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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a propaganda piece written by a wealthy person trying to convince you, a not wealthy person, that you shouldn't support higher taxes on the wealthy because they are just doing it to prevent you from being as wealthy as they are.

There is no evidence presented.

I know a couple of billionaires. None of them are even trying to get richer. Their investments are all made in an attempt to make the world a better place, from their point of view. Getting richer is just a side effect of that. They want higher taxes because they think wealth inequality is bad, but they know that if they just give away their own money, it won't solve the problem, because there needs to be systemic changes forcing everyone to give their money away, otherwise the people who aren't giving their money away will just collect it from the ones that are, via middle class and poor intermediaries.

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The article is trying to provide a framework for why it is that very wealthy people might be vocal supporters of taxes. The observations you are making of your billionaire friends are more specific but broadly in line with the reality the article is arguing for; so it isn't obvious what more evidence you need.

EDIT And any billionaire who says getting rich is a side effect is lying to someone. Possibly themselves. A billion dollars has never happened by accident.

No, getting richer is a side effect. They very much intended to get rich to make the first billion. It's the investments after that that aren't intended for wealth building, but are intended to fund things they think make the world better.

> The article is trying to provide a framework for why it is that very wealthy people might be vocal supporters of taxes.

And I'm saying that it's wrong. They are vocal for higher taxes because they know that higher taxes reduce wealth inequality, and we know that inequality is bad for economic growth. But they also know that they can't just give their own money away to solve inequality, because then the people who aren't giving it away will just collect what they give away.

> ...and we know that inequality is bad for economic growth...

If I look at a list of top billionaires [0] all the American ones are men who are poster children of driving enormous economic growth, and frequently a great deal of social good. Bezos, for example & picking the top, is responsible for rewiring and modernising a big chunk of the worlds logistic systems in a way that was not going to happen if he had been taxed into oblivion.

The problem is the ossification of the upper class; and that is promoted far more by governments bailouts such as seen after the '07 financial crisis, or as will probably surface when people have time to go over what actually happened in the emergency COVID spending. Protecting idiots while they are in charge of the financial system is a much bigger drag on growth than the existence of wealthy people.

Now if we were to talk about stopping those sort of welfare-for-wealthy-people policies then I'm sure we all agree. But taxes are a different policy, they imply we keep going with the welfare and then guess where it landed to try and take it back. I don't buy that the democratic process can handle that level of precision.

Trying to tax billionaires out of existence while the existing ones enjoy a great deal of government support for the financial status quo is exactly the sort of kick-out-the-ladder behaviour the article would lead us to predict for people in quadrant 4 of the article's graph (which is where you're describing them). I'll even go as far as guessing they probably support policies that bring the US into line with Europe - because that is what the article would predict.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#202...

Bezos is also responsible for creating a new precariat who can only do their jobs by pissing into bottles because they aren't allowed the basic humanity to look after their needs.

If you're going to try to persuade me this is a good thing and not a Hobbesian nightmare, you're not going to succeed.

This isn't just about taxes. This is about humanism vs financial authoritarianism.

It's also about the fact that the world was both more stable and more obviously prosperous when tax rates were much higher.

Economies are supposed to be prosperity factories for everyone to enjoy, and not just billionaire factories for a few extremely privileged individuals whose wealth exists because they've placed unacceptable financial and personal burdens on the people who work for them.

Bezos? The world would not be the poorer or have missed out one bit if he hadn’t created Amazon.

The very success of Amazon is proof that the world is better with it than without it: Amazon did not take out money by force. We, the customers, have made it successful by rewarding it with our business every time it won it in our minds over its competitors. Every extra cent of Amazon profit comes from a happy customer. Happy customers == better world.

In a world full of competition and alternatives, in a world where the low price is far from being the only differentiating factor, Amazon is winning due to innovation, better customer service and choice, massive, almost infinite, choice.

I’ll avoid taking an absolute position on Amazon—socially beneficial or not—but I do take issue with your argument: only by the most stunted measures of “better” is turning a profit sufficient or even necessary to show someone “makes the world better.”

