Sprotch 39 days ago [-]
A better metric than income inequality would be the standard of living of the poorest. If everyone has access to medical care, housing, and education, does it really matter if some people have more on their bank account?
danans 39 days ago [-]
> If everyone has access to medical care, housing, and education, does it really matter if some people have more on their bank account?

It still matters when some people have 6+ orders of magnitude more wealth than the median person.

Because of this wealth disparity, through the legal channels of campaign contributions, they are able to have a disproportionate and therefore antidemocratic effect on government policy.

msgodel 39 days ago [-]
That's always going to exist. Unless you make people themselves absolutely uniform you're always going to have individuals with unusual amounts of influence. Instead of freaking out over this you should try to ensure their interests are aligned as closely as possible and that they're not abusing each other.
const_cast 39 days ago [-]
As with everything in life, it's a matter of scale.

It's truly not a problem if some people have maybe 10x more influence than others. It becomes a problem when some people have so much influence that they, alone, can change the trajectory of their country and even sidestep democratic processes. Which is what we're seeing in countries like the US.

nh23423fefe 39 days ago [-]
citation needed. "so much" is meaningless. power exists to be wielded. the majority of people are ignorant and uncaring so of course a small minority of highly affected and powerful individuals will exercise power.

this common sense is somehow anti-democratic.

scienceman 39 days ago [-]
"power exists to be wielded" citation needed
nh23423fefe 38 days ago [-]
humans compete against other humans to change the world. power is winning. complaining about the valence of the change is just what losing looks like.

the weak spam rhetoric because they lack power to actually enact the change they claim to want.

the losing response to this is to whine about systemic blah blah blah, enjoy your subservience.

PaulHoule 39 days ago [-]
Some very powerful people are ignorant and uncaring too, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

and in the case of Meta it is not just "morals" or "ethics" but very basic attributes of quality and UX. Instagram fails to load the first time I try to load it on my computer, but it usually comes up after a reload. Uploading photos on Instagram is much more of a hassle (takes much longer) than it is on the unfunded web Mastodon client which is developed by open source fanatics who'd I'd expect to have zero empathy for ordinary users. I like the idea of the Meta Quest 3 but so many things, particularly the social features, are terribly thought out and if you're delighted that something works now there's a good chance it will regress next week.

If Zuck fired his whole front end team in Silicon Valley and hired some good FE people in Minnesota, retired and put a rando in charge I bet he'd be worth 5x as much overnight.

TFYS 39 days ago [-]
With the technologies we have today, I'm pretty sure it would be possible to create a system that doesn't have to give anyone so much influence that it becomes a problem. If you allow a system to have such concentrations of power, it's only a matter of time until someone incompetent or otherwise faulty person takes control and a lot of lives are ruined.
user____name 39 days ago [-]
Political influence is not a step function.
surgical_fire 39 days ago [-]
Maybe if we bow enough to our billionaire overlords they will spare us is your rationale?

This is bullshit. You can have lower income inequality without necessarily having an elite with destructive amounts of money with proper regulations and taxation against the most wealthy.

It's alright for a rich guy to live in a nice house ans drive around in a luxury car. It's not right when they have enough money to just buy access to the highest levels of everything to their benefit (and the rest of society prejudice).

candiddevmike 39 days ago [-]
We all only have so much time on this earth. Why is it fair for some folks to spend a disproportionate amount of that time toiling away for basic sustenance while others spend their days on their personal hotel sized yachts?
delichon 39 days ago [-]
For the same reason that it's fair when one seed falls on asphalt and dies when another seed falls in shit and thrives: it isn't. Fairness turns out not to be one of the forces of the universe.
candiddevmike 39 days ago [-]
Wealth inequality isn't some random thing though, our government and economic system enables it. It's not like we have no control over it.
gruez 39 days ago [-]
At the most fundamental level it is. Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity, and therefore wealth. As the economy becomes more globalized and more knowledge-based, differences in ability are magnified even more. A skilled antelope hunter can at best hunt 5x more than the median hunter, but someone who makes a killer app can make billions. Sure, government can play a role in redistributing that wealth, but that's an intervention, not the default state of things.
janalsncm 39 days ago [-]
> Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity

Even if I accept your premise, it doesn’t explain why some places have far more wealth inequality than others despite having similar differences in abilities in those places. There might be some innate differences in abilities, but the magnification of those differences is socially constructed. It’s not a fact of nature.

