History rhymes. Read Thomas Piketty's Capital and Will Durant's Story of Civilization to understand the cause and recurring nature of economic inequality.
And why not Benjamin Tucker's critique of Marx in "State Socialism and Anarchism", wherein he correctly predicts from first principles that state socialism eventually leads to gulags, about 20-30 years before it actually happened.
OK I'll bite. That logic is ridiculous. "Because X led to Y for one instance of Z, X leads to Y (ultimately and permanently) for all Z?" Spot the fallacy. (And what exactly do you mean by 'first principles' in a field of social science and political economy?)
Counter-thoughts from reality: China's doing great, and the US has a higher percentage of its own population incarcerated than any other state in human history.
I think that Tucker would argue that the US prison state is a result of socialistic tendencies in this nation. He made statements about 2/3 of the way down that are reminiscent of counter drug wars arguments (of course that is not strictly a prediction since counter drugs laws argument have tuckerian ideas in their DNA.)
Tucker made the accurate prediction. If you challenge that it won't happen again, the onus is on you to explain what is different and why Tucker's model will fail this time around. Did you even read the essay?
This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose.
Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium?
Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even a dropout?
Maybe we should compensate workers based on responsibilities (ie dependents, that, in some ways would be fairer, the woman with three dependent children gets paid more than the man with one, but the man with two where one requires extra care gets paid more than either, to compensate for added medical expenses)
You see fairness and equality arrive at different conclusions, so my point is fairness can seem unfair, depending how we slice fair. Still, one can argue pay based on need is quite fair, if not fairer than simple equality.
We don't typically distrust people to not spend on their dependents to appropriately provide for them. But, let's say we don't we could compensate with vouchers.
Maybe we should compensate workers based on responsibilities (ie dependents
I was following you up until this notion. Compensation has nothing to do with a worker's responsibilities. Compensation is based on how much the job is worth to the person or company paying. That's why a brain-surgeon with no dependents is paid more than a ditch-digger with a house full of kids.
I understand, and this is out current model, but some argue for income equality, so I ask what kind of equality? Let's have goals before we discuss the merits.
> Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium?
You just assumed the gambler ended up worse off. What if he won? Do we compensate the investor for his sub-risky-gambling return?
Seems to me this hits on a very important point. There's a terrible language barrier that is damaging our ability to come together on this issue in the US. Inequality of income growth is a great metric for indicating that there's a problem, but that language is counterproductive for solving the problems. There's a gut reaction that since "inequality" is the problem that the goal is income equality which (I think most agree) it's not. Economic fairness might be a better way to explain the goal.
This makes a lot of sense. What do you think of the other term often used to describe the same idea: "level playing field" ? Sure you can (inevitably so, maybe) have unequal distributions of wealth but we at least want to rid 'systematic bias' from the list of reasons why.
I think that is a lot better because it implies that each player has to work for it to the best of their abilities, we're just establishing fair rules for the game.
There's another term I'm seeing misinterpreted earlier in the thread too that is relevant. We use mathematical distribution of income growth over the population as the metric and people misinterpret it to mean distribution of wealth in the Marxist sense. It's just a measurement of who has what, but it implies a solution (to some) that has a lot of political baggage.
Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you fix this unfairness without invasive changes to home life starting from the minute the family goes home from the hospital?
And, of course, this entire thing is a symptom of fixed-pie mentality. When inequality exists - when some people have bigger slices of pie than others - people seem to be reliably made happier by throwing chunks of the pie on the floor as long as they're someone else's chunks of pie. They're happier about throwing away chunks of pie than they are about getting an entire new pie to split up. It really bugs me when I see "fairness" valued over actual goodness.
Unless you believe something like the Banach-Tarski paradox [0] is possible in our world, there is a relatively constant amount of matter within our reach. (In fact, there is a finite amount of matter that we will ever be able to reach.)
This puts a hard cap on how much "stuff" can exist. Therefore, the pie is fixed.
I think most of us don't define "pie" that way. In particular, I (and, I presume, saulrh) were talking about the economy, not about the total amount of matter within reach of the human race.
Even using your definition, though, the pie is not fixed. We can't mine the moon today. Perhaps someday we can. If so, the amount of matter available to us is not fixed. Or perhaps we can mine the earth's core. More mundanely, there's fracking. That's dramatically added to the amount of matter (of a particular useful form) that is available to the human race.
I wasn't even defining it economically, although that's one very concrete way this mentality appears. It also appears in discussions of civil rights, in everyday social interactions, and even when people are offered sterilized game-theoretic experiments. It's a depressingly general pattern.
>I (and, I presume, saulrh) were talking about the economy
So am I. What is "the economy"? I submit that it is the tracking of material in space.
There is a fixed amount of space on the planet as well. At some point, there will be no more space or material to place another Hearst Castle.
I guess someone should provide an example of an "entire new pie". (Interestingly, this is what I demanded in my first post.)
My theory even explains your observation that 'People will complain about who got "more than their fair share" of the new pie'. The reason they complain is because the pie is fixed and the new pie is a lie.
If we could just create "entire new pies", then there would be no reason to complain about the newest pie, because we can just create yet another entire new pie.
See, you're talking about the fundamental limits of the economy (or the human environment), and the rest of us aren't. We're talking about the economy this year vs the economy last year (or next year). We aren't anywhere near the fundamental limits of the amount of material, or the amount of space. Therefore, what the rest of us mean by "the economy" has plenty of room to grow. And that's where "the new pie" comes from - it's the growth in the actual economy as experienced by actual humans participating in it, not growth in the fundamental limits of the economy.
There are (probably) fundamental limits to the economy. That's a different topic than the one the rest of us are talking about, though.
You keep using the same words ("pie", "economy") to talk about something different, and then you argue that we're wrong. It's tiresome, and also not useful for actual communication.
My first post here was very simple. Someone needs to show an actual "entire new pie". No one here has done that yet.
They have only said that my idea of "entire new pie" is incorrect (while couching that it is actually probably correct). How can I know the difference between my meaning and yours if you are unable to produce an instance of what you are talking about?
>There are (probably) fundamental limits to the economy. That's a different topic than the one the rest of us are talking about, though.
The topic you are all talking about is subsumed by the more fundamental limits (saulrh even explicitly referred to this in their OP). If there are limits, then there is a notion of fairness. The original premise of saulrh's argument was that "fairness" wasn't useful because the pie is not fixed (even though it is incorrectly [according to saulrh's OP] perceived to be).
I also think that there may not only be universal (or inter-universal [or other])) limits, but there may be local limits as well. For instance, once I create an entire new pie, where does it go? It would need to displace some thing, even if it's just atmospheric molecules.
> How can I know the difference between my meaning and yours if you are unable to produce an instance of what you are talking about?
Take the US economy of 1900 as "the pie". The US economy as of 2015 is more than double that, even after accounting for inflation and population growth. That is what the rest of us are talking about when we say "an entire new pie".
As for the rest, you seem to be deliberately (and needlessly) nitpicky and argumentative, and I'm done with this conversation.
Probably for the best, as I am near positive that you have not been able to define "the economy", or "economy", even though you use it nearly every sentence. This makes it seem like you have no idea what you are talking about.
>Take the US economy of 1900 as "the pie". The US economy as of 2015 is more than double that, even after accounting for inflation and population growth.
See, you are talking about two different things. There are very few people alive today who were alive in 1900. So, an "entire new pie" takes 115 years to make?
Now I will be you:
`But, jsprogrammer, didn't saulrh claim, "They're happier about throwing away chunks of pie than they are about getting an entire new pie to split up.", in their OP?`
Edit: My only real point here is that "entire new pie" is a bankrupt concept. It has no real substance. There is "stuff we can do to improve things", but those have costs (and I'm not talking about monetary).
If you define "pie" as a physical chunk of matter under an implied laundry list of restrictions, maaaaaaybe.
If you define "pie" as real wealth, then it becomes effectively unbounded; see fractional-reserve banking for a real-world example.
If you define "pie" as value of your personal rational utility function, you get a much nicer - which is to say, much less bounded - result. I don't exactly think that Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski is directly possible, but it's almost certain that our minds are in a region of the state space of all possible minds that is also mapped to by simulated brains with vastly greater measure than all brains existing in universes ex nihilo (for more exploration on this topic please consult Permutation City by Greg Egan and then chapters 2+ of The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover by Eliezer Yudkowsky). Which extends to Tegmark's Mathematical Universe hypothesis, which defines (and I do mean defines, in a constructive sense) uncountably infinite universes implying uncountably infinite versions of indistinguishable-from-me (as far as I know, see previous) that are simulated in universes which have unbounded quantities of utilitronium.
I haven't read Permutation City yet, but it's on my list. I haven't heard of the other book, but I'll be looking into it. Thank you for the suggestion.
Multiple universes may just be an artifact of our math. For instance, Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory may provide or point to a resolution.
Ultimately, the economy is measured in "units moved", which is ultimately tied to the amount of "units" available in the entire system.
* We take a set of axioms, just like any other mathematics. Say ZFC.
* We construct an isomorphism - a bijective mapping - between states of universes and the reals. This step is honestly pretty trivial. Our laws of physics, as far as we can tell, are just big continuous-ish differential equations, so it's just going to be a serialization.
