the lives of our great-great grandchildren wonderful. We've done the math and we acknowledge that 60 people will die unnecessarily and 50 families will lead miserable lives for the next few generations... but we're going to do great things!" I would much prefer if someone stood up and said: "how about we do this slowly, live happy lives now, and then our great-great-great grandchildren can live great lives".

As in: what do individuals and small groups of individuals see such need to be the personal figurehead of success in a society, especially at such great costs to those below them? I refuse to accept that it's OK to moralize someone's actions by letting them say "but I'm going to help everyone from my throne." It sounds more like justifying greed and less like benevolence to me.

Also, I'm of the cynical belief that the phrase 'assuming good faith' is a pretty goddamn big assumption.

I think 'assuming good faith' may be the issue, as it cannot usually be reasonably assumed, and without it, everything good about this falls apart.

In that trip of 300, I don't think what you set up quite aligns with the way things are. If it were more realistic, 50 people already are going to die unnecessarily anyways, and 40 of those families will already lead miserable lives for the next few generations. The point is, things are bad in a lot of ways, but making them temporarily worse can making things incredibly better in the future.

Now, of course, the fully realistic scenario there, is that the 5 smartest people end up deciding later on "hmm, well we do have half of the wealth in the whole tribe, we kinda hold the power here now...we could just keep serving ourselves...what's that? 180 extra people will die as a result and every family but those of the 5 smartest will live miserable lives? Sucks to be them I guess!"

Or even if they had good faith life-long, their children may not.

So I agree with you in practicality - its best if someone stands up and says "hey lets just work together as a tribe and do this as fast as possible but avoid ever purposely causing harm, so not as fast as those 5 say"

In principle though, if there was some magic way of good faith staying true, then the 5 people ruling could end up being the best case scenario.

Effective altruism is the Gospel of Wealth for the new millennium.

There tends to be a fair amount of cognitive dissonance and whataboutism on HN regarding inequality. It usually takes the form of one of the following:

"The 1% are just normal successful people (who happen to also be the NIMBY ladder pullers who often perpetuate inequality in unintentional ways), it's the 0.1% we should be talking about!"

"Don't blame smart, motivated people for making money (and pursuing growth-at-all-cost companies that often provide little value to people who aren't yuppies), anyone could learn to code and pull themselves up by their bootstraps!"

And my favorite, "These authors don't understand basic economics! Tech people are expanding the economy and creating wealth for everyone (when your definition of 'everyone' is mostly people with enough money to be investors or enough youth to be startup employees), so of course it makes sense that we're getting richer faster than 99% of the population!"

I personally view it as the Pareto principle at play.

If we were to equally distribute resources among the entire population, over time we would see those resources begin to bunch up into the top 20% of society due to superior abilities (intelligence, business instinct, skills, etc.)

As time continues, then resources continue to pile up at the top 20% of the initial 20, and so on, and so on...

I might be okay with that, if there was no possibility for ultra-wealth to be inherited from one generation to the next.

Make each generation work hard for their wealth, and you avoid the concentration of wealth that occurs because it is also a concentration of political power, at which point the sole purpose for that wealth and power is to accumulate more wealth and power and give their kids an insurmountable advantage over the next generation of kids.

> The success of many a startup relies on investors whose capital comes entirely from the concentration of wealth and the lack of redistribution.

But they are redistributing the money precisely by investing it in startups.