(I submitted this) - don't agree with all their stats and the article could be better, but thought it would be interesting to hear HN community's views on the issue.
The text is hysterical bullshit, and a lot of the examples are cherry-picked, or don't show what they purport to (eg the first graph about the concentration of wealth suggests stock holdings have diluted rather than concentrated over time.
But yes, our economy has some serious problems, and inequality is one of them. Not because I believe in socialism, but because above a certain level we waste a lot of money on guarding the current distribution of wealth, and that has a considerable opportunity cost. See this small but rather influential economics article: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teac...
My personal hunch is that free economies are never destined for pure equality, but if they drift too far from a Pareto distribution the fiscal disparities will result in sharply increased political polarization. statisticians of the future are going to have a whale of a time with the combination of the census, an unusually severe recession, election data and a massive lexical analysis dataset.
I definitely don't believe in Socialism, having personally witnessed its failures, but I've begun to think the free market beliefs I hold don't always benefit most people either.
Seems like the majority of people are more suited for holding a job rather than building a company, by optimizing for entrepreneurship we're benefiting a very small part of society, and as we lose the promise of belonging to a strong, stable middle class with certain amount of effort we're creating a serious risk for democracy. I think we're already seeing political fringe movements creeping into the mainstream as result.
Without disposable time and income people won't be able to buy the products which create the wealth of the upper class. If the middle class disappears, the upper class will disappear as well.
Yes because it it under attack from two forces that actually hate each other, the left and the right.
The right because there are rich men who aren't satisfied with being rich, other people have to be poor. No middle class for them. They want to return to humanities default state, the poor peasant majority and the handful of Dukes and Earls who have all the money and power.
The left because they despise the 'bourgeoisie', not understanding they are playing right into the hands of the above rich.
We better figure out that the middle class is in fact humanities greatest achievement.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 30.8 ms ] threadBut yes, our economy has some serious problems, and inequality is one of them. Not because I believe in socialism, but because above a certain level we waste a lot of money on guarding the current distribution of wealth, and that has a considerable opportunity cost. See this small but rather influential economics article: http://www.econ.brown.edu/fac/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/teac...
My personal hunch is that free economies are never destined for pure equality, but if they drift too far from a Pareto distribution the fiscal disparities will result in sharply increased political polarization. statisticians of the future are going to have a whale of a time with the combination of the census, an unusually severe recession, election data and a massive lexical analysis dataset.
Seems like the majority of people are more suited for holding a job rather than building a company, by optimizing for entrepreneurship we're benefiting a very small part of society, and as we lose the promise of belonging to a strong, stable middle class with certain amount of effort we're creating a serious risk for democracy. I think we're already seeing political fringe movements creeping into the mainstream as result.
Without disposable time and income people won't be able to buy the products which create the wealth of the upper class. If the middle class disappears, the upper class will disappear as well.
The right because there are rich men who aren't satisfied with being rich, other people have to be poor. No middle class for them. They want to return to humanities default state, the poor peasant majority and the handful of Dukes and Earls who have all the money and power.
The left because they despise the 'bourgeoisie', not understanding they are playing right into the hands of the above rich.
We better figure out that the middle class is in fact humanities greatest achievement.