Inequality Without Class
dissentmagazine.org
dissentmagazine.org
There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off. Inequality is an interesting indicator but gets far more airplay than it is worth.
We are social creatures which calibrate our satisfaction to our circumstances. We can be happy with little, and equally happy with plenty.
In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless, largely because it is not the absolute quantity, but relative amount that matters.
For the most part, people have no measure for the material quality of their lives besides comparing it to others in they see. It doesnt matter if you have wealth and comforts beyond your grandparents wildest dreams, if it seems like you are worse off than 90% of the people on the street.
The emotional response to inequality has led to some of the biggest government-sponsored mass murders in history [0]. It is perhaps the worst-scaling social response that evolution has cursed us with. Focusing on it is stupid, and we'd all be better off if we focused on absolute living standards instead.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anthropogenic_disaster... - Communism was flat out worse than a Mongol invasion. Best case scenario it was the same ballpark. Best attempt ever made at solving inequality though.
In my opinion, attention on the monetary differences exagerates the difference in experience and comfort. That is to say, Wealth inequality is much less relevant than difference in consumption and utilization, to the degree that either matter.
Musk might have 1,000,000x the net worth of the median American (200B vs 200K), but he is not eating one million times as many hamburgers, living in a house 1 million times larger, ect. People struggle to understand that "net worth" is simply a name on a paper associated with resources someone else is utilizing. It is not proportional to spending or consumption.
>Or as Adam Smith would later put it, in what Milanovic stresses was a Copernican shift in perspective: “The high price of labor is to be considered not merely as the proof of the general opulence of society which can afford to pay well all those whom it employs; it is to be regarded as what constitutes the very essence of public opulence, or as the very thing in which public opulence properly consists.”
The premise of your argument is absurd. If we were to accept it, we’d have to expect that people in the 1100s were all just depressed/angry/anxious — including the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet — to a degree that is literally unfathomable to a modern first-worlder.
Brains just don’t work that way not because other people are fickle emotional messes, but because a brain like that wouldn’t work.
(Yes, obviously poverty sucks and higher standards of living are preferable to lower, just to head off some strawmen)
However, you appear to be saying that the 1100s (where people were, I note, substantially more equal than today in absolute terms) are comparable to 2000s. I disagree - I would be unfathomably depressed/angry/anxious if my living standards reverted to my social equivalent in the 1100s, conditions were basically inhumane. We should be aiming to get society as far from 1100s as possible, both temporally and in terms of absolute living standards.
I don't care if the wealthy are much better off than they were in 1100 if I get functional plumbing, air conditioning, reliable food, an electric car, Amazon and improved medical care out of the bargain. And I get much more than that [0]. Their wealth seems to be to my benefit. The wealthy got wealthy because my life got better along the way.
[0] This is rhetorical, I don't own a car. But since I've already mentioned Musk ...
Would it be OK to have a single individual worth $1e24, while everyone else has the standard distribution of wealth as we know it in 2024? A septillionaire could give $1 trillion to every person on the planet every year for 100 years and still have 99.99% of his money left. How much power and influence over the world would someone like that have, while the rest have comparatively close to zero? I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society--we have to have some limit. We probably also agree that $1million is probably too low a limit. So it's not a question of whether there should be a limit but where that threshold is.
You can hopefully see the logical issue here with the argument - we can both just pick absurd premises and point out that we could get our preferred moral outcome from them.
Although my hypothetical isn't as absurd as it might seem on its face. Zuckerburg's wealth is divorced from physical goods for example. Facebook's real consumption is only a couple of server farms worth of stuff. We could seize all the servers but it is hard to see what resources could be freed up for better uses in the real world.
> I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society--we have to have some limit.
No we don't. If the highest living standards (in a for-everyone sense) resulted from infinite inequality, we should go with that.
In your just-provided example, the comparison is to your modern life. In a world without time travel, people can and do compare themselves to others living today because that is how brains work.
If your argument involves accepting 1100s living standards as acceptable, I disagree with it. The conditions in the 1100s are only acceptable as far as they led to the improvements found in the present. We don't need to compare to them to usefully make judgements about the present. It is a baseline that everyone should have opportunities (and results) far in excess of what 1100s peasants could achieve.
Here's my argument restated: "inequality is a far stronger contributor to unhappiness than absolute wealth."
This is an empirical fact, not a belief or a wish about the way the world ought to work, and it overrides your belief/wish that people "should" just care about absolute living standards.
You said, "there is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off." This is quite literally incorrect. This has been studied. There is plenty of reason -- i.e. empirical evidence -- to believe exactly that.
Here's a simple question: was every person in the 1100s woefully depressed/anxious/angry to a far greater degree than any modern first-worlder dissatisfied with their station in life?
If no, then your premise is disproven. People's happiness and satisfaction are not determined by their absolute standard of living (regardless of whether you think they should be).
