The statistics for gender are misleading. If you're just comparing the average wage of men and women then of course women are going to earn less: they work less than men on average. If you control for age and whether women have children the gap shrinks a lot (in some areas it reverses).
And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter (since it means income is going to a small group of individuals, rather than a broader group of individuals who are swapped in and out of the top income groups).
So these statistics are hardly "disturbing", though they do merit further research to see how much of a problem these things actually are.
Will I believe you or will I believe the secretary-general for the OECD?
“We have reached a tipping point. Inequality can no longer be treated as an afterthought. We need to focus the debate on how the benefits of growth are distributed. Our report ‘In it Together’ and our work on inclusive growth have clearly shown that there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between growth and equality. On the contrary, the opening up of opportunity can spur stronger economic performance and improve living standards across the board!” OECD Secretary-General
The previous poster is arguing metrics and the secretary-general is arguing ethics. You can't compare those two. Both statements could be true or false; the truth value of the statements is independent.
There have been several papers that show the US is last in income mobility while having other papers show it's in the top 3. Suffice to say there is no consensus.
Also, measuring mobility by income quintiles is challenging as quintiles aren't the same across countries. You could move from 1st to 4th income quintile in one country and have a higher wage than some moving from 1st to 5th in another country.
>And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter (since it means income is going to a small group of individuals, rather than a broader group of individuals who are swapped in and out of the top income groups).
Actually I have to disagree, a bifurcation in income is reason to worry in itself. In a society where everything is commodified this wealth gap allows the rich to opt out of normal civil society. A society where a small few can buy their way out of a crap education system, out of a crap healthcare system, etc. isn't just no matter how well we swap people in and out of that group.
A windfall (winning the lottery or some other one-off event) is generally considered a good thing, unless you don't know how to handle it and spend it all at once. Everyone getting a windfall, in different years: still not a bad thing, even if it makes inequality statistics look bad. In theory.
But that's not the world we live in. Most people don't get windfalls and have little savings.
The problem with the “inequality” framing is that your victory condition is dragging everyone down into the crap systems. Engineering greater total suffering so that you don’t have to be indignant at others suffering less, is not exactly noble.
We could end education and healthcare inequality today by shutting down all the good universities and banning all good health insurance. But that’s backwards.
>The problem with the “inequality” framing is that your victory condition is dragging everyone down into the crap systems.
Yes but that's good.
>Engineering greater total suffering so that you don’t have to be indignant at others suffering less, is not exactly noble.
I actually think it would reduce total suffering, just that it's a short-term vs long-term thing.
>We could end education and healthcare inequality today by shutting down all the good universities and banning all good health insurance. But that’s backwards.
You're sort of close to what I want but not quite. We'd shut down all education systems which allow you to buy good results, same for healthcare, it's not about absolute quality it's about the relative quality in exchange for dollars.
My point is that when you drag everyone into the same crap system, the most powerful in society who currently get to opt-out are stuck as well. They're forced to advocate for systems which are universally better rather than advocating for systems which are selectively better. By changing the incentives this way we stick everyone on the same side, inside of one side against another, it's better for everyone.
If you have the electoral majority to drag down the wealthy, then you have the electoral majority to lift up the poor. Using public policy to compel support for other public policy is nonsensical unless the former has broader support.
>And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter (since it means income is going to a small group of individuals, rather than a broader group of individuals who are swapped in and out of the top income groups).
So a society in which there's competition to be among a handful of feudal lords, but where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning? How so?
We've been through this in American history. It was called the Gilded Age and it was a nightmare for all but a handful of robber barons, resulted in widespread social and political instability, and violence.
I have no idea why you linked that. The two comments you have posted make absolutely no sense. Non sequitors. Why did you use feudalism first, and then some weird alt right stuff second? What's going through your mind?
The idea is that feudal ideologies are making a comeback with the rise of an aristocratic class. These ideologies are finding support amongst the (conservative/reactionary) lower classes as they try to process why their lives are getting shittier without being provided a clear logical explanation. Thus they reach backwards for older more authoritarian models to try to restore their power. What is missing is the narrative of class struggle.
From the linked wikipedia article:
"It broadly rejects egalitarianism and the view that history shows inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment (thus, it is in part a reaction against "Whig historiography").[1][2] The movement favors a return to older societal constructs and forms of government, including support for monarchism or other forms of strong, centralised leadership such as a "neocameralist CEO"[3] of a joint-stock republic,[4] coupled with a right-libertarian, conservative or other approach to economics."
There is an idea circulating that the political system in the US is turning into a "neo-feudalism", pushed by a mix of those alt-right "theorists" and some of the new rich.
How much of this "neo-feudalism" shares with actual feudalism is not clear to me.
Just for reference, feudal lords didn't have wages. If it was discovered that you worked for money, you were basically expelled from aristocratic society.
No, that's not what I said. I'm arguing for the same thing you are. But income inequality isn't itself a problem if there is mobility between the income groups. They statistics in the Bloomberg article show income inequality but don't show lack of mobility, and then say we've hit "a disturbing new threshold".
There may be lack of mobility along with income inequality, but the article doesn't demonstrate it.
>I'm arguing for the same thing you are. But income inequality isn't itself a problem if their is mobility between the income groups
I'm not sure how you can't be arguing the same thing I am. The income inequality is what creates the immobility. This is demonstrated by other developed countries where there is less income inequality and greater social mobility, as others have pointed out. Can you elaborate?
Are you sure the income inequality creates the immobility and isn't just linked to the immobility in other ways? The demonstration of other countries implies the latter, but even that is really hard to prove.
Yes, because history. There are no historical examples where wealth was held by the few and social mobility increased broadly. Only when resources are more evenly distributed among social classes has that ever happened.
The graphed figure is not wealth, but income. The (great-)grandparent poster is suggesting that as long as people bounce between income levels, i.e., they have some higher paying years and some lower paying years, it has a smoothing effect on the net income inequality.
US ranks very low on income mobility. Some people get bumped when they sell a business, but even selling a home will not put most people into the 420+K income range of the top 1% let alone the top 0.1% which at $1,600,000/year excludes even many lottery winners.
PS: Don't forget the median US home is only worth $188,900, which means 1/2 of them are worth less than that.
Second, I think it's still a problem if the income of 90-98% of the country stagnates for decades, while the top earners get higher and higher income. Of course that affects inequality.
I'm also not sure it matters that much if the players at the top switch around if they have increasingly larger leverage on society.
For instance, we're seeing CEOs get rewarded larger and larger amounts of money every year, even if the companies lose money, like in this absurd case:
Where's that money coming from? The employees' potential salary increases? The retail investors' money? It seems to me that the rich keep siphoning off money from everyone else, and that's not sustainable.
They also get larger and larger amounts of money even when they get kicked out of the company for failing. This doesn't make sense to me at all. And I think the excuse that they need such amounts of money or otherwise they wouldn't take the job or something is utter BS. I'd more likely believe the board is giving them the money so the CEO doesn't sue the company, or better yet because the CEO was the one writing their checks before that, or something along those lines.
And this is just the corporate world. The US Congress seems to get crazier every year and listening more and more to corporations and their interests, and less and less to the people and solving real problems in the country (healthcare, infrastructure, etc).
It's like the whole American society is on the brink of collapse, and everyone just doesn't know it yet. Eventually, people will "suddenly" start to violently riot because of all this stuff added together, and it won't be pretty.
One thing I've never understood- in a fair society in which people are not artificially limited, wouldn't we expect social mobility to decrease over time as successive generations "sort" themselves into the spots allowed by their genetics?
Let's say we've got a feudal society with dumb nobility that rules over a smart peasantry by force. If that society becomes free, we'll expect smart peasants to move up and dumb noblemen to move down across the first few generations... but once they've moved, they've moved. Ergo, declining social mobility.
I tried multiple times to try to refute all of the assumptions made in this post, but I gave up.
1) One does not have to be intelligent to be wealthy.
2) Those born wealthy do not have to be intelligent to remain wealthy - they just need not be a consumeristic imbecile.
3) Genetics has such a small impact, if any, on social mobility - quite the opposite. If I am born a Kennedy I am more likely to never fall below my birthright social class because of my family lineage.
4) You contradict yourself. You say the nobility rules by force, then immediately follow that with "If that society becomes free" - how exactly would that society magically free?
1. Of course not, I referenced unintelligent wealthy people ("dumb nobility") in my post.
2. 70% of rich families lose their wealth by the second generation, 90% by the third. [A]
3. IQ is a greater predictor of income than parental SES. Someone in the 95th percentile for IQ has a higher EV for earnings than someone born into the 95th percentile for wealth.
4. A number of revolutions have happened. If you don't believe that modern France or Japan are freer than their feudal predecessors then I agree that we are probably not on the same page.
I would not use the Time article as a reliable source, it cites the 70/90% figures a study by the "Williams Group wealth consultancy", which of course is trying to sell its services to wealthy clients.
I've seen the statistic quoted in so many places, yet have never found a link to the actually study. No info on sample size; we don't even have a definition of 'wealth' used in the study.
I think it's easy to explain why wages have stagnated. The time wages started to stagnate coincides with women's lib, immigration policy changes, and free trade changes. Women's lib dropped an extra 40% more people into the labor pool. Of course that's going to put downward pressure on wages. We changed our legal immigration policy to favor more poor people while simultaneously changing our illegal immigration enforcement policy to keep tons of illegal aliens in the country pushing wages down for the American poor. Trade policy has gutted a huge portion of the country in favor of the already wealthy elites on the coast.
The big economic question of the day should be asking how we've managed to keep wages at only the "stagnation" level rather than precipitously falling in the face of so much downward pressure.
You're arguing against a straw man. It's possible to support social and economic policies while recognizing that they have both positive and negative aspects to them.
Sure, once the people here today have had a century of assimilation I suspect they will not impact the income distribution curve.
If you were happy with the income equality from a century ago, I'm willing to adopt the welfare and tax systems of that time so all the incentives are the same.
1) What is mobility? The ability to move out of the lowest income group? How easily does that happen? If it's quick and easy, why doesn't everyone do it? And what about the reverse? How easy it for a person to move from a median income back into the lowest income. I think the idea of mobility is used as a reinforcement for the protestant work ethic / American dream sort of delusion that says "poor people can just work harder and save more and they won't be poor any more". But we have an enormous amount of evidence that points to that not being the case.
2) Also, you haven't provided an argument for why income inequality isn't a problem. If the lowest earners have extremely limited access to housing, healthcare or education, such as is the case in the U.S. I think that's a problem.
Other comments have brought additional evidence about declining wage mobility. I'll add that the article's stats about the impact of race demonstrate lack of mobility. Working while black seems to mean a 20% pay cut, regardless of education.
As an American, I've always based a lot of national pride on our history as a (relative, for some groups) meritocracy with a lot of mobility. It's really sad to see rapid erosion of this over the last 20y.
Most opportunities for mobility were linked to America being a nation of rapid growth, not because of the kindness of some national ethos. As our growth opportunities slow, you can be sure the haves will do everything in their power to prevent loss of ground to the have-nots.
Meritocracy in the U.S. is a myth in civilian life. The military almost approximates meritocracy but it is by design not egalitarian or democratic. Without extreme discipline, again found in militarism, meritocracy results in the formation of elites who define what the metrics are for merit, they quickly become corrupt with nepotism, lowering the ladder for family and friends to the exclusion of people with actual merit, and it becomes incompetent.
Uh...the gilded age resulted in massive industrial and income expansion, the rise of the US onto the world stage financially and the lowering of maternal death rates, raising of life expectancy and a general post-industrial boom. Wages and average per capita savings doubled.
