American society is more unequal than those in most other OECD countries
economist.com
economist.com
I guess we'll have a huge class of people that will basically get free money through the state. But maybe that won't be so bad since wealth will be so abundant?
So we're just assuming it will?
Every time new automation is invented, people think is going to happen. Seriously, this goes back to pre-Industrial Revolution times. Any time part of the labor process is automated away, people think that there's going to be permanent economic damage, and they're consistently wrong.
We'll adapt. There's always new things to be done. Personally, I'm betting on a greater diversity of creative and artistic work happening - people in core industries that are going to remain and grow in profitability (technology, raw materials, energy, consumer goods, construction, etc) will have more surplus income to spend on personalization, customization, different and more unique kinds of entertainment, etc.
We're going to seem a massive boom in people able to make a basic living from pure creative professions enabled. There'll also be more personal services offered. Ideally a lot of ineffective governmental costs can be optimized down, and more of government spending can go to refining and cleaning up the environment too, planting more trees and flora and fauna, things like that.
I think a lot of excellent jobs that don't exist today are going to be created. I also think many more people will learn basic technology skills than perhaps is commonly thought. A few hundred years ago, no one - and I mean no one - would have believed you if you told them what literacy rates would be in developed countries. They just wouldn't think it possible. So, more people will get on the tech bandwagon as time passes and kids grow up with it. Computer literacy will become like language literacy.
Good things are happening man, we're living in the greatest era ever. God damn I'm so optimistic and grateful to be alive right now.
2. Technology has created most of the jobs that exist today
3. Most jobs it makes obsolete were created by technology in the first place
4. Technology allows us to more with the same amount of people.
5. Human civilization hasn't even started yet. You're suggesting we're already done.
The 1820s called, they want their fallacies back.
Or to be honest, the Stone Age: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tZ5NoVqeSA
Contentment seems to be more a matter of "keeping up" and "as good as" than some sort of absolute measure.
From an evolutionary perspective, this might -- speculation -- involve the individual ensuring they are still valued by and a member of community. If you aren't doing well within the community, you are at risk.
The paper explores a large number of factors, but it is diffult to see how the base premise is anything other than Inequality needs to be 'tackled'. Where destruction of the middle class is happening, that needs to be tackled. Extreme poverty needs to be tackled. Creation of a middle class in countries that lack it needs to be tackled. Inequality, however, is a metric, and one that is oblivious to whether things are getting better or worse. Successfully tackling inequality says nothing about whether the lives of people have gotten better or worse, it merely tracks uniformity of outcome.
I'm very supportive of policies that prevent social instablity, and poor outcomes. My libertarian streak is weak at best, and centered around a distaste for government interfering in social policy. I'm unhappy with framing this metric as problem, because it easily falls into the trap of helping make people unhappy with otherwise good outcomes. The metric used is inherently oblivous to outcomes that I think matter.
Churchill's "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." applies here.
I can agree we should have distributive tax policies due to falling real wages at the bottom, yet that point is obliterated by starting the debate with a relative metric that I do not agree should drive the policy.
Given a society where everyone at least has the possibility to have a home, have food, and live a decent life (i.e. not do 16 hours of work per day or be applied a different legislation for different people), I don't care how inequal we are or how many hundred or thousand times more an executive makes than the employee with the lowest salary.
"Fixing" a society by making it more "equal", mainly to shrink the income distribution, doesn't magically help the poormost. Any "fixes" to the wealth distribution are likely to sift down only to the nearest classes in the continuum: the acquisition of any wealth extracted from rich would be a task easiest for upper middle class.
Humans are likely to always form into a number of "lower" and "upper" groups: if we can't do it with money, we do it by some intangible property such as ancestry or nobility. Compared to those, I much prefer money.
Conversely, a person doesn't need much: we only need to guarantee some minimal standard of living, should a citizen wish to receive it, and we can afford that if we wanted. There's no reason to try and take on the impossible task of "fixing" inequality: unless we gave an equal salary to everyone we would still have some people who form the poormost group.
The only thing that does matter is how well the poormost are doing. We can fix that if we want. Compared to them everyone else is doing just fine, equality or inequality, more Porsches or less Porsches.
Does anyone have any insight as to why Mexico was at the top of the list of countries with growing inequality?
Those in Mexico that can easily cross the border often come into America not to seek work but to buy their groceries and other items at a much cheaper price. Yes medication is a lot cheaper in Mexico, but most things are not when you look at comparable quality.
http://www.heritage.org/index/country/mexico
The competitiveness of American farmers despite market distortion is amazing. When I go into the US I see Milk for $2 or $3 / gallon where as it's more like $4-6 in Canada.
