A Random Distribution of Wealth (2017)
masswerk.at
masswerk.at
There will always be inequality of talent , of effort, what have you.
If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to ensure the availability of life’s necessities so that anyone else with a similar inequality can provide the maximum benefit regardless of the circumstances they’re born into.
This is just one prominent example, another would be the huge amount of food waste produced by grocers and other retailers.
Not drilling and not refining let's them jack up prices while blaming inflation
At a macro level yes, if everyone increases supply 10% you'll see some price fluctuation, but that doesn't necessarily hold for an individual, self-interested company. Hell, that company could produce 10% more but sell it for $y-0.05 and presumably make more money selling for cheaper.
Of course there are non gasoline car uses for oil, and those are worth investing in, but there is much less of them.
This is what unbridled capitalism and profit seeking gets us
They have production capacity already and they refuse to use it
You’re suggesting they are refusing to increase production out of greed, but the greedy move would be to expand drilling and refinement to capture more of the high margin volume. Preventing this defector behavior requires an explicit cartel (see OPEC), which is not legal in the US.
So your explanation for why oil companies don’t increase production is lacking.
How does your stance make sense at all? In what market does increasing supply not lead to decreasing prices?
Of course they're going to keep restricting supply to keep prices high while they can. What I don't understand is why you're here defending them without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you
It’s super basic economics unless you control 100% of the market.
An oil provider that doubles their output from 1% of the market to 2% will only put a slight downward pressure on the price while doubling their high margin income.
The winning move is always to increase production.
> without listening to the earning calls where they literally state what I am telling you
I’m telling you that you don’t understand what they are saying. If they are unwilling to build it’s because the future of the oil is uncertain, not because the margins are high right now. The margins being high is a great reason to expand drilling even into hard to extract areas.
They don't need to build anything
They already have capacity, they have the distilleries and holding already built but sitting entirely unused, they just aren't spinning it up to purposely restrict supply and keep profit margins high. That's what we get with an oligarchy, the companies work together to control production and price.
The math is is a simple as, “why make a billion on a 500 mill investment when you can make 2 billion on 1.1 mill”? You’re suggesting they are both incompetent and not greedy, which can’t possibly be true of all of them.
The more precisely realistic one is his geometric-variance model, in which some end up in massive debt while others end up very rich--a permanent division of society into landlords/bosses and peons. In theory, the state is supposed to prevent this through taxation and policy, but what we observe in capitalist countries is that the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state that is supposed to constrain them. The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality, and the EU is only 20 years or so behind on this neoliberal roller coaster to nowhere.
Capitalism promises equilibrium, but it diverges. The people in charge will always have the power and resources to see to it that (a) they stay in charge, and (b) the gains from economic growth go solely to them.
At least some of this wealth is completely inherited (maybe even most of it). There's not a good mechanism to determine how much someone should inherit, but I bet wealth being limited to the lifetime of one person would certainly change the model and make it not-so-inevitable.
The results of the "precisely realistic" model (according to you) are not taking into account the self-employed members of society but are also attempting to create an artificial divide in the aformentioned society by labeling them ("peons"? seriously?). So much for your seemingly pro-equality message.
What exactly is the state supposed to prevent? Employment of individuals by other individuals? The ability of an individual to OWN property rather than being at the states mercy? Free trade between members of society?
"...the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state..." golly gee, so that's why all of those non-capitalist, anti-wealth utopias of the past are...gone?
"The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and inequality..." except the American perception of corruption and inequality is "i earn 70k per year, i drive Hyundai, my boss earns 200k, he drives Mercedes, very bad!!!" which is different from say earning 3k per year, not having any access to quality financing services (which would allow you to start your OWN business) and on top of that not having a vehicle at all (which in many countries, especially the post-antiwealth-utopias is still a pipe dream for most).
No it doesn't. Capitalism promises and provides the ability to convert your abilities, wealth and products of abilities/wealth/wealth+abilities as an individual or a group of individuals into monetary units which are then used as "fuel" for facilitating trade/services in the society.
Also i find it ironic that your last sentence perfectly describes every communist state of the past: they stay in charge (one party system, transfer of power between the Party members), the gains from economic growth go solely to them (the state is the only employer and services/products provider and as a result the Party becomes the main benefactor from everyones labour while the people recieve mere scraps without any way establish any business of their own) and how it also ignores that regardless of the system in use taxation is still a thing with the only difference being the percentage of taxes taken.
Perhaps it's time to stop trying to make false equialences of hierarchy and capitalism, considering that the latter allows you to minimize your dependency on any sort of a hierarchy?
Well let me be the devil's advocate here and ask why.
Is there any compelling reason not to make the life of other people better? Is there any reason we should leave people work countless hours, suffer, and likely dying due to diseases that manifest out of stress (e.g. cancer)?
Imagine for a moment a society such that there's no need for the proles to steal or hurt people. Criminality drops to near zero, world is safer, we all get to thrive.
Edit:
Kind reminder to argue for the position instead of downvoting out of disagreement.
[0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/coping/feelings/stress-f...
