Neoliberalism has resulted in preference for greater income inequality | Hacker News Reader

Neoliberalism has resulted in preference for greater income inequality

nyu.edu

110 pointsgeox314 comments

The conclusion seems to be that citizens of economically free countries tend to value income increase as incentive for making a greater individual effort, which makes sense. The rest of the article seems to pass judgment on this view, and implies the alternative is preferable.

Very hard for me not to have this opinion now after working in a few different companies where half my coworkers seem to not be doing much more than jerking off all day and at best accomplishing a days worth of work in a week. How could anyone who has had this experience NOT want greater variation in pay that’s at least somewhat correlated to effort/performance?

This stands out more to me in an office environment but the dynamic existed even when I worked at McDonald’s. Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight.

Reminds me of the old Soviet saying, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us". But there seems to be a rise in popularity of the idea that meritocracy and competition is bad and everyone should be paid the same. Killing incentive seems like a bad economic policy to me that's already been tried.

It's not that meritocracy in abstract is bad, it's that it is a fiction which does not really exist, certainly not in our capital-skewed status quo.

Yeah, I find it weird that proponents of wealth inequality think that theyre defending meritocracy.

They're overtly or inadvertently defending "the magic of compounding" which is the ideology of the parasite - precise antithesis of meritocracy. 3rd generation trustafarians are not 1000x more productive than a burger flipper. Theyre less productive.

We'd probably have orders of magnitude less inequality with some kind of genuine meritocracy.

War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength and Income Inequality is Meritocracy.

The phrasing used by the poll in the article probably resulted in the vast majority of respondents think in terms of differences in pay and not in terms of investment income. I’m not a fan of wealth inequality, but some degree of income inequality is useful as an incentive. Concentration of wealth is only loosely correlated to that & evening out wages wouldn’t do much of anything to change it.

But meritocracy is different from income inequality. Some examples.

Society 1 has classes. The small owning class has all their income from their inherited investments. While the majority are peasants. If you are a peasant, no matter how hard you work, you won't get any more pay and thus cannot do investments.

Society 2 has no real classes. Taxes on inheritance are high. Education is free. Startups are supported by the governments. Rich people's offspring don't usually just live on investments. In families, generations and even siblings move up and down between rich and poor status all the time.

Society 1 and 2 might have the same income inequality by some metric. Yet 2 is much more meritocratic than 1.

The problem with society 2 is that people have very few incentives to start new companies, except if they can use the startup to reach into the pot of government subsidies for less effort than any other job. In other words, the people who start companies will be the nephews of the officials who control the pot of money.

This is what happened in the Soviet Union. The economy hollowed out under this set of "fair" rules because human nature was left out of the equation. Corruption wasn't allowed, but it happened on a massive scale because it was effective. The more "fair" system resulted in greater income inequality than the unfair capitalist countries!

Forget income inequality. The metric we should be tracking is median income (in real terms). Wealth of the normal household is what we want to optimize, so optimize for it. Horribly unequal capitalism has been great for the average person. "Fair" systems, not so much.

"Meritocracy" is a bad word for what people who like capitalism actually want.

Uh, going from 2 to Soviet Union is quite the leap. The way 2 is described, it is more like your average West European country today, depending on what GP believes is "high" inheritance tax.

2 would work just fine for many years, especially if inheritance tax was progressive. Don't underestimate the good will of some people, and the need to excel above others for some other people. As long as the incentives aren't flat-out dead and the people in charge aren't corrupt to the bone.

2 is described based on the government funding startups quite heavily and having heavy inheritance taxes and "no real classes," where rich kids "don't usually just live on investments." This is not how your average Western European economy functions. Yes, they have free education and healthcare, but startups are still very risky and unsubsidized, and rich kids do get to inherit a lot of wealth. Risk and income inequality (in other words, the important factors for wealth creation as in society 1) are very much alive and well in Western Europe.

Commenter in question has yet to articulate their points. You're already pushing "government funding startups quite heavily", which original comment never specified, and "heavy" is still too vague to quantify. Even so, this doesn't answer why 2 wouldn't work. Unlike communism, there are clear incentives for individuals to provide merit and do better other than "hoping to see your hard work trickle back". Unlike modern day capitalism, your future isn't largely decided by your (lack of) inheritance. The only thing that holds is corruption, but really, you'd have an easier time listing things that don't get worse for the commoner when corrupted.

Nevertheless, the point isn't "this is Western Europe". The point is, you were already going off the deep end with a Soviet Union comparison, while 2 the way it is described is still a far cry from it. We don't need to choose between the extremes of capitalism and communism when there's something in the middle that can work out better, and we have yet to explore it. It's pretty evident unbridled capitalism isn't helping in several aspects either, even if it is holding together longer than Animal Farm.

Risk and income inequality still apply to society 2 as important factors.

Sorry, but you picked out the "government funded startups" line. How about the "no real classes" and "don't usually just live on investments"?

Also, it is not true that inheritance defines your wealth in modern capitalism. Most billionaires and almost all millionaires are self made in the US (ie they don't come from billionaire or millionaire parents).

In Soviet Union, the "startups are supported by the governments" was not true. Neither was the "no real classes" part because Nomenklatura existed. The real reason why people had "very few incentives to start new companies" in the Soviet Union was because they were deprived of the benefits of doing so, not because Soviet Union was a "type 2 society" as described above.

I tend to be mostly supportive of meritocracy as a driver, but with a pretty wide carve-out. When you declare something to be a meritocracy, you also have to answer one fundamental question: who gets to define merit?

Taken to its (il)logical extreme, unchecked meritocracy is a route to a mix of mercenary rule and nepotism.

I'm not sure this is true, at least I haven't come across more than a handful of people advocating for pay equality. My experience has been that people increasingly believe the systems we have now are not meritocratic or very competitive and have grown more disillusioned with them as a result (very anecdotal obviously as it's based on sources I read/people I know/etc.)

It’s called “equity” in newspeak. We’ve gone from “equal opportunity” to “equal outcomes”. This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years. Interesting that it’s also self serving.

>This is the great contribution elite humanities departments have made over the last 25 years.

In the US? Hasn't there been a serious growth in wealth inequality there over the past 25 years?

No one thinks meritocracy is bad. Many think the modern meritocracy is a pretense used to justify rewarding people not for their efforts or contributions but because of their inherent “worthiness” as a member of the wealthy class.

Well, i think meritocracy is bad. The job should go to the most suited and not to someone who has earned it cause of past efforts. People hope those two are the same, but in practice they might not. Meritocracy favors career-bureaucrats, who make up whatever metric that defines the merit.

This kind of sounds to me like we're defining merit as some kind of points system where you get merit just by expending effort. Like if I work really hard at digging a hole in the dirt somewhere, I can then use my amassed merit points to get a promotion. I think most people would count being suited for a job as having high merit.

Your post reminds me of a reddit comment by a Russian who said they would welcome Communism back so they can be like children again.

I don't know. I also feel that I work more than let's say half my colleagues at whichever company. Mostly because I really really really enjoy what I'm doing. That being said, I'm not really sure how their salary impacts my life. I negociate to what I want for what I do and that's that.

Your ability to negotiate a salary at all is a function of a diversity of salaries though. Limiting that in favor of more equal pay across the board means you’re more likely to be stuck getting paid what others are getting paid regardless of your personal efforts.

Equal pay for a particular role seems very in line with the market efficiency theme. For better pay, you need a better job where the effort required is actually higher.

Only if the roles are specified with essentially infinite precision. Would you expect "sales representative who makes between $199k-200k in sales" and "sales representative who makes between $205-206k in sales" to be separate roles at a company?

How much harder than you did the CEO work for how much more pay than you got at any of these companies?

CEOs are not paid for working hard, they are paid for BEING RIGHT, aka making the right strategic decisions. Bad CEO can bankrupt the company, good CEO can grow it's revenue ten times. You pay CEOs for their experience and expertise in running companies, not for the number of hours worked.

CEOs are wrong all the time, they are also paid so much for being fired there’s a term for it: “golden parachute”

Yeah the OP comment doesn’t make sense to me. Right or wrong a CEO will probably make more than you regardless.

If you paid the CEO of McDonald's the same amount as a burger flipper, you are going to get someone who is wrong much more frequently. When we see that CEOs get things wrong, that seems to be more of an artifact of the future being hard to predict than any individual being stupid.

Ask a CEO to flip burgers and you'll find they'll make a lot of mistakes too.

CEOs have specific education and/or experience to help them make better decisions. They suck just as much as anyone else at unknowns.

I'll bite: The CEO would do just fine at flipping burgers if that were their job. Honestly, after only a few weeks of training, the CEO will probably do better at flipping burgers than the average employee. Everyone sucks at a job when they start out and it's a strawman to say that if you took the CEO to flip burgers for a day, they would suck at it compared to someone who has been flipping burgers for years.

It's no more of a strawman than saying that CEOs would be wrong more often if they were paid the same as a burger flipper.

> the CEO will probably do better at flipping burgers than the average employee

this is the same old magical thinking "CEO's are special people" bullshit

IQ helps predict job performance even among unskilled labor. CEO's tend to have high IQ, so you'd expect them to perform better than average people in unskilled labor as well once they have gotten comfortable with the role. (Statistical expect, that is the statistically expected performance of CEO's at the role vs the statistically expected performance of typical current employee, would still be lots of overlap)

The following study shows this connection for low skilled job. It also shows that the connection has to do with IQ correlating with better understanding of the role, so wont show until after the worker has learned it, but the connection is still there so you'd expect the CEO to learn the role better than an average employee.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/

That article concludes that it's very risky to use IQ tests to measure just about anything because there are heaps of weak data around them

> As others have pointed out, statistical corrections are no magical compensation for weak data and that it is risky to reach conclusions about test validities from those currently available (Oswald & McCloy, 2003; Russell & Gilliland, 1995). The only solution is properly conducted primary studies, with larger representative samples, better measures, and so on.

Here's the important bit that basically advises not using IQ tests in the exact way that you're using them:

> Until they are available, investigators should be extremely cautious about disseminating conclusions about IQ test validities, from correlations between IQ and job performance.

CEO is a job title, not a measure of intelligence, or even job performance. There are no shortage of shitty CEOs, just as there are no shortage of shitty performers in just about every possible job.

That's an idealistic, maybe even naive point of view. There are plenty of CEOs who generally make bad decisions and take increasingly more money while their companies lose money, their best workers, their most innovative projects and so on. Hierarchical power structures are always prone to corruption and value extraction from the bottom to the top.

In fact the above is so prevalent that I'm specifically admiring leaders who are exceptions, actually take responsibility and care more about their workers, clients and the many other people they impact as opposed to their individual gains via compensation and social currency at the top (board, shareholders etc.)

Also CEOs generally work hard regardless of the quality of their work. But they generally have a ton of responsibilities and people to talk to. In terms of time invested per day, it is not uncommon for them to do several hours more work than say an engineer.

(It's not the same _kind_ of hard though, I personally find social activities, reading and communication much less exhausting than technical work, but it's also less fun.)

Also likely that your average CEO is not spending time washing dishes, doing the laundry or grocery shopping. There is more capacity for "work" when the only work you do is your day job.

Working hard is not inherently valuable. You have to do something with your labor that other people value, which may require hard work. It might also require working smarter, creativity, taking advantage of a rare opportunity, making the right connections, etc. Of course luck is involved. Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?

>> Do you think we should penalize people being lucky?

If this means that this will increase morale of others, then why not?

For me mere existence of luck factor means that the system is not build for the people but for the benefit of the owners of the system. Its a bit like with the casino - in the end house always wins because the system is build with them in mind and not the players.

The existence of the luck factor is life. The house is the universe. Who you're born to, where you're raised, who you meet, what sort of advantages and disadvantages your particular biology affords you in whatever environment, what sort of ideas you might randomly come across, etc. There's no gaming that and there's no system that can make it all equal out. Someone buys a lottery ticket and they win, we don't take all their winnings and redistribute it because there would be no reason to play the lottery. Or gamble. Or create a startup. That we even exist as a species instead of some non-avian dinosaur descendant is the luck of a mass extinction event.

Sure, luck inherent to the nature and reality. We cannot get rid of it and cerate totally deterministic system. But that does not mean that we cannot minimalize it and that somehow it has inherently good value. I could argue that almost all our civilization exists because we eliminated randomness from our primal lifes.