In other countries because of the dynamics of the market lower grades of fruit and vegetables are more generally available. I'm not sure where you are from but you may be looking at US and Canadian grocery pricing through the lens of major metropolitan centres, or depending on where you shop the difference in price between Whole Foods and Wal-Mart. The price of groceries is going to be much different in the midwest vs. NYC / SF.
My query was purely based on the idea that is for some reason in my head, not on any actual experiences.
Cheers for the elaboration!
We are continually told that the US is a terribly unequal society - I'm just curious how things would work out if you took something like the EU (higher GDP, much higher population) and compared it to the US.
Note that I am a European, I'm generally pro-EU but I think Europeans generally unfairly criticize the US in this area when we actually live in an increasingly shared society that clearly has its own issues with inequality.
However, the US had a Gini of 45 [1] while the EU had a Gini of 30 [2], suggesting that despite the vast differences among the European states, overall they are more equal. The reason is that countries like Luxembourg are very small (in population), and Europe as a while is dominated primarily by countries like France, Germany and England where individually income distributions are vastly more equal than in the US.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
[2] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
The poorest Americans are still in the 68th percentile for world-wide inequality.
I suspect that if you charted European countries on this map, the line would start higher and end lower than the US, hence their lower Gini.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2010/09/cuba-lays-off-...
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2043235,00.htm...
http://www.nolanchart.com/article8623_If_You_Pit_Ron_Paul_Ag...
In a truly egalitarian society wealth would be distributed by contribution to society. And one should expect unequal distribution of wealth according to the unequal contributions to that society. These studies presuppose that income should be divided equally, it shouldn't, it should be divided fairly and that's something that's very difficult to measure. There's nothing egalitarian about taking money from people who've earned it and giving it to those who haven't.
We could equalize income tomorrow by gov't decree but the real question is whether that makes for a better society.
I think most would agree that some inequality is good. After all, people are not equal. However, a too high degree of inequality will fuel social unrest.
It leads to a society in which the rich have to build higher and higher walls to keep out the poor. Not my idea of a fun place to live.
Honest question.
I've always chaffed with that sentiment a bit. "Can't"- ok. "Won't"? That's a choice.
The rough concept is that, when it comes to society/politics/law, you should think as if you are yet to be born and don't know where in society you will end up. So, you might become the richest man in the world, or you might live a life in poverty and unemployment.
As to why it matters, should people dying of hunger in the third world be ignored? Should we not care about homeless people who are sleeping in the cold and wet and will have crazily low life expectancy and a terrible standard of living?
I'm not sure where the 20% comes from or how accurate an estimate that is, but the more fortunate should always do their part, whether through legislation (such as taxation) or charity, to help the less fortunate. While different people will have different views on many areas of this, such as to what extent they should be helped, how badly off you have to be to deserve it, and so on and so on, I think very few would say that the bottom end of society deserves no help at all.
But I don't understand the attitude of "It's noble to steal money from some, and redistribute it to others". It seems immoral.
And frankly you shouldn't need to have to imagine being in that position, how can you not feel that we should all care about those worse off than ourselves?
Oh, and there are plenty of selfish reasons as well. Society would fall apart if only the rich were able to live and we left the poor to, eventually, either become rich or die out. Who would make your cars, clothes, food, serve you a coffee, sell you your ticket to a sports game, etc etc.
My ex wife (IQ of 140-150) phoned me the other day complaining about how she can't pay rent. Note that she lives in social housing despite making in excess of 68K per year. She works for the gov't and could go to any number of places with cheap rent, yet she insists on living in some of the most expensive areas of Canada.
Two weeks ago she was raving about how much fun the new Green Day edition of Rock Band was and next week she is going on vacation.
Think there might be a connection as to why she can't pay subsidized rent let alone market rent?
When I was with her, I bought my own place at 22 while working a crap tech support job.
A counterpoint example (although this is from the UK, but similar thing). When my sister was unemployed a couple of years ago, she signed up for unemployment benefits ("job seekers allowance"). That was something pretty low like maybe USD$100/week, but it was OK as she was living with parents and not paying rent. The purpose of job seekers allowance is, as the name suggests, to support people looking for work, and you stay on it you are meant to regularly prove that you are doing your best to find a job.
