Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality?

[coloradoatheist]

Or there is a different answer to the OP. They are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill in terms of the problem. The problem isn't really a problem. What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have. And the US has a lot of wealth in that regard. And last, for the most part, the people have the access to what the wealth do, just some level of quality changes, but not important enough distinction.

Regarding the government. Our government never really was a democracy and they didn't want it. And the government was never meant to solve most problems. And with the size and diversity of our country, having a government that does that is a problem.

I don't understand what exactly you are trying to say in the first paragraph. I guess that you are trying to say that the income inequality isn't very important because "What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have." If this is the case please liquidate your wealth and send it to me. You will still have access to it, I promise.

The government wasn't formed as a perfect democracy, but that is no reason for us to stop moving it further toward the goal of one, as we did in the removal of the requirement to own property, the 13th and the 14th amendments, universal suffrage, the direct election of Senators, one man one vote, etc. It is terrifying that you consider this to be a valid point in this discussion. I suppose this is the attitude that allows societies to move in the other direction toward authoritarianism.

Of course, it is the government's role to solve problems. The government's role in defining and regulating the economy is no different than its role in defining and regulating behavior in the society as a whole. The government says that we can't rob, rape and murder. Do you believe that any of these are not the government's proper role? What if I told you that the government didn't need to regulate these behaviors because of a fantasy that I have that there is an all powerful entity who will doom us to an eternity of damnation in hell if we do any of these. Would this be considered to be sufficient in your mind for government to stop trying to regulate our behavior in society? As you believe that your fantasy of a self-regulating free market means that the government shouldn't try to regulate the economy. Is there any difference in the two fantasies?

On paper someone that lives in a dirt shack in Africa who has no mortgage, no car, etc is wealthier than an American who has a $400K house but owes $450K in stuff. But there is no comparison in the two.

Yes there is some regulation in that the government's role is to protect direct harm between people, but it's not its job to try and run the economy. There is also a false believe that the economy has to be at a certain stage every single moment. Trying to overcorrect issues causes problems. The financial meltdown was a reaction of oversteering the economy earlier.

 

[J842P]

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

Humans vary very little.

These huge variations in wealth have nothing to do with genetic differences. It is all about variation in experience.

And they are harmful.

One way you deal with inequality of wealth is through the elimination of top-down despotic power structures that are harmful to equality.

I agree with RV. There are dramatic differences between people. People vary in their people skills, ability to retain, work ethic, charisma, tolerance, learnability, and etc. I differ than some in that I don't care about inequality. It's going to happen. It's not going to keep me up at night. I have no problem with people who have far more than I. I don't want to work more than 40 hours a week anymore. If someone wants to work more and not enjoy life, fine with me. But I think that government should do a better job of boosting people up who want it. They should help with creating opportunities. They should increase the safety net.

Ah yes, the good old brainwashing of the Protestant Work Ethic. Rich people just work more!

I will make much more money than a lot of my peers because I was born to a well-off family.

My undergraduate and graduate education was paid out of pocket, I have no debt.

I have a lot of friends that work much harder than me, that make and will always make much less money than me. Probably because they had to take the first shit job they were offered when we graduated, because they had 100,000s of dollars of debt bearing down on them. I was able to just go back home for a year and then to grad school to ride-out the recession, and when I was done with that, my starting salary leapfrogged their current salary even though they have been working for half a decade.


And these are just the rifts inherent between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class. This doesn't even touch the differences between the truly elite and the rest of us. So yeah, sleep well.

 

[J842P]

I agree with RV. There are dramatic differences between people. People vary in their people skills, ability to retain, work ethic, charisma, tolerance, learnability, and etc.

They vary this much because opportunity varies so much.

They vary this much because the experience of being poor is so different from the experience of being rich.

Human do not vary much at all genetically.

What varies is experience.

Well, this is the old "nature vs nurture" debate. You assert that the determining factor is 100% nurture. I like debating you. But you are very similar to Trumpsters (sorry for the insult!) in that you make grandiose statements with no supporting data.

According to this article, it's roughly 51-49. About 51% of behavior is determined by your environment; 49% is genetic. I'm sure that there will be a study in a month that will state that 51% is genetic, 49% nuture.

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/have-researchers-settled-nature-vs-nurture-debate/

Anyway, my larger point is that I would ease the burden of the environment by increasing opportunity and increasing the safety net through progressive taxation. Here's the difference: I would tax to help others, not tax in order to punish.

