The usual HN response to wealth inequality is "why do you care how much they have?" The answer is, of course, that money is power and the power that many of the wealthy are exercising is not to the benefit of most people.
You don't even need to think about money as power, you can just think about money as money. There's a far simpler way to think about wealth inequality. If you believe it's a problem, by definition the people holding the wealth are the cause of the problem. This isn't some social or philosophical construct - it's just basic deduction.
So quite literally, the wealthy holding the money means less money to go around to everyone else. The more they hold themselves, the more is withheld from everyone else. You can have debates about wealth distribution endlessly because it's subjective and complicated, but you can't argue that the wealthy getting richer is good for anyone except the wealthy. Trickle-down-economics has already been established as propaganda at this point.
I understand that wealth is not static in the world and it's possible to create wealth for everyone, but my point is money hoarding is definitionally the cause of wealth inequality.
If the wealthy held their wealth in money then there would be no problem. The problem arises because the wealthy hold their wealth in assets, the most productive of which become hoarded in fewer and fewer silos. Since the assets are desireable and increasing in scarcity their asking price increases. Since this price is paid in money, the value of money falls. This would be fine except that most normal people do hold most of their wealth in money so this reduction in buying power makes them poorer.
This split is particularly difficult to address because money is easy to tax (redistribute) while assets that may or may not be for sale at some arbitrary asking price are a lot harder to break up in this way.
Ultimately, to attempt to extract and redistribute this sort of ethereal wealth requires unpopular adjustments to long-held values of personal freedom and ownership that make the whole system possible in the first place.
The problem may in fact be insoluble sustainably. Most of human history provides examples of extreme wealth inequality.
I get what you say -- hoarded wealth is essentially idle. But I think there's more to it. The people who hold that wealth prefer to live in one country, and have inflicted themselves on the governance of that country.
> I get what you say -- hoarded wealth is essentially idle.
I'm not talking at all about wealth being idle in my previous comment. My point is entirely that the more money the rich have, the less money the poor have.
What you're bringing up is how the wealthy use their money to change their political environment to benefit themselves. This is also a problem, but is parallel to the point I was making.
You are replying to every single comment - you seem really upset about this. I never said anything was stolen from me. I said wealth inequality is the result of rich people holding money, because by definition there can be no wealth inequality without rich people. It's an objective statement and you're projecting so much political vitriol onto it.
> That doesn't all mean they are "holding" money. Money is not the same thing as wealth. Personally, I don't have any money other than pocket change.
I'm using money and wealth interchangeably here because there is no meaningful distinction in this context. I cannot take you seriously when you keep bringing up irrelevant things. It's obvious you don't understand my point. And I've had enough arguments with you on this site over the years to know it's a waste of my time to engage with you more than I already have.
It would be absurd to expect to change anyone's core beliefs with a couple of HN posts.
I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets. I also admit that it is not an easy thing to understand. How can a chaotic system possibly work?
For a given definition, it doesn't. At least, not without vastly understating the gov's role (some might say responsibility) to step in and monopoly bust, regulate strategically important sectors of the economy, and generally try to provide human-scale stability to a system that tends to want to burn itself and polite society down more than a caffeinated toddler with an outlet, a fork, and a dream.
That's debatable. The US economy grew spectacularly in its first century, pulling scores of millions of poor people up into the middle class and beyond.
Regulation along the lines of enforcing contracts, protecting rights, and internalizing exernalities are the proper role of government.
Governments have never managed to make economies stable.
Anything's debatable. The question is whether or not what you've chosen to defend is more or less substantial than a wet fart in a hurricane.
Pre-industrial growth that was driven largely by settler colonialism does not make for a useful economic model since we're unlikely to find any new continents any time soon. To say nothing of the horrors inflicted on native populations, but I suspect that's not a group you'd be too sympathetic towards.
I would recommend you stop confusing your own willful ignorance with lack of evidence. You could take a cursory look at the wikipedia page on Australia's response to the GFC as a case study in government doing it's actual job, instead of this fantasy of auto-regulation via free market competition. You can have a bit of both and reap outsized benefits as has been the case for every great to super power sunce the dissolution of the USSR.
> It would be absurd to expect to change anyone's core beliefs with a couple of HN posts.
I 100% agree.
> I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets.
I'm a believer in free markets. You just cannot stop projecting assumptions onto me. I've clarified my point multiple times already so I'm not going to bother repeating myself again. I think we can both agree it's okay to be misunderstood by people on the internet.
> "I'm satisfied just letting you know there is a case for free markets."
There's no such thing as "free markets", it's A. Smith's BS.
> "I also admit that it is not an easy thing to understand. How can a chaotic system possibly work?"
A chaotic system cannot work for any meaningful stretch of time. Moreover, we don't have a chaotic system, actually it's a system under finely tuned control: Biden placed 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, helping Tesla. Trump added more tariffs on China, exempted Tesla... Truly a chaotic coincidence /s
> the wealthy holding the money means less money to go around to everyone else
Wealthy entrepreneuers created their wealth, it was not transferred to them. It does not reduce the amount of money elsewhere.
The wealthy do not "hoard" wealth, either. They invest it. All of it. Even checking accounts are not hoarded wealth, because the money you put in it is loaned out by the bank (less the reserve requirements).
This is largely debatable and hard to measure. The thing about creation is that it's not black or white, it's gray.
Everything relies on thousands of other things. Products and services are huge graphs that nobody truly understands and that span hundreds of years. How much is created, and how much is reused? Hard to say.
At least some of the money is taken via exploitation. For example, if you opt to outsource product X to some third-world country and you drop labor cost 10%, and that in turn grows your company, you did not "create" that growth. You systematically stole it.
