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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

> There are plenty of people in the world who would think that anything over $500/month is way more than enough for one person. Should your compensation be reduced to that amount?

Disclaimer: I live in a 3rd world country and my salary is 1/3 of what the standard US salary is.

YES, I do believe that everybody's compensation (including mine) who are in the top 10% of the population should be decreased/limited. Provided that their living costs are adjusted so that the $500/month get you similar standard of living to other nice places (say, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, etc).

The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. How the 90% of the population haven't turned on us is just sheer luck and a political, security system that is rigged in our favor.

I would be happy to be part of a "pay cut initiative" for all the top 10% earners, if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody. I had the opportunity to grow up and be friends with poor people who just did not have the chance to succeed, so I don't believe the "poor people are just lazy" narrative. There's good hard working people that just never had a chance. Similarly how there is bad rich people that just want to leech from others.

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> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable.

Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.

Historically it was much, much worse. The only way you can make an argument for saying inequality is greater now (when global poverty/subsistence farming is at the lowest % since human settlement 12000 years ago) is to point to the sheer amount of wealth we generate compared to any other period and nit pick about it's allocation. That's fine, but if you want to go back to farming for your life, like most humans for most of history, you'll probably find it a worse life than being in a developed country middle class, even if "your wealth is technically more equal to a king than a middle class to a ceo"

What source are you basing that on? You can find countless sources that show the 0.1% owning an ever greater share: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i... "Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%."

I'm basing that on global numbers, not national numbers. Sure, I don't doubt that in developed economies inequality is getting worse.

But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.

There's a good video on how that $1.90 is arbitrary and too low, and if you try to come up with a poverty line from first principles, you end up more in the $5-$12 range, where it doesn't paint such a great picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s

Inequality is about the ratio of high earners to low earners. What you have linked to is a different concept, i.e. absolute income. Income inequality in china also increased, see figure 5: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-ine...

Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.

Thats completely true, tho a peasent was working for his master a lot less than we currently do for our masters.

When we get 3days work week and 4 days of „time for my stuff” we can go back to discussing that.

The peasant was working for their master a lot less because if the master asked for more, the peasant would literally starve to death, because he wouldn't have enough hours in the day to work for himself.

The ruling class will happily soak up all spare productive capacity - and as the amount of work necessary to keep someone clothed, sheltered, and fed went down, that spare productive capacity grows, and more of it flows upwards.

Ok now how really it did look in history:

Landlord was lending land to peasents - rich peasents, because bottom cast did not even have a chance to talk to landlord.

For the land peasents got, they had to work for the landlord specific number of days in a week. For some time it was 1-2-3-4-5 days per week. Most common was 3 days.

Thing is - the peasent was not obligated to do that work himself. He could have sent a son, family member or even hire someone.

That way it was super easy to keep his agreement with the landlord while mostly focus on his own farm.

Who had it terrible were bottom, poor peasents that worked for other peasents.

They did not have their own land and were at mercy of their “master peasents”.

They most likely had to work whole week or 5-6 days.

They were more of a slave than a peasent tbh, but its a hard disregarded truth.

Current middle class in our times could be translated to “master peasents” back in time. Slave peasents would be the slave-wage ppl.

When I discuss or compare medival peasents to current corporation workers I always compare master peasents to corposlaves.

And master peasents had it super better than corposlaves do now.

The subsistence farm does not wait for your days off. You will live your life according to its schedule, and it does not care about sick days or vacation.

To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week" is nonsense. They worked hard af for all sunlight hours for some seasons, and had plenty of leisure in times like the winter. On average, maybe that's 4 days off, but let's not pretend that working the land is not back breaking work. It's not leisure. If you really think some 40 hour wfh coding job is harder work than farming for your life, then there's no law saying you can't buy some land and go off grid. You're welcome to subsist. Hell you could land a few million subs on youtube airing the experience, that category is all the rage these days

> To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week"

Well.. noone said that. If you mind reading the comment again.