The "nature vs nurture" debate was settled almost a centry ago by ethologists. Spoiler alert: it's a false dichotomy.

 

[rousseau]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

I would go further, and say that it is the purpose of government, in a democracy, to reduce inequality, lest it lead to civil unrest and bloody revolution of the poor against the rich.

A government that does not actively work to reduce inequality is unfit for purpose; Governments that act to increase inequality are worse than useless.

Capitalism will inevitably lead to increases in inequality, absent government action to prevent this from occurring. Capitalism is very useful as a tool for avoiding shortages and surpluses, and for rewarding innovation; Unfortunately, people often oversimplify their toolkits, and assume that that particular hammer is all you need, and that everything looks like a nail.

I agree, although would like to write out an extended response to this to flesh out my own thoughts.

I think the gist of it would be: 'In a world where a majority of nations are at worst authoritarian or badly corrupt, and at best only mildly corrupt, and where the people serving in government are largely sociopaths, how does idealism fit into the model, and where does it lead us'? Maybe to some extent a well functioning geographical area with relative peace and prosperity is not normal and only something to strive toward.

Maybe the answer is that, in the most basic terms, most people realise that the world as is sort of sucks, and that it's a good idea to make it better, even if 'perfection' isn't really possible. And so idealism kind of serves as a guide-post to point us in the right direction, rather than intentionally trying to move backward. So even if there are real forces pulling us apart, there are also forces pulling us back together.

 

[Hermit]

Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality? - The New York Times

In theory, in a democracy, the majority should influence — some would even say determine — the distribution of income.

That's the first sentence of Edsall's opinion piece, and it is fundamentally wrong. In theory democracy is not meant to determine the distribution of income at all. It is an ideology used as a weapon against the feudal system, which is principally a social pyramid with the elite at the top franchised by birthright. Far from aiming to achieve material equality, it wants to establish a formal equality, an equality for all in the eyes of the law. As such, its aim was to remove the obstacles to an individual's desire to become rich that privilege by birthright put in his (yes, his) path. Democracy is the ideological underpinning of laissez faire capitalism.

If you want to ease material inequality, democracy as such has nothing to offer until you add a magic ingredient: socialism. That is something the Democratic Party in the US has decisively turned its back on starting with Bill Clinton's presidency at the latest. Forget Edsall's review of Picketty' book. Don't bother with Picketty's book. Read or listen to Thomas Frank instead. This would be a good start.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

Exactly. The reality is people differ by ability and differ by how they handle money. I've known all too many people that always spend as much as they have even when they make enough there's no need to live paycheck-to-paycheck. (For example, one who always buys a new car when the old one is paid off. She has IIRC 3 cars.)

Furthermore, government shouldn't try too hard to reduce inequality. Imagine a society with full equality--what's the point in trying harder? It won't make any difference.

As far as I'm concerned government should intervene with regard to those who don't have enough for the basics. Beyond that, though, I do not think it's the proper job of government to intervene. (The tax system should be progressive, not to reduce inequality but because those with more can afford to pay more to keep society running.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

Sure, there is a tiny bit of human genetic variation.

But a huge variation in experience and exposure.

Young Donald Trump was taught the real estate business by a very successful developer early in life.

So he gets very rich as a result.

A very ordinary man with exposure that leads to a becoming a very rich man.

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

Variation due to exposure: The answer here is education.

Something that would be useful is for the government to fund the creation of a website that to the extent feasible teaches every subject that's generally taught. Provide peer-to-peer discussion forums.

These would not map one-to-one with classes offered by any school as they would be divided up into smaller chunks.

Furthermore, universities would be required to permit any student to challenge any pure-knowledge class based upon passing a specified list of classes from the government site. (The school gets to pick which ones are needed to comprise the course material so long as they don't include anything irrelevant in the list.) The first time they challenge a specific class it's free, but if you fail and try again they can charge you. Lab classes obviously can't be challenged (however, it could be treated as a separate session--challenge the classroom part and take the lab part) and there are some classes (mostly in the social sciences) where discussion is an important part of the class, those couldn't be challenged.

 

[SimpleDon]

Or there is a different answer to the OP. They are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill in terms of the problem. The problem isn't really a problem. What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have. And the US has a lot of wealth in that regard. And last, for the most part, the people have the access to what the wealth do, just some level of quality changes, but not important enough distinction.