You also are discounting luck. Some people are lucky. They were born with enormous inherited wealth. Or, their business happened to be in the right place in the right time.

nh23423fefe 39 days ago [-]
so what, what's wrong with luck? you are pretending that inherited wealth came from nowhere. someone did it and they love their family more than randoms. so of course their family benefits.

why should i work hard for strangers who vilify me?

janalsncm 38 days ago [-]
It’s at odds with meritocracy. We should reward competence and hard work, not membership in a dynasty.
gruez 38 days ago [-]
Do you have kids? If so, are you going to send him/her to a private school, assuming you can afford it? What about stumping up money for extracurriculars or tutoring? Or if you're not really wealthy, what about giving immaterial aid like tutoring yourself? All of these things are "at odds with meritocracy", but that doesn't mean it's a slam dunk argument against them.
nh23423fefe 32 days ago [-]
You seem to think that rich people don't win because they are better. Seems like cope to me to imagine they are outside of merit systems.

Family relationships are just compound interest.

int_19h 31 days ago [-]
For the most part, it's not people who are making killer apps that make billions, it's people who hire those who make the apps.
mindslight 39 days ago [-]
Government plays the interventionist role of enabling the killer app maker to make billions of dollars, rather than zero antelopes - or more realistically, a meager amount of food doing menial labor for the local warlord. That's the thing many app makers have seem to forgotten.

I'm coming from a libertarian perspective, so I'm certainly not trying to use that to justify no-exit totalitarian thinking. But it's still important to remember that base truth when analyzing the overall outcomes of our current system.

ToucanLoucan 39 days ago [-]
> Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity, and therefore wealth.

Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.

I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery, entry into which also requires some level of wealth and not a tiny amount of it either.

john-h-k 39 days ago [-]
> Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.

Not too long ago I dug a large hole, and then filled it back in again. It was very difficult and tiring, and entirely useless.

If you accept that I don’t deserve money for this, then you reject the premise that effort/work is the only factor determining value, and “utility” or value to others also matters

TFYS 39 days ago [-]
There’s no objective way to determine how much of a product’s utility is created by whom. For example, if I invent a thingamajig and hire people to build and sell it, how can we determine what percentage of the value comes from me, the workers, or the users who find new ways to use it? We can’t.

As a result, money gets distributed based on the relative power of those involved in the process. Business owners typically hold the most power, in-demand workers have some leverage, and others have less. So being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a lot of value for others, it may just mean you’ve held positions of power.

Getting rid of these positions of power is the way to create a more equal and prosperous society.

gruez 39 days ago [-]
>Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.

This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid", because the statement basically becomes "show me literally any study that correlates salary with wealth". However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work", and would rather have some subjective measure like "social value" or whatever. As imperfect market wage is, it's as objective of a measure as we can get, and letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.

>I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery.

My claim isn't that wealth right now is distributed 100% meritocratically, only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.

ToucanLoucan 39 days ago [-]
> This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid"

I do not even remotely accept your premise. A short list of jobs that are crucial to modern life that are chronically underpaid:

* Teachers

* Nursing/care staff

* Daycare workers

* Janitorial staff

* Delivery/logistics workers

FAR from an exhaustive list.

> However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work"

Considering how many working poor there are I'd say there's a solid reason for rejection. If people are working full time hours and still unable to meet their needs, clearly something is wrong.

> only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.

This is an utter non-sequitur to anything I was talking about. You assert that value of work is tied to the wealth of the one doing the work. I challenged this by pointing out numerous whole categories of laborer that are and have been underpaid for some time. You assert that this is a subjective measurement. I don't know what to really say here.

If doing work that needs doing for the understood full time hours we as a society have stated is not a path to at least a stable life, if not a particularly luxurious one, then what's the point of working? And, more concerningly, why would anyone take up that job that being the case? Nurse and teacher retention right now is horrific specifically because the pay isn't very good and it's a very demanding job, and as a result we have a shortage of both. But we still need them.

gruez 39 days ago [-]
>letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.
theLiminator 39 days ago [-]
I guess the question is is wealth inequality/income inequality something to be targeted? Also, there's the question of whether the living standards of the poorest improve faster if we target wealth/income inequality?
BurningFrog 39 days ago [-]
Empirically, the only working paths to wealth equality is that everyone is poor.