Were it pure luck. Unfortunately, capital and connections are heritable.

Obviously, but your examples are too obvious.

Should a subpopulation of entrepreneurs be able to coast by on brand recognition and first mover advantage after an initial burst of effort?

Should manual laborers be paid jack for doing a job which puts them at high risk of being stuck socioeconomically, despite putting in loads of effort?

People want harder work to be more rewarded, but the saying is "work smarter, not harder" for a reason.

In a simple poll like this though more complex topics won’t be on peoples minds, that’s a flaw in how this was conducted.

I don't think that is a flaw when the majority of people don't even have the knowledge to think further on these topics, and people tend to act rather simplistically most of their lives anyway. In your own example, think about what would happen if all these dead weights suddenly became more competitive. I don't think the working class fully realizes what will happen when we boost it some more, despite recent events in the 20th century inflating the working class at the benefit of entrepreneurs and the detriment of (already participating?) workers.

Like ideally, if I was in such a situation, I'd want my coworkers to work more so I could slack. In reality, I don't think them working harder would benefit me in the long term, due to numerous other factors (myself, the boss, wealth pipelines, etc.)

If compensation was all about hard work then coal miners would be billionaires. The arguments about income inequality largely come down to the fact that there is very little correlation between hard work and compensation. Instead the large difference in income are correlated with factors generally considered beyond people's control. I would have a hard time becoming a real estate tycoon because I don't have a father who can grant me a small loan of a million dollars, for instance.

These conversations are rarely productive because no attempt to find common ground is made. For example you just assume that a coal miner is hard work. I assume a coal miner is easy work. You seem to think things like physical exertion, working conditions, or danger define what is “hard work” while I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work. The average coal worker has almost no chance of failure. They are told where to go, told what to do, told how to do it. They do it and then get paid. Easy work. Writing a successful novel is hard work. The author just sits in an air conditioned room in front of a computer for 6 months clicking keys on a keyboard. So why is that hard work? Because they are most likely going to fail to complete the novel, or even having completed it, are likely to fail at gaining a significant audience. Most people who try fail, hence hard work.

Neither of us is right or wrong, we just have different world views. Finding common ground between our world views is a critical first step to having any productive conversation.

Miners have a pretty high chance death while on the job - according to https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/osh/os/osar0012.htm, the US death rate in 2007 (because that's the first figure I found) was 24.8 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared to 4.3 in all private industry. Sounds like a much higher "chance of failure" than most other jobs.

That's not hard work. That's dangerous work. They are completely different things. They didn't fail at attempting to accomplish their goal. They met an unlikely, but well understood risk, of death on the job.

"The average coal worker has almost no chance of failure."

Surely death at their job is failure, and historic chances of coalminer dying on the job used to be extremely high?

'I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work."

I define 3 to equal to 4

If you want to say 'free market reqards risk', thats fine, but don't redefine english language to suit your needs

If you are replaceable, and more coal minera can be hired in 5 minutes, it does not matter how hard you work and how much you risk.

The tip 3 predictors of success are family wealth, what school did you go to and the social connections. None of those are hard work or risk.

> You seem to think things like physical exertion, working conditions, or danger define what is “hard work” while I define the chance of failure to define what is hard work.

So gambling is hard work then? You'll forgive me if I find your definition lacking.

Regardless, even under your definition everyone born into wealth has much lower chance and consequence of failure than other people because of their inherited access to greater resources.

It's about valuable work, not hard work. Valuable as in what other people are willing to pay for your labor, whether it's physically demanding or not.

I get you. I've had that opinion as well. But anymore, I realize that's not my problem. What I want is my share. When a company says, "Best year ever!" and my share is a 2% raise, fuck that.

That is literally what socialism means: you get a stake in the place where you work.

That isn’t quite accurate and it’s dangerous to twist definitions like that.

so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/

noun

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

I'd argue that the dynamic you're talking about is a part of a free market though. Like you could use your McDonald's example to make the opposite point that you're using it for. You could say "A lack of pay, recognition of effort, and career growth opportunity at McDonald's means that workers are unmotivated and do not give 100%. More ambitious workers who want to give more effort and be recognized for said effort move on to higher paying opportunities elsewhere".

If this were the case I would expect more people to give a shit in higher paying office environments but I’ve actually seen the exact opposite of that. Having more opportunities available allows people to have even less potential consequence for not actually trying.

Very nice sentiment, but unfortunately that's not how reality works. Do you honestly look at the world and see that incomes are correlated to merit/effort/performance/work?

> Nobody wants to have to carry dead weight.

But there's a lot of "dead weight" to carry. And it has a voice and a vote.

It makes sense... in an idealized version of neoliberalism, but the reality is that people are kept poor and indentured despite the "individual effort" they put in. There's eugenics happening, from people unable to pay for health care because one, health care is too expensive, two, wages are too low, and three, there is not enough assistance for people to be able to pay for health care. This has led to loss of life and limb, where people had to, for example, ration their insulin, or they couldn't afford to keep a fridge running to store said insulin. It is literally killing people for being sick and not rich enough.

This is the system working as designed. This profound unfairness exists and propagates, and those who benefit most from it have a mental framework to justify it to themselves as "fair".

What I meant is, it makes sense that people in free market economies would value free markets.

Of course effort isn’t always positively correlated with income.

The question is whether or not the prosperity resulting from innovation and risk-taking in such a system is worth the trade-off of unevenly distributed wealth. I think a good argument could be made in the affirmative, but it’s not exactly a settled economic question.

I think it's not clearly spelled out in the summary, but it strongly implies that it has created a disconnect between preferences and outcomes. People's preference for increased inequality leads to increased inequality which is taken prima facie as a bad thing.

That may be, but the other side of this is that global poverty has never been lower [1]. I think both absolute and relative poverty are important to consider, but generally the direction the world is going with respect to poverty is good. The example questions they ask reflect a pretty superficial and biased view in my opinion:

“We need larger income differences as incentives for individual effort” and “Incomes should be made more equal."

Versus perhaps the neoliberal framing (also biased) of "we should incentive people to take risks" and "fewer people living in poverty is more important than income distribution".

1. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

> I think both absolute and relative poverty are important to consider

I would be interested to learn your (or others) thoughts on why relative poverty is important. I've thought frequently, but probably superficially, about this quite a bit over the years. Many people who are considered impoverished in the U.S. are: obese (AKA not hungry), housed, and have a smart phone and cable TV. It is very hard to wrap my mind around their "hardship" when we have real world examples of people in other places who lack all of these things. My mind, likely due to my own biases, tends to conclude that it is a function of a country that has become too wealthy and thus abstracted away from the resources and efforts that created and sustain that wealth–natural resources, rule of law and due process, hard work, training and experience, risk taking, innovation and creativity, etc etc.

Is relative poverty important simply as a system feature that elevates political risk? Or is there something more tangible in terms of human need that I miss?

That's really applying stereotypes to a huge swathe of people and I think you should seriously review your biases and stereotypes.

You are saying a lot of people are obese and not hungry; what about the ones that can only manage to afford shit like dry pasta?

Housed, what about the over half a million homeless? What about the ones that aren't technically homeless but live couch to couch, in a van, or with family even though they have a family of their own? And what about the ones that can hardly make rent every month, let alone never have a chance at home ownership?

The smartphone thing is moot; they can be cheap, and they cost a fraction of, say, a month of rent. The "you have a smartphone so you can't be poor" line is just dumb.

There's a lot of whataboutism as well, i.e. "what about these other people who have it worse"; it's not like it's one or the other. There's wealth inequality, and there's poverty in many forms - poverty that seems intentional and avoidable.

The solution? It's not easy, but raise the minimum wage, tackle the housing crisis; fix the health care system and make it affordable for everyone; tax the rich and do a Robin Hood, or at least fix the infrastructure, reduce the decades long exorbitant spending on the army in favor of health care, public health and education.

And I think all of these can be made to work together with this neoliberalism thing. It just requires some people to give up some of their privileges.

My greater point is about the definition of poverty and perceptions therof. In the past, poverty was defined as lack of access to the basic necessities of life: food, water, and shelter. That definition has expanded in scope quite dramatically. You say there are 500k in the U.S. that are unsheltered, and I would agree that, yes, those people most certainly fit the classic definition of poverty. But the U.S., according the U.S. Census Bureau, has 38 million people living under the poverty line.

> can only manage to afford shit like dry pasta

Go tell someone who is starving to death in Yemen or South Sudan how having access to dry pasta is the equivalent of real poverty. I'm sure they would correct you had they the energy.

> The smartphone thing is moot;

You only underscore my point. You take having a smartphone (a product of the Neoliberal system) so for granted that you believe it is "dumb" to point it out. A smartphone would have appeared as God's Real Magic 100 years ago. It is one of the most powerful tools ever built by mankind.

> There's a lot of whataboutism as well,

You literally "what about" multiple times in your own reply.

Raising the minimum wage will result in fewer people getting jobs. This is accepted as fact by economists.

As for your other prescriptions, they amount to, "Just do it." In other words, they are equally naive or uninformed. These are intractable problems in ultra complex systems that do not have easy or obvious solutions. For example, you write, "fix the health care system and make it affordable for everyone". Please do explain how to do this. But in your reply, please make sure to show your work. For instance, what are the trade-offs to a single payer healthcare system? Talk to any Briton over a pint and they will enumerate a long list of cons to their healthcare system, some of them very serious. When it comes to ultra complex systems, when one pulls one lever, a thousand others move, often in unexpected ways.

Yes, I think both are important.

On fixing absolute poverty - it means children and adults don't starve to death or die of treatable diseases. Hopefully it's self evident why it's important to solve.

On relative poverty - it means equal opportunity. The gap in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest is like 10 years. The lowest quartile has the least income mobility, and still struggles to have more access to quality food, health care, education. And that lack of mobility concentrates wealth and reduces generating wealth which leaves society as a whole poorer.

Are global averages meaningful to look at, though? You could have millions lifted out of poverty in countries that are becoming more developed, counterbalancing changes elsewhere, without neoliberal policies being correlated.

In Brazil, extreme poverty was reduced by 75% during a decade of a left-wing, welfare focused government, and then promptly went up again as soon as neoliberal (not exactly, but close enough for the purpose of this argument) politicians came back to power. And the averages didn’t improve either - quality of life has deteriorated for everyone else too.

75% of global poverty reduction has been due to China lifting over 800 million people. The real number is even higher if you account for Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Then there are also many nations that don't classify themselves explicitly as government-planned economies where the public sector plays a huge role in providing a wide breadth of basic services to the people, rather than the private markets doing so.

So virtually all of the poverty alleviation has happened when governments have prioritized access to basics (housing, education, healthcare, public transport, pensions, wage regulations, utilities like power/water/sewerage, etc) to the common people rather than leave it up to "market forces".

Institutions that represent the interests of people using state budgets for inclusive policy have a much bigger role in poverty alleviation, by creating an environment of fair opportunity for the poor, than explicit deregulation/privatization.

Source: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

>75% of global poverty reduction has been due to China lifting over 800 million people. The real number is even higher if you account for Vietnam, Laos and Cuba. Then there are also many nations that don't classify themselves explicitly as government-planned economies where the public sector plays a huge role in providing a wide breadth of basic services to the people, rather than the private markets doing so.

You can also make the opposite argument by pointing out China's growth only really got started with Deng's market liberalization reforms, which did the opposite of what you described.

The government guaranteed access to the basics to the masses. It made money via the market liberalization policies. I was talking about how governments using their budgets for inclusive policies can have a much more impactful role in poverty reduction.

In other nations where the governments don't take these proactive role, people are at the mercy of market forces for everything, including basics needed for survival.

Topic on how governments can make money via global trade is a different thread of discussion. This one pertains on how the public sector can/should use their power to empower the underprivileged.

Where did China get the money to do all of that? They're the poster child of benefiting from globalization and free-trade.

Money came from global trade. That trade could be possible there because the pre-Deng governments prepared a very skilled workforce. In order to have usable skills, one needs to be fed, clothed, educated, in relatively good health, housed and should be able to get to their workplace.

Governments investing on critical infrastructure, and basic services that give a foundation of opportunity is a precondition to growth led by industrialization/trade.

This thread is about how the governments can use their money and power to uplift the underprivileged, and not about mechanisms for the government to make money. It is a conversation on leaving the poor to "market forces" vs. governments ensuring basics to the impoverished.

