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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone who isn't like PG (so, 100% of the population) is finding it difficult to make enough money to have a life in the most basically fulfilling sense: education, retirement, support for loved ones, and good health

This exactly. PG arguing the relevance of the Gini coefficient is oblivious to the the crumbling state of the public infrastructure in the US and the declining accessibility of high quality public goods to the working and middle class.

The Gini coefficient is an indicator, not an objective in and of itself.

Investment in public goods might even make the super rich even richer by making the corporations they own more effective through better trained workers and less loss due to poor infrastructure.

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Life expectancy is dropping like a rock, and that's a number with a little more rigor behind it than PG's moronic hand waving. The guy has no idea what he's talking about and comes across as incredibly desperate to justify obscene hoarding of wealth. He'll draw a line between any two data points you can dig up, no matter how distant and spuriously correlated, if it will allow him to fellate a few billionaires.

We get it, these people pay you. Just say it: "I can see nothing wrong with the current distribution of wealth because the lenses in my eyeglasses are actually solid gold, a gift bequeathed to me by the Duchess of Facebook." The guy needs meritocracy to not be a myth, because he's styled himself as some kind of kingmaker who can selectively pluck only the most deserving young founders from a bubbling vat of Stanford alumni DNA. It's been a good run, but it's just getting gross now.

> The guy has no idea what he's talking about and comes across as incredibly desperate to justify obscene hoarding of wealth.

I don't think he's ill-intentioned, but like many people in his position, he's probably just personally unaffected by the crumbling of public goods.

He'll never take a dangerously overcrowded train, nor will he ever worry about whether his kids are in a safe school. Inequality seems mostly like a set of interesting stats to him, with little real world negative personal impact.

I don't believe he has ill intent because he has taken concrete steps to examine the issues (i.e. YC's UBI experiment), but it sounds like he's limited like anyone by the environment he mostly exists in, where he reasons about issues like inequality too much from data like the Forbes top 100 list.

The Gini coefficient is a relative measure. It is possible for the Gini coefficient of a developing country to rise (due to increasing inequality of income) while the number of people in absolute poverty decreases. This is because the Gini coefficient measures relative, not absolute, wealth. In Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty is looking at wealth groups (top 1%, top 10%, rest of the population). And it paints a very different picture.

Agreed. Admittedly upon reviewing the article, PG did use it as an effect, not an objective. But at the end of the day he's reasoning from rarified datasets like % of billionaires inheriting their wealth, vs using more broadly meaningful indicators like inequality in healthcare and education access, housing uncertainty, and others. That's what makes him so out of touch.

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