Wealth inequality is root cause of all current economic woes. Interview. [video]
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I think projecting the quality of fairness is a false hope.
The Dutch are the tallest people in the world and Asians tend to be the smallest. Remember that oxygen and food are also resources in the world. Consequently, the Dutch inherently use more food and oxygen to maintain their bigger bodies compared to the Asians.
As such, it is unfair to an Asian person that their Dutch friend use so much more, if we were to judge them based on fairness.
Now, just to mess with the reader's mind, I'll flip my own case by saying that since there are many more Asians than the Dutch, it's unfair to the Dutch that Asians consume so much of food and oxygen.
I hope that the reader gets my point that projection of any sort of fairness is an exercise in vain.
I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness. We need to looks for things beyond these realms of false projection.
Personally, I have accepted the idea that some people have more wealth than others and some less. I neither despise those people nor I love them. I feel content with whatever life has given me. Now, that is not to say that I don't desire to be richer. I do and I continue to act in my own favour. It's just that I do not feel sad that I have less than others or hate someone if they are richer.
That is what is being eroded by the wealth inequality. The wealthy are significantly insulated from the law, are shaping laws that further reduce their chance of loosing wealth, increasing their wealth in the process and reducing everyone else's economic opportunity.
For a society this creates an unstable situation, if all economic (and political) power sits in the hands of only a few that creates unrest often leading to a violent overturn of the situation (or trying to counteract via totalitarian measures).
As a side note, you say you're content with not being wealthy, but how far would this content stretch, would you be content if you are so poor that you'd struggle to feed your kids?
Instead, in many countries, it's not uncommon for some people to be sitting on a hundred, a thousand, even a million times as much money as others. The disparity is so great that it's difficult to fully visualise - hence why you get videos of people like Tom Scott driving around trying to demonstrate just how different these sorts of numbers are.
More importantly, wealth scales in a strange way. Becoming a billionaire didn't just entitle you to more exotic holidays or vehicles or mansions than your millionaire peers, it brings incredible ability to influence politics and the world, with next to no accountability from the people whose lives you are affecting. You can buy media companies on a whim. You can demand meetings with politicians. You can make economic threats in order to get your own way. And, unlike politicians, there is no democratic process to elect you or remove you.
The analogy is, therefore, absurd. The premise is that, if you have an issue with wealth inequality, you have an issue with inequality universally, at all scales. But it misses the point that the issue with wealth inequality isn't that the numbers aren't an identical, it's that extreme wealth actively causes problems.
I'd like to give you a thought exercise, if you be so kind to me. I'd like for you to take that Dutch argument and replace Dutch with "human adult" and Asian with "human baby" (assume it's a booming population where babies outnumber adults) and see if your reasoning serve you well.
It's difficult to take you seriously.
I think it might be easier for you to explain your point if you didn't describe it in analogy, and instead described it directly. The criticism is that large (i.e. several orders of magnitude) wealth gaps are bad for society, and that they cause tremendous power imbalances in what would otherwise be a democratic society.
Purely in terms of wealth inequality, and not through analogy, why do you disagree with this criticism?
There are capitalists in this world. There are communists in this world. There are Christians in this world. There are Muslims in this world.
I'm not taking any sides. I'm just saying that it is impossible for all of them to be right... Because they are mutually exclusive ideologies/religions. Someone is bound to be wrong. Therefore, someone deserves to be treated poorly by the law. Infact, dare I say, all these 4 groups are being a bit childish. Also, "totalitarian" is also another such group. Anyway, personally, for the current situation of the world, I think that the world needs at least one adult leader at the helm. In other words, dare I say, a single leader. No, definitely not someone who believes in totalitarianism.
Finally, personally, I think that if I fail to feed my children properly, then, it's either a failure on the part of society to educate me properly or to manage the resources. I am, afterall, a product my society.
Also you might want to actually watch the movie. The whole point about growing inequality is that society is failing to provide economic opportunity because inequality is going through the roof. Education will not help you because of the economic realities.
If someone culture is to be honest and not steal, they don't. But having an ideology is not a invitation to force ones own values on to other people. I'd like to live in a honest world and that's the part of the world I limit myself to. I do not force my views onto others or claim to speak for other cultures.
Secondly, in response to your second paragraph, I'd like to quote another sibling comment of mine already in this thread.
It's one of those things, that is, if you know, you know. If you don't, then you don't. Unfortunately for us, I don't feel good about revealing too much about it (or myself). Sorry.
Or fairness. Exhibited by this quote of yours:
>I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness.
You might not be a nihilist, but nihilism is 100% what you are preaching here in defense of wealth inequality.
If you're not, it's somehow even worse. And, it reminds me of this rather brilliant scene in the big lebowski:
Walter Sobchak: No, without a hostage, there is no ransom. That's what ransom is. Those are the fucking rules.
Nihilist #2: His girlfriend gave up her toe!
Nihilist #3: She though we'd be getting million dollars!
