Hacker News Reader

Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

This is true if you view the world from a zero-sum perspective. If the rich are winning, then the poor must be losing.

But I would argue the world is not zero-sum. Modern life for middle class or poor class people is a lot better than the vast majority of history (the 2 notable exceptions are post WWII USA and post Cold War USA, when America was punched through as an undisputed global superpower).

We are a looooonnng way away from 19th century standards. Like seriously, would you desire to go back in time to 1890? Okay, have fun if you're not white. Good luck with polio and leprosy. Hope you're not bored with reading (if you can read) because video barely exists.

View on HN

There are two separate concerns here:

- increases in material standards of living

- decreases in class mobility and increased concentration of social power

It is perfectly coherent to appreciate one and condemn the other. The parent comment seems to focus on the latter.

> decreases in class mobility and increased concentration of social power

> The parent comment seems to focus on the latter

Okay but it's still not a very good argument. Like really? That's when you literally had to be _born_ noble, like your blood ancestry. That's why a bunch of people died in the French revolution, Russian revolution, etc

The Gilded Age, the stereotypical example of a time with high inequality (which we have, in fact, now surpassed by any reasonable measure) was in the 19th century in the USA.

We had no hereditary nobility (not in name, anyway). The robber barons were all (to the best of my knowledge) "new money"—their families made their fortunes right here in America by getting in on the ground floor of brand-new industries (very much in the same way that startup founders are trying to do today) as the Industrial Revolution was ramping up...and then becoming monopolists and extracting all the money they could (very much in the same way that startup founders are trying to do today).

You may need to review your history.

I don't think "class mobility" is a thing that we have to have. I don't think its a problem that needs fixing.

I also don't think its a problem that there is a big gap between rich and poor.

I _do_ think we need to make sure that our governments are well funded, and that it can afford to feed, house, and make safe all of its people, no matter how disabled, unlucky, or lazy.

I also think we need to have protections in place so that the wealthy can't use rent seeking behavior to feed on those with less money.

> I don't think "class mobility" is a thing that we have to have. I don't think its a problem that needs fixing.

Really? If there were zero class mobility, that would mean that no matter how hard someone works, no matter how good their business ideas are, they'll never become more wealthy than their parents were when they were born (at least, compared to someone who sat around doing nothing). And it would mean that no matter how inefficiently or stupidly a rich person blows their money, they'll never become less wealthy than they already are. Bloodline would become a better predictor or wealth and status than luck, charisma, investment opportunities, or hard work.

Even if we lived in a world where even there poorest of the poor were provided for, I wouldn't be okay with zero class mobility. It would basically be acceptance of inherited birthright privilege.

When I hear class mobility, I think moving categories, not moving up and down in your own category.

I believe strongly that people need to be rewarded for getting out of bed in the morning and doing something productive. I fear the UBI because I think its human nature to choose to do nothing. I think people who claim people will still work on a UBI are kidding themselves.

So in context, I believe it's important that everybody's material wealth is going up. We don't need laws that somehow make it easier for you to go from nothing to a billion dollars somehow.

The evidence people do not prefer to be lazy. UBI studies show this too. Where is your evidence?

I have no problem with existence of the rich per se. What I have a problem with is them using their money as 'speech' to buy politicians in order to erode regulations and rights that make life worse for everyone else.

> Like seriously, would you desire to go back in time to 1890? Okay, have fun if you're not white

The ancestors of the people living in Gaza were much better off than their descendants today, being bombed while the US Navy sits off shore to enable the massacre (coming via bombs made in the USA). Same is true of many in the world. Hunter gatherers in the Amazon were not being massacred by mining companies back then to the extent they are now.

> But I would argue the world is not zero-sum. Modern life for middle class or poor class people is a lot better than the vast majority of history

Zero sum is not a binary. For things where we are able to increase output using technological progress to the point where supply sufficiently meets demand, sure, it doesn't feel zero sum. Nobody is arguing that we need to fix that -- the challenge is actually preserving the situation in these cases (it's bad to kill the reward signals that make the economic engine go).