It was also associated with the immigration of tens of millions of impoverished people, which is part of the reason for the massive inequality numbers - the population doubled during this period.
Excuse me but those benefits weren't result of the Guilded Age. Correlation, not causation. Both things were a result of the industrial revolution and globalization.
Exactly. As was communism for that matter. Ultimately almost all major economic change had technology at its root. And where that change has undesirable side effects it's the job of government to address them.
Exactly. The Gilded Age was also a result of the industrial revolution and globalization. It describes a period of history - during which, these things happened.
You can't really support the argument that the Gilded Age actively caused these negative things by virtue of them taking place during the Gilded Age without supporting the argument that the Gilded Age caused positive things by virtue of them taking place during the period.
And if you have morals, you can also say they weren't worth it. You could make the same argument about slavery, etc, but suggesting it was totally worth would be pretty bonkers.
Humanity can accomplish great things without dehumanizing or hurting most of the population, and being critical of the morality of these systems is a big part of that.
Ignoring that it's very odd to retroactively justify immoral behavior because of unintended, positive side effects: I'm saying that being critical, like asking if the slave-like conditions of most of the population were actually necessary, is a pretty reasonable thing to do. This isn't black and white issue, like I have to pick between "a couple generations have horrible working lives" vs "antibiotics exist". I'm asking if both were possible, and I'd argue that they would be if the people at the top were willing to accept even a little less.
I think the phrasing of your first sentence is fascinating. Does that mean you think that the behavior (union busting, incorporation, or the creation of financial markets, for example) was solely intended to have malicious consequences, and that there were no positive motivations or intent?
Also, it's not that odd. It's a direct response to the criticism you levy - that these things are not worth it. How are you to judge if you only take the immoral acts in a vacuum? You brought up slavery again; their conditions were not slave-like, simply impoverished.
I agree that it's a good idea to question whether periods of chaos, destruction or immorality are actually necessary for progress. It's been pretty much taken as a given since Hegel, but it's a good thing to verify and even within those boundaries there may be some behaviors we can effectively limit while leaving the good bits.
As to your final argument, I don't actually know if that's true, but it's immaterial because that's not how people have done it.
The actions that led to the conditions of the gilded age were most certainly selfish acts of the ruling class. The conditions were not created for the sake of it, or because it was funny etc.
I sincerely doubt the people making all the money were not doing it because the poor people they were exploiting (or killing) might eventually get iPhones or penicillin
I also don't know why I can't criticize the conditions resulting from policies in the gilded age because there's a chance that the policies were maybe not "soley intended to have malicious consequences". Again, things aren't black and white. "Modern tech is nice" and "poverty is bad" are not diametrically opposing ideas.
I'm confused by what you're arguing here. People want to reduce inequality, and you're argument seems to boil down to "nothing really matters anyway" or "maybe them being poor is for the best" (which you insist is something we can never actually find out..?) If you're saying that human nature is inherently corrupt and humanity can't unite to make progress for broadly selfish reasons, I might actually agree. But talking about how this is shitty and / or how to fix it doesn't seem pointless, either.
I have never said and do not support a statement that 'maybe them being poor is for the best.'
You started out saying a moral person would say that the positive consequences of the gilded age were not worth its negative experiences. I disagree.
You then say:
"Ignoring that it's very odd to retroactively justify immoral behavior because of unintended, positive side effects: I'm saying that being critical, like asking if the slave-like conditions of most of the population were actually necessary, is a pretty reasonable thing to do."
By saying this you are effectively saying that I am defending immoral behavior with the misconception that such behavior directly led unintentionally to positive consequences. I don't think that, and I'm not doing that. I'm specifically saying that removing 'robber barons' from the equation entirely removes both the positive effects and actions and the negative. The positive and negative are done by the same person, but the actions causing them were entirely different. This isn't simple, as you continue to point out (while, it seems, attempting to simplify it entirely)
People want to reduce inequality - ok, how? I think that's important to figure out. What kind of inequality? Wealth or income or some other kind? What is the consequence of inequality?
To find out, we need to view history as a complex thing and understand both the pleasant and unpleasant, as well as their consequences. Conflict has been a powerful tool, historically. The excesses of one group have often given rise to conflict with another group, which then created a system of greater equality. Could that have happened without the conflict? I'm not sure, I don't have many examples where that happened and a ton of examples where it didn't.
There are a lot of times where people did awful things and they either didn't result in positive consequences or what was positive was not worth the loss. The Gilded Age? Probably not one of those times.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but there are direct causal links between the Gilded Age and robber barons causing huge harms, like union busting using bullets, and absolutely no causal links between robber barons and global decreases in poverty.
Put another way, it's very easy to prove that without robber barons we wouldn't have had many of the terrible abuses during the Gilded Age, and also very easy to prove we would have had worldwide improvements in the human condition even without the robber barons.
No robber barons mean no railway expansion and no massive expansion of jobs west, so no immigration boom. Robber barons are also responsible for financial regulation, futures markets which allowed for much greater predictability and sustained farming output, increased ties to Europe and specifically the UK over Germany, the massive increases in production brought by low oil prices and standardization of performance, arguably unions and labor reforms and a standard wage.
"But if many people have total food insecurity and bad health outcomes, that's bad right?"
"Well hey but in the long run people got wealthier overall than if we redistributed wealth and no one would have an incentive to work like a dog"
"That would have happened anyway because it's not capitalism but science and technology that drives wealth forward"
"Look, Capitalism works far better, the USSR didn't have a choice consumer devices or food while the West did"
"Fine but the USSR actually lifted more people out of poverty faster and its GDP grew faster than the USA, plus they endured two world wars on their own soil and still were able to bounce back and expand ... and China just lifted the most people out of poverty ever, wages increased 25x over 20 years, all through central planning and building entire cities"
"Yeah but China is a hugely authoritarian state and is not free. Plus they adopted some capitalist principles and that's why they are so successful. Look at Venezuela and North Korea. Socialism does't work."
"Well China is quite centrally planned as was the Interstate Highway system and other infra projects. And all those were a success. As for Venezuela did you forget the sanctions and oil prices drop? And North Korea has had sanctions for decades just because they are communists."
"Redistributing just destroys all incentive to work."
"We are automating everything anyway. We will need to redistribute money to a growing unemployed / underemployed class."
"Universal health care results in death panels and long waits. The government dictates how much doctors can charge and this stifles innovation --"
"-- and the USA is an outlier in how much we spend on healthcare, because there is no collective bargaining the prices down"
"Yeah and also no death panels. Look at the wait times in other countries--"
"As opposed to the infinite wait times in the USA for those who have 'access' but can't afford to even do a basic preventative checkup? And even if we remove those, the wait times in the USA are atrocious too. And other countries have more doctors per capita and more hospital beds too. Medicare gets better prices than almost all smaller insurers."
"We get BETTER doctors and beds. The USA leads the world in medical innovation precisely because providers are not squeezed like they are by Amazon, Apple and other monopolies, so it attracts innovation from around the world and peopel vote with their feet"
"Well maybe if you abolished drug patents innovatio could come from all over the world instead of the chilling effects we have today. Open source beats closed in the long run and Open source Drugs would beat big pharma in the long tail whose plight isn't even worth pursuing for these guys. Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, why is medicine different than science?"
Ayn Rand: "Stop robbing a man of the product of his own mind. I DID build that!"
"But living in the 21st century who do we compensate for all the advances throughout human history that preceded us? Can't we accept that this is a free gift and redistribute the wealth?"
"Socialist!"
"You support Billionaires!"
"No I don't, billionaires are the product of government favors and I want to shrink government"
>> "Well maybe if you abolished drug patents innovatio could come from all over the world instead of the chilling effects we have today. Open source beats closed in the long run and Open source Drugs would beat big pharma in the long tail whose plight isn't even worth pursuing for these guys. Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, why is medicine different than science?"
Literally no new drugs would be produced if there was no guarantee of sole distributor for some X number of years. What country has "open source" drugs?
Seems like a great place to nationalize the means of production! Why not? Economic incentives are inherently at odds with helpful medicine. If it helps too much you can't make money off it!
Error, wrong, incorrect. Modern day big-pharma developed vaccines such as HPV. Current market forces incentivizes "best" treatment (heavily regulated of course as it should be). Don't spew false facts to try to push an agenda.
the polio vaccine was released in 1955. My thought experiment literally cannot be "error, wrong, incorrect."
I'll solidify my thought experiment to Valeant. Valeant would have bought the polio vaccine, hiked the price, and reported significant growth in returns while the disease was not being eliminated.
Not to mention your assumption a pharma company created the first polio vaccine is false - it was developed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine with heavy backing by the U.S. government.
Don't have a mock strawman argument this long. If you have a point to make, just make it. Don't write up a whole argument that includes weak responses so you conveniently 'win'.
Why don't you respond to specific points yourself? I did have a mock argument because these aren't real people but all those are real (and relatively strong) arguments from both sides. The ones supporting IP are actually FROM Ayn Rand for example, paraphrased to include a reference to "you didn't build that".
> Also, why are you telling people how to have discussions?
It seems like he thinks their argument is dishonest strawman and manipulative. The discussion is usually improved by people pointing that out, as it makes such argumentation less likely.
The problem is that he only thinks this, with hardly anything to back it up, and doesn't discuss the substance. He merely talks about his impression of the discussion.
The reply is correct, many discourses can also be considered "one sided", such as Socratic dialogues. However, it is also very possible that the commenter feels it's that way because they are biased to one or the other side of the debate themselves. I am not even sure which side they considered the strawman.
No, he's not the only one. Most of the arguments used are not the strongest possible arguments but are in fact extremely flawed, precisely in the ways you took them apart. fancy that.
You are wrong. I didn't mean to start a discussion. I meant to illustrate how people largely talk past each other yet make very good points overall. Both have ideological and pragmatic elements. Both make good points.
The fact that you think I took apart one and the other wasn't taken apart probably implies more about where YOU are on the political spectrum.
These are the actual arguments that people use. For example "China is one of the most authoritarian countries" is a great rejoinder to all the progress they have made using central planning. You may think it takes the position completely apart - since there is so much evidence lately of China's citizen ranking system and facial recognition and jailing dissidents, very reminiscent to the USSR, and China's history with Mao and so on. But it isn't such a slam dunk as you think. Because yes it is authoritarian but many people are OK with it the same way they are OK with anti terror laws here. They give up freedom for a temporary safety and prosperity, to quote Benjamin Franklin. But that is just one side of the story.
Or for example you may think "You support billionaires" is easily taken apart with "No, billionaires are the result of government." Which is pretty straightforward as most billionaires (in Russia for example) are in fact the result of government favors and being well connected. Libertarians are definitely arguing for eliminating coercive power structures and helping promote an environment where more can compete without coersion or licenses.
But I assure you that the other side's arguments are strong as well, you just dismiss them because they don't trigger in you all the supporting baggage that they would if you actually HELD that position.
In short you are reading a lot of your own bias into it. None of these arguments are slam dunk.
"where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning?"
Capitalism in the US has created more wealth and lifted more people out of poverty than any other nation in the history of mankind. Your statement applies to third world countries... not the United States. Oh, we're also the most free and most prosperous nation ever. That helps.
Non sequitur. Capitalism requires some income inequality, but runaway income inequality will not be beneficial. Eventually, people get sick of eating rotten cabbage and the guillotines come out.
Side note: "most free nation ever" is a total fiction as part of American exceptionalism. For just one example out of many, there are still religious blue laws on the books in towns across the country, and many are still enforced.