Again, I like the logical rigour in your argument. The only problem you have is that the underlying point is stupid. The answer is yes. The 1100s is woefully depressing/anxiety inducing/infuriating compared to the modern first world. Nobody would choose to go back to the 1100s. Trying to defend that position is dumb and a disservice to the very real problems in the present caused by low real living standards. There is an urgent and pressing need to get poor people (indeed, all people) cheap energy, more goods and better services. Telling them that they'd have had to suck it up and cope in the 1100s isn't a path to good outcomes.
I think you're probably trying to make a point about hedonistic adjustment? It isn't a bad point in the abstract but it doesn't work in this argument. The people who account for that usually end up taking vows of poverty or Epicurean-style hedonism. Which is cool and all but the logical end of that philosophy is maximising inequality. The wealthy are still wealthy but the adherents are as poor as they can manage because they'll be happy regardless of what inequality is present.
> This is quite literally incorrect. This has been studied.
You've asserted that twice, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong. A fairly cursory glance at reality and the literature suggests that people can't actually detect inequality with any reliability [0, 1] and I don't think people are at all consistent on defining what the word means. It is hard for the average person to get worked up about something they can't detect. You have no idea how equal we two are, for example. And even among peers in meatspace it's a struggle to estimate any real metric - credit is a huge confounder.
People do get worked up by being in a lower class or in an unpleasant spot in the status hierarchy - but that isn't inequality as much as 10% of the population is going to be in each decile as a statistical matter of fact. It isn't possible to change that.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590051X2... - "Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, the reality is contrary to people’s perception since low (high) actual income inequality in the region is often reflected in its overestimated (underestimated) perception." is a choice tidbit.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214211062... - Leads with "While some scholars suggest that awareness of income inequality is strongest when the actual level of inequality is high, others find that individuals’ awareness of income inequality is largely unresponsive to actual inequality"
By that pattern, the more wealthy you are then the more risk, and higher risks, you can take on without impacting your quality of life, your better off-ness. A billionaire can take on more risk than a millionaire, and a millionaire can take on more risk than waged employee.
And further in that pattern, wealth over a certain amount translates into increasing risk tolerance. And leveraging that tolerance to take on risk, and it paying off, leads to more wealth. But the only thing you can use the increased wealth, since it's beyond whatever the threshold for comparative impact is, for is taking on even more risk.
I suppose we need to have an understanding of what "better off" is and how it is measured.
Fair. And I think in fact most people probably would agree with you as a hypothetical. Where I think we would disagree is whether we think an economic system that produces 10x the Musks is an economic system that could also eliminate homelessness. Would the political leaders in such a system want to spend money eliminating homelessness, or spend money on the Musks who e.g. finance their elections, or provide them with well paying jobs?
Right now we live in a world with a growing number of super billionaires and we have tons of homelessness. Especially San Francisco and LA have tons of super rich people but also many homeless. So it seems to me that breeding more billionaires is not going to solve anything.
So voting on people just because they say they will punish the rich is a good way to not solve the problem. Vote on competent people, not people looking to assign blame.
I think you're right, but not in that way.
Tesla charged wealthy people a lot for the original tesla roadster. Then they took what they learned and charged wealthy people a lot for a better car, the original model S. Then the X.
He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people for further updates to the model S/X, updating the motor, then motors.
Now the model 3 and Y are available for less wealthy people. I'm sure the next generation of tesla cars will be more affordable, maybe even Jimbob.
Nobody needs a Tesla.
If a wealthy person pays $100k for a car, it’s because they think it’s worth $100k.
If the price later drops to $80k, that’s not money out of the first persons pocket. They were willing to trade $100k for a car they wanted.
And by this very logic, lowering the price of goods over time is bad. What a insane world we’d live in if that were true.
But does everybody need another 100 years of gasoline cars?
It probably is a bizarre way to look at things, but the wealthy people are paying to develop EVs, then the not so wealthy to develop even more practical cars and so on until they are practical for normal folks. And they reach price parity with ICE cars.
People have been saying that the economical/low impact car to buy is a used car that was already built. Now you can buy used teslas.
I'd argue he used subsidies from the government, both direct and indirect.
Buyers get a tax credit for electric cars. SolarCity received hundreds of millions of dollars in direct grants from different state governments, I believe this all went to Tesla.
Tesla's high curb weight causes more damage to roads. Tesla's lack of unionization means that it relies on mistreatment of workers to get its cars made.
There are a lot of examples of Musk taking money both directly and indirectly from those who are not in his customer base. I won't argue whether or not Tesla has been a net benefit or not for the USA, but the result of this is that Musk can point to his company's success and marketing to pump the share price-- and he is now attempting to dump it.
The sneaky thing about inequality is that a lot of the direct costs are externalized. Musk can still appear "self-made" when he has externalized so many of his costs to the taxpayer and his workers.
Those cars wouldn't have been made or bought without those grants, the grants offset the extra cost of electric cars so they didn't put money into anyone's pockets, its just the government investing in getting electrification happen earlier.
Without them that money the profits would just have went to combustion car manufacturers instead like before.
So, the question is, how much of his wealth did he actually create versus simply grab from others? When it comes to MySpace Tom the answer isn't super important, but it is very important for the masses of poor people who make up the vast majority of the planet.