> Institutions can promote well-being and solidarity, or they can encourage competition, individualism, and hierarchy.

Why is this presented as an either / or?

How do you reconcile solidarity, aka consensus with individuality?

By accepting a compromise between the two, which seems like the only sane way to do it to me. Otherwise if you go too far in terms of solidarity you end up with totalitarianism (everything is the state & the state is everything)

The compromise you speak of is simply neither, which is not reconciliation

It’s sort of a false binary where neither can actually exist, they’re just ideological terms. If you wanted to think about it in a simplified and overly broad way you could model it as a range of 0 to 1 where the actual reality can only ever be a decimal.

Individuals can very well voluntarily donate to charities without having government goons force to give half of their profits

This would work great if we were a species of ants

You mean "spend some time helping others, without being coerced", right?

Are you asking how to make sure that the society is accommodating to those who are not willing to be accomodating to others?

You don't. If the group is too strict, you find another one. Having no borders would sure help.

But yeah, global issues need a global consensus. Can't let someone kill the planet for all of us.

Pretty easily in fact, with old liberal non-aggression principle.

Non-interference unless what an individual is doing obstructs good of others. Includes the expenses if they are high enough. This cannot be defined individually.

The non aggression principle cannot work without a shared definition of aggression.

And, 9/10 times between mutually aggrieved parties there is no shared definition of aggression.

So, no, it's not that easy.

This is actually where a shitload of disagreement and misunderstanding comes from. Due to peoples different perspectives, people have varying definitions of various terms. This makes discussing heated topics like politics super difficult because the people with different perspectives fundamentally generally don't understand the definitions used by the other and assumptions are made leading to disagreement

This is also why defining terms is so important in a conversation. "Robber baron" and "job creator" refer to roughly the same set of people, but have wildly different connotations. Whoever sets the definitions gets to set the framing of the entire conversation that follows. Sometimes, this means that even using the name of a group lean a conversation one way or another. (e.g. The term "Objectivism", Ayn Rand's name for her own philosophy, is accepting that there is something objective about it.)

To paraphrase Fred Brooks: "Show me your arguments and conceal your definitions, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your definitions, and I usually won't need your arguments; they'll be obvious." (s/flowcharts/arguments/ and s/tables/definitions/ from the original.)

That's a great quote from Fred Brooks, thank you for sharing! Do you happen to know where its from?

According to wikiquote[0], it is from The Mythical Man-Month. Also, just to be clear, this is a paraphrasing of the original with the substitutions as mentioned in the original comment. The initial context was of software data structures and software algorithms, emphasizing that the data structures are by far the more important.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks

That's a feature. Human words are supposed to be flexible. Re-defining and re-shaping them is a key way that we evolve as a society.

Insisting that everyone in the room uses the same definitions for all words, and trying to force some mono-mind of language, rather than actually working to solve problems is counterproductive. It can be productive to discuss and understand how terms are being used differently by different parties, and it is absolutely necessary for everyone in the room to understand that words are different for different people, but then you have to actually start working on the shared problems.

It's incredibly frustrating when people waste everyone's time trying to come up with a completely new shared "compromise vocabulary" that no one is happy with and will get discarded the moment people leave the room.

The problem could be solved by simply discussing definitions at the start of a debate, there's no need to come up with new vocabulary.

Human words should change over time, as that helps communication. However, human words varying across participants of the same conversation drastically harms understanding.

As a non-political example, the first time I heard the term "server-side rendering", I thought it was one of the soonest ideas I had ever heard. With the latency between client and server, needing to go back to the server for every screen draw would make for an incredibly laggy interface. I hadn't known that JavaScript developers use "rendering" to refer to making HTML, whereas I associate it only with making an image to be displayed. Because there was no shared definition, communication was harmed.

Non-aggression is when people who completely disagree don't attack each other.

Solidarity is when people who substantially agree on something act in concert.

I can't see how one can substitute the other.

I think there are too many people that cannot do this reconciliation.

This reconciliation is embodied in phrases like, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Solidarity is not conformity. You can be different. There is likely no person on this planet with which you truly have no shared interest, no shared objective, no shared sympathy. Even if you find you identify strongly with your difference with another, the ability to see more fundamental shared interests, objectives and sympathies are the underpinning of things like secularism, freedom of speech, and liberalism in general.

I don't think what you're describing here is individualism though.

On the other hand, going a little further with that phrase: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - while it's a benign ideal, looking at applications of that philosophy in practice you often seen it being applied in an inconsistent manner, whereby someone's "right" to say someone infringes on the autonomy of others (essentially a case of competing rights). It's only in cases like that where individualism comes into play.

Through: liberte egalite fraternite

People have been doing it since "at least" the French Revolution, I am sure that you could chuck some Pericles speeches in there too

It reads to me that the true intent is more in restriction competition and individualism more than it is promoting well-being and solidarity. I’m no fan of what they’re criticizing but you do have to consider what the alternative would be and who would be implementing it, and given the current political power structure that doesn’t seem like an attractive option either.

Because they are mutually exclusive. Competition, individualism and hierarchy will make sure that the ruthless will end up on top of the hierarchy, caring only about their individual needs, squashing attempts at solidarity and squandering opportunities to have any kind of well-being for others.

This sounds as if all actors are completely independent, and there is no long-term strategy in their actions.

Henry Ford famously cared for his workers to be well-paid, so that they could afford the cars his company produced.

And there are infinitely more people in similar positions who are completely the opposite.

The fact you have to go back in time as far as Henry Ford proves the point, frankly. It's an exception, not the standard.

You don't have to go that far back. You're assuming something that's not true.

That's a myth. Ford increased wages only to stop the high levels of staff turnover, which was affecting productivity and quality.

That's a market mechanism working well. No need for regulations or benevolent leaders to stay in post. A situation where naturally everyone wins is the best sort of situation.

it doesn't work too well for the employees if there aren't alternative jobs or a social security system for them to go to. They're then at the mercy of the employers.

at least without unions. Henry Ford's anti-union tactics were extreme and quite violent.

This is a narrow, binary view of the world. People are not born employees or employers. Anyone can start a business and also become an employer. Almost anyone can see that their skills are in demand or not and move to new industries. Anyway can become a consultant.

I'm not saying this is perfect, but assuming people are at an employer's mercy is not a great place to start. I don't think people should blame themselves if an industry collapses. Of course people fall on hard times. But I also don't like how little agency we tell people that they have, and we don't teach people the skills and attitude to stay ahead of things rather than just wanting to clock in and clock out and not have to worry.

I suppose that anyone can get that 1 million dollar loan too, for start capital? Heck, make that $100k + student loan + a home.

What you said sounds like a fanfiction. Most people really are at the mercy of their paycheck, even the top of the middle class.

I'm not saying people don't live paycheck to paycheck. I'm saying they shouldn't assume their current employer is their only plan, and should be working to ensure that they are not. That has the nice side effect of what could have been activism effort going into creating value for other people.

I mostly agree with your points, but it takes certain personality traits to be able/willing to take chances with your career when the bottom rung is "eat at soup kitchens and sleep in your car". After all, society doesn't exactly make it easy to live without debts or financial commitments. Few of us are still homesteading.

I'm not convinced the alternatives are net better for the overall wealth of society. But the fact that anyone can sell their services to the market is also something that's hard to view in isolation.

> assuming people are at an employer's mercy is not a great place to start

I don't assume that. It's just a matter of who has the most power under what circumstances. Employees usually only have any power at all if there are alternative jobs they can take.

So when there is lots of unemployment, people are at an employer's mercy.

Neoliberalism has this covered though and maintains a certain degree of unemployment through monetary policy. Look up "Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" (NAIRU).

Sorry but you sound like you were beamed down from the mothership yesterday and you got this info from an introductory pamphlet on planet earth :)

The issue isn't that people don't have agency, it's that when they use their agency to enact any actual meaningful changes they get beaten down mercilessly by people which much more wealth and power.

And that's exactly what was happening to workers in Henry Fords era, and it's what lead to an explosion of labour activism which was responded to with murderous brutality that is too well documented to recount in full detail here.

And the question here isn't whether people use their agency or not, or whose side you take or whatever, it's just whether educated onlookers can even talk honestly about it without going off in to flights of abstraction and fantasy.

Edit: added a smiley to clarify I am not trying to be mean, just communicate some level of incredulity about popular conceptions of labour history of the late 19th / early 20th century...

I'm not talking about activism; I'm talking about meaningful changes individuals can make in their own lives to always have a plan b/c/d and not assume their employer rules the roost and should be relied upon to provide.

Henry Ford was a Nazi not the greatest example

And yet there is not another Henry over 100 years in the waiting

This isn’t true unfortunately. I recommend reading a biography of the man because he was, amongst other things, an old school Fascist and this ideological belief helped him succeed.

This can’t be true imo because neither absolute could actually ever exist. There’s always elements of all of these things at play in various aspects of society. Despite being grouped & framed as polar opposites they can’t be mutually exclusive if they’re always intertwined with one another.

As long as 2/3 of all individual actors are honest, consensus can always be reached.

Capitalism acts as a consensus mechanism that solves for efficiency and productivity. To your point, though your take is cynical, it's meaningful to consider the adversarial condition.

In my opinion, what we need is to figure out a mechanism that solves for distribution, which as a byproduct also will solve for well-being (key point: and will be robust even under adversarial conditions).

The problem is that it is based on economic efficiency and productivity, which both escapes from material means and strives to maximally exploit people, potentially ending in one or another kind of a trap - a global minimum of human life quality for most of the people, as there's no profit to be had in getting it higher; or conservatively limiting research that would be threatening to capital owners. (Death of start-ups, ownership of science.)

I think realistically having a high “global minimum” is all we can really achieve that’s sustainable in the long term.

I’ve thought about it quite a bit, and though there’s a certain sense of satisfaction in wanting to bring down the elite / establishment, it doesn’t actually solve anything from the perspective of helping the average person.

They are just as mutually exclusive as saving money and staying alive: You can't save 100% of your money as you need to spend some on shelter and food among other things.

The obvious notion here being that there has to - and CAN be - a balance of the two.

Agree, it’s a common trick to subtly insert some false dichotomy where the real possibility space is continuous.

Competition is like eating. It’s an important part of everything that life touches. Whether or not it’s healthy is entirely contextual. A study which puts competition into the category “bad” is starting off with a highly questionable assumption. Same for individualism. I’m not a fan of hierarchy, and tend to see it as more bad than good, but even hierarchy isn’t one or the other. It’s contextual.

The assumption that "competition [...] is an important part of everything that life touches" seems at least as questionable.

Indeed and was questioned by Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution. He would go as far as theorizing a whole kind of organization around this.

Further he was famous while he was still alive amongst scientists for his writings on this topic. It wasn’t until later that he became an icon of the Mutualist / Anarchist movements.

Competitive evolution is seen everywhere, from plants evolving poison to deter animals from eating it to foxes evolving to hunt rabbits and rabbits evolving to avoid foxes. Cooperative evolution is definitely a thing, but you can't say that competition isn't a massive part of evolution.

It was roundly disproven by many schools of naturalism in the 19th century. The notion that competition is somehow inherent to life is convenient to justify zero sum games but not observable, especially within a single species. Peter Kropotkin was famous during his life as a scientist because of how rigorously he demonstrated this.

Capitalism isn't a zero sum game, and competition along with cooperation has existed throughout human history. Even with eusocial insects like ants, there is still competition with other colonies. Lions and hyenas are cooperative in their prides/packs, but they certainly compete for food and territory with each other.

>>Capitalism isn't a zero sum game

Maybe at this moment not, but I suspect that it has tendency to become one (when the tempo of inequality increase surpass increase of total wealth)

You confuse capitalism with trading. Capitalism tends to monopoly and no amount of regulation can fix it, because politicians can be bought or coerced given enough cash.

Sounds like your soul is already profoundly shaped by neoliberalism - Thatcher would be proud...

Why do you think ruthless end up on top? I do not see that follows.

Consider rulers in most countries of the world. Democracy and rule of law is the exception, not the 'normal' state of things as it might appear living in the West.

