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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

I agree that oligarchs are a problem but some of the other assumptions are wrong.

First, we are already in a very unequal world. Putting aside the oligarchs and monopolies which again are very problematic, advanced technologies have the potential to lessen inequality and raise everyone's standard of living.

I view the inequality and symptoms of that like oligarchs as a failure of societal organization and again, properly integrating high technology into society is probably the best tool we have for fighting that.

That doesn't mean that I agree with the classical technocratic vision which is quite centralized and dated.

These things fundamentally come down to a core difference in worldview. I see technology as helping to progress beyond the failures of human nature. Whereas the opposite view feels the status quo is not so bad, and just blames technology for making things worse.

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As you say, technology has the potential to go either way. What we see over and over is that technology is used to deepen inequality. Because those with control of the most powerful technologies benefit most from inequality. The rich have incentive to take all they can get and shape society to benefit them more, so we should consider the default reaction to new technology to be deeper inequality.

The answer is safeguards. There's no room for hope. We must build a system (of laws, most likely) that promotes equality and is robust against abuse, or we will continue to slide deeper into inequality.

Why is it so important to reduce inequality if even the worse off are better off than any other time in history?

Why not revert back to pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer societies with (presumably) maximized equality?

> Why is it so important to reduce inequality

Generally said by those who benefit from said inequality.

I'll bet you most who complain about inequality are just salty they are not the ones with the $100M yacht. And would happily claw their way to the top if given the opportunity e.g. a bloody revolution. Me, I like my $200 big screen TV, my comfy trailer, cheap gas and electricity and prefer to enjoy them in peace.

Now those who really have a case against inequality probably don't even have a voice and live invisibly in third world countries, providing the above amenities the Western "poor" take advantage of.

Wow, that is incredibly dismissive of perspectives you don't understand. This type of ignorance and close-mindedness is disappointing, yet unsurprising. Sad that there people like this in the world.

That's an easy bet to make from your comfy trailer with cheap gas, electricity, and big screen TV. As you say the majority of people in the world don't have reliable access to those luxuries and would want nothing more but to claw their way up to just that. The voices you hear probably aren't the ones who want super-yachts. Instead they see those with a real case and are lending their voices to them.

"You shouldn't be upset with the unfair treatment of someone if anyone in human history has had it worse than them" is not a particularly convincing moral argument.

I believe income inequality is bad because many people don't have enough to live comfortably and my parents taught me sharing is important. We can get into all sorts of economic arguments, but at its heart it is really as simple as that.

> I believe income inequality is bad because many people don't have enough to live comfortably and my parents taught me sharing is important.

The "living comfortably" metric is useful. It rules out the "hunter gatherer" argument where we're back in stone age, presumably not comfortable but as equal as can be.

If everyone had enough to live comfortably but inequality increased, would that be OK?

Pretty much, yeah, with the priviso that "comfortable" is relative to the times. These days, "comfortable" would include a place to live that is clean and fairly safe, food that is more than just enough calories, ordinary medical care, and access to the Internet.

This is a lot more than a century ago, but they're widespread and cheap enough that we can easily afford to provide it for every (Western) citizen. It's costly, but we could provide it, and the super-wealthy could still be incredibly wealthy. Shy of that, there's going to be a lot of tension.

I can't predict what that will look like in the future, and I can't say what to do about the non-Western majority of the world who can't afford to do this. But at least for the here-and-near-future-now, it's something that would allow people to live without desperation. We now have so much unnecessary desperation, and that's what I find offensive.

We'll still be faced with problems of meaning, but at least we're avoiding the hypocrisy of wealthy people saying, "Go find your meaning by working for me, while I take the vast majority of the profits just because I'm already rich."

"Living comfortably" is obviously a subjective metric, but that is the general goal. Most people don't want equality of outcome in which everyone's life is exactly the same. Some range of wealth inequality is permissible in many people's minds, including mine.

I think the problem with your hypothetical is that increasing wealth inequality generally comes at the expense of someone. It isn't simply that the billionaires' wealth grows faster than the wealth of the poorest. Often the billionaire is a billionaire because they have taken advantage of an unequal system which has real victims.