Another example we see a lot today is cutting quality. A lot of goods today are produced more efficiently, but not as much as you may think, because some of the productivity gains is simply pseudo-monopolies using their market dominance to cut quality without recourse. It's just human nature that we can't perceive a, say, 1% cut in quality. But if you cut 1% every year for half a century, then congratulations, you "created" a bunch of wealth. But you didn't actually create anything.
Choice isn't binary, it's a continuous distribution. There's not "free choice" and then "gun to head".
Work, especially for vulnerable, exploited populations, is not voluntary. Particularly when we talk about pseudo-slavery tactics used on migrant workers or other vulnerable populations.
There's a reason companies will often progressively move down to poorer, more vulnerable populations for their labor. Those people are much easier to exploit. We even see this in the US, to an extent. Tyson recently had a debacle where they threatened their (knowingly undocumented) workers with ICE if they attempted to unionize. To call this "voluntary" is willfully ignorant, at best.
Some items absolutely are zero sum - anything that is in short supply with a high demand becomes unobtainable for anyone who isn't rich.
Some things that are effectively out of reach for at least half of everyone:
Mansions and Luxury Condos in desirable locations
Private Jet
Private Island
The best quality food
2021 Ferrari 812 GTS
The best legal advice
A favor from a US Senator
These things are effectively zero-sum, only a limited number of people can have them and we can't expand the supply very much (or intentionally don't because that would hurt their exclusivity value).
The wealthy aren't exactly hoarding the money under their bed. They buy treasuries and bonds so the money get used elsewhere in the economy to do something.
The federal government's credit card is funded by the saving of the rich, which allowed us to run up huge debt.
The vast inequality you seen is the result of undertaxation of monopolies and deliberate granting of monopolies. Disney wouldn't be as big if copyright actually expire some 20 years after the fact.
Anyway, the billionaire are less relevant to you than the average homeowner next door. They are the one who hold further infill development hostage and are inimical to anyone who would depress the value of their home.
High housing prices are the result of a housing shortage. The shortage is the result of government zoning, regulation, and slow-walking building permits.
(Apparently California has only issued 4 permits so far for people to rebuild after the fires.)
Luxuries are cheap and getting cheaper. Basic necessities like housing are increasingly expensive. That's where most of the inequality is being felt by people.
Particularly after Citizens United, money has squelched voter influence in favor of a few large donors. People don't seem to realize however imperfect the choices are, actively voting against this agenda instead of giving up and hoping it'll somehow work out will fail.
One easy thing you can do on HN is replace "they" with "we" in a lot of those instances.
HN has a lot of good people. HN also has a lot of people who consider themselves supporters of meritocracy and see everything they've achieved as solely a result of their own hard work. HN also has a lot of people with absolutely mind blowing levels of wealth. HN also has a lot of people who, saying it as kindly as I can, just do not know what life is like for a normal person.
Many years ago I heard a mathematician speaking about some open problem and he said, "Sure, it's possible that there is a simple solution to the problem using basic techniques that everyone has just missed so far. And if you find that solution, mathematics will pat you on the head and tell you to run off and play.
"Mathematics advances by solving problems using new techniques because those techniques open up new areas of mathematics."
A proof of a long-open conjecture that uses only elementary techniques is typically long and convoluted.
Think of the problem as requiring spending a certain amount of complexity to solve. If you don't spend it on developing a new way of thinking then you spend it on long and tedious calculations that nobody can keep in working memory.
It's similar to how you can write an AI model in Pytorch or you can write down the logic gates that execute on the GPU. The logic gate representation uses only elementary techniques. But nobody wants to read or check it by hand.
The only confirmed example I know of is Harley-Davidson, roughly during the boom of cruiser motorcycles (1995-2010?): They only ran one shift, but the PR of waiting lists and extremely high instant resale prices made the choice appealing in the face of the capital costs.
The important part is at the end of the article: "For those interested in building a stronger foundation in logic, the Open Logic Project provides excellent free educational resources on propositional and predicate logic, formal proof systems, and other topics such as modal logic and set theory - all targetted towards a non-mathematical audience."
It happens, but in a more subtle way. Usually direct comparison's don't happen, but rather is expected to be inferred by the quality of arguments, whether they can prevail with their line of thinking and so on. In a sense, that variant of 'rationalist' is rather crude in comparison. I am trying to think of an appropriate example, but I am struggling a little.
Yeah well I've never seen violence happen in the rationalist community, but I'm sure if I keep looking I'll find instances of Hacker News posters committing murder too.
"I began to see TIs like Luca as a group of individuals who are caught between two competing narratives.... The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques."
This isn't a value-neutral belief. It has consequences and some of those aren't pretty.
Yep. I empathize deeply with these people, but I also can't feed their delusion of grandeur if it very clearly causes them discomfort. I feel a human need to "rescue" someone from false senses of persecution, even if it ultimately feeds someone's belief that they're a subject of interest.
It's also tough, because I realize that all of us are somewhat responsible for this. The proliferation of technology, advertisement and security marketing has kinda destroyed the concept of being alone. People who suffer unjustly, or who are insecure/anxious about their environment can easily fall down a rabbit hole that never ends. It's the product of indiscriminate profiling and constant dubious marketing of "security" that people become disillusioned and paranoid with tech. The part that really fucks me up is, what if they're just expressing the most rational, conscious human reaction to the information superhellscape we all share? What if we only think the water's fine because we felt it boil slowly?
Japan had more structural problems than that. For one thing, at the time it was reported that wealthy, powerful people could not be allowed to lose money in the stock market; the broker would make them whole, until the day that they couldn't anymore.
