Who do you think would "allow" this? God? This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself catching up to an excessively idealistic set of policies; this policy decision is downstream of that, not arbitrary.
If you can't conceptualize this as a constrained optimization problem, you're not even worth arguing with; you simply lack the tools to think about this in a useful way.
And I don’t ask you to believe me from the goodness of your heart. I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
I hope your degree was "economic" in the sense that you didn't pay much for it
> I think Piketty must have had something like half a dozen best sellers on this topic alone at this point.
Thinking pop-slop authors like Piketty are worth paying attention to is a worse self-indictment than the most condescending thing I could possibly say here.
You should downgrade your confidence that it's possible to meddle with natural resource allocation without causing problems.
Charitably, you seem to be implying that any actions which would disturb the current situation would be detrimental because current allocation is the best that can be done.
That seems highly suspicious to me because I don't think anyone is happy with the current fiscal policies. People disagree about what should be done but I think everyone agrees we are not at an optimum.
> Japan mostly solves this with very high inheritance taxes.
Details: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/japan/individual/other-taxes
Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.
The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).
Society is defined by what we owe one another in pursuit of civil interactions with one another.
If the only contract society offers me is "work your hands to the bone and then be discarded once you can't work anymore" then I have no incentive to keep up my side of the contract and perform labor or observe property laws in the first place. And once everyone is trying to cheat and steal from one another then you no longer have a society anymore.
What do you think you get if you don't hold up your side of the bargain? It's not like the state of nature was an early retirement.
Based.
Sure such thoughts are not probably concerning for the majority of people, but it only takes a small percentage of people losing faith in society combined with a bit of public apathy about people living criminal lives or doing criminal things for them to bring the entire thing to its knees.
So, I completely agree with most things you say. The core here is: Just don't work 40+ years for a retirement.
Take sabbaticals along the way.
Change your career when it is stale.
The counter for this: Don't buy into the hype. You cannot afford sabbaticals if you need two new cars every 4 years and a house that stretches your finances.
> This is a resource constraint imposed by reality itself
I don't think we should have ceilings, but we certainly should have floors. Minimum standards. Despite that belief, I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year[0] and a buttload who make that same amount while they're asleep[1]. These levels of wealth are so large that they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to spend within several generations, not just one lifetime.
This is only a problem, because the floor is lowering while the number of people in these groups are growing, especially the shit group.
If we have to make trades between ceiling and floor, I'd rather sacrifice ceiling for floor than floor for ceiling. Because the latter is simply greed.
Importantly, we can have both. This isn't a zero sum game, we produce more wealth and resources as time goes on. It is only zero sum at a single point in time. We can simultaneously raise the ceiling and the floor. But currently, we are shifting what percent of these gains go to which groups.
It would be insane to build extravagant and ornate Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor. It would be dangerous to build those ceilings without ensuring there is a strong foundation and forgetting to build the pillars to support them. Without that, the ceilings fall and it all becomes dirt and rubble.
It is an allocation problem, not an amount problem.
[0] If you have $100bn, are able to make a conservative 0.05 yearly interest and take 5min to shit, you've made ~$50k during that time.
[1] You only need $1bn given the same statistics, but closer to $45k. There's over 3k billionaires.
There are finite resources to allocate. If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
> I think there is something wrong when there's about 20 people who make more money while they take a shit, than most American families make in a year
That's usually indicative of a lack of understanding of highly connected networks, power law distributions, etc. - the types of things you need to grapple with if your question is "how do I maximize some economic objective for X million people?".
> This isn't a zero sum game
It's a constrained game (and there exists a zero-sum tradeoff between instantaneous allocation of resources to capital good production and consumable good production)
> Cathedral ceilings to only have a dirt floor
You're really leaning on this analogy that isn't very useful for actually thinking about the problem
> There are finite resources to allocate.
I'll try to illustrate this with an easy example. There's a finite amount of gold that humans have mined, and thus available for use. We could even say that there's a finite amount of gold on Earth, that is available. But these are different things. If we do no more mining, we have a fixed amount of gold. If we mine more, we get more. Total gold available for use, increases.
The analogy extends. As our technology advances, more gold becomes available to be mined, and eventually we could even transmute gold. There's more resources in our solar system than we could conceivably use in the next billion years (even with exponential growth in use), so it can be treated as infinite (over these bounds).
This is especially important as we build... software. It is similarly effectively infinite within our bounds. We are rapidly building better hardware, increasing computing power and memory. This is a positive sum game.
The same is true about the economy in general.
You're right!
> If you can't conceptualize this, there's literally zero chance you can think about this in a productive way.
IF IT WAS ZERO SUM, then it would be even more important to discuss allocation, not less. In an extreme case, let's assume we have enough resources to make everyone in the world live at a middle class level. It is finite. But there are an infinite number of ways in which we may allocate these resources. I think it would definitely be a problem if we were allocating it in ways that some people could buy a private jet every day for the rest of their lives ($100bn easily does this), while others are can't eat at least one meal every day. That's not a lack of resource problem, that's an allocation problem.