Definition of a zero sum game:
A situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it
And myriads of instances where helping others makes your life better. In-fact, not to help other people is unequivocally a horrible and myopic decision. For starters, we need exponential number of scientists to keep making linear progress. Furthermore, paying taxes which are used to fund education results in lower criminality [1]. Furthermore, we have that investing in education can give back a 5x ROI [2].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4901649_The_Effect_...
> For example, it is now generally acknowledged that for heart disease—the nation’s leading cause of death—emotional stress is a major risk factor, equal in importance to other such recognized risk factors as hypertension, cigarette smoking, elevated serum cholesterol level, obesity, and diabetes. Stress also has been recognized as an important risk factor in high blood pressure, ulcers, colitis, asthma, pain syndromes (e.g., migraine, cluster, and tension headaches; backaches), skin diseases, insomnia, and various psychological disorders. Most standard medical textbooks attribute anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all disease to stress-related origins.
https://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-stress/s...
At least in the United States:
No one ‘has to’ crime. People commit crime primarily because they have poor impulse control and lack long term thinking.
Or because they just really don’t like school and don’t like working a job, and don’t have any other ideas.
We aren’t living in medieval France where peasants are stealing loaves of bread. People aren’t committing crimes because they are poor. Lots of incredibly poor people commit no crime at all. Statistically it is a small subset of people.
because there's civil unrest otherwise.
I'm playing devil's advocate, but indeed there are those who agree with that statement. Who gets to decide which is right?
Maybe you saw another post?
The question is why would you prefer there being civil unrest to there not being civil unrest?
And if you prefer the latter why would you not exercise whatever power you have to realize your preference?
The phrase "civil unrest" is far too tame; it doesn't even begin to conjure the horrors that people are capable of when they get angry enough.
Anyway, if death is the price you have to pay for living a life true to yourself, in accordance with your values, in accordance with what you think is right and not what you think will appease some hypothetical angry mob, then so be it. Surely it's better to live a short life true to what you believe, than a slightly longer life lacking any sense of integrity.
And that's why pure self interest is something to be avoided even by people who only care about themselves.
Some elites might imagine that they can remain on top forever, unaffected by the violence and oppression they inflict on others. History suggests otherwise.
We even had the cycle of elite-formation and power-accumulation into civil unrest and collapse happen in the Soviet union, which was literally engineered to prevent this exact thing from happening, complete with profound socialist indoctrination of the population. They weren't supposed to be self-interested, yet when it came down to it, they were.
Overall I'm fairly skeptical toward the notion that societies can be designed at all, to a meaningful degree.
What fundamentally shapes the human societies is human nature which is self-interested and largely immutable. You can try to force it, to artificially make societies that contradict human nature through the imposition of rules, but that's if anything even more volatile, because that makes all their citizens unhappy, like animals in a zoo.
As you said: the "cycle of elites climbing to the top and being overthrown...sucks for those involved".
Having acknowledged that it sucks, why not try to improve it?
The problem is that while you can convince someone briefly that your new utopia is a good idea, as the years go by, people start having other ideas, they start wanting things. Self-interest never really went away. So you need to stop them from thinking wrong and wanting the wrong things and having the wrong ideas, and the only way to do that is through oppressive totalitarianism.
Human institutions ossify and start to serve the ends of their own power accumulation, no matter how noble their initial ideals and goals were.
> If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to ensure the availability of life’s necessities
That's an individual decision, not an oppressive dystopian institution.
In fact, one way we could start working on reducing inequality is to reduce the oppressive dystopian elements of our current institutions.
And toward that end, we should note that any elite privileges you may enjoy ultimately rest on the ability to call on the government to use force on your behalf.
My personal worldview is quiet bleak and I'm very glad to already be in the middle of my thirties, because I struggle to find a reason which would matter to them.
I don't think there is any chance we'll avoid mass murder on the average people at this point, and I doubt the average software developer will escape unharmed either long term. Hopefully after I'm dead though.
If you imagine a scale from [0, 1] where 0 is no redistributive mechanisms at all and 1 is perfect, daily rebalancing to exact equality of outcome, it's fairly obvious to me that neither extreme of 0 nor 1 is "the very idea of goodness itself".
Civil unrest led to women's suffrage, racial equality, and countless other things that are indeed good. Good things sometimes come from bad situations.
There's very little to support your argument that "Why can't there just be civil unrest?" is arguing against the idea of goodness itself.
When you think about that, there is no way declared to be free markets are actually free.
Separately, speaking as someone that spends a lot of time with optimizers, it seems silly to not have _some_ form of regularization. That doesn't mean zero inequality (that doesn't seem good either) but we should be wary of unchecked inequality.
The potential for consumption is infinite.
Most heart disease and cancer, the two biggest cost centers, are somehow self-inflicted. People choose to eat badly and take drugs. In fact, moving away from a post-scarcity society would be the best at mitigating healthcare costs. If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny servings of grain and produce, they would have less health problems and live longer.
> student loans
This is also self-inflicted. People do not need to get the vast majority of degrees that they have. Most people are attending college to get the college experience. They want to party and waste time because stacking up loans is easier to them than actually working a job they are fit for. The degrees they are choosing to get are not serving to increase their employability, and burdening society's balance sheets for the debt they never pay off. We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated.
