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Billionaires Blast off

Bomb#20 said:
DBT said:
It was better decades ago, but the gulf between the super rich and the rest of us has been growning out of all proportion, economically, morally, ethically, and the trend shows no sign of improving.

What has been happening is indefensible.
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Inequality is decreasing.

sala%20fig%203.JPG


(Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w15433.pdf)
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Your graph is deceptive. It doesn't represent the true picture. It doesn't account for both relative and absolute terms;

quote;
''When measured in relative terms, global inequality has been decreasing. However, in absolute terms it has been increasing. ... While it remains vital to continue reducing the global incidence of poverty, inequality has risen both in international and national agendas.''

Figure-1a_0.png


''For instance, if incomes for all people (or households) increase by 10%, inequality would not be affected. However, a 10% rise for a millionaire is much more money than a 10% rise for someone who has very little to begin with. Therefore, it also makes sense to measure inequality in absolute terms and/or using so-called centrist measures, which are a combination of absolute and relative indices.''
 
DBT said:
Bomb#20 said:
Inequality is decreasing.
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Your graph is deceptive. It doesn't represent the true picture. It doesn't account for both relative and absolute terms;
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Rightly or wrongly, GINI is usually measured WITHIN one country. Looking at Worldwide GINI may be a very good idea, but it is confusing and intellectually dishonest to quote world-wide GINI without explicitly labeling it as such.

I don't understand the difference between "Absolute" and "Relative terms" for GINI. Yes, DBT gave a link, but my schedule is already busy. :)
 
Swammerdami said:
DBT said:
Bomb#20 said:
Inequality is decreasing.
Click to expand...


Your graph is deceptive. It doesn't represent the true picture. It doesn't account for both relative and absolute terms;
Click to expand...

Rightly or wrongly, GINI is usually measured WITHIN one country. Looking at Worldwide GINI may be a very good idea, but it is confusing and intellectually dishonest to quote world-wide GINI without explicitly labeling it as such.

I don't understand the difference between "Absolute" and "Relative terms" for GINI. Yes, DBT gave a link, but my schedule is already busy. :)
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From the article;

''Income inequality is typically measured using so-called relative indicators. These indices — for example the Gini coefficient — do not show a change in inequality at all if all members of society experience the same relative change in income (or other dimensions of living standards). For instance, if incomes for all people (or households) increase by 10%, inequality would not be affected. However, a 10% rise for a millionaire is much more money than a 10% rise for someone who has very little to begin with.''
 
Swammerdami said:
Rightly or wrongly, GINI is usually measured WITHIN one country. Looking at Worldwide GINI may be a very good idea, but it is confusing and intellectually dishonest to quote world-wide GINI without explicitly labeling it as such.
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That's ridiculous. DBT didn't say the gulf between the super rich Australians and the rest of us Australians has been growing out of all proportion; and he said the gulf was morally and ethically indefensible. By all means, explain to us the moral calculus that says the gulf between super rich Australians and ordinary merely rich Australians is a significant moral issue compared to the gulf between super rich Australians and actually poor Chinese. If anyone was under an obligation of intellectual honesty to make explicit whether we're talking about the gulf between super rich Australians and ordinary merely rich Australians and whether actually poor Chinese don't count among "the rest of us", it was DBT, not me.
 
What happened in Europe also happened in China.
  • Western Han: 200B - 10 - 40
  • Eastern Han: 40 - 180 - 220
  • Sui: 550 - 610 - 630
  • Tang: 630 - 750 - 770
  • Northern Sung: 960 - 1120 - 1160
  • Yuan: 1250 - 1350 - 1410
  • Ming: 1410 - 1620 - 1650
  • Qing: 1650 - 1850 - 1880
Chinese dynasties had relatively short disintegration periods by European standards. Counts of "instability events" per decade fit very well. Europe: I 0.6 +- 0.06 IE/d, D 3.8 +- 0.5 IE/d. China: I 3.4 D 11.3.

There is a shorter two-generation "fathers and sons" cycle with length 50 +- 10 years that is evident in the European data though not in the Chinese data.


All this work is for preindustrial societies. These were agrarian societies, societies where a large fraction of people were farmers, societies where most industrial production was in cottage-industry fashion. One's data for them are largely "horizontal", with great extent over time, but not very "vertical" -- not much detailed demographic and economic data. There are some exceptions, like the Myceanean clay-tablet palace records of 3000 years ago, the Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments of 2000 years ago and the Domesday Book of 1000 years ago. One sometimes has to rely on archeology, like statistics on coin hoards. We've heard of putting money in a mattress, but in past centuries, people often buried their coins, something safe for coins made of precious metals.