Regarding the government. Our government never really was a democracy and they didn't want it. And the government was never meant to solve most problems. And with the size and diversity of our country, having a government that does that is a problem.

I don't understand what exactly you are trying to say in the first paragraph. I guess that you are trying to say that the income inequality isn't very important because "What matters is the wealth the person has access to, not what they have." If this is the case please liquidate your wealth and send it to me. You will still have access to it, I promise.

The government wasn't formed as a perfect democracy, but that is no reason for us to stop moving it further toward the goal of one, as we did in the removal of the requirement to own property, the 13th and the 14th amendments, universal suffrage, the direct election of Senators, one man one vote, etc. It is terrifying that you consider this to be a valid point in this discussion. I suppose this is the attitude that allows societies to move in the other direction toward authoritarianism.

Of course, it is the government's role to solve problems. The government's role in defining and regulating the economy is no different than its role in defining and regulating behavior in the society as a whole. The government says that we can't rob, rape and murder. Do you believe that any of these are not the government's proper role? What if I told you that the government didn't need to regulate these behaviors because of a fantasy that I have that there is an all powerful entity who will doom us to an eternity of damnation in hell if we do any of these. Would this be considered to be sufficient in your mind for government to stop trying to regulate our behavior in society? As you believe that your fantasy of a self-regulating free market means that the government shouldn't try to regulate the economy. Is there any difference in the two fantasies?

On paper someone that lives in a dirt shack in Africa who has no mortgage, no car, etc is wealthier than an American who has a $400K house but owes $450K in stuff. But there is no comparison in the two.

Yes there is some regulation in that the government's role is to protect direct harm between people, but it's not its job to try and run the economy. There is also a false believe that the economy has to be at a certain stage every single moment. Trying to overcorrect issues causes problems. The financial meltdown was a reaction of oversteering the economy earlier.

The reasons that governments exist is to define and control the economy and to provide security from internal and external threats to the society. It has always been this way. Did you read the quote that I presented from Stiglitz, that there are no mainstream economists left who believe in a self-regulating free market? Search the thread for the phrase without quotes, "there is no respectable intellectual support for the proposition that markets, by themselves, lead to efficient, let alone equitable outcomes".

Who do you depend on for your surety that Stiglitz is wrong, that the free market can exist? Whose quote can you provide from a living economist that the free market can exist in an industrial, complex economy like we have now?

Can you name a society in the past that had a self-regulating free market economy independent of government?

The meltdown was caused by the failure of the neoliberal free market loving Bush II administration to regulate the market in mortgage backed securities, as admitted by the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, before the Congress, admitting that they caused the meltdown by failing to regulate the market on 23 October 2008.

Now tell me your source that convinced you that the Bush II administration caused the meltdown by too much regulation, too much oversteering. Name, date and link, as I have provided to you.

There is also video of Greenspan in front of Congress admitting their failure to regulate the sales of the derivatives based on the subprime mortgages, which the Republican congress under Clinton passed a law preventing prior regulation of the derivatives market, but which the Fed and the Securities Exchange Commission could regulate after the fact of the issuing of the securities with their broad powers to regulate the banking system and the markets, respectfully. The Bush appointed head of the SEC wanted to force the banks and the markets to abandon the sales of the derivatives but she needed the Fed to go along. Greenspan refused, believing that the markets had learned to self-correct. He was wrong.

But since you believe that the meltdown occurred because of over regulation you can provide for us what has now become a two to three year failure of the opponents of regulation to provide us with a single example of a regulation that cost us jobs. All that you have to do is to explain the regulations that caused the meltdown, which caused the loss of millions of jobs. I have provided evidence that the exact opposite happened, that the failure to regulate cost us millions of jobs, threw millions of families out of homes that they wanted to live in and nearly destroyed the world's economies, some of which haven't yet recovered.

The dirt shack dweller doesn't live in the wealthiest country in the world and doesn't contribute to that wealth with so little returned to him in wages so that the uber wealthy can gain ever increasing amounts of more wealth. Perhaps that is why the American has so much debt and a negative net worth.