I think the perspective of “happy customers = better world” is a bit sickening. I’ll give benefit of the doubt that if really pressed, that sentiment would be walked back. That sort of quippy line is how crooked politicians and their cronies come into and stay in power, though.

And no, the world isn’t a better place with them unless your definition of world excludes billions of the population.

The world would be better if Amazon were not anticompetitive, and were not extracting what is arguably monopoly rent in several sectors.

The world would be better if Amazon treated its employees fairly, hired enough of them that they didn't have to work themselves to the bone to achieve the desired speed of shipping, and allowed them the basic dignity and freedom every human being deserves.

The world would be better if the money Amazon has made were distributed much more evenly—even if it were only among Amazon's employees.

"This is a great idea, and should be in the world, as it makes it better" is not the same thing as "the person who came up with this idea deserves every cent they ever made."

The good aspects of any given person, company (or other organization—including countries), product, or service do not justify inequalities created by them, oppression perpetrated by them, and generally the negative things they create. The world is not black and white, and we can absolutely say "the convenience Amazon brings to retail is an amazing thing that is a benefit to the world," while also saying "Amazon is a predatory monopoly and monopsony in some areas, and should be better regulated" as well as "Jeff Bezos is a terrible person, and absolutely does not deserve the amount of wealth he has amassed."

That's nonsense. Facebook is also successful and the world would clearly be better off without it.

I don’t agree with this at all.

The “value” was lower cost (and later, convenience). But by hiding the actual cost.

Amazon grew a large customer by cutting corners, like sales tax; not taking monetary responsibility for defective and dangerous items; making IT “easier”, but eventually more expensive.

When that became insufficient, they began stealing small business ideas and making it their own.

In other words, their only path forward is becoming a monopoly. Not innovation.

> And I'm saying that it's wrong. They are vocal for higher taxes because they know that higher taxes reduce wealth inequality

Even if your billionaire friends are super virtuous, it doesn't mean that other billionaires are the same. They could want higher taxes for the exact reason the article describes.

And regardless of why your friends say they want higher taxes, the bottom line is that it's very easy to say something is good idea when it doesn't affect you negatively. Did they also want higher taxes back when they weren't so rich, and were working on building their wealth? My guess would be no.

And also, you don't mention what kind of taxes your rich friends would like raised. I assume income taxes, of the sort that might not affect them all that much? How do they feel about wealth taxes, which likely would affect them? If they're in favor of higher income taxes but not the enactment of wealth taxes, then perhaps they aren't as interested in fixing wealth inequality as they say they are. It just sounds like, "we'd love to fix inequality, but only for the next generation; don't take away the result of how we've benefited from that same inequality!"

"a billion never happened by accident" Being successful isn't an accident. Why should people feel bad for being THAT successful?

Going to be a great world where success like that is "punished" in the name of "equality" or "equity"

100% my read too. The fact that the author doesn't make an effort to identify which taxes is a signal that they aren't really being truthful.

> that you shouldn't support higher taxes on the wealthy because they are just doing it to prevent you from being as wealthy as they are.

The inevitable math is if income is taxed at 40%, it greatly diminishes the ability to grow wealth.

Instead of taxing wealth creation, the government should be taxing pollution.

Aren't you proving the article's point with the example of your billionaire friends? The higher taxes they want won't affect them because they aren't interested in getting richer, and so likely don't have high incomes compared to what the article calls the "usurpers".

Higher taxes for your billionaire friends, regardless of why they say they want them, will have the effect described in the article: your friends will remain just as rich, and it will be harder for other people below them on the ladder to climb up to them.

It's already almost impossible for anyone who isn't born into wealth to become a billionaire.

How exactly would taxing ultra-high net worth individuals make it harder for everyone else to get rich?

In America it's very possible. For example, Oprah Winfrey went from welfare to billionaire.

She is literally the only person on the billionaires list who was born in the bottom quintile. She is the most outlier of outliers.

10 billionaires who grew up dirt poor:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/11/10-billionaires-who-grew-up-...

Compared to how many who didn't?