* We construct the reals from our axioms.
* By the isomorphism from before, we have constructed all possible universes which run under our laws of physics.
* We have constructed our universe.
Epistemologically speaking, mathematics doesn't work like anything else. Just about everything else you ever do is fundamentally bayesian in nature - we form hypotheses and attempt to disprove them by comparing them to our observations, and all we can do is disprove hypotheses, and even then not particularly strongly. Consult Karl Popper's works on empirical falsification for deeper discussion. Mathematics, in contrast, is inductive. We can prove that a statement is True by combining other True statements, and once we've done this it's done and cannot be "disproven" by the addition of more information. Well, unless you count Godel's result, but that's a bit of a special case and we usually ignore it because it's annoying.
Sure. I'm actually reading through (a translation of) The Logic of Scientific Discovery right now, but I am already familiar with the ideas, conclusions, etc of Popper, Godel, and others whom have done related work.
However, mathematical induction is different from "inductive reasoing" (as opposed to deductive, or "the deductive theory of testing", as Popper's translators call it). In fact, I don't believe it is a contrast to Popper's work; mathematical induction is actually a form of deductive reasoning (of course, this makes it rather confusing to talk about). Popper's method requires first formulating a system (axioms) in pure mathematics (logic). Then deriving the logical conclusions from the system and determining tests that could be performed that could contradict those conclusions. Popper also provides a schema for comparing systems, deriving contradictory conclusions, and designing experiments to distinguish between the various theories under consideration.
>The way this works is:
I don't mean to be obtuse, but it's not immediately clear to me at the moment what "this" refers to (although, from the context of the prior post, I would assume it refers to Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory). Is there another way you could clarify what we are talking about?
Edit: Ok, I read my last post again and I think maybe you are giving a physical theory that is not based on integers or number theory? My concern with that interpretation is that I'm not sure how meaningful of a distinction can be made between Integers, ZFC, or Logic within the context of physical theories. Doesn't Shannon's work allow us to collapse all writable (a necessary precondition to execute Popper's method) theories to integers?
The pie gets bigger, but most people's concrete amount of pie they get generally does not change, while a tiny amount of people end up with the benefits of the expanding pie.
I guess I should have worded it to better indicate that what I gave is a simple, obvious, and uncontroversial example of things that go into causal coupling between parental and child intelligence, but not the only or even remotely the strongest element. There are many reasons why being born to unintelligent or poor parents is incredibly unfair.
Arable land is a particularly bad example of a justification for a 'fixed pie'. Highly developed countries such as the USA have upwards of eight times the crop yield per acre compared with developing countries, and yield appears to be increasing everywhere. In fact, yields are improving so much that the amount of land dedicated to crop production worldwide has already or will soon begin decreasing.
I'll take Rawls' veil of ignorance and say yes, I'd rather be born into unequal world A than equal world B if everyone in world A has strictly more pie than in world B.
Destroying parts of the pie clearly isn't Pareto optimal, either.
Most people would, depending on the amount of inequality and how bad off the least fortunate are. There's been pretty good research on that. Rawls' thought experiment is meant to reveal what people in a society would consider just, not to be prescriptive. Rawls had ideas as to what people would choose and but he was wrong about how much equality they would prefer.
I would probably enjoy wealth, yes. However, what I truly desire most would be to understand the Universe. Understand reality. What are we? Are we?(see some of Dr. James Gates work on supersymmetry) So many questions and, it would seem, way too much geopolitical bullshit on this planet to ever truly get any answers.
That's what you say. Biologically we aren't designed that way. We're designed to seek status and achievement as it aids in reproduction. Understanding the universe doesn't help you achieve this goal in anyway. It probably hinders you.
Too many people like to think about themselves as robotic savants desiring only to be logical and more intelligent. This is a fantasy story that is somewhat true but side steps the issue of what we really want. If you were truly intelligent you would know that biologically speaking what we want is sex, money and status.
In front of you have two doors. You go through door A you can have knowledge of the true nature of the universe and the promise that you have to live like a hobo for the rest of your life. In the other door (door B) you have billions of dollars, the adoration of the most beautiful women in the world, the respect of everyone and the promise that you will die without ever knowing the true nature of the universe.
Don't be absurd, in what reality can you actually believe any being understanding the nature of the Universe could "live like a hobo" whatever the hell that means. If you were truly intelligent you'd understand money is a man made construct that you've been socially engineered to want above all else as a means to control the masses. You honestly just asserted we're hard-wired to want money, sex, of course, but money, preposterous! I view status much the same, some of the world's most powerful individuals operate in complete anonymity, and couldn't care less about the adoration of serfs! While I don't claim to possess world power, I can assure you I do not seek the adoration of the mindless masses.
"The secret to success is being smart enough to play the game well, but not so smart you figure the game out. Then you realize how stupid it is and you don't want to play anymore."
Someone like... say... Donald Trump strikes me as just the right amount of smart.
> A world in which everyone suffered from horrible poverty would be a perfectly equal one, he says, but few would prefer that to the world in which we now live. Therefore, “equality” can’t be what we really value.
Frighteningly fallacious logic. I want a house with a pool. But I don't want one a 2-hour commute from work even if it has a pool. Does that mean I don't value the pool?
Stuck through it for shits and giggles, but the article doesn't really get better from there.
Not necessarily. In this case, OP values the commute more. What if it's a tossup between a 10 minute commute with no backyard and 25 minute commute with a backyard with two trees to put a hammock on. Maybe in that case, OP would take a longer commute to get a shady backyard.
I think that's why the logic is fallacious - it only works for a specific question phrased in a specific way.
Well I suppose the issue is muddled because having a pool is a binary thing where as commute time is not. That makes them hard to rank.
Suppose instead of just saying that you're choosing between a house with no pool but a short commute over a house with a pool and a long commute you try to rank your priorities:
1. Pool
2. Commute < 1.5 h (choosing an arbitrary cutoff to turn this constraint into a binary one)
Now if the pool is really the most important thing to you, then you will have to forfeit the < 1.5 h commute no matter how long it is. If you decided to forgo the pool for a shorter commute, then that is sort of exposing a hidden priority, it would look something more like
1. Commute < 2 h
2. Pool
3. Commute < 1.5 h
The point being that if we haven't fulfilled a certain priority, then it cannot be the most important priority. At least in this binary priority model, there are of course other ways you could lay this out. I just don't think it's fair to call the logic "frighteningly fallacious"
It depends on the shape of your preference curves. If you're a 1.5 hour commute from work, your highest value change might be a shorter commute. But if you're a 20 minute commute from work, your highest value change might be a pool.
Similarly, if you live in a rich society, you might prefer a more equal society to one that's somewhat more wealthy on average. But if you live in a poor society, you might prefer one that's wealthier even if it has more inequality. For example, the U.S. has 25-35% higher PPP GDP per capita than Germany and France. However, the ratio between the income of the top 10% and the bottom 10% is twice as wide in the U.S. as in those countries. I imagine a lot of Germans and French are okay with that state of affairs.
Yeah I agree, I think the issue is that "really value" is ambiguous and implies that there's only one thing which we can optimize for at a time. I don't think that's true, but I don't think it's a logical fallacy either, just a bad assumption.
Karl Marx saw a couple flaws in Capitalism, similar to what we practice today. I think he's right about one and wrong about the other. And the part he's right about is what people find unfair.
He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what bothers people. It isn't fair. And they are helpless to change it.
And it is what is happening more and more. And the eventuality of it is Capitalism will eat itself as those without will be large enough in numbers where they assume power. Those which did the exploiting will either have their heads rolled or at the very least made impotent and marginalized. This is revolution and leads to Socialism and eventually Communism.
The second part Marx argues is that only the State can sort out the best way to distribute means and goods - that the free market is too chaotic. This I disagree with and I think time has shown this to be false. The state will eventually be corrupt if it isn't already. And whose to say what is best for one person is also the best for the other?
So, the free market exists where people can pick and choose. They have freedom. This allows some to have more than others and I think people are in fact OK with that. In fact I think people want that because we believe in getting what you're worth. Its just they don't want their own labor to be discounted to the point of being exploited - which is happening more and more with through wage suppression via policy or globalism which has displaced a lot of people very quickly, even if it might eventually benefit everyone as a whole.
>"He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what bothers people. It isn't fair. And they are helpless to change it."
This has been clearly demonstrated to be incorrect many times.[1]
The theory might be sound but the effects of policy unilaterally advantage the capitalist at the expense of the local worker. This is why people feel they are being treated unfairly. They are competing with other groups around the world who haven't caught up yet.
I believe we will eventually progress to the mean here but until then there are people feeling cheated. The trade agreements and bank bailouts did not consider the displacement in the near term and thus has created a growing group that is angry due to feeling that the system is not fair.
Price theory shows how businesses don't 'mark up' to generate prices; they sell for as much as they can, whether at a loss or a profit.
>"policy unilaterally advantage the capitalist at the expense of the local worker"
This is obviously untrue, and can simply be demonstrated by looking at how many of the supposedly disadvantaged workers strike out on their own, and form new businesses; if it were so easy and so sure, everyone would be doing it. Most employees with enough money to form a business in their field do not, because they do not think it is worth it.