The main function of government in regulating the economy is to determine how the rewards of the economy are split between wages and profits. It has always been this way in every society that has existed. Starting with the very first tribal chief who decided how the food that was hunted and gathered would be split between the members of the tribe. It was not so obvious for so long because the split between the members of the society of the rewards of the economy were static for centuries at a time. But the rapid industrialization changed all of that. Suddenly, well over decades, the industrial economy produced for the first time an abundance of production over what was needed for simple survival.

And due to the miracle of capitalism the production grew every year, increasing the wealth of the society. For the longest time the bounty from the production was split according to the old, static rules, with most of it above the need for survival going to the capitalists, the owners. The capitalists liked this and thought that it was the "natural" economy, the way that God intended, the fantasy all powerful entity that I referred to earlier.

But it was just how the split occurred when the government was allowing the corporations to grow big and powerful without letting the workers form an equally powerful organization able to counter the power of the corporations to set wages. Once the government allowed the workers to organize into the unions and the government defined the rules that governed the unions like the government defined the rules that governed the corporations, the split between the growth in income every year was split evenly between wages and profits.

It was no accident or desire to return to a more "natural" economy that the people like you, the neoliberals, attacked the government's support for the unions, it was the desire on the part of the capitalists to have more money. They didn't want the money from the growth every year to be split evenly, they wanted it all. This is called greed. This is what you think is equitable, right? That the capitalists are paid all of the real growth of the economy and that wages go up by only the rate of inflation, right?

But at least you realize that you were wrong about the progress of our democracy. Or am I reading too much into your failure to comment on it?

 

[SimpleDon]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

Sure, there is a tiny bit of human genetic variation.

But a huge variation in experience and exposure.

Young Donald Trump was taught the real estate business by a very successful developer early in life.

So he gets very rich as a result.

A very ordinary man with exposure that leads to a becoming a very rich man.

What society needs to do is reduce the variation that is just due to exposure.

If a level playing field is the desire.

Variation due to exposure: The answer here is education.

Something that would be useful is for the government to fund the creation of a website that to the extent feasible teaches every subject that's generally taught. Provide peer-to-peer discussion forums.

These would not map one-to-one with classes offered by any school as they would be divided up into smaller chunks.

Furthermore, universities would be required to permit any student to challenge any pure-knowledge class based upon passing a specified list of classes from the government site. (The school gets to pick which ones are needed to comprise the course material so long as they don't include anything irrelevant in the list.) The first time they challenge a specific class it's free, but if you fail and try again they can charge you. Lab classes obviously can't be challenged (however, it could be treated as a separate session--challenge the classroom part and take the lab part) and there are some classes (mostly in the social sciences) where discussion is an important part of the class, those couldn't be challenged.

I suspect that I am quite a bit older than you or I have a much better memory than you. I remember all of the previous revolutions in education that would make the students in chairs listening to lectures obsolete. First there were corresponce courses, then there was courses on the TV. Then self-paced courses in the universities. None of them blew students sitting in chairs listening to lectures out of the water. I have high hopes that you are correct that the internet schooling will be what does it. But I suspect that like all of the other silver bullets that internet learning will prove to be successful with the brightest and most dedicated students and a bust with the rest. We need to educate the most number of students as far as we can to face the future.

 

[untermensche]

Unfettered capitalism is an unjust dictatorial system that creates artificial inequality.

It is the problem.

No solution.

It is unfettered capitalism that is the problem. The solution is to regulate capitalism. The solution is to redistribute the income from the wealthy. The solution is Social Democracy. The solution is higher wages and lower profits. The solution is to give the workers more equal footing in wage negotiations with the corporations. The solution is to stop chasing fantasies of how the economy should be and to face how it is. The solution is to put the workers as at least equal in importance to the corporation as the shareholders. The solution is to control the rentiers of the financial sector and to limit the percentage of the economy that they claim. The solution is to recognize that way that the economy is today is the result of how government defines it and how they control it, the idea that it is an organic creation is absurd. The solution is to establish that the purpose of the economy is to distribute the rewards from the economy to the greatest part of society and not just to the 0.1% of the wealthiest.

You are correct that the inequality is the enemy of democracy. The solution is to constantly push back against the forces that subvert democracy, the money that subverts democracy, the fake news that subverts democracy, the pillorying of the government that subverts democracy.

The solution of Anarchism is to replace dictatorial control in the workplace with democratic control. Move from top down control to horizontal control.