For a society to become wealthy, those who produce more wealth need to get to end up with more wealth.

delichon 39 days ago [-]
Wealth inequality broadly follows the Pareto distribution, which is natural and does derive from randomness. We could define fairness as a flat distribution and redistribute accordingly, but that requires continual work to be done against the random Pareto distribution or it reverts. It's do-able, but it requires a long term consensus that doesn't currently exist.
scienceman 39 days ago [-]
There is no one pareto distribution — it is a family of distributions, with different parameters meaning different intercepts, and therefore different levels on inequality.
johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
To some extent. If you vote in a rep and he lies about his policy, then the people are stuck with him for 2 or 6 years. We don't have mechanisms to impeach someone like that (some states might, but it's not a federal mechanism); his colleagues need to impeach him, which they hesitate to unless something dsmning occurs.
ToucanLoucan 39 days ago [-]
But that unfairness is itself based on forces of the universe, in this case: a seed can grow in shit, a seed cannot grow in asphalt.

To extend your metaphor, we have tons of the available "surface area" for people to fall on paved with asphalt, to suit the preferences of those sitting in shit. These are not fixed things. We placed the asphalt. We can tear it up, if we so choose to.

delichon 39 days ago [-]
We have the surface area for the next generation, but since unconstrained life grows exponentially, it runs out within a few generations. Isn't some kind of homeostasis preferable to repeated booms and busts?
ToucanLoucan 39 days ago [-]
If unconstrained life grows exponentially why is it every developed country is having a birthrate crisis? It seems most populations tend to naturally stabilize once parents realize they don't need to have like 7 kids hoping 2 or 3 survive childhood.
tw600040 39 days ago [-]
When someone asks how something is fair - coming back with life is like that or life isn't fair is not a valid response. Humanity should strive to make the systems as fair as possible while accepting the fact that unfairness will still exist. Why will theft etc be a crime if not for the idea of fairness. You can make the same life is unfair argument to defend theft but that's not the way it should be / is.
gruez 39 days ago [-]
>Humanity should strive to make the systems as fair as possible while accepting the fact that unfairness will still exist.

The standard argument against this is that "inequality is a good thing because it leads to innovation" or whatever.

drewcoo 39 days ago [-]
So the question is "why is life unfair?"

Or is it "why do bad beginnings with lots of drudgery not lead to yacht ownership?"

int_19h 31 days ago [-]
The question is rather "why do we accept that life is unfair rather than try to make it more fair?"
lotsofpulp 39 days ago [-]
It’s not fair, just like most of life due to the genes/parents/geography/etc you are born to.
jjice 39 days ago [-]
I don't know enough about anything to intellectually comment on this kind of thing, but I do agree that the standard of living for the poorest is probably a good metric of a society.

If the poorest people in a country get to live a happy, healthy life with people that love in not be stressed about food or housing, that sounds like a fantastic world.

Do any countries current achieve this? Japan maybe? I have no clue.

39 days ago [-]
johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
These days, I believe every country is struggling with housing in some regard. But a good part of the EU and Japan and maybe South Korea might have had all those in the 2010's
socalgal2 39 days ago [-]
It's hard to compare countries. Japan has a culture of lots of construction, and that housing is not an investment. They also have far less zoning rules and far less housing requirements (less of "must have 2 parking spaces, must have N meters of space in front of lot, must have X size bathroom", etc. The result is there are plenty of inexpensive and small places to rent. For example, I just did a search on suumo.jp on one train line 1 or 2 stops from Shibuya. 36 units came up under $275 a month. (would be several hundred units if I search all lines that go through Shibuya). The units are small (7.5 to 15 square meters), Many don't even have a shower (you'd walk to a public bath). But, you'll have shelter. So even on a minimum wage part time salary you can probably afford to have a roof over your head. And, that was in Shibuya. Go out 10-15 stops and it will get even cheaper or they'll get larger with more amenities for the same price.

Food can also be affordable in Japan.

bongoman42 39 days ago [-]
I think all GCC countries achieve this for their citizens, going well above just living wage.
abdullahkhalids 39 days ago [-]
Because even modern democracies are much closer to 1-money-1-vote than 1-person-1-vote. "If some people have more on their bank account", what we have observed is that they use that money to change the rules of the game to extract even more wealth from those who have less in their bank account. So pretty soon the system evolves to where many don't have "access to medical care, housing, and education".

