Are Computers Making Society More Unequal?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Automation may increase inequality between those who are able to take advantage of it, and those who aren't - but it is better to say that increased automation exposes an existing problem. Namely, it so happened that many people were recently able to make a reasonably comfortable living in less-skilled work. There was always a population who couldn't manage that, but now it is a larger group. So the idea that people below a certain productivity threshold don't "matter" isn't tenable any more. But that was never a morally acceptable idea, just a politically pragmatic one.
Reducing inequality shouldn't be a first-order goal. Of course we should make sure that everybody has a decent chance to make the best use of their abilities and resources. But we also need to structure our society to reduce suffering and improve the general quality of life, including for the economically unproductive.
One of the reasons income inequality is such a silly measurement of overall economic well-being is because people often believe it must be correlated with suffering. In other words, those at the poorer end of the spectrum must be suffering relative to those at the rich end (and usually because of those at the rich end). But this doesn't appear to be true in modern society at all.
In reality, those at the poor end of the spectrum have never experienced less (physical) suffering. Food, clean water, and basic shelter have never been cheaper. On a minimum wage salary, you can live a life without what I would call suffering, though it will look nothing like the typical portrayal of "middle class" life we see on TV. If you're sick, you can get extremely advanced medical care without cost (even in the US, there are free clinics in all major cities, and if you visit the emergency room, though you may be billed preposterous sums, you'll still get care).
What constitutes "suffering" is probably one of the biggest disconnects that plague liberals and conservatives.
And I agree that being poor in a contemporary rich country isn't as miserable as other ways of being poor. I see you were quite careful to pin your example to "a minimum wage salary", which is a level of income and security that many people don't have. Since I think we probably both care a lot about equality of opportunity, we should agree that being billed preposterous sums for healthcare is still not a brilliant situation, just like not being able to afford to go to college, lacking access to banking services, and so on. I'm not saying we need to buy everyone an Xbox One because that's the new baseline, but I hope that liberals and conservatives can agree that there are powerful mechanisms that entrench people in poverty, to the general detriment of society.
>>the concerns of the unemployed and underemployed have tended to be politically ignorable (due to lack of numbers, cultural shaming, the perception that unemployment is always temporary, etc.<<
This seems like it must be true, but I'm not sure it is upon further consideration. Politicians have spent a great deal of time and effort on issues that affect the poor (and the comparative "poor"). In the US, we have a substantial welfare system that includes housing subsidies, a variety of food subsidies, and a variety of medical care subsidies. I would add that benefits under each of these systems has been pushed through by both "liberal" and "conservative" governments. (Many European countries have had an even greater focus on policies that benefit the poor.)
But I would argue that the biggest gains those on the poor end of the spectrum have made over the last 30 years (and certainly over the last 200 years) has been driven by market forces, not political ones. The widespread decline of food prices has been due to private activity, in spite of government policy (see, e.g., various agricultural subsidies/tariffs that maintain above-market prices). The enormous decline in prices of finished goods, durable goods, electronics, and basically anything you’d put in your home, has similarly been driven by market forces. This leads to a tremendous decrease in suffering that is difficult to measure. [For example, cheap air conditioners, furniture and televisions make what would have been miserable conditions in 1950's New York into perfectly pleasant conditions today.] So, perhaps focusing on overall growth will produce greater benefits to the poor than simply focusing on symptoms of poverty.
>>Since I think we probably both care a lot about equality of opportunity...<<
Equality of opportunity is a terrifying outcome. Of course it sounds wonderful in theory, but how do we attain it? The novel Brave New World illustrates how this would have to be done: (1) prohibit natural births, instead hatching babies under laboratory conditions; and (2) raise and educate children en masse, in a (presumably) government-run institutions. Of course even this would result in slight differences in opportunity. Even if everyone shared the same DNA, it would be impossible to ensure each person had the same experiences during childhood (i.e. Billy gets bullied for some reason and never reaches his potential while Bobby doesn’t and attains success).