While industrial societies often have very good "vertical" extent of data, they have very poor "horizontal" coverage, and much of that time for some of the older ones is vitiated by participation in major wars. The United States is a major exception. It was less disrupted by major wars than the major European powers; it did a lot of mobilization and war production for WWI and WWII, but its armed forces typically fought far away in those wars. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was the closest to what other major powers suffered from in those wars. The US was also one of the first nations to become industrialized, not far behind Britain.
 
I rescued some of the links in some previous posts by locating their contents in the Internet Archive. Peter Turchin presents a lot of supporting data and he explains his methods.
I'm also rescuing links

I can't resist this bit of fun: John McCain as a rhinoceros (RINO, fake elephant)
 
The United States has an abundance of "vertical" data, like demographics and economic statistics, even if not nearly as much "horizontal" data as for preindustrial Europe or China.

PT describes how he processed his data to make cyclicity more apparent, by detrending it, removing long-term trends. Once he did that, he found roughly a cycle and a half of remarkably good correlation of data.

WhatProxyDirection
Labor oversupplyProportion of population born outside the USA-
Price of laborWage in relation to GDP per capita+
Biological well-being/HealthAverage stature and life expectancy+
Social optimismAge at first marriage (both sexes)-
Wealth inequalityLargest fortune in relation to the median wage-
Intra-elite competition/conflictPolitical polarization in the Congress-
Sociopolitical instabilityFatalities per 5 years per 1 million population-

YearValueEvent
1800+0.4Start of data
1824+0.8Era of Good Feelings
1904-1.4Gilded Age bottoming out
1960+1.3Eisenhower/Kennedy era
2000-0.3Data cutoff
Since the late 1970's, the US has been in Gilded Age II, the Reagan Era.
 
Peter Turchin classifies his data sources:
  • Population Well-Being
    • Employment Prospects -- fraction of people who are foreign-born (-)
    • Relative Wage -- median wage / GDP per capita (+)
    • Health -- physical height (stature) (+)
    • Health -- longevity (+)
    • Family -- age of first marriage (-)
  • Elite Overproduction
    • Top Wealth - largest assets / median wage (-)
    • Education Cost - Yale-University tuition / median wage (-)
    • Elite Fragmentation - party polarization in Congress (-)
  • Political Violence (assassination, lynching, terrorism, riots) (-)
Where he uses these definitions:
  • Assassination: one/few against one/few
  • Lynching: many against one/few
  • Terrorism: one/few against many
  • Riots: many against many
The (+) and (-) are their direction of variation relative to overall trends. PT counts mass shootings as a form of terrorism, though it's usually not a very systematic form of terrorism.

Comparing to Schlesinger's cycles of history, we have
  • Rising: L Revolution, C Hamilton Era, L Jefferson Era, C Era of Good Feelings
  • Falling: L Jackson Era, C Slaveowner Domination, L Civil War & Reconstruction, C Gilded Age
  • Rising: L Progressive Era, C Roaring Twenties, L New Deal Era, C Eisenhower Era, L Sixties Radicalism
  • Falling: C Gilded Age II
What's interesting is which way increasing wealth inequality is correlated: with worsening standards of living for ordinary people, not improving standards.
 
Most of the policy prescriptions that one can derive from Peter Turchin's analyses seem left-wing, but there is one that some right-wingers might like: restricting immigration. I say "some" because it is the xenophobic sort of right-winger who will like restricting immgration, and not the economic-elitist sort of right-winger. Back in the late 19th cy., business leaders *loved* all the immigrants that the US was getting, because that was just the thing for dealing with pesky workers -- hire new ones right off the boat.

Peter Turchin's recent books:
More:
with
From "The Real Class War" on today's billionaires:
But they conspicuously lack any self-awareness, much less insight into issues of broader human concern, as will be obvious to anyone who bothers to read Ray Dalio’s autobiography. Likewise, one could watch every episode of David Rubenstein’s talk show vanity project, “Peer-to-Peer Conversations,” only to come away with the impression that Rubenstein has never asked an interesting question in his life. In fairness, however, he is not half as self-deluded as Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, or Howard Schultz. The case of Donald Trump speaks for itself.
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They don't seem like the super geniuses that their sycophants believe them to be. They may be good at things that will get them money, like making business deals and having friends who know when something is going to happen in the business world, but not much more, it seems.