Nihilist #2: Iss not fair!
Walter Sobchak: Fair! WHO'S THE FUCKING NIHILIST HERE! WHAT ARE YOU, A BUNCH OF FUCKING CRYBABIES?I think we don't know if there a meaning to life and we might never have an answer. If such a meaning exists, I think that humans simply are not equipped to reason about the meaning of their own existence.
Okaaaay, but I don't see how that view which you hold can be reconciled with this view which you also espoused:
>I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness.
I'm feeling a lot like Walter right now.
We don't share perspective. Therefore, we can't see what the other is seeing. One thing I am taking away from this conversation is that at least one of us need to study better.
> I'm feeling a lot like Walter right now.
The thing about feelings is that our feelings are arbitrary. One can feel intense hatred for a waiter who served the food a little too late, and intense love for a political leader who promotes honor-killing to maintain status quo. To some, it sounds bad and to others it sounds good.
The issue isn't that we don't share perspective, but that you appear to have contradicted yourself.
I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness.
Sometime in the 1960s (don't quote me on the year), there was plenty of scientific research coming out that cholesterol is bad for your heart's health. Doctors were recommending to completely avoid cholesterol. Governments were in the process of banning it.
It got so bad that for decades people were avoiding food with cholesterol like plague. Companies were actively seeking to substitute it with other things or artificially remove it from their products.
Then, I think in the 2000s (again, don't quote), to everyone's surprise, research started coming out that there seem to be even stronger links of those heart disease with trans fat.
So much so that trans fat actually got banned across countries in the world by many governments by 2010s. Even higher that cholesterol.
Anyway, upon reviewing the old research about cholesterol, researchers learnt that food with high trans fats also tends to be high in cholesterol. I mean, it makes sense, they are both fats... And most food have a complex combination of many fats (among other things). But really, the cause was not cholesterol, it was trans fat.
So, in the cross fire between reasoning (and heart disease) and evidence (caused by trans fat), cholesterol got shot, for no good reason.
I'm reminded of the "businessman and the fisherman" parable.
Wealth and GDP isn't everything. And they definitely aren't moral judgements. People don't just deserve to have more because they have little to start with.
I'm trying to pull my sister and her family out of poverty; the partner doesn't want to work any more than mowing lawns, and they go to the beach on Sundays. That's all they want out of life
> I speak to people a lot about what the economy is like where they are from. Every single person in the world thinks there is a massive house price crisis caused specifically by the planning system in the city they live in. People in New York think this. People in London think this. People in San Francisco think this. People in LA think this. People in Tokyo think this. People in Shanghai think this. People in Sydney think this. People in Vancouver think this. People in Toronto think this. People in Rio de Janeiro think this, right? It's a fucking global problem. It's not even just - look at stock prices - every asset in the world has gone through the fucking roof. This is a problem about asset prices broadly and it's clearly global.
Everyone who understands the same mechanics should also get why giving more wealth to people who don’t move it would collapse the base structuresnof money flows. I can’t believe how 15 year old me understood that very high earners (owners) should be taxed hard because they have zero incentive to use their money after they reach the ”end game”. Even in IT I see DINK/single colleagues buy everything they wanted years ago, and put big sums (relative to average earners) to stocks and funds. They understandably don’t have lavish spending habits so they just feed an engine that is degrees detached from the basic exchange of goods and services.
The metagame is simply to put money away into a safe scheme and not spend it towards others’ wages with services (restaurants or events) but stocks and large investment funds. At some point the money missing from the circulation just hollows out the lower rungs of the economy, especially when bigger fish keep eating the small fish: no small grocer survives against the big boys, so even that daily spend at the store goes to megacorps.
As with MMOs, we need game mechanics changes that radically slow down the built in feature of capitalism: snowballing accumulation of wealth that sucks the market dry of competitors.
Point to a billionaire and I’ll show you a coddled idiot who couldn’t grow their own food.
The top, if there must be one, should be the people wearing out their bodies to make the roads and grow the food.
Office workers munging numbers around is not worth much to the real economy that requires construction and production of real things.
Why should a rich person have the ability to burn more fossil fuels?
Nah we need a more scientific method for economics. Perhaps constraints built on how much a lifestyle pollutes?
If you are not specific, then you do not have a position.
You might remember a few.
But nonetheless, the specifics always matter. While you might think society is more about the feels, there's a lot of reals that guide people too.
Avoiding the specifics is probably fruitful, but you will not convince me without it.
America is similar to Brazil and Mexico, but it's a third-world country politically with mostly soft, misguided, uneducated voters who don't realize how badly they're mistreated unable or unwilling to take effective corrective actions to address the root causes. Jan 9 riots, conspiracy theories, political complaints about one party or another, bikeshedding, and flashpoint issues absorb and express this discontent ineffectively. Unfortunately, economic inequality cannot be reformed from within (see also: John McCain) when the political operating system is absurdly polluted and usurped by billionaires intent on maintaining the status quo feudal lobbying system that anoints celebrities to high office with media buys in exchange for access and influence. Nonviolent, massive, sustained pressure is the only way to force out the corrupt, bribed officials and attain revolutionary campaign finance reform.