Give me a viable political system where wealth is not correlated with political power, and I will be liable to agree with you.

twoodfin 39 days ago [-]
If that’s the scheme it’s failing miserably:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

rangestransform 39 days ago [-]
I think housing is the biggest problem here, the ideology-based encouragement of homeownership led to homeowners voting for people who would protect their “””””investment””””” and preserve their particular lifestyle. Restrictive zoning and well meaning but restrictive laws (affordable housing requirements, minimum floor area, union labour requirement, countless procedural burdens) mean that we will effectively never have the Japan housing situation in the US
AliAbdoli 39 days ago [-]
Yes it does. I presume you don't wanna live in a world where Elon owns every company and you have no choice to work for him even if his wage is livable
stego-tech 39 days ago [-]
Because once you change the goal post, it becomes gameable. If we say the better metric is healthcare, housing, and education, then:

* Healthcare will be defined as “Primary Care Visits with approved in-network physicians”, who will also have proportionally lower pay so those who made that definition can keep more money for themselves

* Housing will be redefined to include cockroach-infested squallor, so landlords can pocket more money

* Education will have more stratas put in place at higher costs, such that “free” or “baseline” education is increasingly worthless, wages depressed, and only those of means may participate in society

All of those circle back to wealth inequality, and is why that metric won’t go away - and why the rich have a vested interest in convincing the poor that it’s everyone and everything else’s fault for their precarity.

It’s all about money. When more people have a larger share of the money, better decisions and outcomes are more likely than 1.1% of people hoarding 50% of global wealth for themselves. The math is absolutely that simple, as are the solutions (TAXES).

user____name 39 days ago [-]
Inequality always expends until the political interests of the rich and poor diverge so much that societies come apart at the seams.

Relative equality is just as important, people get all kinds of stress related illnesses if they cannot keep up.

One example is people people putting themselves in debt in order to get a college degree.

Furthermore, the financial system works as a procyclical tool for the wealthy, since they can use debt financing as a leverage mechanism, while the poor have an insufficient credit score. This makes is easy for those with money to commandeer an outsized share of the available resources within an economy.

For example, wealthy owners using real estate and as an investment vehicle, bidding up house prices for everyone. The banks make a killing on selling mortgages while the population becomes indebted and precarity rises.

Here are some theories which I find interesting:

The Iron Law of Oligarchy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Structural Demographic Theory https://peterturchin.com/structural-demographic-theory/

Elite Overproduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

Firm Hierarchy predicts Income https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/11/19/firming-up-hi...

Herring 37 days ago [-]
Yes unfortunately it does matter. Concentration of economic power generally leads to concentration of political power (ie non-democracy). There are tons of pathways, eg campaign finance, lobbying, media ownership, threat of capital flight, regulatory capture, to name a few.

Then lack of political power leads right back to lower standard of living for the poor.

drewcoo 39 days ago [-]
> people have more on their bank account

That's a measure of liquid wealth inequality, not income inequality.

ajuc 39 days ago [-]
Income inequality is not exactly the right metric. Wealth inequality is what matters. But I think that's what you meant because you talked about the bank account.

But, anyway - it does matter, obviously. Money are a way for the society to decide what is more important. The more money you have the more decisions in a society you make. If a few people have most of the money - they get to decide for the whole society what is actually happening.

TL;DR: high enough wealth inequality turns democracy into oligarchy. Even if it's a nice cozy oligarchy with good social - odds are it probably won't stay that way forever.

loxodrome 39 days ago [-]
By that logic it’d be okay to have everyone making the minimum wage if it was high enough. Do you realize what a communist distopia that would be?
lucyjojo 39 days ago [-]
everyone with a universal income? with no unnecessary suffering for housing, health, food or education?

that's an utopia.

talkingtab 39 days ago [-]
I apologize in advance but this issue is a crucial one. The effects of this "inequality" for all people, rich and poor alike should not be underestimated.

Accurately understanding cause and effect, having a diagnosis that actually affords an understanding and solution to the problem is of some importance then.

In the US we see a severe and dramatic event: falling income and rising stock market. In simple terms, corporation profits are rising and those rising profits are going to those who are already wealthy. At the same time, the real income of common people is falling. The discussion often turns to "inflation" as though low inflation is good news. If you cannot afford reasonable health care, food, adequate housing, low inflation does not help. In the discussion of these increasingly common problems, the obvious solution - paying a living wage - does not come up.

