Ask HN: Do you think Wealth Inequality is solvable?

[kkcorps]

I am not asking about the Poverty.I think poverty is a solvable problem. What I am asking about is wealth inequality e.g. Richest 1% holding 50% of the wealth. Do you even think if this is a problem? IMO, no matter what you do, inequality will still be there since there are a subset of people who are overly ambitious and will do anything to reach the top.

[ggm]

Postwar conditions tend to flatten the disparity. The destruction removes static capital assets, money in banks is siezed, currency collapse and reform removes most surplus. What happens over time is a return to capital accumulation by surplus from investment.

Absent war and revolution I'm not sure what flattens anything as quickly or as much. Taxation doesn't seem to work in a globe of transfer pricing. It's meant to. It's notable high taxing Nordic countries have less extreme disparity. Millionaires and a few billionaires no trillionaires

Note, there are many millionaires in America and India and the lowest poverty in India is far lower and more widespread than in the US but the disparity in magnitude rich to poor in India may actually be better because.. Musk and Bezos.

Not that it helps but the disparity in the USSR in cash terms was tiny by comparison but post kleptocracy that's returned to western norms. In sheer power and agency it was probably comparable. Bezos can't have millions of people sent to work camps with a single phonecall, he probably has noted the compliance costs and effort.

The 1MBD scandal shows how Asia feels about things. Suharto is gone. Marcos is gone. The Sultan of Brunei is doing fine and there's more money sloshing around Asia than ever. Jack Ma got "sat on" which suggests he'd accumulated too much power, maybe money too?

[dane-pgp]

If we accept the (increasingly uncertain) assumption that democracy is sustainable, and that taxation policies reflect the wishes of the majority, then we would expect (to a first approximation) that the wealth distribution in a country would match the average or majority wishes of the citizens in that country.

As for what the "desired" wealth distribution is, a naive view would be that everyone believes that we are all inherently of equal worth, and therefore we should all have roughly the same amount of total assets over the course of our lives, but a lot of people instead accept the premise that if there were no reward for working hard, people would freeload.

Fortunately some research has been done on what the desired amount of inequality is, and here is an article[0] which compares that desired distribution to the actual distribution, and also to the distribution that people think exists in America. The results are quite illuminating.

One way to bring the actual distribution in line with the desired distribution (other than improving democracy/representation and education) would be with an explicit annual wealth tax. For simplicity it could be designed to only apply to people with more than $5 million in net assets, and it might have to be agreed in coordination with other advanced countries (like the recent global minimum corporate tax rate agreement). The revenue could be redistributed into public services like free healthcare and college.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/america...

[baash05]

There's a third option to the inherent equal worth vs freeload. That is, that people are just not of equal inherent worth.

I'm a coder, and I do not believe for an instant that I am as valuable to the population on the whole as a nurse or a doctor. I mean even even just reading your last full sentence one might argue you feel the same.

If you were trapped on an island, would you want a DR or a coder with you?

[dane-pgp]

I think the problem is that "How much is someone worth?" can't (or shouldn't) have a financial answer, in the same way that slavery is morally wrong.

(Yes, technically it is necessary to calculate things like the amount of money a society should spend to increase the number of Quality-Adjusted Life Years of the population as a whole, given that there are finite resources and competing things to spend them on, but even then we don't typically try to judge recipients by their skills or professions.)

If I were trapped on an island, I wouldn't want a doctor or a coder to join me, I'd want to not be trapped on the island. That's dodging the question a little, but just because a doctor might be more useful to me in some circumstances doesn't necessarily mean that I want society to produce worse outcomes for coders (or anyone else) than for doctors, except to the extent that providing better outcomes for doctors is necessary to produce more/better/enough doctors.

[baash05]

I don't think it's a real problem in general. I don't mind if Gates, Musk and the likes have X cash.. It doesn't affect my life.

In general the poverty rate of the world is dropping super fast, and every year more and more of the world is raised out.

I do worry about facebook and twitter because I fear the power they're growing. But I don't care much about their balance sheets.

[wsc981]

I think it is unavoidable, given enough time, that most wealth accumulates into very few hands. In a capitalist society this might happen slower than in a socialist society.

The small group of people that get all the wealth, get all the power. See for example how billionaires use foundations to guide government policy.

As such, I believe that in order to maintain a somewhat fair society, we might reach a point when it’s required to force billionaires to share a large part of their wealth with society, perhaps by paying debts of countries or citizens.

[beardyw]

> In a capitalist society this might happen slower than in a socialist society.

In a democratic society this might happen slower than in a totalitarian society.

[poormystic]

No, because wealth is the property of greedy intelligence, whose great power protects that wealth. It's continuous rape, and the perpetrators don't want to get off.