Inequality is real, personal, expensive, and it was created | Hacker News Reader

Inequality is real, personal, expensive, and it was created

inequality.is

13 pointsph0rque17 comments

Let me be the first to link to Paul Graham here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

These neo-Calvinist arguments are absurd (and cribbed from the 1880s), and the sprinkling of the efficient market hypothesis on top doesn't make them any better. No one individual is billions, millions, or probably even thousands of times more productive than any other able-bodied individual. When you see these massive differences in wealth appear, they must either come from theft or luck, both of which are unfair because they reduce the rewards to labor of the vast majority of humanity and instead funnel unearned power to those least equipped to use it for our mutual benefit.

You don't believe that certain individuals can create orders of magnitude more value than others? Or do something for which there is high demand but low supply, hence very high prices? So Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Larry Page don't deserve their millions?

> No one individual is billions, millions, or probably even thousands of times more productive than any other able-bodied individual.

Productivity is not the only determinant of wages. Not only that, but it is quite hard to definitively say how productive a person is. And this doesn't even matter because in general, people get paid however much their employer thinks their labor is worth and that's very subjective. And I would say that many people have in fact created billions in wealth for the world.

> When you see these massive differences in wealth appear, they must either come from theft or luck, both of which are unfair

Luck itself isn't unfair, although you might say that the distribution of luck is 'unfairly' stacked towards the wealthy.

> because they reduce the rewards to labor of the vast majority of humanity and

I (by luck) invent some fantastic widget that improves the lives of people all over the world and I become a billionaire. By becoming a billionaire, did I really make everyone else poorer? I would say no, because I _created_ wealth. Wealth doesn't have to be taken from other people to be had. I won't disagree that theft (which generally involves government/corruption) is 'unfair', although you'll have to clearly define that word since it can mean anything.

> instead funnel unearned power to those least equipped to use it for our mutual benefit.

And who is best equipped to use it? What is 'our mutual benefit'? Who determines what is earned and unearned power (wealth?)?

> No one individual is billions, millions, or probably even thousands of times more productive than any other able-bodied individual.

That isn't correct. Compare Einstein to an able-bodied laborer. How long will it take the laborer to figure out relativity, assuming an infinite lifetime?

Being "able-bodied" isn't much of a consideration in modern times, and in the future, when robots do all the manual labor, it will become completely irrelevant. Not to say we won't exercise for health and enjoyment, only that we won't dig ditches.

"Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has money enough to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend to them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars, and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort."

Joseph Schumpeter, from "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942)

"inequality.is is best viewed with browsers that support the newest elements of HTML5 and related technologies. Would you mind upgrading your browser?"

You want me to enable Javashit in my browser in order to view your site.

That's fine, if you really think you need it, but you need to be honest with me, and you are not being honest.

Quite frankly, I don't enable java on most websites and I don't think I want to see what you have to say enough to enable it.

I'd love to see the stats after this page stays on HN for a bit. (ie., how many people make it the entire way through; how many people click "take action")

Not so many will make it all the way through, with the white text so hard to see.

I'm tired of this lie.

I care about the magnitude of my net worth, not the ratio of Mr Bill's net worth to mine.

Huh? Why shouldn't the top 10% be more than 5 times as productive as the average?

Apparently entry-level software engineer salary is "making too much money".

$106,187 is the you're-rich-enough cutoff (at least for an Other Race-male)

Totally uninformative because it concerns itself with the structure and history of income equality, rather than the root causes. It's great at showing what happened, but has no clue about why.

To name one example, they address the question of education by showing correlations between college degrees and income. What this is missing of course is any change within college degrees themselves. What are students studying? What is the quality of their work? How well does it match up with what employers need?

I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe if you drill down, you find that some college degrees (like electrical engineering) have kept up very well with productivity and wage growth. Others, like anthropology, have not.

I will tell you that I live in one of the most educated regions in the nation (DC area), and it is extremely difficult for technology businesses to hire people with the right skills. If you are a good programmer or sysadmin, you can make a lot of money here tomorrow. But a bachelors in political science is not, by itself, going to get you much.

If the numbers on this site are correct ($90-$100k average is what we all should be making) then some degree wages have kept up with productivity but none have really grown faster than it. That's still a problem, isn't it?

Our wages have kept up, but we're in a _very_ privileged position. We happen to have the right skills at the right time. We're not more industrious or more virtuous than the typical struggling middle-class wage earner. We're just luckier, and we shouldn't forget that.

Let's also not forget that there are benefits to living in a just and equitable society that aren't reflected in paychecks and equity grants, and that the marginal utility of each additional dollar is less than that of the previous dollar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com