A key tool in understanding situations is "Cuo bono?" Who benefits? In the US and other countries it is corporations. An ancillary question is who does not benefit? The answer to that is question is given by the fact that the national minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. Who benefits? Who does not? When the "too big to fail" banks had problems, the US instituted socialism for corporations. Who benefited? Who did not?

And certainly there is less public opinion support for higher minimum wages. Why could this be? Public support is to some extent determined by public discussion - where people express their problems and issues. If there is no forum for this discussion, then perhaps that is the crucial factor. In which case measuring "public opinion" will not be predictive.

A question then is whether there are forums where the experiences of common people are primary. Perhaps the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, is a such a forum? Really? Or perhaps other media, supported for the most part by corporate advertising is the answer. For example, the NYT with their articles about where to buy your two million dollar vacation home? Or here is a recent article for you:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/style/plant-sitter-nanny....

Our so called news media have dramatically failed. And somehow the NYT is surprised that there are people who will now choose any alternative over the status quo. And if you had the nerve to reject both candidates in the last election, the NYT deemed you a "double hater".

RestlessMind 39 days ago [-]
> In the US we see a severe and dramatic event: falling income and rising stock market

Inflation adjusted median wage has been increasing since mid-90's: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

talkingtab 39 days ago [-]
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johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
>Our so called news media have dramatically failed. And somehow the NYT is surprised that there are people who will now choose any alternative over the status quo

Our media is bought out by the very people who benefit, sadly. We've truly hit full oligarchy in 2025. Even manipulating the ones suffering to vote against their own best interests

comrade1234 39 days ago [-]
It feels like the USA is becoming like India (and others) where a middle class lifestyle depends more and more on the work of the extreme poor. I have friends in India with live-in Nannie's, live-in chef and a driver and they aren't extremely rich - they can get by paying these people a pittance.

The USA similarly relies on low-paid, often illegal, workers being paid less than minimum wage to harvest their food, wash their cars, do their gardening, etc...

nostrademons 39 days ago [-]
A lot of this is because of the housing theory of everything along with increasing wages and professional opportunities for (a subset of) women.

In the post-WW2 era, housing, food, and energy were cheap, which made it possible for a single wage earner (usually the husband) to support a family. All of the things that upper-middle-class families commonly outsource - cooking, cleaning, gardening, childcare, housework, driving kids around - were done by the wife. Now they are low-paid labor; before they were unpaid labor, but they still had to get done.

The existence of a market for low-productivity tasks like childcare and cleaning depends upon income inequality. These are not jobs where capital and specialization makes you more efficient; one person can do them roughly as well as another, and often times a household member is more efficient than external paid help. For a market to be profitable in these activities, the opportunity cost of one person’s time must be much greater than the wages they pay for this service, which implies wage inequality.

Two-edged swords and all that. Greater equality between sexes within a family is made up for by greater inequality between families.

johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
Calling childcare "low productivity" is sadly part of the problem here. It doesn't hit the GOP as hard, but it's a necessary task for the future of society. And those impacts determine how future generations react.

You don't invest in your future, don't be surprised when the future doesn't invest in society.

nostrademons 38 days ago [-]
I mean this in its specific technical and economic definition. Childcare is low productivity in that no matter how much capital, technology, and mechanization you throw at it, one adult will be able to care for a limited number of children, and that limit is not all that much higher than what a parent could do. Infant childcare, for example, is limited by law in many jurisdictions to no more than 1 adult per 4 children, and if you've ever cared for an infant, you'd know that limit is pretty inherent to the job itself. Through Baumol's Cost Disease [1], this implies rising costs in these sectors and an increasing percentage of employment devoted to them.

That these sectors are necessary was part of my point. If the parent isn't doing the job, somebody else is; you can't just eliminate or automate the job entirely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

danans 39 days ago [-]
> It feels like the USA is becoming like India (and others) where a middle class lifestyle depends more and more on the work of the extreme poor.

With a longer perspective, the trend in the US can be seen more as a reversion to a prior state. 100 years ago the US wasn't that different than India today in terms of exploitation of poor laborers.

drewcoo 39 days ago [-]
> 100 years ago the US wasn't that different than India today in terms of exploitation of poor laborers.

100 years ago there was a period of prosperity in the US following WWI.

100 years ago there was much stronger unionization for Americans both in factories and on farms.

The high tech infrastructure 100 years ago was electrification, US cities being wired up and almost all rural (where most Americans lived and worked) areas not. You might argue for the phone but rural phones took longer than electricity to deploy. The high tech infra today is Internet and rural Indians are much more connected than century-ago Americans.