Inequality will still exist because some will have rare skills but the degree of inequality will be less and the problems inherent to dictators with a lot of power, even power over governments, will be eliminated.

This is not only a moral solution but it solves many of the problems of dictatorial capitalism.

 

[Bomb#20]

...
He explains why the self-regulating free market can't exist in an industrial economy, that in fact, the self-regulating free market had never existed, that it was the attempt by the classical liberals of the 1830's in England who tried to implement the self-regulating free market of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Edmund Burke that caused so much pain inflicted on the residents of capitalistic countries that continues even to today.

That this attempt to impose the fantasy of the self-regulating free market and free trade was responsible for the deaths of a million Irishmen, colonialism, the gilded age with its decades of financial deflation, the world wars and the great depression, in varying degrees.
...
It wasn't just the government that the neoliberals attacked in support of the very rich. They attacked the academic economics of 1948, which was heavily Keynesian. They wanted their pro-rich neoliberalism to supplant the Keynesian economics that was being taught in the universities. They were wildly successful in doing this, over a period of decades, because it is the very rich who fund the economic research in the universities and it is the very rich who hire the graduates of the universities.

I know you have a religious need to blame your favorite boogeyman for every problem under the sun, and your overall picture of history has a fierce immune reaction to infidel memes; but for the love of god, "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.". The potato famine, colonialism, the world wars, and the great depression were not caused by free trade, free markets, or free market ideology. The world wars were caused by nationalism, militarism, and a series of miscalculations mostly by German governments. The great depression was turned from a vanilla recession into a great depression by government monetary policy, by protectionism, and by restraint of trade in endless forms. Colonialism was caused by powerful governments eyeing weak countries and seeing an opportunity to get stuff without buying it. And the extended series of famines culminating in the Great Famine were caused by centuries of English government interference in the economy of Ireland -- first and foremost, the policy of seizing land owned by Irishmen and handing the title over to Englishmen. Go ahead, point out to us all where free market ideology says that's what governments are supposed to do.

 

[SimpleDon]

As far as I can tell an unequal society is the default state. This would be a result of phenotypic variation and the supply/demand of various skills. Added to these maxims is another that it takes power to accumulate power.

So governments can work to reduce inequality, but it's always going to exist in some form, and there will always be tension between it's reduction/expansion.

Exactly. The reality is people differ by ability and differ by how they handle money. I've known all too many people that always spend as much as they have even when they make enough there's no need to live paycheck-to-paycheck. (For example, one who always buys a new car when the old one is paid off. She has IIRC 3 cars.)

Furthermore, government shouldn't try too hard to reduce inequality. Imagine a society with full equality--what's the point in trying harder? It won't make any difference.

As far as I'm concerned government should intervene with regard to those who don't have enough for the basics. Beyond that, though, I do not think it's the proper job of government to intervene. (The tax system should be progressive, not to reduce inequality but because those with more can afford to pay more to keep society running.)

Capitalism in fact depends on a large degree of inequality to work. You have to pay the better people more or no one will want to progress.

The question is how much inequality is needed and how much can we stand. Surely the minimum amount that we can correct is to eliminate the people who are willing to work still living in poverty. Elevating the working poor to the lower middle class would help the economy and society more than anything else that I can think of.

The criminals in our society largely come from either the lower class because they see it as a way to get ahead, possibly the only way. Or they come from the upper class because they more often than not get away with the crimes and if they don't they can afford the best attorneys, reference Donald Trump. The middle class feels that they have too much to lose to commit a crime, and they can't afford the best attorneys. It is the middle class that is wholly dedicated to the idea of education. Once again, the lower and the upper class fail on this point. When you have no chance that you can see looking at your parents and your older siblings or other kids and you see them failing, then how do you bust your butt to ultimately fail? Or if your last name is already on a building at Harvard and Dad already has your office picked out at his firm why bust your butt, just ride on the greased skids.

Obviously I am falling in love with the words again and not the ideas. I will try to be more succinct.

There are problems with providing too much inequality, it is bad for the economy. It results in too much debt among the middle class, the majority of the population. Debt destabilizes the economy. It makes downturns more likely and they go deeper when they happen. The problem is the paradox of thrift, when people have a lot of debt they react quicker to the threat of a downturn, they come out of the downturn slower because they are more careful to spend when they have a high debt load, this is debt deflation, not actual deflation in that prices aren't dropping but the economy behaves as if the prices are dropping and no one is spending to see how low the prices will go. In the extreme inequality can produce riots, pitch forks and the unwise acceptance of extremists, reference Donald Trump.