Bruno Mars is already worth $175m. Won't be long till he's a billionaire.

Given that JK Rowling's parents were a scientist and an aircraft engineer and she went to an elite elementary school, I question that entire articles' definition of dirt poor.

Yes, she was on the dole when she wrote Harry Potter, but that doesn't mean she grew up poor.

You're moving the goal posts. Rowling was on welfare.

Another the list doesn't mention: Paul McCartney. Michael Jackson's estate is now over $1 billion.

How did I move the goalposts. I said Oprah was the only one born in the bottom quintile. JK Rowling was most definitely not born in the bottom. She had the advantage of a great education growing up.

And here is an article saying neither was Shultz: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/howard-schultz-says-...

Rowling was on welfare. She describes herself as "Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling

And Shultz was still in a government housing project.

Steve Jobs wasn't poor, but was certainly lower middle class.

> Rowling was on welfare.

As a middle aged single mother. She wasn't born that way. She still had her elite education and family connections as advantages. And she's not even American (this thread is about American billionaires).

> And Shultz was still in a government housing project.

Described by the residents as "middle class government housing".

The point is that Oprah is the only one who was born in the lowest quintile, the only who who didn't grow up with any advantages that helped her become a billionaire.

There are 7 others on the list.

Though I'm curious how you believe government housing is some sort of elite advantage. Or what "family connections" you believe took Rowling right to billionaire status. I read about her education. Looked rather ordinary to me.

This sort of debate is always difficult because of definitional challenges. When we talk about inequality, are we talking about billionaires? About the top 0.01%? The top 1%? The top decile?

Interestingly—and I don’t know what to make of this—the US seems to have a fairly high percentage of “ultra rich” whose wealth is not primarily inherited (https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2016/10/10/where-...). On the other hand, across the entire population, the US does relatively poorly on inter generational earnings elasticity (i.e., in the US, what your parents earn is a very good predictor of what you will earn) (https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf).

I think any such debate thus needs a stronger foundational discussion of what metrics matter.

High marginal tax rates do have the effect of impeding people moving up.

> what your parents earn is a very good predictor of what you will earn

This makes perfect sense to me, as peoples' state in life is the sum of their choices. Successful parents proactively teach or passively show their kids habits and methods to being successful.

This is why I've advocated that the public schools should teach, as part of the core curriculum, basic accounting and finance. And even how to run a business. This would be a very cost-effective way to help the poor.

High income tax rates vs taxes on capital earnings do that, irrespective of how progressive the income tax rate is, no? I assume the point you are making is that taxing income at a higher rate than returns on capital favors earnings from already-accrued wealth over wealth accural.

As to heritability of earnings, I think there are a number of potential causes:

* Parents pass on knowledge, skills, and values that are valuable.

* Parents pass on actual wealth, or social standing that can help accrue wealth (like helping their kids make business contacts or find internships).

* Parents buy their kids improved education or similar (e.g. childhood nutrition, college test prep, etc).

* Structural biases (racism, classism) tend to reflect attributes that are somewhat or fully inherited (ethnicity, accent, perceived social class).

* Earnings reflect things that are biologically inherited (intelligence, greed, etc).

I don't find the last point very compelling but I'm including it for completeness. But what I think this list demonstrates is that it's somewhat hard to understand just how pernicious the causes of low intergenerational social mobility may be—the first and last points seem kind of "working as intended" (in a meritocracy); the second and third points are troublesome, and the fourth point is deeply problematic.

> pernicious

The real pernicious thing is the assumption that one cannot improve one's state by improving ones choices and actions. People are not doomed to be poor because their parents are poor. But if a person assumes this to be true, they are indeed dooming themselves to poverty.

Possible, but still vanishingly unlikely. An outlier generally does not prove a trend.

There are 614 American billionaires. 56 were added in 2020.

Of course, with Biden's inflation, everyone will be a billionaire soon!

No, it is not "very possible". That is simply not a statement that aligns with reality.

A tiny sample of outliers doesn't define a probability distribution. It's just plain wrong to suggest it does.

I agree, but they also have a point about taxing inheritance or wealth and not just income.

