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Comment by learnstats2 | Hacker News Reader

Aren't those the same?

If you raised everyone's income above a minimum threshold, that would reduce income inequality by almost any measure.

Gini coefficient (the most commonly used inequality measure) effectively uses logarithms in its calculations: so raising incomes away from zero is the most effective way of reducing inequality by this metric (and most other metrics, and, I think, in most people's minds).

[Edit: are y'all down-voting because I said something technically wrong, or because you disagree in your mind? I'd like to know.]

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What if you did it in a way that makes Bezos even richer? What if you could increase low end incomes while simultaneously worsening inequality? Should we do it?

My vote is, of course. But I'm genuinely curious to hear the counter argument.

The fact that Bezos can get incredibly richer this year, while other people struggle harder is symptomatic of a system that allows inequality - it's not that Bezos getting richer in itself causes inequality.

Bezos's wealth is already effectively unbounded. He has the same wealth as ~50% of the population of United States altogether. That won't immediately change if you uplift poor people's income (since income is not wealth). Why is it important to consider his right to get even richer?

> Why is it important to consider his right to get even richer?

Because it has a correlation with making a lot of other peoples' lives better. For example, I needed to do some repairs two days ago, and ordered the parts necessary from Amazon, and received the parts yesterday. I didn't have to spend 2 hours driving somewhere to get those parts. That extra 2 hours is a benefit to my life. Amazon, in aggregate, has saved me a great deal of time. Another benefit Amazon provides is selection - I can find much more exactly what I want, rather than accepting whatever the store has.

This example is a specific benefit, but not one that Amazon has provided.

It's a benefit that online shopping has provided, which Amazon has monopolized, partly via suppressing competition and exploiting labour (which society has to pay for in other ways).

Amazon utterly revolutionized online shopping, a benefit Amazon provided. There's simply no way it could have otherwise grown to the biggest company in the world from a garage in Bellevue.

25 years later it's easy to assume that online shopping was always like it is today. No way. Nobody even conceived of what it has become. I remember, for example, when ordering by mail meant "allow 3 to 6 weeks for delivery". I'm still astonished by next day delivery - which Amazon created and made ordinary.

I agree. They revolutionized it in a way nobody else was prepared to do. I think there should be regulations to make sure labor is treated fairly, rather than any kind of specific measure to reduce inequality, which seems like a vanity metric to me.

Yes, nobody is arguing for unfair labor practices.

For another example, Sears used to be the king of mail order. Famously, you could even mail order a house! It was delivered on a pallet and you got to put it together. I used to buy lots from the Sears mail order catalog. It was fun just thumbing through it.

Amazon wiped it off the map, from a garage.

> partly via suppressing competition and exploiting labour

> What if you could increase low end incomes while simultaneously worsening inequality?

That it absurd. If you double the wealth and income of every person on the world, nothing changes. Same gini coefficient, same poverty.

The sum of all money and other financial objects might change in numerical value but still represents the current amount of goods and land that exist on the planet.

I'd argue that you haven't really increased incomes at all if you simply double the monetary amount. To actually increase wealth/incomes you'd have increase the amount of material goods, services, and realise improvements to their quality of life.

And that exactly happend with globalization for US cititin.

> I'd argue that you haven't really increased incomes at all if you simply double the monetary amount

That's what I wrote.

> Same gini coefficient, same poverty.

That statement is obviously false. The US and Haiti have about the same gini coefficient.

> If you double the wealth and income of every person on the world, nothing changes.

The commenter surely meant doubling material wealth (as you put it, the "current amount of goods and land that exist on the planet"), not just some abstract numerical value.

>> Same gini coefficient, same poverty.

> That statement is obviously false. The US and Haiti have about the same gini coefficient.

I'm comparing before the doubling and after, not across different countries. facepalm

> The commenter surely meant doubling material wealth

That post clearly reads "What if you could increase low end incomes".

If you increase their income by giving them jobs where they can be more productive, poverty decreases even if the rich also get richer. Consider building factories in a poor country. People can both contribute and earn a lot more in factory jobs versus back on the farm.

This suggestion is literally colonialism.

> What if you could increase low end incomes while simultaneously worsening inequality?

If you could increase them more than you would be able to by redistributing wealth, then I think you should. But I can't think of any scenario where this is evenly remotely close to being the case. In practice we have plentiful but finite resources, and by far the easiest and most practical way to increase lower end incomes would be to redistribute our existing wealth.

The size of the cake is not fixed. Excessive redistribution somehow leads to less cake production.

It's not fixed, but neither is it unbounded.

> Excessive redistribution somehow leads to less cake production.

Indeed, but emphasis on excessive. I'd argue that we currently have an excessive lack of redistribution which is also leading to less cake production.

Agree, a balance has to be found, I would say most of Europe is in balance. Cake could be (practically) unbounded, since (real) value can increase with actually less consumption of resources.

> Cake could be (practically) unbounded, since (real) value can increase with actually less consumption of resources.

I don't think this follows. Yes we can make better use of resources, but there's a limit. And given the huge wealth differentials (two or three orders of magnitude) it's feasible and even likely that that limit is lower than the amount of wealth available for redistribution.

Go back 100 years and the way we have increased our resources would have been completely unimaginable. It would break any possible definition of boundedness that you could have thought of at the time. For all intents and purposes, trying to establish potential limits on economic growth is silly and destructive.

That is the beauty (sometimes cruel beauty) of capitalism. It's not up to you to imagine a way for this to happen. Anyone can imagine a way to increase their own wealth by creating value for other people.

Increasing income does not have to be increasing the number of dollars you make either. What if you made the same money, but it went a longer way? Like you could get cheaper healthcare, but good food for less, or have any other show up at your doorstep in two business days?

I'm not saying our system is perfect, and I actually agree that this is probably a good time to look at redistribution of wealth. But I think limiting others' creativity because of our own lack of imagination is a terrible idea that makes us all worse off.

Who said anything about limiting people's creativity. I do think we should limit how much we compensate people for their creativity (in order to balance compensating others for theres). But they are free to be as creative as they like.

On second read, I think we pretty much agree

> finite resources

Resources are infinite under free markets. For example, software. There is great wealth in software creation, yet it does not exist in the physical world. Even for physical things, they can be re-arranged to make the new arrangement more valuable.

Seems to me that everything then would simply become more expensive to sustain Bezos's (or others') wealth?

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