Tired Of Inequality? One Economist Says It'll Only Get Worse

I think Zarkonnen was trying to say that as the inequality increases then it becomes more and more difficult to rise above a certain threshold. As the inequality increases then that threshold becomes more difficult due to standard economic situations and due to interference from the elite that likely would eventually want to control access.

Today it may be easy to raise your economic standing, but that doesn't mean that will continue into tomorrow.

It's a word. Just mispelled: precariat.

Maybe. It could always get worse though. The poor maintain their current standard of living in part thanks to laws and structures that protect this: minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, unions, Medicaid

These tend to be in decline or under attack, sometimes with good reason. But there's no impetus to replace them with anything.

Brazil may be our future. The low end goes very low there.

But very little data exists about the happiness levels of people in a country where despite income inequality the poor have a higher living standard than they did at any other time in history, as it is in the US. If the poor are doing better than ever, and the rich are doing better than ever, what's the problem, really?

The problem lies elsewhere. The problem is that the system is so sick that the poor have to pay taxes for rich banksters bonuses. Hence, destoying all the credibility of the system. Rich paying to the poor is socialism. Poor paying to the rich is feudalism. Poor could care less about the toys they can get when they can afford less and less food, energy free time. Plus pay feud to the corrupt banksters on top of that. That's not capitalism, that's feudalism. Cowen is proposing neo-feudalism.

Empirically, however, societies with higher income inequality have lower happiness (and this is fairly robust to confounding factors and different kinds of society, and even shows up internally when comparing different time periods of the same society, e.g. when you look at different U.S. decades). Perhaps in principle it's possible to have a happy and highly unequal society (in sci-fi this is commonly imagined as involving happiness drugs or VR), but we haven't seen one yet.

I was with you up to the part where you think chopping off people's heads is" the only way to revert back to capitalism and liberalism."

Nope, let's call it for what it is. The current situation is capitalism and liberal doctrines's consequences. Some economists and thinkers have said all along that this is the only outcome possible for such ideologies.

Banksters is a term that was widely used and is regaining ground in far-right populist parties in Europe (and America if I recall correctly).

But I like the idea of neo-feudalisme, it fits the picture and describes the situation quite well.

"Please don't call it capitalism."

What if they're the same thing?

There are other ways to escape neo-feudalism... Guillotining is just a bad soltuion to a bad problem.

Or we could just build a colony of smart people on the moon. Or Mars. Or my favorite, a floating city in the climate stable upper atmosphere of Venus. A lot easier to generate renewable power there.

I think that is what is really missing in the world, a frontier to go to when your oppressors get out of hand.

Feudalism and capitalism are both defined by the mechanism of interaction between people, not by what percentage of society different sorts of people occupy.

Feudalism - each person (besides the highest king) is bound by oath to serve his master.

Capitalism - each person owns some property and has the right to trade property/labor with other willing parties.

> what really destroyed neo-feudal society was the French Revolution

It was really messy though. I am sure the 0.1% will understand this fact. It is in their best interest to make the rest of us think we have something, something to lose. Therefore, our buying more "stuff" helps them two-fold. They have sold us more stuff, therefore soaking away liquidity which increases the value of their money. Furthermore, it gives an impression that we have "stuff" to lose as well in case of conflict.

>At the top are private creditors of nations - central bankers."

Only took a few comments before someone blamed things on the Fed. Nice.

>i.e. the US newborn already has to pay off few hundred thousand in debt through their live-time). Please don't call it capitalism.

You understand that "paying back" public debt means reducing private financial assets right? Of course you don't.

>We need Robespierre's and Danton's guillotining banksters and their whore neo-feudal political class.

Yeah, let's kill people who undertake a specific, necessary occupation in society!

Take your ignorant, conspiratorial hatred elsewhere.

Yes. We can call it capitalism.

Capitalism is private ownership of the means of productions. There is nothing in capitalism that implies less inequality. If the balance between capital and work switches to favor capital more, there will be inequality.

> That's not capitalism, that's feudalism

Why not call it capitalism. They call it capitalism, everyone else does. How much do you want to bet going around asking what economic system US has and less then 0.1% will say neo-feudalism.

Using alternate monikers used to justify still believing in this magic religion (oops I mean magic economic system) is a bit silly. This is the typical

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Why not just assume that capitalism is an idealized system that never works, it is just too unstable.

If this pattern seems familiar, it is not surprising they used to say the same thing about communism. Oh what they have in country X is not communism. "True communism is not like that, this is Y (replace with ugly sounding term)".

> That's the only way to revert back to capitalism and liberalism.

Revert to what? Guillotining people in the streets? Or rather are there good examples of capitalist paradises on earth here to inspire us?

You do realize the Parent was being funny?

And seriously, saying something is feudalism doesn't make it so. There is so much wrong with your post I don't even know where to start. Just wow. Feudalism is a military system with lords and vassals. Vassals provided military services to the lord in trade for land. Calling SF neofeudalist in hystrionic nonsense. No such thing exists in SF. Nothing even close to that exists.

You might want to google feudalism and capitalism. Here's some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-be...