So, in this respect, I don’t believe that anyone wants true equality of opportunity. The question is, how close is close enough, and at what cost? Because, at a certain point, the only way to increase equality of opportunity is to decrease freedom. We’re currently at the point where the main freedoms we are losing relate to how much of our income we get to keep (i.e. increase tax revenue to provide subsidies/programs for the poor). Most people don’t have a huge problem with this.
But we’re already begin to sacrifice other freedoms, and this is only accelerating. If your kid is fat, he will have a decreased opportunity to succeed. So, we impose sin taxes on certain ingredients. The FDA bans trans-fats. New York City tries to impose size restrictions on sodas. All of these rules are meant to save us from ourselves, or in essence, to give those with less information or willpower a more-equal opportunity to succeed. The same logic applies to smoking or drinking, housing, schooling, etc.
I’m not sure I see a logical place to stop. If someone notices you drinking or smoking during pregnancy, should society step in? There is a chance the child will be negatively impacted. Of course, this means he won’t have the same opportunities as if you had not drunk or smoked during pregnancy. This means the child’s opportunities won’t be equal to others due to your choices. Should we supervise or jail you to ensure you don’t drink or smoke while pregnant? Even terminate the pregnancy if we discover you drank or smoked while pregnant?
Of course, the child of a successful 35-year old mother who drinks or smokes while pregnant may have far better opportunities than the child of a 15-year old mother with no education who doesn't drink or smoke. To what extent should or must society intervene in the latter case?
The converse case is even more terrifying. I didn’t have an equal opportunity of succeeding because I had a stay-at-home mom who taught me to read when I was 4. She taught me years of history and science outside of school, things my peers never learned after 20 years of schooling. I got to peer over the shoulder of friends and relatives who ran successful small businesses. There’s simply no way replicate or ensure that everyone has these experiences (outside of a Brave New World-esque regime). Should my parents therefore be prohibited from trying to give me an advantage over others?
It’s fascinating to me that America chose a revolution based on liberty near the time the French chose a revolution based on equality. 200 years later, the world is a far richer place due to the advances wrought under freedom. Certainly giving people as much opportunity as possible is a worthy goal, but I fear the consequences of what would be required to ensure true equality of opportunity. So then, perhaps we’re back again to the more worthy goal: eliminating suffering.
More concretely, people who are really passionate about inequality could invest in nonprofits to help exactly the people who need it through things like targeted scholarship funds, charter schools, food banks, foster care charities, mentorship programs, addiction recovery organizations, and the like.
I believe that we've already been restructuring society to ill effect. Let's start with restructuring our Thursdays. I'm sure our crossfit friends or trivia night at the pub will manage without us.
In other words, I would like us to "restructure society" not through programs, laws, and schemes but by personalizing the problem by taking care of our actual neighbors who have actual needs.
I subscribe to a different argument with the same conclusion: I care about the inefficiency in the way we, as a society, handle our human resources. Poverty is a morass of catch-22s that conspire to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it, and that's a waste of human potential no matter how you slice it.
The minimum-wage worker who spends 1/3 of his time on his first job, 1/3 of his time on his second job, and 1/3 of his time in a perpetually unrewarding search for something better has no time or energy left for putting himself in a better position to create value for society. He is aware of the problem and he knows the theoretical solution. It is not necessarily a lack of discipline or market insight that hold him back, it's the inability to take on risk in the form of investing time and resources into a new mode of value production that make it an unattractive option. If he tries and fails, food, shelter, and health care become mutually exclusive "luxuries" next month.
HN is full of entrepreneurs who are acutely aware of the importance of being able to take risks, but it is important to realize that we (the software engineering profession) are, at the moment, comparatively well sheltered from the wrath of the market by the fact that we posses a skill that is currently in demand, and even with this shielding many of us opt for risk aversion. If we fail, our fallback plan is a cushy $100k job that we can use as a springboard for our next attempt. Our "punishment" is a temporary stint at helping someone else build their dream. On the other hand, if Sam the supermarket checkout clerk, Mike the aspiring musician, or Anne the academic go into business and fail, their punishment will be far more draconian and far less amenable to taking another chance.