> that you shouldn't support higher taxes on the wealthy because they are just doing it to prevent you from being as wealthy as they are.

> There is no evidence presented.

That is fair game when most arguments for the opposite are also presented without any evidence.

I see the message of this article more as "the high vs low taxes game has nothing to do with the problems of the poor, it is about helping or preventing any members of the middle class to become rich".

I tend to believe it. Trump shown us that the poor are so easy to manipulate into voting directly against their own interest that no one will be bothered to do much for their sake - it's not necessary at all for any politicians' goals. It's a balance of interest of rich (billionaires/centimillionaires) and middle class (the rest of the 1% or so). The rest of people are just taken along for a ride, some of them under false impression it has something to do with their interests.

If you need everyone else to do it for you to want to do it, you don't want to do it.

It is about solving a problem, not a race about who want to do it. Wealth inequality is the problem. Even uneven distribution of loan/debt is a problem.

and there is no solution to it.

Why? because there's uneven skills, uneven effort, uneven luck, uneven work ethic, etc, etc, etc.

As long as humans are involved... in all human history, in all societies, in all things there has been inequality and no effort so far has had any affect on it.

In fact, most efforts have made it worse across the board. Socialism and communism are failed experiments with a 100 years of history as proof.

> In fact, most efforts have made it worse across the board

Have they? Most social democracies seem to be going along fine.

There is a sliding scale between Hayek and Marx you know.. it’s not a binary choice

Inequality still exists and is growing worldwide... so I'd say... Yes.

And the harder its pushed for "equality", the more it turns into bad times.

"binary" I never said it was... I said increasing efforts generally trend towards increasingly bad consequences - and we are talking about pushes to end "inequality" in this chain of conversation... the harder the pushes, the worse the outcomes.

At no point in any society has inequality been removed.

> Inequality still exists and is growing worldwide... so I'd say... Yes.

I think global inequality has drastically reduced these past 30 years. Don’t forget that 30 years ago for anyone in India or China the main prospect was subsistence farming.

And why are the consequences of curbing inequality increasingly bad? What is “increasingly bad” about the Nordic countries?

You can't eliminate inequality but you can reduce it. We can't eliminate disease but there is still medicine.

And this is patently false:

> no effort so far has had any affect on it

FDR and the New Deal reduced inequality in the US and most Americans thought that was a good thing. Stalin and the communists reduced inequality in the Soviet Union. Their methods were less well received. But the question isn't whether there was less inequality but whether it was worth it. There are many societies today that take active measures to reduce inequality -- Finland is an obvious example -- and they are generally considered extremely successful.

Why reduce inequality? Because inequality reduces social cohesion, promotes corruption -- it produces people who can buy government policy and action --, reduces democratic control of the government, and the mass of people lifted up by its reduction benefit much more than the few wealthy people suffer who are made poorer.

"stalin reduced inequality" There was still inequality... the ruling class lived like kings and everyone else lived in squalor.

"new deal reduced" and didn't remove. Inequality has grown steadily with a wider range of "all boats rise unequally".

"Why reduce" the goals aren't in question... simply the results. You can say you want to reduce inequality... but if the end result is more inequality and more suffering? then your stated goals don't match reality.

"inequality reduces social cohesion, promotes corruption, reduces democracy" all things that happen in the march towards "equality" and "equity".

"few wealthy" the problem is, again, the results... the harder the push for "equity" the more likely its everyone who suffers - not just the "few rich made poorer".

> "new deal reduced" and didn't remove. Inequality has grown steadily with a wider range of "all boats rise unequally".

Here is the first line of the comment you are responding to:

> You can't eliminate inequality but you can reduce it. We can't eliminate disease but there is still medicine.

That was the important part. Making things better is desirable even if you can't make them perfect.

Inequality has indeed grown steadily. This is not because of FDR's programs, though, but because of measures taken since and other events: reducing marginal tax rates, reducing inheritance taxes, the weakening of the labor movement, globalization, and so forth. Also, incidentally, by asserting this you are contradicting your own previous assertion that nothing anyone has ever done has had an effect on inequality.