Also, I'm not sure why the hypothetical situation of what would happen if Zuckerberg hadn't founded Facebook would be particularly relevant to people in poverty. If MySpace became the most popular social networking company rather than Facebook, how would the poor be in a different situation?
If we recognize that broadly the same pile of money would exist absent Zuck, and instead belong to Tom or Joe or Jane, this provides us a nice justification for not letting Zuck have quite so much money anyway. He's the guy who hit the lotto. It's not such a bad thing to say the government is going to take a lot of it and spend it on poor people.
The lotto ticket is a great analogy. If other people picked the winning numbers, they'd have won a lot of money too! But they didn't. Does that create an obligation for the real winner to compensate all the hypothetical would-be winners?
How do they make the better or cheaper product? Did they do it by, perhaps, exploiting the people or resources of another, poorer country? Or skirting safety regulations? If so, I would say they are "grabbing from others", yes. And they are motivating other companies to follow along to keep up.
If the allegation is that people made money but skirting regulations or otherwise illegal things, then it's crucial to explain the nefarious practices at play. Not just asserting that someone who is wealth must have acquired that wealth through underhanded means, simply on the basis of being wealthy.
If it was state sponsored and without ads, people would get much happier since they are no longer constantly mentally assaulted by ads intended to create cravings or feeling of missing out.
There is no other way capitalism can work.
The author writing the story didn't take millions of dollars from the persons manning the presses, without the author the work done by the presses wouldn't be as valuable and those millions of dollars of value wouldn't have materialized.
The same goes for most of the people who got rich on their own, they realized a way to create more value using the same number of workers, so they get rich and it didn't involve taking from anyone, just giving more value to customers.
"That's just zero sum thinking" has been the smokescreen for gullible people for at least fifty years.
Zero-sum (or fixed-sum, since zero-sum strictly means the aggregate quantity is not only fixed and finite but actually zero) doesn't just mean the total is finite (which is obviously correct), it means that output is fixed and the choices made only affect distribution, not the quantity of goods and services that are produced and made available. This is not the case.
So no, I don't give a fig if "total wealth" whatever that is is somehow going up in aggregate, not if it's not being shared more uniformly.
That's obviously why distribution matters as well as total production (or aggregate utility), but fixed-sum means that distribution is the only thing subject to change, and that for someone to gain someone else must lose equally. (There's also an argument that things get closer to fixed sum in utility terms if you first lift everyone out of extreme poverty, because relative wealth/deprivation becomes a much more significant source of utility/disutility than absolute wealth is of utility once you are beyond extreme poverty, but even there its much more complex than fixed sum.)
> Moreover, certain material conditions--safety from harm, freedom of expression, and the political power to maintain those things--absolutely do not increase in some global sense the way that economic output does.
They certainly don't increase in lockstep with economic output, either globally or locally, but neither are they fixed-sum, where for someone to have more someone else must have less in the same degree (except maybe "political power").
Oh, you can gain love, satisfaction, respect, and all the other things that money can't buy and it doesn't cost anyone else a thing, but the minute you gain something that money can buy, you've gained a little bit of trading power within the economy, which everyone else has lost.
> They certainly don't increase in lockstep with economic output, either globally or locally, but neither are they fixed-sum, where for someone to have more someone else must have less in the same degree (except maybe "political power").
Safety from harm and freedom of expression, perhaps, don't come at the cost of others, but those examples were meant to illustrate that some things of value--economic value even--truly are "fixed" and do not increase simply because of progress and innovation. But "political power" is the biggie, anyway. That's the most important one. That's what extremely wealthy people are buying. It's not yachts and mansions. It's political power, which has enormous implications for the rest of us.
Better shopping, or is it more about capturing shopping and taking a slice from all transactions?
It's not just goods, services too grow in absolute terms. We invented radio in 1900 (ish) and introduced a wholly novel set of services. Before photography, in order to get one's likeness recorded you had to sit for a portrait painter. After practical photography was developed, portraits became much more accessible. I could go on.
Humanity is increasing the pool of goods and services in absolute terms all the time.
Yes, they are.
> Humanity is increasing the pool of goods and services in absolute terms all the time.
The ever-increasing amount is still finite, at any given time and even aggregated over the entire history from the evolution of humanity to its inevitable extinction.
While you're thinking about that, think about this. You and I live in the present. Of what use is it to us in the present if there's more total wealth in some future long after we're gone?
Correction: That should be, "Not all people on Earth who have existed in the past or will exist in the future exist in our present."
Let me help you out, because I actually know what you mean when you say the number of people on Earth is "potentially infinite" even if you don't really know what you mean. You mean that that there's no upper bound. But, that can only be true under a set of unlikely conditions:
There is no upper bound to the existence of Earth.
There is no time in the future when Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Given that the most unassailable models in science make it practically certain the Sun won't exist as it does now within 10 billion years, your necessary conditions are unlikely.
Consequently, I rate your claim: False
^_~ You do you, I suppose.