Too much feeding the rich also hurts the economy. The rich don't spend the windfalls that they receive, they save the money. They say that they invest the money but they are accurately just saving it, usually in the stock market or in real estate, reference Donald Trump. Too much money being spent into anything produces inflation, but like using the "investing" for what is actually savings, they have a special phrase for the inflation in the stock market or in real estate, they call it "capital gains" and they pretend that it is special and good, but it isn't, it is just inflation. The inflation in the stock valuations puts pressure on the corporations to produce profits that justify the inflated stock price. This has a progressively detrimental effect on the corporation. They have to make changes to meet the profit expectations of the shareholders but without any extra capital, money, to do it with. They don't share in the property of the higher share price so they are forced to go into debt or to lay off workers or to decrease any wage increases. Or to offshore more production. If they do produce the expected profits they get recycled into the stock price and the cycle starts again.

Inflation in the real estate market is also bad because ultimately it raises the cost of living, putting pressure on to raise the wages.

Of course, increasing wages won't have the negative impact of causing inflation if the wage increases are kept within the increase in productivity every year. This is another reason for the government to constantly try to reduce the income inequality. Otherwise the demand for higher wages will peak above the rate of the productivity increase and you risk inflation.

Please be aware that I am only talking about the way that the actual economy works. I don't know and I don't care how your fantasy economy would work if it was put in place.

 

[DBT]

Self interest is the common driver of human behaviour, looking after oneself and one's own interests first and foremost, family, friends, social group, nation and state as a hierarchy of needs, wants and fears. Those who have the greatest capacity to take care of their own interests will generally do better than those who have not the capacity, perhaps lacking the entrepreneurial spirit and drive or acumen for investing, the former accumulating great wealth while the latter fall behind, often kept down by policies implemented by the rich and powerful taking care of themselves and their own. A vicious cycle of exploitation and neglect, gross inequality followed by revolt.

 

[Harry Bosch]

How the hell is having a tax policy getting out of the way?

Humans vary very little.

These huge variations in wealth have nothing to do with genetic differences. It is all about variation in experience.

And they are harmful.

One way you deal with inequality of wealth is through the elimination of top-down despotic power structures that are harmful to equality.

I agree with RV. There are dramatic differences between people. People vary in their people skills, ability to retain, work ethic, charisma, tolerance, learnability, and etc. I differ than some in that I don't care about inequality. It's going to happen. It's not going to keep me up at night. I have no problem with people who have far more than I. I don't want to work more than 40 hours a week anymore. If someone wants to work more and not enjoy life, fine with me. But I think that government should do a better job of boosting people up who want it. They should help with creating opportunities. They should increase the safety net.

Ah yes, the good old brainwashing of the Protestant Work Ethic. Rich people just work more!

I will make much more money than a lot of my peers because I was born to a well-off family.

My undergraduate and graduate education was paid out of pocket, I have no debt.

I have a lot of friends that work much harder than me, that make and will always make much less money than me. Probably because they had to take the first shit job they were offered when we graduated, because they had 100,000s of dollars of debt bearing down on them. I was able to just go back home for a year and then to grad school to ride-out the recession, and when I was done with that, my starting salary leapfrogged their current salary even though they have been working for half a decade.


And these are just the rifts inherent between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class. This doesn't even touch the differences between the truly elite and the rest of us. So yeah, sleep well.

I was mostly talking about ownership. The only for most people to get "rich" is to start a company. Create a disruptive product, grow it from nothing, grow its value, sell - you make big money. The problem is that when you create a new company you are responsible for marketing, engineering, sales, finance, distributions, and everything else. It's a 90 hour a week job. I'll settle working for someone else and only work 40 hours a week. Secondly, for many jobs, the more you work, the more you get paid. For most sales jobs, the more you sell, the more you get paid. People who spend the extra time networking at events at night will generally close more deals that the person having dinner with his family at 5 each night. Same thing with engineers. The ones who put in the extra effort will become more valuable and will get paid more on average.