> contradicting

My main assertion is the stronger the push to end inequality, the more it does the opposite... the strongest pushes like Communism and Socialism are easily viewable through historical examples - or using present examples (IE: Venezuela). Yet pushes to use "Social Democracy" to enact the changes have the same, albeit slower, effect of not working or causing horrible effects (IE: growing inequality).

"here's the first line: can't eliminate disease"

likewise, if you want to walk that metaphore... we are approaching a time where diseases are increasing resistant to medicine and we are making things worse by creating worse diseases (IE: MRSA and antibiotic resistant "super" strains). We work to "cure diseases", have short term successes and, ultimately, make things worse.

you can look at countries like Sweden that are held up as examples of how it should be done... and see an increase in inequality across the board.

"make things better" I'm all for working towards better... but sweeping changes generally don't work because of unintended consequences (IE: Globalization and higher taxes closing small businesses and hurting competition and rising prices and etc)

Maybe I could be more clear... but I stand by my belief that the harder someone pushes for "equality" or "equity"... the more unequal and inequitable the results are.

> likewise, if you want to walk that metaphore... we are approaching a time where diseases are increasing resistant to medicine and we are making things worse by creating worse diseases (IE: MRSA and antibiotic resistant "super" strains). We work to "cure diseases", have short term successes and, ultimately, make things worse.

Antibiotic resistance is surely a problem but it doesn't indicate a general failure of medicine. On all other fronts medicine continues to improve, and even in the case of antibiotic resistance we aren't giving up. Phage therapy is a thing. New antibiotics continue to be found. We strive to prevent the mis-prescription of antibiotics in, for example, animal feed. And interestingly, the slowdown in antibiotic discovery is in part a market failure: it's hard to make back research costs with antibiotics, so the free market doesn't provide them even though we need them. It's not a good metaphor for free market fundamentalists.

> I stand by my belief that the harder someone pushes for "equality" or "equity"... the more unequal and inequitable the results are.

I won't argue with you further.

Do you think the US was more or less democratic after the New Deal?

More or less prosperous? More or less stable? More or less able to innovate and deliver?

> and they are generally considered extremely successful

All the FAANG companies are American.

Sweden says hello

Inequality growing in sweden says hello

https://nordregio.org/nordregio-magazine/issues/state-of-the...

"From having the second-lowest level of inequality in 2000, by 2017, Sweden had the highest level of income inequality in the Nordic Region. The overall income inequality between households in the same municipality was also higher in Sweden than in the other Nordic countries."

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/a...

"From an all-time low around 1980, income inequality substantially increased, reflecting a strong rise in top incomes and income from capital, more recently also a widening gap between bottom and middle incomes. Behind this are the dual income tax system, established in the early 1990s, the introduction of earned income tax credits, and a diminished coverage of social insurance programmes, which widened the income gap between employed and non-employed during the 2000s. The benefit and tax systems became less redistributive and thereby contributed to increased income inequalities"

Coincidentally, that was when European governments started to shift from Social Democratic policies to Neoliberal policies.

That's not really a winning argument if you're trying to claim that Neoliberalism is the solution, not the problem.

> Wealth inequality is the problem

Wealth equality has been tried many times, and turns out to be an intractable problem.

I don't think anyone here is seriously advocating for wealth equality, just less inequality.

In a fair world, financial success would be based more or less solely on a person's abilities, and their effort and skill in making use of their abilities. Since those things will have wide variance, there will be inequality, but that kind of inequality is ok (though we should still have a safety net to ensure no one must live in poverty because of their lack of ability). Our world is not fair: luck, ancestry, and unbalanced power dynamics (among other things) have an outsized influence on financial success. And I fear it will only grow more unfair as time goes on.

> inequality should be based as close as possible on variations in people's ability and effort, not on luck, ancestry, and unbalanced power dynamics

Indeed, and free markets achieve that better than any other system.

I absolutely disagree with this. Free markets just drive people to their worst tendencies, to lie, cheat, and exploit others when they have the advantage.

