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I've noticed an increasing trend in people using phrases such as "it is trivial", "it is obvious", "it is self evident" to defend their arguments. I have yet to encounter a case where it made their argument better.

This might be off topic but it has become a pet peeve because I've even started to encounter it in real life. It is similar to starting a discussion with "if you disagree with me, you are stupid".

I agree and I also probably am an offender.

IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia. Fair enough that "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader, but it's the coherence that I'm referring to.

> IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia.

Um, why would it be incoherent? By all observations of perfectly coherent physics, the universe itself is currently the largest it has ever been and is growing at an ever faster pace. While perhaps your opinion is that such things should not be possible, it is clearly non-sensical to say that such a thing is incoherent when it actually seems to be the basis of the entire universe.

Fair enough, it’s possible, but I maintain: the model proposed would have been operative always and everywhere, so would we not expect this to be occurring all of the time? Would history not be very different, with no middle class (our middle class has only recently declined)? Wouldn’t extended periods of broad prosperity would be an aberration, rather than the broad stroke of history?

> "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader

I don't think that is the reason for it being inappropriate. In my opinion, such phrases are a result intellectual laziness, of which I am also guilty at times.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” - intellectually lazy, or a claim whose verification or refutation is left to the reader?

Well, maybe not lazy in the case of the declaration of independence, but it's definitely filler words.

Actually my reading says that the context there is stating the assumptions on the basis of which the rest of the document is based.

And I don't think "accelerating inequality we’re witnessing is not the natural inequality of competition and the power law, easily explained by simple arithmetic" as an axiom compares to "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

As an aside, I believe the founders of the US did some great work, but let's not put their use of certain phrases on a pedestal. For example, I for one do not believe in a creator at all.

I'll add that I think your comment was interesting which is part of why I commented on it. My comment was meant to be generic and the only reason I commented here was that I saw this thread was popular and your comment was near the top. So it is not a critique of the information and it was a bit unfair to call you out. I am hoping others consider not using those phrases so often. I've noticed very smart people use it a lot, probably because these things are indeed trivial to them. But it does not help anyone understand their arguments. Many times just removing the statement makes the argument more understandable as there is less noise.

There's plenty of excess that can be removed or revised for simplicity and understanding in Empacts writing style that would would help in clarifying and simplifying their point...

This is the one tic that makes it grating for me to listen to anything spoken by Noam Chomsky (interviews, discussions, monologues etc. - his written material not so much), regardless of how persuasive I may find his arguments.

Add "you can look it up" to the list, a frequent Chomskyism which sounds like a casual declaration of confidence in his sources but in effect functions as a rhetorical control device, in that it passively asserts the listener is uninformed about the data being referred to, and that Chomsky presumes not just the authority of an expert, but arrogates the prerogative to assign homework to his listeners/interlocutors as well.

I would suggest that your perception of his use of the phrase is just your perception. I have listened to him often, and never found him to be arrogant. He is not passively asserting that the listener is uninformed. He is just saying that the sources are abundant and easily available. Not to mention, he often cites people whose work he is referring to. If you are familiar with the work he is referring to, he is clearly not assigning homework to you. If you are not familiar, I don't see how it is arrogant to ask someone to familiarize themselves with a given perspective on the subject matter where sources are easily available.

And to assume that he does not have authority as an expert in a myriad of topics seems to be giving him little credit.

"You can look it up" is doubly annoying because it shifts the burden of defending a source from he who references it to he who questions it. If one wants to use evidence to support his argument, he alone is responsible for keeping a copy of the source for reference.

It depends on how the word trivial is used. In mathematics, it is typically meant that the logical inference is a relatively straightforward application of the axioms. I would suppose for academics in other fields they could be using the word in this sense, however, at large, most people associate a strong negative connotation with the word trivial.

Would it help you to replace those phrases with, "Let's assume" because that's basically what they're saying, in a way.