For things where we cannot rapidly increase output, things that have unlimited demand but very limited supply, the rich are likely to monopolize. In those cases, it is zero sum. Public spaces (think of the beach access controversies with people like Vinod Khosla), farmland, housing, fresh water, college admissions. Housing and land in particular are really tough.

Strategies like wealth redistribution (but _also_ other related policies!!) are needed to mitigate the latter.

Wealth centralization is also anathema to democracy -- just ask proof of stake folks. When the wealthy get to make all the laws, you won't want to live in that society.

> Housing and land in particular are really tough.

Housing and land are not "tough". There's plenty of dirt cheap land even in highly developed countries; it just happens to be outside the most popular locations. But if we want housing to become both cheap and livable we must invest in those "unpopular" places, even as we also try to build more housing in the more high-demand locations. There's just no avoiding that.

I wonder if that's really true, I'm going to do some web searches latter because I think its interesting, but I doubt a young person who has an online only tech job, and can therefore live anywhere, could even afford an undeveloped parcel of land in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, they could - much of the land in the US sells for hundreds of dollars per acre.

I think the point is that humans need a lot of infrastructure to live. Reliable water/sewage, internet connectivity, schools / day cares if you have kids, access to healthy food (google "food deserts"), etc.

Ahh, no, I think there is an interesting question here, can a young person today go out west and build all that stuff from nothing. (Like people did a few hundred years ago)

Can you buy a small parcel of land, dig a well for water and a hole under the outhouse, plant veggies, have some chickens, pigs, perhaps a goat.

Can you do it in range of a cell tower for internet, do you need some satellite solution. How much solar and how big a battery do you really _need_. How would today's tech change the life of the settlers?

I did some web searches for here in Australia, and I didn't parcels of land much less than 10k, and they looked liked barren desert to me. More like 100k if you want nice looking forest in the middle of nowhere.

> can a young person today go out west and build all that stuff from nothing. (Like people did a few hundred years ago)

Maybe a specific young person with a lot of relevant experience and strong desire for this sort of life could, but it would be pretty hard and the initial costs are nothing to sniff at.

Water is especially prohibitive. The American West is going through massive aridification and the water table is overdepleted in many places. Gotta watch out for water rights too.

Electricity and internet are doable if you can afford the right systems.

Food is really hard unless you're willing to buy everything at dollar general. Modern farming is highly reliant on artificial sources of nitrogen. And it's just not a good use of your time if you have a tech job. Social needs of humans cannot be overlooked.

People even a couple hundred years ago would move whole communities. They had access to abundant natural resources and divided responsibilities differently.

Maybe you're just interested in van life but + farming? It's expensive and probably a bad investment overall, but makes more sense than owning random cheap but poorly situated land outright.

My point stands. Getting investment into those places is tough. Towns and cities don't construct themselves. Construction is especially sensitive to monetary policy.

Land by itself is not useful -- if you can't make a living what's the point of having land? Land is most useful when it's in proximity to opportunity, and opportunity-adjacent land is scarce and only getting scarcer.

It’s true that we’ve come a long way as a society (in many places), but just because we’re better off, doesn’t mean we’re in a good place.

I hope we can look back 100 years from today and reflect on how bad things were in these times.

Global society is a zero sum game until we get to a place of over abundance. With such limited (often artificially limited) resources, when the rich are winning, the poor in fact are losing.

I think the feeling that this imbalance is accelerating is real. The ever widening technology gap enables the wealthy to leverage powerful tools that simply aren’t available to much of the world population. It’s far easier to game the system than it has ever been.

> Modern life for middle class or poor class people is a lot better than the vast majority of history

I 100% agree with you.

I'm upper middle class and I live better than any king or any robber baron ever lived up until the early 20th century.

Better dental care, better surgical operations (which saved my life when I was 18 or so btw and which save my daughter the day she turned 7 years old btw), better car, better soundsystem, better clothes, etc.

We also know a more lot about what's healthy and what is not. Personal hygiene, including of those you have intimate relation with...