Even if that wasn't the case, we don't really have much in the way of free markets in the world, or even within legal jurisdictions. Regulation is everywhere, and markets are always restricted to some extent. I don't believe that's a bad thing overall (for example, I don't think we should go back to allowing unrestricted child labor, or rolling back gains in the minimum wage), though often regulation does create unnecessarily inefficient markets (e.g., many credit airline deregulation as the main driver behind today's comparatively cheap ticket prices, but deregulation has not made flying less safe).

If we were to remove all regulation and bring markets as close to full freedom as possible, I would only expect income and wealth inequality to get worse, not better.

(Also, for anyone confused, I edited my wording after the parent quoted me, but my meaning is -- hopefully -- the same. Sorry about that!)

> Free markets just drive people to their worst tendencies, to lie, cheat, and exploit others when they have the advantage.

I recommend reading about the Soviet economy and how it functioned.

Do you really think that under socialism, people stop lying, cheating, and exploiting others?

Note that lying, cheating, exploiting is illegal in a free market.

I don't think it's fair to suggest that anything other than our current system is the Soviet system. It makes me feel like you're arguing in bad faith to present such an obviously-false dichotomy.

People of course lie, cheat, and exploit others in our current system (and of course did so in the Soviet system as well). Some of it is illegal, but unfortunately happens anyway, because people are often vulnerable and law enforcement can't help them. Much of it is legal exploitation, too, though. Making markets freer can never fix these problems, by definition. Restrictions can, though they can't and won't fix everything.

I don't think my point a few steps upthread was that restrictions on markets are necessarily the answer, at least not in all cases. We need a fundamental shift in humanity's attitude toward what it means to live and prop up others so they can also live. I'm not really holding my breath for that to happen in my lifetime, though. So we need more blunt instruments like income and wealth taxes, wealth redistribution schemes that don't create more problems than they solve. It's hard to get right, and easy to get disastrously wrong, but I think it's worth trying. Our current trajectory puts us in line to eventually become a world of corporate-run states, and that's not going to be good for anybody but the shareholders and executives.

> We need a fundamental shift in humanity's attitude

I'm sorry, but you're not going to change human nature. Every system that has tried to deny human nature, or change it, has resulted in misery, death and disaster.

Why not work with human nature? That's what free markets do. Free markets lift people out of poverty. Look what happened in the US 1800-1900. Scores of millions lifted themselves out of poverty into the middle class. Every country that tries this experiences the same result.

> that's not going to be good for anybody

So far, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Netflix have improved my life in many ways.

The road to Utopia is not an all-powerful government that regulates and micromanages our lives. Freedom is the road.

Walter - no one is advocating for a radical 180 degree change of humanity. But even within the United States we have seen radically different approaches to inequity. Today’s economy most closely resembles the Gilded Age when it comes to concentration of wealth. At the turn of the 20th century, there was a strong nationwide response to the problems dramatic inequality caused for society - ending up with trustbusting, labor laws, unions, and higher taxes on the wealthy, culminating in the New Deal and GI bill. Those changes persisted post-WW2 when American equality was at its best and we enjoyed unprecedented growth, and really only were unwound in the Reagan administration and beyond.

> we have seen radically different approaches to inequity

Not once have seen changes to human nature.

> unprecedented growth

Are you sure about that? It was higher in the 19th century.

> only were unwound in the Reagan administration

Forgetting the stagflation of the 1970's and Carter's "Malaise Forever". Things got a lot better under Reagan.

The Guilded Age saw massive increases in the standard of living across the board. The notion that it was some hellish period in our history is unfounded. I've read "Titan", the biography of Rockefeller. The book failed miserably at presenting any evidence whatsoever that Rockefeller got rich at the expense of the poor.

There are possibilities other than unfettered market capitalism and an oppressive dictatorship that tries to plan an economy with at best primitive computers.

> primitive computers

Do you want your life specified and controlled by AI?

And again: There are possibilities other than AI overlords and the computers the Soviet planners had available.

It's kind of up to you to enumerate those possibilities and give examples of them working.