Conditions are very different in important ways. I'm intentionally leaving out race/caste comparisons, which are valid but will also lead to massive downvotes.

danans 39 days ago [-]
> 100 years ago there was a period of prosperity in the US following WWI.

Prosperity for whom?

See for yourself where inequality was in the 1920s vs the post WW2 period:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Uni...

39 days ago [-]
msgodel 39 days ago [-]
Most of the world looks that way and it's largely a consequence of their culture.

We've spent decades saying that the US's culture was immoral for various reasons and did everything we could to import foreigners from places like that, now we're seeing the cultural shift and it turns out the ideas we had weren't as bad as we thought.

cropcirclbureau 39 days ago [-]
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msgodel 39 days ago [-]
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surgical_fire 39 days ago [-]
That you think that US has historically been "friendly" towards the idea of rights for women, blacks, and latinos is pretty amusing.

At the very least it shows a history illiteracy that can only be derived from ignorance. It's either that or malice. I'll cut you some slack and presume it's ignorance.

msgodel 39 days ago [-]
We fought an entire civil war to free the blacks, they're more free here than in many places in Africa. We preceded most countries with giving women rights and even many of the most misogynist people here want them to have more rights than they have in most of the rest of the world.

If we gave minorities and women any more than they already have we'd have to actively take things from other people here (and in some cases we're already doing that.) The idea that we now or have historically not been near or at the frontier of this is completely absurd and actually historically illiterate.

SR2Z 39 days ago [-]
So you complain that tolerating women and minorities is bad... because now a different, smaller set of people are getting the short end of the stick?
msgodel 39 days ago [-]
I'm not necessarily saying it's bad, I'm saying it could be (likely is) the cause of the problem. Maybe it's worth the cost.

I don't think it is but a lot of people seem to think tolerating that is an absolute moral axiom that should supersede anything else so if you think that then you would say it's good.

cropcirclbureau 39 days ago [-]
I'm referring to some of the rhetoric used to sell the current so called "decline" (authoritarian or economic). I believe they call them wedge issues? Every culture has nice words for it's bullshit. And yeah, that's whatabotism.
msgodel 39 days ago [-]
So you disagree with the article and believe there isn't a decline?
cropcirclbureau 39 days ago [-]
There's an obvious decline in income inequality and other metrics of economic egalitarianism in the U.S. A big part of these stats has always been the labor for those industries with undocumented labor, prison labor and the like but recently, wages for your average service worker have failed to keep up with inflation and, on a longer horizon, productivity gains. These gains are in big part from automation, and I suppose owners feel entitled to that share of the pie but with gig work, monopolies and mega-corps slicing up the economy amongst themselves, workers have generally have it worse than their forebears.

Economists and sociologists have been forever talking about this.

mindslight 39 days ago [-]
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isapoor 39 days ago [-]
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baggy_trough 39 days ago [-]
I feel a deep sympathy for poor people, especially young people with minimal skills, which is why I think the minimum wage should be abolished. Making it much easier for them to get jobs is an important way for them to start gaining skills and becoming more productive, justifying a higher wage.
johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
I'll take "what is a dead end job" for $500, Alex.

The kind of jobs offering sub-living wages are generally not ones that care about your growth. If they could get away with slave labor they would.

baggy_trough 39 days ago [-]
A so-called dead end job is much preferable to no job at all, which is the option on offer.
johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
No job and studying for a career is preferable to not paying rent despite having a job.

Of course I'm assuming you have a support network for that option. But that's the thing about poverty: you work twice as hard and progress nowhere.

baggy_trough 39 days ago [-]
Each person should be able to make that trade off for themselves. There’s no universal answer, and attempts to impose one are destructive.
msgodel 39 days ago [-]
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exabrial 39 days ago [-]
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justanewuser27 39 days ago [-]
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jdasdf 39 days ago [-]
>The minimum wage can be an effective policy tool for mitigating economic inequality, but public demand for higher minimum wages has not kept up with rising levels of income disparities

They could start the paper by not stating something obviously false.

johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
Given some of the takes in this comment section so far, this community seems to be proving its point. I imagine almost no one in tech is making minimum wage, so I'm a bit perplexed why we seem to be so split on raising it. Some seem to have fallen for the "prices raise" narrative, as if they didn't raise regardless for the last 1t years.
user____name 39 days ago [-]
You can find metastudies on historic minimum wage effects on prices or employment rates, spoiler alert: there is no correlation in sight. Same for rent control. Sadly that doesn't stop people from taking econ 101 and think they can use it to explain everything.
const_cast 39 days ago [-]
People ham-fisting free market economics is incredibly frustrating. Nobody actually bothers to do step 1: explain how a particular market is a free market.