First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team. I don't believe the strongest players on whatever football team you follow are squashing or squandering anything. You can't get to good graduates schools, even in garbage dump of politics the social sciences have become, without being more clever, interesting, and intelligent than your peers. It's laughable that people who make it to the more prestigious institutions, because of slavishly hard work for most of their lives, then turn around and say that merit based systems are inherently flawed. Should the Columbia just accept students at random? Even if they did, it wouldn't matter. The irony, in a world that isn't competitive, no one would pay more attention to their paper than a paper from Crappy Backwater University on why peanut consumption makes people more sedentary.

Their result isn't surprising. When you value and reward competition - you get more inequality. However, societies that don't favor competition often have completely rigged and sham economies. I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity.

What I think is right to criticize, is how do we deal with the impact of inequality. It's fine to have inequality as long as certain needs are met. Access to medical care, housing, food security, and education are all things that should be available to everyone. It's okay to have inequality and competition as long as we mitigate the emotional and physical impact of inequality. But the thing that will allow us to pay for that is a highly competitive and effective economy.

>> First off, you can have competition and cooperation. Take a look at any sports team. It's a highly competitive environment that's also highly cooperative. You can't win unless you play as a team.

Sport is probably the worst possible analogy for any fair economic system. It promotes cooperation between people only as far as crushing your opponents team go. How exactly exactly promotes cooperation between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid within it's rules ? Who would want to live in a world where there is place only for one winner?

>> I'm racking my brain to think of one economy outside the US, UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc, that isn't based on competition that isn't a morass of local bribes to the dictator's cousin's uncle or whatever. In China, for example, "common prosperity" is the cudgel wielded against any perceived alternate power center. It has little to do with actual prosperity.

I believe that corruption and bribes are orthogonal to economic systems. Capitalism is full of corruption and especially corporations are full of kick back schemes (I have seen few personally that would make comrade Brezhnev blush). My personal standing is that corruption comes from people who have to much decision power and too greedy to play by the rules. Only proper build in control systems can restrict that.

>> Sport is probably the worst possible analogy for any fair economic system. It promotes cooperation between people only as far as crushing your opponents team go. How exactly exactly promotes cooperation between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid within it's rules ? Who would want to live in a world where there is place only for one winner?

Remember when Zidane head-butted the Italian player and France lost the World Cup because Italy got a penalty shot? Because the referee called the foul. Because both teams agree to cooperate and respect the decision of the referee during play. If you didn't cooperate, no sporting even would be fun to watch. Soccer (football) would be about as much fun to watch as a brawl - which is what it would turn into. But both teams agree to guidelines on what makes a good football (soccer) game.

Imagine a world without competition and you'll see a world that's dead inside. You'll see a world that drives Trabants and you have a 5 year waiting list for something like a Commodore 64. It's because Sony and Microsoft are competing for your gaming attention/dollars, or Intel and AMD are competing for your desktop, that I can have a nice graphical display on a computer that, inflation adjusted, cost me 1/5 the price I paid for my first computer in the 1980s.

>> But both teams agree to guidelines on what makes a good football (soccer) game

This seems like a very useless definition of cooperation from the perspective of the discussion that we are having. Sure, following same rules is some form of high level cooperation but You could equally easy switch sport to something more extreme - war would be good example I suppose - and try to convince me that if both sides are abiding by Geneva Convention while killing each other then this is an equally good analogy.

>> Imagine a world without competition and you'll see a world that's dead inside.

I have to bring one of my favorite quotes into discussion, sorry You forced my hand :) :

"That's just like your opinion man".

I understand where you are getting this sentiment (my family used to have Trabant and I remember "good" old socialistic people republic times from my childhood) but I do not believe for a second that this is either or situation. I think that there is place for better, more sophisticated economic systems, that combines rules from current systems. The problem is that ideology is standing it their way.

> laughable that people who make it to the more prestigious institutions, because of slavishly hard work for most of their lives,

Or because of legacy preferences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

Or because their parents paid off the right people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_briber...

> First off, you can have competition and cooperation.

Given existence of an impartial referee, fair conditions and no metagame.

Capitalism is not just competition, it is literally a fight for one's life. An unfair one, given corruption and marketing metagames.

Even your sports example breaks down in seconds. The team won't get funded unless it brings attention to feed marketing companies that funnel money into the team. You can absolute metagame European football with financial injection (heated lawn to practice off-season, buying better players, trainer, doping and so on).

As if 'competition, individualism, and hierarchy' is bad. Well, somebody has to work hard, compete and provide to those who want to enjoy well-being and solidarity. In the meantime, the left wants to use this as a selling point to abuse the power and be the one in control without paying the hard price of working hard and taking risk.

They are mutually exclusive. Solidarity is the opposite of individualism.

Probably true but "preference" almost feels like a loaded word.

I suspect few people want inequality directly, but it's a means to an end.

Looking throughout history, extreme inequality, while unfair for most people, still achieves some useful progress. All attempts for a perfectly equal economy, that I'm aware of, have ended in disaster. Sometimes horrifically.

For that reason, I think it's fair to see some level of income inequality as a necessary evil until someone can convincingly demonstrate otherwise.

I would go further than the article and say neoliberalism is optimizing for income inequality.

I would also point out that the dichotomy you talk about: neoliberalism vs equal economy is false . Modern Social democracies don't optimize for perfect equality, they try to strike a balance between market forces and humane values. They reject the neoliberal idea that perfect markets are morally correct.

I'm not sure any economy is fully behind what you describe as neoliberalism though? Even the USA has welfare, tax and many other not purely Laissez-faire institutions.

You'll note that I never even actually argued for neoliberalism. I think social democracies are far better than unfettered neoliberal capitalism.

However, I think the way that people answered those questions is completely compatible with social democracy too. They never asked do you want inequality and perfect markets above all else. Modern social democracy is much closer to neoliberalism than it is to communism or even 70s style socialism.

One way or interpreting these poll results is that living under a neoliberal world order has increased support for inequality because people are, on the whole, happy with how it changed their lives. Sure, some rich people are absurdly, unfairly rich, but in many ways the average person's life drastically improved from the 70s to now at far quicker rate than ever before in history.

Perhaps many people accept that increased inequality is a fair price to pay for the way they feel life has improved?

Certainly speaking for myself, I don't particularly care that Elon Musk is so rich that he could buy every superyacht in the world, provided that I have all my basic needs met and the economic resources to try and achieve what makes me happy. I'm not jealous of the wealth of others. Looking at what happened to my family under the economic policies of the 70s in the UK, I am pretty glad to have grown up in the 90s.

I'm aware that not everyone is as lucky as me to have all their basic needs met. I think that's a great shame and as far as inequality goes, I think it's fine if someone is 100000x as wealthy as someone else PROVIDED THAT person on the bottom has a house, food, heating, healthcare etc. which certainly is not the case right now.

Ultimately, I'd prefer to be the poorest well fed person in Britain rather than starving in the same boat with everyone else.

I don't see why income inequality is inherently "evil". Yes, too much can be a problem, although I'd be more concerned with the overall standard of living than whether billionaires exist. Is it evil that some artists or athletes become extremely popular? Is it evil that someone's business becomes extremely successful? Do either of those things lower the standard of living for other people? I tend to think they grow the economic pie and provide goods and services which didn't exist to the same extent before.

This isn't to say there are no problems with income inequality, or that there shouldn't be proper safety nets or taxation, just that income inequality doesn't seem to be an evil in my judgement. Some people are just going to end up more successful than others for whatever reasons, and as long as it's done within the law, I don't see the inherent problem with it. I do see a big problem with trying to make economic outcomes equal, and I don't think it works.

Income inequality isn't evil, optimizing for it is. Creating a system where wealth and thus power and freedom is concentrated in a shrinking percentage of the populos is wrong and exploitative.

It's also outright stupid, inefficient and ineffective. So many great achievements in history have been lost, shattered or set back because of hierarchical and combative power relations.

The current nature of what is unequal is also a problem. If we had enough food/housing/water/necessities for everyone that were created and delivered autonomously, and the only inequality were social criteria (reputation, jobs, accomplishments), it would seem more tolerable, or not as high of a priority.

The lower bound of inequality means you go hungry/thirsty or become homeless. If the lower bound meant you just lost a cool opportunity (but could go chill until the next one), then I think most of us would be okay with that.

> All attempts for a perfectly equal economy, that I'm aware of, have ended in disaster. Sometimes horrifically.

I guess the tens of thousands of years from when humans were painting on caves to the first manifestation of a class society 10000 years ago was a horrific disaster.

Can you site your reference or foundation for your comment please? Like to see a counter-point to what my understanding is.

I was always under the understanding that inequality was horrific 'tens of thousands of years from when humans were painting on caves'. If I was not producing enough for the tribe or group I would be left behind or worse. The strong ones had the most food, women, and best spot in the 'cave' i.e. inequality.

Here's one example:

https://www.denverpost.com/2012/12/17/archaeologists-find-pr...

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/science/ancient-bones-tha...

> If I was not producing enough for the tribe or group I would be left behind or worse. The strong ones had the most food, women, and best spot in the 'cave' i.e. inequality.

There were no known tribes over ten thousand years ago, there were bands. In your perception, children abandoned their parents to death when they aged, which is not behavior anthropologists observed in modern hunter gatherer bands. Also, anthropologists observer modern hunter gatherer bands eating gathered berries and the hunt in communal meals. You do not have one man with multiple wives/concubines/mistresses in the manner of the class societies following this - although often all the fertile men and women who are not close relations are sleeping with one another. Your picture of pre-class society does not jibe with archeological finds of old societies or anthropological observations of modern ones.

I am indeed not aware how those societies worked, and I put that caveat in there because I knew someone would probably say we what about cavemen or something.

But I'm not sure you can really compare cavemen to the past 6000 or so years of attempting society at scale.

For one there's fairly limited understanding of what those societies were really like. Discussions about how they were attempting to architect their economy are likely to run into walls pretty quickly. Do we have anything to suggest they were perfectly equal?

Secondly, I think the constraints are much different when you're talking a few family groups mostly eating and hunting, where everyone knew and personally cared for each other, rather than 8 billion people in a highly developed and interconnected global economy.

I suspect a lot of societal features and economy in general is just due to the need to scale out trust. Many things are easier when you have almost perfect knowledge of everything that's going on in your tiny group, but the larger that group gets the more you need to invent abstractions like money.

The closest things that exist to those societies now is probably families or partnerships, which can operate on a broadly equal basis - though even they often don't.

So is it "some level" or is it "extreme"?

See this chart: piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F0.I.1.pdf This is the income inequality in the USA in the 20th century. The slump in inequality coincides with the post-war "golden era of capitalism". On the other hand, its return to gilded age levels heralded the decline of the working class, overfinancialisation, and eventually the catastrophe of 2008.

>All attempts for a perfectly equal economy, that I'm aware of, have ended in disaster. Sometimes horrifically.

There can never by any such thing as a "perfectly equal" economy, so it's useless talking abou it. But we can see that most of the best countries in the world to live in (economically) have comparatively low levels of income inequality.

> For that reason, I think it's fair to see some level of income inequality as a necessary evil until someone can convincingly demonstrate otherwise

If all you have to share is “I guess the status quo is as good as I’m willing to allow”, just say that instead of trying to browbeat those of us who have the ability to believe a better world is possible.

If all you can do is dress your FUD up as shrewd analysis, at least recognize that you aren’t actually sharing anything new and are just defending the status quo. I’m sick of this kind of dishonesty and, frankly, fear mongering in defense of a machine that operates on greed and suffering by design.

Utopian thinking has always, and will always, lead to disaster. There will never be a 'perfect' world for humanity, we have enough historic evidence to show how foolhardy it is to try.

On the other hand, optimizing for a better balance than we have currently is possible. We had much lower levels of income disparity in the middle of the 20th century and we could certainly aim to restore those levels.

However, that would be difficult in our globalized economy of the past 40 years. This is the part of neo-liberalism that is causing the most problems for the non-elite. Globalization is leveling the field for the non-elite of the world, American wages are stagnant or dropping by real value, while wages are rising in east and southeast Asia(for example). The global elites are winning no matter what. The only way to change this is to restrict globalization and international corporations, just changing US laws to tax the rich more or break up us companies won't change much as global elite will give up their citizenship and international companies will detach from their us divisions. You will need a global effort at this point to affect any change to the system, and even then you will have serious problems. And that is only for minor changes to the system. The fact that we have interconnected most of the world in the way that we have means that any disruptions to the system are global and everyone suffers.

> Utopian thinking has always, and will always, lead to disaster. There will never be a 'perfect' world for humanity, we have enough historic evidence to show how foolhardy it is to try.