Enumerate what? Computers more advanced than what existed in 1989 that didn't turn into oppressive AIs?

> Enumerate what?

You wrote: "There are possibilities"

Enumerate the possibilities.

All you do is selectively quoting me and making false dichotomies. You aren't interested in a serious discussion.

> . Our world is not fair: luck

I would argue luck is the fairest system. Who has the right to complain to a die that their number didn't come up?

Successful people know how to get lucky. For example, if you want to find a partner:

1. stay at home - luck will never find you

2. go out and socialize - luck will find you

That is not luck

The people who rolled badly, which isn't something they could have influenced.

Move yourself into a position where getting lucky is more likely.

For example, if you want to be a pro basketball player, you'll be more likely to get lucky if you start practicing basketball a lot.

Watch TV instead, and you have zero chance at a pro ball career.

That just means luck isn't the only factor.

It's not going to help the person sitting behind me at a concert if I sit down and everyone else stays standing.

Well yeah it would? It wouldn’t solve entirely the problem for the person behind you but it would make it better.

No it wouldn’t. They couldn’t see before and they still can’t see now.

Life isn’t binary. It is possible to see more than before but not see everything.

Can someone explain why wealth inequality is bad?

Social exclusion is terribly bad and must be fought at all costs, true. Consumption/income-measured, absolute poverty is bad in all or almost all cases - true, we could probably afford sacrificing some of the economic efficiency to eradicate it.

Relative consumption/income-measured poverty is not "bad" as long as it rises with overall income levels rising faster.

And wealth... why do poor people need any wealth at all? If anything, in socialist-ish, European countries most people don't have any wealth at all, they own nothing, they live for generations in regulated rental apartment - that regulated rental contract they can pass as inheritance is their biggest (although intangible) asset. They don't need any "wealth" - government covers all their risks and funds their healthcare, unemployment, education and retirement and they can literally live hand to mouth all their life and don't feel at all precarious (and this is why wealth inequality is bigger in EU than in US, even as income inequality is smaller).

Repeating myself from above:

Wealth inequality is not the same thing as income inequality. Moreover, they are inversely related: more income inequality usually means less wealth inequality (because people know government won't care for them so they save and invest cash to make up for it). And there is nothing morally wrong with wealth inequality: European democratic states that American liberals love the most, like Netherlands, Denmark or Sweden, are more unequal in terms of wealth than the U.S. - but much less in terms of income, and even less in terms of after-tax income including "free stuff".

Netherlands and Sweden have a higher GINI than the US after a shift towards right-wing government - far-right in the case of the Netherlands, and also notoriously corrupt.

Denmark doesn't.

Russia also has a higher GINI than the US, but I don't think most Americans would consider it a successful economy.

If you prefer oligarchy to democracy and are happy with corruption at all levels, there is indeed nothing morally wrong with wealth inequality.

If you're not a humanist and have given up on the lessons of the Enlightenment, that makes perfect sense.

Which specific European countries are you thinking about? This does not match my experience at all - I have never heard of inheriting rental contracts & I have lived in Europe for basically all of my life. Family in Germany & Italy have also never mentioned such a thing.

there are areas in Torino with really subsized rents and a good chunk of these flats got sold to renters a lot below market value

You have an implicit assumption that progress (in terms of absolute wealth) and equality are negatively correlated.

Many of the people who argue the other way disagree with that assumption.

I would say historically equality has preceded and caused growth from Magna Carta onwards, do slave states progress more than those with hired workers? Did Monarchies progress faster than constitutional monarchies or republics?

There's an interesting argument that 20th century warfare lead to socialism since you need lots of healthy trained soldiers, compared with a knight on a horse where the power is concentrated. And so the country that promises more to their soldiers can steal progress from the others. And that might reverse again with robot-driven wars.

A libertarian perspective would point to what fraction of the billionaire's wealth was accumulated from free exchange versus coercion, corruption, nepotism, extracting rents and gaming the system as a better measure of both progress and equality.