In contrast, I noted
To see what competence is like, there is a bit of "Knock Down The House" where AOC compares her campaign literature to her opponent Joe Crowley's literature. She said that she didn't want to brag about it, but she pointed out that hers has when to vote on it, and her platform. JC's has no voting date, and the extent of its platform was opposing President Trump.
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From NOEMA (Peter Turchin, Jack Goldstone),
First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.

Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.
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Like suppressing labor unions and keeping down the minimum wage.

The NOEMA article was written in 2020 Sep 10, and it stated “Almost any election scenario this fall is likely to lead to popular protests on a scale we have not seen this century.” -- Trump being a VERY sore loser and his inviting his followers to besiege the US Capitol building on January 6.

PT and JG in NOEMA then describe two societies that avoided big revolutions: Britain in the 1830's and the US in the 1930's under Prime Minister Lord Grey and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The formula in both cases was clear and simple. First, the leader who was trying to preserve the past social order despite economic change and growing violence was replaced by a new leader who was willing to undertake much-needed reforms. Second, while the new leader leveraged his support to force opponents to give in to the necessary changes, there was no radical revolution; violence was eschewed and reforms were carried out within the existing institutional framework.

Third, the reforms were pragmatic. Various solutions were tried, and the new leaders sought to build broad support for reforms, recognizing that national strength depended on forging majority support for change, rather than forcing through measures that would provide narrow factional or ideologically-driven victories. The bottom line in both cases was that adapting to new social and technological realities required having the wealthy endure some sacrifices while the opportunities and fortunes of ordinary working people were supported and strengthened; the result was to raise each nation to unprecedented wealth and power.
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Sacrifices like buying one less yacht, for instance. I think that superyachts are a much more gross symptom of wealth imbalance than spaceflights. The recent and planned billionaire spaceflights are early-adopter spaceflights, something typical of new technologies. At first they are very expensive, and only deep-pocketed customers can purchase them. But with increasing use comes increasing experience and increasing purchase of those technologies, a virtuous cycle.

But superyachts are another story. What can they be used for? Super expensive houseboats? They'd need a *lot* of refitting to become good ferryboats or charter boats or cruise boats. Billionaires who want big watercraft ought to invest in Clive Palmer's Titanic II. That's a big boat that actually makes some sense. We have numerous replicas of notable past ships, so why not the Titanic?
 
From BuzzFeed:
The task force’s initial report, published in 1995, identified three risk factors that seemed to predict whether a state would fail within the next two years in about two-thirds of cases: high infant mortality, low openness to international trade, and level of democracy. On the last measure, partial democracies were more vulnerable to collapse than fully democratic states or autocratic regimes.
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From the NYT:
In Turchin’s case the key is the loss of “social resilience,” a society’s ability to cooperate and act collectively for common goals. By that measure, Turchin judges that the United States was collapsing well before Covid-19 hit. For the last 40 years, he argues, the population has been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders. “The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out,” he says.

...
Turchin is not the only one who is worried. Eric H. Cline, who teaches at the George Washington University, argued in “1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed” that Late Bronze Age societies across Europe and western Asia crumbled under a concatenation of stresses, including natural disasters — earthquakes and drought — famine, political strife, mass migration and the closure of trade routes. On their own, none of those factors would have been capable of causing such widespread disintegration, but together they formed a “perfect storm” capable of toppling multiple societies all at once. Today, Cline says, “we have almost all the same symptoms that were there in the Bronze Age, but we’ve got one more”: pandemic. Collapse “really is a matter of when,” he told me, “and I’m concerned that this may be the time.”
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It was devastating. "Sea Peoples" overran much of the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt lost its Levantine Middle Eastern Empire, what is now Israel, Lebanon, and coastal Syria. The builders of the Medinet Habu mortuary temple celebrated a great victory on the temple's walls -- a victory in the Nile Delta. The Mycenaean Greek palaces were destroyed, though they were half-remembered by later Greeks. The Hittite Empire of central Anatolia was also destroyed, and nobody heard from them again for over 3000 years, when archeologists dug up their cities.