What she found was that, while she genuinely wanted a job, and wasn't picky (she wasn't thinking "I need to get a job suited to my skill set in a really specific industry", she would have been happy in a supermarket), the government staff that she had to see twice a month clearly didn't care about helping her find a job, and didn't even care about checking whether she was trying to find a job herself. To them it was all about ticking her off on a list and paying her the money.
That's really terrible, because it means that if you want to get benefits instead of working it's incredibly easy, and because, if they had bothered to help her find work sooner, she would have spent less time getting benefits, therefore taking less money out of the system.
So, was the system good in this example? No, it was terrible. But, at the same time, because she couldn't find a job, she did need the system, and she would have been much worse off if it didn't exist.
I've been in between jobs for several months. I have less than $1k in the bank.
I had a confirmed job offer from nVidia. Then yesterday, I was notified they just went into a "hiring freeze" due to their stock being down. So even though they have 2 billion dollars in the bank, they can't hire me. Poof, I just went from "decent living" to "likely impoverished". (I've been in the process of getting a job there since January. Everything went very positively at every step of the way, so I didn't try to pursue anything else.)
My wife is displaying signs of schizophrenia, which has become acutely evident to both of us within the last several months (and slowly evident over the last 5 years). We're both freaked about it, especially because there is literally nothing we can do. She was just hired at a coffee shop, so there aren't any health benefits. And since we're married, she can't use her father's insurance.
I personally suffer from either hemorrhoids or rectal cancer or stomach ulcers --- I can't go ask a doctor because, again, no job = no health insurance. So I try to ignore the blood and quietly hope it's nothing serious, even though there's a possibility it might be.
Where's my charity? I don't get any. And I don't want any, unless it's to help my wife.
Because people are supposed to deal with their own problems.
It's not easy. In fact, it blows. But that's why they're called "problems". You just deal with them. You have to.
If you want to be charitable, then email me an offer to let me work for you remotely. I have a decade of experience and can solve virtually any software task. There's just nothing in St Louis MO, which is where we happen to be stuck at.
Every human deserves to live in dignity. If someone is unable to earn enough money to live a dignified live, society has to provide the means, wealth has to be redistributed.
What exactly living in dignity means and how exactly wealth should be redistributed is certainly always up for debate but this is the basic outline of a pretty standard argument. I would, for example, be very surprised if less than a large majority of people in my native Germany agreed with the basic argument.
Those who agree with the argument have compared the immorality of taking away someone’s money with the immorality of not enabling someone to live a dignified life and concluded that the second violation of rights weighs heavier.
This is the crux of the issue right here.
Another key point is that the usefulness (to the holder) of a given unit of wealth is inversely proportional to how much total wealth they have.
$100 is worth a lot more to someone who has $3 than it is to someone who has $3,000,000. Therefore there is a certain utilitarian argument in favor of putting the wealth where it will have the most benefit. And yes, I know utilitarianism is horribly flawed when you force it to its logical conclusion, that isn't the point here.
Think of it a bit like spreading fertilizer on a field. If you want a good harvest, it doesn't really make any sense to distribute it in any way except according to its need.
As the parent said: this is just one argument. I'm not saying that it is conclusive, nor do I expect you to agree with it.
Advance warning: I find his writing pretty heavy going; I don't know whether that's a quirk of my brain or just means that he doesn't write as clearly as he might.
Now I just need to work out what the Bach that keeps going round my head is.
F Ab G F C Ab G F C(0) Db C Bb Ab G
It could be from one of the cello suites... but looking through them I can't for the life of me find it. Definitely it's played by a cello, pretty sure at the start of the piece, might be for solo cello or might be something close to the brandenburgs..
Would be immensely grateful if you could place it, I've been feeling so dumb for not knowing it for about a week now, I know I really ought to.
edit: I think there's a good chance it is in F minor as with my above notation, but it's quite possible I'm wrong about that.
edit: because I hate music written with letters.. http://misc.corincole.com/bach.png
The beginning of the first movement of BWV1023 (it's a violin sonata) isn't a million miles off, but it certainly isn't quite it and it's a violin rather than a cello.
(Are you absolutely sure it's Bach? Not that I have anyone else in mind.)
And I can't bare it, I've heard it so many times, have definitely heard it in concert if not even played it myself when I was younger, just can't quite remember.
Don't suppose you could ask your wife if it rings any bells for her if you didn't already? (I saw she's a rather good viola player on your site.)
Isn't this a tautology, or am I confused?