Even the sophisticated arguments for inequality generally take the view that monopolies are bad, but any attempt to regulate them will be worse because it will be gamed by the powerful to achieve the opposite and strengthen monopolies.

it isnt

Wealth inequality is bad for the same reason soviet communism was bad. Concentration of power and the corruption that comes with it.

>wealth inequality is bad

wealth inequality isnt bad by any means, structural* poverty is. Stop this "equality" bullshit.

*there are various types of poverty: absolute poverty should be allieviated and situational (functional) poors should be reintegrated into society by education,job,training or any other means

It seems obvious to me that we can break the discussion apart into one of:

* equality of opportunity

* equality of political representation

* equality of means

I agree that the last is the least important. Unfortunately, data and common sense both suggest that inequality of means results in inequality of opportunity (see e.g https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf), and that, in a democracy where money talks, it translates to inequality of political representation as well.

Equality of opportunity and equality of means are the same thing. Everyone tries to make the best of their opportunities. Some just don't have the ability to do so, which is also a kind of opportunity.

I think by the most deterministic view of human behavior everything boils down to inequalities of opportunity, but that may be a little reductive.

I was looking at this more in the Rawlsian sense of “everyone should have the same chances, such that if they had the same ability they could achieve the same thing.” I don’t think I (or most “meritocratic” societies) believe that social equalizers should completely eradicate differences in outcome that arise from innate differences in ability—but perhaps those differences should be somewhat reduced.

Concretely: if the same person were born rich or poor, they should be able to achieve mostly the same things. But if the same person were born stupid (or lazy) or smart, it’s probably ok if there is some resultant difference in outcomes, as long as all outcomes support basic dignity and needs, right?

>A couple of years ago, former Obama and Bush officials estimated that only 1 percent of government spending is backed by any evidence at all. 1 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, evaluations of government-sponsored school and work programs have found that some three-quarters of those have no effect.

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/19/7628801/obama-evidence-based-p...

As a billionaire, you're much better off donating your money to highly effective charities than lobbying the government to tax other billionaires so it will use the money from that to build bombs.

Given the sums of money involved, no. You're better off lobbying for taxes AND evidence based policy.

That 1% seemed kinda off to me. The original article is kinda weird:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/can-gov...

One example they cite is healthcare being more then 50% spent in treatments that don’t work. But they don’t say it is Medicare and Medicaid treatments. Even if it is Medicare+Medicaid alone is 38% of the budget, so it sounds like at least 14% or so is effective rather than just 1%.

Sure, but the sad thing to me here is that no one even seems to care much about this. Note these articles are both from over 5 years ago. We aren't even capable of having that level of discussion nowadays.

Our federal government is projected to spend $5.8 trillion in 2021 alone. The entire Gates fortune is $124 billion.

And yet Gates probably does more for the world's poorest -- the federal government is overwhelmingly focused on serving Americans -- globally speaking, mostly wealthy white people: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

What good is being done with that $5.8 trillion exactly? Is the federal government with its military interventionism, agricultural subsidies, etc. really doing 1000x as much good annually as the Gates Foundation? (The annual budget of the Gates Foundation is around 0.1% as large, at around $5 billion.)

The failed F-35 stealth fighter project alone has a total cost estimated at $1.7 trillion. Note that this has received almost no coverage. Defense contractors milk the federal government like there's no tomorrow and it doesn't get any attention because mentioning it doesn't serve either party's political goals.

Suppose we hypothetically took the entire Gates fortune and added it to the federal budget, so the government spends $5.9 trillion this year instead of $5.8 trillion. Would you even notice? How would you expect the $5.9 trillion budget world to be different from a $5.8 trillion budget world? I'm pretty sure that people in developing countries will miss the work done by the Gates Foundation a heck of a lot more than already-wealthy Americans will appreciate another $0.1 trillion in the federal budget.

Using evidence to focus on the most effective possible programs for helping the world's poorest goes a long way, and unfortunately the vast majority of the federal government's spending is not that. Increasing taxes on rich people isn't gonna change that. Before plowing more money into ineffective federal spending, we should first make it effective.

"It's ok to waste trillions, the important thing is for us to feel really egalitarian about it"

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