That type of feudalism isn't sustainable in a world with increasing automation. A better model would be slavery in Rome immiserating both the slaves (obviously) and the people who used to work the land, but on a far larger scale. Speaking of the implications of service robots, Hans Moravec once said, "Perhaps governments will decide they no longer need citizens." Which is unlikely. But the truth in that statement is more and more people's survival will depend on the sympathy (rather than self-interest) of the rich and the politicians whose bridles they hold.

I didn't call it capitalism. I said that the 0.1% were capitalists. I.e. owners of capital. They're not the bankers, almost all of whom are in the professional class. These are the people who own not just the banks, but the F500 companies, etc.

And you'll also need an industrial revolution to provide manufacturing jobs.

As someone who grew up in the low income bracket of America I totally agree with your first point, it is amazing how easy it is to simply work hard and get somewhere like I have, yet people throw that chance away all the time. Your second point, however, I think is not so much about students thinking they can be whatever they want and more about not succeeding in their first choices. Most of the people I went to college with tried to be engineers or physics majors or something similar but didn't put enough effort in and instead of simply dropping out decided to change their majors to something easier because "you have to get a degree" is such a strong idea by our parents generation that most kids will accept the debt knowing they will never find a good job simply to not look like a failure. I'm not saying this is any better, but this in my experience seems to be the more common reason for so many people getting those degrees.

You're basically getting to what separates the professional class from the capitalist class, and why a couple in Manhattan making $500k/year HHI is part of the former and not the latter.

Thanks to exploding housing prices, skyrocketing tuition, dysfunctional urban schools, etc, having a 2BR + a couple of kids in New York City involves a $1 million house, $30k x 2 per year in school expenses, $50k per year in nanny expenses, $25k/year in health insurance, etc. On top of that, you've got $50k/year in paying off your student loans, because after all you didn't get to a $500k HHI without an expensive bachelors or graduate degree, and you'd better be putting some of that in a college fund to help your kid repeat the whole cycle, lest she fall into that 90%.

I don't see him portraying Congress as anything like that at all. Those people use their money like that because Congress allows it. Congress allows it because voters aren't organized enough to vote them all out. Voters aren't organized for that because the media keep playing the tribal Reps vs Dems game. And I guess the media keep playing that game because there's profit in it for them. It's a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

These issues are the outcomes and culmination of corrupt and pernicious actions taken a long time ago in the USA. If you look at Europe and other places around the world, there are sufficient models to emulate to solve these problems; but the corrupt master class has no interest in solving the "problems" that serve their interests and they have no interest in letting us, as a people, realize that we are not exceptional and therefore could learn by looking outside of our own culture and borders.

What America doesn't realize, even the supposed most intelligent and informed, is that we are no different than any other people living under a controlling regime, we just have more resources to burn that allow the margins for error to be humongous compared to other places. The controlled media, corrupt politics, the rationalized abuse of laws you are destroyed for not abiding by, the propaganda, the war mongering, the racist subjugation of certain groups. It's all there, we just don't see it, as a people, because as with the same form of national socialism that destroyed Germany in the early 20th century, the American version of national socialism has brain-washed people into doing, thinking, and saying things to and about others that they would never want happen to themselves.

I think they meant Brooklyn-like environments, not literally Brooklyn, NYC. There are plenty of them in semi-gentrified urban cores around the USA and Canada, but not enough to house the predicted boom of semi-employed bohemian upper-lower-middle-class.

what middle-class?

I'm not sure I agree. The technological revolution hadn't happened yet in 1913. We saw an increase in new types of jobs over the course of the 20th century because any innovation that occurred still required a significant amount of human labor. I believe we will see a slow acceptance that we are not going to see a high level of full time, high paying, high skill jobs. After the recession, employment has slowly creeped up again but you can see that the types of jobs that people are working now are different than they were in the early 2000s. More jobs might have been created, but they are of a lower quality in terms of hours, pay, benefits, and the amount of skill they require.

We are at a point with technology where any conceivable manual task that we do will almost certainly be automated away at some point, and many tasks requiring high degrees of skill - including intelligence tasks - will also be automated away. It will be increasingly hard for us to find pockets of value in areas that we can offer the marketplace that it hasn't already seen. I do believe the decline won't be rapid - our expectation for full employment will slowly but steadily fade away - but over the course of decades I think we will come to the idea that we are all entitled to a minimum quality of life, regardless of our ability to hold a job, and that we will have to be guaranteed such in order to maintain a stable society.

It may actually have been closer to 100k. They have a pretty good bonus structure. I don't remember for certain though and know it was over 80.

Poverty != inequality, provided poverty refers to a fixed material standard of living (which is how you seem to be using it, since you are referring to specific material goods).

To illustrate the point, consider India and the US. India has little inequality but lots of poverty (if we take the 5'th percentile of the US as the poverty line, then 95% of India is poor). The US has lots of inequality but little poverty.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...

Poverty is inefficient, sure. But inequality is also inefficient. Paying someone to work private security for example. There are better uses for human labor.

And when the wealthy make more money does it sit in big Scrooge McDuck style money bins, or is it reinvested into the markets or spent? If you don't want to "siphon wealth into the means of production owners pockets" then get your own means of production. Start a company and spread the stock out to your employees as evenly as you see fit. It is easier now than it ever has been to start and grow a company.