Two responses to this:

1) Please don’t communicate in absolutes (always, never, etc); you’re speaking for yourself only and I don’t share your limited imagination. Attempts to set arbitrary axioms like this is a dialog-shutdown tactic and I don’t share your perspective.

2) Perhaps you’ve intuited this, but you didn’t respond to my actual argument (that the GP is arguing in favor of the status quo); so instead you have to invent a straw man where I’m an idealist with his head in the clouds, so that you can have something you’re qualified to respond to. Congratulations!

> On the other hand, optimizing for a better balance than we have currently is possible.

Why say this if you’re going to spend the rest of your post talking about how any change to adjust the status quo will be undermined by “global elites” (your phrase, not mine)? I’m not sure you’re actually interested in this beyond a rhetorical feint.

You’re making the same argument as GP, know you have nothing new to share, yet still insist on browbeating anyone who points out the system isn’t producing good outcomes.

> The fact that we have interconnected most of the world in the way that we have means that any disruptions to the system are global and everyone suffers.

How convenient! Spoken like an ant, excited to watch the grasshopper starve.

We have attempted fully equal societies though - many times. It always seems to end in mass poverty and violence against the population it claims to exist to protect.

How many times do we have to try it before deciding it doesn't work? If you have a good idea, feel free to describe it, and explain how it would not suffer the same failures all past attempts have. I can't see how it would work, and if you're convinced it can, show your working.

I don't defend the status quo either. I said SOME level of inequality. I personally think that inequality has gotten out of hand in the last few decades - the gap between the rich and poor has become absurd. Scandinavian nations and others have shown that a nation with less income inequality than UK/US is possible and may be desirable - though there are definite limits to how comparable Scandi countries are to countries like UK/US.

Broadly equal societies may be possible at extremely small scales when in a state of abundance. Once you go past the limit where everyone knows and trusts each other, things seem to rapidly fall apart without hierarchy and inequality.

What if we just decline income equality as a meaningful or valuable ideal at all? Full income equality is not a viable or desirable outcome, and it seems like a distraction from solvable problems like political and institutional corruption - paid for out of funds collected under the pretext of policies to combat said inequality.

The word and concept is even a second order artifact of the belief in a zero-sum human economy, and an idea whose goal is to centralize power and resources into the very institutions whose corruption it moralizes. The Gini coefficient is no better than a horoscope, and arguably, "income inequality" isn't meaningful as a thing.

What is more plausible? That most of the people who take risks to build businesses do so from an exploitative and evil urge, or that a few performers like Piketty, Varafoukis, Krugman and the Greek chorus of lazy ideologues who talk, write, and flatter for a living are self dealing? The word itself is a begged question, and accepting its negative definition as a premise makes any logic built on that idea seem internally consistent because it will always sound "good" because it is "against bad."

Merely being anti-bad is not even rationally ethical, it just means one has been folded into a mob that doesn't actually believe anything - they're just against the representation of a bad thing. It's easier to believe than accepting we've been tricked, but please, enough.

The fundamental problem is wealth having a high correlation or even causation with power.

At any point in time, very little keeps a neutral or even benevolent elite from turning malevolent. At that point, you're stuck with the populace willing to shed sweat, tears and blood to fight back.

We also tend to select on relative fitness, and both wealth and power contribute pretty strongly towards fitness. You can educate people to look past this, but it's pretty difficult to get individuals to look past their basic instincts even after training them to do so their entire childhood. You can change society to minimize the negative effects, but society can lose knowledge and trend the other way over time.

If it was just "well more income for everyone means less people in poverty", yes, it would be useless. But that's not what is happening.

Why don't we attempt to strip the power from wealth rather than attempting to take people's wealth away?

The fact that wealth and power are correlated has a lot to do with the fact that we have these hugely complicated legal systems with a lot of gray areas. The wealthier you are, the more you can afford to look for loopholes.

What if we took an axe to the codes of laws and closed the loopholes? What if we stripped certain offices of power so that there wasn't much benefit to corruption?

Humanity has built systems that give the wealthy power, but we don't have to design them this way.

I would agree this. That said, good luck trying to change this in the first place. Not only is it incredibly ingrained into our system, the status quo has a lot to lose and would not be willing to give it up, while it is incredibly difficult to unionize the masses and not have them defect for a pittance.

Either way this will have to be answered by the time paradigm shifts and automation eventually question the worth of human labor as a whole.

Rich people's children don't necessarily inherit (let alone develop further) any of their merits yet have all the wealth leaving huge numbers of people in poverty. The latter have potential they could have had developed for good of the society but they are doomed to waste it. Perhaps limiting how much can one person inherit could solve the problem, perhaps not.

A lot of the framework is tautological. Income for work, that he receives more money for an hour of labor than him, has always been of minor concern to people who have not bought into the neoliberal system. It's a concern for some at the top of the system. Social relations between those who work and the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those who work might be more of a concern.

I don't know what market friendly psychological tendencies are or free-market reforms. Large corporations have instituted reforms to quash the market. Don't rely on me, Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel and others have said the same thing. Industries are oligopolies from music (Universal controls more than half of US music) to breakfast cereals.

I am not sure what a free market is, in the Soviet Union people were free to go to a small market owned by the proprietor and buy potatoes or radishes with rubles, just like in the UK (with pounds) or US (dollars). So what is a free market? Or are they talking about control of the commanding heights of the forces of production? But that is not a market.

Also a country can be run by FDR and he says a New Deal economy is good and this idea is promoted from the top. It can be run by Reagan, with control of the media becoming consolidated and corporatized, and promoting another view if the economy. It is no surprise if all people hear 24/7 from people from Bush to the Clinton's how great so called free trade agreements etc. are that more will echo that sentiment. The reality is working people have been and are resistant to these economic agreements which harm them, relative to the opinion of the decision makers.

Income inequality decreases significantly during recessions. Check out the wealth owned by by the top 1% during the latest recessions.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

Would anyone argue that the situation of the poor got better during this time?

Neoliberalism overwhelmingly rewards self interested behaviour, explicitly at the expense of cooperative and altruistic counterparts, which iteratively nurtures disproportionate sociopathic tendencies in those who thrive in the system. It’s often posited that the solution is to replace it wholesale with something else entirely, but I’ve argued for some time that it’s best to be subjected to a counterbalance in the form of a competing system that rewards cooperation and altruism at least equally.

My thesis is neoliberalism, in the way it rewards self interested behaviour closely aligns with valuing optimisation, which in turn requires quantifiable resources with which to precisely measure performance, namely those intrinsically finite. Long story short, this boils down to basically energy and time, a lay explanation I’ve used is anything that intersects with E=mc^2.

An example of a resource that’s abundant, or at least not intrinsically finite, is information. The way this is currently incorporated into our value systems is through artificial scarcity constructs, namely copyright and patents. These mechanisms incentivise locking them up as tightly as possible, manifesting as greater sociopathy.

An alternate would directly value the breadth and depth of an idea’s use, the scarce component being the links between the ideas, and amplify the incentive for the idea to be used and made as widely available as possible, rewarding collaboration and altruism. I see it as basically Page Rank applied to the current scope of copyright and patents. Funding for payments would be an additional or modified source currently used by entities who hold sovereignty over their currency, and I’d argue would require much less abstraction from the realised value than existing debt and interest mechanisms.

When you suggest that reducing taxes and eliminating regulations might hurt the most vulnerable, they have two responses: 1) no way, it would only help them because the market is perfect!, 2) who cares? the poor need to get a job!

People like neoliberalism for the same reason they like fascism: people want to believe in a utopia that mirrors their values. Belief is a hell of a drug.

Lower taxes is not a utopia, it's perfectly feasible, unless you think that you owe something to the poor just for existing.

I don't think I owe the poor anything for existing, I think they should be taken care of as fellow humans. We live in a society, we should take care of each other.

And that's where I disagree. It's not "they" taking care of the poor, it's you and I with money that they take from us whether we like it or not.

And you don't like it why? You're probably just not paid enough to maintain current lifestyle should you pay some "for the poor", is that correct?

So, ultimately, it's a decision of some boss somewhere?

You owe much of what you are to the society that supports you. It is a fantasy that anyone living in a society achieved their successes in a vacuum.

I'm happy for the money to be taken from me to help take care of people that, for whatever reason, find themselves in an awful situation against their will.

So you're a #2 :)

Taxes aren't just about "the poor".

Decent infrastructure benefits everyone.

People that aren't poor participate in the economy and help business.

I shouldn't have to explain it only money terms, but in that way it makes sense.

Why should society pay more to keep people poor, the numbers don't add up.

Unless it's not about the money at all but about punishing people?

It's about spending less money. When you have a whip of "you will be homeless and starve", people will accept odious salaries and work conditions much more easily.

I don't think you owe the poor directly. But you probably owe a fair chunk of your success to society (fundamental research, education, health, infrastructure). Then society decide how to spend that money. I might not like how that money will be spend but the game seems fair.

If Amazon workers collect food stamps, it means Jeff Bezos "just existing" owe them quite a lot of money. Also, bussiness and innovation requieres good infrastructure. For some reason most tech startups do not start in tax heavens like Somalia, but in highly developed countries.

Why should poor people not come into your house and simply take your things? If you don't care about them, then why should they care about you?

Well of course they're feasible. The Soviet Union was feasible. Ancient Mesopotamian societies were feasible. The Aztec Empire was feasible. Feasibility is the lowest bar for picking a solution. All it means is that it's not physically impossible to implement it.

You do owe them to some extent, because if you deprive them enough, they will revolt, which will be much more disruptive to your life than higher taxes.

It's not "for existing". Taken collectively, their work underpins the conditions for the lives of those better off.

Remove "the poor" from the equation, and it's likely your quality of life would collapse. The market as operating doesn't recognise that in their remuneration because negatives are easy to externalise, and then roll down hill.

Your taxes could go to help the poor, or to police them. Both cost money.

Most people don't really think about the world they live in. They listen to the radio, watch TV and don't see any hidden agenda. They just simply learn to parrot what they hear.

Then ask them, framing the question in a familiar way, and they just parrot back.

LOL. Sounds like GPT. :-)

It's amazing how such a large proportion of our society becomes incapable of thinking critically about policy and incentives when the policy in question is the product of a legislature.

Regulations just stupid rules made up by stupid humans. They're not special. They're no more likely to be a net good or bad for the groups they apply to than some random policy that comes down from corporate.

Every regulation that removes a rung from the ladder and increases inequality sails under the flag of some noble goal. And useful idiots take that shit hook line and sinker.

If prosperity was as simple as playing regulatory whack-a-mole on every bad thing we see we'd be a hell of a lot more prosperous.

Who likes fascism?!

Fascism must be the least popular extremist ideology in 2022. I have never heard anyone in my life talk about how it might be a good idea, or how "real fascism hasn't been tried yet". Hell I have barely even seen it on the internet.

As far as I can tell it exists today only as an epithet, but happy to be proved wrong.

There’s definitely a sizable fringe community of fascists with outsized cultural influence online, but their line is more “fascism was good actually” than “real fascism hasn’t been tried yet”.

Surely if no-one liked fashism, there wouod be no fashism?

"Today, few political parties openly describe themselves as fascist, and no openly fascist parties are currently in power as of 2022. However, fascism is far from extinct. France's fascist "Front National" won more than 25% of the country's vote in 2014, as did the Danish People's Party in Denmark. Moreover, the ongoing prominence of groups such as the Patriot Front in the United States, Greece's Golden Dawn party, and Hungary's Jobbik testify to the ideology's continued appeal to some individuals. Additionally, smaller-scale fascist movements exist in dozens of countries to this day.
What's more, many modern-day political parties and governments avoid the fascist label but still incorporate fascist ideas into their platforms and strategies. Rhetoric that recalls a time when a country was a great empire but was brought down by certain people enjoying undeserved benefits, or that rejects social programs on the basis that not all citizens deserve them, or that endorses the suppression of certain people's individual rights or civil liberties—violently if necessary—is often rooted in fascist philosophy.

Fascism can be difficult to define and identify. This is partly because it is often modified to meet a specific fascist party's political goals and partly because it has many variations, many of which overlap with and arguably fit better into related ideologies such as socialism. Because of this vague categorization, considerable differences of opinion exist as to which governments qualify as truly fascist and which are instead some other system, such as right-wing dictatorships or authoritarian regimes—which are similar but do not follow fascist ideology."