Wealth inequality also leads to other issues of fairness that go beyond living conditions. For example, impact on the environment is one. That $100m yacht you mention will have a huge carbon cost. There is also a concern of political power in a democracy with free speech. If a billionaire can afford to plaster their political message on every TV network, radio station, and social media site, will that give them an outsized role in a democracy that is meant to grant political equality to all? This unequal distribution of political power can easily create a feedback loop that allows these billionaires to use their wealth to capture more wealth and political power.

Aren't you assuming a zero sum economy without growth? The four men in the article all created their own wealth, they didn't steal it, so this seems like a pretty poor situation to try and make the argument that wealth inequality must always create "real victims".

The economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. The easiest way to prove that is to look at a company like Tesla. Do you think their entire market cap is newly created value? For that to be the case, everyone who purchased a Tesla wouldn't have purchased any other car if Tesla didn't exist. As soon as we acknowledge that Tesla has siphoned off customers from other companies, we acknowledge that there is at least some zero-sum nature to the economy. Then you just have to start looking for other places that this partial zero-sum situation exists such as employeer-employee relationships at Musk's companies and that brings us back to wealth inequality.

I don't follow. Let's presume the rational markets hypothesis for now (dubious in the case of Tesla but it's not important here). Then the value created by Tesla is not people owning cars who previously didn't, but the increased quality or value of the cars vs what they otherwise would have had. Whilst individual purchasing decisions are zero-sum in the moment i.e. if someone spends X on a Tesla they can't then spend X on anything else, that doesn't mean Tesla siphons customers from every other company in the world (why restrict to cars?). Rather, in the long term other companies get more competitive, increasing the value of all cars, and people get "richer" because now they can drive more/better/their air is cleaner/whatever, and Tesla also get richer, so wealth has been created. An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth.

>An individual micro-economic transaction on that day may be zero sum, but the whole economy overall isn't unless there's no growth.

As I said, the economy is neither zero-sum nor completely not zero-sum. It exists somewhere in between. If you can recognize that individual microeconomic situations can be zero-sum, you should be able to recognize that some macroeconomic situations are zero-sum.

I'm not arguing that these guys didn't create any wealth. I am arguing that their wealth is not equal to the value they created. Some of their wealth is wealth they captured from other people. I think it is pretty obvious that stockholders of other automakers would have more wealth in a world without Tesla. Musk now captures that wealth for Tesla stockholders.

The same situation plays out for other people in Musk's orbit. The rest of the automakers are now producing fewer cars due to the presence of Tesla, therefore they are employing fewer people. Musk is extremely anti-union while many of his competitors have a unionized workforce. This allows him to treat his employees worse off. His wealth is therefore effectively coming from workers who are now in a worse situation than they were if Tesla didn't exist and those employees were working for another automakers.

They didn't create that wealth, they were just in a position of power that enabled them to take a portion of the wealth created by many others. The wealth actually created by the contribution of these men doesn't have much to do with how much wealth they were rewarded with. If a king sees some unworked land and orders some servants to grow food on it, does the king create the food?

This is a very "ugh capitalism" take. Of course they created that wealth, what position of power did any of these guys have when they started? Comparing these guys to kings is absurd. Zuckerberg was literally a student in a dorm room. Musk was an immigrant from South Africa who taught himself programming. Andreessen was just an ordinary programmer who interned at IBM. Thiel is the maybe the closest to this, being a finance guy who went to Stanford Law and was able to casually raise a million bucks to start a VC fund from friends and family. But losing a million bucks is easy. Thiel didn't lose it, he made it back many times over.

None of these guys had any power. They created the wealth mostly by writing useful hardware and software, but also by locating, recruiting and organizing other people who could also create useful software.

No power? What do you call the ability to control what thousands of people do with their time? Ownership is power. Capital is power. Most of that wealth wouldn't exist without all the people who worked for their companies to create it. The reason they get to keep such a large portion of it is not because they create it, but because they have the power to get rid of anyone who demands a fair share. Sure, they've done a lot of hard and important work to get the companies where they are now, but that work is not worth billions. It's normal work not much different from the work employees do for these companies.

