[roenxi]

> To me all these bifurcations seem to me to stem from a change of a world of more evenly distributed wealth (for working, lower middle, and middle class) and one with wild inequality.

> Back in the 50s and up to the 80s a single-income middle class household could still send a kid to college, buy a house, and so on.

Is the right word inequality? There aren't less college places, houses in NY/the Bay, etc in the world than there were in the 80s. By extension, the problem is not enough new wealth creation rather than inequality.

I'm open to being wrong, but at a guess there aren't all that many rich people who consume more than 2 degrees, live in 2 houses, etc. There are those that do, but they are relatively rare. Mostly they just get first pick from the existing stock, except in housing where they buy but then rent out in my experience, so it isn't exactly removing stock from general availability. If the rich disappeared tomorrow, would that free up enough resources that the poor could all have "whatever"?

I've no answer, but rhetorically I doubt it. The rich physically can't consume that many resources in absolute terms.

[michaelmrose]

The resource they consume is wealth. It's disingenuous to claim that a wealthy person does not consume more resources. Houses are a particularly poor example.

A wealthy person may have a 2. 5 million mansion and a quarter million dollar vacation home and own 3 rental homes.

They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost of the mortgage while fighting to maximize the value of investment by limiting the supply of new housing.

With 40% of their neighbors paying rent to people like them and some living on the street it's hard not to qualify the situation as unequal.

[roenxi]

> They may trivially capture some of the resources available for others housing by buying up the housing supply and renting for more than the cost of the mortgage while fighting to maximize the value of investment by limiting the supply of new housing.

You're focusing on accounting, which is fine and all, but there are two scenarios here:

(1) There are 10 houses, 10 people live in them. Everyone owns their own house.

(2) There are 10 houses. 10 people live in them. All the houses are owned by 1 person. 9 people rent.

From an inequality perspective, obviously one scenario here is grossly less equal than the other. From a what-is-phyiscally-happening perspective, these situations are roughly identical.

The $2.5 million mansion you mention is potentially a nice house that is the same physical size as a $700k house in the country. My point here is although the situation may be grossly unequal, but part of the issue here is what actual, physical resources do we want the rich not to be using?

Eg, do we want to take away vacation homes from people and subdivide it into government housing? How much stock does that create? Is that going to solve housing affordability in, say, SF?

This isn't me being disingenous, I'm just genuinely curious why people think inequality is the problem since I personally favor that wealth creation is being strangled by hostile political forces.

Inequality is a problem; it is a symptom of things going badly wrong. But that doesn't mean that reducing inequality cures the disease - it is easy to reduce inequality by forcing everyone to have nothing. We all want to reduce inequality be creating more wealth. Houses, stuff, fun experiences, etc, etc. Is that possible? Is redistribution a valid route? Maybe. It does work sometimes.

[michaelmrose]

When you find yourself proving that 2 + 2 = 17 this is your cue to examine the chain of logic that got you there.

The idea that one person can own everything and everyone is equally well off as if they all owned equal shares is wrong on its face.

In practice in an environment that isn't deeply unequal the landlord creates value by investing capital in maintaining housing stocks that renters may lack or not want to invest. They trade both current money and foregone future wealth for increased flexibility and predictable costs.

In an increasingly unequal one renters have no options because nearly 100% of the value they create for society is captured by others including the landlord or go to pay for their increasingly lackluster survival. In many cases they may end up creating less total value for society and themselves because they can't invest the time and money to maximize their own value.

Your 9 renters example is too small in scale. Back in reality some portion are pushed onto the street, some live substantially poorer lives, families barely see one another because one party or both is gone 60-70 hours per week, people die sooner due to substandard health care, people don't go back to school because they can't work 60 hours to support their family AND go to school. People don't take chances that would improve themselves because they can barely afford to live now. They live in the ghetto because that's all they can afford.

Having an increasing share of the wealth means trivially mathematically that others have less. Only for the upper middle class does that mean they have just as nice a house in a less desirable neighborhood.