>"people feel they are being treated unfairly"
People can feel they are being treated unfairly for a number of reasons, but we should make it clear that there are a few kinds of fairness that people care about, and they are not always mutually compatible. Fairness of treatment refers to procedural guarantees, and fairness of outcome refers to how equitable people feel the result of the process was. Conservatives tend to value the former, and liberals tend to value the latter.
>"I believe we will eventually progress to the mean here but until then there are people feeling cheated. The trade agreements and bank bailouts did not consider the displacement in the near term and thus has created a growing group that is angry due to feeling that the system is not fair."
You should be careful about making sweeping predictions based on simple theories, as they have the unfortunate tendency to be wrong. Tetlock's book is a good read on the subject of predictions and judgement if you are interested.[1]
> He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what bothers people. It isn't fair. And they are helpless to change it.
Given your other statements, this is not a sensible position. A widget is priced according to the value it delivers a buyer -- if there are 100 brands of widgets on the market and they are easy to make, it's priced low; if I am the only widget maker, the only limit on the price is what I can convince people to pay.
And what I pay my factory workers is subject to the same competitive forces -- labor's value is limited by my ability to replace it. That's your free market in effect, labor is only extracting value for itself until it exceeds the cost of the alternative, be that a robot or another worker.
So if you are a believer that free markets deliver the best pairing of choice and freedom, how do you not look at a person working in a factory, being paid a low wage, enjoying no participation in profit, and think if they had more value to offer, they would negotiate a better deal.
Because of policy, as I stated. They can't negotiate a better deal because the labor pool they are competing with is global. So they are now valued less and feel it is unfair.
I'm not here preaching socialism. I'm just saying a near term effect of rampant globalization is people are going to be displaced and feel they are being exploited. I think this is where unrest comes from.
Your statement only makes sense in a context where both the buyer and seller have roughly equal power. As it is, that has almost never been true when talking about labor. An employer who doesn't have enough employees is still going to be able to compete and make money, just not as much. However, an employee who doesn't get enough work is going to be homeless or starve.
"However, an employee who doesn't get enough work is going to be homeless or starve."
Don't mean to be sarcastic here, but isn't that the whole point of government right now? Foodstamps, welfare payments, child-assistance money, social security, free medical care, etc.
At what point can we stop using this supposed "power-differential" between employer and employee as some sort of silent force in the labour market?
Probably when people stop talking about a "supposed" power-differential, realize it exists, and do something about it.
And while you're not wrong that a lot of that safety net stuff is the point of government, you'd have a pretty hard time claiming that they were doing it well, or helping everyone who needed it, especially with a lot of states slashing aid from their budgets in order to give tax cuts.
The answer to the first question is the time-value of money. The capitalist has put his capital into the production and is delaying the return on his investment to the future. The employee is being paid now, regardless of when the income from their labor is realized. This is why a good is sold for more than the worker is paid. The worker is not being paid less than their labor is worth.
Investing your capital into business/machinery yields higher profits. Those get taxed at corporate tax rate, which is 35%. This rate is only matched with the highest income-tax rate bracket.
It may not "look" fair on the surface, but to compare capital gains tax with income tax is an oversimplification. For one, invested capital is unpredictable.
This is a good way to describe it. He got the first part right, and identified the true flaw of capitalism.
Too many people still associate him and his theory of communism with failed communist states like the soviet union, North Korea or pre-capitalistic China. While the association may or may not be real, his observation about capitalism is unequivocal.
Thanks. It's amazing to see how many folks in the tech industry don't see this when the whole idea of H1B visas is to get workers that can easily be exploited over here. Especially since the first attempt in the late 90's of out sourcing failed.
But out sourcing has worked fabulously for many other industries. And although I agree globalization has many benefits the side effect is many displaced people today seething with anger as the capitalist class gets wealthier. That anger will turn to pitch forks when there's enough of them.
to compete with people around the world means to be exploited here and policy doesn't help it so people feel they are not allowed to participate in society fairly. Capitalists (including me) need to behave otherwise revolution will come and our bourgeois heads will roll.
Can we drop the "conservatives are evil" mantra at some point? It really adds nothing to the discourse.
Having a family full of conservatives (mind you I can't speak for all), I can tell you that for them, it comes down to how big the system is and what benefits should be provided by the government or not. The difference in where the line is drawn and why it's drawn is the difference between conservatives and democrats.
They think that outcomes would be better with a smaller federal government, that it is not the responsibility of the government to take care of everybody, and that everyone would be better off for it. They think that the federal government should deal with defense, foreign diplomatic policy, and inter-state issues, not insert itself into every aspect of policy making nationwide. They think that governments closer to the people can respond better to the needs of the people.
So yes, that does mean that it shouldn't redistribute wealth, at least on the federal level. But it's not that they want to see people suffer, it's that they think it's not the responsibility of the federal government to ameliorate it. That's not the same thing.
Note: I don't agree with them on a lot of things. I just don't like seeing these things misrepresented.
> I can tell you that for them, it comes down to how big the system is and what benefits should be provided by the government or not.
While that's certainly not a bad thought, we have all benefited from larger government. History shows out that the more government spending and distribution of goods and services there is, the better the economic outlook. Even amongst most developed countries today, the government accounts for around half of GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce....
'Small government' is nice as a political philosophy, however it hasn't been shown historically to be a great economic policy.
Not to mention, while right-wing politicians and economists argue for private enterprise, lower taxes, smaller government, less spending, etc..., they simultaneously use state institutions to their advantage. In most economies governments fund research, education, they are responsible for building most infrastructure, funding transit, etc... These things benefit us as a society, yet the same people who reap these benefits every single day argue against paying for them (ie. paying taxes).
The problem with left-wing economics is that they aren't intuitive. Right-wing economics is - it's simple, and reminds people of budgeting at home. The only problem is that when you study macroeconomics, you realize that it's more about behaviour than about finance. Government spending increases GDP, in most cases by more than the dollar amount spent. Social nets increase entrepreneurial behaviour, and reducing poverty always yields social benefits.
> So yes, that does mean that it shouldn't redistribute wealth, at least on the federal level.
No one would argue that the government should only build roads in rich cities. Or only build hospitals in rich cities. Yet creating infrastructure is a redistribution of wealth. When the US government creates a new military base, they're redistributing wealth. When they give money to schools, they're distributing wealth.
Yet for some reason we have it in our heads that 'taking' taxes and then giving 'cash' to others is wrong, but it's OK when the government uses other means to redistribute wealth.
Anyhow, the point is, we see it as 'fair' that we work hard and get paid. That we 'deserve' what we make. That we did it 'alone'. The fact is, wealth cannot be created in a vacuum. Whatever we do, we do because others helped us. We're more than happy to use the institutions created for us, but don't want to share the rewards. We see 'fairness' as more important than prosperity.
That is all way besides the point, seeing as I was describing my family's political philosophy as something that is not evil, not offering it up as something right or wrong. Yeesh.
I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'. The Great American Dream is about someone seizing an opportunity; equality means we all have an opportunity to seize an opportunity. Economic Inequality means there is a disproportionate number of opportunities at the top, and very few at the bottom.
Not everyone takes those chances, but we want to make sure those who do have the shots to gamble the take, so that there is a churn that allows the cream to rise to the top.
That, to me, is the meaning of the message of equality, and I suspect it's what people like Sanders are talking about.
When I think of inequality and opportunity in the US, I think about the education system. Sadly, the quality of K-12 education in the United States is too strongly tied to economic output / wealth / income of a region, which seems regressive to me.
I've felt the same, and it's because schools are mostly funded by real estate taxes. Changing that model would help - even if it was something as simple as pooling all the taxes for an entire state.
The difficulty with doing that is that real estate values, and thus taxes, is a very local thing, it's quite hard to set them universally.
it certainly isn't confined to the US. You simply have to read the right sites to see that that is a world wide phenomenon. What isn't talked about is that a lot of what keeps people from success also affects their local schools, as in they don't participate because they don't have the drive to do it. The same lack of drive to push ahead.
Having worked as an education beat reporter in a number of really small, really wealth-divided communities for many years, I can tell you that state education is unlikely to ever be the solution to the wealth gap.
Honestly, from my time in the trenches of listening to trite, small, yet passionate people discussing some of the harder parts of educating children (i.e. hard to educate when they're coming to school having eaten 3000+ calories from horribly un-nutritious sources), I've learned that there's no easy solution.
You can't bus those kids out of the low-tax neighborhoods into good schools if they're still going home to a shit environment. The best you can do is stand up and try to mentor one or two kids in your neighborhood in small ways, and encourage others to do the same. Distributed cultural-standard building. That's the best I've got.
But that has a strong cultural component. So we're implicitly talking about changing 'poor people in the us culture'. I say "in the US" because I have been to other countries where even poor people put all their extra (over sustenance) resources into educating their children. Yes, it happens a tiny bit in the US, but not as much as in other places.
