Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

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But the vibe of the thing is about income inequality, and it's good that it is, because the value of money isn't fixed. Only rich people staring at a stock portfolio care about "number went up", what most people care about is their real purchasing power. Right now, the income you need to qualify for a mortgage on a house in the US is around the ~80-85th percentile mark of household income, generously. The Gini Coefficient is mentioned by the linked article exactly because income inequality is really important for what someone's effective purchasing power is, partially because some markets, like housing, are priced in a competitive manner, which is why I keep mentioning housing (Also, it's a huge factor in people's material living conditions, and a cost that has risen far faster than "inflation" in all of the periods discussed so far, which is the kind of phenomenon you can't really explain by trying to do big broad averages in "adjusted dollars" but which measuring things like inequality can tease out causal factors for a lot better).

If we're just going by vibes, the overwhelming vibe (which is also supported by the numbers) is that income inequality is increasing and that this is a huge problem, and it seems like most of the people who don't feel this way are pretty decidedly in the small portion of the population for whom this is working out. It doesn't surprise me that people here don't vibe with that. Based on the forum alone, I'd bet all the people in this thread are at least in the 80th percentile of US household income (adjusted for local purchasing power if you happen to live elsewhere). If this wasn't the vibe in 2021, Paul Graham wouldn't have been writing bullshit to try to dismiss said vibe, and this person wouldn't be responding to him

yes, philosophically and by the vibes, we are in complete agreement. clearly inequality is growing, clearly that is bad.

but you're doing a disservice with completely bogus claims like "incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s". it only makes it harder to talk about the real issues and facts, because why would the other side stick to them now? the trust between sides gets further eroded and the gap widens

there's enough real data that we don't have to start making stuff up. the author could have easily pointed to housing instead like you. i think it's actually extremely important to get these facts right. enough to argue about on an internet forum on a sunday evening

I agree that the author made an imperfect argument and probably should not make factual claims that aren't supported by data. I think people arguing in bad faith tend to pick up on this kind of error because, like the commenter I responded to, they feel that their ability to refute anything about the argument means they've refuted the argument. My intent in responding was to point out that this is stupid, and that no one writing informally can really make an unassailable factual argument, which I did by doing the same kind of stupid nitpicking on their nitpick. Finding the weakest peripheral claim made in an argument is essentially always a fractal recursion into increasingly banal minutiae that serves no one except people like me who are trying to procrastinate on actual work by writing comments on a dumb aggregator website where devs argue for fun. I think we are in agreement at most of the self-similar layers of this

income inequality is really important for what someone's effective purchasing power is

Not really. Bill Gates isn't bidding up the prices of homes or groceries in your neighborhood.

Also, it's a huge factor in people's material living conditions, and a cost that has risen far faster than "inflation"

Yes, housing is far too expensive. And the main reason for that is state and local governments forcibly preventing people from building more housing, which is hard to blame on free markets.

most of the people who don't feel this way are pretty decidedly in the small portion of the population for whom this is working out

The point of the "minor factual nitpick" that median incomes are increasing rather than decreasing is exactly that capitalism works out pretty well for lots of people other than the wealthy.

Groceries? Maybe not. Houses? Absolutely. I mean I don't know about Bill Gates in particular, but the overwhelming majority of wealthy people have diverse portfolios, including in real estate, which means that large companies or funds are making offers in cash for houses they're not planning to live in, which drives up prices in aggregate. It's not the only factor, but it's actually a significant one. Yes, housing stock is artificially limited for bad reasons. Also, the relative value of real estate near cities is, in an era where remote work is pretty feasible but a lot of companies don't allow it, artificially skewed toward the population centers people are forced to move to for work. That these are also factors does not imply that inequality isn't one

Also, reducing the entire question of whether something has gone wrong and what and what one might do about it to a binary of "capitalism good" or "capitalism bad" is pretty pointless. Lots of things we could call capitalism have worked out really differently from each other, and looking at what the aggregate trends are and what policies might drive them and how they might be adjusted to better people's situations is a lot more useful than pretending that this is about "capitalism" versus "not capitalism", which so far as I can tell you are the first person in the thread to do, including the author of the linked article

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