The thing is, we (as a society) don't really want more supermarket clerks, street musicians, and struggling adjunct professors. We want these people to be successful because they will generate 100x the value if they are! But we are unwilling to invest the comparative pittance to cover their base needs to let them try and fail. If we played our cards right, social welfare would become an investment, not a parasitic nuisance. Unfortunately our current welfare policy (to include minimum wage) is filled with so many perverse incentives that it probably accounts for a solid half of the poverty-perpetuating morass of catch-22s I lamented earlier, if not more.
What's funny is that I regularly see people on opposite sides of the socialist/libertarian axis agree abut both the problem and the solution, even if their intermediate reasoning is different. I think you'll take my word about the socialists, but here's Milton Friedman discussing the negative income tax: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
1) A roof over your head (not the best housing, but adequate)
2) Food in your belly (not great food, but enough)
3) A healthcare program (where you don't have to worry)
4) Basic education (so you know enough to learn further on your own)
5) Enough money left over to afford a computer and an internet connection (so you can learn on your own)
With all those needs met, everyone has what they need to do well for themselves. Those at the winning end of inequality know they've given everything necessary for others to join them if they make the effort. The winning end can reap further rewards by deserving it in the form of making the five line items above insanely efficient to deliver. Create cheaper, adequate housing, make food more plentiful and nutritious for cheaper, make healthcare more effective and cheaper, make basic education more effective and cheaper and make computers and internet access cheaper. The people who contribute the most to those goals deserve to live the best because they've done the most to contribute to the general welfare of all.
> ...the cognitive requirements of working with smart software...
> Online education... will only deepen inequality... Because of the premium it places on conscientiousness. some people are pure self-starters... But at the same time, I think it’s a pretty small percentage of the population.
These are all excellent points.
It's funny -- centuries ago, when there was no meritocracy, if you stayed poor, it probably wasn't your fault. You were born a peasant, and there really wasn't any way out of it. Some people argue that it made for happier people. (And if you were rich, it wasn't because you were really smart or capable, you were probably just born into aristocracy.)
But the kind of ruthless economic meritocracy we have today is much less forgiving, as your shortcomings are made so much more obvious. If you're the kind of person who enjoys reading programming manuals and studying Fourier transformations for fun, then you'll probably have a great career ahead of you. But that's just not the case for most people.
And it won't be the people we put out of work, it will be the people who paid us, who will have long since had enough of it.
Companies don't pay programmers big bucks and give nice benefits unless they make a lot more off the software programmers build.
Nobody is getting ripped off here.
Companies would be THRILLED to eliminate developers and no longer have to pay them. And plenty of people are working on that problem:
"Imagine sitting at a Salesforce event in 2008 in Chicago while Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, swiftly works an entire room of business users into an anti-software frenzy. I was there to learn about Force.com, and I’ll summarize the message I understood four years ago as 'Not only can companies benefit from Salesforce.com, they also don’t have to hire developers.'"[2]
[1] http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2010/06/3918.html [2] http://programming.oreilly.com/2012/10/salesforce-developers...
That doesn't change the fact that they continue doing so (at least for now) because they see it as a good deal. Programmers are responsible for continuing to have skills that are marketable if the economy changes.
>> "right up until it's eliminated"
This phrase implies an Evil Power is deciding who gets to live or something. In reality, a job is "the opportunity to meet a demand by selling labor." It's not unjust to stop demanding something.
When people stopped wanting top hats, that wasn't unjust, even though it meant hat-makers needed new jobs. If people stop wanting software, it won't be unjust, even though it will mean programmers need new jobs.
I'd love for my house to produce its own electricity so that I could fire the power company, but until that seems easy and cost-effective enough, I pay for power because I think the money I spend gives me outsize benefits. Same with my employer paying me.