Organizing school districts by geography, and then enforcing that children attend the school nearest them, is a bureaucratic convenience that a) makes it easy to centrally plan resources by forecasting student population, b) eliminates competition for the families' business. In New Orleans they simply started allowing students to attend any school in the city, and the schools' budgets were adjusted for the enrolled population they accepted. The outcomes jumped substantially (there were other reforms as well).
The issue is that they aren't just using the term starfish - they're usually giving more details about what they mean by "income inequality" and it usually has to do with the 1% literally having more money than most people.
And I'd add -- the Waltons would be a weird example to key on if you were concerned mainly with punishing Wall St. speculators but keeping dynamism and entrepreneurship alive. Regardless of how you feel about WalMart, the Waltons are rich because they built a big, successful business. Not sure why they're first among the villains for ol' Bernie.
You can't have merit and equality at the same time. You have to pick one.
As long as you strive for merit, and the more you strive. The more inequality this leads to.
Define the principles of the society you wish to build. If you wish to trade merit for equality, then you should also live by its consequences. Which is people going else where their hard work is better recognized.
Free market economy is a direct result of learning to live by the consequences of your actions.
They have the right to be rich, but there's an issue with their unequal wealth? I don't understand the difference between "being rich" and "having unequal wealth." Magnitude?
My point was that the Waltons existing today deserve no special credit for having created a business; they didn't. There is nothing dynamic or entrepreneurial about inheriting a fortune. It's dumb luck.
Every single one of the policies you describe are exactly wealth redistribution (except for corporate lobbying -- that's restriction on speech). You just perceive them as examples of good policies. You think they are particularly fair ways to redistribute wealth.
Unless you think that when tuition is free, the cost isn't passed to anyone? Or if the minimum wage is raised, no one has to pay?
> I've always felt that when people talk about economic equality, they are talking about equality of access, not equality of 'things'.
The features which provide access to economic opportunities are, themselves, economic goods, and wealth is largely (though not entirely) fungible, so the two things are not entirely separable. You can't provide an equality of access that meets some common standards of fairness without finding some way to reduce the degree and circumstances in which the current system produces inequality in things.
I would argue the opposite. You can't provide an equality of access that meets any given standard of fairness without creating inequality, because now you are favoring those who happen to conform to/ or be better suited to/ or have a better temperament for the new standard over the old.
no such assumption. The statement at the end is that there in inequality created at the end. I.E. there will be winners and losers. Now you could argue that the 'right correction' would create the 'right winners and right losers' but I think historically, almost all of the best-intentioned corrections applied by the states have ultimately hurt the dispossessed.
You may say that's the opposite, but to me, its two sides of the same coin -- and its a fairly significant problem in achieving anything satisfying the common desire for fairness. If equality of access is fair, it produces inequality of outcome, but inequality of outcome itself destroys equality of access.
There's no stable equilibrium that is fair, achieving fairness, to the degree that is possible, requires constant monitoring and active balancing.
You're talking about equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome?
This is specifically not what Sanders is talking about. He's saying that the basic fact that the rich have become richer than they used to be, relative to everyone else, is wrong and must change.
Really? Every single point there is about increasing taxes on the rich and reducing taxes/burdens or increasing pay for the poor, leading to one thing: more opportunity for the poor to pursue life decisions that aren't mandated by position or need (e.g., not going to school because you cant afford it or dont have the time when not working your two jobs).
The rich being richer and the poor being poorer is an indication of the disparity of opportunity. This disparity is being used to illustrate the difference -- it is the cough caused by the cold; the cough is not the root cause, but a signal. Income inequality growth is not the root cause, it is the outcome of policies that affect access to opportunities and why all of the points that he proposes are goals to alleviate that access imbalance.
Oh -- so income inequality is evidence of disparity of opportunity, so you are actually concerned with income inequality. You'd prefer incomes to be more equal.
If opportunity were perfectly equal (your ideal state), what would you imagine income distribution to look like? Would that be acceptable then?
In other words, at what distribution would you not argue that the distribution itself is evidence of unfairness?
The way you've worded your questions you are trying to lead me in to a talk of wealth redistribution. Incomes being more equal is not about distributing, but in countering things that are naturally regressive by:
Establishign a more progressive tax rate, ending on the cap of social security payments (which is the literal definition of a regressive tax), a livable minimum wage, equal access to education (education being generally a flat cost, and so affects the poor a lot harder than the wealthy), a singlepayer healthcare system which will put a much larger portion of income for the poor (than the rich) back in to their pockets ($300/mo for insurance is a lot more to someone who earns $1k a month than to someone earning $10k a month).
These happen to be points 1, 8, 2, 7, and 9 on the page you linked.
See? You can make income (and thus opportunity) more fair without redistributing.
I also think that we fundamentally disagree as to what "equality of opportunity" means.
You think it means that the government has a role in making sure the poor and the rich have the same outcomes available to them. In that sense, the rich being able to afford fancier educations, better housing, better healthcare, etc. is something that needs to be fixed.
I think it means that the law is blind as to your station in life -- that you are free to do with your life as you please, as your abilities and good fortune allow. That you do not get special treatment from your government if you happen to be rich or connected -- but definitely not that you can be assured that life will be fair, and that the hand you're dealt will be worth the same as your neighbor's.
That you do not get special treatment from your government
if you happen to be rich or connected
Sure you do. Up until a few years ago you paid a significantly smaller tax rate, since capital gains were taxed at 15%. The rich also hit the social security tax cap, which means the rich pay a smaller tax rate there too. Not to mention tax protection shelters that having an expensive accountant affords you.
You also have access to better lawyers to protect you from crimes you commit, which means you'll serve a lighter sentencing (on average).
Being rich has very clear advantages beyond simply having more money, and to deny that is to be willfully obtuse.
I agree, I didn't say we were at the perfectly optimal point of equality of opportunity. I was defining what I think the term means. I agree with most of those points.
Except social security cap -- social security was supposed to be a benefit, not a tax. You don't get paid more after that cap is reached.
And capital gains tax is a stupid example outside of the very narrow debate of carry-interest income.
> Except social security cap -- social security was supposed to be a benefit, not a tax. You don't get paid more after that cap is reached.
There is a social security benefit cap, but its on final benefits based on lifetime social security qualified earnings adjusted to account for wage inflation from the year earned. Capping annual social security qualified wages and tax liability isn't actually essential to maintain the integrity of that scheme (and it arguably is unfair treatment to income earners based on degree of annual income volatility.)
Further, the benefit formula already has bend points where aggregate qualified wages past a certain point contribute less in benefits per dollar of wages than below that point, so there's no reason that couldn't be extended and the benefit cap removed, possibly with another bend point.
> And capital gains tax is a stupid example
Asserting that is not an argument. Capital gains are income, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to treat them more favorably than other income in taxation, except that you want to favor capital holders over those deriving income from other sources. (It may make sense to excluded them from the kind of SS/Medicare taxes and qualification calculations, though arguably this is unfair to minor capitalists who must actively manage their own capital to derive income from it, and face similar issues to actual workers when it comes to loss of their own ability to do so; it would makes ense to include individually-received capital gains in both the tax and benefit calculations for SS & Medicare).
Favorable treatment of long-term capital gains is sometimes justified, in a progressive tax system, by the fact that not giving some favorable consideration overtaxes the capital gains as they are not earned over a single year, but progressive tax is based on the presumption that the income received in that year is earned in that year. But when you have enough capital that you can structure it such that you are consistently rotating holdings so that you are regularly realizing "long term" gains, that's less sensible. A more sensible approach to addressing this problem -- which also addresses labor income that has volatility, where the peaks are enabled by the choice to work in a domain where the troughs are also an occurrence, is to simply set up a system for all income where income can be recognized for tax purposes in advance of being realized (and thus, taxed) without limit, and also, with some limits on time and amounts, deferred after realization for tax purposes, giving tax payers with irregular income from whatever source the ability to smooth those irregularities within the structure of a progressive income tax system, without structurally favoring those with large, consistent, capital income streams.
People indeed want fairness. This is a little bit obvious, though. Furthermore, to say that people aren't generally "FOR equality" is a straw man.
It is imperative that those who might claim to be against the idea of "equality" for some abstract philosophical reason to separately ask themselves why they can't also be AGAINST egregious and institutionalized inequality.
Being against both universal equality and egregious inequality is an entirely consistent position. Setting up the utopia of universal equality as a straw man in order to avoid addressing the latter question is dishonest and immoral.
The article never defines what fairness is. Another word for fairness is "justice". The article betrays its bias when it analyzes how income is "distributed". Of course, income isn't distributed - it's earned. If person A earns 100x person B then of course it's just. However, if income were indeed distributed, all things being equal, unequal distribution would not be just. So, do you believe wealth is earned by hard work and diligence or that it is distributed by some kind of greater power?
"Distribution" is a neutral term that refers to how quantities are spread out in a population. E.g. you can talk about age, weight, or height distribution in a population.
Age, height, even weight (for the most part) are qualities of humans that cannot be controlled. Wealth is qualitatively different than these attributes.
Edit: no one would ever talk about the distribution of "ability at basketball" for example.
And yet you still talk about the "distribution" of those quantities. Which undermines your premise that the use of the word "distribution" implies centralized apportionment of some quantity.
