Yeah I'm getting paid by the Big Poverty lobby. Also im a Russian bot.
Wealth & Income Inequality
- Thread starter Eboue
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Yeah I'm getting paid by the Big Poverty lobby. Also im a Russian bot.
Working towards full equality is a futile and pointless exercise. It's law of nature. We should just work towards controlling it. Slavery is an example of out of control and society bought it under control. Proves the point rather than otherwise.
There is no such proven modal which shows how economics will play out in future for an event with any kind of guarantee. We can use them as a resource but using them as a prediction tool is not really guaranteed.
No, but it is a game of strategic interaction with finite resources.
It is a fact that the policies that some of the super rich and mega corporations support absolutely have a direct negative effect on other less wealthy individuals and small businesses (not always but usually) as many examples show.
When the FSMA and CFMA were unleashed to allow the shady traders at Bear, Lehman, mortgage brokers like Countrywide to achieve immense profits, there were absolutely losers including homeowners, institutional investors (like CalPERS) and the general tax payer who had to pay the bailouts. So while the economy in general is not a zero-sum game, that absolutely does not mean the self-serving policies that special interests massively profit from do not have losers who were negatively effected by those same policies.
When the shady California energy de-regulation scheme was unleashed, there were absolutely winners for a time (Enron and other fossil fuel companies got rich) meanwhile it was the California citizens paying higher rates (loss) while some senior citizens even died due to the blackout manipulation of the energy traders (human loss).
So again, while the overall economy is not quite "zero-sum" there are absolutely direct negative consequences from policies pushed by immortal entities of extreme wealth whose only organizational obligation is to maximize its own profits.
Its just sleight of hand to try to use "its not zero sum" to ignore the direct negative consequences that corporate self-serving policies have on the general population. Its interesting because many economists have looked into measuring a lot of this dispersed negative social consequences of corporate greed like pollution. I could start linking tonnes of articles on these topics
I'm not quite following how this is relevant so I'll give an example of what I mean.
Early childhood programs (Pre-school) overwhelming increase positive outcomes in society. The benefits drastically outweigh the negatives therefore that is a public program that absolutely should be funded.
I also support experimental programs in localities that believe they might work. I strongly believe in an dynamic model that is not afraid to try new things and experiment to achieve better outcomes. If something doesn't work get rid of it. If getting rid of something didn't work (like the elimination of vocational programs in many US high schools) then bring it back. Trial and error is how science and human knowledge advances
RAND research said:
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We should still aim to move as close to it as we can. Certainly 'controlling' it strikes me as a move in that direction.
We're never going to have equality of outcome since everyone has a degree of agency and can do what they want. We can however work on equality of opportunity.
You saying it's not there (racism and sexism aside) ?
This is one of the better discussions in this thread
No business will succeed simply because they have money. It also requires extreme talent. Both were excellent programmers. Zuckerberg used to create codes and even computer games when he was a child.
And there are thousands of people who have started from humble beginnings. Not sure if you’re serious here. Someone mentioned Oprah.
All these are immaterial anyway. The point still remains that both these people are earning money due to the vision in the product rather than any other way
Yes.
A kid born in poor rural area with minimal/no funding in public services/school is naturally at a massive disadvantage compare to another who enjoys those services, being more fortunate to be born elsewhere.
It's not a coincidence that the majority of people end up in the same economic ladder as their parents. The minuscule number of people who are lucky enough to end up 'successful' (like your idol Oprah) doesn't change that reality, which we need to combat.
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Extreme talent? One of them just made a website in the mid-2000s when millions of people were making websites
And how many of those millions of code writers are multi billionaires now?Extreme talent? One of them just made a website in the mid-2000s when millions of people were making websites
Who exactly are you talking about here?Extreme talent? One of them just made a website in the mid-2000s when millions of people were making websites
Fun read and I agree with most of it.
That said I find it very hard to give Piketty the benefit of a doubt that this book is actually written in good faith*. To write a book as comprehensive as Capital in the 21th Century, one has to have a solid grip on statistics, relevant theories and other view points. The amount of "mistakes" and one-sided presentation of the data is just astonishing. I think the only convincing explanation for this is, that Piketty believes, that the ends justify the means. His motivation isn't to engage in honest scientific exploration of the subject, but to present the strongest possible case for certain policies. Additionally the approach of finding grand-theories is nothing short of a disaster in economics. Grand-Theories usually violate basic scientific values and the field is moving away from it. What Picketty did in this book is to present advocacy under the guise of accademic work.