But its true that peasents had a lot more time to work on their own stuff than on what master told them to do.

Either way most peasents worked for higher tier peasent because landlord often has hubdreds of hectars of land.

with minor blips where the peasants revolt and take out those above them only to settle back under the rule of someone new. it is a minor annoyance to those amassing wealth to keep in mind.

Never really happened in my country. The second tier complained at one point, and peacefully reached an agreement with the top tier (Magna Carta.) Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.

Uh, what about the time that Parliament decapitated the king and established a Puritan dictatorship for a minute

> for a minute

Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)

>Never really happened in my country.

>Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.

So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".

> So we've shifted the goalposts

No... why do you think that?

> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth.

That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there.

Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question.

> "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years"

I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.

It's fairly simple, really. You said that wealth ratios have remained the same "for all of human history". Someone came back and pointed out that it hasn't always remained that way and there have certainly been blips. You then responded by saying "not in my country" for the past "1000 years".

Well, according to your first assertion we're not supposed to cover only your country for the past 1,000 years. We're supposed to cover all of human history - every nation, as far back as at least 10,000BCE.

Think you're mis-reading or misunderstanding!

> Someone came back and pointed out that it hasn't always remained that way and there have certainly been blips

The blips didn't change the ratios though. Ratios have stayed the same.

> You then responded by saying "not in my country" for the past "1000 years".

Yeah - my country hasn't really had those blips. And the blips in other countries didn't change the ratios anyway, just transferred who owned them, so it was a separate point.

> Well, according to your first assertion we're not supposed to cover only your country for the past 1,000 years.

No it was a separate comment and point!

I am fairly sure inequality is more extreme than that (top 10% hold 70%) at the moment, and it was less bad in the second half of the 20th century. The top US marginal income tax rate was 90% in the 1960s, and 70% in the 1970s, and it did not seem to discourage GDP growth or innovation.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...

No one actually paid those rates, so it goes. The narrative is that part of lowering the rates was closing the loop holes...

We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago.

Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials?

Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money.

Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly.

Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.

> What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos?

Here are just a few massive differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos that have nothing to do with buying luxury goods:

1. Jeff Bezos can get an audience with any Congressperson, any State governor, most countries's heads of state and probably the President of the US, with a telephone call and likely with less than 24 hours notice. That person will listen to and likely be influenced by what he says.

2. Jeff Bezos's public statements can move global financial markets.

3. Jeff Bezos can (and does) own and control mass media companies which can amplify and downplay political issues and shape the outcomes of elections.

4. Through philanthropy, Jeff Bezos can, if he wants, simply decide what counts as a "public good" to be funded and supported, as opposed to the public deciding through the democratic process. Bezos is capable of offering an amount of support for his causes that dwarfs government-funding. We are merely lucky that billionaire philanthropists have so far focused on good things like curing malaria and not on evil.

> Jeff Bezos can get an audience with any Congressperson, any State governor, most countries's heads of state and probably the President of the US, with a telephone call

Can he?

Didn't you see how US state politicians danced to get the new Amazon offices located in their state?

So some politicians took calls when it was directly relevant to their area of concern?

None of what you've said about Bezos is dependent on him having wealth though. If you could somehow construct a functioning society without money, there would still be someone who has the exact same power/influence that you've described here.

Basically, when you remove money, something else becomes the currency you're describing. Taking away billionaires wealth might actually make it harder to identify the people who have this influence. Rather than news outlets writing articles every other day about Jeff, you'd have some shady person high up in some unelected bureaucracy getting to wield this power. How is that better?

Lots of America struggles under the weight of trying to pay for basic health care and dental (50% of Americans have medical debt[1]) and for many education is utterly out of reach. 11.4% of America lives in poverty (poverty being defined as "a lack of those goods and services which are commonly taken for granted by members of mainstream society"). It's disingenuous to look at the state of things and say that because we have cellphones and cavemen didn't we're all doing fine.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/debgordon/2021/10/13/50-of-amer...