In other words, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, you would rather that the poor were poorer given that the rich were less rich.

Every documented great rise in the median wealth was accompanied by a rise in inequality. Every documented great rise in equality was accompanied by a disaster in which millions suffered.

Given this, how much suffering is equality worth?

> Given this, how much suffering is equality worth?

This is a false dichotomy because the premise isn't true.

I don't think either of us have time to dig into papers right now to explore complex relationships between different factors of economic wellbeing. Let alone by trying to compare aggregates across all of history.

Shouldn't it be obvious though that "you would rather that the poor were poorer given that the rich were less rich" is untrue slander? (and from Margaret Thatcher -- not often I see her quoted unironically.) People are explicitly asking for resources and help for the poorest. That this can only be accomplished by taking from the richest is a result of the greed of the richest who don't care about the quality of life of the poor (or don't care enough to understand how bad it is).

It should not be obvious. When measured on consumption data, the poor did indeed become richer under Thatcher.

https://iea.org.uk/blog/thatcherism-and-poverty-did-the-poor...

Second, Thatcher specifically created a lot of disruption which lead to a lot of people becoming poorer. But the trend she discussed is generally true. Starting with the Industrial Revolution (which is still spreading in third world countries) we've seen a rise in general prosperity over and over again be tied to a rise in inequity. And documented rises in equity are generally tied to large disasters that destroy wealth.

But third, my comment was a general one about psychology. Many of us respond negatively to rises in inequity. Even if it is tied to a general rise in prosperity.

Actually, I should have been more specific. I should never have discussed "inequality" - it's a counterproductive buzzword, but it's what we were using.

I don't care how much money poor people are able to spend. What I actually want is for everyone to be able to eat, sleep in a stable home, spend time with their loved ones, pursue their hobbies and dreams, and participate in their local community/government at their pleasure. To be able to protect their health from preventable disease. All of these to me are human rights, not trophies to earn through work.

The second thing I want is to take away wealth from the extremely rich or otherwise divorce their unreasonable hoards of capital from political power. But the latter is extremely difficult to envision. I don't know how it could work robustly. I'd rather just take their money since money = power is the game they want to play.

At what point does wealth created through human labor become someone else's right?

I'm not asking this as a rhetorical question. It is extremely practical. We want the poor to receive houses, food, healthcare treatments, broadband, access to computers, transportation, and so on. All of these are created through human labor. Many were invented fairly recently. Some within my lifetime.

At what point does it go from new invention to a human right? And how do we as a society make that happen, and incentivize the continued creation of new inventions? And how do we continue to incentivize the continued labor needed to provide these things?

We currently do an admittedly crappy job of it. For example we should be building a ton of housing, and we don't. But what we do have, we mostly do through money. We get people to invent things. To build things. And then we tax some of it, and give to those who have not, and provide some at the bottom.

But it seems you want to get rid of wealth at the top. Take away from billionaires, who are far more generous with their money than most of us. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge for example.

And you want to provide far, far more to the bottom. Enough that I'd be happy not to work again. As well as countless others.

Many variations on your scheme were tried in the 20th century. They feature problems like mass famine, and totalitarian rule by the bureaucrats in charge.

What are your proposals to make sure we don't get those bad outcomes again?

Can you show that the inequality changes lead to the median wealth changes? I could just as easily argue that the causality flows in the opposite direction you are implying. When median wealth increases, people stop policing inequality as fervently and when median wealth decreases, they recommit to addressing inequality.

In many specific cases, yes.

The classic example is the Industrial Revolution. Which continues to spread.

When the textile industry reaches a particular area, peasant farmers move into factories. This is better paying and easier work than life in the rice paddy. And therefore is a rise in the median wealth. But the economic wins from those running the textile factories are far larger than their employees, and so also comes with a rise in inequity.

The same thing happened with assembly lines. Henry Ford's famous $5/day was a multiple of what people could be paid in other kinds of manual work. But Henry wound up with over a billion dollars. A rise in general welfare accompanied by a rise in inequity.