While Magness and Murphy can rightfully be considered biased, most of their conclusions actually check out: The paper from David Sutch is validating some of their findings. His conclusion is about as harsh as possible without calling Piketty a fraud (its important to note, that David Sutch would probably agree with much of Piketty's concerns)
The fact, that he actually has to write the last sentence in his abstract says it all.
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*this applies also to various other economists, who pursue public advocacy - on both sides of the spectrum.
Don't Amazon, Apple, Microsoft etc have Employee Unions?
Out of the listed the only that would make sense to have one is Amazon.
Why not in other companies? I picked microsoft and apple because they were talked about in the thread. Surely having an employee union helps the employees only regardless of sector and companies
Usually unions are associated with low qualification labour, where wages have small deviations. The other companies rely mainly on very qualified workforce where there are significant differences between remunerations due to differences in experience and ability.
Spot on.
@Eboue Out of curiosity, how much wealth do you think one person should be allowed to accumulate then?
£1.50
Enough to buy a can of Pepsi then, not bad.
It's so annoying to see valuable discussions get derailed again as usual. Stop discussing extreme opinions like 'all wealthy people are evil' etc, it's not adding anything of note to the discussion.
How about 5 million per year. 100 percent tax on all wealth above that point. 90% inheritance tax. Tax capital gains the same as income. Etc
Your 100% tax again, that is just ludcrius on so many levels.
Your 100% tax again, that is just ludcrius on so many levels.
The Bernie Sanders progressive taxation scale he proposed to help pay for his healthcare plan is workable.
I think Galbraith's suggestions (from that article I remembered earlier) are a logical and powerful place to begin
James Galbraith said:
Considering that universal healthcare is much cheaper for every other country that has it from Europe to Canada to Japan, its not really going to cost more in the long term. Its just going to require a short-term shifting of resources (of course that is what some are trying to fight to the death because that is their ez-money train going away). For taxes I hope Bernie's scheme includes unearned income because that is where the top .01% really rip off the rest of the taxpayers by paying such a low rate.
The taxation rates were of course a very small part of how Sanders proposed paying for Medicare for all (some of which is very speculative).
The bulk would come from employer paid health care premium of 6.2% and a 2.2% income based premium for all households. The other parts coming from raising capital gains taxes, reducing tax deductions for high net worth people, and finally (most speculative of all) savings from existing health care expenditures.
Your 100% tax again, that is just ludcrius on so many levels.
Try posting without smiles for a change
I would actually argue that the fact that we can name these people we point to as a "look how far they climbed, you can too" example illustrates their rarity.
Even on a less famous scale, there's also a decent amount of 'survival bias' at play. "My grandfather was born into nothing and worked hard all his life to give us the opportunities and privileges we enjoyed growing up" is a nicer and more memorable story than the countless ones of "my father started at 2 and I'm at 2 (or 3 or 4 or whatever)."
Never ceases to amaze me how little tax you Americans pay. Incredible that those rates would be perceived as high. The US government must be sitting on an absolute fortune if it was willing to tax its citiizens as much as most of Europe.
Definitely. But then again Americans have been conditioned to believe that government is bad and generally tantamount to waste and that money is best kept in the private sector, which of course helps keep most of it in the pockets of the top 1 percent.
Is income inequality really a great indicator of anything? Surely what matters is the income and quality of life at the bottom not how far the arbitrary distance is between bottom and top-level incomes. I'd rather income and quality of life at the bottom was high even if the gap between the richest and poorest was greater than a scenario where the quality of life at the bottom was poor but it was somehow 'better' because those at the top weren't as rich.
Its informative in so far as if most of the capital is coagulated at the very top end, then deductively the remaining 98% are not going to have access to the services needed to run a functional society. Not only would money and quality of life be greatly affected, but so too would power.
In a world where the people at the top are either in governments directly, or lobby them with every fibre of their being a pound/dollar in their bank account, of course income inequality is a great indicator. The reason these people don't give a flying feck about the people at the bottom, is because their ivory towers are too big to notice them down there.
But government officials on the minimum wage and see how quickly that minimum sky rockets.
But government officials on the minimum wage and see how quickly that minimum sky rockets.
Progressive taxation is certainly the most viable in terms of wealth distribution. I just think any plan with a 100% top bracket is unworkable.
Your 100% tax again, that is just ludcrius on so many levels. *rolleyes*
Well the top rate is HK is 15%