We have laws against trading on Sundays here in Norway too. They might well have started as religiously justified laws but they are nonetheless popular here where the vast bulk of the population is non-religious and a substantial fraction avowed atheist. We don't want our day of quiet disturbed.
No matter how much you love a law, limiting someone's ability to do something peaceful* is limiting their freedom.
*Peaceful here means there ability to do something that doesn't harm others. We can start deep diving on the value of having a quiet day, but the idea that you can't buy a bottle of Gin on Sunday is a choice some people might not find is worth the quiet
Welcome to the mid 1800s, where almost everyone is a serf almost everywhere, and the only way that'll change is through a revolution in industry, supported by uncoerced but nonetheless low-brow, hard, and nearly thankless labour.
>So a society in which there's competition to be among a handful of feudal lords, but where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning? How so?
To be fair, he did say it's concerning if the top income brackets are static, so as long as we shuffle out our feudal lords from time to time, we should be okay.
The 'feudal lords' are not the 1%. They would be the .1% or the .01%. I imagine the latter two remain a much more static environment.
Also, the 1% in this article is not even defined. After some digging it looks like it is Gross Adjusted Income. There are CEOs who wouldn't be considered in the 1% because they take salaries of $1 while making millions in stock options - it is such a ridiculous metric.
Inequality is about wealth as much as, if not more than, wage.
It was a time of massive improvement in the standard of living across the board. You can see this objectively in annual statistics on infant mortality, longevity, and average height.
The industrialization of America was not producing luxury yachts for the overlords. It was producing consumer goods for everyone.
The same could be said for the racial-based statistics, since race might be tied to cultural opinions which could impact how many hours a week or years in a lifetime someone works.
Why should we care the reason people make their choices? What if I like surfing, so I decide to work part time which allows me to surf more? Does my skin color or gender matter? If I want to participate in this "surf culture," why would you feel the need to either force me to work more or demand that others subsidize my surfing habit?
I’m just saying there is a factor that could impact the statistics and that how much a person works should be taken into account for all the findings. Not just the gender-based one, so that we have accurate data from which to make decisions from.
I didn’t say anything about forcing anyone to work or subsidizing habits. I think these charts are trying to claim that discrimination is happening and if how much someone is working isn’t taken into account, they don’t support that claim very well.
To be clear I’m not stating that discrimination is or isn’t happening. I’d just like better data.
Well, the difference between race and gender is that most women have children, which take up a lot of time and require taking at least some time away from work. If the difference is due to cultural issues then maybe it makes sense to worry about the differences and try to address them, but if the difference just comes down to women have children so they work less that's a less compelling reason to try to equalize men's and women's wages (and as I noted, in some areas young women out earn men already, partly because they tend to be more educated).
Men have children too. There are not many kids that have no biological father.
I mean these comments talk about it as if kids and work around them had zero to do with men and we're some kind of female hobby. Among some men it is so as they don't care, but many men do actually care and do spend time with them.
You cant take numbers from Norway when talking about Americans incomes. Norway is way less christian and way more socialist. Precisely this kind of statistics differ between countries. I have no idea how America compares. (For example Norway has similar suicide rates for women then America, but less of them for males. That is the one on top of head.)
Also, male incarceration is much higher then female one, that is another difference that should push income the other way round. And some babies without fathers are due to incarceration and people in prison are not earning all that much.
I mean, I get argument that women are more likely to do kids work and more likely to say no in work because something kid related, but it kinda rubs me wrong when people talk about kids and female only thing. I see too many good caring fathers around me and also fathers who did made choice to spend more time with kids in expense of career. They deserve a bit of recognition too.
You don’t need to know the reason why someone isn’t working or is working less to have better claims for or against discrimination. I’d just like to see something that says that a certain demographic who work a certain number of hours a week differs from a different demographic who works the same number of hours a week.
> If you control for age and whether women have children the gap shrinks a lot (in some areas it reverses).
I generally agree with this line of thought, but you're also missing the higher level question: why, in our society, do we have to control for women who have children, but we don't have to control for men who have children?
Because women get pregnant and are the primary caregivers in most families?
Edit: Basically you have to control for what's causing women to work less when the have children. And the obvious answer is because if you're a woman it's hard to work when you have a child at home. If you're a man that's not really true since typically your wife/girlfriend takes care of the child. You can argue that maybe men should take more responsibility for raising their kids, but that's more of a social/political issue than an economic one.
Political and social issues and economic issues are one. They are only disconnected in the strange milleu of libertarianism that America finds itself in.
How is that not economic issue? That is just ridiculous claim. It may be issue that is not caused by her employer sexism, but impact on her retirement or perspective in case of divorce or simply buying power or what not is absolutely economic.
People have a choice in whether or not they procreate. If you can't afford to do it or are unwilling to sacrifice the extra income to focus more on your family, then you shouldn't have children.
Just as if I chose to go live in the wilderness, it would only make sense that my income would drop. No one would be at fault and I wouldn't expect the government to make up the difference for my "lost" income.
And a lot of people going into wilderness would be economic issue with economic consequences.
Your first paragraph applies equally to men - but men are statistically less willing to sacrifice extra income to focus more on familly. Maybe men should not have children (?!).
Nevertheless, ignoring judgemental moral in previous paragraph, it does not make theoretical "men with children earn less" something that needs to be discussed as not economics.
You can. Last I read, men who don't have children end up making less than men who do, and for young men in cities it has become less than women in the same demographic.
It's very fascinating to me how the vast majority of time someone is saying "the statistics for gender are misleading" it appears to be a man saying it.
> If you control for age and whether women have children the gap shrinks a lot (in some areas it reverses).
Citation needed.
> And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern
What are you implying? Is there some point you want to make about being a man and its relation to gender studies, or was that a sexist statement trying to call out sexism?
It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical. Let's try not to be facetious while simultaneously undermining our own argument with poorly veiled prejudice.
> One of the best studies on the wage gap was released in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Labor. It examined more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the 23-cent wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” In the past, women’s groups have ignored or explained away such findings.
> And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter
Cant they control democracy via increase access to speech though wealth.
This is in keeping with a long term trend in which the standard of living for the median American has been allowed to stagnate for a long time. The male median wage has been stagnant or declining since 1973. This was previously discussed on Hacker News:
The fact of the matter that we can't even discuss, let alone even mention the realities of these matters on account of the PC authoritarian goons going after you and silencing you and banning your accounts, is quite telling.
It's quite unfortunate that regardless of when, all of this current liberal, PC, postmodern insanity will result in horrific results, because nothing can deviate so much without causing repercussions, regardless of what they may be.
Just take your last point; we simply can't even discuss, let alone bring up the fact that the "death-by-childbirth" rates that you lament as being so high, are localize to specific ethnic and racial groups; but because the PC nazis will go after you if you if you don't, we are forced to imagine and repeat that the USA suffers from these third world problems not because there are exponentially more third world people in the USA than in ANY developed country.... while we are compelled to chant "diversity is our strength" at the end of the barrel of a gun.
There is actually a huge degree of likelihood that you would not have seen this comment at all any more than you see any of the other comments and users that are digitally silenced and executed and whisked away to digital mass graves on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. So maybe this comment is just for some future researcher or digital archeologist that is able to reconstruct this message from digital pieces in their effort to understand how the current form of authoritarians were able to hoodwink and bamboozle the feeble minded fools into self-destruction and self-harm and pushed humanity to the brink.
Median wage is a bad metric in a world where health insurance costs (and thus non-wage benefits) are rapidly rising. Median household wage is doubly bad in a world of changing household composition.
These stats are pretty ridiculous. Not all advanced degrees are more valuable than a bachelor's. In my own company, we definitely have men with a BS in computer science earning lots more than women with master's degrees in English and education, but you can hardly blame the wage difference on their genders.
Those that are okay, with this are 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires' who don't have millions yet. Fact, remains only people that love capitalism are capitalists themselves. for the rest of us we're doomed, if we don't embrace BI, Unions and a massive welfare state. Also full 100% inheritance tax.
I disagree, I happen to love capitalism though I'm just a student. Its brought about incredible changes, and raised the standard of living for billions across the world. I've lived in post-soviet countries, and I've lived in the west and I'd much rather live within a capitalist system. Socialism and its derivatives do little to replace inequality as they merely replace trackable, earn-able financial capital with an amorphous social capital. One gets jobs based on who they know, who their parents are or perhaps what tribe they come from. No one can reasonably aspire to the the child of the nomenclatura. One can reasonably push toward the middle class, or upper middle class. Further within a racially stratified country, it seems likely that ethnic class-difference would be reinforced rather than alleviated.
If that's the case, then why are none of those countries leading in actually creating technology? For the most part they are benefiting from technology that gets created in the US or Asia.
Also, those are all very homogenous cultures. I don't think you can map what works there onto a very large, very diverse place like the US.
I don't think I will ever be as rich as Bill Gates but I would still rather live in a capitalist country as a middle class person than in a communist country as a rich person.
I'm not a capitalist (if you define that as someone who makes the majority of their income from investments). I in no way feel "doomed". I was able to lift myself from poverty by dedicating my life to a craft I love (software development). The system we inhabit in the West allowed that to happen. Quite the opposite of doomed.
I know that the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" rhetoric is supposed to frighten or shame me into supporting liberal causes (most notably wealth redistribution), but although you're absolutely correct that I don't have millions and likely never will, when I compare how I grew up to what I've been able to carve out for myself by just educating myself and doing the best job I could against what I see in places like Venezuela, I continue to be more concerned by people like you than people like, say, the Koch brothers. It's a shame that traditionally left-wing causes like humane working conditions get bound up in really dangerous suggestions like universal basic income and single-payer healthcare, because there are a lot of areas where America could stand to improve if only we could stop being so back-biting and divisive.
"Hard work" will pretty soon not be enough to achieve whatever American Dream you might have achieved for yourself. The bar is getting higher and higher. In the 1950's any half-wit with a high-school degree could get a decent factory job and raise two kids in a 2-car-garage-picket-fence-in-the-suburbs. A lot of those jobs are just gone now and never coming back. What are people who can't go into STEM supposed to do now? What about in 20 years, after advances in machine learning and AI eliminate even more jobs that used to put food on the table? Work harder?
Yes, those of us in software can just be smart and work hard and be successful, but millions of others will not be, and it will be harder for them to get to where we've gotten to. Telling them to suck it up and "work harder" is exactly how you get wealth distribution, in fact. On terms you really won't like, just ask the Romanovs.
Millenials are the first generation in a long time to be worse off than their parents, and no, it's not because of avocado toast or iphones alone.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" rhetoric is indeed meant to frighten, but your "anyone can make it if they work hard" is so mid-to-late-20th century Reagan-era rose-colored-glasses adorable, it's positively quaint. Let's just ignore automation and globalization and supply outstripping demand and tell those lazy kids to just get a job, eh?
Everytime I see this proposal it's of the "burning bridges" type. To ensure that everyone starts at the same crappy starting position. There are never any considerations what to actually use the tax revenue on. It's only intended purpose is to take away money from the "evil" rich parents. The justification is that the income is unearned but the flaw with this type of justification is that the parents clearly earned the money and paid taxes on it.
So far I haven't seen any proposals to redistribute the money to actually decrease inequality other than by making everyone equally poor. How about distributing that money back either in form of a UBI or some kind of trust fund that children can withdraw from at the age of 18. I haven't seen anything like that and therefore I'm against a 100% inheritance tax.
What would you rather have?