> Given that the most unassailable models in science make it practically certain the Sun won't exist as it does now within 10 billion years, your necessary conditions are unlikely.
Everything that happens is unlikely. There isn't anything in particular stopping either of those conditions being fulfilled if progress keeps up at the rate it has for all of recorded human history and the upper limit is a long way away. We'd have to move the earth at some point in the next few billion years.
It does seem most likely that we bump in to a hard limit somewhere under the same logic as the Fermi paradox - but we don't know what it is yet and until we do it is simply the case that the number of people on the earth is potentially infinite. As is wealth, as far as we know - especially since wealth doesn't have to have mass.
But the above commenter states that goods and services are zero-sum, which is not true. Goods and services do grow in absolute terms. His whole thesis is that accumulation of wealth necessarily entails the depravation of others. This is not at all true: wealthy can and does grow in absolute terms.
What you're describing here is literally the opposite of zero-sum. The total set of goods and services in increasing. It directly contradicts your claim that the accumulation of wealth necessitates the deprivation of others.
Adam, Bob, and Charlie are all shipwrecked on an island. They divy up the ship's goods equally. One day, Charlie decides to build some furniture. Now he has more goods than Adam and Bob. Did he deprive others, to achieve his comparatively greater wealth? If you just looked at one snapshot of time, you'd see Charlie with more wealth than the others, though.
I'm glad we finally agree that wealth is finite.
> the key thing is that over time the collection of goods and services grows.
That's cold comfort for people who never live to see a time when they can compete for those goods and services.
Wrong, wealth is not finite and it can be - and is - increased. Yes, the amount of wealth at Monday, 03-Jun-24 04:12:33 UTC is going to be finite, because that's a fixed point in time. This is just a pointless tangent, because in our world time is not frozen. In our reality, where time flows, wealth is not finite and is indeed grown in absolute terms.
> That's cold comfort for people who never live to see a time when they can compete for those goods and services.
Yes, people who lived in preindustrial societies saw more or less fixed living standards for generations. But fortunately for us, we live in one of the most economically dynamic points of in all of human history [1]. Your statement does ring true for most of human history, but not in our age.
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_GDP_per_capita...
>> At one given instant sure
> Wrong, wealth is not finite
Perhaps you could make up your mind.
> Yes, people who lived in preindustrial societies saw more or less fixed living standards for generations. But fortunately for us, we live in one of the most economically dynamic points of in all of human history [1]. Your statement does ring true for most of human history, but not in our age.
These people do not live in a preindustrial society.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/28/poverty-raci...
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at any one point in time is fixed. At a particular instant in time, there is an exact number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. And that number is fixed and doesn't change, unless you pick a different timestamp. Does that mean we can just keep burning fossil fuels and the amount of carbon dioxide doesn't change?
No, because time isn't frozen. We don't live in a world where time is fixed. Seriously, I can't believe how much time I've wasted on this.
Then let's cut out fanciful stories of the planets and the birds and the bees and cut to the chase.
In the 8 years between its IPO and Elon Musk taking it private again, Twitter (now X) made a profit in only two, according to Wikipedia. Meanwhile according to Glassdoor it has a median total comp for a Twitter Software Engineer in SF at $250k. But the median restaurant worker in SF makes about $40k according to Ziprecruiter. All of these people, Twitter engineers and regular restaurant workers, are generally competing for housing in the Bay Area. Tell me. Who's typically going to win those bids for housing, the Twitter engineer or the restaurant worker?
This is one of the more pernicious aspects of zero sum thinking: people engaging in zero sum thinking assume that reducing the wealth of some people means it'll end up redistributed to others. The reality is that it often just results in everyone being worse off.
No, a different mix of workers will move in. If they flatten the income distribution then life will be better for the non-tech workers who already live here. San Francisco's economy wasn't always so focused on tech, just as other vibrant cities in the U.S. aren't so focused on tech.
> That restaurant worker may lose their job because there's not as many customers.
The different mix of workers that would move in may go to restaurants just as much, and if they don't then sure, some restaurants will go out of business. So what? Some of the restaurant staff can adapt to other jobs, and they'll have longer to do so because their rent won't be so high.
> This isn't speculation, this is actively happening: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/san-francisco-budge...
That article doesn't even mention tech. What it says is:
The snowballing shortfall is primarily caused by formerly reliable streams of revenue — namely, taxes generated by tourism and a once-thriving downtown — sputtering amid the post-pandemic recovery.
> This is one of the more pernicious aspects of zero sum thinking: people engaging in zero sum thinking assume that reducing the wealth of some people means it'll end up redistributed to others. The reality is that it often just results in everyone being worse off.
If reducing the wealth of some people and creating a flatter income distribution "just results in everyone being worse off" then evidently increasing the wealth of some people and creating a skewed income distribution will have the opposite effect. Suppose you lived in a place and a time with a highly-skewed income distribution with severe winners and severe losers and you're the loserest loser of them all. Suppose as luck would have it everyone else makes more money than you do. Evidently that would "just result in everyone being [better] off" even you, right? In that case, you should be thrilled with that arrangement. What do you say? Would you be thrilled to have the lowest income in your city?
