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Comment by proveanegative | Hacker News Reader

I think the popular conceptualization of economic inequality (effectively, "inequality is suffering") is misleading because it doesn't take marginal utility into account.

What I mean is, take the pizza-dividing example and suppose we have doubled the pizza. The inequality (expressed as the ratio of pizza owned to the available total) would stay the same but those with the smallest part of the divide would be noticeably less hungry than before.

In a world of plenty inequality would not mean suffering. More realistically, inequality would not mean (nearly as much) suffering in a world where a minimum slice of pizza was the birthright of a citizen.

Edit: This line of thinking is seriously flawed when applied to the real world. See drabiega's comment for why. metaphorm mentions some examples of where competitive costs may apply.

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The problem with this is that many costs are inherently competitive. The pizza metaphor starts to break down here but I'll try to maintain it.

The problem is that share is a flow, not a fixed quantity to be divided up. Because of competition for resources, people are forced to use part of their share of those resources to compete for future resources. You've got to use part of your slice to ensure that you keep getting slices. When the pie increases but your share stays the same you need increase the amount of your share allocated towards ensuring future slices, meaning that the amount you actually get to eat diminishes.

"...in a world where a minimum slice of pizza was a birthright of a citizen."

We do not remotely live in such a world, or even such a country. (I'm referring to the U.S.)

Whether a basic income or even a basic job program is plausible under the current conditions in the US is very debatable (you can find yummyfajitas' criticism here on HN).

What I had in mind with my final remark is more about the future, i.e., "how to handle things when the machines take over".

> In a world of plenty inequality would not mean suffering.

This has a nice feel to it mathematically, but I suspect the reality is somewhat different. Access to non-scalable resources like land will remain problematic. In a world where money translates to power, if inequality is high, the power imbalance stays high.

this is a distraction. first off, why should we suppose we have "doubled the pizza"? I see no point in discussing abstract hypotheticals. We ought to stick to real world examples of the real world economy or else we're not really talking about anything meaningful.

[retracted due to a misleading argument from analogy]

you have a lot more work to do to establish that "the poor are not worse off in absolute terms". to conclude that you would have to take into account cost of living, inflation, quality of their (local, regional, and national) community, quality of their living situation, access to quality education, access to quality medical care, ability to meaningfully participant in civic life and governance, level of political participation and enfranchisement, and the impact of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. and that's hardly a comprehensive list, just a few things off the top of my head.

in other words, you really have no ability whatever to make judgments about the wellbeing (or lack thereof) of the poor if the only thing you're looking at is GDP (thats what your pizza pie metaphor represents, right?). that is a grossly inadequate measurement and drawing conclusions about the wellbeing of millions of people based on it is misinformed.

You are right. I take back my comment.

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