> the great bulk of programmers will be lined up and shot, in retribution for their years of pampered arrogance.
_This_ is what your parent finds "bizarre". Are you arguing that the same would be said about any other job that was eliminated by changing market conditions? No, that would be insane. They lost their jobs and found a new line of work (or fell into poverty). And that's what will happen to programmers if (when?) our job is eliminated.
Checkmate unmeritants.
I see it more as a matter of alignment: my strengths currently align with market demands. This is not something I predicted when I developed those strengths. As a kid I, perhaps naively, didn't think playing around with computers was even a real thing you could do as a job. Partly that might've been because the people I looked up to and read stuff by didn't seem to be doing it as a job (e.g. the author of a typical 1990s Phrack article). I assumed when I grew up I would have to get a real job, doing proper engineering, or carpentry, or accounting, or something.
If we imagine technology jobs dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow and drawing suddenly became a high paying career, would you invest the time and effort required to become good at drawing, or would you rest on your innate interests and watch your job opportunities fade away? That is the distinction the parent appears to be making. The tools are available to become good at just about anything you can imagine, but it requires a certain type of person to push towards that goal when the natural curiosity is not present.
I think that's reasonably common. I can't think of people I'd consider "highly meritorious" technologists who have no strong like of technology, and picked the field just because it was a good career. In fact may of them picked the field in a previous era, when it wasn't as lucrative of a career. I think many people who are good at and interested in something have fairly high "stickiness" to it, so salaries tend to track the rise and fall of the fields, more than the merit of individual people, who don't switch fields that easily or quickly. It's in that sense I'm skeptical that salaries are a good indication of "merit". They're just an indication of what they literally are: the current relationship between market supply and demand for a specific skill. This may even related to all kinds of structural issues, e.g. quick spikes in demand coupled with slowly responding training pipelines may cause high salaries in an area to persist for a decade or two, but this has more to do with the training pipeline's slow response than the existing workers' high merit. (And similarly in reverse.)
While I've never had a job drawing sketches specifically, I have had jobs using other artistic mediums. I've spent a lot of my career as a programmer. I've been farming for several years now. If there was strong external interest for drawing, I'd probably be quite keen to hone my skills there too. I've been spending my spare time recently introducing myself to a few other industries that seem promising. I haven't worked professionally in those industries yet, but who knows what the future holds?
That all seems natural to me, though it is clearly not for everyone. I can see where the parent is coming from though. From my point of view it is somewhat difficult to imagine someone who wouldn't want to become an expert in computing, drawing, or whatever industry needs.
There is certainly luck involved, but chalking all success up to fortunate nerd-dom is a simplification. Also consider the importance of avoiding pitfalls like drug abuse, crippling debt, and unexpected pregnancies. Also, millions of students do boring and pointless schoolwork every day to improve their grades so they can get into a good college, not because they were born with the "I like dioramas" gene. Calling success luck diminishes that brand of responsibility and hard work.
Valley startup culture seems to sort of hate that culture, though, and considers it a kind of obsolete old-people culture that needs to be (wait for it) disrupted.
Wouldn't avoiding those things largely fall under the "certain type of person" I mentioned? There are certainly some variables there too, like being born into poverty, but we can, for argument's sake, assume outside factors are otherwise equal when comparing people under this.
At some level we may just disagree about how fair it is to consider us all fleshy robots and how important it is to consider individuals instead of populations.
I'm saying ignoring behavior like the ones I mentioned for the sake of argument leads to fallacious reasoning with respect to the causes of (and probably the solutions to) poverty and inequality.
You could chalk decisions up to DNA and brain chemistry, but at that point we're having a metaphysical argument. You could say that we should be considering trends in populations and not individual behavior but then we'd be having another philosophical discussion.
Or maybe you agree with all that and I'm misunderstanding your point.
This made me chortle a bit.
True, there are some nerds in ghettos across the world, but I doubt they have safe shelter, food, water, and a half decent education. If you can't fucking read, it doesn't matter if you're the "type of person that enjoys reading".