As http://www.paulgraham.com/richnow.html shows, this is a general trend today. Most of the current great fortunes are based on people who created new wealth. Most becomes part of our general lives getting better. Of that which goes to the new company, some goes to employees, some to investors, and some to those who built the company. The division varies. But the result is increased wealth and inequity both.

>When the textile industry reaches a particular area, peasant farmers move into factories. This is better paying and easier work than life in the rice paddy. And therefore is a rise in the median wealth. But the economic wins from those running the textile factories are far larger than their employees, and so also comes with a rise in inequity.

I don't know how you can state this as a definitive argument because it relies on assigning an arbitrary monetary value to something that is impossible to measure. For example, how can we say that life as a subsistence farmer on some aristocrats land is inherently a worse life than working 12 hours a day in sweatshop and going home to a slum and a room shared with dozens of other random people? Yes, the subsistence farmer might technically own nothing and the factory worker has a wage, that doesn't mean the factory worker has a better life.

Also the PG argument is flawed as it seems to suggest that a company's value is all new value. The economy is more complicated than that. There are some zero-sum interactions in the economy. PG's Airbnb wealth didn't just come from people renting out their spare bedroom. It came at the expense of hotels. It came at the expense of housekeeping workers at those hotels who were no longer needed due to reduced demand. It can at the expense of people who were priced out of their neighborhood because people were buying real estate to rent on Airbnb. It is easy to miss the consolidation of wealth if you think that any new fortune is from entirely new value.

Where the textile industry goes, you find people moving from farms to cities to get those jobs. Often sending money back home. And then better factories move in to take advantage of the new workforce, and textiles move on to a new place where people can be found who are desperate enough to take the worst factory jobs.

This pattern has been going on for over a century. I base "this job is better" not on an arbitrary monetary standard, but by the fact that people show their preference by voting with their feet. Over and over again. Over decades, and across many countries.

You are once again establishing a causal link that isn't nearly as definitive as you imply. The industrial revolution didn't only happen in factories. It happened on farms too. Many people left farms because their agricultural labor was no longer as valuable. Many had no choice but to move to cities. That is part of why they were sending money back to their family on the farm, the family needed it.

Wealth inequality reduces social cohesion and increases unrest.

You can preach all you want about how envy is a sin, but banning envy would probably be just as successful as banning premarital sex.

What do I care about inequality? If someone invents some new tech and makes a trillion dollars how am I worse off?

In your hypothetical scenario where a trillion dollars spring into being without any other consequences: you’re not.

If you want to sprinkle some consequences into the scenario, how about you lose your job, and the supply of positions for said job decreases to a third.

Because children can't eat correct, even in the western countries (and while US and UK are the worst offenders, this isn't limited to them).

That's also why I'm quite cross with the 'you should have children' crowd. No. Please don't. I've heard of a 14 yo girl prostitute herself in the toilets to guys her age (from her class even). A quick BJ for two meals. And I've seen her cry after that. Imagine the reputation she had in her highschool (this was circa 2010, so social networks already existed but no smartphone in the area).

If we cannot take care of our children half-decently, everybody, even those with atrophic empathy, should care.

The fact that we do not is a stain on humanity.

The newly-minted trillionaire could use their wealth to monopolize positional goods: social status, housing, politicians' attention. This could worsen your standard of living if you compete with them for the same positional goods.

You define "standard of living" positionally, which is not how it is usually defined, but does make a lot of sense given the prevalence of envy. By that definition, yes, inequality does absolutely worsen standard of living. Points for being honest about your motivations, unlike every other person who rails against inequality.

Do you like centralized power? Would you like to live in a dictatorship? Because that's what inequality taken to the extreme is. So unless you do like those things, you should care about inequality.

> properly integrating high technology into society

High tech is major expensive. Who owns it at the start? Won't this be like a trickle-down effect before it becomes broadly available? And when that happens isn't the cutting edge already far ahead and with the increasing wealth inequality even more in the hands of the few?

Technology is an amplifier, it doesn’t fix human nature.

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