Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality

Not necessarily. I agree that having values dictated by fiat is a recipe for disaster - such arrangements are bound to get corrupted over time. But on the other end of the spectrum, there is some sense of social value - a sense in which e.g. garbage collectors, firemen and doctors do more socially valuable jobs than athletes and entertainers. A sense that's easy to convey - imagine if suddenly, any one of the former three occupations disappeared; the death toll and suffering would quickly overshadow the largest of wars. Meanwhile, even if both of the latter occupations disappeared, the culture would be a bit poorer, but the society would function just fine.

Unfortunately, it seems that this concept of social value is very hard to robustly define. And if we can't define it, effectively optimizing for it is pretty much out of the question.

Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money.

Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precisely with a lot of people’s personal values.

Are literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values?

Right now, the justice system, the zoning system and the operations of private foundations, and beyond are engaging in leadership that makes value judgements about what is socially valuable. That is how society has worked historically and the US in earlier times made those judgements more explicit.

Point blank denying this is actually calling for even more social change than the article.

There is. The opinions of other people in your society - generally expressed via the ballot box in a democracy. All authority is, or should, derive directly from that source of truth.

That's sort of what society is - everybody else. Hence why we have social judgments on what is appropriate - like banning guns and the death penalty - and why we have different countries to encapsulate different views on those social judgments (my country bans the former, yours likely doesn't - but we both take a dim view of marrying off 12 year olds, something other societies are quite relaxed about).

There is no objective truth here. It's all a social creation by a set of people who have chosen to co-operate with each other and call themselves a country.

Relative wealth buys you status, position, and power in society. That status protects you when things go wrong, when the system fails to measure or optimize for the things that you care about, or when the music suddenly stops and you find that you're the one left without a chair.

People deeply care about not being on the bottom of the pecking order, because if you look at history, when anything goes wrong, it's always those at the bottom who get hit the hardest - whether it's famine, war, economic recession, or any of the myriad of instabilities and ills that visit our societies from time to time.

Your contention that we should only care about minimum living standards requires a large amount of faith, not just in the system as it stands today, but that the system won't slowly erode those minimums over time because the poor lack the political and social power to keep their minimums. Without the power to protect your own interests, you're at the literal mercy of those who are better off than you to throw you a bone when you're most vulnerable.

And the best guarantor of social and political power is to be necessary - to be a critical component of the means of production. Automation, outsourcing, and foreign competition have all been chipping away at the competitive position of the median American worker.

A look at the path of inflation-adjusted minimum wage, the evisceration of unions, the opioid crisis, the recent Great Recession, the fact that standard housing, schooling, and medical care is becoming increasingly out of reach of the average wage-earners would suggest that in fact, life is not getting better for those at the bottom, despite the very large increase in absolute wealth since the 1970s.

The resulting state of prospering areas filled with poverty has been called the paradox of progress and poverty because the more prosperous area you have the more homelessness and disgusting living conditions you find. Whether it is San Francisco with their smelly homeless neighborhoods, Hong Kong with 4sqft apartments or London during industrial revolution as described by Dickens in Oliver Twist.

Sadly the 'absolute living standard' fairy tale is perpetuated by people on the economical right which makes anyone on the left dismiss anything further they say. (I'm on the right myself, but this crap infuriates me).

The relevant items to study in order to understand this effect 1. Law of Rent by David Ricardo 2. Henry George theorem

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the nuanced discourse of groups tackling these problems directly at the political level, instead of taking textbook definitions of words and none of the context of the broader social movements behind the effort.

“Wealth” is a measure of relative living standards. You’re talking about the same damn thing these groups do but somehow seem annoyed at your own lack of experience with the political conversation.

DRY can apply to more than code. No reason to reinvent definitions and quantify problems when people have already spent a lifetime discussing these things.

Get off HN and engage directly maybe, rather than getting circle and repetitive.

Humanity built bridges and roads and trade before it had any answers like we do about physics and math. We do not need or rely on the uptight definitions in academia. Language is mushed up as needed.

STEM headed nerds would be wise to forget their academia a bit and their propensity for falling into functional fixedness when it comes to language

Why is capitalism relevant? Because the driving economic force under capitalism is that the rich (capital owners) want to get richer (earn returns on their capital investments).

Why doesn't a rising tide lift all boats, in practice? Because that doesn't maximize return on capital. The people who financed development and operation of a hospital get the best returns on their investments by pricing things out of reach of those with the least. You don't maximize area of a rectangle under an income distribution curve by making the lowest point of the curve the top of the rectangle.

Perhaps the best way to think of it is "a rising tide lifts all boats, but some of them aren't lifted by as much as the water level has risen." Not quite as snappy, is it? It does get the point across, though. Inequality functions as a measure of how many boats aren't keeping up with the rising water level.

That's why so many people care about it. It's the same thing as your goal, but bundled up as an aggregate and easy to track, instead of involving hundreds of subjective measures. No measure is perfect, of course, but it's a lot harder to game than something like the CPI is.

This isn't an issue that can be fixed by a rising tide lifting all boats.

In a deep sense wealth distribution is about what form of government you want to have. If you want an oligopoly, then you let the majority if the wealth go to a few people. If you want a government that looks after most of the citizens, then you want a more equitable distribution of wealth.

We cannot remain an egalitarian democracy if economic power continues to concentrate as it has, regardless of median living standards.

Lines of code? That was shown to be a total failure years ago. Jira tickets closed? Some tickets are much harder than others. Hours of butt in seat? Well, sadly that still seems to be a bit in vongue, but is thankfully dying out.

Vlue collar jobs are easier to put a number one, but a lot of white collar jobs don't, and the USA is rapidly shifting to white collar work.

The counter-arguments from fiscal conservatives generally take one of two tacks: either a plainly disingenuous one where they argue that this is somehow only possible in those specific countries (e.g. due to being small and/or relatively homogeneous), or an ideological one where they argue that even if this is beneficial to the society as a whole, they're against it because taxing the winners more is fundamentally wrong, taxation is theft etc.

Well, the Nordic countries don't do the UBI part, but taxing the winners heavily and funding policies that are effectively redistributionist because they treat everyone more or less equally (like public transportation or universal healthcare), yeah they do that for sure.

Because it reduces the incentive to try to be a winner. The government might get a bigger piece of the pie, but the whole pie will be smaller. More importantly, since we live in regime of economic growth, this kind of policy can have extremely significant impact down the line: over 30 years, the difference between 2% and 3% economic growth is really, really large. Thus, increasing taxes today might result in money to redistribute today, but less money to redistribute 30 years from now.

Most governments fortunately understand it, and so in 1980s and 90s significantly reduced income tax rates in top brackets, and are in no mood for raising them. The tax rates for top earners in Sweden and Norway are about the same as they are in the US. The biggest difference between them and the US in terms of taxation is that Sweden, Norway, and other European welfare states typically tax the middle class much, much more than the US does. The welfare state in Germany, France, Norway or Sweden is not funded primarily by the "winners", it is funded by high taxes on people with incomes rather close to the median.