This, right here, is the crux of your incorrect worldview. No, a flatter income distribution is not inherently better. Which is better: 90% of people with $60,000 income and the top 10% with $600,000, or 100% of people with an income of $10,000? The latter is flatter, but even the poorest people were still much, much wealthier in the former than the latter.
> Suppose you lived in a place and a time with a highly-skewed income distribution with severe winners and severe losers and you're the loserest loser of them all. Suppose as luck would have it everyone else makes more money than you do. Evidently that would "just result in everyone being [better] off" even you, right? In that case, you should be thrilled with that arrangement. What do you say? Would you be thrilled to have the lowest income in your city?
Again: I care about my own material conditions. If a genie gave me the choice to double my income doubling (in real terms, as in the actual value of goods and services accessible to me doubles), while everyone else's income increases tenfold of course that's be a good thing. Why would I forego an improvement to my own conditions, just to keep everyone else's conditions from improving proportionally more? The fact that others benefit more doesn't change the fact that I'm left strictly better off. To do otherwise is the epitome of the crab mentality: It's better to harm everyone just to maintain your relative position.
I didn't say it's "inherently" better. I said it's better for "the non-tech workers", which is just a stand-in for "anyone below the median." I'm sure flattening the income distribution might not be regarded as better by people above the median. Oh well!
> Which is better: 90% of people with $60,000 income and the top 10% with $600,000, or 100% of people with an income of $10,000?
The latter example is better for everyone except for the people who would've been in the top 10% in the former example. The scale of the dollar amounts is just arbitrary, after all. It could be a flat income distribution where everyone makes $10,000, or $100,000, or $100,000,000, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
> Again: I care about my own material conditions. If a genie gave me the choice to double my income doubling (in real terms, as in the actual value of goods and services accessible to me doubles), while everyone else's income increases tenfold of course that's be a good thing. Why would I forego an improvement to my own conditions?
You haven't. You just experienced a loss in your material conditions. Congratulations. Now, everyone else has 5 times as much income as you (assuming everyone started equally). They can easily outbid you for housing, for food, for vacations, for everything. You better think fast and invent something of value that they don't have so you have a little monopoly at least for a little while, otherwise you're screwed.
Again, as I wrote the comment I'm talking about real value not just dollar values. Everyone is worse off in the latter scenario.
> You haven't. You just experienced a loss in your material conditions.
No, I just doubled my material conditions. Again, it seems you're just not able to comprehend the notion that material conditions are not zero-sum. The fact that other people gained more does not mean o lost.
Think of this in more concrete terms: I have a 2,000 square foot house and one car. A genie offers me the ability to get a 4,000 sq ft house and a second car, but everyone else gets a 20,000 sq foot mansion and 9 cars. I may become less wealthy relative to everyone else, but I'm still better off than I was initially.
It seems like it's just impossible for you to convince of a scenario where society can collectively experience increases in living conditions. The only way you're able to think about value is in relative terms, not in terms absolute increases. It's pretty a sad, and unfortunately common train of thought.
> Again, as I wrote the comment I'm talking about real value not just dollar values.
In your example, how exactly do these people receive their income, be it $10,000 or $60,000 or $600,000?
Again, if we achieve a flat income distribution by reducing the value of what everyone can it with their income is that a good thing? Everyone's purchasing power is reduced: the 90% can only buy 1/6th as much as they could before, the top 10% 1/60th as much. But since the income distribution is now flat, this is somehow a good thing even according to you though everyone can buy only a fraction of what they could before.
This is what you're seemingly not able to comprehend: the total sum of value in the world isn't static. If I bulldoze a 2 story apartment building and build a 20 story apartment building I've just created a 10x increase in the residential floorspace on that block. If I develop cheap rocket motors I can put satellites into orbit for much less money, and thus enable things like high speed global internet. If I build a much more efficient factory for building cars and tractors, then foods gets much cheaper and farmers can replace draught animals with machinery. And shipping companies can haul much more cargo with trucks. The total value of goods and services in the world can, and is, increased. And it has more than doubled in the span of a typical lifetime for the last century. It doesn't take ages, it happens fast.
Most people who get enormously wealthy do so by founding or investing in companies that do something novel to increase the sum of value. Let's flip the previous analogy on its head: a genie gives you the ability to increase the real purchasing power of 90% of people by 6x, and the top 10% of people by 60x. Is that a bad thing, because the income distribution is now more unequal even though everyone is left strictly better off?
Well, no, I didn't write that, but setting that aside, maybe you can pick whichever one strengthens your argument the most.
Possibly the word you want to be using is limited; it is slightly harder for people to make pretend that the pie is fixed with that one. Although your point is much stronger than your opponents - wealth is infinite, since wealth doesn't have to be physical.
LOL on at least two separate occasions my "opponent" has said that wealth is finite. Sounds like they might be your opponent!
> since wealth doesn't have to be physical.