"Wealth distribution" is a descriptive, not a prescriptive concept, just like "height distribution." Here is a system applied to some population; let's measure how some quantity ends up distributed among that population based on the behavior of the system.
I think your point is more pedantry than substance. Yes, wealth is qualitatively different, but referring to it as distributed across a population is still intuitively clear and does not read as an abnormal use of the word.
> So, do you believe wealth is earned by hard work and diligence or that it is distributed by some kind of greater power?
I don't believe either thing absolutely. I believe wealth can be earned by hard work and diligence, but that those things are neither necessary nor sufficient. I believe wealth is often distributed by a greater power in effect if not in literal practice through things like regressive taxation and systematic difference in access quality education that have a disparate (and in my opinion, inequitable) impact on those of lesser means.
Not to go all anti-objectivist, but I've yet to see a consistent equation where (quantity of work) * (quality of work) = wealth
There's a myth of the hustle that gets perpetrated whenever a feel-good story about a hard working, intelligent person's success gets bandied about.
The reality is that I'm where I am at least as much because of who I was born to as to how much hard work and diligence I've put into my professional career.
Even to win the state lottery you have to make the effort to buy a ticket. Are you saying you've done nothing more significant than having good parents?
Not that one can do nothing significant, but that one is significantly advantaged by his or her parent's wealth.
And studies bear this out. One of the greatest predictors of a person's wealth is whether his or her parents are wealthy. And this, even when corrected for such factors as environment and behaviour.
Meh. Saying people prefer fairness over equality doesn't actually tell us much, mostly because neither of those two terms have consistent definitions that allow us to analyze whether a situation is fair or is equal.
On the one hand there's the internal division of equality of outcomes vs. equality of opportunities. (See this [in my opinion somewhat confused] article by Dylan Matthews[0]). On the other hand "it's not fair" usually seems to mean "I have been slighted".
As someone who has worked in Game Theory, I've seen a variety of notions of what constitutes fairness (in the form of social welfare). There isn't one obvious-even-if-technically-infeasible choice. There's a variety of plausible, mediocre alternatives.
I think that what this actually demonstrates is that most people have muddled thinking on most topics.
I think the reason why people don't want equality is because it's arbitrary. To take a simple case, let's say there are five people and five apples. An "equal" distribution might distribute five apples to each person, but let's say one of them is allergic to apples. Then suddenly the "equal" distribution doesn't satisfy equally.
So how does one formulate an equal distribution, and who gets to choose those rules?
Well too bad most don't understand what fairness is. Far too many are quick to discount the work or effort of others because they do not understand the work they do. Its like, I don't know how to do that but it can't be that hard so its obvious they have too much. This is especially true when comparing labor that is more physically involved than that which requires more application of mental ability.
One thing most miss out on is they want fairness but don't want to give up their stuff or such because it is so much tied to who has how much stuff, money, and more. Far too many will state unequivocally that those richer than them don't pay their "fair" share when those same people contribute a higher percentage and far more wealth into the system.
This is primarily driven by politicians who profit by dividing people. That is what most people miss. They hear about all the disagreement in government as if that is a problem. In the US the government wasn't designed to be fully cooperative, it was designed to make governing difficult so as the federal government would not overrun the states. Where events were not to be treated with such division there are statements to that fact.
Yet politicians spend more time pitting people against each other to preserve their own status and this is why people don't understand what fairness let alone equality is.
This article is terrible -- it sets up a false dichotomy. The article actually refutes it's own conclusion in the paragraphs about what people view as the ideal income distribution. We don't want total equality but we do want less inequality than is actually present today in every 1st world country. So we should care about the current (and growing!) levels of inequality -- even if we don't want a perfectly equal distribution, we want one that is more equal.
fairness is a horrendous choice of words, but the one this article chose to use
there are many unfair side effects of current economics
look at taxes..
recently i read a major corporate entity paid 4k pounds in taxes in 2014(o). The top comment says:
TIL our small UK startup pays 10-20x more corp tax
.. Doing things honestly and by the book
is expensive in both money terms and time terms
(paying accountants)
Big corps .. make me feel like a fool.
though these corps are seen as equals in buraecratic lines, the expectations and avenues of utilising those regulations seems unfairly balanced
or look at fines..
if i get a parking ticket(i) for 100$, i may be unable to pay it right away with my zero savings and my 12k/yr income, someone making 80k+ a year will just pay the 100$ grievance and be done with it
i will have to start budgeting myself to make enough to pay the 100$ fine, but it will take time with bimonthly paychecks and in that time i will be punished with late fees only increasing the financial burden and time needed to accrue the funds
even if trying to do the right thing people punished further simply for economic circumstance
so though the two violators are seen as equal, the expectations and avenues of how to rectify the violations seems unfairly balanced
people making less end up paying more for the same violation due to the bureaucracy maintaining the violations
or i could use a payday loan(ii), another damning option
these are only two examples of areas where a conversation about fairness stead equality alters the direction of the conversation
You've hit on a really key point. Life is easier when you have more money.
Not trying to be callous, but it's going to come out that way -- maybe the answer is to try to make some more of it.
Because trying to redesign society to eliminate this basic fact of the world has so far led to disastrous results. Like, hundreds of millions dead kind of results. With nothing to show for it, because there were still haves and have nots.
"But I'm not advocating Stalinism!" you'd say. But remember, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin came from good intentions, too. So did Mao and Pol Pot and Ho and Kim. Everyone wanted to solve the problem you're describing.
callous? i'd say you're offering a proven solution
but i'd wonder, how does one 'make some more of it'?
stalinism? you're arguing with someone else
my complaints are against the bureaucracy of the problem
there is more to this conversation than a binary of stalinism and some undefined other
what do you mean by 'easier'? seems to the suffer the same ills as using vague language such as 'fair'
and i'd caution against utilising the concept of 'fact' when discussing subsets
what of a generation born into wealth that fails to make any more if it but their life remains, or even becomes moreso, by your own definitions, 'easier'?
The elephant in the room is how do you measure fairness? We devolve into measuring the end results in terms of equality which ultimately provide a negative feedback loop and move the conversation and solutions into trying to make things equal instead of fair.
Governmental policy devolves into this to the detriment of everyone involved.
Entire political campaigns are centered around not making things "fair" but "equal". Watch and see who communities vote for and why they vote for them; it is closely related to the child who prefers to have one and everyone else zero as opposed to everyone getting two.
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Counter-thoughts from reality: China's doing great, and the US has a higher percentage of its own population incarcerated than any other state in human history.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/jun/22/inside-chin...
For that matter, the US has it as well (albeit to a 'cleaner' extent):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium?
Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even a dropout?
Maybe we should compensate workers based on responsibilities (ie dependents, that, in some ways would be fairer, the woman with three dependent children gets paid more than the man with one, but the man with two where one requires extra care gets paid more than either, to compensate for added medical expenses)
Hint think how single people will see this.
I was following you up until this notion. Compensation has nothing to do with a worker's responsibilities. Compensation is based on how much the job is worth to the person or company paying. That's why a brain-surgeon with no dependents is paid more than a ditch-digger with a house full of kids.
You just assumed the gambler ended up worse off. What if he won? Do we compensate the investor for his sub-risky-gambling return?
There's another term I'm seeing misinterpreted earlier in the thread too that is relevant. We use mathematical distribution of income growth over the population as the metric and people misinterpret it to mean distribution of wealth in the Marxist sense. It's just a measurement of who has what, but it implies a solution (to some) that has a lot of political baggage.
And, of course, this entire thing is a symptom of fixed-pie mentality. When inequality exists - when some people have bigger slices of pie than others - people seem to be reliably made happier by throwing chunks of the pie on the floor as long as they're someone else's chunks of pie. They're happier about throwing away chunks of pie than they are about getting an entire new pie to split up. It really bugs me when I see "fairness" valued over actual goodness.
Also, the pie is fixed.
I didn't claim that it was. Maybe you should ask saulrh that.
> Also, the pie is fixed.
Economic growth has exceeded population growth rather reliably for the last two hundred years or so. The pie is definitely not fixed.
This puts a hard cap on how much "stuff" can exist. Therefore, the pie is fixed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
Even using your definition, though, the pie is not fixed. We can't mine the moon today. Perhaps someday we can. If so, the amount of matter available to us is not fixed. Or perhaps we can mine the earth's core. More mundanely, there's fracking. That's dramatically added to the amount of matter (of a particular useful form) that is available to the human race.
So am I. What is "the economy"? I submit that it is the tracking of material in space.
There is a fixed amount of space on the planet as well. At some point, there will be no more space or material to place another Hearst Castle.
I guess someone should provide an example of an "entire new pie". (Interestingly, this is what I demanded in my first post.)
My theory even explains your observation that 'People will complain about who got "more than their fair share" of the new pie'. The reason they complain is because the pie is fixed and the new pie is a lie.
If we could just create "entire new pies", then there would be no reason to complain about the newest pie, because we can just create yet another entire new pie.
There are (probably) fundamental limits to the economy. That's a different topic than the one the rest of us are talking about, though.
