Further, that money is being transferred voluntarily. People buy things like iPhones because they think it enriches their life more than having the $600 it costs. Hundreds of millions of people believe this, so Apple has a ton of money. There were no victims in the transactions.
If we assume it is causal and the trend continues, you can expect belts to start tightening. I don't know if you've ever worked at a company that wasn't turning a profit (and isn't living on the borrowed time of VC money), but I have, and it sucks. Hiring freezes, wage freezes, wage reductions, staffing reductions. All kinds of fun.
Correcting income and wealth inequality will help ensure the long term health of the economy, and once that's done, we can have another debt-financed consumption binge, but the current binge can't last forever without consequences.
"Fixing" wealth inequality by decreasing the productivity of the wealthy is madness.
"Inequality" is a feature of exchange and production, it cant be "fixed". The lives of those who suffer most can be improved by helping them be more productive. Not by hobbling everyone else. That fails to improve anything.
EDIT: To clarify, the inequality is in what you can do with your total current assets: including time/effort, but CURRENT WEALTH.
Yes, Jeff Bezos can do more with $100B than you can with $100. And yes, you with 100$ can do more than a person with 1$.
People in poor countries produce things at a rate and with such general demand that their current assets (including their time/effort) arent very productive.
Bezos can make another billion without taking it from anyone, just by deploying his assets better than you cna.
Also I’m pretty sure Bezos doesn’t collect much salary. His wealth is tied to how much Amazon is worth. He’s essentially taking nothing from his workers because his net worth is based pretty much entirely on how much someone else is willing to pay for his shares.
To use a metaphor, a slave owner having the "vision" for a palaestra including all its designs does not mean that he does not exploit the slaves (who, remember, wouldn't have a job if it weren't for him, nor would the palaestra exist). In the philosophy of exploitation, exploitation can occur even in mutually beneficial relationships.
Also your metaphor sucks. If you think that wage workers are on par with slaves, I suggest you look a bit more into what slavery actually is.
You metaphor still sucks because it doesn’t say anything useful. It’s purely an emotional appeal. You could apply your metaphor to literally any employment relationship and it’s no different. The CEO is (over)compensated for vision and so everyone else is exploited, from the Executive Vice Presidents down to the receptionists.
The argument is not that employees are exploited because the CEO is over-compensated for vision, but rather that it follows naturally for such relationships to work at scale. Nevertheless, it's useful as a thought experiment, since it ought to make people consider the nature of modern work and life in capitalism. Indeed, some philosophers do apply this to all employment relationships[0], the most extreme argue that they are exploitative, the less extreme only inquire to the nature of our desires in the employment relationship[1].
If that's where the argument leads then that's where it goes.
[0] John Roemer, Yoshihara and Veneziani, Marx
[1] Frederic Lordon's Spinozist anthropology
I'm a bit confused by your statement that "it [exploitation] follows naturally for such relationships to work at scale". If this is how it naturally works, then is there a viable alternative? I also don't agree that this is (necessarily) exploitative. Perhaps we have differing opinions of what "exploitation" means. If we have a business partnership that is mutually beneficial, but you profit from it more than me, is that exploitative?
I think that exploitation can, in general, be defined as when A exploits B, A takes "unfair" advantage of B. In order for this to be the case, there must be some mechanism by which A has the ability to exploit B, which I see as defined by the distribution of productive assets necessary to live. It gets more complex speaking of how we define productive assets, and whether exploitation exists as a matter of class (neo-Marxian sense) or as a matter of profit (the Marxian sense).
More people have become millionaires by being Microsoft employees than by any other mechanism. Via stock options, Microsoft very much shared the gains with their employees.
Instead, he kept all those shares and has more money than he could ever spend and many warehouse workers have worked incredibly hard and been unable to build any wealth over the years.
It's not true. He uses his money to fund space flight initiatives, and many other things besides.
Billionaires use their billions to make more billions. If it was wasted on unproductive spending, the future would be poorer than the present.
The board of directors can allocate stock to warehouse workers and/or pay them more. For that matter, you could send your money to these warehouse workers and yet you don't. This idea that Bezos should personally give up his fortune to increase warehouse worker compensation is a bit absurd. Amazon isn't a charity and its employees are not a registered 503c, either.
For profit companies can pay their workers better and still prosper. No one is suggesting Amazon should have been a non-profit. The suggestion is just that their CEO could have shared the wealth more with his workers. Workers who helped him build his fortune.
Jeff Bezos takes a salary and his income isn't tied to stock.
Net worth is a terrible measure of anything. You have a networth 100s times a person in a developing country but you're not "100x" anything.
Jeff Bezos can invest the rewards of his lifetime effort, yes, billions of times better than you can.
