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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Yes. We all agree about that. The question is: how much does that matter? Maybe it matters a whole lot. I won't be surprised if it does, because that's what I intuitively believe too. But if it's so obviously true, we should be able to marshal evidence to support the idea the idea that distribution of wealth matters to the welfare of the whole population.

So far, arguments against the comment upthread boil down to two things:

* Arguments that appear factually incorrect, like, "the wealth gap means the rich have good nutrition but the poor don't".

* Arguments that wealth inequality means that the poor can't become wealthy, which is like saying "the problem with wealth inequality is wealth inequality".

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"the problem with wealth inequality is wealth inequality"

Just one nit - the problem with wealth inequality is that it perpetuates wealth inequality (and Piketty has detailed evidence for that).

We have had a lot of back and forth in multiple threads for this post. It is helping me clarify my thoughts, which for now can be summarized as:

1. Today, rich people have much better life than poor people.

2. Rich have higher chance of being rich tomorrow than poor folks. So that means they and their heirs have a higher chance of having a better life perpetually than ordinary folks and their heirs.

3. I don't begrudge better lifestyle for those who earned it (Gates, Zuck, Buffet...), but I do think its grossly unfair to enjoy better lifestyle just because you were born to rich parents (Walton heirs, Koch heirs, Paris Hilton...).

4. If you think capitalism has improved things so much that differences in wealth hardly matter (or such will be the case in future), kindly provide me evidence. I don't see it anywhere in my observations - eg. first class vs economy class experience in air travel, public schools vs private schools in the USA, job prospects for ivy league vs third tier univs, or even longevity[1] - rich people's life is better in almost all aspects (some of those aspects might frivolous but some are very meaningful).

[1] : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/us/23health.html?_r=0

   > differences in wealth hardly matter

This is obvious from any comparison between the United States and any genuinely poor or developing country.

In the United States, the "poor" own cars and televisions (with cable!), enjoy smartphone service, live in air-conditioned houses, and eat lavish meals. The standard of living they enjoy is fantastically better than the poor or even middle class in any developing nation. Not only that, but their standard of living is far superior to the standard of living of the "poor" in this country 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Economic growth has lifted all boats. What's more, no one in this nation has a valid justification for envy.

If your neighbors are eating well while your children are starving, okay, be envious. It might be justified. That's not the case here. As Maggie Thatcher once responded to an accuser, "you would prefer that the poor be poorer, in order that the rich would be less rich". Greed and envy are not to be confused with justice, and should be rejected.

Perhaps if the wealthiest among us suffered more equally the pain of fighting wars and of medical care insecurity, they would invest more heavily in world peace and healthcare, and less on Angry Birds and luxury taxi services. This is why equality of quality of life matters -- to keep us focused on each others' wellbeing.

We do have virtually equal quality of life in the US. A rich person can have ten cars, but he can't drive ten at the same time. It is a left-wing cliche that the burden of fighting wars falls upon the poor. In the real world we live in, the military is all volunteers and mostly middle-class, not from the poorest demographics. And pretty much everyone in the USA has access to state of the art care. You cannot buy your way to the top of an organ donor list or something. Certainly there is a difference between rich and poor, but you have not shown that it is an unjust difference or that it is harmful to the poor person.

Disparity of wealth also erodes our democratic process, when money buys speech.

I'm confused about what people object to, about the parent comment.

Gates and Zuck were born rich, FYI.

It's hard to get off the streets and back to "normalcy" (or dignity) if people pretend you don't exist.

West is becoming more like semi-urban India as the vice-versa... flattening.

Those sort of arguments are broad generalizations.

It's impossible to say anything's impossible given determination, but the level of difficulty varies and it's context-dependent.

It's harder to become wealthy if your car is a POS and you miss a crucial client meeting, or live in a rough neighborhood and have your laptop & cell stolen because your apartment was robbed. None of those sort of things individually are fatal, but the likelihood of i) not being taken seriously (lacking friends, intros, pedigree, previous exits, paying customers per my previous comment) or ii) more set-backs as mentioned here make it HARDER to "get ahead." When someone is really broke, doesn't have a car and is living on the street, it's much hard for them to claw their way back to "normal..." it's an uphill battle that only slightly flattens out into more "normal" everyday challenges. (Life's challenges never go away, no matter which end of the spectrum, the challenges just become different.)

Unless someone has been homeless, their ability to appreciate and empathize with the set of challenges they face would be a stretch.

(I've done client-facing AWS technical consulting in the mobile industry while living out of the back of my car, and bested the competition and expanded the "beach-head" as it were. So I've little patience for laziness or people that can't hustle to bring home the bacon.)

How do we make them not broad generalizations? How do we get the "is" right, before debating the "ought"? What's an axis along which the rich have a zero-sum quality of life versus the poor?

Do the correctness of generalizations matter to someone living on the street?

By the way, how apropos: Pandora just played George Thorogood's "Get a haircut."

This reminds me of my father yelling at me when I was 16: "If you don't do good in school, you won't get into a good college, and you won't get a good job and you'll be working at McDonald's." This same dogmatic formula plays out in hundreds of millions of families. It's only partially true, for some kinds of jobs. But if one is absolutely set on startups or some technical jobs, then it's not absolutely essential. In fact, it's best to know what job/field one would be aiming for and work backwards from that... may save a lot of effort, time and cost.

(I did the least amount of work possible in high school and didn't study for the SATs.)

A every increasing wealth inequality destroys incentives to work hard. The song sixteen tons encapsulate the feeling workers get when they just get "another day older and deeper in debt".

With wealth being hereditary entitlement to one group that increasingly get more wealthy, we end up with everyone else being in more debt to them each passing day. The debt bondage model simply moves from being about a mine, and becomes the model of the country.

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