I think poverty is a HUGE reason why African American's aren't highly represented in tech. Or hell, West Virginians.
Being born poor and living in poverty has the biggest impact on long term health due to both restrictions in linguistic development and brain health from a poor diet. There was a study recently that reinforced that poverty was the #1 determinant of long term educational attainment.
It's too far a bridge to say that we are increasingly economically meritocratic, if anything some of the "meritocratic" tools we have are only benefiting those that can afford being outside of the mainstream.
We're at less than 50% global internet penetration. How many of those people without internet have access to programming books and computers?
The only reason being a self-starter is so important is because of how trash CS(/math/engineering/stem) education is, globally, and because, unlike the other STEMs, self-teaching programming doesn't require expensive equipment.
Online education will almost certainly not deepen inequality edit: among the 30% of the world population that has access to computers and a safe, healthy childhood since it will allow people to skip the real barrier to entry in software engineering: dreadful professors and boring, overwrought courses at expensive to attend institutions.
Unless we are talking about unconditional equality (i.e. same for everyone including slackers), what about an equality based on how productive people are? It's called marginal productivity ethics, and following that theory our current society is very unequal, and the society envisioned by the articled (the so called "hyper meritocracy") is much more equal.
"In the aftermath of the marginal revolution in economics, a number of economists including John Bates Clark and Thomas Nixon Carver sought to derive an ethical theory of income distribution based on the idea that workers were morally entitled to receive a wage exactly equal to their marginal product" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_product_of_labor)
If anything, computers put an emphasis on the fact that waking up everyday and showing up for "work" with the only qualification of having a pulse is not sufficient anymore to command a salary, especially when machines can replace the worker for a fraction of the cost (and do a much better job)
Things change. I for one will not lament on the fact that our society is becoming so productive and efficient that (gasp!) some people also have to become more efficient!!
For example it's a common meme on HN to talk about "10X" or "100X" programmers. If such things are true then it probably makes sense for 100X programmers to be paid 100X more. The difference between a 1X and 10X programmer however may only be marginal in terms of actual intelligence etc.
Therefor if we assume a 10X programmer gets $100,000 , a 100X programmer get $1M and a 1X programmer gets $10,000 which is not going to be a living wage if one has a family.
So one needs to be at least say a 3X programmer to earn a living wage. But maybe there is no such thing as a 3X programmer, only 1X , 10X and 100X.
To me, a 10x has always been someone who's studied a ton of material and has solved a lot of problems. It'd be a bit strange if you couldn't be 10 times as productive as a junior guy if you had depth and breadth knowledge of, say, an entire web stack.
If technology gets to the point where it's a very large multiplier, then the human involved would basically be a constant in the face of a large value and multiplier -- almost irrelevant. That might mean that hiring can disregard any requirements (which would be nice for some of us!), but I think that's going to be a far cry since the industry seems to be going in the opposite direction (more languages/projects/knowledge required for an entry level position than 10 years prior)
Who could have guessed?
A good book on the policies that helped kill unions and weaken the middle class is Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrick Smith.
http://www.amazon.com/Stole-American-Dream-Hedrick-Smith-ebo...
You don't feel immoral selling your car to the highest bidder. Why should selling your labor be different?
You don't feel immoral buying bananas as cheaply as possible. Why should purchasing labor be different?
I'm not trolling; I'm genuinely trying to think through these questions.
First, a silly hypothetical that at least shows that when selling a car, I care about something other than price. Option 1: sell my car to a single parent trying to support a family for $5k. This parent's old vehicle was destroyed in a wreck (not their fault) and they need a way to get to work. Option 2: sell my car to an eclectic billionaire whose hobby is running over little cars in his monster truck. This billionaire is offering $5k + $.01
Almost certainly I will take option 1 despite the lower payout, and I suspect almost all of us would. When the difference between payouts is large enough - and that value will vary depending on the person - we will take the higher payout.