1) Perfect income equality (1:1 poorest:richest), but everyone is starving and most don't live out of childhood
2) Perfect income inequality (1:~infinity poorest:richest)), but the poorest in the world have a much higher standard of living and that standard is going up 3-5% a year.
The point I'm driving at here is that income equality, by itself, isn't automatically desirable if the cost is a worse standard of living for the poor.
It makes perfect sense that income inequality would increase due to globalization. The economic ramifications of "correct" business decisions are amplified by orders of magnitude when compared to mercantilist economies a few hundred years ago.
Fallacy of the excluded middle much? We can (and should!) aim for a situation between the two you have described. And in any case, your proposed model isn't working: everyone else has had stagnant real wages since the 1970s.
And income inequality actually is a problem even in and of itself, even without reference to absolute living standards. There's an increasing body of research that higher inequality in a society lowers happiness and increases resentment, ultimately undermining social cohesion and trust in government.
Do you believe that the 25th percentile of income today has a higher standard of living than the 50th percentile person in "the golden age" of 1950? I do.
Today's 25th percentile person is likely to have air conditioning, refrigeration, internet, a cell phone, a microwave oven, an HDTV, and a reliable car that needs very little routine maintenance and has air bags and antilock brakes.
Today's 50th percentile is beating 1950s 75th percentile adding easy, affordable, safe, and reliable air transportation and living in a far larger house than their 1950s half-again higher counterpart.
Today's 75th percentile is beating the 95th percentile in 1950.
All of them have better health care options, and a longer life expectancy.
Real wage growth may not have arrived for those who trade their hours for wages, but the standard of living available from those wages has risen dramatically.
Wage inequality is just a labor aristocracy, divide the masses tactic. We should also be looking at non-wage income i.e. dividends, interest, and capital gains. The untold story: non-wage income in the US is increasing as a share of total income, and the richest of the rich pay the lowest in taxes
What do you mean by "the lowest"? Percentage wise? Because I'm sure they pay millions or even billions in some cases. I agree that the rich might not pay the same percentage that you pay, but that's not even the real problem.
The real problem is that we don't have equal opportunities. That gives the rich people a huge advantage when it comes to earning more money. We don't need to tax the rich more, that doesn't really help you when you're poor. We need to wisely use the money that we already have to create more opportunities for everyone.
As a percentage of their own income, of course. How does taxing the rich more not help you when you're poor? Those taxes could go towards funding for training and education, medical expenses, infrastructure, all of which would work towards creating more equal opportunities
It doesn't help you because the money don't go directly to you. They go to companies own by other rich people, companies that have contracts with the government. So you keep taxing the rich and they keep getting their money back.
What gets me is the job holders in the upper 20% who actively support a system that benefits the non-working (or don't need to work) top 1%.
I make a pretty high wage compared to a cashier at a store, but my interests align with them a lot more than a Walton. Yet my peers are convinced that because they have the trappings of the petite bourgeoisie and a well funded 401k that they have more in common with a Koch.
I'm not familiar with a society that experienced such high inequality and did not have very disruptive upheaval afterwards. One would think the wealthy would advocate for universal health care, education and safety nets as a small price to pay for their own self preservation. On the other hand, they haven't had much to fear from the lower classes for a long time now.
Why do you think so many 1%ers are advocating for Universal Basic Income? It's not due to some altruistic notion that everyone should be able to follow their dream. It's out of fear of a populist revolt. Their backup plan is New Zealand based prepper compounds.
Populist revolt? In America? 50% of the population would gleefully shoot the other 50% dead as soon as their Masters tell them it's just "treasonous liberal Marxists". The 1% are super-duper safe. They've got nothing to fear from the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
A UBI is literally the purest form of redistribution of wealth. It takes money disproportionately from the rich and then gives it equally to everyone.
There are only three classes of people who oppose it: 1) people who oppose all redistributive programs, 2) people who favor the centrally planned farce of the existing welfare system because it allows them to covertly insert corrupt industry-specific subsidies into the system, and 3) people who don't actually understand how it works.
If the 1% favor it they must like income redistribution, dislike opportunities for political corruption, or not understand what they're asking for.
I don't think there are only 3 groups of people that oppose it. You can draw some nuance here. For example, many people believe that work helps give people a sense of purpose, and a mere basic income might enable people to make poor life decisions. A "basic minimum job" might still be a re-distributive system, but with some nuance.
Half the point of a basic income is that it doesn't discourage people from working, unlike welfare systems that suspend payments to working people including a basic job that de facto prevents you from taking a real job because if you stop doing the makework job you no longer get the redistributive subsidy.
A basic income even eliminates the need to have a minimum wage, which allows people whose labor is not worth a living wage to nonetheless trade it for whatever they can get and still not starve.
A basic job is economically damaging because by definition the value derived from the work is less than the compensation (or it would just be a regular job). Which creates all kinds of terrible incentives where, basically, people choose the basic job over more actually productive work because it's government-subsidized and the real job isn't.
>For example, many people believe that work helps give people a sense of purpose, and a mere basic income might enable people to make poor life decisions
Working as a teacher and having a second job to subsidise the first is considered purposeful.
Working as a teacher and receiving the rest of the income as UBI is suddenly no longer purposeful?
The pro UBI argument is:
UBI removes the incentive for people to work at jobs they hate. It gives them negotiation power.
If people are looking for purpose in their work then arguably not being restricted by financial considerations is allowing them to find purpose and be more happy. People get to decide what purpose means to them. I believe this is what women are doing in exchange for lower pay.
The anti UBI argument is:
Someone must force their own definition of purpose on them and if they weren't forced to work bad jobs they wouldn't have any purpose at all. They need someone that "thinks" for them because they are unable to "think" for themselves.
If you would take a look at bay area, it's a very good example of what happens when you give a lot of people bigger income - rent, housing and prices will automatically go up and net average would be the same.
I don't understand why people are pushing for redistribution of income rather than redistribution of goods like we pretty much did with utilities, public transport and, to a certain degree, internet.
> If you would take a look at bay area, it's a very good example of what happens when you give a lot of people bigger income - rent, housing and prices will automatically go up and net average would be the same.
The main price increase in the bay area has been housing -- rent is still housing -- and the reason for that isn't primarily incomes. It's artificial scarcity (from zoning) in the face of increasing population. In a normal market without the artificial restrictions, the fact that people are willing to pay a million dollars for housing would cause lots of new housing to be constructed which would bring the price down.
Incomes contribute, because if housing cost that much and people weren't making that much money then they would move out of the area (which would lower demand), but those prices would never be sustainable without the restrictions on new construction.
But more importantly, this is all about relativity. If Bob has twenty dollars, Alice has ten and Charlie has one, and you print three more dollars and give each person one, now there is going to be ~10% inflation because $31 used to exist and now $34 exists. But now Charlie has $2 which are worth as much as $1.82 used to be, which is less than $2, but he's still up $0.82.
And on top of that, a UBI doesn't actually create new money. Everyone gets a dollar, but it's because Alice paid $1 in taxes and then got it back and Bob paid $2 in taxes $1 of which went to Charlie. There is no new money to cause inflation, it's just redistribution.
In theory there could be relative demand shifts, if Charlie likes to buy different stuff than Bob would have, but unless that stuff is in limited supply, people will just make more of it. And if it is in limited supply, it still works as redistribution because it just means we're back to relativity -- even if things did cost more, it still increases the proportion of things that Charlie gets.
> I don't understand why people are pushing for redistribution of income rather than redistribution of goods like we pretty much did with utilities, public transport and, to a certain degree, internet.
I don't understand what "redistribution of goods" means. More free public infrastructure? There are good reasons to do that for natural monopolies like roads and utilities, but that's a completely different thing, and we can do both at the same time.
Because there has been a successful campaign to vilify the 1%. When you look at income levels, the 1% includes doctors, lawyers, lots of small business owners, and even many software engineers that got good stock grants in Silicon Valley.
So picking 1% as the threshold was very ill-conceived because now it includes many expert professionals and small business owners. So it's very easy to relate to them if you are also an expert or small business owner.
What? No, you're arguing for a winnowing down to 0.1% or 0.01%, but our problem is the other way around as the parent described. The problem is the 10% or 20% who support the same basic policies as the 0.1%.
er, small business owners making $800,000+ a year? I don't think that's very easy to relate to.
Who is waging this campaign?
I don't think is a campaign to vilify the 1% as much as it's an increased awareness by the 99% that no one needs to be making $800,000 a year. As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible, healthcare difficult to afford, fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings, is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people?
And that's where the mistake is. A significant number of people (including me) are fine with someone creating a company, selling it for a few million, or just having 10 good years of operation and retiring. The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years.
This is the problem with using 1%. The bottom of the 1% is filled with normal professionals that took huge risks (starting businesses) or spent a significant amount of time in training (brain surgeon).
>As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible
Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US. Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality. Just look at the bay area where there are people making good money. The housing shortage has caused prices to sky rocket to absorb up all of that difference. If you have 1000 people fighting for 100 houses, 900 people are going to get screwed regardless of income inequality.
> healthcare difficult to afford,
A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people.
>fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings
Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings.
>Who is waging this campaign?
Well people like you who claim nobody needs to make a lot of money and then blame a bunch of unrelated issues on income inequality. I can't tell if it was just the mathematical ignorance of who started the movement or if it was partially orchestrated by the super-rich. But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are, they lost significant support of the population within 50% of that income.
>is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people?
I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them.
If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt, I don't think there would have been very much disagreement from a significant chunk of the US. As it stands, it just looks like an arbitrary cut-off screwing the people who managed to secure a good life rather than being focused on people with enough money to hire full-time Washington lobbyists.
> The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years.
New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new. I don't feel that we ought to reward people who for merely creating things that are new. And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life? $465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life.
> Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US.
You're thinking in a narrow context. For someone like me who moved from the midwest to the west coast, yah, I could just go back "home". The larger issue however is that, to borrow a tired phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. The jobs that make a city work are largely not high-income earning jobs. That is: paramedics, firefighters, teachers, bus drivers, road repairmen, linemen, auto mechanics, delivery drivers, locksmiths, and on and on. Much fewer of these people are transplants than the high-earners and don't have support networks in those cheaper parts of the country. Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out.
> Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality.
While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost.
> A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people.
I agree, the healthcare system is broken and the problem isn't for lack of money. But when you see politicians attempting to gut medicare for tax breaks for the rich it doesn't little to instill confidence that that money could be better spent.
> Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings.
I agree.
> But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are
"Huge Risks"? If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them.
> I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them.
Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger. Referencing the professions I listed above, can those skilled professional expect to make $250,000 a year in their profession?
> If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt
While I only know a handful of people who have gone to medical school or law school, the path to repaying those loans seems to be pretty straightforward and perhaps a little nerve-racking at times, but I don't know anyone who's gone destitute as a result of those loans. Also, I'm critical of a system that puts the burden of risk on the individual for training individuals to do those important, necessary jobs.
Their risk-taking isn't what we ought to be rewarding, it's the value that those professions bring to the general population.
These problems are all intersectional. Is it the fault of rich people that there are poor people? Often not, in some cases yes. There have long been abuses of the lower economic classes by the higher economic classes. I think one the largest problems is how quickly wealthy people lose solidarity with lower earners and believe that it's their "hard work" that got them their wealth. People stuck in lower incomes know how ignorant that belief is. It's also exceedingly difficult for a person living paycheck to paycheck, rais...
>New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new.
If people don't think they are getting value out of a business's product, people will not pay for it and the owner won't be rewarded. Markets 101.
>And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life?