Living in the physical world as I do, I require that my needs for physical wealth be met first: goods and services like food, shelter, safety, furnishings, entertainment, and the political power to maintain them. Non-physical wealth--love, feelings of accomplishment, etc.--are important, but they come later.
What about you? Are you satisfied with non-physical wealth alone?
Only with the qualifier of, "at one instant in time."
Now answer this question: in the real world, are we frozen at one instant in time? Or does time flow?
That's a pretty important qualifier.
> Now answer this question: in the real world, are we frozen at one instant in time? Or does time flow?
That's two questions. Obviously, any one of us exists for a finite interval of time, that's for sure. Let's call that "a lifetime." Does technological innovation occur, does the world's productive output increase, and do average living standards rise over a typical lifetime? Sure. Does that mean that wealth is infinite? Not at all. Among other things, it depends on exactly what you mean by "infinite" which, so far, you've never said. Does time flow? I'll leave that to the philosophers.
OK. I've answered your questions. Now answer this one, please.
If a person alive now, today, in the present, is unhappy because they have a meager share of the world's wealth, would you expect them to become happy once you've explained to them that the world's wealth will be larger in the future, long after we're all dead?
I'd expect them to be happier when their material conditions are improved.
And how is that accomplished? Under a zero-sum mindset, this requires taking wealth from other people. So the answer is to raid and conquer neighboring countries and enslave their people. The pie is of a fixed size, so the only way to increase your lot is to reduce someone else's. This was true for much of human history, until the industrial revolution.
Fortunately, though, we live in the 21st century. We live in a time where material conditions are rising faster than at any point in human history. Much of this comes down to automation, and better energy capture. My responsibility is would be to invest in a more productive economy to raise living standards across the board. Make the pie bigger. This does not take a long time, world GDP per-capita more than doubled in the span on one lifetime: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Progress-of-the-human-sp...
Again, your statements are just factually wrong. Global average living standards have increased substantially, over the course of one person's lifetime. The growth is not "in the future, long after we're all dead". The average 70 year old has almost certainly seen drastic improvements over the span of their life.
> I'd expect them to be happier when their material conditions are improved.
You didn't answer the question I asked. I mean, you're not obliged to answer any questions, but for the record, you didn't answer this one. Perhaps your justification for not answering it is something like "false premise": perhaps you believe that a person's material conditions will necessarily improve as time progresses and overall wealth increases, such that they won't need you to explain to them that they're better off because they'll be able to see it with their own eyes. If that's your belief then I don't even need to offer my counterargument because surely you must already know it by now, I've already made it enough times. But, maybe I'll give you a little hint anyway.
> world GDP per-capita more than doubled in the span on one lifetime
Hint: "per-capita" is an average, which means you're already on shaky ground
> Again, your statements are just factually wrong. Global average living standards have increased
How can my statement about "global average living standards" be wrong when I never made a statement about "global average living standards"?
> The average 70 year old has almost certainly seen drastic improvements over the span of their life.
I assume that by "average 70 year old" what you really mean is "typical 70 year old" as in "representative 70 year old" but that still demands clarification. Where does this typical, representative 70 year old live? What percentage of the world's population do they represent? However many people that is, what about the people left over, the one's whose lives are not represented by this typical 70 year old? How have their living standards changed, if at all? These are really just rhetorical questions to try to get you to think. Don't feel the need to try to answer them.
There was no "reaching into others pocket". It's a luxury car, not a fire extinguisher being sold to a guy on fire.
People reached into their own pocket and handed him cash. Voluntarily. For something they wanted.
Then Elon sold off pieces of his company to people who reached into their pockets and handed him cash for it. Voluntarily. Because they wanted it.
It's one of the least coercise set of transactions I can possibly think of.
Can you do it without absolving others, like the city, of their responsibility to make sure housing gets built?
Why would I do that? I never said that tech is the only cause of homelessness. Outcomes can result from multiple causal factors, after all.
So new jobs and high pay are bad?
That sounds incredibly anti-worker.
They're bad for the people who don't have them, like teachers, restaurant workers, and custodial staff...people who are also "workers".
But regardless, your argument is that new, higher paying jobs are bad because other people make less?
Do you hold a general belief that all progress is "bad" because deprecates existing things? If so, how far does this go?
Would you consider a new cancer drug "bad" because all those people who received an older drug didn't get to experience such good results?
This seems like an "anti-progress" mindset.
new jobs and high pay
> your argument is that new, higher paying jobs are bad because other people make less
My argument is that new, higher paying jobs are bad for the people who don't have them. Is your argument that they're somehow good for the people who don't have them?
> Do you hold a general belief that all progress is "bad"
No. My belief is that progress is not "good" for the people who don't share in the benefits of that progress. Are you going to argue otherwise?
> Would you consider a new cancer drug "bad" because all those people who received an older drug didn't get to experience such good results?
No, but if a person suffers because they can't afford a new cancer drug and regards that as "bad", I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to make that judgement. Are you?
Yes
> No. My belief is that progress is not "good" for the people who don't share in the benefits of that progress. Are you going to argue otherwise?