Meanwhile in reality in the last several decades 25% more than previously, people take a look at life ahead of them and put a gun in their mouth,forego going to the doctor and end up dying of an infected tooth, or ration their insulin and wind up dead.

[roenxi]

> The idea that one person can own everything and everyone is equally well off as if they all owned equal shares is wrong on its face.

You say that, but it your counter is also obviously wrong. It would be trivial to have a system where everyone owns equal shares of everything - dissolve private property rights and nationalise. On the face of it that isn't a bad idea but when it is tried it fails spectacularly. I'm not aware of any surviving examples where equal ownership has worked without becoming hopelessly corrupted.

So in practice we know that some level of inequality which, if dropped below, does result in everyone being worse off.

As an interesting aside, ~90% of Canada is owned by the Crown [0]. It isn't obvious that this inequality is their biggest problem w.r.t. living standards.

> Back in reality some portion are pushed onto the street ... and end up dying

Yeah all that stuff does sound awful, but you are not going to the meat of what I was asking. Assuming we aren't creating new wealth (because that would be something that could be done now) then the wealthy will have to give something up so that the poor can gain. What is it? If wealthy people stop going on holidays then retrain the hotel receptionists as doctors? Are wealthy people taking more hours of doctor time than they need and so we make them live with shorter appointments?

I don't believe the wealthy are using enough raw resources for to make a difference; there'd need to be a massive redeployment and upskilling program training new people to have higher skills. That isn't obviously an equality issue, it might be an education problem or related to government healthcare policy.

> Only for the upper middle class does that mean they have just as nice a house in a less desirable neighborhood.

You haven't changed the number or quality of the houses, so you're basically suggesting the middle class and the poor swap houses. If the poor persons prior home wasn't an acceptable dwelling, why would it be acceptable to put a middle class family in it? Is there something wrong with the poor persons house? Is the issue that the wealthy are using too much building material so the poor can't do home repairs?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land#Canada

[michaelmrose]

You are being deliberately obtuse and confusing the map for the territory.

Can you really not conceive of anything that could be done to decrease inequality less than literally swapping houses?

Money is an abstract store of value so that we don't have to trade goats and houses.

I suggest we tax the rich to fund a better social safety net, education, and free medical care for all Americans.

[roenxi]

> Can you really not conceive of anything that could be done to decrease inequality less than literally swapping houses?

I can think of lots of ways to decrease inequality.

> Money is an abstract store of value so that we don't have to trade goats and houses.

Yes.

> I suggest we tax the rich to fund a better social safety net, education, and free medical care for all Americans.

That is cool and all, but talking hypothetically what if we doubled everyone's real wealth & income? That'd more than double the tax take and the poor would have more to start with to boot.

So that would be a big improvement for everyone even though inequality would have risen some ungodly amount.

Why would the rise in inequality in such a scenario be bad? The list of things you have here is of phenomenon of absolute amounts of resources. Inequality is a phenomenon of relative amounts.

[michaelmrose]

Protip: No amount of wealth creation will ever trickle down to the poor people.

We can increase equality by providing free national health care and a social safety net that would allow people to take time off and retrain along with educational opportunities.

Turns out that this works better than giving handouts to the rich.

[pryelluw]

Yes, I think the word inequality is correct. It comes as a result of hoarding wealth.

[bhl]

Is the right word inequality? There aren't less college places, houses in NY/the Bay, etc in the world than there were in the 80s. By extension, the problem is not enough new wealth creation rather than inequality.

Yes, the right word to describe this bifurcation is inequality. It's correct to note that the absolute number of available housing and students going to university are up, but relatively compared, people are finding harder to do both because the number of available spots has grown slower than population growth.

At first glance, this may seem like an issue with not enough wealth creation: why are there not more houses and universities being built? But when you look at productivity versus income [1], the issue is with the unequal capture of wealth not with its creation.

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/