Hacker News Reader

Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

I like Vinod Khosla's take (on Twitter):

   Stop measuring GDP and instead measure the total income of the bottom 50% of the population and optimize policy for that. Additions and exits from this group can also be tracked. We get what we measure. Will this raise income inequality?

View on HN

That's just Rawls's Original Position but restated poorly.

That would make a great sci-fi story: somebody wakes up with amnesia within a John Rawls thought experiment. I'm not smart enough to write it, but I'm giving the idea away for free.

It's not just income. Corporate America has turned "prey upon the poor" into a science. Nobody really cares about protecting the poor from that sort of thing. So they'll have to deal with BS like, say, getting paid via a debit card, whose bank charges fees for nearly anything. Then there are the astronomical credit card rates/fees. There are no limits on credit card APRs.

Even government has been highly optimized for the ultra-weathly and tries to fuck over the poor. The poor get audited at a rate orders of magnitude higher than people who make $1M+/year, despite audits on the poor rarely recovering much in the way of unpaid taxes, but audits on the wealthy tend to make the IRS giant piles of cash, because rich people love to cheat on their taxes.

Then there's court fees. Get arrested, you're suddenly on the hook for a bunch of expenses. If you don't pay them - jail.

Further: look at the ease with which you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax writeoffs for owning a bizjet.

Compare and contrast to the hoops a single mother has to go through every 6-12 months to keep "re-certifying" their children as qualifying for about ~$25 in monthly benefits for food for said kid. The appointments are only 9-5, M-F. Which means you have to take a day off from work; that means you lose at least $100 in income, which is a huge amount of money for a single mother working a minimum wage job.

The appointments are typically at state offices nowhere near major metropolitan cities or public transit, which means you need a car, or to take a taxi, or get a friend to drive you.

Apparently we need to be really concerned about single mothers just giving away their kids and still taking advantage of WIC at the tune of...$25/month?

Then there's all the administrative busywork generated by legislators who demand it so "taxpayers aren't ripped off."

Meanwhile, that bizjet sure does make a lot of weekend trips to Vail and the Bahamas in the winter...

The "prey upon the poor" is just as bad, if not worse, in Brazil. Growing up there you don't really realize, but after living abroad for a while it is painfully obvious.

Just a small example, stores that sell anything >30 USD don't put the real price of goods when they advertise them. They always put "<h5>x12</h5> <h1>{REAL_PRICE/12}</h1>" (show the price of the installment, while putting how many installments really small)

I had a data scientist friend who worked at a bank optimizing how much credit he could give out to people (while staying legal with the regulations). Like his goal was to get people to get more credit (usually credit card). My Bank app constantly bombard me with notifications about taking loans and getting credit cards.

This friend was not the most moral person I ever met and even him was disgusted after a few years working there, he was making a ton of money but he left anyway.

The mostly state owned largest bank (Banco do Brasil) did a "Black Friday" last week.

A bank. State owned. Doing Black Friday. In Brazil.

Plus all the raffles / lottery stuff that's just normal business. I agree with 100% preying is on another level.

My parents had mid/severe problem with lotteries, they kept saying god was going to make them win the lottery so they could pay off their debts and fix the car.

I remember when I found out that some months they were spending around 20% of their income on lotteries.

I would have thought Khosla to be quite intelligent, but then he says this:

> additions and exits from this group can also be tracked. We get what we measure. Will this raise income inequality?

I'm not that smart but I'm pretty sure that X = Y here, and X - Y = 0.

Reminds me of the Sacha Baron Cohen bit where he suggested to Bernie Sanders that we move the 99% into the 1%.

I think a generous reading is Khosla was referring to capital rather than people, which is something similar to Gini coefficient. Very generous.

On the other hand, maybe people like that, who for no reason aside from their massive personal fortune have a huge megaphone, deserve less generosity and should give everything they write a sniff test first. Idk.

Yes? It sounds like it is the churn rate he wants to measure. Which could be used as a proxy og social mobility.

This the guy that illegally keeps fencing off public beach?

I would say this is a pretty good example of an ad hominem attack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

If the standard is that someone has to be unimpeachable before they can suggest a well-being metric than no one can.

I disagree. When one demonstrates contempt for the public we should be inclined to pay less attention to their opinions on public welfare.

No this is an example of pointing out hypocrisy. He says that others should do what he is not willing to do. If he were to practice what he preached, the bottom 50% of income earners would have access to his beach.

The messenger doesn't need to stand by his message

Two things can be true: The message is good, and the messenger is also hypocritical.

Technically, there was no ad hominem fallacy. RcouF1uZ4gsC just argued that Khosla is a hypocrite.

Agreed, but under a charitable interpretation.

Under a less charitable one, RcouF1uZ4gsC was discrediting the message by using the messenger's ``ethos''.

If we did this fifty years ago, we’d be having this discussion by snail mail.

No, we might be having this discussion on mars instead of iPhones.

None of our elites care about: a) 99% of us living a meaningful life b) technologically moving humanity forward (supports bullet a)

Install elites that care about those and then you can use any measure you want, any system you want, etc. Instead we’ve replaced god with money. Only an upgrade for the 1%.

Email was invented gratis by government and university employees who were largely paid by the public. Email worked fantastically for decades before the private sector monetized it with spam and CTAs to drive more interactions.

And so what if we did, if it meant Americans were better off economically?

I can tell you I am no happier now that I have email than I was back in the snail mail days. In fact, if anything it's a negative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com