When buying food, especially meat, I absolutely do feel immoral sometimes. E.g. if I purchase low cost beef, with high probability I am supporting an agricultural organization which contributes to negative externalities. For example, many animal feeding operations create waste which harms the environment (and by extension many individuals), but this harm may not be fully reflected in the price.
It's not at all obvious to me what this means for buying and selling labor. For example, perhaps I'm an employer and I have a job opening for a full time position which pays well below a living wage, and further assume that somebody voluntarily fills that position. On the one hand, I feel bad that I'm paying my employee well below a living wage. I wonder about their happiness and health and that of their family, and this keeps me up at night. On the other hand, I believe that the employee would not have voluntarily taken this job unless they believed that the exchange of time for money was strictly beneficial to them. So every night I fall asleep content in the knowledge that I have improved someone's life...
Go around and ask most people (i.e. non-tech) what they make relative to their coworkers and industry and they probably don't know. Hard to auction yourself when the numbers are secret.
Inherently, or only when it leads to abuses, like in "The Jungle"? Are worker treatment laws sufficient?
>> value is also determined by the cost of production
In what way? If it costs me $500 to make something, but nobody wants it, its value is still $0 (eg, a crappy sculpture). If it costs me $0 to make something and everybody wants it, its value could be millions.
Treating labor as a commodity is by definition dehumanizing. Dehumanization “entails a perception of other people as nonhumans — as statistics, commodities, or interchangeable pieces in a vast ‘numbers game’. Its predominant emotional tone is that of indifference ... together with a sense of noninvolvement in the actual or foreseeable vicissitudes of others” (Bernard, Ottenberg, and Redl 1971, 105-6). Even in cases of slavery, the slave's labor is not what is actually considered the commodity. Commodification of labor has lead to real declines in the US and abroad in terms of worker quality of life, wage stability, worker freedom, power relations, worker skills, and democratic involvement.
Intelligent machines, software and connectivity have only made it easier for a single person to provide value to millions of other people.
Lebron James makes $60 million a year because the NBA, the Miami Heat, and the companies that he endorses feel he provides at least that much value to their organizations and brands. NBA players fifty years ago didn't make that much because the fans weren't able to have the kind of access that is available now through 24/7 sports TV channels, the Internet, social media. That increased access through technology means Lebron can provide more value.
Also part of the reason athletes make so much more today is because of sustained labor agitation on the parts of the unions. Go read 'Ball Four' for an example of what pre-union sports was like.
It's not like "computers" can be stopped...
"the rate at which technology increases our productive capacity is probably polynomial, rather than linear. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in individual productivity as time goes on."
Eventually things tend to even out. Money wants to flow, and you can't have an economy with all money concentrated in so few hands and nobody to spend it.
This is why I believe this time is different - a basic income is needed or else the populace will be like serfs with little mobility from their trade. In other words, a caste system.
In general, the individual knowledge requirements for most jobs have gone down drastically, and the potential paths to acquire that knowledge have grown.
It's a set of notions extracted from a book - if the book is better written and more clearly organized than the article, it will be a thought provoking read. But if it parallels the article, it will be a tiring slog through disjointed assertions.
A key idea is that people with the right blend of conscientiousness and cognitive capacity and style will be able to use technology to enhance their lives in ways that most people will not. And that we cannot predict what these will be, but there there are analogs, and they show the power of the idea.
Intriguing speculation, worthy of consideration, poorly presented in the article. Hopefully better presented in the book, but I ain't readin' it just yet.
This is-- from a scientific perspective-- not far off at all, and we haven't figured out the ethical system that can help us navigate this coming phenomenon.
Even start-ups like Counsyl, which are doing great work with respect to genetics and family planning, are a part of this movement towards genetic variation between the rich and poor.
On a microlevel the argument seems to make sense the middle-market jobs are the ones that are being wiped out and having salaries driven-down by out-sourcing and technology.