I didn't even mention free market / communism, let alone construct a straw man. If you think I have please point it out and add to the conversation.
If you don't agree with the idea that wealth should be distributed according to contribution then please let us know why. (Seriously, the idea is 300 years old, surely in that time we've found something better)
I agree with most people that those unfortunate enough to not be able to provide for themselves due to sickness or disability should be taken care of but I think that's a relatively small amount of money and everyone would agree that that sort of thing should be done.
There are a lot of things that affect your contribution to society that are not measured by how much money you can take from others.
I just don't agree that some people contribute more than 1000 times as much as others. Everyone is human. We all simply play our part. So in my eyes, distributing according to contribution will not result in a that large inequality.
an individuals contribution is largely a matter of their innate dispositions coinciding with their innate aptitudes coinciding with the particular labor demands at the time in which one is alive.
society perpetuates bring people into this world without any guarantee that they will be able to contribute at a certain level. yet you expect that only the individual should carry the burden of that throw of the dice?
i put A LOT of effort into training myself as a software developer and now make a reasonable living from that, but i also simply found myself at a young age with a passion for understanding computers and a reasonable aptitude for the kind of thinking involved.
other kids found themselves with a disposition for sports, or painting, or french literature, etc., but maybe their aptitude doesn't make the cut in those winner-take-all fields.
tragically, other kids simply never find any disposition or aptitude.
they don't deserve to be in that position any more than i deserve to be in mine.
so yes, there ought to be systems for redistributing wealth from those who are lucky enough to find themselves with financially remunerable dispositions and aptitudes. there ought to be guarantees for certain standards of living, and those standards ought to be damn high given that no one asks to be born, no one asks to be afflicted with attachment to being alive.
And are walls to keep out the "poor" really a consequence of inequality?
This is the standard boneheaded 'I'm on Hacker News and banging on about entrepreneurship and how we're all headed to a beautiful meritocracy, so I will interpret everything that occurs through this lens'. US manufacturing collapses? Entrepreneurship. Estate tax weakened? Entrepreneurship. Growth of low-end service jobs? Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship.
Chill out. There's no reason to be nasty.
It's hard to tell whether the guy is being actively intellectually dishonest (ie. is aware of what the major factors are in increasing inequality but is choosing to ignore them) or simply naive to the point of dimness.
Even TFA - an extremely brief treatment of inequality without a definitive focus on the US - offers enough illumination to make it obvious that simply chanting 'yay, this must mean entrepreneurship' in response to this isn't so smart.
On the other hand, if your goal is to make fun of the dimwits that surround you...
It's a fact that the world consists mostly of dimwits. I'm a dimwit about virtually everything, except programming. But it would be much more satisfying for me to teach you something programming-related, rather than to point out how stupid you are for [X programming mistake due to lack of knowledge], don't you think?
Sometimes, as the old USENET saying goes, we must retract the foreskin of ignorance and apply the wirebrush of enlightenment.
I will instead ponder the strange default assumption of everyone on Hacker News that they have Much To Teach Me about Programming. Maybe the screenname "Onan the Barbarian" fails to convey gravitas...
Pointing out these major factors instead of merely asserting they exist might be a more productive way of addressing the OP's comment. I, for one, would be very interested to know what factors you believe contribute to income disparity.
One is also inclined to raise an eyebrow at the Rise of the Bankers (and the fortunes made that way), though that is entrepreneurship - and very creative - in its way.
Where, by the way, do 'these studies' assume that income should be divided equally? That seems like an odd position and I honestly haven't heard very many people except for extremists express it. I think a solid majority accepts (some degree of) income inequality.
Does it look to you like there is any correlation in how they all succeed t promote entrepreneurship?
They sort of tip their hand by including Mexico, which should probably be on the "societies with a bit more inequality than the West" list instead. If you included every nation in the world, I wouldn't be surprised to see the USA still sitting sixteen places from the right.
Go to downtown Portland today and you'll find young people from middle class families living on the streets by choice. That's how good our safety net is. You really can't get yourself into the same sort of poverty that you see in most of the world here.
In most places, being poor means you're likely to die of starvation in the near future. In the US (and other countries on that chart), it means you can't afford a new television this year.
So sure, there's always room for improvement. But it's a bit silly to compare the USA to places that actually have a big divide between rich and poor.
Milton Friedman has some interesting thoughts on the subject:
Friedman and Sowell on Equality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJBeuR0xEP8
Milton Friedman - Redistribution of Wealth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRpEV2tmYz4