Tall poppy syndrome. Why shouldn't we strive for people to have paths to easy lives? Attacking the 1% just strikes down people who have done well without improving everyone else.
>$465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life.
You assume it's sustainable for life. These people are not clock punchers working for some government with no budget limits. If you run a business it could lose money for a year and your salary could easily be < $0 if you are keeping it alive. If you are a highly compensated professional and lose your job due to industry collapse or even just industry, you might not find a job for years. Have you ever even considered that or do you assume salaries just flow the same every year?
How about the fact that a medical student has to throw away ~12 years of earning potential and accrue debt with interest?
These are all massive risks that these professionals take and that's the reason they are compensated the way they are. If it was so easy there would be a big supply of them and they wouldn't be so well compensated by buyers. Markets 101.
>Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out.
But you are part of the problem by choosing to live there and competing for the shortage of housing (either via rent or purchase). The Midwest isn't having those problems and it isn't due to a lack of rich people. There just isn't such a strong NIMBY culture there that prevents housing being built and there isn't a giant influx of millennials moving into them as if they are the last place on earth.
>While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost.
This is absolutely false. People can get loans with much less than 20% down and they can go in with family members/friends on a mortgage. If everyone only had $1000 cash and there was a housing shortage, the house would go to whoever was the most desperate by taking out the largest loan (with a group if necessary). Housing costs would continue to squeeze the life out of the community because there just aren't enough houses and people are competing for them (see the pigeonhole principle).
>If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them.
Have some imagination. Every single medical student for one. They can finish medical school/residency with life crushing student debt, screw up, and nearly immediately have their license revoked. Or they can just fail school right at the end. Not only did they throw away their 20s, they now have significant student loan debt that is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy.
If you don't think small business owners put in any risk, I suggest you try to get a small business loan from a bank without putting a bunch of your own savings in as collateral. 99%+ of small businesses don't get showered with VC money, they have to go the loan route because they aren't "changing the world".
>Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger.
Nope, this comes up in professions like truck driving, mechanics, etc all the time. The difference between those two is usually just deciding offer your services as a contractor with the risks involved rather than working for a big company directly. A plumber running his/her own business ma...
People being upset is a poor sign that things are actually wrong, or that they could change.
I'm upset when natural disasters occur, but I don't blame anyone for them. I'm upset when it's too cold outside, but I don't blame anyone for that.
The problem is that, when it comes to the economy, people for some reason think that it's nothing like a force of nature - they (sometimes subconsciously) assume that if one person is rich, that means another person is poor. Or even, that if someone is rich, than that has something to do with whether she "deserves" it. That's close[1] to being as nonsensical as asking if someone "deserved" to die in a hurricane.
[1] I write "close", because this only applies in a good capitalist economy. There are of course ways to cheat, whether by directly stealing money from other people (in which case you'd go to jail in a well functioning society), or by changing the laws to benefit yourself (which is a subversion of the capitalist system, but it can happen. It's not what people are usually complaining about though).
Just for reference, being in the "top 1%" in the US means about $300k income and/or $3m net worth at age 40. That's not "buy a politician" rich, but it is also not the average professional or small business owner.
There's a lot more to America than Silicon Valley. Whatever the average SV wages are, they're outliers when compared to average wages across the county.
And everyone here complains about it being hard to pay housing instead of bragging how great everyone is. If th norm in SV would be so great, I would expect them to.complain less.
It is common for a very small portion at the very top of a job that already pays more than most jobs. The BLS, which uses reliable statistical methods to estimate wage information for occupations, found that only 10% of software developers make more than $157,590[1].
I would argue that having $3MM net worth is more than enough to "buy" one or more (local) politicians for an election cycle or two in many parts of the USA.
> What gets me is the job holders in the upper 20% who actively support a system that benefits the non-working (or don't need to work) top 1%.
It's not a zero sum game. Just because the 1% benefit from a particular policy, it doesn't mean other non-1% people supporting it don't benefit as well.
In some cases they might benefit from the same policies, but usually disproportionately so.
What was labelled the "death tax", which somehow became a grassroots issue, was taxes on inheritance over roughly 5 million. It's now doubled to 11 million with the new tax bill. This is not in the interest of well over 99% of people.
> In some cases they might benefit from the same policies, but usually disproportionately so.
If I benefit from something, it doesn't bother me at all that someone benefits even more. Should I forfeit my benefits out of spite?
> What was labelled the "death tax", which somehow became a grassroots issue, was taxes on inheritance over roughly 5 million. It's now doubled to 11 million with the new tax bill. This is not in the interest of well over 99% of people.
Maybe people feel it's fair to get to pass your wealth onto your children and that if they were rich they would support this idea. There's something to be said about sticking to your moral values and not being a hypocrite especially when what is being debated is having the state take a private citizen's money away from them.
The choice isn't between no benefits and the status quo for lower classes / income brackets. It's about lower classes getting a bigger piece of the pie. You're acting as though questioning how resources are divided among a populace, which is almost entirely what politics is, is irrational or pointless, as though we've arrived to the current state of things via some other perfect, entirely natural process that we're foolish to tamper with.
I'm giving you insight into why people disagree with you. I think if you actually look at it from their point of view it makes sense as it's logical and/or consistent with their morals. A lot of people just aren't that bothered that choosing an option that benefits them also benefits the 1% (often even more so).
The "1%" might be an overly broad bracket (it's catchier than "the parasite rentier class"), but there are plenty of people in that category who actively support policies that not only don't benefit the vast majority of the population, but actively, physically harm them. See, for instance, every top health insurance executive in the country.
Old article but probably still relevant today: 39% of Americans think they either are (19%) or one day will be (20%) among the top 1% incomes [1]. You can’t get someone to oppose enriching the richest if that person thinks he’s one of them!
That's because a surprisingly large fraction of them are right.
At any given time a person is more likely to be a student, in an entry level position, or retired, than be at the height of their career.
39% in the top 1% is still an overestimate, but it's probably not far wrong to say that 39% of people will at some point in their lives be in the top 5%.
The problem is with using "1%" as the threshold, because that just means you and your spouse are successful professionals at the height of your careers, when the real problem is the top <0.001% and, even more than that, the accumulating wealth of large corporations relative to individuals.
According to old (2014-2015) measurements, to be in the 1% you need to be pulling in at least $455k a year[1], $1.4M on average[2]. It’s probably even higher today. That’s way way beyond the typical “professional at the height of his career.”
That's household income, including your spouse's income. Your half of that is significantly less than what a senior cardiologist or senior partner at a law firm makes.
A senior cardiologist or a senior partner at a law firm is not remotely a typical professional at the height of their career. Even a typical physician or a typical lawyer is highly unlikely to ever reach that level. Cardiology is a high paying specialty that most physicians will not be in. Most lawyers will never even make it into big law much less make senior partner after making it into big law.
I chose cardiologists and senior partners because they make significantly more than the threshold without being some kind of Machiavellian supervillains that everyone hates. Regular doctors and lawyers still make about that amount of money at the senior level.
This is also not at all out of line with what trade professionals like electricians are making when they start out on their own but by the time they retire have half a dozen people working for them.
You could also have a year where you sell a house in excess of the gain exclusion, sell a rental property, cash in some stock options, convert an IRA into a Roth, sell a bunch of appreciated stock, sell a small business, or sell some other capital asset.
Those "one time" activities will all temporarily boost your AGI, meaning people come into and out of the "top 5%" brackets pretty regularly. It won't get you into the top 0.001%, but could easily boost what you think of as a "normal" two-income couple into the top 5% or 1% at some point in their life.
No source but I read an article that agreed with your idea. A surprisingly large percentage of people were in the upper income range (iirc it was top 5% or so) for at least one year though it could also be due to a windfall like inheritance, insurance claim, sale of a business, etc. On mobile but will try to add source later.
I suppose the question is open to interpretation. When asked, “will you one day be among the top 1%?” some people might think, one year out of my 70 on earth, I will sell my house for $400k and therefore for a brief moment be among the 1%, so I should answer Yes. I’d expect that most people think of “being among the top 1%” as a more persistent class change.
What’s most amusing to me are the 19% who think they are currently among the top 1%. That’s just math fail.
That's exactly what happens in Brazil. The middle class fears the introduction of inheritance tax more than the lack of universal health care or good public schools.
I'm not sure what your point is. I was criticizing another comment for neglecting the role of principles in political choices. So it seems like you agree with me?
Indeed. The advocacy for Universal Basic Income for the top 1% has always struck me as a wealth insurance move on their behalf. Sustain the status quo and the great unwashed won't sack your property portfolio.
208 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadAnd an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter (since it means income is going to a small group of individuals, rather than a broader group of individuals who are swapped in and out of the top income groups).
So these statistics are hardly "disturbing", though they do merit further research to see how much of a problem these things actually are.
“We have reached a tipping point. Inequality can no longer be treated as an afterthought. We need to focus the debate on how the benefits of growth are distributed. Our report ‘In it Together’ and our work on inclusive growth have clearly shown that there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between growth and equality. On the contrary, the opening up of opportunity can spur stronger economic performance and improve living standards across the board!” OECD Secretary-General
http://www.oecd.org/social/inequality.htm
Hmm, I wonder ;-)
edit: We know that the USA ranks lower than almost every other OECD country in terms of social mobility, see pages 4 and 5 of this slide deck: https://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/NERO-22-June-2015-income-ine...
Also, measuring mobility by income quintiles is challenging as quintiles aren't the same across countries. You could move from 1st to 4th income quintile in one country and have a higher wage than some moving from 1st to 5th in another country.
Actually I have to disagree, a bifurcation in income is reason to worry in itself. In a society where everything is commodified this wealth gap allows the rich to opt out of normal civil society. A society where a small few can buy their way out of a crap education system, out of a crap healthcare system, etc. isn't just no matter how well we swap people in and out of that group.
But that's not the world we live in. Most people don't get windfalls and have little savings.
We could end education and healthcare inequality today by shutting down all the good universities and banning all good health insurance. But that’s backwards.
Yes but that's good.
>Engineering greater total suffering so that you don’t have to be indignant at others suffering less, is not exactly noble.
I actually think it would reduce total suffering, just that it's a short-term vs long-term thing.
>We could end education and healthcare inequality today by shutting down all the good universities and banning all good health insurance. But that’s backwards.
You're sort of close to what I want but not quite. We'd shut down all education systems which allow you to buy good results, same for healthcare, it's not about absolute quality it's about the relative quality in exchange for dollars.
My point is that when you drag everyone into the same crap system, the most powerful in society who currently get to opt-out are stuck as well. They're forced to advocate for systems which are universally better rather than advocating for systems which are selectively better. By changing the incentives this way we stick everyone on the same side, inside of one side against another, it's better for everyone.
So a society in which there's competition to be among a handful of feudal lords, but where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning? How so?
We've been through this in American history. It was called the Gilded Age and it was a nightmare for all but a handful of robber barons, resulted in widespread social and political instability, and violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
From the linked wikipedia article:
"It broadly rejects egalitarianism and the view that history shows inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment (thus, it is in part a reaction against "Whig historiography").[1][2] The movement favors a return to older societal constructs and forms of government, including support for monarchism or other forms of strong, centralised leadership such as a "neocameralist CEO"[3] of a joint-stock republic,[4] coupled with a right-libertarian, conservative or other approach to economics."
How much of this "neo-feudalism" shares with actual feudalism is not clear to me.
See
https://www.thedailybeast.com/californias-new-feudalism-bene...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/07/new-feudalism-fred-ba...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/the-age-of-n...
