[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Afaik his finding are disputed. And even if not, why should it even be desirable to encourage labor? If capital is so great, people should seek owning capital, not seek to work more. As they say, savings plans start at 50$/month.

It seems rather great that this opportunity exists (assuming it is true). The alternative is that you have to work and work until you die.

[SamBam]

"Why doesn't everyone just get rich?"

[logicchains]

Because a good chunk of people suck at delayed gratification so are incapable of saving money. Even on an average income it's not unfeasible to retire a millionaire if saving a significant percent (and indeed there are people who do this, small businesspeople and tradespeople, the "millionaires next door").

[anoncake]

When people are incapable of something, it isn't feasible for them. It doesn't really matter why "everyone getting rich" doesn't work.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Arguably, almost everybody in the Western world has gotten rich.

Go visit a medieval castle sometime. The standards that now everybody has required an army of servants in the old days.

It is just a hateful lie of the left to claim "being rich" is dependent on exploiting poor people.

[SketchySeaBeast]

That's silly - compared to cavemen, even workers in third world countries are "rich", being able to trade things for goods and services and not being required to hunt and gather. Inequality solved?

[kofejnik]

yes, exactly; to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low

Also, I don't see why exactly inequality is inherently bad. I'm poorer than Bezos, _and that is a good thing_. Pretty much like Steph Curry is better than me at basketball and so he should have a lot more ball possesion should we be playing on the same team, Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with.

[onion2k]

to have equality, you'll have to reduce everyone to the lower common denominator, which will be rather low

Why must everyone go down to the lower common denominator? Wouldn't moving everyone to the average also be equality? For most middle-class Westerners that would be a reduction, but for most people on Earth that would very likely be a small improvement, and in some cases a significant improvement.

The real problem is that it's logistically impossible. Someone living in the middle of a desert just can't have access to the sort of food wealth and stable energy supply we have because the technologies to get those things to where they are don't really exist yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to move everyone towards the average a bit though.

[tathougies]

Of course the technology exists to bring food to the desert. Move to california if you think this is what the hold up is.

[kofejnik]

If everybody is forced to be average, what's the point of even trying? I'd probably noodle on my guitar all day and play Fallout, rather than work

[chipotle_coyote]

It's a bit of a strawman to take arguments of the general form "we should enact policies to reduce inequality" and implicitly restate them as "we should enact policies that force perfect equality," then argue against that restatement, don't you think?

[beerandt]

I think the concept of "inequality" itself is a type of straw man. It's basically a problem that will perputually exist. Arguments (straw man or not) pointing out the lack of a concrete, absolute (non-relative), morally justified goal is appropriate as long as "inequality" itself is the stated "problem."

If we were talking about a fixed, concrete goal, then I'd agree with you. Reducing poverty, reducing world hunger, increasing standards of living, etc are things that can be accomplished by setting some absolute, concrete moral goals, which moving towards by any measure might be considered morally good. But "inequality" on its own is, prima facia, a term that requires comparison to the point of "perfect equality".

Doing good things might result in less inequality, but reducing inequality for the sake of itself is just justification of envy. There's nothing inherently "evil" or even negative about it.

On a side note: "Reducing inequality" is an activists dream. They can sell political solutions forever for a problem that will always exist, by some form of the definition.

(Unless we were to oversimplify it and set some standard deviation type hard-target for income distribution, but I've not heard anyone suggest this, let alone an appropriate "fair" target distribution. I'm not for it, but it's at least a measurable goal.)

[SketchySeaBeast]

> Bezos is much better than me in allocating resources, so he should have a lot more resources to play with.

How do you know that, though? Have you had the opportunity to be in the exact same place he was for the exact same time? Do you sincerely believe there aren't, in the billions of people on earth, someone with better resource allocation skills than Bezos? Having more money is not proof of ability.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

We know that because he did it. He literally proved it by becoming a Billionaire.

Yes, lots of people were alive in the exact same time when he started Amazon.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Why exactly is inequality a problem? Because people suffer from their envy?

People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem.