Capitalism is an effective system for motivating productive activity, but it also has an inherent tendency to concentrate wealth.
If we want to avoid a situation where a few people control such a large proportion of the world's resources that there is not enough left over to meet the needs of others, then we need to balance this tendency. Income taxes are one approach, but wealth taxes deal with the actual issue.
Taxing wealth is not unfair if you accept that the economic system we have chosen is itself unfair. We give too many advantages to those that gather income through owning things (i.e. unearned income) compared with those that engage in productive activity (i.e. earned income).
I say we 'give' those advantages because they are not due to some inherent law of nature. It is a choice we have made as a society. In the natural world hoarding works in the opposite way. A stash of nuts doesn't magically grow. Quite the opposite. Real effort has to be expended to preserve the stash.
I think you have to ask yourself where this newly minted money ends up first. I think you'll find that it largely just increases the nominal value of assets.
> The pie grows every year.
The 'pie' is the world's resources - not the money. If new money essentially just increases the nominal value of assets it doesn't invalidate what I've said. Quite the opposite. An increase in the money supply exacerbates wealth inequality as can be seen recently with historically low interest rates.
Except that's not zero sum either. Oil that was in the Permian Basin was there all along, but before the invention of fracking it might as well not exist because of how hard it was to get out of the ground. If some company gets rich because they were able to extract said oil, is the world really worse off because "inequality"?
If so, then its always increasing, we have not fully discovered all the world's resources.
You are just being obstinate all over this thread not even rebutting points, just straw-manning.
You read like an argumentative'AI'.
No, humanity has not discovered them all, or know the actual quantity available to us. Like how discovery of silicon leads to enrichment of a country pretty much immediately (relative scale, still may take a few decades). The resource was there the entire time, the economic output was not, it was not a part of the market until it's discovery.
> You are just being obstinate all over this thread not even rebutting points, just straw-manning.
If I am, then its in opposition to another's "strawman".
> You read like an argumentative'AI'.
Thanks, I do like to defeat other people's logic by the most simplest means. If you can't answer, then you don't have a solution, you have an opinion of dubious quality.
If your imagination limits "resources" to bare materials, yes, of course they're limited—though there's an awful lot of sand in the Earth's crust. But it's a stunted view of economics, so stunted as to be worthless as a model.
We're on HN and I don't know if you got the memo but there's this thing called computing and digital information.
Zeros and ones, which can be copied near infinitely and make nowadays a huge part of the GDP.
I listen to music, watch movies, participate in discussion, read books, etc. without it eating much of the world's natural resources.
I know Marx totally missed that that would happen but, well, shocker, it happened: Microsoft, Google and Meta are three of the top 10 companies by market cap in the world. Software.
Software. It's time for people to get their head out of Marx's ass.
I find Henry George's much more accommodating.
His definition of land is important to distinguish between different sorts of wealth. We are a part of nature and as such natural resources have particular importance to us.
Designing an economic system for "fairness" is a horrible idea. I would rather live in an economic system with high inequality, high standards of living, and high social mobility, than in a system with low inequality, low standards of living, and low social mobility. Inequality is bad in the same way that debt or medicine is bad: the danger is in the dose. A society with extreme inequality is probably screwed, but a society with moderate inequality is not necessarily worse off than a society with low inequality.
Wealth taxes have been tried many times, they don't work very well.
> In the natural world hoarding works in the opposite way. A stash of nuts doesn't magically grow. Quite the opposite. Real effort has to be expended to preserve the stash.
So you would prefer to spend your time roaming the forest in proletariat ecstasy looking for more nuts, rather than using the nuts to plant some trees?
If the economy is growing (not a zero sum game as you say), but the economic ability to own assets is decreasing then you are creating a situation where after some time all assets are owned by only very few. I'm not sure if you consider that a good basis for society. I certainly would prefer my children not to live in a cyberpunk distopia.
Planting trees would be productive activity, not hoarding. This is exactly the type of behaviour that should be rewarded. Of course, we need people to have access to resources in order to engage in productive activity (in this case land).
Regarding your comment about the world not being zero sum, I agree to an extent (hence my comment that it is largely zero sum). Obviously we can - through productive activity - 'create wealth' in many ways. Another commenter gave the example of turning sand into silicon chips. My concern though - and where I think a zero sum situation exists - is with those resources that are fundamental to security, agency, and well being like land and clean water. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where they live to 120 but all of those resources are already hoarded and the prices are so high that they have little to no chance of getting a share. A world where only a few have access to use natural resources for their own benefit is a crappy world however you look at it.
> Wealth taxes have been tried many times, they don't work very well.
There's a whole debate to be had here, but I think I'll just say that I don't think that this is the case.