Nevertheless, feudal Lords did competed among each other and parent talked about competition not about wage.
There may be lack of mobility along with income inequality, but the article doesn't demonstrate it.
I'm not sure how you can't be arguing the same thing I am. The income inequality is what creates the immobility. This is demonstrated by other developed countries where there is less income inequality and greater social mobility, as others have pointed out. Can you elaborate?
Uh... The industrial revolution.
You seem to be confusing wealth inequality with income inequality which might be muddying your arguments.
PS: Don't forget the median US home is only worth $188,900, which means 1/2 of them are worth less than that.
The article doesn't demonstrate it because that is not the goal of the article. But it is happening nonetheless:
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-upward-mobility-fallen-sharply...
http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-on-the-dec...
Second, I think it's still a problem if the income of 90-98% of the country stagnates for decades, while the top earners get higher and higher income. Of course that affects inequality.
I'm also not sure it matters that much if the players at the top switch around if they have increasingly larger leverage on society.
For instance, we're seeing CEOs get rewarded larger and larger amounts of money every year, even if the companies lose money, like in this absurd case:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/22/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-got-...
Where's that money coming from? The employees' potential salary increases? The retail investors' money? It seems to me that the rich keep siphoning off money from everyone else, and that's not sustainable.
They also get larger and larger amounts of money even when they get kicked out of the company for failing. This doesn't make sense to me at all. And I think the excuse that they need such amounts of money or otherwise they wouldn't take the job or something is utter BS. I'd more likely believe the board is giving them the money so the CEO doesn't sue the company, or better yet because the CEO was the one writing their checks before that, or something along those lines.
And this is just the corporate world. The US Congress seems to get crazier every year and listening more and more to corporations and their interests, and less and less to the people and solving real problems in the country (healthcare, infrastructure, etc).
It's like the whole American society is on the brink of collapse, and everyone just doesn't know it yet. Eventually, people will "suddenly" start to violently riot because of all this stuff added together, and it won't be pretty.
Let's say we've got a feudal society with dumb nobility that rules over a smart peasantry by force. If that society becomes free, we'll expect smart peasants to move up and dumb noblemen to move down across the first few generations... but once they've moved, they've moved. Ergo, declining social mobility.
There's an extreme amount of assumption baked into that.
1. Genetics is the only factor that determines merit for wealth?
2. Genetics merits extreme differences in income/wealth?
2. We're talking about social mobility, not the level of inequality.
1) One does not have to be intelligent to be wealthy.
2) Those born wealthy do not have to be intelligent to remain wealthy - they just need not be a consumeristic imbecile.
3) Genetics has such a small impact, if any, on social mobility - quite the opposite. If I am born a Kennedy I am more likely to never fall below my birthright social class because of my family lineage.
4) You contradict yourself. You say the nobility rules by force, then immediately follow that with "If that society becomes free" - how exactly would that society magically free?
2. 70% of rich families lose their wealth by the second generation, 90% by the third. [A]
3. IQ is a greater predictor of income than parental SES. Someone in the 95th percentile for IQ has a higher EV for earnings than someone born into the 95th percentile for wealth.
4. A number of revolutions have happened. If you don't believe that modern France or Japan are freer than their feudal predecessors then I agree that we are probably not on the same page.
A. http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/
I've seen the statistic quoted in so many places, yet have never found a link to the actually study. No info on sample size; we don't even have a definition of 'wealth' used in the study.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324662404578334...
The big economic question of the day should be asking how we've managed to keep wages at only the "stagnation" level rather than precipitously falling in the face of so much downward pressure.
If you were happy with the income equality from a century ago, I'm willing to adopt the welfare and tax systems of that time so all the incentives are the same.
1. Demand is not perfectly elastic
2. Demand is perfectly elastic, but supply was increased more on the lower end of the income range which reshapes the income distribution.
3. Trade policy reduced demand in the middle of the income range.
1) What is mobility? The ability to move out of the lowest income group? How easily does that happen? If it's quick and easy, why doesn't everyone do it? And what about the reverse? How easy it for a person to move from a median income back into the lowest income. I think the idea of mobility is used as a reinforcement for the protestant work ethic / American dream sort of delusion that says "poor people can just work harder and save more and they won't be poor any more". But we have an enormous amount of evidence that points to that not being the case.
2) Also, you haven't provided an argument for why income inequality isn't a problem. If the lowest earners have extremely limited access to housing, healthcare or education, such as is the case in the U.S. I think that's a problem.
Many people do when they retire. Or when they take time off between jobs (intentionally or not).
As an American, I've always based a lot of national pride on our history as a (relative, for some groups) meritocracy with a lot of mobility. It's really sad to see rapid erosion of this over the last 20y.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/th...
It was also associated with the immigration of tens of millions of impoverished people, which is part of the reason for the massive inequality numbers - the population doubled during this period.
Humanity can accomplish great things without dehumanizing or hurting most of the population, and being critical of the morality of these systems is a big part of that.
I don't agree with that at all, and I'm not sure I would if I had to pay that cost myself, either.
Also, it's not that odd. It's a direct response to the criticism you levy - that these things are not worth it. How are you to judge if you only take the immoral acts in a vacuum? You brought up slavery again; their conditions were not slave-like, simply impoverished.
I agree that it's a good idea to question whether periods of chaos, destruction or immorality are actually necessary for progress. It's been pretty much taken as a given since Hegel, but it's a good thing to verify and even within those boundaries there may be some behaviors we can effectively limit while leaving the good bits.
As to your final argument, I don't actually know if that's true, but it's immaterial because that's not how people have done it.
I sincerely doubt the people making all the money were not doing it because the poor people they were exploiting (or killing) might eventually get iPhones or penicillin
I also don't know why I can't criticize the conditions resulting from policies in the gilded age because there's a chance that the policies were maybe not "soley intended to have malicious consequences". Again, things aren't black and white. "Modern tech is nice" and "poverty is bad" are not diametrically opposing ideas.
I'm confused by what you're arguing here. People want to reduce inequality, and you're argument seems to boil down to "nothing really matters anyway" or "maybe them being poor is for the best" (which you insist is something we can never actually find out..?) If you're saying that human nature is inherently corrupt and humanity can't unite to make progress for broadly selfish reasons, I might actually agree. But talking about how this is shitty and / or how to fix it doesn't seem pointless, either.
You started out saying a moral person would say that the positive consequences of the gilded age were not worth its negative experiences. I disagree.
You then say: "Ignoring that it's very odd to retroactively justify immoral behavior because of unintended, positive side effects: I'm saying that being critical, like asking if the slave-like conditions of most of the population were actually necessary, is a pretty reasonable thing to do."
By saying this you are effectively saying that I am defending immoral behavior with the misconception that such behavior directly led unintentionally to positive consequences. I don't think that, and I'm not doing that. I'm specifically saying that removing 'robber barons' from the equation entirely removes both the positive effects and actions and the negative. The positive and negative are done by the same person, but the actions causing them were entirely different. This isn't simple, as you continue to point out (while, it seems, attempting to simplify it entirely)
People want to reduce inequality - ok, how? I think that's important to figure out. What kind of inequality? Wealth or income or some other kind? What is the consequence of inequality?
To find out, we need to view history as a complex thing and understand both the pleasant and unpleasant, as well as their consequences. Conflict has been a powerful tool, historically. The excesses of one group have often given rise to conflict with another group, which then created a system of greater equality. Could that have happened without the conflict? I'm not sure, I don't have many examples where that happened and a ton of examples where it didn't.
There are a lot of times where people did awful things and they either didn't result in positive consequences or what was positive was not worth the loss. The Gilded Age? Probably not one of those times.
Put another way, it's very easy to prove that without robber barons we wouldn't have had many of the terrible abuses during the Gilded Age, and also very easy to prove we would have had worldwide improvements in the human condition even without the robber barons.
No robber barons mean no railway expansion and no massive expansion of jobs west, so no immigration boom. Robber barons are also responsible for financial regulation, futures markets which allowed for much greater predictability and sustained farming output, increased ties to Europe and specifically the UK over Germany, the massive increases in production brought by low oil prices and standardization of performance, arguably unions and labor reforms and a standard wage.
"Inequality is totally OK"
"But if many people have total food insecurity and bad health outcomes, that's bad right?"
"Well hey but in the long run people got wealthier overall than if we redistributed wealth and no one would have an incentive to work like a dog"
"That would have happened anyway because it's not capitalism but science and technology that drives wealth forward"
"Look, Capitalism works far better, the USSR didn't have a choice consumer devices or food while the West did"
"Fine but the USSR actually lifted more people out of poverty faster and its GDP grew faster than the USA, plus they endured two world wars on their own soil and still were able to bounce back and expand ... and China just lifted the most people out of poverty ever, wages increased 25x over 20 years, all through central planning and building entire cities"
"Yeah but China is a hugely authoritarian state and is not free. Plus they adopted some capitalist principles and that's why they are so successful. Look at Venezuela and North Korea. Socialism does't work."
"Well China is quite centrally planned as was the Interstate Highway system and other infra projects. And all those were a success. As for Venezuela did you forget the sanctions and oil prices drop? And North Korea has had sanctions for decades just because they are communists."
"Redistributing just destroys all incentive to work."
"We are automating everything anyway. We will need to redistribute money to a growing unemployed / underemployed class."
"Universal health care results in death panels and long waits. The government dictates how much doctors can charge and this stifles innovation --"
"-- and the USA is an outlier in how much we spend on healthcare, because there is no collective bargaining the prices down"
"Yeah and also no death panels. Look at the wait times in other countries--"
"As opposed to the infinite wait times in the USA for those who have 'access' but can't afford to even do a basic preventative checkup? And even if we remove those, the wait times in the USA are atrocious too. And other countries have more doctors per capita and more hospital beds too. Medicare gets better prices than almost all smaller insurers."
"We get BETTER doctors and beds. The USA leads the world in medical innovation precisely because providers are not squeezed like they are by Amazon, Apple and other monopolies, so it attracts innovation from around the world and peopel vote with their feet"
"Well maybe if you abolished drug patents innovatio could come from all over the world instead of the chilling effects we have today. Open source beats closed in the long run and Open source Drugs would beat big pharma in the long tail whose plight isn't even worth pursuing for these guys. Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, why is medicine different than science?"
Ayn Rand: "Stop robbing a man of the product of his own mind. I DID build that!"
"But living in the 21st century who do we compensate for all the advances throughout human history that preceded us? Can't we accept that this is a free gift and redistribute the wealth?"
"Socialist!"
"You support Billionaires!"
"No I don't, billionaires are the product of government favors and I want to shrink government"
"Then abolish patents"
"No that is intellectual property"
Etc :)
Literally no new drugs would be produced if there was no guarantee of sole distributor for some X number of years. What country has "open source" drugs?
the polio vaccine was released in 1955. My thought experiment literally cannot be "error, wrong, incorrect."
I'll solidify my thought experiment to Valeant. Valeant would have bought the polio vaccine, hiked the price, and reported significant growth in returns while the disease was not being eliminated.
Not to mention your assumption a pharma company created the first polio vaccine is false - it was developed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine with heavy backing by the U.S. government.
I think you missed the point of the comment to which you're responding.
Also, why are you telling people how to have discussions?
It seems like he thinks their argument is dishonest strawman and manipulative. The discussion is usually improved by people pointing that out, as it makes such argumentation less likely.
The reply is correct, many discourses can also be considered "one sided", such as Socratic dialogues. However, it is also very possible that the commenter feels it's that way because they are biased to one or the other side of the debate themselves. I am not even sure which side they considered the strawman.