> Like seriously, would you desire to go back in time to 1890?

No. Not as a king. Not as the richest man on earth.

On the other hand, you have to work for a living, don't have a private cook, prostitutes/concubines if that's your thing etc.

I think I'd very much prefer to be a king in 1890 than McDonald's worker today. There's a risk I'd die of infection that's easily treated today, but, on the other hand, I'm not flipping burgers through majority of my waking hours.

> But I would argue the world is not zero-sum.

The world is complex. Some things are zero-sum (like land), some are not (like education).

While the low/middle class are certainly more comfortable these days, there is not yet enough evidence that this can be done sustainably in perpetuity. After all, if the entire world lived like the average US citizen, we'd quickly run out of resources (another zero-sum example, btw)

I think you're confusing zero-sum between people at different economic levels and zero-sum between people at different points in time.

Yes, people at a given economic percentile today have many things better in absolute terms compared to poor people at that same economic percentile X years ago. (This is obviously true for large enough X. Everyone's got it better today than the Cro-Magnons did!)

That does not mean the present system is not zero-sum in its relative distribution of wealth among people today. Every dollar in a billionaire's bank account is a dollar that could be in someone else's instead.

> Every dollar in a billionaire's bank account is a dollar that could be in someone else's instead.

This is not an example. Today the government can print more dollars out of thin air. So no, dollars is not zero-sum.

Even then, dollars is only an approximation of value, the thing that really matters. And value is also not zero-sum because of technological innovation and the existence of waste. If we are smarter about how apply our resources, literally more people can have more, and no one has to lose. (One example is people in the US simultaneously being food insecure while the nation also has tremendous food waste).

> Every dollar in a billionaire's bank account is a dollar that could be in someone else's instead.

This is true, but billionaires don't just have a billion dollars sitting in bank accounts. The billions in wealth comes from ownership of property and companies. Some of this may be considered "zero sum" in the way you describe (e.g. a billionaire that owns and rents out single family homes).

However, I would guess the majority of that wealth is not "zero sum" in the way you describe, such as a warehouse robot (or the warehouse itself). What are you going to do with a warehouse robot? It has no value to you, or almost anyone else.

that would be an interesting idea in the 2000s, when everyone wanted to be an entrepreneur.

This very forum is (ostensibly) about entrepreneurship. Since 10 years ago however, the common advice is to ditch the startup and go work for the bigtech behemoths instead.

The biggest factor in whether people become rich is simply luck.

Why else would a small number of people who are by far not the most intelligent or capable among us, and who happen to live in a few select countries, be the ones who own 90+% of the world's resources?

Sadly, even Silicon valley tells a grim story. How many successful founders go on to repeat their success in another venture? How many don't even bother to try and instead become "philanthropists" or pundits of some kind, promoters of their personal brand, still trading off of that one burst of luck they had?

We all know that most people with big successes would absolutely never subject themselves to the "meritocracy" again, once they have already established financial dominance over others...

If the world were meritocratic we would not tolerate people living uneducated in slums and those with resources would invest heavily in human capital. Do they? Absolutely not, they build gates around their homes to protect themselves from the masses. The pass zoning laws to limit the density of dwellings so that the poor won't live nearby, etc.

I think you are straw manning their argument. I believe it's clear from context that they are referring to something different than material conditions.

> Like seriously, would you desire to go back in time to 1890?

This is a completely frivolous argument. We should all sit tight and be content because we're not being lynched or dying of dysentery?

We live in a world where a tiny number of people sit on mountains wealth that will last them a hundred lifetimes while the vast majority ration themselves what limited education, food, shelter and healthcare they can afford in a given month or year. A few have unfathomable plenty and most live in a world of constant scarcity. That's the world we live in today and that is the world we must grapple with. The 19th Century has jack all to do with it.

> This is a completely frivolous argument.

> The 19th Century has jack all to do with it.

Okay well why don't you tell that to the GP who posted the comment: "We are devolving to the status quo from the nineteen century and before."

I'm replying to the comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com