- https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/fascist-c...

It's an attractive ideology for, well, society's humiliated losers, essentially.

It typically calls itself anything else other than fascism when it reemerges but it shares all the same features.

In the US e.g. use of the term "cuckservative" would probably signal that you align yourself with most of the tenets of a fascistic ideology even if you dont explicitly call yourself a fascist.

If anything it's become a lot more popular over the last 15-20 years than ever before. No tiki torch marches in the 90s.

So fascists are everywhere but they don't call themselves fascist and pretend they're not fascist but they're secretly fascist?

If you genuinely believe this, why the secrecy? Why not just be out and open with it like the communists are?

Overt fascism tends to scare people away. Theyre all well aware of its image problem as they dogwhistle for far right authoritarian ultranationalism.

Typically they do remain a disorganized mess (as could be expected for an ideology popular mainly with opportunists and losers) but every so often some rich person feels threatened or ambitious and throws money at them and organizes them into a militia or something. Thats when they transition from an unpleasant crowd to a genuinely terrifying threat.

Neoliberals are likewise loath to actually call themselves neoliberals while they argue for privatising a publicly owned utility.

Fascism is authoritarian ultra-nationalism. Putin’s Russia fits easily. Various European leaders and parties fit to differing extents. Trump fits.

Just like dictators call themselves presidents, fascists call themselves other things.

I covered this in the OP:

As far as I can tell it exists today only as an epithet

Fascism is an extreme Bonapartism.

It is authoritarian, and anti-republican. Anti-republicanism in practice: removing power from courts (especially supranational organs like the US supreme court), consolidating media power (aka removing or pushing to the fringe dissident media) and removing various transparency laws (in France, stuff like making sure the campaign accounting is public, or letting the public know the complete estate?(patrimoine) of the presidential candidates).

You can in practice have a fascist semi-democracy or oligarchy. Another key point is that unlike Bonapartism, and like Nazism and Stalinism, Fascism don't use plebiscite that much, historically only at the start, to help consolidate its power. This make it quite different from Gaullism (which is a very moderate Bonapartism). While Fascism, unlike Nazism, is not expansionist, it still have racist undertone and can use the hierarchy of races to justify colonialism and neo-colonialism, and appartheid.

Like other far-right ideologies, their myth can be resumed like this: "We (our ethnical/religious/cultural/national group) are the best in the world. But right now, we aren't at our rightful place. This is because these external groups (The French/the English/the Russians/the Chinese) are preventing us to reach it, aided by our internal enemies(The Gypsys/the Jews/the communists/the anarchists/the libs) that we have to render inoffensive by any mean."

I do see some fascists nowadays, but this is true that they are less anti-republican than they used to be 80 years ago, so a new denomination might be necessary? Unless anti-republicanism is just an inheritance from Bonaparte and not as central as i thought?

The debate about "lower/higher taxes" is a such a loaded discussion from both sides it's not even funny

Those more on the left treat it as a holy grail as if government spending wasn't historically very inefficient and prone to corruption.

Those more on the right think all the society that was built around them was free and came out of nothing.

I certainly don't like paying taxes but they're needed. I don't like goverment "intervention" but no free market is going to build a road in front of my house, establish a government with fiscal/monetary policy (and a currency - and no, no cryptocrap will solve this) and build relations with other countries.

And in fact old capitalists seemed much more society focused: they built railways, universities, etc. Instead of yet another web app

It's because we're a society of plenty now. Nobody thinks they need taxes if they already have a road. And a lot of people are just ignorant and don't comprehend the compounding effects of societal inequality.

We know there are problem on both sides: Too big and powerful government = corruption and inefficiencies Too big and powerful corporation = corruption and inefficiencies I prefer going more toward the free market as corporation are in competition and that force some accountability that we don’t see in the government. Keep the government small and nimble, mostly as a control mechanism for corporation that become corrupt and monopolistic.

Read Atlas Shrugged if you want to see the opposite of your point of view.

Corporations are accountable to their bank statements and Governments are accountable to people. Except when the opposite is true. The real world is complicated and generalizations don't pan out. Neither do philosophies rooted on generalizations.

Of course. Since at least Clinton the Democratic neoliberals have been the party of the 1% and the welfare recipients. The rest are screwed.

Most of the Covid "relief funds" ended up in the hands of cronies, enabling them to buy private airplanes (there is a severe shortage right now), drive up the stock markets to ridiculous heights and use the gains to buy up even more real estate.

(The Republicans are of course also doing all of this, but neoliberalism refers more to Democrats betraying their original interest groups.)

If you understand that you realize why they fool everyone with the equality and diversity slogans.

Gotta convinces the fools you aren’t robbing them blind!

Both Sides is quite the global, age-old narrative that most people are vulnerable to. The two sides couldn't be more different than ever, if you'd care to see what Biden and Democrats have actually passed in the last 16 months.

There's been more fury over Pelosi buying shares of US companies than there was over Trump pumping stocks on national TV, or about the leadup to Roe vs Wade, or about the right's attack on democracy. Which is what both sides fallacies has always done, always, by default it serves the shittier of two sides and makes people disinterested or impractical. And now it's louder and more exploited than ever thanks to social media. Thanks to you.

If you are a proponent of the Both Sides Fallacy in the year 2022, you need a hard look at reality of the last 100+ years and the last 16+ months. You're helping the red wade and helping to move the Overton Window further right, learning nothing from the protest and non-voters of 2016, paying no attention to the reality of how many positive things have been done in the past 16 months, and things that have been 180 different from the previous four years, but you just see the Both Sides headlines.

>If you are a proponent of the Both Sides Fallacy in the year 2022, you need a hard look at reality of the last 100+ years and the last 16+ months. You're helping the red wade and helping to move the Overton Window further right, learning nothing from the protest and non-voters of 2016, paying no attention to the reality of how many positive things have been done in the past 16 months, and things that have been 180 different from the previous four years, but you just see the Both Sides headlines.

If you're going to criticize over-simplistic narratives, consider the flaws of your own. "Both sides are the same" is not a fallacy when both parties have regularly voted to increase the power of the state, cater and pander to their chosen special interest groups at the expense of the average citizen, and continue to punch holes into enumerated rights of the constitution. If you are of the view that the ends justify the means so long as you get your favored party into power, then your methods are no better than those of the elephant men.

There is nothing remotely logical about voting for either of the parties, even as a buffer against the excesses of the other. If you can only conceive of politics in terms of binary spectra, you've already lost.

META

I'm seeing more and more political pieces like this here. There was a similar piece yesterday about privilege and inequality.

What's the limit here before we just turn into Reddit?

I'd say economics is inside the purview of hn.

I think that it's really important for knowledge workers to think about these kinds of things. We (the HN target audience) are in one of the most lucrative professions in the world, and I think it's easy to lose perspective as a result.

the study is interesting, but it's wrong to infer causation. you don't have data about what people thought back in the 70s, so it may as well be that economy got shaped in order to reflect what people were already thinking in term of values

The question on the survey was

"We need larger income differences as incentives for individual effort" vs “Incomes should be made more equal.”

But the ridiculously biased title pretends that people who picked the first option just want income inequality for no good reason, and are somehow brainwashed by neoliberal institutions.

Headline: nazis want to kill minorities

Comment: the actual question was: 'We need to kill minorities to make more living space for our people'

But the ridicilously biased title pretends thay people who picked the first option just want death for no good reason, and are somehow brainwashed by nazi institutions!

Every action ever has some reasoning behind it, from you buying coffee to Russia's invasion to Hitler's genocide - Lebensraum. The propaganda succeeds when false reasoning has been accepted without questioning it

Straight to Nazis huh...

Context matters. People might support a free market where they can excel and see their hard work rewarded. That isn't quite the same as wanting income equality. It's a 2nd order effect of the first desire.

Thats the point i was illustrating - the argument 'people have their reasons' is not a good one.

Also is hard work rewarded when top 3 predictora of sucess are family wealth, school and connections?

You want a real free market, set 100% inheritance tax. You could probably abolish all other taxes with it.

How does a 100% inheritance tax create a free market?

Godwin would be proud.

> Overall, the analysis showed that in countries in which there was a higher-than-average level of neoliberalism, as measured by the “Economic Freedom Index,” there were also subsequent higher-than-average levels of preference for income inequality.

> “Our results suggest that a few years is sufficient for—as Thatcher put it—systems to change ‘souls,’ ” concludes Goudarzi.

You thought that the "system" may have the side effect of concentrating mass media (aka the mechanism to 'grab souls') in a few monied hands, which in turn after decades of directed media assault on values would shift them, but no, it is in fact "the neo-liberal free market" that magically shifts values.

> Neoliberalism has resulted in preference for greater income equality

is I think a misguided conclusion from what the survey actually asked.

Just because one of the side effects of having more freedom is that many people will choose not to use that freedom - while a few will totally successfully use it - doesn't mean that that is my preferred outcome. I could prefer to have freedom and also prefer to have everyone use that freedom to their best benefit so that everyone is better off. It's just that that isn't what usually happens (mostly due to human nature).

In other words I could just as well say this (don't even need a survey for that):

Socialism results in preference for less freedom.

> mostly due to human nature

Citation needed.

Seriously, are you sure you are not mixing up free market conditioning with nature?

Check out Dawn of Everything.

Okay I didn't wanna go into that discussion: I don't think the true reasons are crucial for my argument here.

"Everyone": Go tell the homeless sleeping under the bridge to praise the Lord we don't have socialism, or they would end up in those nasty Khrushchyovkas.

Didn't the soviets send people who didn't work to prison and then forced them to do hard labor?

> Neoliberalism, which also calls for greater privatization and deregulation, has become the predominant global socioeconomic framework since the late 1970s.

Why should the results be of any surprise. If these are the rules, those most able to play the game are going to benefit most from those rules.

I believe that's the intention. Fair enough.

The failure comes from greed.

It not the collecting of resources per se. It's the lack of fair and equitable sharing. Oddly enough, for the most part, the proles idolize, if not worship the winners (as opposed to challenging their greed and demanding fairness).

Free markets will always remain the most fair system of resource allocation.

Any other system requires an uninvolved power, likely a govt, to decide.

Who gets to live in the 56 Leonard PH?

Free markets are not a fair system of resource allocation and were never intended to be such, they are about efficient resource allocation. Having eg. a government involved might lead to a fairer outcome but efficiency will take a hit

> a government involved might lead to a fairer outcome

Fairer for the supporters of a government that is. Even in a modern democracy a government is really just supported by a small majority ruling over a large minority. That does not mean that democracy has failed but it heavily implies the government power needs to be limited to a minimum in order for a free society to thrive. _That's why_ the lesson learned and applied by "neoliberalism" has always been meddling with economic forces is a sure road to serfdom (to quote the young F.A. Hayek which Thatcher's politics was always inspired by). It's never been about suppressing the poor. To the contrary. (Even Hayek argued in favor of small social security net.)

OK, so let's remove thing like corporations and private land ownership and IP, all government inventions that interfere with non-aggressive freedom.

Limiting government power to a minimum and let the market do its magic? I'm pretty sure that's a really bad idea, just thinking of leaded gasoline, tobacco advertising, chemical softeners in food packaging etc. one could get the impression that free market maximalism is an extreme that is as bad as communism, just like any extreme stance/opinion is. In the end it is all about balancing interests of different groups with (hopefully) a bias towards the people, not toward capital

The free market should be thought of as an optimization algorithm. Ideally, the government's role should be to set up a constrained optimization problem, which attempts to align profitability with human well-being (e.g., "provide people with whatever material comforts they want to pay for, under the constraint of not poisoning them and not polluting the environment"). The market's role is to solve the constrained optimization problem, and if the incentives set up by the government are good, the optimal point of profitability should reasonably approximate an optimal point of human well-being.

The error of so-called free market proponents, is that they want the government to set up an unconstrained optimization problem. The market will find some kind of optimum, but without intelligently designed constraints (i.e., regulations), there's no guarantee that optimal profitability should correspond to optimal human well-being.

Very well put, I fully agree and might even borrow this explanation when talking to the subset of people who understand optimization algorithms/the analogy.

Next up: Optimization Algorithm ELI5 for the rest

> Fairer for the supporters of a government that is

Can’t see the logic here. Government policies by definition affect everyone regardless of affiliation. Unless you’re implying corruption, which is orthogonal to this discussion.