The fact that you think I took apart one and the other wasn't taken apart probably implies more about where YOU are on the political spectrum.
These are the actual arguments that people use. For example "China is one of the most authoritarian countries" is a great rejoinder to all the progress they have made using central planning. You may think it takes the position completely apart - since there is so much evidence lately of China's citizen ranking system and facial recognition and jailing dissidents, very reminiscent to the USSR, and China's history with Mao and so on. But it isn't such a slam dunk as you think. Because yes it is authoritarian but many people are OK with it the same way they are OK with anti terror laws here. They give up freedom for a temporary safety and prosperity, to quote Benjamin Franklin. But that is just one side of the story.
Or for example you may think "You support billionaires" is easily taken apart with "No, billionaires are the result of government." Which is pretty straightforward as most billionaires (in Russia for example) are in fact the result of government favors and being well connected. Libertarians are definitely arguing for eliminating coercive power structures and helping promote an environment where more can compete without coersion or licenses.
But I assure you that the other side's arguments are strong as well, you just dismiss them because they don't trigger in you all the supporting baggage that they would if you actually HELD that position.
In short you are reading a lot of your own bias into it. None of these arguments are slam dunk.
Yes, it's designed to illustrate a point and not engage someone in a discussion.
The comment I'm responding to just had a bunch of misrepresentations of people he/she disagrees with.
>Also, why are you telling people how to have discussions?
It's not a discussion, it's a lecture buried in a fake conversation without facts.
Capitalism in the US has created more wealth and lifted more people out of poverty than any other nation in the history of mankind. Your statement applies to third world countries... not the United States. Oh, we're also the most free and most prosperous nation ever. That helps.
citation needed
>Oh, we're also the most free
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_b...
>and most prosperous nation ever
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/02/the-worlds-most-prosperous-n...
Side note: "most free nation ever" is a total fiction as part of American exceptionalism. For just one example out of many, there are still religious blue laws on the books in towns across the country, and many are still enforced.
*Peaceful here means there ability to do something that doesn't harm others. We can start deep diving on the value of having a quiet day, but the idea that you can't buy a bottle of Gin on Sunday is a choice some people might not find is worth the quiet
You mean, like, people who did productive business? How dare they!
To be fair, he did say it's concerning if the top income brackets are static, so as long as we shuffle out our feudal lords from time to time, we should be okay.
For example:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.htm...
Also, the 1% in this article is not even defined. After some digging it looks like it is Gross Adjusted Income. There are CEOs who wouldn't be considered in the 1% because they take salaries of $1 while making millions in stock options - it is such a ridiculous metric.
Inequality is about wealth as much as, if not more than, wage.
It was a time of massive improvement in the standard of living across the board. You can see this objectively in annual statistics on infant mortality, longevity, and average height.
The industrialization of America was not producing luxury yachts for the overlords. It was producing consumer goods for everyone.
Is it helpful in a discussion like this to use exaggerated rhetoric? Wealthy people aren't in any meaningful way feudal lords.
"everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation"
But that doesn't describe Americans either, where absolute poverty levels are below 3%.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/09/17/americas...
I didn’t say anything about forcing anyone to work or subsidizing habits. I think these charts are trying to claim that discrimination is happening and if how much someone is working isn’t taken into account, they don’t support that claim very well.
To be clear I’m not stating that discrimination is or isn’t happening. I’d just like better data.
I mean these comments talk about it as if kids and work around them had zero to do with men and we're some kind of female hobby. Among some men it is so as they don't care, but many men do actually care and do spend time with them.
If that has a impact on the economical state of everyone involved is up to debate, but there is a distinctive difference.
Also, male incarceration is much higher then female one, that is another difference that should push income the other way round. And some babies without fathers are due to incarceration and people in prison are not earning all that much.
I mean, I get argument that women are more likely to do kids work and more likely to say no in work because something kid related, but it kinda rubs me wrong when people talk about kids and female only thing. I see too many good caring fathers around me and also fathers who did made choice to spend more time with kids in expense of career. They deserve a bit of recognition too.
I generally agree with this line of thought, but you're also missing the higher level question: why, in our society, do we have to control for women who have children, but we don't have to control for men who have children?
Edit: Basically you have to control for what's causing women to work less when the have children. And the obvious answer is because if you're a woman it's hard to work when you have a child at home. If you're a man that's not really true since typically your wife/girlfriend takes care of the child. You can argue that maybe men should take more responsibility for raising their kids, but that's more of a social/political issue than an economic one.
Just as if I chose to go live in the wilderness, it would only make sense that my income would drop. No one would be at fault and I wouldn't expect the government to make up the difference for my "lost" income.
Your first paragraph applies equally to men - but men are statistically less willing to sacrifice extra income to focus more on familly. Maybe men should not have children (?!).
Nevertheless, ignoring judgemental moral in previous paragraph, it does not make theoretical "men with children earn less" something that needs to be discussed as not economics.
> If you control for age and whether women have children the gap shrinks a lot (in some areas it reverses).
Citation needed.
> And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern
Citation needed.
It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical. Let's try not to be facetious while simultaneously undermining our own argument with poorly veiled prejudice.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-g...
> One of the best studies on the wage gap was released in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Labor. It examined more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the 23-cent wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” In the past, women’s groups have ignored or explained away such findings.
Cant they control democracy via increase access to speech though wealth.
Yes it is, history teaches us that it leads to dissastisfaction and in some cases violent revolution.
http://www.epi.org/publication/the-state-of-american-wages-2...
The Bloomberg article didn't even mention whether the changes were adjusted for inflation (they are).
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike...
Also, consider that, when it comes to death-by-childbirth, the USA is among the very worst developed countries:
https://maternityneighborhood.com/the-case-for-care-model-in...
It's quite unfortunate that regardless of when, all of this current liberal, PC, postmodern insanity will result in horrific results, because nothing can deviate so much without causing repercussions, regardless of what they may be.
Just take your last point; we simply can't even discuss, let alone bring up the fact that the "death-by-childbirth" rates that you lament as being so high, are localize to specific ethnic and racial groups; but because the PC nazis will go after you if you if you don't, we are forced to imagine and repeat that the USA suffers from these third world problems not because there are exponentially more third world people in the USA than in ANY developed country.... while we are compelled to chant "diversity is our strength" at the end of the barrel of a gun.
There is actually a huge degree of likelihood that you would not have seen this comment at all any more than you see any of the other comments and users that are digitally silenced and executed and whisked away to digital mass graves on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. So maybe this comment is just for some future researcher or digital archeologist that is able to reconstruct this message from digital pieces in their effort to understand how the current form of authoritarians were able to hoodwink and bamboozle the feeble minded fools into self-destruction and self-harm and pushed humanity to the brink.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/where...
https://erikrood.com/Posts/consumer_expenditures.html
I think their societal structures are much better suited for the technologically advanced world we live in today.
Also, those are all very homogenous cultures. I don't think you can map what works there onto a very large, very diverse place like the US.
Yes, those of us in software can just be smart and work hard and be successful, but millions of others will not be, and it will be harder for them to get to where we've gotten to. Telling them to suck it up and "work harder" is exactly how you get wealth distribution, in fact. On terms you really won't like, just ask the Romanovs.
Millenials are the first generation in a long time to be worse off than their parents, and no, it's not because of avocado toast or iphones alone.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" rhetoric is indeed meant to frighten, but your "anyone can make it if they work hard" is so mid-to-late-20th century Reagan-era rose-colored-glasses adorable, it's positively quaint. Let's just ignore automation and globalization and supply outstripping demand and tell those lazy kids to just get a job, eh?
Everytime I see this proposal it's of the "burning bridges" type. To ensure that everyone starts at the same crappy starting position. There are never any considerations what to actually use the tax revenue on. It's only intended purpose is to take away money from the "evil" rich parents. The justification is that the income is unearned but the flaw with this type of justification is that the parents clearly earned the money and paid taxes on it.
So far I haven't seen any proposals to redistribute the money to actually decrease inequality other than by making everyone equally poor. How about distributing that money back either in form of a UBI or some kind of trust fund that children can withdraw from at the age of 18. I haven't seen anything like that and therefore I'm against a 100% inheritance tax.
The point I'm driving at here is that income equality, by itself, isn't automatically desirable if the cost is a worse standard of living for the poor.
It makes perfect sense that income inequality would increase due to globalization. The economic ramifications of "correct" business decisions are amplified by orders of magnitude when compared to mercantilist economies a few hundred years ago.
And income inequality actually is a problem even in and of itself, even without reference to absolute living standards. There's an increasing body of research that higher inequality in a society lowers happiness and increases resentment, ultimately undermining social cohesion and trust in government.
Today's 25th percentile person is likely to have air conditioning, refrigeration, internet, a cell phone, a microwave oven, an HDTV, and a reliable car that needs very little routine maintenance and has air bags and antilock brakes.
Today's 50th percentile is beating 1950s 75th percentile adding easy, affordable, safe, and reliable air transportation and living in a far larger house than their 1950s half-again higher counterpart.
Today's 75th percentile is beating the 95th percentile in 1950.
All of them have better health care options, and a longer life expectancy.
Real wage growth may not have arrived for those who trade their hours for wages, but the standard of living available from those wages has risen dramatically.
The real problem is that we don't have equal opportunities. That gives the rich people a huge advantage when it comes to earning more money. We don't need to tax the rich more, that doesn't really help you when you're poor. We need to wisely use the money that we already have to create more opportunities for everyone.
I make a pretty high wage compared to a cashier at a store, but my interests align with them a lot more than a Walton. Yet my peers are convinced that because they have the trappings of the petite bourgeoisie and a well funded 401k that they have more in common with a Koch.
I'm not familiar with a society that experienced such high inequality and did not have very disruptive upheaval afterwards. One would think the wealthy would advocate for universal health care, education and safety nets as a small price to pay for their own self preservation. On the other hand, they haven't had much to fear from the lower classes for a long time now.
There are only three classes of people who oppose it: 1) people who oppose all redistributive programs, 2) people who favor the centrally planned farce of the existing welfare system because it allows them to covertly insert corrupt industry-specific subsidies into the system, and 3) people who don't actually understand how it works.
If the 1% favor it they must like income redistribution, dislike opportunities for political corruption, or not understand what they're asking for.
A basic income even eliminates the need to have a minimum wage, which allows people whose labor is not worth a living wage to nonetheless trade it for whatever they can get and still not starve.
A basic job is economically damaging because by definition the value derived from the work is less than the compensation (or it would just be a regular job). Which creates all kinds of terrible incentives where, basically, people choose the basic job over more actually productive work because it's government-subsidized and the real job isn't.
Working as a teacher and having a second job to subsidise the first is considered purposeful. Working as a teacher and receiving the rest of the income as UBI is suddenly no longer purposeful?
The pro UBI argument is:
UBI removes the incentive for people to work at jobs they hate. It gives them negotiation power. If people are looking for purpose in their work then arguably not being restricted by financial considerations is allowing them to find purpose and be more happy. People get to decide what purpose means to them. I believe this is what women are doing in exchange for lower pay.
The anti UBI argument is:
Someone must force their own definition of purpose on them and if they weren't forced to work bad jobs they wouldn't have any purpose at all. They need someone that "thinks" for them because they are unable to "think" for themselves.
I don't understand why people are pushing for redistribution of income rather than redistribution of goods like we pretty much did with utilities, public transport and, to a certain degree, internet.
The main price increase in the bay area has been housing -- rent is still housing -- and the reason for that isn't primarily incomes. It's artificial scarcity (from zoning) in the face of increasing population. In a normal market without the artificial restrictions, the fact that people are willing to pay a million dollars for housing would cause lots of new housing to be constructed which would bring the price down.