You keep using the same words ("pie", "economy") to talk about something different, and then you argue that we're wrong. It's tiresome, and also not useful for actual communication.
They have only said that my idea of "entire new pie" is incorrect (while couching that it is actually probably correct). How can I know the difference between my meaning and yours if you are unable to produce an instance of what you are talking about?
>There are (probably) fundamental limits to the economy. That's a different topic than the one the rest of us are talking about, though.
The topic you are all talking about is subsumed by the more fundamental limits (saulrh even explicitly referred to this in their OP). If there are limits, then there is a notion of fairness. The original premise of saulrh's argument was that "fairness" wasn't useful because the pie is not fixed (even though it is incorrectly [according to saulrh's OP] perceived to be).
I also think that there may not only be universal (or inter-universal [or other])) limits, but there may be local limits as well. For instance, once I create an entire new pie, where does it go? It would need to displace some thing, even if it's just atmospheric molecules.
Take the US economy of 1900 as "the pie". The US economy as of 2015 is more than double that, even after accounting for inflation and population growth. That is what the rest of us are talking about when we say "an entire new pie".
As for the rest, you seem to be deliberately (and needlessly) nitpicky and argumentative, and I'm done with this conversation.
>Take the US economy of 1900 as "the pie". The US economy as of 2015 is more than double that, even after accounting for inflation and population growth.
See, you are talking about two different things. There are very few people alive today who were alive in 1900. So, an "entire new pie" takes 115 years to make?
Now I will be you:
`But, jsprogrammer, didn't saulrh claim, "They're happier about throwing away chunks of pie than they are about getting an entire new pie to split up.", in their OP?`
Edit: My only real point here is that "entire new pie" is a bankrupt concept. It has no real substance. There is "stuff we can do to improve things", but those have costs (and I'm not talking about monetary).
If you define "pie" as real wealth, then it becomes effectively unbounded; see fractional-reserve banking for a real-world example.
If you define "pie" as value of your personal rational utility function, you get a much nicer - which is to say, much less bounded - result. I don't exactly think that Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski is directly possible, but it's almost certain that our minds are in a region of the state space of all possible minds that is also mapped to by simulated brains with vastly greater measure than all brains existing in universes ex nihilo (for more exploration on this topic please consult Permutation City by Greg Egan and then chapters 2+ of The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover by Eliezer Yudkowsky). Which extends to Tegmark's Mathematical Universe hypothesis, which defines (and I do mean defines, in a constructive sense) uncountably infinite universes implying uncountably infinite versions of indistinguishable-from-me (as far as I know, see previous) that are simulated in universes which have unbounded quantities of utilitronium.
Multiple universes may just be an artifact of our math. For instance, Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory may provide or point to a resolution.
Ultimately, the economy is measured in "units moved", which is ultimately tied to the amount of "units" available in the entire system.
That's not even close to being what that math is about.
That is, a refutable, physical theory that is not based at all on integers?
* We take a set of axioms, just like any other mathematics. Say ZFC.
* We construct an isomorphism - a bijective mapping - between states of universes and the reals. This step is honestly pretty trivial. Our laws of physics, as far as we can tell, are just big continuous-ish differential equations, so it's just going to be a serialization.
* We construct the reals from our axioms.
* By the isomorphism from before, we have constructed all possible universes which run under our laws of physics.
* We have constructed our universe.
Epistemologically speaking, mathematics doesn't work like anything else. Just about everything else you ever do is fundamentally bayesian in nature - we form hypotheses and attempt to disprove them by comparing them to our observations, and all we can do is disprove hypotheses, and even then not particularly strongly. Consult Karl Popper's works on empirical falsification for deeper discussion. Mathematics, in contrast, is inductive. We can prove that a statement is True by combining other True statements, and once we've done this it's done and cannot be "disproven" by the addition of more information. Well, unless you count Godel's result, but that's a bit of a special case and we usually ignore it because it's annoying.
However, mathematical induction is different from "inductive reasoing" (as opposed to deductive, or "the deductive theory of testing", as Popper's translators call it). In fact, I don't believe it is a contrast to Popper's work; mathematical induction is actually a form of deductive reasoning (of course, this makes it rather confusing to talk about). Popper's method requires first formulating a system (axioms) in pure mathematics (logic). Then deriving the logical conclusions from the system and determining tests that could be performed that could contradict those conclusions. Popper also provides a schema for comparing systems, deriving contradictory conclusions, and designing experiments to distinguish between the various theories under consideration.
>The way this works is:
I don't mean to be obtuse, but it's not immediately clear to me at the moment what "this" refers to (although, from the context of the prior post, I would assume it refers to Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory). Is there another way you could clarify what we are talking about?
Edit: Ok, I read my last post again and I think maybe you are giving a physical theory that is not based on integers or number theory? My concern with that interpretation is that I'm not sure how meaningful of a distinction can be made between Integers, ZFC, or Logic within the context of physical theories. Doesn't Shannon's work allow us to collapse all writable (a necessary precondition to execute Popper's method) theories to integers?
Ok...now define real wealth.
Your statement is correct, but your assumed cause is not. It's 60-80% genes: https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/iq-heritability-...
It is present, but relatively weakly compared to genetics: http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap
There is fixed and diminishing amount of arable land to grow the wheat and apples. You can make only so many pies.
That's a really bold statement to make. Where is your proof? Are you just making it up based on your own biases?
If we're just going by anecdotes, then I can honestly say, I have never met anyone who wants to destroy other people's piece of the pie.
If anything, I've met more people adamant about defending other people's pie pieces. Like you, for example.
When given the choice between fair-pie-on-the-floor and unfair-everybody-gets-more-pie, humans reliably choose fair-pie-on-the-floor.
Destroying parts of the pie clearly isn't Pareto optimal, either.
If we aren't rich, fairness is the next best thing.
Too many people like to think about themselves as robotic savants desiring only to be logical and more intelligent. This is a fantasy story that is somewhat true but side steps the issue of what we really want. If you were truly intelligent you would know that biologically speaking what we want is sex, money and status.
In front of you have two doors. You go through door A you can have knowledge of the true nature of the universe and the promise that you have to live like a hobo for the rest of your life. In the other door (door B) you have billions of dollars, the adoration of the most beautiful women in the world, the respect of everyone and the promise that you will die without ever knowing the true nature of the universe.
Which door do you choose? Let's be real. (Door B)
Money is a social construct that is tied to status. We want money because we want status.
You claim not to seek power. But if it was in front of you would you take it? Which door? Be honest.
"The secret to success is being smart enough to play the game well, but not so smart you figure the game out. Then you realize how stupid it is and you don't want to play anymore."
Someone like... say... Donald Trump strikes me as just the right amount of smart.
Frighteningly fallacious logic. I want a house with a pool. But I don't want one a 2-hour commute from work even if it has a pool. Does that mean I don't value the pool?
Stuck through it for shits and giggles, but the article doesn't really get better from there.
I think that's why the logic is fallacious - it only works for a specific question phrased in a specific way.
Suppose instead of just saying that you're choosing between a house with no pool but a short commute over a house with a pool and a long commute you try to rank your priorities:
1. Pool
2. Commute < 1.5 h (choosing an arbitrary cutoff to turn this constraint into a binary one)
Now if the pool is really the most important thing to you, then you will have to forfeit the < 1.5 h commute no matter how long it is. If you decided to forgo the pool for a shorter commute, then that is sort of exposing a hidden priority, it would look something more like
1. Commute < 2 h
2. Pool
3. Commute < 1.5 h
The point being that if we haven't fulfilled a certain priority, then it cannot be the most important priority. At least in this binary priority model, there are of course other ways you could lay this out. I just don't think it's fair to call the logic "frighteningly fallacious"
Similarly, if you live in a rich society, you might prefer a more equal society to one that's somewhat more wealthy on average. But if you live in a poor society, you might prefer one that's wealthier even if it has more inequality. For example, the U.S. has 25-35% higher PPP GDP per capita than Germany and France. However, the ratio between the income of the top 10% and the bottom 10% is twice as wide in the U.S. as in those countries. I imagine a lot of Germans and French are okay with that state of affairs.
He's right in that Capitalism is not about marking up a product to generate a profit by taking the cost of the goods and the labor to produce it but rather by paying labor less than what their labor is worth. And this is what bothers people. It isn't fair. And they are helpless to change it.
And it is what is happening more and more. And the eventuality of it is Capitalism will eat itself as those without will be large enough in numbers where they assume power. Those which did the exploiting will either have their heads rolled or at the very least made impotent and marginalized. This is revolution and leads to Socialism and eventually Communism.
The second part Marx argues is that only the State can sort out the best way to distribute means and goods - that the free market is too chaotic. This I disagree with and I think time has shown this to be false. The state will eventually be corrupt if it isn't already. And whose to say what is best for one person is also the best for the other?
So, the free market exists where people can pick and choose. They have freedom. This allows some to have more than others and I think people are in fact OK with that. In fact I think people want that because we believe in getting what you're worth. Its just they don't want their own labor to be discounted to the point of being exploited - which is happening more and more with through wage suppression via policy or globalism which has displaced a lot of people very quickly, even if it might eventually benefit everyone as a whole.