But people do share in them, even if they themselves don't get a new job and higher pay. The most obvious one is taxes - these new jobs create new taxes that go to the government to be spent on society.
Beyond that, isn't it better if your fellow citizen who was unemployed has a job now? Or if they switched from a lower paying job to a higher one? That's a societal benefit.
> No, but if a person suffers because they can't afford a new cancer drug and regards that as "bad", I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to make that judgement. Are you?
You missed my scenario. If a new drug comes out, is it bad that someone benefits when the people who didn't get the new drug (because it wasn't available) don't benefit?
> Yes
This ought to be good. Let's hear it.
> these new jobs create new taxes that go to the government to be spent on society
Wealthy people pay a lower tax rate than non-wealthy people do. That means the tax system is a net transfer of wealth from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. Try again.
> Beyond that, isn't it better if your fellow citizen who was unemployed has a job now?
Not if my fellow citizen outbids me on an apartment, no, it isn't.
> You missed my scenario
No, I presented a different scenario. Sorry for not playing along
Please provide a source.
Youre also ignoring the fact that even with a lower rate (which you haven’t proven), they may still pay more overall which benefits society.
> Not if my fellow citizen outbids me on an apartment, no, it isn't.
So you’re prefer if your fellow citizen was left unemployed, rather than you being outbid on an apartment? It sounds like you’d prefer to keep poor people down rather than have to spend more time finding housing. Isn’t that selfish?
> No, I presented a different scenario. Sorry for not playing along
Why would you refuse to give your thoughts?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2021/09/23/new-...
> Youre also ignoring the fact that even with a lower rate (which you haven’t proven), they may still pay more overall which benefits society.
Yes. I'm ignoring it because it's not relevant. Think about it. Suppose for the sake of argument 400 people took 99% of the output of the nation (~$23 trillion in 2023), and since we're supposing, let's be generous to your argument and suppose those 400 pay a higher tax rate of say 40%. That's ~$9 trillion in taxes or roughly double what the IRS actually collected. Sounds pretty good, right! Except...that leaves the remaining 300 million with a per capita income of less than $1000 per year. Would you prefer this supposed situation in which the richest 400 pay even more in total taxes (and tax rate) than they actually do in reality?
> So you’re prefer if your fellow citizen was left unemployed, rather than you being outbid on an apartment? It sounds like you’d prefer to keep poor people down rather than have to spend more time finding housing. Isn’t that selfish?
Wrongo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
"left unemployed" is not the only alternative. There are others. "Employed but with an income the same as mine" is one. Given the choice between my fellow citizens taking home so much more than I do such that I can't afford to live in my city, and my fellow citizens taking home the same as I do such that I can afford to live in my city, I would choose the latter. Would you choose the former?
> Why would you refuse to give your thoughts?
Why did you stop beating your wife? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
I haven't refused to give my thoughts on your scenario. I chose not to elaborate on your scenario. I did "give my thoughts", however.
No, but if a person suffers because they can't afford a new cancer drug and regards that as "bad", I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to make that judgement. Are you?
That's not a source. That's a cherry picked, politically motivated source about 400 billionaires? The average person getting a job at Tesla and competing for your apartment isn't one of them?
Want to try again?
> Except...that leaves the remaining 300 million with a per capita income of less than $1000 per year.
But that's not what's happening. What's happening is someone is getting a job paying a couple hundred thousand at Telsa. And as a result they pay more in taxes.
> "left unemployed" is not the only alternative.
It is in the example I gave. You stated that instead of "losing an apartment" you'd prefer that person never got a job at Tesla.
> Why did you stop beating your wife? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question
You refused to answer (you literally stated you won't answer), so I asked why. That's not a loaded question.
> Want to try again? Not particularly, no. You asked for a source for my claim that the wealthy paid a lower rate in taxes, and I gave you one.
> But that's not what's happening.
I know. It's called a "thought experiment." It's designed to explore the implications of reasoning. This thought experiment illustrates that even if the wealthy pay a higher tax rate and/or higher overall taxes, the benefits to society of those taxes do not compensate for the drawbacks of there being rich people in that society.
> It is in the example I gave. You stated that instead of "losing an apartment" you'd prefer that person never got a job at Tesla.
Well, no I didn't state that, but even if I did, "never getting a job at Tesla" does not logically imply "left unemployed." There are other employers besides Tesla.
> You refused to answer (you literally stated you won't answer), so I asked why. That's not a loaded question.
No, I literally said, "No, I presented a different scenario. Sorry for not playing along." That's not a refusal. That's simply me choosing not to engage with your scenario at that time. Who knows! Maybe I'll engage with it later (not likely).
In every mixed economy, there's a capital side and a labor side. Rich people getting paid for owning things, poor people getting paid for working. There's a healthy tension there, but for the last 50 years capital has been kicking the shit out of labor and it's really starting to show.
Playing devil's advocate though, I'm not sure that most people are really that bothered about billionaires, to me it's always felt like a stereotypical lefty trust fund kid thing.