There are also actually differences in skills, performance, diligence, and so on. It would be very unfair if some people weren't allowed to earn more money than others.

Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question.

[ianleeclark]

> People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem.

Most people, when they critique wealth inequality, aren't critiquing their neighbors because most people in the same zip code are going to be at similar levels. When people critique wealth inequality, they're talking about the Koch brothers, or other parties who leverage capital to gain unfair advantage and political powers and then work against the first half of your statement.

> Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question.

I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

"Unfair capital advantage"

Well, again, start accumulating capital, if it is such an unfair advantage.

"I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons."

I am absolute against such a thing, in fact I consider it an insane proposal.

It seems one of the fundamental human rights should be people being allowed to provide for their children.

People work to have successful children. It is absolutely incorrect that all children should have the same starting positions for a fair world. If a couple works hard to earn money, and others don't work and instead pop out 10 children, why on earth would it be fair to take money from the hard working parents to distribute it to all? I know many people who would like to have more children, but feel they can't afford them. Why should they be punished for being responsible.

It even starts before people have children. They work hard to be attractive and find a good mate, to improve the odds for their children. That is basic human nature.

The acts of their parents are not the children's fault, of course, and everybody should be given a fair chance to make it in life. But there are limits. Both strategies can be valid (have few children and try to give them a good head start in live vs having as many children as possible and leaving them to their own devices), but it would be unfair to politically punish one strategy over the other. At the very least, if you take away money from the responsible parents, you should have to limit the behavior of the irresponsible parents.

The only way to make things completely equal for everyone is to disallow people to have children, and instead rise future children in clone factories. Why should that be considered desirable?

And even more basic than that: people should be allowed to do with their money as they please. Including giving it to their children.

[FeloniousHam]

> I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons.

I am very far from an economic leftist, but the elimination of inheritance seems to me the fastest, fairest, path to equality of opportunity (the disposition of the confiscated assets is a separate argument). Tax the dead guy.

[anoncake]

> Why exactly is inequality a problem? Because people suffer[...]?

Yes. That and the fact that rich people don't gain as much utility from additional wealth, making inequality inefficient.

> Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question.

No, it isn't. Unless you think wealth is somehow intrinsically a problem even if it's equally distributed.

[simoom22]

Are you saying poor people aren't exploited?

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

Presumably there are people who are being exploited in the world. But to claim in general poverty is a result of exploitation seems very questionable.

Start with basics. People live in the woods, with nothing. Some start building a hut from sticks, others don't. The ones living in huts suddenly are richer than the ones who don't, even though they haven't taken anything away from the ones who don't have huts.

And of the ones who don't have huts demand some of the huts from the people who built them, who is doing the exploiting?

[bigger_cheese]

People in huts eventually band together into villages, villages start to trade goods with one another. Eventually the largest village is able to coerce (either using the threat of force via superior military or through infiltration, bribery subversion etc) the smaller villages into giving it the best deals.

The largest village gets very rich while extracting all the resources and goods from the smaller villages around it. The largest village is able to ram through treaties, trade pacts etc that favor it's interests, it is able to interfere in politics of surrounding villages and sometimes provides backing to despots or outright overthrow leadership of smaller villages that might be doing something the largest village does not agree with.

[Mirioron]

What you say is true, but when people usually talk about inequality, they're talking about inequality in a specific country. In your example that would be inequality inside a single village rather than between the villages.

Also, with similarly bad faith you could say that when the first group was building their huts, the second group was sharpening their sticks. Once the huts were completed they used their sharpened sticks to coerce the richer people (those with huts) to give them huts too.

[kofejnik]

not the parent's OP, but yes; I'm saying the whole notion of exploitation is rather silly

[simoom22]

We'll, I guess all notions can seem silly from some perspective. Children climbing up chimneys or adults wearing diapers to meet chicken plucking quotas can seen silly from a certain perspective, but usually not a first person one.

[dls2016]

What the hell use is capital without labor?

[nybble41]

What use is labor without capital? Labor needs tools to be productive.

[pksdjfikkkkdsff]

A roof over you head can be very useful in the rain.