> housing
Housing is extremely cheap. It is not extremely cheap in the Bay Area, but if we forced the chronically homeless, criminals, and indigents on section 8 to move to affordable locales we would not only no longer have a housing crisis, but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy.
One small disaster that disrupts the food supply chain and they'll quickly be starving and turn to violence.
>We should start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot be educated.
I don't even know how you would begin to definitively determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less denying something which is handed out freely in other countries.
>but we could restore the cities that have been lost to their degeneracy.
Income inequality is vastly more responsible for city degeneration than the homeless.
I believe there is already data out there that correlates a specific college degree with average income post-graduation. Lenders should require degree focus and inversely scale interest to expected income. Getting a loan at 14% to major in history might steer people towards engineering, nursing, or go into a trade.
Think of it like how the US does credit scores: the lower the score the higher the interest rate.
Is it - cancer is self inflicted or homelessness disappears if the homeless are removed or kids get 100K+ loans to party for unemployment.
This is one of the great achievements of humankind, and while we have much more to do, it's good to recognize the progress we've made.
And while I'm also skeptical about the amount of resources organizations use to maintain themselves, any organization or organism or community that does not have a primary goal of keeping itself alive will in short order cease to exist. If you think your organization has a long-term beneficial purpose, you better design it to be self-sustaining, and with a large margin of safety.
> hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our position we will always want more
There's an Indian holy man, now deceased, who said we need to learn to practice "ceiling on desires". It may be that only the expression of our higher values can clear this logjam?
> so how this could happen without damage to the environment
One thought that occurs to me is if we could create a kind of split-level economy. There would be a real-world ecologically-informed economy that met basic needs as efficiently as possible. On top of that substrate we would have a computer-mediated virtual economy where there were no (or very few) effective limits on hedonistic adaptation (or status-symbol seeking, or whatever). It seems like we're seeing something like that emerge "naturally" anyway, eh? NFT & "crypto", in-game purchases, whatever FB's metaverse becomes, etc.
Eventually, people might submit voluntarily to enter "the Matrix": your physical body kept perfectly safe, and the only limits are your imagination? Not my cup of tea, but not insane on the face of it, eh?
You cannot remove government policy from the equation. It's like trying to solve a problem with code while removing the computer. The code runs on the computer, with out it, it's meaningless.
The government could stop passing any new laws and things would chug along fine for quite a while. I think that was the parent's point. We don't need anything new out g Washington, as driving prices to 0 is already pretty strongly incentivized.
That's part of what's driving inflation. And that's what inevitably happens when sectors consolidate towards monopoly or small enough oligopolies where company's convergent interests can align and they start competing on things other than price.
This is part of what we see driving current inflation. There's a lot of talk about how the labor market is driving inflation, or pandemic shocks are, and both of those are true. But corporate profits are still at record highs and rising. If supply shocks and labor prices were truly the main driver, then corporate profits should be near zero. They're not. Companies are taking advantage of the fact that inflation is already going up and that they have convenient scapegoats to raise their prices far more than they need to in order to cover labor increases or increase supply. There are reports of executives bragging about this to their boards. [1]
Edit: To follow up, these ideas that the Capitalist free market system and competition incentivize innovation aren't actually founded in empirical research of any kind. It's pure theorizing and it's theorizing based on a house of cards of bad assumptions.
One can zoom out and look at history and see that the standard of living for people has steadily increased, and humans have steadily innovated. But there's no empirical evidence to support the idea that it's a capitalist free market driving those advances.
Yes they advanced further in free societies, most of which have up until now employed some version of a Capitalist free market linked to more or less social democracy. But you could just as readily theorize that those advances are just down to an innate desire in people to make the world a better place for everyone, an innate desire to innovate. And that authoritarian societies squash their opportunities to do so, while freer societies leave enough opportunities open that they enable them. But they don't necessarily add incentives for that innovation in addition to the innate incentives.
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/big-companies-keep-bragging-...
The two are actually not mutually exclusive. Each node in the market tried to push their own costs to 0 and their own prices to INF. The net effect is what matters, and in a competitive market the net is to move toward 0.
Software is a great example. Tons of money pours into it specifically because products can be provided with near 0 marginal cost.
> To follow up, these ideas that the Capitalist free market system and competition incentivize innovation aren't actually founded in empirical research of any kind. It's pure theorizing and it's theorizing based on a house of cards of bad assumptions
If you ignore the largest most comprehensive experiment on the planet, the global market, then sure. Markets with stable, enforceable, property laws do better than any other setup.
The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of arable land and raw materials to host a human population. Some of the major conflicts over the 20th century in this area have revolved around land reform and land ownership, whether it was breaking up feudal estates and redistributing land to peasants (Russian Revolution) or expansionist ideologies (Germany's 'Push to the East' for 'lebensraum', aka 'settler colonialism' which was also a feature in America's 'Manifest Destiny').
The United States is again setting the stage for such conflicts with the majority of young people being priced out of the housing market. Homeownership rates shot up after FDR's New Deal reforms, and there was a brief peak in 2004 before a sustained collapse that showed some signs of recent recovery:
https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state...
It's fairly skewed by age and this increasing (probably high student loan debt being a major factor), i.e. homeowners are getting older and fewer young people are buying homes:
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...