Most of the issues surrounding inequality seem to come about with things like e.g. transit vs driving, big house vs apartment, good diet vs bad diet, etc.
Basically just living next door to people that you* will never be, because I'm not sure that realistically we can give everyone a house on an acre with two cars on the drive.
you*: Not literally you or any individual, it's not that hard to make it out of poverty, but collectively not everyone can/will.
This seems to imply that a reduction in inequality would not reduce homelessness. I don't follow the reasoning here, and I'm not aware of evidence for this reasoning. I can probably find evidence that affluent countries with stronger social safety nets and less inequality have less homelessness.
If that meaning wasn't intended, then it must be implying that billionaires like Musk are linearly motivated by money -- that is, the more money they can make for themselves, the harder they will work to provide value.
Or maybe you are implying that the potential of unlimited riches will attract the best talent?
> There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that. Wealthy people don't just sit on their wealth -- they use it. To buy power. To have an outsized influence on government and the lives of other people. To employ financial advisors that let them enjoy the benefits of citizenship while evading or minimizing the taxes they pay. To lobby for tax laws that favor people who live off of wealth (assets, stock, etc) rather than income. To buy citizenship in other countries and evade international sanctions. To destroy, directly or indirectly through their influence, resources that are finite or very difficult to replace, like fossil fuels, rain forests, clean air.
Did Putin make his wealth without harming others?
I'll riff a bit here, too: even if the super-rich don't hurt anyone by becoming super-rich, you have to wonder if they wouldn't be better off just being kinda rich. Having billions seems like a very isolating experience. Would you still find it easy to trust other people? Would you have an outsized opinion of your abilities and importance? And what about your children, would they be valuable, upstanding members of society? Would they even be able to take care of themselves? Would they see themselves as intrinsically better than poor people?
It would be nice if those were the only two options.
One POV is you’re proving the point: people feel much more strongly about exacting vengeance against antagonist celebrities than helping people generally. They’ll of course say the opposite in worthless Internet comments.
You may want to follow your own advice in reading my first response. People feel strongly about inequality period. It's well established social fact that people's happiness and stress are tied to relative measure of success/status/access to resources etc. It also historically true that greater inequality leads to social instability. Partly because of the first point, but mostly because this top cadre of people are over-powered and will, human nature being what it is, use that power to exploit those with the least power until we're back to a point where there are a whole bunch of very poor people struggling to survive.
So it may be nice to think there could be an option of having supersized inequality (e.g. a bunch of 10x Elons) AND have everyone above the poverty line but the fundamentals of people and society mean that super-inequality is simply incapable with a state in which all of worlds poorest can thrive.
Living standards of who, exactly?
Are you talking about aggregate GDP regardless of how it's distributed?
Is it okay if the top 5 deciles do better, while the bottom decile does worse?
> a 10x Musk and no homeless people
That doesn't seem to be how it works, as the population of unsheltered people appears to be positively correlated with the population of billionaires.
Everyone. There isn't some group we should wish ill on in the abstract. The best way forward is one where everyone is better off. That is how the big leaps forward tend to work - the wealthy get insanely more wealthy, the middle gets more wealthy and the lower end of the wealth spectrum stays where it is but shrinks as a relative share of society [0]. I'd rather that than one of the big equalisation pushes like what we saw in Russia or China last century.
The problem with the excessive focus on inequality is it is an easy way to lead people away from approaches where everyone wins.
[0] Due to mental health and rare people with unusual personal preferences, the poorest person in society will always have basically nothing. I don't think that is theoretically possible to improve on. And the mechanical reason why I think "reducing inequality" is a really bad idea - the only reliable way to do that is drag people towards being impoverished.
(Genuinely asking; I know very little about this and would like to become more familiar with what people know about it.)
This is circular reasoning and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of basic economics and what wealth even is.
> You'll never get 10x Musk's without creating homeless people
This is stated without evidence.
> We compete with each other for resources using wealth and power
The classic 0 sum theory of economics. It's a good thing economics isn't actually 0 sum because with more than 10x population growth since the 1700s we'd be fighting over loaves of bread.
It's not circular reasoning because it's not even reasoning. It's a claim. I have not attempted to justify it. I could, and I may, but I haven't tried to (yet).
> This is stated without evidence.
Yes. It's another claim. I'd be happy to explain it if you like.
> It's a good thing economics isn't actually 0 sum because with more than 10x population growth since the 1700s we'd be fighting over loaves of bread.
People still find it difficult to obtain even basic needs like food, even in what another commenter referred to as one of the "affluent" countries.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
How do you think the less-affluent countries became that way? By enriching the affluent countries, that's how.
You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year.
Unfortunately, aid is a short term fix for problems. The only real way to help them is to properly invest in them, which requires a stability that less affluent countries often lack.
No it isn't.
> It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it.
I never said anything about a conspiracy.
> You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year.
I suspect the less affluent countries wouldn't object to less aid and investment from the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iran_coup
What, you think these places are a shining beacon the moment they stop exporting a single resource?
I don't understand your question. Can you rephrase?