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Comment by ggggtez | Hacker News Reader

> to make economists less greedy they should be paid less

How about we tax billionaires, and pay our academics real wages?

I was an academic once, and I made near minimum wage. It's insane to set up a reward structure that punishes thinking people and rewards the randomness of birth.

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I'm very much in favor of taxing inheritance at much higher levels, but I think there is a debate to be had whether the marginal dollar is best spent on social science research or academia writ large.

I've seen those arguments against free college (what if people get a useless degree in literature!). I think it's bogus.

I want to live in a society of thoughtful intelligent people. I pretty much don't care what you study. I don't care if it has immediate industrial impact like STEM. Higher education is tied to all sorts of benefits, including lower crime rate, better health outcomes...

I think if someone wants to attend college, and they've got the aptitude, then I want that person to do it. I don't want them prevented from learning because of cost.

Looking over the list of top billionaires, well under half appear to have been passive beneficiaries of birth randomness.

Is this supposed to be reassuring?

From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually the thing we want to reward in our tax code.

It’s not clear that the tax code is rewarding that in a significant way. You might argue it’s failing to punish it enough for your taste, which is a fine discussion to have.

When I look over the top 10 here, 9/10 are on that list from being overwhelmingly self-made and I want what 8 of those have created to exist. (I think lots of other people self-evidently want LVMH to exist, even though I don’t care either way. Same with L’Oreal though that’s also the one that’s not self-made.)

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

So when deciding on the policies of a nation of 350 million people, you look at the top 10?

That's a completely arbitrary cut off. Why not look at the top 1, and then tell me that I should extrapolate that out to say that every billionaire is bald and owns Amazon.com ?

Surely you see how choosing top 10 is a completely arbitrary cut off that you invented.

Ok. Pick a different N and do the analysis to see if it differs materially in a way that supports that birth lottery matters more than within-life activity.

This has a LOT to do with the fact that inherited wealth is distributed amongst a number of heirs and held in trusts that they aren't the full beneficiaries of.

The argument that the top few have self-generated wealth doesn't in any way impinge upon the larger trend of wealth being concentrated amongst a smaller cohort over time.

Of course inheritance is not meant as an incentive for people to choose to be born to someone rich; that is not something one can choose.

When asking whose behavior something incentivizes, the answer must always be among those who can influence it.

The possibility of inheritance is an incentive to have money when one dies, that it might be passed on to one's heirs, whose wealth one often values, by virtue of valuing their general well being (as money can be exchanged for goods and services).

It is not the not-yet-conceived who advocate against there being large inheritance taxes.

Aren't prosperity and wealth things we want to see? We shouldn't tax wealth at all, that is what we want, a wealthy society.

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