I disagree. "Let's assume" leaves room for doubt, where "it is obvious" allows for none. I think most people who use these phrases are going for the latter.

An assumption is a prior, which necessarily means it can't be challenged, as in there is zero doubt about it, in the given/specific conversation.

Also, as a smell, when you say "I think most people" you're often just trying to mask your own biases.

A _lot_ of US public policy changes and economic structural changes which favour the rich have happened since 1971. The problem with trying to pin everything on inflation is that inflation has been more stable and lower in recent years than much of the Bretton Woods era...

> inflation has been more stable and lower in recent years than much of the Bretton Woods era...

That depends how you measure inflation. The government-published inflation rates use all kinds of creative accounting to make the number seem artificially low. It's in the government's interest to make it seem like that's the case. The reality is that housing prices (and rents) are increasing at a very high rate, and this is probably the biggest expense that we all have to pay. It's also a fundamental need.

Also healthcare and education, which are also not measured

As far as I know, the highest inflation since 2008 has been experienced by "financial assets", which is not really considered in the actual inflation numbers published by the government, because supposedly it's not important for the majority of people. Well, it turns out that when you have an increasingly financialized(is this a word?) economy, it becomes important.

The crazy part about inflation isn't that the governments are focusing on a narrow definition of inflation. The crazy part is the idea that inflation is global. If you pump in money into the financial sector it will immediately propagate to consumer prices. The outcome is obvious.

Housing prices aren't a measure of inflation. The average size of a house has gone up, the average quality of a home has gone up. Houses have more appliances, air/cooling, and electronics which increases pricing. They aren't making any more land, and our population is increasing, so naturally land prices will rise.

If you were able track housing prices of equivalent homes and adjust for land scarcity from population- you'd have a much stronger metric. Without that context it's hardly relevant.

According to the chart below, housing, food and beverage and other costs are up > 56% over the last 20 years. Granted, for many things in society, prices have declined thanks to manufacturing advances and trade, etc.

The difference is between those who held dollars and had a 56%+ loss of value over 20 years, vs those who held the same in assets which appreciated at the same rate as the general increase, and so did not lose value over time. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/

Who pays for their housing, food and beverages out of a stash of dollar bills accumulated 20 years ago though? The same chart shows the wages they buy their food and beverages with actually rising faster on average, and people saving their wages for a house in future or a pension fund for their future food and beverages tend to put it in places which pay interest.

Granted, you're a lot worse off if you need to pay a hospital bill or go to college, but I don't think any serious person argues that the real structural problem there is lack of a Gold Standard...

>Who pays for their housing, food and beverages out of a stash of dollar bills accumulated 20 years ago

Very few people could afford to do this, but in some markets for home ownership those would be the only type that could actually afford to own a home any more.

The gold standard has always been there for thousands of years and is likely to remain for many forseeable lifetimes to come.

The structural problems (from the citizens' point of view) are a result of how & when the US declined to participate any longer.

Not much different than anyone else over the centuries who could once afford a little gold but no longer any at all.

Remember since the US dollar was always tied to gold (after foolishly withdrawing from additionally constitutionally mandated silver in an earlier century), then when that was later tied to the confiscation of gold from the citizens, that allowed the dollar to be more powerful than gold as long as US taxpayer's assets were strong, making the USA actually relatively affluent as a nation. Therefore the gold price worldwide could be stabilized at $35 per ounce for decades, indefinitely if the taxpayer's assets would have been truly worth preserving by the regime. This was as long as the dollar remained tied to gold, even though citizens had not been allowed to hold gold of their own for most people's lifetime by then. With income taxes skyrocketing beyond the "temporary 1 percent tax on income" needed to pay for wars, tremendous wealth was transferred to the federal government over the decades and held as gold, until the fed had more wealth than the citizens which is the opposite of how the US actually grew as a free country, back when prosperous stuff could just pop up anywhere without federal interference.