A government is not a single-celled entity. Parlament, city and state legislatures, etc, are setup so that representation of all parts of society (even the non-supporters) can be achieved.

I would go further and define “efficient.” They are, in western society, efficient at accumulating private capital in the hands of capitalists. No claim is made by anyone to the contrary.

This is exactly the type of efficiency I had in mind.

> No claim is made by anyone to the contrary

The comment I replied to stated "fair" resource distribution and I claim it is most definitely not about fairness

Edit: Line break

Free markets have always been innately fair.

If you own something, how would it be fair for the government to have any direct say on what you should do with it?

I guess you will have to give an explanation what you think constitutes a free market and what kind of fairness you have in mind.

It depends on the kind of property, as there might be very legitimate reasons for the government (representing the people in democratic nations) to have a direct say what you are allowed do with it. You might own a lake or a spring that's important for the population. You might own a factory where government dictates how clean the sewer runoff needs to be. Would that be unfair?

I stated below that it is all about balancing interests, as I view every kind of extremism (that includes free market maximalism) as at least counterproductive, if not outright harmful

I don’t know of many free markets (regulations effect everything).

A free market necessarily requires government involvement.

A free market is industry-specific. For it to work, a company in one industry may not influence the market in a different industry, or that market won’t be free anymore.

To prevent this, government involvement is required to ensure fair start conditions for all companies within of the free market

While a free market economy requires government involvement, one must admit it requires less than an economy that tries to ensure equality. I also suspect the more you leave an economy to its own devices, the more unequal it becomes.

This is incoherent, industrial categories are a convenience, not a natural component of economic activity.

Is automation an industry? Because an automation innovator might be built on the assumption that it can influence another industry.

Can a manufacturer of one thing decide that they have the internal capacity to manufacture something at a lower cost than the existing competitors and then not share that methodology with the existing competitors?

Is it fair when somebody has rich parents and just inherits so much money they never have to work?

Is it fair when a disabled person starves because they cannot earn money?

I think that there are ways to improve fairness beyond a total free market.

Though I agree that if you push it too hard, you remove incentives that are good.

It's a tough problem and I don't think the optimum is in the extremes.

It's "fair" only in a very tautological sense of the word, and in the sense that literally any wealth distribution system is "fair". Like yes, a hedonistic trust fund baby who spends their life buying luxury goods and going on vacations may "create value" merely through allocating wealth to goods and services which bring him pleasure. I think that's an extremely stupid way to look at the concept of value though.

> I think that's an extremely stupid way to look at the concept of value though.

You seem to have changed the topic to "value creation", which wasn't part of the previous poster's point.

The only question is: do you want to destroy one of the largest incentives for people to create value by removing their ability to pass wealth to their descendants?

It seems unlikely to me that a vast majority of people with enough wealth to create a scenario like this truly created that amount of value in the first place though. In other words, the existence of billionaires in the first place is indicative of inequality.

Replace an inefficient organization with a slightly less inefficient organization and you generate billions in value if it was large enough. Doesn't sound like an impossible outlier to me, there are plenty of huge inefficient organizations out there.

And you can't do that with politics. The huge entrenched organization will always have way more political power than your new efficient startup, so without capitalism they will never get replaced. With capitalism it is still hard to replace then, but it is possible since you have the power of capital investors to rely on and not just politics, and that can give you enough leverage to grow your organization until it can compete with the huge old one.

So the lesson is that basing all decisions in society using politics is bad. But also basing all decisions in society based on capital is also bad. You need a mix since they are good for different things.

Why are you talking about billionaires? And inequality isn't a bad thing by itself. For example, someone who chooses 120 hour weeks and stress and a heart attack at 50 will probably have an order of magnitude more money than someone who chooses a lifestyle job. That's not bad; that's a choice. Inequality is far too vague a term to be used in a debate.

> For example, someone who chooses 120 hour weeks and stress and a heart attack at 50 will probably have an order of magnitude more money than someone who chooses a lifestyle job.

I really don't think that's true.

I don't know what to make of this.

> Free markets will always remain the most fair system of resource allocation.

Based on what? Theoretical models are full of assumptions that doesn't hold in practice. Empirical evidence is limited too since free markets don't even exist in the real world. If anything, evidence show that they fail for a wide range of applications where there are inefficient and not fair.

> Any other system requires an uninvolved power, likely a govt, to decide.

Free markets also required a government. They need to be regulated and can't work in a vacuum.

This is the neoliberal ideology they are talking about, yes :)

> Free markets will always remain the most fair system of resource allocation.

First, I think there's a lot of different angles from which you can challenge that claim. In a truly "free market", things like nepotism, bribery, and inherited wealth still exist (and by definition they'd exist in higher levels than in regulated markets). Does some random millionaire trust fund kid in a free market really create value? Is it fair that Bezos is a billionaire when low-paid workers are the ones actually creating value at Amazon? I would argue that without some restriction, free markets almost guarantee _unfair_ resource allocation. Like without antitrust regulation, for example, it would become a winner-take-all game where a single megacorporation could absorb all competitors and value labour however the hell they want.

That is all besides the point though. I would argue that the "most fair system of resource allocation" is not a desirable outcome at all. If a true meritocracy were possible, swaths of people would just starve to death.

You cannot have free markets without a government, sadly. It is either an utopia or a dystopia, depending on your point of view of private militia and consolidation of corporate power.

Also, free market ideology come from the idea that natural ressources are infinite (JB Say explained that clearly, JS Mill implied it). Later on, other free market economists corrected him (to make Say's law still relevant) and added that even if not infinite, ressources can be substitued easily once one is over-exploited.

2007-2008 put a question mark on the "easily", as the disruption from a conventional oil peak lasted until 2012 in Italy (and probably Greece, Spain and Portugal, the four EU countries that depend the most on oil to make their electricity). This year will put a bigger question mark on how well agricultural ressources substitution work.

The issue is with cronyism and not liberalism.

I read this preference for inequality as: in countries with rampant cronyism and social divisions economical freedom isn't able to lift everyone but just a few that have connections to the people in power. That isn't to say that economical freedom makes the poorest more poor.

Look at this list of countries by equality. https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/

Neoliberalism hasn’t actually been the world order at all, but rather soft fascism in which government and corporation walk hand in hand. If you add to this the cartelization of global banking, the situation starts to look more like neo-feudalism. I would hasten to say that there has never and will likely never be a “neoliberal” world order; people in power don’t typically just give up their power.

Also, don’t start an article with words like “findings” and then use the article to spout your own moral values.

Yes, this idea of neoliberalism and free market reforms has meant corporations getting more government involvement in the economy. Eliminating market barriers to promote competition is mythical, it has been the opposite - most industries are oligopolies.

Look at the 40 billion that Congress just pushed to give to US military contractors en route of some of the output to Ukraine (supported by the Squad, opposed by some Trump friendly Republicans). This has been modus operandi of US pumping taxpayer money into corporations since World War II. Biden had diplomats go to Venezuela to get oil and pull back Monroe Doctrine US military operations down there as its shifting military operations from around Venezuela to the western border of Russia.

People throw around that word "Neoliberalism" as if its meaning is self-evidently clear. The author cites three elements of it, only one of which (free market capitalism) I've seen consistently used, but that isn't even something that began in the era most commonly ascribed to the ascendency of this doctrine. Just what preceded "Neoliberalism" so that we can distinguish its full defining feature set?

Before that was Classical Liberalism. At least in US and Western Europe. In Eastern Europe it was something officially called "Unimplemented Communism/Developed Socialism".

What is the main difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism?

Regressive taxation and pro-corporate rather than pro-small business stance.

Classical liberalism also is fine with public spending.

Neoliberalism is associated with the policies in the Western world during the 1980s, mostly under Thatcher and Reagan. The emphasis is on financial deregulation, globalisation and privatisation.

Classical liberalism is rooted in 17th-century philosophy, best represented by John Locke and Adam Smith. The emphasis there is on individual economic freedom, natural property rights and limited government.

Note that they aren't directly competing ideas. These philosophies aren't pure abstractions. Classical liberalism was crafted in a different historical context, in the era of monarchies and theoracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus

The 10 rules of the washington consensus essentially define the feature set of neoliberalism.

Theres a little fuzziness on some items but it's crystal clear on 95%. E.g. Q: would a neoliberal advocate privatization of state enterprises? A: yes.

It is a defined economic term and has scientific papers detailing its inadequacy

As opposed to some alternative economics which doesn't have inadequacies?

Such as? There are half a dozen definitions being used in this thread already, none of which really overlap with each other.

Liberalism means freedom in all spheres (including economically and socially), no need to add the neo- prefix. When you have freedom in a global economy there will be massive income inequality (think about Lebron James or Elon Musk vs the average person) but everyone is better off. Technology allows the best athletes to entertain millions, and the best entrepreneurs to serve billions.

"Neoliberalism" is a specific term for the conceptual forms of capitalism the west has been under since the 70-80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

But the 'neo' refers to the resurgence of basic ideas of freedom, not a big change in philosophy over the original liberal ideas.

Specifically, neoliberalism was a created to return to the Roaring 20s to rollback the post-Great Depression attempts at economic stability.

Less sardonically, neoliberalism is classical liberalism in the 20th Century but with an 18th Century perspective that ignores the oppressive potential of corporations that are more powerful than nations. Neoliberals have a hard time figuring how to hold "corporate persons" accountable for their violence against humanity and our environment, because they never cared to solve the problem of dilution of responsibility.

Interesting, freedom to do what?

Freedom to do whatever you want as long as it does not infringe the rights/freedoms of anyone else.

And freedom to define those rights/freedoms as you see fit.

> as long as it does not infringe the rights/freedoms of anyone else

that seems like the hairy part

Like freedom buy from slaveowners and to dump poisons into the environment, as long as you don't interfere with others freedom to suicide or starve or clean the poison.

Fortunately, this Atlas Shrugged variation of Liberalism, and it's tragic results are quite visible for all to see in societies like the United States.

Meanwhile...., In other places, in societies with a lesser number of Elon Musk's or Lebron Jame's, countries like the Nordics or even France, Germany and others, those millions of normal persons, enjoy 30 days of holidays per year, state sponsored retirement benefits, free or almost free healthcare and free or almost university level education.

Those countries are more demographically/culturally uniform and are higher trust societies. Even Bernie Sanders admits this is necessary for large social programs.

> Those countries are more demographically/culturally uniform and are higher trust societies

What does that even mean?

it means society can only thrive pre-integration or post-genocide/ethnic cleansing.

For example, Northern Ireland cannot exist in the successful European model until the Catholics are gone, or all the Protestants are gone.

Which is a strange thing to claim because e.g. in Germany, Protestants and Catholics "coexist in the successful European model", whatever that means. Claims of "can only thrive" are trivially refuted by counterexamples.

There is a vein of thinking that “diversity causes division” in the United States and this undermines our political willingness to create effective universal safety net programs.

High trust vs low trust societies tend toward egalitarian vs clannish communities respectively.

That’s not true. “The best” here is simply an effect of amongst other : first mover advantage, already secured liquidity to be a first mover, the network effect, and the money to push massive campaigns to influence a topic. So we are not seeing the “best” in the context where everyone is better off.

I would argue that Europe who have more social economies the everyday person is better off. Less student costs, less medical costs, lots of utilities provided for the people. It took ages to get an infrastructure bill in the US.

I appreciate that they defined neoliberalism. In Northern California over the last five to ten years, it has been so misused that people who are not very neoliberal, but have been called neoliberal a lot, started adopting the term to describe themselves. And these people would never agre with Thatcher or Reagan on much.

Isn't... isn't that the core idea of liberalism? Letting people do their thing? Which, naturally, leads to some people getting more than others? What am I missing?

Me grabbing a gun and a baseball bat and terrorising the neighbourhood into paying me protection money is "me doing my thing" which "leads to some people getting more than others". Yet it's hardly Liberalism (at least as understood in the classical sense of the term, not sure about current "neoliberalism" :))

Is neoliberalism just an alias of conservatism?

Neoliberalism calls for elimination of social services? I know it as the exact opposite! Who defines these terms? Who defines what is canonical?

Liberalism and neoliberalism have always been about the rights of the individual above everything else. But the concept of "liberal" has been perverted in America.