Incomes contribute, because if housing cost that much and people weren't making that much money then they would move out of the area (which would lower demand), but those prices would never be sustainable without the restrictions on new construction.
But more importantly, this is all about relativity. If Bob has twenty dollars, Alice has ten and Charlie has one, and you print three more dollars and give each person one, now there is going to be ~10% inflation because $31 used to exist and now $34 exists. But now Charlie has $2 which are worth as much as $1.82 used to be, which is less than $2, but he's still up $0.82.
And on top of that, a UBI doesn't actually create new money. Everyone gets a dollar, but it's because Alice paid $1 in taxes and then got it back and Bob paid $2 in taxes $1 of which went to Charlie. There is no new money to cause inflation, it's just redistribution.
In theory there could be relative demand shifts, if Charlie likes to buy different stuff than Bob would have, but unless that stuff is in limited supply, people will just make more of it. And if it is in limited supply, it still works as redistribution because it just means we're back to relativity -- even if things did cost more, it still increases the proportion of things that Charlie gets.
> I don't understand why people are pushing for redistribution of income rather than redistribution of goods like we pretty much did with utilities, public transport and, to a certain degree, internet.
I don't understand what "redistribution of goods" means. More free public infrastructure? There are good reasons to do that for natural monopolies like roads and utilities, but that's a completely different thing, and we can do both at the same time.
So picking 1% as the threshold was very ill-conceived because now it includes many expert professionals and small business owners. So it's very easy to relate to them if you are also an expert or small business owner.
Who is waging this campaign?
I don't think is a campaign to vilify the 1% as much as it's an increased awareness by the 99% that no one needs to be making $800,000 a year. As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible, healthcare difficult to afford, fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings, is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people?
>that no one needs to be making $800,000 a year.
And that's where the mistake is. A significant number of people (including me) are fine with someone creating a company, selling it for a few million, or just having 10 good years of operation and retiring. The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years.
This is the problem with using 1%. The bottom of the 1% is filled with normal professionals that took huge risks (starting businesses) or spent a significant amount of time in training (brain surgeon).
>As people see home ownership being increasingly implausible
Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US. Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality. Just look at the bay area where there are people making good money. The housing shortage has caused prices to sky rocket to absorb up all of that difference. If you have 1000 people fighting for 100 houses, 900 people are going to get screwed regardless of income inequality.
> healthcare difficult to afford,
A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people.
>fulfilling work unable to be found and less than $1000 in savings
Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings.
>Who is waging this campaign?
Well people like you who claim nobody needs to make a lot of money and then blame a bunch of unrelated issues on income inequality. I can't tell if it was just the mathematical ignorance of who started the movement or if it was partially orchestrated by the super-rich. But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are, they lost significant support of the population within 50% of that income.
>is it any wonder people are upset, bothered and judgemental of people who make an impossibly larger amount of money than 99% of people?
I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them.
If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt, I don't think there would have been very much disagreement from a significant chunk of the US. As it stands, it just looks like an arbitrary cut-off screwing the people who managed to secure a good life rather than being focused on people with enough money to hire full-time Washington lobbyists.
The link references data from 2014.
> The rewards for creating something new need to be worth the risk of complete failure and loss of income for those years.
New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new. I don't feel that we ought to reward people who for merely creating things that are new. And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life? $465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life.
> Not if you give up on living in the most expensive parts of the US.
You're thinking in a narrow context. For someone like me who moved from the midwest to the west coast, yah, I could just go back "home". The larger issue however is that, to borrow a tired phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. The jobs that make a city work are largely not high-income earning jobs. That is: paramedics, firefighters, teachers, bus drivers, road repairmen, linemen, auto mechanics, delivery drivers, locksmiths, and on and on. Much fewer of these people are transplants than the high-earners and don't have support networks in those cheaper parts of the country. Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out.
> Even then, a housing shortage is hardly attributable to income inequality.
While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost.
> A broken healthcare system can't be fixed by fewer rich people.
I agree, the healthcare system is broken and the problem isn't for lack of money. But when you see politicians attempting to gut medicare for tax breaks for the rich it doesn't little to instill confidence that that money could be better spent.
> Capping incomes of successful professions will not add more fulfilling professions nor will it increase their savings.
I agree.
> But by making it include skilled professionals that had to put in huge risks to get where they are
"Huge Risks"? If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them.
> I don't know what "impossibly larger" is supposed to mean in this context. Someone who makes $250k will not see someone who makes $500k as making an "impossibly larger" amount of money than them.
Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger. Referencing the professions I listed above, can those skilled professional expect to make $250,000 a year in their profession?
> If this whole movement had been more carefully crafted to exclude people that had to go to medical school and go $350k into debt
While I only know a handful of people who have gone to medical school or law school, the path to repaying those loans seems to be pretty straightforward and perhaps a little nerve-racking at times, but I don't know anyone who's gone destitute as a result of those loans. Also, I'm critical of a system that puts the burden of risk on the individual for training individuals to do those important, necessary jobs.
Their risk-taking isn't what we ought to be rewarding, it's the value that those professions bring to the general population.
These problems are all intersectional. Is it the fault of rich people that there are poor people? Often not, in some cases yes. There have long been abuses of the lower economic classes by the higher economic classes. I think one the largest problems is how quickly wealthy people lose solidarity with lower earners and believe that it's their "hard work" that got them their wealth. People stuck in lower incomes know how ignorant that belief is. It's also exceedingly difficult for a person living paycheck to paycheck, rais...
I suppose you will be heading up the committee to decide the value of what people do for the community.?
If only there were some automatic way where the markets could decide what is valuable and what is not.
Then reference correct newer data.
>New things are not inherently valuable by virtue of being new.
If people don't think they are getting value out of a business's product, people will not pay for it and the owner won't be rewarded. Markets 101.
>And why should anyone be rewarded beyond having a comfortable, easy life?
Tall poppy syndrome. Why shouldn't we strive for people to have paths to easy lives? Attacking the 1% just strikes down people who have done well without improving everyone else.
>$465,000 is an insane salary, magnitudes larger than is required for a comfortable life.
You assume it's sustainable for life. These people are not clock punchers working for some government with no budget limits. If you run a business it could lose money for a year and your salary could easily be < $0 if you are keeping it alive. If you are a highly compensated professional and lose your job due to industry collapse or even just industry, you might not find a job for years. Have you ever even considered that or do you assume salaries just flow the same every year?
How about the fact that a medical student has to throw away ~12 years of earning potential and accrue debt with interest?
These are all massive risks that these professionals take and that's the reason they are compensated the way they are. If it was so easy there would be a big supply of them and they wouldn't be so well compensated by buyers. Markets 101.
>Creating cities where only the wealthy can afford to live necessarily, forcefully pushes other people out.
But you are part of the problem by choosing to live there and competing for the shortage of housing (either via rent or purchase). The Midwest isn't having those problems and it isn't due to a lack of rich people. There just isn't such a strong NIMBY culture there that prevents housing being built and there isn't a giant influx of millennials moving into them as if they are the last place on earth.
>While I agree that it's vital to build enough housing for the demand, there is one reason alone that a house can cost $600,000. That is because someone has ~$120,000 in liquid, spendable cash. If everyone had only $1000 of cash, how much could a house possibly cost.
This is absolutely false. People can get loans with much less than 20% down and they can go in with family members/friends on a mortgage. If everyone only had $1000 cash and there was a housing shortage, the house would go to whoever was the most desperate by taking out the largest loan (with a group if necessary). Housing costs would continue to squeeze the life out of the community because there just aren't enough houses and people are competing for them (see the pigeonhole principle).
>If you have stories about skilled professionals who risked their security and failed I'd love to hear them.
Have some imagination. Every single medical student for one. They can finish medical school/residency with life crushing student debt, screw up, and nearly immediately have their license revoked. Or they can just fail school right at the end. Not only did they throw away their 20s, they now have significant student loan debt that is extremely difficult to discharge in bankruptcy.
If you don't think small business owners put in any risk, I suggest you try to get a small business loan from a bank without putting a bunch of your own savings in as collateral. 99%+ of small businesses don't get showered with VC money, they have to go the loan route because they aren't "changing the world".
>Sure, but someone who makes $45,000 is likely to see $100,000 as impossibly larger.
Nope, this comes up in professions like truck driving, mechanics, etc all the time. The difference between those two is usually just deciding offer your services as a contractor with the risks involved rather than working for a big company directly. A plumber running his/her own business ma...
I'm upset when natural disasters occur, but I don't blame anyone for them. I'm upset when it's too cold outside, but I don't blame anyone for that.
The problem is that, when it comes to the economy, people for some reason think that it's nothing like a force of nature - they (sometimes subconsciously) assume that if one person is rich, that means another person is poor. Or even, that if someone is rich, than that has something to do with whether she "deserves" it. That's close[1] to being as nonsensical as asking if someone "deserved" to die in a hurricane.
[1] I write "close", because this only applies in a good capitalist economy. There are of course ways to cheat, whether by directly stealing money from other people (in which case you'd go to jail in a well functioning society), or by changing the laws to benefit yourself (which is a subversion of the capitalist system, but it can happen. It's not what people are usually complaining about though).
[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm
https://ballotpedia.org/School_board_elections,_2016 https://ballotpedia.org/Money_in_local_elections_(2016)
It's not a zero sum game. Just because the 1% benefit from a particular policy, it doesn't mean other non-1% people supporting it don't benefit as well.
What was labelled the "death tax", which somehow became a grassroots issue, was taxes on inheritance over roughly 5 million. It's now doubled to 11 million with the new tax bill. This is not in the interest of well over 99% of people.
If I benefit from something, it doesn't bother me at all that someone benefits even more. Should I forfeit my benefits out of spite?
> What was labelled the "death tax", which somehow became a grassroots issue, was taxes on inheritance over roughly 5 million. It's now doubled to 11 million with the new tax bill. This is not in the interest of well over 99% of people.
Maybe people feel it's fair to get to pass your wealth onto your children and that if they were rich they would support this idea. There's something to be said about sticking to your moral values and not being a hypocrite especially when what is being debated is having the state take a private citizen's money away from them.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hop...
At any given time a person is more likely to be a student, in an entry level position, or retired, than be at the height of their career.
39% in the top 1% is still an overestimate, but it's probably not far wrong to say that 39% of people will at some point in their lives be in the top 5%.
The problem is with using "1%" as the threshold, because that just means you and your spouse are successful professionals at the height of your careers, when the real problem is the top <0.001% and, even more than that, the accumulating wealth of large corporations relative to individuals.
1: https://www.investopedia.com/news/how-much-income-puts-you-t...
2: http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/u-s-top-one-per...
Senior Associate Attorney: $239,270
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-associate-attorney...
Senior Physician: $225,076
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/senior-physician-salary-S...
This is also not at all out of line with what trade professionals like electricians are making when they start out on their own but by the time they retire have half a dozen people working for them.
Those "one time" activities will all temporarily boost your AGI, meaning people come into and out of the "top 5%" brackets pretty regularly. It won't get you into the top 0.001%, but could easily boost what you think of as a "normal" two-income couple into the top 5% or 1% at some point in their life.
What’s most amusing to me are the 19% who think they are currently among the top 1%. That’s just math fail.
You may disagree, but many people do have priciples that include private property rights, limited government, and flatter tax schemes.
Btw, I don't see being "selfish" as a bad thing or value judgement. It's kind of what we do as humans.