Then one day Nixon comes along and offers the US gold to the rest of the world for $36 per ounce. Citizens still not allowed to participate, but the Saudis for example being some really big ones having a faster appreciating asset that sizable took great interest because they could actually afford to trade a portion of their faster-appreciating asset for one with less forseeable upside at the time.

Then Nixon "opens up China" so there can sooner be a new lower living standard to decline towards, gradually of course which is generous because the taxpayers can be put into free-fall at any time without a parachute since then.

> We have found that inflation (1) worsens income distribution

This is an interesting question, but that's [1] a terrible study.

It compares "data averaged over 5-year periods" across different countries. It's effectively a scatter plot of income inequality versus inflation.

The study's findings are better stated as "countries with high inflation have worse income distributions." Which makes sense. High-inflation countries tend to have low-quality institutions and low economic growth, factors which make being middle class difficult and poor miserable.

The right way to do this is longitudinally, studying populations over time. Even that's hard, given the number of interceding factors. At a minimum, an input must be the distribution of credit and debt, given inflation transfers wealth from the former to the latter.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.295...

If someone were interested in the link between inequality and inflation a scatter plot would be a perfectly reasonable place to start.

The issue is that the scatter plot shows there are something like 30 countries with an inflation rate of 0-15% and no correlation between inflation+gini/inflation+growth and then 8 countries where there is.

It cames to my mind that that constant 2% inflation, and the constent effort to limit it to such level said to be good for economy, was indeed slowly impovishering the working class by the fact than increase rate of salary was not as high as increase in price. In short the price of good increase constantly, but we stop the inflation before it reach also salary, leading to inequal raise of cost of work (null) and cost of good (2%).

This is by design since the early 1970's.

Ray Dalio's recent post agrees and is complementary to your comment: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-has-gone-mad-system-bro...

>An accelerating and historically high broad societal effect is naturally a product of broad and unique properties of the current regime, rather than fundamentally consistent properties, which would naturally be seen across all time.

You're completely correct here. Unfortunately, neither the current levels of income inequality nor the acceleration of said inequality is unique or historically high. It's not even unique in the last hundred years.

I'm talking about measures like these, which granted, are only recorded back 100 years or so: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2015/demo/gini... https://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e201a5... https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mark-abdelnour/issues/abd-s-...

But in those times, relatively rich Americans were selling to extremely poor Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Inequality overall has gotten better, just the geography has shifted substantially so that previously homogeneously equitable places now have a more representative share of world inequality.

So increased inequality on a local level is good as long as the global average goes down? I thought the idea was to make _everyone's_ lives better.

Well yes decreased inequality globally does make life better, it's just that those who've gained the most (the ones that used to be poorer than the American poor) arent part of your in group

Exactly so. For evidence and details there is the weighty and data packed book "Capital in the Twenty-First_Century" by Thomas Piketty

> neither the current levels of income inequality nor the acceleration of said inequality is unique or historically high

I'm not sure what you're saying, as these statements are unqualified:

"current levels of income inequality"?

"acceleration of said inequality"?

"historically high"?

I'm saying that by most measurements income inequality is roughly the same as it was in the early twentieth century and the rate at which the inequality increased and the acceleration of that rate is less than it was in the early part of the 20th century.

Are you saying that I need to break down what measurements I'm talking about? I can agree with that but we're on a forum and I was responding to a person who I assume, based on how they wrote, shares a general knowledge base upon which we can have a conversation.

Note that the effect of steeply progressive income taxes is making it much more difficult for people to move up the economic ladder.

Income taxes are much less progressive than they were half a century ago.

I don't know what the statistic for this was 50 years ago, but today 38% of federal income tax revenues come from the 1%.

And the top 1% earn 2x as much of the income as they did 50 years ago, but don't pay 2x more of the share of income tax.

Meaning that income tax is less progressive now.

Also the 38% number that right wing groups like to throw around is very carefully crafted to avoid FICA taxes, which account for a much larger percentage of the tax burden for lower income earners. And the social security component goes away after the first $130k in income.

