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by acover 1192 days ago
This is a really interesting perspective. People from poor countries should be paid less so they can't be rich relative to their neighbors.

Are rich people so destructive to neighborhoods?

1 comments

> should be paid less

Please reread what I posted and recognize that I did not remotely suggest this. I expressly supported the policy, and want to add a frank recognition of its trade offs because its absence seemed important in the post.

> Are rich people so destructive to neighborhoods?

Disproportionately large influxes of money into a local economy cause distortion to the incentives of that economy. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the individual people with said money or their individual impact, and often it doesn’t.

The reason I think it should be part of the discussion is specifically because decisions like this don’t tend to account for externalization. If 100 companies like this are fully equitable internally, that’s awesome! But if their impact is pricing people out of housing, that sucks! If you care mostly about the former, that’s cool! I care about both, and I want to include both in the conversation.

You suggested exactly that.

Your counter argument to equal pay for equal work was location based pay prevents distortions in local prices.

Most countries want as many rich people as possible. Progressive taxes seem much more effective at combatting inequality.

> You suggested exactly that.

I not only didn’t, I stated exactly the opposite.

> But if you’re anticipating counter-arguments, this glosses over a pretty important one. Regardless of geography, higher income brackets tend to have outsized influence on prices across all income brackets in that region. The more it deviates from the median, the more it distorts local pricing. All of this “rising tide” might eventually “lift boats”, but it depends where all that new capital is flowing and even in the best cases it doesn’t keep up with price inflation.

Please explain what you mean by this then.

What I mean is that if you’re anticipating counter arguments you should anticipate the arguments you can expect, not the ones you want to advance yourself. Edit: in HN culture this is commonly phrased as “steel man”, but in basic exchange of ideas it’s just taking seriously the weaknesses your position might have. Generally it’s a good way to strengthen your position, if you can take the alternative views seriously.