But my larger point that you might have missed is that I don't care about other people's success. It appears that you had an easier path than me. Bit whoop. I really don't care. Elon Musk can have a 100 cars, doesn't bother me in the least. I want three. That's all. I'm happy for people who desire great success, then work for it, then get it. I was there when I was younger. But I don't need it anymore.

I think that we need to focus on helping people up, not taking people down. Taking away your golden path isn't going to help anyone.

 

[untermensche]

Capitalism in fact depends on a large degree of inequality to work. You have to pay the better people more or no one will want to progress...

Capitalism is all about inequality of power. Wealth in a society that recognizes that wealth is a form of power.

Capitalism could be many things.

US capitalism emerged directly from a slave society and still contains within it many master/slave relationships and ideas.

The idea that the slave, the sole reason the slave owner has wealth, is lucky to have their lowly position is the turning on it's head of any sense of how wealth is gained by an individual.

That insanity of the slave owner that thinks he is the reason for the slave's comfort as opposed to the reason for his misery is still inherent in US capitalism.

Top down power structures exist so people at the top can steal a little from all below them.

That is monarchy. That is modern US capitalism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I suspect that I am quite a bit older than you or I have a much better memory than you. I remember all of the previous revolutions in education that would make the students in chairs listening to lectures obsolete. First there were corresponce courses, then there was courses on the TV. Then self-paced courses in the universities. None of them blew students sitting in chairs listening to lectures out of the water. I have high hopes that you are correct that the internet schooling will be what does it. But I suspect that like all of the other silver bullets that internet learning will prove to be successful with the brightest and most dedicated students and a bust with the rest. We need to educate the most number of students as far as we can to face the future.

I'm not expecting it to replace classrooms--a freebie system has the serious lack of a teacher to ask questions of.

I'm saying that it can make education much more affordable. A lot of students can complete at least some of their classes on their own.

- - - Updated - - -

The solution of Anarchism is to replace dictatorial control in the workplace with democratic control. Move from top down control to horizontal control.

Inequality will still exist because some will have rare skills but the degree of inequality will be less and the problems inherent to dictators with a lot of power, even power over governments, will be eliminated.

This is not only a moral solution but it solves many of the problems of dictatorial capitalism.

Keeping beating this drum doesn't make it work.

 

[dismal]

Ah yes, the good old brainwashing of the Protestant Work Ethic. Rich people just work more!

I will make much more money than a lot of my peers because I was born to a well-off family.

My undergraduate and graduate education was paid out of pocket, I have no debt.

I have a lot of friends that work much harder than me, that make and will always make much less money than me. Probably because they had to take the first shit job they were offered when we graduated, because they had 100,000s of dollars of debt bearing down on them. I was able to just go back home for a year and then to grad school to ride-out the recession, and when I was done with that, my starting salary leapfrogged their current salary even though they have been working for half a decade.


And these are just the rifts inherent between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class. This doesn't even touch the differences between the truly elite and the rest of us. So yeah, sleep well.

I was mostly talking about ownership. The only for most people to get "rich" is to start a company. Create a disruptive product, grow it from nothing, grow its value, sell - you make big money. The problem is that when you create a new company you are responsible for marketing, engineering, sales, finance, distributions, and everything else. It's a 90 hour a week job. I'll settle working for someone else and only work 40 hours a week. Secondly, for many jobs, the more you work, the more you get paid. For most sales jobs, the more you sell, the more you get paid. People who spend the extra time networking at events at night will generally close more deals that the person having dinner with his family at 5 each night. Same thing with engineers. The ones who put in the extra effort will become more valuable and will get paid more on average.

But my larger point that you might have missed is that I don't care about other people's success. It appears that you had an easier path than me. Bit whoop. I really don't care. Elon Musk can have a 100 cars, doesn't bother me in the least. I want three. That's all. I'm happy for people who desire great success, then work for it, then get it. I was there when I was younger. But I don't need it anymore.

I think that we need to focus on helping people up, not taking people down. Taking away your golden path isn't going to help anyone.

Getting rich is easy.

First, you get some workers. This is easy because they have no choice but to come work for you for slave wages.

Second, you exploit those workers. Again, this is easy. Just wait until they produce something, take it, sell it.

Use your profits to get some more workers. Rinse and repeat.

 

[untermensche]

The solution of Anarchism is to replace dictatorial control in the workplace with democratic control. Move from top down control to horizontal control.