If you express FICA in terms of benefits received / contributions paid, it is quite progressive.

If you're only considering direct first order benefits then nearly all taxes are quite progressive. Even a flat 10% income tax would be progressive using that model because people's direct consumption of government services doesn't scale linearly with income. The only way to have a non-progressive tax was to charge everyone a flat rate.

"Why should I have have to pay a penny more in taxes than that teacher over there. It's not like I'm consuming more units of military protection than they are."

Hopefully you can see the problem with that.

Maybe it should be more like 50% because doesn't the 1% have 50% of all assets?

Maybe, but if you eliminate the 1%, then who is going to pay that 38%?

Taxing the 1% more heavily isn't really the same thing as eliminating the 1% though is it? And taxing wealth over a certain limit, which is what the person you were replying to is probably getting at, solves your problem taxing income preventing people from becoming wealthy in the first place.

> Taxing the 1% more heavily isn't really the same thing as eliminating the 1% though is it?

Bernie Sanders has stated he wants to tax billionaires into non-billionaire status. So yes, it's about eliminating the 1%.

There are only about 600 billionaires in the US. The top 1% is over 3 million people. Also they'll still be in the top %0.01 with $999 million.

You're also making some weird assumptions that transferring money away from billionaires would just destroy that money, and that the current billionaires are using their resources in the most productive way possible. The real world isn't Atlas Shrugged.

Look up income velocity of money.

> You're also making some weird assumptions that transferring money away from billionaires would just destroy that money, and that the current billionaires are using their resources in the most productive way possible

There's nothing weird about that. You don't get to be a billionaire by being bad at managing your money, nor do you get to be a billionaire by investing in less productive investments.

By taxing the 1%, you are removing money from the most productive investments.

>You don't get to be a billionaire by being bad at managing your money, nor do you get to be a billionaire by investing in less productive investments.

Since close to half of America's billionaires inherited their fortunes, that's not really something you can prove. And that fact that it makes money doesn't necessarily mean it's beneficial to society, nor does it even mean it's the most economically productive possible use of resources.

>By taxing the 1%, you are removing money from the most productive investments.

Billionaires aren't the 1%. And "the most productive" investments isn't something you can prove or even make a semi-convincing argument for.

You're going to have a tough row to hoe convincing anyone that the people who make the most money from their investments aren't the best at productively investing money.

1. There's no way to prove that. We aren't a pure meritocracy. There's a huge element of luck to becoming a billionaire. So it's very likely that there are > 600 people out of the 330 million non billionaires who are at least as good or better at investing than the current billionaires.

2. Even if we do assume that the current billionaires are better at making money individually, there are still advantages to collective action. That is to say that taking 10% from the most individually productive members of society and building an interstate system likely produces more societal and economic benefit than whatever they would have done with the that money individually.

How's that?

You need income to accumulate into wealth. The more of it that is taxed away, the harder it will be.

I was going to reference a similar point. There are economists out there that have predicted this and are not surprised. This isn't necessarily an "open question" but it is one that there is not the precious "consensus" that we see in other popular issues.

In the USA, inflation went down as inequity increased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation.s...

I don't doubt that inflation is a factor. Duh. It's just a tax by another name.

But it takes extreme incredulity to ignore the biggest policy change (pink elephant): shifting the tax burden from capital (assets) to labor (income).

PS- Your cites note Bretton Woods. What's your position on the gold standard?

Very good links, thank you. Unlike a lot of people I never really saw the inherent utility in an inflationary currency system (but admit it could have existed: just that I never saw it in practice). But criticize the fed or offshoring and you're a bigoted racist who just can't grasp the bigger picture.

That graph shows productivity and compensation growing together, then diverging right in the 1970s. This would be expected if we suddenly got a large supply of labor. You can see exactly that on this other graph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chart_of_foreign_born_in_...

Inflation has been pretty low for the last two decades, so by your logic inequality would be falling.

Can you show me the simple arithmetic, please?