This has been clearly demonstrated to be incorrect many times.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price
I believe we will eventually progress to the mean here but until then there are people feeling cheated. The trade agreements and bank bailouts did not consider the displacement in the near term and thus has created a growing group that is angry due to feeling that the system is not fair.
>"policy unilaterally advantage the capitalist at the expense of the local worker"
This is obviously untrue, and can simply be demonstrated by looking at how many of the supposedly disadvantaged workers strike out on their own, and form new businesses; if it were so easy and so sure, everyone would be doing it. Most employees with enough money to form a business in their field do not, because they do not think it is worth it.
>"people feel they are being treated unfairly"
People can feel they are being treated unfairly for a number of reasons, but we should make it clear that there are a few kinds of fairness that people care about, and they are not always mutually compatible. Fairness of treatment refers to procedural guarantees, and fairness of outcome refers to how equitable people feel the result of the process was. Conservatives tend to value the former, and liberals tend to value the latter.
>"I believe we will eventually progress to the mean here but until then there are people feeling cheated. The trade agreements and bank bailouts did not consider the displacement in the near term and thus has created a growing group that is angry due to feeling that the system is not fair."
You should be careful about making sweeping predictions based on simple theories, as they have the unfortunate tendency to be wrong. Tetlock's book is a good read on the subject of predictions and judgement if you are interested.[1]
[1] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7959.html
Given your other statements, this is not a sensible position. A widget is priced according to the value it delivers a buyer -- if there are 100 brands of widgets on the market and they are easy to make, it's priced low; if I am the only widget maker, the only limit on the price is what I can convince people to pay.
And what I pay my factory workers is subject to the same competitive forces -- labor's value is limited by my ability to replace it. That's your free market in effect, labor is only extracting value for itself until it exceeds the cost of the alternative, be that a robot or another worker.
So if you are a believer that free markets deliver the best pairing of choice and freedom, how do you not look at a person working in a factory, being paid a low wage, enjoying no participation in profit, and think if they had more value to offer, they would negotiate a better deal.
I'm not here preaching socialism. I'm just saying a near term effect of rampant globalization is people are going to be displaced and feel they are being exploited. I think this is where unrest comes from.
Don't mean to be sarcastic here, but isn't that the whole point of government right now? Foodstamps, welfare payments, child-assistance money, social security, free medical care, etc.
At what point can we stop using this supposed "power-differential" between employer and employee as some sort of silent force in the labour market?
And while you're not wrong that a lot of that safety net stuff is the point of government, you'd have a pretty hard time claiming that they were doing it well, or helping everyone who needed it, especially with a lot of states slashing aid from their budgets in order to give tax cuts.
Investing your capital into business/machinery yields higher profits. Those get taxed at corporate tax rate, which is 35%. This rate is only matched with the highest income-tax rate bracket.
It may not "look" fair on the surface, but to compare capital gains tax with income tax is an oversimplification. For one, invested capital is unpredictable.
Too many people still associate him and his theory of communism with failed communist states like the soviet union, North Korea or pre-capitalistic China. While the association may or may not be real, his observation about capitalism is unequivocal.
But out sourcing has worked fabulously for many other industries. And although I agree globalization has many benefits the side effect is many displaced people today seething with anger as the capitalist class gets wealthier. That anger will turn to pitch forks when there's enough of them.
to compete with people around the world means to be exploited here and policy doesn't help it so people feel they are not allowed to participate in society fairly. Capitalists (including me) need to behave otherwise revolution will come and our bourgeois heads will roll.
People would rather see those less fortunate have to beg and suffer than to give up what they 'worked' for.
Never mind the fact that we all derive benefit from systems that we inherited, and did not work for...
Having a family full of conservatives (mind you I can't speak for all), I can tell you that for them, it comes down to how big the system is and what benefits should be provided by the government or not. The difference in where the line is drawn and why it's drawn is the difference between conservatives and democrats.
They think that outcomes would be better with a smaller federal government, that it is not the responsibility of the government to take care of everybody, and that everyone would be better off for it. They think that the federal government should deal with defense, foreign diplomatic policy, and inter-state issues, not insert itself into every aspect of policy making nationwide. They think that governments closer to the people can respond better to the needs of the people.
So yes, that does mean that it shouldn't redistribute wealth, at least on the federal level. But it's not that they want to see people suffer, it's that they think it's not the responsibility of the federal government to ameliorate it. That's not the same thing.
Note: I don't agree with them on a lot of things. I just don't like seeing these things misrepresented.
While that's certainly not a bad thought, we have all benefited from larger government. History shows out that the more government spending and distribution of goods and services there is, the better the economic outlook. Even amongst most developed countries today, the government accounts for around half of GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#As_a_perce....
'Small government' is nice as a political philosophy, however it hasn't been shown historically to be a great economic policy.
Not to mention, while right-wing politicians and economists argue for private enterprise, lower taxes, smaller government, less spending, etc..., they simultaneously use state institutions to their advantage. In most economies governments fund research, education, they are responsible for building most infrastructure, funding transit, etc... These things benefit us as a society, yet the same people who reap these benefits every single day argue against paying for them (ie. paying taxes).
The problem with left-wing economics is that they aren't intuitive. Right-wing economics is - it's simple, and reminds people of budgeting at home. The only problem is that when you study macroeconomics, you realize that it's more about behaviour than about finance. Government spending increases GDP, in most cases by more than the dollar amount spent. Social nets increase entrepreneurial behaviour, and reducing poverty always yields social benefits.
> So yes, that does mean that it shouldn't redistribute wealth, at least on the federal level.
No one would argue that the government should only build roads in rich cities. Or only build hospitals in rich cities. Yet creating infrastructure is a redistribution of wealth. When the US government creates a new military base, they're redistributing wealth. When they give money to schools, they're distributing wealth.
Yet for some reason we have it in our heads that 'taking' taxes and then giving 'cash' to others is wrong, but it's OK when the government uses other means to redistribute wealth.
Anyhow, the point is, we see it as 'fair' that we work hard and get paid. That we 'deserve' what we make. That we did it 'alone'. The fact is, wealth cannot be created in a vacuum. Whatever we do, we do because others helped us. We're more than happy to use the institutions created for us, but don't want to share the rewards. We see 'fairness' as more important than prosperity.
Not everyone takes those chances, but we want to make sure those who do have the shots to gamble the take, so that there is a churn that allows the cream to rise to the top.
That, to me, is the meaning of the message of equality, and I suspect it's what people like Sanders are talking about.
The difficulty with doing that is that real estate values, and thus taxes, is a very local thing, it's quite hard to set them universally.
Honestly, from my time in the trenches of listening to trite, small, yet passionate people discussing some of the harder parts of educating children (i.e. hard to educate when they're coming to school having eaten 3000+ calories from horribly un-nutritious sources), I've learned that there's no easy solution.
You can't bus those kids out of the low-tax neighborhoods into good schools if they're still going home to a shit environment. The best you can do is stand up and try to mentor one or two kids in your neighborhood in small ways, and encourage others to do the same. Distributed cultural-standard building. That's the best I've got.
At this point it's just a name. It's a phrase a lot of people recognize and has become a rallying cry liberals. You can't change it anymore.
TL;DR Because marketing.
"There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans." - Bernie Sanders
(Also a really misleading stat. If you have a $1 net worth, you have more wealth than the bottom 25% of Americans combined.)
This is where we disagree.
Yes, they have every right to be rich because of their business success.
But their unequal wealth is a result of a broken system that allows for "income inequality".
Some would go as far as saying their business success is a direct result of their ability to exploit "income inequality".
As long as you strive for merit, and the more you strive. The more inequality this leads to.
Define the principles of the society you wish to build. If you wish to trade merit for equality, then you should also live by its consequences. Which is people going else where their hard work is better recognized.
Free market economy is a direct result of learning to live by the consequences of your actions.
What's broken with the system, in their case?
Whether zeroed-out grantor-retained annuity trusts should be a valid tax avoidance scheme is a valid question, if that's your point.
Second, no, that is not what he's talking about.
He's pointing out a symptom of "income inequality"
The solution is not "wealth redistribution", the solution is to be fair.
Pay a fair wage, provide universal healthcare, reduce the cost of tuition, close tax loopholes, end corporate lobbying, etc...
Every single one of the policies you describe are exactly wealth redistribution (except for corporate lobbying -- that's restriction on speech). You just perceive them as examples of good policies. You think they are particularly fair ways to redistribute wealth.
Unless you think that when tuition is free, the cost isn't passed to anyone? Or if the minimum wage is raised, no one has to pay?
The features which provide access to economic opportunities are, themselves, economic goods, and wealth is largely (though not entirely) fungible, so the two things are not entirely separable. You can't provide an equality of access that meets some common standards of fairness without finding some way to reduce the degree and circumstances in which the current system produces inequality in things.
The point seems to be that this is not the case, thus provisions are required as a means of correction.
There's no stable equilibrium that is fair, achieving fairness, to the degree that is possible, requires constant monitoring and active balancing.
This is specifically not what Sanders is talking about. He's saying that the basic fact that the rich have become richer than they used to be, relative to everyone else, is wrong and must change.