Also educated, healthy populations tend to have fewer kids. This isn't an overnight fix, but a long term goal. So the first move is to learn to share like the toddlers we are.
It's not easy and we dont have a solution yet. Greed is fundamental.
As in, taxation + inflation is not enough? We spend 27.9% through government (a "shared resource"). How much more should we disincentivize work?
I think it'll have to be phases. The first goal would be fewer musks/besos/gates etc and spread that wealth around.
Eventually maybe we succeed in automating most of the menial work and let humans collective imagination drive the future.
Greed though. That's our races great filter.
All populations we have which come even close to the living standard a post scarcity world would have are below replacement level and the closer they come, to lower the amount of children. I wouldn't see why you would assume a growing population.
Our economy favors real estate owners maximizing their profit from owning property, regardless of how inaccessible that makes housing to a large portion of the population.
For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world, but some people still go hungry. There is plenty of land and buildings to house everyone, but some people are still homeless. There is far more than enough clothes, but some people still have to wear rags.
I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.
people say that, but it's not true.
We barely have enough to launch stuff into space. There's plenty of limits of resources, and are hard to obtain (e.g., rare earth metals, fossil fuels, etc).
Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food production such that some people are looking at starvation - of course, not in the western countries, but that's not what a post-scarcity society looks like.
By the lack of being able to send much to space, we must not currently be in a post-scarcity society, because space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society.
You're making claims about how space things align with post-scarcity that doesn't match up with the accepted meaning.
Even still, we _can_ send stuff into space, now cheaper than ever. What is the threshold for "send much to space"? Any person can order up a rocket payload on Amazon.space and have it placed in orbit? That doesn't sound good even if it were free. Especially if it were free...
> space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get accomplished by a post-scarcity society
Why?
Strictly speaking, this is false.
I genuinely do not understand how people can claim 'post scarcity' ( unlimited ) access to resources on a, clearly, very limited resource that is Earth.
exactly, this is what i have issue with calling post-scarcity.
may be the term could be "universal basic income capable" (UBI-able).
This is only because we pretend that the free market can solve these kinds of problems. If it weren't for supply chains that optimize in cost efficiency and nothing else, these sort of problems don't necessarily have to exist.
We could absolutely give everyone on earth the median standard of living. If we divided everything up equally (84.71 trillion [global GDP] / 7.753 billion [world population]) we are talking about something like 11 grand per person, per year, total overall spending. That's housing, food, healthcare, fire, police, roads, schooling, etc.
For most people on earth that would be a big raise[0], although virtually everyone in the west would be dramatically poorer.
[0]https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-inc...
People can still lead a good life by focussing upon social rather than material facets. We do not need communications networks to socialize, nor do we need overpowered silicon chips to entertain. This is not to dismiss the positive roles of those technologies. Better communications and computation certainly help in everything from agriculture to medicine. It is just that using them as a proxy in applications where they do not contribute to human welfare can be tremendously counterproductive. The same thing can be said for space exploration, perhaps even more assertively since it is a huge drain of resources with a disproportionately isolated gain.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up, because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the problems down the social pyramid. When the system experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid and crunches the people at the bottom.
We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the ability to change the system, the more incentives they have to not change the system.
(Those priorities are not, in fact, more important.)
Energy is also scarce. A limited amount of solar energy falls on the Earth, and if you need more than that, it gets very expensive (from space somehow).
Food is limited by labor (which scales with people) but also by energy and land (which do not).
As such, there will always be scarcity, signalled through prices. One way of making resources more abundant per person is capping/reducing population.
Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations.
Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy.
It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.
This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%.
> Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy
This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.
A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world in dozens of passenger jets several times just in the course of living has an enormous amount of available energy relative to any time in history. If this is scarce, we don't have a word for what it was like before.
> A lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel
Actually they are. My city is dumping earth into a lake to make new land for residential development. And China is literally building islands in the sea to extend its domain.
So much of society in western nations and especially the US is seemingly optimized to be as wasteful as possible. We live in mansions surrounded by unused land so we have to drive our personal gas-burning suit of armor everywhere, and then we store it in fields of asphalt at our destination. We put resources subsidizing foods that no one will eat, and then ship them to people in ways that maximize the labor to goods transported ratio.
In the US at least, there really just isn't much motivation to be more efficient because the past couple of generations have been raised on perpetual abundance.
For space rockets, the further you want to go, the more fuel you must carry, but all that fuel weighs something until burned, so you need yet more fuel just to launch the other fuel into space. So as your rocket's range increases, the needed fuel to reach that range grows at least polynomially.
For cars, having one enables you to drive to places... but those places need gas stations and parking. The more cars there are, the greater the proportion of land dedicated to roads, refueling and parking. But then there's less space for the places you'd actually want to go, pushing them further. And then you need more gas stations and parking to get that far. And then there's less space again. Repeat ad infinitum.
Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.
Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.
Of course, all of this is on a scale well beyond what we need to (currently) be concerned with- we don't have the technology to fully utilize what we have to fully eliminate scarcity in the first place.
One of the big things we learned during the 20th Century is that this is not true. As basic needs are met, and people (especially women) are educated and socially empowered, population growth slows regardless of how much land is available.
After all, a zero percent interest rate implies the non scarcity of capital.