If they did that, they would be realize that all their conclusions they draw have zero foundation. The labor market is NOT a free market, and that's good. Everyone wants it to not be a free market. But that complicates things, and we can't make 1 million assumptions and draw basic conclusions. We actually have to, you know, analyze things.

almosthere 39 days ago [-]
If you force the federal minimum wage to be $15 for the entire country - we're only exporting more jobs to other countries - nearly instantly.

I do believe that Tariffs should actually be determined by wage disparity. So if the US can make a paper plate for $0.01 each, but China can make it for $0.00001, then the Tariff for the paper plate should just be $0.01 - $0.00001. That way both plates are sell-able for the same price.

johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
People always says this, but the impact in CA's minimum wage increases never happens. Turns out jobs woth minimum wage aren't ones you can easily outsource at this point.
aerostable_slug 39 days ago [-]
johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
>outside of a recession

Well that's already the first problem.

BurningFrog 39 days ago [-]
This system ends up with very high tariffs and prices on things like coffee and bananas, which can only be produced in the US at very high cost.

This system optimizes for some kind of "fairness" between producers, rather than living standard for consumers.

In reality, everyone is best of if things are produced where they can be made most effectively.

int_19h 31 days ago [-]
In reality, "best if things are produced where they can be made most effectively" is usually a roundabout way to say "best if things are produced by the labor whom we can get away with paying as little as possible". Hence, outsourcing to countries where you can get away with smaller wages because the overall living standard is lower there and/or because the labor laws are non-existent or not enforced. But it's the same exact thing, just on a larger scale - you're still inherently relying on some people somewhere having a significantly lower quality of life than us to be able to exploit them like that.
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tptacek 39 days ago [-]
The paper doesn't appear to advocate for a federal minimum wage.
lesuorac 39 days ago [-]
Who determines the price that you can make a paper plate at?
glitchc 39 days ago [-]
You do realize you just advocated for a 100,000% tariff on paper plates, right? Here everyone is shitting the bed at 100% and 150% values.
notyourwork 39 days ago [-]
Who can afford to live on $15/hr, let alone less?
almosthere 39 days ago [-]
People that need a job but can't get a $15 one or hold it steady enough. You end up with roommates or living with mom, but you can live off that.
johnnyanmac 39 days ago [-]
Who's getting approved for a house @ $15 an hour? And now you're hoping your parents can support you as if everyone has a healthy family life. As a not-so-fun fact, many homeless people were orphans aged out of the system. They end up straight on the streets.
loxodrome 39 days ago [-]
This paper seems based on the premise that inequality is bad, which is completely false. Inequality is absolutely necessary so that resources go to where they are used most effectively. This maximizes overall wealth/value creation, which is better for everyone, even if it is unequally shared. USA has highest median income in the world by a large margin for this very reason.
int_19h 31 days ago [-]
> Inequality is absolutely necessary so that resources go to where they are used most effectively.

Like launching a Tesla into space for the lulz?

pbhjpbhj 39 days ago [-]
I mean, little could be clearly less true - people spend billions on advertising because they want to brainwash people into seeing their product as necessary/useful when it isn't. If you want to target resources, kill advertising is probably number 1.

Second, you think we need more "CEO yachts"? That's where the resources are going more and more. IIRC billionaires in UK are 5 times richer since Covid. We have many little with poor housing and food situations.

Western Capitalism directs resources to the wealthy, often those who gained wealth through past feudalism or [other?] crime.

loxodrome 39 days ago [-]
Look at this table

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...

The USA has the highest median disposable income (purchasing power) per household.

How could you possibly believe that capitalism is making Americans and other capitalist countries worse off?

There’s a reason practically everyone wants to move to those places!

pbhjpbhj 39 days ago [-]
We're talking about wealth distribution within countries.
loxodrome 39 days ago [-]
Median disposable income is a key statistic describing the distribution of wealth… half the population makes more and half makes less, so it tells you the central tendency, that is, how the middle class is doing.