How do you read this differently?: https://berniesanders.com/issues/income-and-wealth-inequalit...
The rich being richer and the poor being poorer is an indication of the disparity of opportunity. This disparity is being used to illustrate the difference -- it is the cough caused by the cold; the cough is not the root cause, but a signal. Income inequality growth is not the root cause, it is the outcome of policies that affect access to opportunities and why all of the points that he proposes are goals to alleviate that access imbalance.
If opportunity were perfectly equal (your ideal state), what would you imagine income distribution to look like? Would that be acceptable then?
In other words, at what distribution would you not argue that the distribution itself is evidence of unfairness?
Establishign a more progressive tax rate, ending on the cap of social security payments (which is the literal definition of a regressive tax), a livable minimum wage, equal access to education (education being generally a flat cost, and so affects the poor a lot harder than the wealthy), a singlepayer healthcare system which will put a much larger portion of income for the poor (than the rich) back in to their pockets ($300/mo for insurance is a lot more to someone who earns $1k a month than to someone earning $10k a month).
These happen to be points 1, 8, 2, 7, and 9 on the page you linked.
See? You can make income (and thus opportunity) more fair without redistributing.
In my opinion, it's just word-trickery to call it anything else:
Take money from A, and give to B. As opposed to: Take money from A, pay C to provide service to B, so that B doesn't have to pay.
Moral discussion about "taking" vs "voluntarily giving" aside, of course. That never ends productively.
You think it means that the government has a role in making sure the poor and the rich have the same outcomes available to them. In that sense, the rich being able to afford fancier educations, better housing, better healthcare, etc. is something that needs to be fixed.
I think it means that the law is blind as to your station in life -- that you are free to do with your life as you please, as your abilities and good fortune allow. That you do not get special treatment from your government if you happen to be rich or connected -- but definitely not that you can be assured that life will be fair, and that the hand you're dealt will be worth the same as your neighbor's.
You also have access to better lawyers to protect you from crimes you commit, which means you'll serve a lighter sentencing (on average).
Being rich has very clear advantages beyond simply having more money, and to deny that is to be willfully obtuse.
Except social security cap -- social security was supposed to be a benefit, not a tax. You don't get paid more after that cap is reached.
And capital gains tax is a stupid example outside of the very narrow debate of carry-interest income.
There is a social security benefit cap, but its on final benefits based on lifetime social security qualified earnings adjusted to account for wage inflation from the year earned. Capping annual social security qualified wages and tax liability isn't actually essential to maintain the integrity of that scheme (and it arguably is unfair treatment to income earners based on degree of annual income volatility.)
Further, the benefit formula already has bend points where aggregate qualified wages past a certain point contribute less in benefits per dollar of wages than below that point, so there's no reason that couldn't be extended and the benefit cap removed, possibly with another bend point.
> And capital gains tax is a stupid example
Asserting that is not an argument. Capital gains are income, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to treat them more favorably than other income in taxation, except that you want to favor capital holders over those deriving income from other sources. (It may make sense to excluded them from the kind of SS/Medicare taxes and qualification calculations, though arguably this is unfair to minor capitalists who must actively manage their own capital to derive income from it, and face similar issues to actual workers when it comes to loss of their own ability to do so; it would makes ense to include individually-received capital gains in both the tax and benefit calculations for SS & Medicare).
Favorable treatment of long-term capital gains is sometimes justified, in a progressive tax system, by the fact that not giving some favorable consideration overtaxes the capital gains as they are not earned over a single year, but progressive tax is based on the presumption that the income received in that year is earned in that year. But when you have enough capital that you can structure it such that you are consistently rotating holdings so that you are regularly realizing "long term" gains, that's less sensible. A more sensible approach to addressing this problem -- which also addresses labor income that has volatility, where the peaks are enabled by the choice to work in a domain where the troughs are also an occurrence, is to simply set up a system for all income where income can be recognized for tax purposes in advance of being realized (and thus, taxed) without limit, and also, with some limits on time and amounts, deferred after realization for tax purposes, giving tax payers with irregular income from whatever source the ability to smooth those irregularities within the structure of a progressive income tax system, without structurally favoring those with large, consistent, capital income streams.
It is imperative that those who might claim to be against the idea of "equality" for some abstract philosophical reason to separately ask themselves why they can't also be AGAINST egregious and institutionalized inequality.
Being against both universal equality and egregious inequality is an entirely consistent position. Setting up the utopia of universal equality as a straw man in order to avoid addressing the latter question is dishonest and immoral.
Edit: no one would ever talk about the distribution of "ability at basketball" for example.
Distribution is just a mathematical concept - it doesn't care what type of variable you are looking at.
"Wealth distribution" is a descriptive, not a prescriptive concept, just like "height distribution." Here is a system applied to some population; let's measure how some quantity ends up distributed among that population based on the behavior of the system.
> So, do you believe wealth is earned by hard work and diligence or that it is distributed by some kind of greater power?
I don't believe either thing absolutely. I believe wealth can be earned by hard work and diligence, but that those things are neither necessary nor sufficient. I believe wealth is often distributed by a greater power in effect if not in literal practice through things like regressive taxation and systematic difference in access quality education that have a disparate (and in my opinion, inequitable) impact on those of lesser means.
There's a myth of the hustle that gets perpetrated whenever a feel-good story about a hard working, intelligent person's success gets bandied about.
The reality is that I'm where I am at least as much because of who I was born to as to how much hard work and diligence I've put into my professional career.
And studies bear this out. One of the greatest predictors of a person's wealth is whether his or her parents are wealthy. And this, even when corrected for such factors as environment and behaviour.
On the one hand there's the internal division of equality of outcomes vs. equality of opportunities. (See this [in my opinion somewhat confused] article by Dylan Matthews[0]). On the other hand "it's not fair" usually seems to mean "I have been slighted".
As someone who has worked in Game Theory, I've seen a variety of notions of what constitutes fairness (in the form of social welfare). There isn't one obvious-even-if-technically-infeasible choice. There's a variety of plausible, mediocre alternatives.
I think that what this actually demonstrates is that most people have muddled thinking on most topics.
</curmudgeon>
[0]: https://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9334215/equality-of-opportunit...
So how does one formulate an equal distribution, and who gets to choose those rules?
One thing most miss out on is they want fairness but don't want to give up their stuff or such because it is so much tied to who has how much stuff, money, and more. Far too many will state unequivocally that those richer than them don't pay their "fair" share when those same people contribute a higher percentage and far more wealth into the system.
This is primarily driven by politicians who profit by dividing people. That is what most people miss. They hear about all the disagreement in government as if that is a problem. In the US the government wasn't designed to be fully cooperative, it was designed to make governing difficult so as the federal government would not overrun the states. Where events were not to be treated with such division there are statements to that fact.
Yet politicians spend more time pitting people against each other to preserve their own status and this is why people don't understand what fairness let alone equality is.
there are many unfair side effects of current economics
look at taxes..
recently i read a major corporate entity paid 4k pounds in taxes in 2014(o). The top comment says:
though these corps are seen as equals in buraecratic lines, the expectations and avenues of utilising those regulations seems unfairly balancedor look at fines..
if i get a parking ticket(i) for 100$, i may be unable to pay it right away with my zero savings and my 12k/yr income, someone making 80k+ a year will just pay the 100$ grievance and be done with it
i will have to start budgeting myself to make enough to pay the 100$ fine, but it will take time with bimonthly paychecks and in that time i will be punished with late fees only increasing the financial burden and time needed to accrue the funds
even if trying to do the right thing people punished further simply for economic circumstance
so though the two violators are seen as equal, the expectations and avenues of how to rectify the violations seems unfairly balanced
people making less end up paying more for the same violation due to the bureaucracy maintaining the violations
or i could use a payday loan(ii), another damning option
these are only two examples of areas where a conversation about fairness stead equality alters the direction of the conversation
(o) https://www.reddit.com/comments/3ofo13/ (i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto (ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw
Not trying to be callous, but it's going to come out that way -- maybe the answer is to try to make some more of it.
Because trying to redesign society to eliminate this basic fact of the world has so far led to disastrous results. Like, hundreds of millions dead kind of results. With nothing to show for it, because there were still haves and have nots.
"But I'm not advocating Stalinism!" you'd say. But remember, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin came from good intentions, too. So did Mao and Pol Pot and Ho and Kim. Everyone wanted to solve the problem you're describing.
but i'd wonder, how does one 'make some more of it'?
stalinism? you're arguing with someone else
my complaints are against the bureaucracy of the problem
there is more to this conversation than a binary of stalinism and some undefined other
what do you mean by 'easier'? seems to the suffer the same ills as using vague language such as 'fair'
and i'd caution against utilising the concept of 'fact' when discussing subsets
what of a generation born into wealth that fails to make any more if it but their life remains, or even becomes moreso, by your own definitions, 'easier'?
Governmental policy devolves into this to the detriment of everyone involved.
Entire political campaigns are centered around not making things "fair" but "equal". Watch and see who communities vote for and why they vote for them; it is closely related to the child who prefers to have one and everyone else zero as opposed to everyone getting two.