The problem isn’t we haven’t solved how to make enough food to feed everyone, it’s that it’s not profitable to feed those that can’t pay for it.
There's nothing simple about distribution. It's at least as hard as producing stuff in the first place.
Solving distribution in a way that is both fair and economically sustainable has also proved to be extremely hard--much harder than just producing enough.
Despite the moral problems inherent to market-based pricing (the poor go to the back of the line), all the alternatives we've tried so far have led to far worse results.
Not if you include the population of the world outside of a few rich western countries.
This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate, to be able to feed everyone. That's not even half of it. Distribution and logistics are key, particularly making it robust to all sorts of shocks (droughts, conflict, etc). A lot of areas experiencing famine/hunger are places with very bad governance and infrastructure. Fixing that is Hard and Expensive, and once you do they'll never go hungry again because existing food available for sale elsewhere in the world will make its way there, either always or when needed.
>I don’t have the answer. But I know there’s more to it than technology and innovation.
The answer is in social innovation, and half the issue is letting go of ideological baggage. Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool in a toolbox. Most importantly, we need way more experimentation.
Suppose I were to suggest that we think of Feudalism as a tool in the box, or Slavery/Forced labor. Some economies used to be run like that. And nobody said you have to use that "tool". The thing is - it's not really a tool, which "we" can collectively apply towards reaching accepted social ends. And neither is Capitalism.
I hate how people push centralized government and economies without a single shred of evidence that they have ever produced anything other than misery.
What kind of nonsense is that? We already have the tools, land value taxes and negative interest rates aka demurrage money.
The solutions are trivial, and that is exactly why curing the symptoms can be nothing but complex.
Demurrage money results in the neutrality of money and thereby activates a lot of economic theories that free market advocates take for granted when there is endless evidence that they don't work in a permanent money aka non neutral money system.
Full employment is the default in a market economy, there is no such thing as a business cycle. It is only once you add non neutral money with the artificial zero lower bound that you get monetary cycles.
If money is neutral, then debts won't have to grow eternally and there is no need to erode them with inflation.
You must be one of those anarcho-communists.
It's more that the people who cant get enough food dont have anything that the people who have an excess of it really want.
Global wealth distribution is more the issue than logistics and that wealth includes legal monopolies on all the worlds most arable lands intrinsically backed by the threat of violence.
Sure they do. It's just that forefingers own everything of value in their countries and every time they elect someone to do something about it, the US violently overthrows them, covertly or overtly.[1]
1. https://github.com/binka/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md
What are these legal monopolies on arable land? Do you mean the countries that contain the land or something else?
This is silly. You say that as if the western countries aren't the same and didn't put those people in power...
Also, it's funny how you blame socialists for society not being able to fix the problems of capitalism.
This.
I repeat this over and over again, so sincere apologies to those who are tired of it, I'm a Bucky Fuller fan boy. He was an engineer who had a kind of epiphany one day, and he realized that he could maximize the benefit for humanity of his personal skills and talents if he did his best to work on behalf of all humanity. He went on to invent things like the geodesic dome, and was one of the most famous Americans world wide in his time. He traveled around the world something like eighty times (not eighty days, eighty times.)
Anyway, he calculated (remember he was an engineer) that if we applied our technology and resources efficiently to solving our basic human needs (the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid, eh?) then by sometime in the 1970's it should be possible that people could have careers of only two years duration and then retire, having accrued enough wealth to live "happily ever after" for the rest of their lives.
> ...there’s more to it than technology and innovation. Because those have already given us what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.
Yes. The technology arrived right on schedule, but the (relatively simple) logistical arrangements have not yet materialized.
This seems to me to be a straightforward social/political movement. But it seemed that way back in the 60's with Bucky's "Design Science Revolution" as he called it, yet here we are.
So, yeah, we have all the technology we need, we just have to organize and apply it efficiently and everybody on Earth could have food, shelter, clothes, energy, etc. Not only that, but we could do it in ecologically harmonious ways so that we're increasing the healthy and vitality of the world rather than grinding it down (as most of our systems do today.)
It would be fun and easy.
I have no idea why it's not more popular.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
It isn't as simple as "just send other places more food" when the local power-tripping dictator will just seize the foreign aid
The argument should be to form a society that embraces that fact. But there are certain inefficiencies within out late stage that may stop this an equitable form from happening. As well as be catastrophic if not handled as infrastructure. As the question is what game are we using these AI tools to solve? Profit? Beware of offering stock in market dominated by AI actors that can willingly create disinformation in seconds to pump or short your companies stock arbitrarily. Etc...
Forcing someone into a collective against their will is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery. This by far the greater sin for those who believe in the primacy of individual will and choice.
Even if you wanted to create it on a limited/bounded small scale, basically everything people with this type of mindset are doing and supporting, directly sabotages any ability to ever achieve it. For example; you cannot have "post scarcity", while increasing the demand on resources through immigration on a local level or in general through exponential population growth like in basically all non-European regions of the world.
In broad strokes, Europe and especially the USA were not only "post scarcity societies" up until about 1970, but negative scarcity societies, producing excess of their needs and spreading that across the globe altruistically.