The fall of Rome is the best-known example of a fall of civilization, but that was the Western Roman Empire, and the eastern half survived it for nearly a thousand years more as the Byzantine Empire. These disasters were even worse.
 
That Guardian article has a picture of "a demonstration against tax havens in London, 2016." looking like some tropical beach.
Scheidel’s starting point is welcome: the ways we currently measure inequality are inadequate. The Gini coefficient does not properly measure the incomes of the extremely rich; and the existence of vast, offshore wealth reserves hides the true extremes of wealth inequality. Even on the official measures, wealth concentration is proceeding rapidly – with the number of billionaires controlling the equivalent of half the world’s wealth shrinking from a few hundred to a coachload in less than a decade.
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They hide much of their wealth in tax shelters like certain Caribbean islands.
There is, despite this, still a long way to go: the escalating wealth share of the top 1% in the US has only just reached where it was in 1929. And the ratio of Bill Gates’s wealth pile to that of the average US citizen is roughly the same as that of the richest Roman aristocrats in AD400. Scheidel observes that, left to their own devices, most societies – including ancient Rome – seem to reach a demographic and technological limit of inequality. What reverses this is violence – and not just ordinary violence.

“Only specific types of violence have consistently forced down inequality,” Scheidel writes. War has to be total; revolution has to be ultraviolent and socially pervasive; state failure has to lead to violence so intense that “it wipes the slate clean”. Ditto the social effects of pandemics.
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400 CE? That's not long before Rome fell, in 476 CE. Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Germanic warlord Odoacer -- and Odoacer decided not to make himself a new Roman Emperor. Numerous other Roman Emperors had been deposed by force, but their deposers always included someone willing to make himself a new emperor. Until Odoacer.

With all their wealth, those Roman aristocrats ought to have had no trouble organizing a defense of their realm. But they didn't.
 

On oil and democracy not mixing very well:
He argues that dependence on coal—a single, concentrated energy source—enabled people to build collective political power around the flow of that material. Workers wielded power because they could, through a general strike, shut down the entire system if their demands were not met. The sheer number of workers needed in the coal industry, and their access to critically important mines, rail yards and processing plants, gave them political power.

By contrast, oil workers are comparatively few, and they do not have to go into the ground themselves to bring up the oil. It goes right into a pipeline, onto a tanker and around the globe.
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But coal is nowadays much like oil, requiring much fewer workers to extract.

AOC has expressed concern that oil barons might be replaced by solar barons. But renewable energy is much more distributed than fossil fuels, and that may keep it from creating a new set of oligarchs.
 
lpetrich said:
…renewable energy is much more distributed than fossil fuels, and that may keep it from creating a new set of oligarchs.
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Fuck creating more oligarchs. And besides, a decentralized energy system is far more robust in numerous ways.
If this investment by current oligarchs pays off for society as well as past NASA efforts did, we can call it a public benefit obtained with taxes these oligarchs never paid. We just paid them instead of the government. I still think it should have been a common enterprise, and those taxes should have been paid.
 
Peter Turchin The Ginkgo Model of Societal Crisis - Peter Turchin
What he worked on:
Sample: 30 societies experiencing revolutionary situations (Europe, Russia, Middle East, India, China, US)

Severity components of the outcome:
  • Population decline
  • Population decline > 50%
  • Lethal epidemic
  • Elite: massive downward mobility
  • Elite: dispossession or extermination
  • Ruler executed or assassinated
  • Transformative revolution
  • Civil war
  • Prolonged civil wars (>100 years)
  • Territorial fragmentation
  • External conquest
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Note what can happen to elites: losing their status, being deprived of their property, being killed.

That may be what's behind Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand | New Zealand | The Guardian - "How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific"

PT's results:
  1. ##
  2. #
  3. #
  4. ####
  5. #####
  6. #######
  7. ######
  8. ###
  9. #
(Original illustration was a histogram: 0-1, 1-2, 2-3, ...) This variety of outcomes was what inspired the comparison to a ginkgo leaf - similar sorts of crises having a variety of outcomes. PT proposes that it's important to learn about cases of avoiding disastrous results, cases like 1830's UK and 1930's US.

PT also notes a distribution of loss of life in US political-violence events. With n lives lost, about 1/n events have more lives lost.
 