World income now fits a more continuous curve compared to the rich- and poor- of the past. World equality has presumably been helped by out-sourcing: it's just that some of the 'equality' is no longer owned by the West.
I was talking about inequality between individuals globally, because I think it's fundamentally a more important measure - and there is now far less global poverty.
Also - inequality is a red herring. As long as the poorest people are doing better, it's irrelevant that Bill Gates is a Billionaire.
But the human psyche doesn't seem to work that way. There's a fair amount of research suggesting that we tend to measure our well-being not in absolute terms, but relative to those around us or who are otherwise on our mental radar. [ADDED:] No matter how well someone is doing, if he perceives that others "around" him are doing better, he's likely to feel bad about himself.
[ADDED:] Feeling bad about doing worse than those around us probably has an evolutionary advantage as a motivator. There may even be a dollop of sexual-preference selection at work, too: We probably recognize, perhaps unconsciously, that potential mates judge us in part in comparison to other available candidates.
(Tl;dr: Envy is a powerful force, which may have been built into us in part by natural selection.)
You are ignoring the person who knows how to properly filter and provide fresh water for drinking.
You forget that someone else is always manning the fire, ensuring it's always going. He can easily set it again if it happens to go out for some reason. It also helps that his wife is injured so he can stay close to her.
The fisher can't fish if he's not out in the water, so he has two people helping him. One to mend the nets or other materials needed to fish, and the second to bring the fish onto shore. They both also prepare the fish for cooking.
And the final person the cook, doesn't just cook the fish. He prepare the fish, align with other food he is able to scrounge with whatever person has some free time, ensuring people get a better diet.
So do they have the right to take his fish? Considering without them, he would have died that first night, I'm pretty sure their is some level of obligation.
"We'll mend your nets for 5 fish" is far different from "you have fish and we want them, so hand them over."
It's not nearly as clear an exchange as trade, although of course there are things (like roads) that we wouldn't have at all except via taxes.
(See, for example, "too big to fail" banks.)
Society has a vested interest in preventing this from happening.
You're presupposing that there's such a thing as a "right" outside of a given social framework. (Cf. @rayiner's various comments on that subject.) If people are envious by nature, that's like the weather; to paraphrase Robert A. Heinlein, attempting to argue with the weather is seldom a profitable enterprise.
In any case, Bill Gates's success was not due solely to his own efforts; he built his achievements on a foundation provided by his fellow citizens, of America and the world. So it's not a moral axiom that Gates should keep some particular share of the money that happens to come into his hands. Cf. Elizabeth Warren's famous talk during her campaign for the Senate, where on the subject of fair taxation she accurately pointed out that:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. [1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs, starting at 0:50, transcribed at http://spectator.org/blog/2011/09/22/elizabeth-warren-on-fai....
I absolutely am. I'm with the framers of the US Constitution in saying that government and society do not create rights, they merely recognize them. I have a right not to be murdered, for example, even if I happen to live in a society where murdering people like me is allowed.
But I base that statement on my theology, not my economics.
>> You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.
It's equally true that "the rest of us" drive around on roads that the factory owner paid for - possibly more true, assuming he/she pays proportionally. Why does this matter?
Glad you recognize that. Pragmatically, a "right" exists only to the extent that others accept it, voluntarily or otherwise. I can also claim the right not to be murdered. But if I, an American, were to find myself in the hands of certain factions of the Taliban, then that so-called right might be of little efficacy.
There's a legal maxim -- OK, technically it's an equitable maxim -- ubi jus ibi remedium: Where there is a right, there must be a remedy. That is, once the courts recognize that a right exists, they will somehow fashion a remedy to vindicate a breach of that right. But there's a corollary: If there simply is no remedy that can be enforced, then neither is there a right.
The poverty line for a 3 person home (mom, dad, kid) is 23k. That is far from wonderful, but in many markets that's a fair bit of cash, especially if you consider food stamps, section 8, state aid, tax breaks, socialized schooling, federal lunches, etc.
I'd rather be poor today than in the 30s or 40s.
"What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good."