It is precisely that negative scarcity state that elevated every other people of the world for so long; be it by feeding, sharing technology and knowledge, providing medical care, education, etc. to the whole of the non-European world. Essentially nothing we currently benefit from and enjoy in the whole world is not the product of Europeans that had produced a post and negative scarcity world by various means. Look around you, not a single thing you use and benefits you was not produced by some Europeans.
That process has been poisoned, the micro-dosing of poison starting in about the turn of the 19th century in the USA, as groups started sabotaging, betraying, exploiting, usurping, and undermining the system of negative scarcity.
I think there is some confusion that people are suffering from. We are not moving towards less scarcity, we are moving directly towards increased scarcity; largely precisely because of the confusion and distorted perspective you are looking at things from. You confused the short time scale view of the leveling curve as positive, when in reality it was becoming ever more negative and we are now approaching or at the turning point/apex.
To illustrate; the whole world's population in 1850 was the same as is projected for Nigeria lone by 2100 that has a supposed population of 218M, which is currently increasing at about 9M per year, or about 20 more people if it took you 1 minute to read this far. And that's just one country of Africa, who's overall population is expected to increase by 1.5 Billion by 2050, or about 100 people by the time you read this far. Tonight, if you watch a movie for roughly 90 minutes, by the end of it, there will be 9,000 more people in Africa than when you started the movie. Is the world, let alone Africa producing just alone enough food to feed 9,000 more people all their life by the end of the movie you watched? I don't know, but it seems unlikely. Let's ask the billionaires who want you to eat bugs so they can continue eating beef.
Ironically, that is largely due to the "post scarcity society" that the USA and Europe had produced, largely due to the generosity and incentives destroying principle of "post scarcity society", aka utopian fantasy.
A grain silo is also a "post scarcity society" for mice, until the population explodes, they ruin the grain, and the population collapses amidst either a massive die off or a surge of mice that scour the countryside and spread the devastation.
Scarcity is generally a good thing, it forces prioritization and self-regulation. We are today seeing the effects of "post scarcity" in rather real terms as inflation eats through our economies due to "post scarcity" caused by currency printing that is deflection of realty at best and fraud at worst. The laws of physics remain in effect all throughout though.
Someone implemented the simulation for this as well so you can play around with it here [2]. It is definitely very interesting and shows how essentially a small element of luck will result in a situation where a single person becomes the owner of all wealth.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
[2] http://www.physics.umd.edu/hep/drew/math_general/yard_sale.h...
I forgot author/title.
It's quite sad to see it presented here without attribution; the appropriate reference is Michalek and Hanson, 2006 [1]. For the physically inclined, this [2] is a more detailed description of the underlying mechanics.
[1]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed083p581 [2]: http://hyad.es/boltzmann
This tells me that having debt and no way to reliably pay it off is a really bad situation to be in. Consider income vs. expenses. If the first is consistently higher, life is relaxed. If the second, life is very stressful. If they match then life seems OK then falls apart following some reasonably short-term time horizon. This model bakes that in to the assumptions and sends a lot of people broke, as we might predict.
The two interesting questions that follow from this seem to be:
1. How to convince people who are doing OK to consistently spend less than they earn?
2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or won't save money?
This distribution is without merit and counts as a harmful thing. I'm not sure why any intelligent person would be enthusiastic about it when by definition it represents nothing useful, and at worst damages potentially useful economic players for no benefit at all.
But that certainly isn't how people should operate - if you spend what you earn, sooner or later a surprise will bankrupt you. Helpful tip: nobody should plan to get that outcome. It sucks. Save some money.
I don't believe we can.
Not sure under what premises we should, in a way we (society) already do, personal finance training is only a quick google search away. Free will has its price.
> 2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or won't save money?
We (society) can offer tools, but then it's up to the individuals to use them, or not:
* Bankruptcy
* Personal Finance training that's only a quick Google search away.
In both cases we need to thread carefully, Free Will and Agency are things that we (society) don't want to mess with.
Rental prices increase to capture any excess income, on average you can't save money because the rental prices will increase to capture it all. One way to avoid this would be to take 10% in taxes and not allow access for X years, thus forcing everyone to save 10%, and thus allowing less money to be spent on rent.
Generally, in a functioning society, price-fixing and collusion and extortion count as crime. I would say the distinction between this and collective rent fixing (coordinated, or as an epiphenomenon of the underlying system with self-interested rational actors) is pretty moot: society either decides to dictate the limits of this behavior, or it does not.
The idea that exploding rent prices are inevitable and unquestionable is… well, it's an idea. One might contest the idea of building a functioning society on that assumption. Might consider that behavior being something in the way of criminal behavior, at least on the scale of petty larceny, if not something more serious.
Only if it's student debt you owe. It can still take years to foreclose on a house.
There is a threshold where you have enough so to speak and can start investing in the future. I would say this is typical for the middle class. There is potential to spend in a smarter way here. You get more opportunities, social currency etc.
But being poor is expensive. You have to spend money on subpar quality products because you need them. You pay interest on different forms of debt, which keeps you down. You are constantly worried about the next large bill and are being pestered by bureaucracies and owners (banks, state, landlord etc.).
So below the threshold you get pushed down, above the threshold you get lifted up. It takes incredible effort and discipline to pass the threshold from below.