Elon musk invested his paypal-productivity into making space/car/etc. companies. His actions here eclipse yours.
The only way to save our democracy is by putting in policies that will harm the wealthy aristocracy of the US. The other alternative is war and death that impacts the wealthy, as history has shown time and again. Blood or money, it's their choice.
Those who earned more than $50k a year were more likely to vote for Trump[1].
There's also this[2]:
> During the primaries, Trump supporters were mostly affluent people.
> Trump voters weren’t majority working class in the general election, either.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/0...
This is a more in depth look at the numbers:
http://www.people-press.org/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the...
This is one of the arguments people make against unpaid internships in media and fashion industries. Only rich kids can live in NY for peanuts so these internships effectively filter out poor people (as they were designed to do).
Proportional voting or a move to a parliamentary type of electorate would help these issues and allow for more voices to be heard. There's also the fact that more populous states have less representation in the House than do less populous states due to the limits imposed on the number of Representatives due to space requirements. This is problematic. Add to that the Citizen's United verdict that lifted campaign contribution limits on corporations while still enforcing them on individuals and I think I've made my point that our Democracy is in trouble without even touching the malfeasance by the actual political actors of either party.
The real problem though is that the middle class, the foundational aspect of a functional democratic process is being hollowed out.
When you look at the fact that money is considered speech and the top .001 of the US makes as much every year as the bottom 80% of the country there is no way that even the amalgamated voices of the bottom 80% could hope to have the same political sway as those with money and this divide is only getting worse.
Education is a poor classification of Americans, except for the fact that it generally correlates that the higher education you achieve the more likely you are to have higher income. Obviously your position of negative value degrees are the exception, however I'd be less likely to think that the wealthy are getting these poor degrees as are the poor. The wealthy can just write/ghost write their books and have them immediately be New York Times bestsellers without a single person other than themselves buying the book.In fact this is a common trick. The poor are generally less educated than the wealthy and this leads to an information imbalance that would prevent people from going into poor degrees instead of fields in demand like nursing, math, computer science, etc.
I'm sure many people on this board know someone stuck in a poorly paid IT helpdesk job because they got a Bachelors in IT or something else that didn't lead to money.
We do have this. Have you ever tried to raise money or interacted with VCs? Or dealt with the CEO of a large company? There is definitely a class divide. Look at all of the high end liberal arts students that monopolize the media industries. These aren't people from the trailer park.
"When you look at the fact that money is considered speech and the top .001 of the US makes as much every year as the bottom 80% of the country there is no way that even the amalgamated voices of the bottom 80% could hope to have the same political sway as those with money and this divide is only getting worse"
Except they were able to do this as per my example with Trump. Your theory sounds very valid, but the reality of it was the upper classes and all of their media empires couldn't stop someone from being elected. I think we can thank the internet for giving voice to those who historically wouldn't have it.
Dealing with VCs/CEOs typically involves having the money in the first place. You have numerous cases of people without degrees at all getting VC money and building platforms. I deal with CEOs of large companies on a fairly regular basis. While the Alma Mater matters it's typically a stand in for economic class. People who can afford to not work for a few years to go the HBS aren't typically in the lower echelons. Also workplaces are more conducive to taking time out of your regular schedule for educational advancement the higher up you go, especially since you're usually always working. So the degrees come back to money.
Of the people who voted for President Trump almost all of that lies with white, male voters and that was regardless of whether they were college educate or not, and most of that was in the South. Take from that what you will as neither candidate was a PoC so race wouldn't apply as a divisor. What might have had an impact was the border security discussion. The President's election was as much a fluke as a response to disaffected Sanders voters as a weak Democratic candidate.
I've never understood the claim that higher productivity somehow entitles workers to the surplus. The key component of actually being substantially responsible for productivity gains is missing.
Really? Because the system itself is fixed guaranteeing Capital of the rich is much more productive than wages of the poor, through taxation. That is an employee of Company abc has their wages taxed to a much greater extent than the company owners profits are taxed.
It’s definately not “hobbling” everyone else if we “fixed” the system such that workers wages were taxed less than the capital profits of business owners. In fact the current system is so unfairly weighted only a small percentage benefit from capital gains taxes whereas the masses of the working class are hobbled by greater taxes on their wages making up the difference. Ever wonder why it’s pretty easy to find CEO’s taking a $1 salary (it’s because they take the rest in capital so they are taxed less than their own workers).
Those who suffer the most don’t need to be more productive, they working class is already more productive than anytime through history it’s time their wages reflect that fact and for good measure it’s time wages become more productive by flipping the wage/capital tax paradigm.