They struggle more with being overweight. Most humans in most of human history struggled with having enough food and water to survive. They would trade their struggle for ours in a heartbeat.

Americans are the people who complain when the wifi goes down or someone says the wrong word.

And cavemen would have thought the Roman's life pretty good too, but I don't know how that relates to the average American and billionaires unless it's an attempt to silence people and tell them to know their place. Societal inequality can still be a very real issue even if we're collectively on average doing better than a 19th century chimney sweep.

The problem with rich people is not that they live too comfortably, but that a person like Bezos can buy an important media property and control the political narrative that millions of people are exposed to.

> We live in the most equal time in human history. [...] Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

Well, then, surely it doesn't matter if we tax away 90% of Bezo's wealth, right? His living standard will be same.

It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it.

Beyond that, though, you can only tax away 90% of billionaires' wealth once. That whole game depends on them continuing to produce the same amount of wealth, even though they won't receive any of the returns. (Remember also that most of these people reinvest the majority of this money into their ventures, meaning that taking these dollars will have a compounding negative effect on future productivity.) Look at history. Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Why would they keep taking on so much responsibility? To raise your standard of living? Why should they care about you?

Any of those guys are capable of becoming a surf bum, living on $30k a year, but instead, they build massive companies that deliver incredible value to the rest of us — they get their money because we pay them for that value. Would you rather incentivize Elon Musk to keep working on Tesla or would you prefer him to retire?

> It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it.

So you are advocating 0% taxes?

That argument (of type Econ 101/Ayn Rand) is misguided, because the world is not as envisaged by Econ 101 (or Ayn Rand, who famously enjoyed Social Security and Medicare).

Counter arguments:

1. Society has made available the gift of the limited liability company, to encourage risk taking and entrepreneurship.

2. Society has made available streets, canalisation, schools, defence, police, fire fighters, certain forms of insurance, etc., for a simple reason: market failures. Those goods would be provided in insufficient (suboptimal) number by the free market due to: strong positive externalities, non-excludability, adverse selection, and many other reasons.

For those (and many other reasons) government does have the right to taxation. The question then is the optimal level.

> Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Yeah, the poor Northern Europeans, starving to death... Somewhat higher income, capital gains, estate, and maybe even wealth taxes won't result in mass starvation.

> they get their money because we pay them for that value.

Again, a neat Econ 101 idea that fails to take into account reality. "salary = marginal product" is only true under entirely idealised assumptions of perfect competition [1], in particular no economies of scale and no network effects. That is most definitely not the case for today's tech companies, which quite obviously have monopolistic tendencies, thus extraction of monopoly profit (rent) which accrues, guess to whom, the boss.

And, for what it's worth, if Elon becomes a surf bum, or twitters full time, we'll still get great electric vehicles, maybe a tad later.

[1] Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

While I don't agree with your conclusions, part of your arguments are correct:

> Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

From the paper below:

"This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income"

https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/technology-and-dev...

Might want to check your history books, because mine are full of failed empires and revolutions.

When they failed... did wealth redistribute, or was the bulk immediately claimed by someone else? What examples of civilisations without unequal wealth distribution are you thinking of?

That particular ratio, if true, is not the issue. Someone being one order of magnitude richer than someone else does not necessarily damage society, the problem is how much the richest 0.1% control.

Quite the opposite actually. "all of human history" spans at least 160,000 years and the inequality that you and the parent comment to are alluding to is a rather modern artifact.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

very untrue. It is well documented that income equality is more extreme now (by an order of magnitude) than it was at any point in recorded human history. The inequality is something like 100x that of french revolution times where terms like bourgeois came from. The fact that we haven't broken out in revolution yet is just a testament to how powerful the media state, corporations, and lobbying have become.

> if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody

It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities.

If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

> It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities.