> 2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or won't save money?
1) There's two aspects to this. One I described above and I'm pretty sure this represents the vast majority of cases. Cover the basics with free education, cheap housing and good infrastructure and allow debt forgiveness or just give them money or interest free loans. Basically make sure that the lowest points in the graph (OP) is livable and dignified. This way everyone gets more opportunities to do really good stuff and everyone benefits from that across all layers. Plain and simple.
2) There are also people who are just wired to fuck this up for whatever reason, they need more support and care than anyone else. If they are uncooperative you have to let bang their head into the wall and hope they learn from the pain. You can't help everyone though. It has to be a two way street.
At the very low end you could be pushed down. If you can only afford $5000 for a car, it'll be expensive in the long run. But its also true that on the high end you get pushed down as well. If you have a lot of money and feel the need to buy an expensive car that's no more reliable than a much cheaper car. Plus you have to pay more for insurance, maintenance, etc.
Wanting a 5 million dollar car doesn't count as getting pushed down. And its unreliability isn't really in the same context as depending on the $5000 (or $500) beater. If your 5 million dollar car conks out, you are more frustrated than endangered: no thing that you do is seriously at risk, as you'll have alternate ways to get to work etc., including the random acquisition of the same $5000 car, which to you is pocket change, beneath consideration.
Edit for two Examples:
* I want ice cream but I don’t want to actually leave my apartment and none of the grocery stores have delivery slots open for the rest of the day.
* Champagne cork flying damaged my priceless artwork
Maybe its fun burning money, working a job you hate, spending time away from your friends and family, working till you drop dead. I don't know I'm not rich.
> If your 5 million dollar car conks out, you are more frustrated than endangered: no thing that you do is seriously at risk
You have a very weird perception of things. First, there are no $5 million cars. Have you ever met someone with money? Are they chill about trashing their property? Oh I totaled my $150k car, no big deal! I have an infinite amount of money. People go broke all the time.
Take it from a literal billionaire and former CEO of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein:
> “I can’t imagine how all this is going to come out when you publish,” he says, looking fleetingly concerned…. Blankfein insists he is “well-to-do”, not rich. “I can’t even say ‘rich’,” he insists. “I don’t feel that way. I don’t behave that way.” He says he has an apartment in Miami as well as New York. But he abjures most of the trappings. “If I bought a Ferrari, I’d be worried about it getting scratched,” he jokes.
No one has enough money or doesn't care about burning money.
There are cars selling $4M new from the factory.[0] Because of the scammy economics of these limited edition hypercars, if you are eligible (!), you can buy these and instantly flip them with a million or two in profit.
If you get into vintage collectible cars, there is no real upper limit. Here is a 1955 Mercedes for $140M: [1]
If you think that is ridiculous, you are too mild. But it is real.
[0] https://www.caranddriver.com/bugatti/chiron-2021 [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/19/business/mercedes-worlds-...
The reason the pushing down is asymmetric for rich & poor when it comes to cars is that cars have some minimum expenses that can be pretty high relative to a poor person’s income, and below that minimum they lose access to a car (which in reality pushes them down eve further). Someone on the high end might choose to spend more on a car than their income safely allows, but they actually have a choice of how much to spend on a car, whereas someone on the low end might only have the choice to spend slightly more than they can actually afford, in other words very little choice.
I guess I must be misunderstanding you, because this seems obviously wrong. A very poor person spends ~100% of their income on nutrition and shelter, and their investment rate is 0%. A very rich person spends ~0% of their income on nutrition and shelter and their investment rate approaches 100%.
Do you have evidence for this claim? I don’t believe it’s true. Take food, for example, the US government publishes the fact that food spending as a share of income declines as income rises.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
You will die, some religions will let you take it with you, but none that are popular today. So you may as well spend whatever you earn on things that you think will make you happy.
Where are you getting this from? It’s definitely not true when it comes to savings and investment. It’s not true for food, as I linked below. Its not true for travel. It’s not true for housing either. Why do you believe this?
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/housing-e...
“Low-income families spent a far greater share of their income on core needs, such as housing, transportation, and food, than did upper-income families.”
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
For example in one of the links they discriminate food away from home etc.
It's not the one I'm remembering but it looked a bit like this one: https://flowingdata.com/2018/02/08/how-different-income-grou...
It looks rather proportional. But I have to admit, here housing is fatter at the low and. Personal insurance/pension gets fatter the more you move up. Education is interesting as it is fat at the very low end, gets thinner for a bit, but after the lower middle gets fatter again continuously. It also cuts off after 200k yearly income, so there's that.
OR, rephrased
How do you convince people who are doing OK to not increase prices so that other people's expenses won't exceed their incomes?
How do you get that from this model? In this model it's equally as likely to go from -50 to 50 as it is to go from 100 to 150.
What I get from this model is there may be natural discrepancies in wealth not necessarily attributable to a systematic bias. It's what Taleb likes to call Mediocristan vs Extremistan. The tallest person won't be 100 times taller than the median person, but the richest person may be well over 100 times richer than the median person.
It isn't. You can see that the distribution isn't symmetric, that the individual bars aren't random walks and the equations used are explained down below the graphs.