You are advocating getting the state out of the way of its citizens productivity by redressing the ways by which most people are taxed.
That's exactly the sort of thing i'm talking about.
If you want people in the developing world to improve their lot, get rid of authoritarian gov.s holding them back.
People wish to do things for other people, and wish to provide for themselves. It is institutions, and esp. states, which almost-everywhere and almost-everywhen have got in the way of that.
Fixing institutions is exactly the sort of thing which will help people who suffer needlessly.
But it won't change inequality: the distribution of productivity is necessarily unequal by the nature of productivity (those a little better off now will be able to multiply faster, exponentially).
No, it's not.
Income inequality would be, in an idealized state where you both had a perfect market (with all the ideal rational choice theory attributes like perfect information and perfect utility maximization) andp erfectly equal initial distribution of wealth. Or, at least, the instantaneous income differential at the first moment would be, as well as the resulting wealth inequality; once you are past that you have wealth inequality which means that differences in market clearing price even in a perfect market no longer perfectly reflect differences in utility produced, because the interests of the wealthier participants are favored, so neither income inequality nor it's resulting wealth inequality reflect productivity, and with mortality and inheritances wealth inequality is even farther from a reflection of income inequality after the first generation.
Being born a Trump—or even a member of the first world middle class—puts you pretty high on the world distribution of wealth from day one, and your personal productivity has no contribution to that.
Wealth isn't something that be quantified objectively, so at some point you need to put hard parameters on what qualifies wealth or thresholds of wealth. At some level, "money" (which is the representation of wealth) is at any given point finite. This makes it inherently a zero sum game.
The "any given point" allows us to avoid arguments about fiat and monetary policy. At any given point if I get $1, that value comes from someone else (or elses) down the chain.
I was trying specifically to not do so; I was expressing money as the point-in-time measurement of wealth.
I know this makes it a pain in the ass for you to make / explain your point, because there's no unit of measurement for wealth (hence why you used money at any given point in time). It just doesn't work that way though.
Even money is not zero sum. Anytime someone creates credit, new money is created and the money supply is expanded. And money is not representation of wealth. It is a unit of account and transfer.
That's the fairy tale they sell to suckers.
In real life, it can be very much zero sum, and that's regardless of whether the slice is "growing or not".
Edit: by extension, all the consumers are likely in the same position. Employees are all exploited by their employers, who steal most of the value created which they had little to no hand in.
I'm sorry, but this is bog-standard communist clap-trap. Even if you don't like the current arrangement, the use of the word steal is absurd. Individual wealth, regardless of which income quintile you're in, has risen exponentially since the industrial revolution. There's lots of room for criticism of the world as it stands (crony capitalism and printing a sea of money being favorites of mine), but words like exploit and steal are crazy. And to say that an employer had little hand in the value of the products created is just silly. Even if we ignore everything else, you can't just disregard the massive capital expenses that go into building the infrastructure to make an iPhone. Somebody had to come up with that money to even make the company possible, long before the profits started rolling in.
I've had the dubious pleasure of working for companies that were posting little or no profit vs others that were making lots of money. Personally, I'd be happy to be 'exploited' by the wages Apple pays.
In Apple's case, the "massive capital expenses" have been paid for many times over in profit; when does the compensation shift back to the people creating the day-to-day value? Never, I guess?
And by the way, I'm not talking about the $300k engineers in Cupertino. I'm talking about the people who were throwing themselves of factory roofs until they set up nets to take even that measure of freedom away.
Didn't that turn out to be bullshit? Like, years ago. Pretty sure that guy made the story up. Also, those people weren't employees of Apple.
And I'll take crony capitalism and wealth inequality over gulags and the tens of millions of people who have been killed by their communist overlords (who were also hoarding all the wealth).
Please support that claim.
|will continue to kill millions and millions as the effects of climate change worsen
Communist countries, past and present, hardly have a sterling reputation when it comes to environmental considerations.
Edit: Oh, and you ignored that the Foxconn thing was manufactured. Unless that's what you're calling clap-trap, but I assume not.
Why should we risk it? You might say that previous attempts were "not real communism", but that is what we end up with when we try. We've killed 160 million people trying to implement communism, or at least following leaders who tell us they will implement communism. It doesn't seem wise to try again, does it? Why would things go down differently? It's awfully risky to take the gamble, don't you think?
What motivation would there be for start-up founders? If that just isn't needed because the state owns all business, how do we ensure that unproductive business doesn't uselessly stay funded while productive business is never initiated?
If there is no legitimate way to obtain great wealth, don't you think people might turn to methods that are not legitimate, such as the corruption? History shows that communism quickly turns the culture toward corruption, and that this dissipates very slowly once communism is removed.