The idea of a "political compass" helps. The left has two groups: authoritarians who want to replace culture with something secular and have strong social services and government regulation, and the liberals who want to reject culture and let people do what they want. The right also has two groups: the conservatives who want the government to enforce our culture and the libertarians who want to be left alone.

For the past ~100 years we've found consensus between the liberals and libertarians but everyone is radicalizing away from that. So we still think of liberals as being the leftward movement and libertarians as being the rightward one.

Doesn't the political compass usually use the label "authoritarian" and "libertarian" for both the left and right? There's nothing about being libertarian that is inherently right-wing (in particular if you generalise the logic of "big government bad" to "any large powerful organisation including governments, corporations, and individuals bad" then you end up with a very much left-wing position).

I've never heard government bad being described as left wing. Which left wing organisation would say that?

Any anarchist one for starters. But looking towards more mainstream positions, anyone who is advocating for a Universal Basic Income. While UBI involves high levels of taxation, it does not lead to a big government because the government isn't actually spending that money.

UBI may not create big government (although it probably does) the sort of politics that likes big government also likes UBI.

> although it probably does

What makes you think that?

> the sort of politics that likes big government also likes UBI.

I don't think you can really generalise like that. Certainly the reverse doesn't seem to be true, in that UBI seems to have appeal to many of those who are opposed to big government. It certainly seems to avoid a lot of the bureaucracy that comes with more traditional welfare systems.

The incredible machinery required to collect the current amount of taxes suggests so. Each percentage point requires increasingly more complex tax administration, and with each point more people will try hard to evade it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Yes, the liberals are the libertarian left.

Perhaps it's a US/UK terminology difference, but most of the left-libertarians I know would not take kindly to being described as liberals.

Social/political scientists who actually have intentions of ensuring they communicate in clear terms with each other. I'd go with their definitions, they're a lot more reliable than politicians and their double-speak when it comes to these topics.

You are probably the only one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

Conventionally, neoliberalism is described as a doctrine that commodities and commercialises everything it can. It is the growth of markets into areas traditionally without them, the belief that choice is more important than standards, and so on. That's the basics, anyway.

What you might be thinking of is the tendency for American liberals to advocate for things like the welfare state, universal healthcare etc. That isn't neoliberalism, it is an ideology rather than a process.

> the belief that choice is more important than standards

More like that on average, competition creates the highest standards.

*With transparent, available and easy to decrypt information. Thing like easy to read FoP labels for food, transparent manufacturing ant testing process for parts and pieces like joints.

The last part would kill GE and a number of global companies btw.

Well yes, that too. But the facts from around the world are that the market power of even benign retailers is less effective at creating high standards than regulation.

“Neoliberalism” generally refers to the policy shifts under Reagan, Thatcher, etc. the “liberal” part of the word coming from the original sense of it and not the modern American version just meaning “left”.

> the modern American version just meaning “left”.

To add to this.

"Classical liberal" in the US means laissez faire as a form of government, and is an Americanism for liberal. "Liberal" in the US means closely associated with the Democratic Party, which is also "classically" liberal, but believes that preventing irrational discrimination against the societally disadvantaged trumps freedom of contract. "Neoliberal" also started as an Americanism for liberal but was retconned into referring to the philosophy that liberalism trumps democracy, so societies need to be rigged to support liberalism by any means necessary.

"Liberal" really just means "hands-off." If you're the Republican kind of liberal, you think that the only important thing is that the federal government keeps their hands off of things. If you're the Democratic kind of liberal, you also think that smaller institutions such as churches, Chambers of Commerce, Klan groups and state governments should also keep their hands off things, and that the federal government should be hands-on enforcing that. If you're a neoliberal, you think that the federal government, churches, Chambers of Commerce, Klan groups and state governments should be hands-on enforcing a hands-off policy when it comes to regulating finance or labor.

Both parties will veer from these principles when appealing to their illiberal bases (the religious right and the labor left), but feebly. turning those aberrations into what we call "wedge issues."

The Wikipedia page addresses the meaning shift https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

> Neoliberalism holds that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. Neoliberals endorse liberal rights and the free-market economy to protect freedom and promote economic prosperity. Neoliberals are broadly democratic, but stress the limitations of democracy as much as its necessity. And while neoliberals typically think government should provide social insurance and public goods, they are skeptical of the regulatory state, extensive government spending, and government-led countercyclical policy.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/index.html

Especially in North America, classical liberalism, liberalism, and neoliberalism are different things. Reading something like the Economist, which is British, can cause some confusion.

The short story is that freedom can mean you should be free from the strictures of the state, or it can mean the state gives you more freedom by supplying certain things to you. The long story is really long.

income inequality isn't necessarily bad, "neoliberalism" has lifted millions out of poverty, and poverty as an absolute value is what actually matters.

Would you consider China (which has done a great deal of padding that poverty statistic) neoliberal? I'd say they have a mix of market practices that both benefit from free global trade and at the same time is quite protectionist in a number of ways and i wouldn't exactly define it as neoliberal.

actually global poverty without china follows the exact same trend.

But China's adoption of market practices absolutely has a bearing on their own poverty reduction, then again, I doubt china's figures can be trusted since they've consistently misrepresented economic data for at least two and a half decades.

>>Neoliberalism, which calls for free-market capitalism, regressive taxation, and the elimination of social services,

That first sentence, where neoliberalism is described in a deliberatively pejorative way, doesn't do much for the credibility of the report. Margaret Thatcher (for instance) never called for the elimination of social services. She and the Conservative Party were always in favour of some form of social "safety net".

The phase of politics we have entered is the post-culture wars. It's no longer red vs blue. It's wealth redistribution vs not. "Pay my college tuition loans!" or "give me $ for a new ev car"

But break down what that means? The predominantly rich are who get into those ivy league schools and rack up giant student loans. You're planning to pay off rich kids loans?

Anyone who already paid off the loans gets nothing? People who didn't go to university gets nothing? Also how's that money printing going? 8.5% inflation and still rising... You want more of that?

Lets go further. Let's just imagine we decide to reset. They print a million $ per person and everyone gets it. Everyone is back to equality.

Inflation will obviously blow up and find some equilibrium eventually. We eliminate all debt. What happens? The poor will burn that million so fast. It's the mentality of the psyche, no different than a dog who eats their food as fast as possible fearing they might lose it.

The rich take the million and buy as much investments as possible right away.

In a couple years we go check on how things are doing... the rich are rich. the poor are poor. Nothing changes. People need to understand that money doesn't work this way. Want to eliminate inequality? Teach people to not be poor, teach them to bust their butt doing something useful to society.

> The predominantly rich are who get into those ivy league schools and rack up giant student loans. You're planning to pay off rich kids loans?

that one's gonna need a citation lol.

> Also how's that money printing going? 8.5% inflation and still rising... You want more of that?

ask the corporations that are posting record profits in spite of this inflation

> The poor will burn that million so fast. It's the mentality of the psyche, no different than a dog who eats their food as fast as possible fearing they might lose it.

break out the calipers boys

> The rich take the million and buy as much investments as possible right away.

wait i thought we were getting inflation that makes the million meaningless

> In a couple years we go check on how things are doing... the rich are rich. the poor are poor. Nothing changes. People need to understand that money doesn't work this way. Want to eliminate inequality? Teach people to not be poor, teach them to bust their butt doing something useful to society.

real rich dad / poor dad hours here

> wait i thought we were getting inflation that makes the million meaningless

Hence the investments, as the companies selling the things with inflated prices... will have inflated their prices :)

>that one's gonna need a citation lol.

The whole point of education is that getting it will make you rich. the point I was making though is that statistically the people who get post-secondary educations are from rich families.

https://www.ajc.com/blog/get-schooled/college-admissions-the...

This is a leading reason why the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The big question is if single-payer post-secondary makes sense and while Germany for example does have this... they vastly restrict what you can take. Liberal arts is basically not something you can take in germany.

>ask the corporations that are posting record profits in spite of this inflation

In a high inflation environment, the corporations will always post good profits. It's not the other way around where corporations create inflation, quite the opposite.

>wait i thought we were getting inflation that makes the million meaningless

Oh ya, print that much money and inflation would be insane; it would ultimately be meaningless but the point being illustrated is that even if we equaled the playing field, inequality would come right back.

Well, the only thing that really changes is technology. We don't need 30% of the population doing agricultural labour as we've automated most of it. We can transport goods long distances, giving us access to things no dreamed of 100 years ago. We can communicate instantly across the globe. These are all incredible achievements.

What is the case is that inequality may not go away, but if one's own standard of living is increasing with relatively little effort, then that's the main thing.

>Well, the only thing that really changes is technology. We don't need 30% of the population doing agricultural labour as we've automated most of it. We can transport goods long distances, giving us access to things no dreamed of 100 years ago. We can communicate instantly across the globe. These are all incredible achievements.

The world is a much better place to be sure. Capitalism has dramatically dropped poverty world-wide. It's great.

>What is the case is that inequality may not go away, but if one's own standard of living is increasing with relatively little effort, then that's the main thing.

Inequality starts before high school but is established at high school. Not everyone is equal, there are kids who are barely passing and there are kids who put the work in and earn top marks. This difference in personality will produce a different outcome.

The barely passing person who ends up in a mcjob earning minimum wage should not get the same benefits from society as the top marks kid who becomes a neuroscientist.

The neuroscientist should be driving his Tesla plaid edition while the mcjob is driving the 10 year old beater.

Inequality is not going away until some seismic shift in scarcity occurs; but even after we eliminate scarcity. There will still be inequality in different ways.

It's the poor's fault they are poor, is that it ? They should bet on the right numbers in the lottery, right ?

The non-stop growth of income and wealth inequality for a few decades is only fair, because if you weren't able to pay for tuition, you could still scrub toilets very very very fast and and become rich !

It's no secret to anyone who has been doing any kind of reading about economy and/or investment that money makes money. I'd like to contrast that by mentioning a quite interesting report by the french senate a few years ago which was titled "It's very expensive to be poor" [1]

I'm a entrepreneur and I'm not here to claim that we shouldn't have a free market, but I feel sick in my stomach when I feel like I'm reading that poor are meant to be poor or that it's only their fault. A lot of indicators tends to show the game is more and more biased.

As a sidenote, as i think quite a few readers are americans: I've been living in the US for a few years and I was really astonished by the lack / or malfunction of the social elevator in that country. The American Dream seemed long gone to me.

[1] https://www.senat.fr/rap/r13-388/r13-38818.html (french only, sorry)

>It's the poor's fault they are poor, is that it ? They should bet on the right numbers in the lottery, right ?

Yes, if you have the poor mentality you will be poor. There's no rich people who bet on the lottery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krTo4W7Z2vk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31qfjBEyKds

>The non-stop growth of income and wealth inequality for a few decades is only fair, because if you weren't able to pay for tuition, you could still scrub toilets very very very fast and and become rich !

I don't know you but I have a feeling those 2 videos are going to benefit you greatly.

>It's no secret to anyone who has been doing any kind of reading about economy and/or investment that money makes money. I'd like to contrast that by mentioning a quite interesting report by the french senate a few years ago which was titled "It's very expensive to be poor" [1]

Income inequality at the top end derives heavily from credit score and the ability to take on debt yes. There's no better way to handle this. Nothing tried so far has produced a better outcome. If you have a solution to replacing credit score... I'm all ears.

Also note, we will NEVER EVER be repealing glass steagal or equivalent to fix inner city ghettos with subprime loans ever again. It'll be many decades before we try to fix inner city ghettos again. In fact, I expect no politicians talk about inner city ghettos ever again because of that 2009 financial crisis.

>I'm a entrepreneur and I'm not here to claim that we shouldn't have a free market, but I feel sick in my stomach when I feel like I'm reading that poor are meant to be poor or that it's only their fault. A lot of indicators tends to show the game is more and more biased.

More and more biased? In what way? Yes regulations and higher taxes are making the situation worse on the poor. Rent control and minimum wage is doing tremendous harm to the USA.

>As a sidenote, as i think quite a few readers are americans: I've been living in the US for a few years and I was really astonished by the lack / or malfunction of the social elevator in that country. The American Dream seemed long gone to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

What you are referring to is social mobility. Yes, something went very wrong in the USA. They were clearly #1 for a long time, but now they are in last place. Why? If you look at the options on that wiki page, you are basically forced to agree or come to the conclusion, culture/poormentality and housing are the USA's problem.

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