The whole problem is that it's just as likely to go from -50 to 50 as it is to go from 100 to 150, but this does NOT in any way change the fact that actors will exist within the system that end up at 1000 for no good reason, causing lots of other actors to be at -50 for no good reason.
The fact that it's just as likely for one of 'em to randomly get lucky and start surging up to 1000, as it is for the actor at 1000 to go to 2000, is not the point. Point being, it's not about merit, it's about the automatic emergence of that distribution when it's not warranted and is in fact harmful.
(assuming that the points being awarded in an economic model have anything to do with existence and the ability to function, create and innovate versus being stifled and unable to execute on ideas)
Why save a money when they are worthless (inflation)?
a) Inequality is not just the fault of some actors, who are either ingenious/proficient/hard-working/greedy or incompetent/insufficient/lazy, but a natural byproduct of interaction.
b) We should be careful when attributing economic success to merit, since this may be just a tautological assertion of inherent random processes, even in a model as simple as this.
Now imagine, what will happen, if we add systematic biases of all kind, the costs (and profits) of debt being another of these factors. What this may mean in terms of politics and if there arises any kind of obligation for the society that enables and necessitates these interactions is left to the beholder.
import numpy as np
W = np.ones(1000, dtype = int)*100
for _ in range(1000000):
i = np.random.randint(1000)
j = np.random.randint(1000)
if W[j] == 0:
continue
W[i] += 1
W[j] -= 1
$0 | #####
$10 | #########
$20 | ###########
$30 | ##############
$40 | ###############
$50 | #######################
$60 | #################################
$70 | ##################################################
$80 | ####################################
$90 | ##############################################
$100 | #########################################
$110 | ########################################
$120 | ######################################
$130 | ############################
$140 | #########################
$150 | #####################
$160 | ################
$170 | ########
$180 | ########
$190 | #####
$200 | #You mean your toy simulation of wealth follows a Guassian Distribution.
Most people I know are not randomnly giving dollars to the entire population pool, they are mostly giving them to already wealthy corporations.
Wealth in real life is not independent. People with more wealth have more investment opportunities and thus more ability to grow, tending to a power law. You can see the same phenomenon with craters on the moon.
for _ in range(10000):
for i in range(N_players):
if W[i] > 0:
j = np.random.randint(N_players)
W[i] -= 1
W[j] += 1
In your model, on every step a random person gives to another random person if he has money left.
In the model from the post, every step everybody gives something, but a random person gets something. This asymmetry between getting and giving is enough to cause (large) inequality!
Everybody goes down with the same speed, but dumb luck at some point can actually bring your wealth up really high very fast, and since the downward speed is limited, you will stay rich for a long time.
At a higher level: the average behaves the same upward and downward, but the flukes behave differently.
There's also the possibility the random number generator is not sufficiently uniform.
The total number of heads after N coin flips follows a binomial distribution [0]. So too does the total number of times an individual will receive a dollar over N game rounds.
So I don't really see the usefulness of this incentives-less simulation, money never flows randomly. To me this does not really prove anything.
There's also a discontinuity if you leave out the debt part, further aggravating the problem, but the bottom line is if it's random then you can have tons of people giving their dollar to one person for NO reason. And the person with all those dollars still (by the rules of the game) gives one dollar away each step.
Pretty sure that's how it arises. Think of it as, the ultrawealthy actor is no different or better than the others, but they 'went viral'.
I don't know how the system handles debt - but it appears to compound & exponentiate the inequality (which is true in reality).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_distribution
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_uniform_distribut....
CLT dominates only if you do the sim wrong by making unrealistic simplifying assumptions (e.g. that each round is independent and variance is constant) that effectively eliminate the main parts of the simulated system and ensure that the simulation gets misleading results.
*******
The CLT simply says that the distribution of a sum of random variables will be Gaussian (as the number of random variables being summed tends to infinity).
It is not obvious to me that the agent-level difference equations in this simulation would naturally lead to the overall distribution of wealth being a sum of random variables.
However, I think you are correct and I am wrong about the population level distribution; I wrote and ran the simulation myself and got a Gaussian-looking distribution at the population level.
Do some reading on geometric vs additive means, and on the log-normal distribution for finance.
'should' has nothing to do with it. It provably doesn't. Even in the absence of any complicating factors or considerations of value or merit.
If everyone has an equal (random) chance of winning, the person who can play the most games wins in the end.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
You see this in sports where Steph Curry isn’t much more likely to hit any specific 3 pointer than any other NBA player. But he tries almost an order of magnitude more often. So now he’s known as one of the highest scorers in the game.
Where did you get that stat from? He is almost in the top 10 of all time in terms of shooting percentage [1]. What makes that understated is how much he shoots. The people above him on the list only shot them when they were "guaranteed" whereas he shoots them all the time.
[1] - https://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/fg3_pct_career....
It is not descriptive of social reality; and it is also not the desirable social reality. So, I don't quite see how it is useful.
intervention (weath distribution) can only lead to more inequality.
there is no solution.
all of you on the left: your equality of outcome bs will not help.
all of you on the right: your "you just need to work hard" bs will not not help.
life is hard.
The weird thing about defining the amount of money given this way is that as people go further into debt, they give more and more money.