Inequality will still exist because some will have rare skills but the degree of inequality will be less and the problems inherent to dictators with a lot of power, even power over governments, will be eliminated.

This is not only a moral solution but it solves many of the problems of dictatorial capitalism.

Keeping beating this drum doesn't make it work.

It has worked and it will work.

Getting it past the economic dictators with inordinate power is the only problem.

Like getting rid of slavery was a problem.

 

[SimpleDon]

Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality? - The New York Times

In theory, in a democracy, the majority should influence — some would even say determine — the distribution of income.

... Forget Edsall's review of Picketty' book. Don't bother with Picketty's book. Read or listen to Thomas Frank instead. This would be a good start.

I read Thomas Frank and I read Thomas Piketty's book. I don't see the two as conflicting, save for the normal academic's tendency to overstate the significance of whatever insights their research has provided. What I mean by this is that both did solid historical research but went off of the rails when they came to conclusions about what should be done with the information. It is natural for academics to believe that work that they spent half of a working lifetime doing is more important than it is.

The classic example of this is Marx, the last of the classical economists and the one that saw the greatest impact of the industrialization of the economy because he lived through more of it. He had extremely valuable insights about the rising industrial economy concerning the impacts of private debt and of class on the economy and then went totally insane when he told us what we should do about these problems, condemning hundreds of millions to the horrors of the economic and personal hell of communism.

You have to keep this in mind whenever you read books written by academics intended for the popular audience. Read the books for what they provide in information about what they know, history and economics, and prepare to be extremely selective when you get to the part where they tell you what this means to us and what we should do about it.

 

[SimpleDon]

Why Is It So Hard for Democracy to Deal With Inequality? - The New York Times

In theory, in a democracy, the majority should influence — some would even say determine — the distribution of income.

That's the first sentence of Edsall's opinion piece, and it is fundamentally wrong. In theory democracy is not meant to determine the distribution of income at all. It is an ideology used as a weapon against the feudal system, which is principally a social pyramid with the elite at the top franchised by birthright. Far from aiming to achieve material equality, it wants to establish a formal equality, an equality for all in the eyes of the law. As such, its aim was to remove the obstacles to an individual's desire to become rich that privilege by birthright put in his (yes, his) path. Democracy is the ideological underpinning of laissez faire capitalism.

If you want to ease material inequality, democracy as such has nothing to offer until you add a magic ingredient: socialism. That is something the Democratic Party in the US has decisively turned its back on starting with Bill Clinton's presidency at the latest. Forget Edsall's review of Picketty' book. Don't bother with Picketty's book. Read or listen to Thomas Frank instead. This would be a good start.

In my view, the idea that government has no role in the economy, such as determining the income distribution, is completely wrong. History and logic tells us that defining and controlling the economy is the main reason that governments exist and that as societies and their economies have become larger and more complex that governments have had to become larger and more complex.

The theory of laissez faire capitalism is completely counter to both history and to logic. Never in the history of social man can we see an example of a self-regulating economy without a government. Government has always defined and controlled the economy. Governments and economies are so intertwined that it is hard to determine which came first, to the point that the question becomes moot.

Logic tells us that a simplistic mechanism of supply and demand setting prices can't regulate the complex economy that we have today. Much less to punish the actors in the economy who are willing to lie and to cheat to make money.

I can't fault the classical economists, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, etc. They made a reasonable stab at explaining their still largely agrarian and artisan economy. But they got many things completely wrong. Who I can fault are the present day economists who say that we should change our complex modern industrial economy into one based on the classical economists' theories and conclusions and to ignore the massive volume of work done by two hundred years of economists and the practical knowledge gained in that time through trial and error. It would be the same as saying that we should plan on going to the moon based on an earth centric model of the planetary system. It is doomed to certain failure.

What we can do here is for each of us who are on the opposite sides of this question is to state why we believe what we do believe. There are many here who believe in what you believe, that we should change our economy into one based on laissez faire in its modern guise of neoliberalism and supply side economics, the prevailing view of the current political economics of pretty much all Republicans and at least half of the Democrats in power. And there are many, but likely fewer here who believe what I believe, that we should keep the economy that we have today and try to understand it so that we can get the most that we can get from it for the greatest number of people in our society. Which you view as socialism, I presume, but which I consider to be better described as social democracy, since I am a committed capitalist and democrat who doesn't believe in the state ownership of the means of production or in authoritarianism.