> If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

How are these two passages connected? If there's one efficiently-run government organization (there are, even in the US—benefits programs tend to be quite efficient, contrary to "common knowledge") then that proves... what? That taxing the rich would equalize opportunities? The two things have practically nothing to do with one another.

> If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

Please let this trope die. The US government is generally, and especially when it comes to welfare programs, efficient.

Welfare is one of the least efficient government programs in the U.S. It's rife with corruption. What makes you think it's efficient?

"It currently stands at about 25 percent, as did in the 1970s. This means the ability of the poor to sustain a higher level of income independently of transfers has not changed over time."

[1] https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...

All of my experience dealing with the government says the exact opposite.

If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

Why is government judged on efficiency rather than service?

If there's a government agency with money to give to vision impaired people, and they set up a website (graphics heavy, non-ADA compliant of course) as the only way to sign up for the payments, that department would be extremely efficient - they might only be able to reach a fraction of their target market, but they'd do so very efficiently with little overhead and they'd even have money left over since they had so few applicants, so they could cut the budget next year!

In contrast, if that same agency took $100M of their fund to set up offices across the country, and hire outreach staff to drive to the homes of qualified applicants to help them apply, that wouldn't be very efficient, but it would provide better service.

Government is not a business and shouldn't be run like one.

The problem isn't the 91% to the 99% in my opinion. In the United States, the 99th percentile for income is ~$300,000, which is a ton of money in a low cost of living (rural) area and a decent amount of money in a high cost of living (urban) area.

But these are not the "capitalist class". They don't own significant portions of a company unless they started a small business (a lawyer or doctor running their own practice). They also generally had to go through an enormous burden to get there. A doctor for example might be nearly 40 years old with $500,000+ in debt before they're making $300k, and many doctors will never make that much, period.

The funny part of "limiting income" is that it only affects the working rich, not the capitalist class. Steve Job's salary was $1 and many CEO's famously have basically no salary and compensation in stock.

So what do you do? Tax their stock sales? We do and should do more. Force them to sell their stock for the benefit of the taxpayer? Ban them from even owning large amounts of the company? Have the government automatically own part of the company? All of these sound yikes to me.

The same limits can be applied to organizations and constellations of organizations.

Just curious, if 10% of people holding 70% of wealth is unreasonable, how do you reconcile 1% of Spotify artists getting 90% of all "streams"?

Basically, you're saying that the current distribution is crazy/unsustainable (and maybe it is) but the distribution is actually not totally out of whack with the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle).

Just wondering where your confidence comes from that a functioning society doesn't actually depend somewhat on that distribution? i.e. that the general populace's sense of "fair" isn't actually correctly calibrated at this distribution?

Actually, it's not simply the proportion, but the fact that over time the proportion of wealth held by the richest has been growing really fast. So, to use your analogy, I agree that a small number artists commanding the lion's share of attention can be fair, but if over time, an ever smaller number commanded an ever greater share, very soon every one would be listening to one artist and one song, and fair or not I don't think that would be good for Spotify, audiences, artists or anyone else.

I think there's a valid point here, but I also think (at least anecdotally) that we are trending in the direction of more people listening to fewer songs. (Would love to see some Spotify data on that front lol)

I would argue that it's not going to collapse to 1 artist or 1 song for a similar reason that all wealth will never be in the hands of 1 person. If the rate of change (or just raw distribution) in wealth is unhealthy, that will present itself in the form of a less healthy economy.

That will likely cause a bit of a churn and redistribution to sort of self correct. There's also the fact that wealth typically doesn't survive through generations all that well. If this didn't happen, the Rockafeller's/ Vanderbilt's/ Carnagie's from the past would still have the top wealth holdings - sure they are still incredibly well off and have a huge advantage from family name, but per a Forbes list none of them are in the top 2500 wealthiest.

90% of the customers voted with their "ears" to listen to 1% of music producers. Nothing wrong with that.

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