DBT said:
''Income inequality is typically measured using so-called relative indicators. These indices — for example the Gini coefficient — do not show a change in inequality at all if all members of society experience the same relative change in income (or other dimensions of living standards). For instance, if incomes for all people (or households) increase by 10%, inequality would not be affected. However, a 10% rise for a millionaire is much more money than a 10% rise for someone who has very little to begin with.''
Click to expand...

You posted that earlier, and I DID read it then. It just didn't make sense to me mathematically. (It's not that I'm too lazy to click and see if the source is sensical! There's just too many places I want to click, and too little time. :) )

Bomb#20 said:
Swammerdami said:
Rightly or wrongly, GINI is usually measured WITHIN one country. Looking at Worldwide GINI may be a very good idea, but it is confusing and intellectually dishonest to quote world-wide GINI without explicitly labeling it as such.
Click to expand...
That's ridiculous. DBT didn't say the gulf between the super rich Australians and the rest of us Australians has been growing out of all proportion; and he said the gulf was morally and ethically indefensible. By all means, explain to us the moral calculus ...
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"Moral calculus"? I was talking about "English communication."

If you decide that yoghurt is morally superior to cheese, will you start referring to yoghurt as 'cheese'?
 
SLD said:
Does anyone else find themselves secretly hoping that one of them explodes?

That’s wrong I know, but what’s the point of these trips? They aren’t advancing science. They’re just going a multi million dollar thrill ride.
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I kinda do hope for that.

I see modern manned space flight as immoral. It's horribly inefficient, given current propulsion systems. One could give a million kids vaccination and mosquito nets instead of giving a big company the resources to send someone into space for a thrill.

That's not the same as sending manned missions to the Space Station. Those can be justified by the knowledge collected, somewhat.

But, yeah, if one of those vehicles blew up like Challengers did it would probably be worth losing a billionaire or two. Other billionaires would be less likely to invest the resources of the Human Family in a thrill ride, which I see as a moral outcome.

Yeah, I kinda hope one blows up.
Tom
 
DBT said:
''For instance, if incomes for all people (or households) increase by 10%, inequality would not be affected. However, a 10% rise for a millionaire is much more money than a 10% rise for someone who has very little to begin with. Therefore, it also makes sense to measure inequality in absolute terms and/or using so-called centrist measures, which are a combination of absolute and relative indices.''
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Therefore it makes sense to use the deceptive data because it supports your point.

Absolute Gini is one such example--it exists purely to deceive.
 
lpetrich said:
The United States has an abundance of "vertical" data, like demographics and economic statistics, even if not nearly as much "horizontal" data as for preindustrial Europe or China.

PT describes how he processed his data to make cyclicity more apparent, by detrending it, removing long-term trends. Once he did that, he found roughly a cycle and a half of remarkably good correlation of data.

Social optimismAge at first marriage (both sexes)-
Click to expand...

This one has a major problem: It's going to be highly influenced by religion.
 
Bomb#20 said:
Swammerdami said:
Rightly or wrongly, GINI is usually measured WITHIN one country. Looking at Worldwide GINI may be a very good idea, but it is confusing and intellectually dishonest to quote world-wide GINI without explicitly labeling it as such.
Click to expand...
That's ridiculous. DBT didn't say the gulf between the super rich Australians and the rest of us Australians has been growing out of all proportion; and he said the gulf was morally and ethically indefensible. By all means, explain to us the moral calculus that says the gulf between super rich Australians and ordinary merely rich Australians is a significant moral issue compared to the gulf between super rich Australians and actually poor Chinese. If anyone was under an obligation of intellectual honesty to make explicit whether we're talking about the gulf between super rich Australians and ordinary merely rich Australians and whether actually poor Chinese don't count among "the rest of us", it was DBT, not me.
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He didn't say anything about Australia at all. And in the context of a discussion about billionaires, the relevant polity is the US, home to most of the world's billionaires (including two of the three who are engaged in the 'space race', and to plenty of genuinely poor people.

IMG_6108.PNG

The third billionaire in the race is Richard Branson, who is from the UK:

IMG_6109.PNG

Poor Chinese people may be an issue, but it's not one likely to be resolved by US or UK taxes, which will inevitably help poor Americans and poor Britons (respectively) disproportionately.

Though having more money in the pockets of poor Americans and Britons will arguably help poor Chinese people more than having that money in the hands of billionaires. After all, it's not the billionaires who buy all the mass-produced Chinese tat at Walmart.
 
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