Wealth Distribution in America

[moda0306]

If things are so much better now (are in many ways), why shouldn't some level of equality still be a goal just as liberty is still a goal? 

I'm surprised with people who can complain about how horrible things are in this country due to "all the freedoms we've lost," and then look at the "47%" and tell them how amazing things are in America so they should quit asking for free stuff.

Which is it?  Is America an amazing place, or a confiscatory, slave-state, socialist hell-hole?


Maybe these are different people and I'm just building a straw-man in my mind, but I think there's some truth there.

[Pointedstick]

Isn't it possible that we have more stuff but less freedom?

Come to think of it, doodle would probably agree with that.

[moda0306]

Isn't it possible that we have more stuff but less freedom?

Come to think of it, doodle would probably agree with that.

Freedom from the direct influence of others or government?

Depends on who you are, and what you consider a more important freedom (Freedom from income tax vs freedom from draft (yes, sorry, went there again)).



Freedom to do things almost unthinkable 100 years ago (like having debates like this while "at work") ?

I'll pick 2013.

[doodle]

Isn't it possible that we have more stuff but less freedom?

Come to think of it, doodle would probably agree with that.

Freedom from the direct influence of others or government?

Depends on who you are, and what you consider a more important freedom (Freedom from income tax vs freedom from draft (yes, sorry, went there again)).



Freedom to do things almost unthinkable 100 years ago (like having debates like this while "at work") ?

I'll pick 2013.

There is something so morally wrong that the guy bent over backwards in 100 degree fields picking my food barely makes enough to feed his own family while me and the rest of the priviledged class here have jaunty debates while "at work". Im not saying that the system today is any better or worse than it was in the past, but there is still a lot wrong with the way this pie is being distributed. And if that is the way the cookie crumbles in a capitalistic free marketplace, then I would suggest that there is a major problem with free market capitalism that allows things to get so unbalanced. Marx, would agree and while he had more positive things to say about capitalism than William Buckley, he was also able to see its weaknesses and flaws.

[doodle]

Isn't it possible that we have more stuff but less freedom?

Come to think of it, doodle would probably agree with that.

A man is rich (*and free) in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Thoreau

* I added that

[Pointedstick]

I guess I was defining "freedom" as "political freedom." If your definition of overall freedom includes having more stuff and more money and being able to debate strangers over the internet during the middle of the day, then yeah, we're all much freer. But I thought we were talking about political freedoms, not life comforts.

[doodle]

I guess I was defining "freedom" as "political freedom." If your definition of overall freedom includes having more stuff and more money and being able to debate strangers over the internet during the middle of the day, then yeah, we're all much freer. But I thought we were talking about political freedoms, not life comforts.

Arent we politically freer today than ever before?

[Benko]

liberty requires eternal vigilance, we must endlessly watch and continually decide which direction we choose to head in
"more now than ever before" is no excuse for allowing freedoms to be reversed, and losing liberty in the name of equality (or safety) seems to be an equally sketchy argument,

If things are so much better now (are in many ways), why shouldn't some level of equality still be a goal just as liberty is still a goal?

if you cant have both which should you choose? (i am assuming you meant economic equality) i prefer equality of opportunity over forced equality, taking by force from one group to achieve equality for another seems anti liberty and quite unequal

taking by force from one group to achieve equality for another seems anti liberty and quite unequal

+1

Free people are not equal
Equal people are not free

Pournelle. 

[moda0306]

taking by force from one group to achieve equality for another seems anti liberty and quite unequal

+1

Free people are not equal
Equal people are not free

Pournelle.

Then you must be anarchists, because the founding fathers stole from citizens to pay for the military and legal structure they preferred. 

If you're anti-government, fine, but if you're only for limited government, then you can't make self-righteous cries about how any government act you don't agree with is tyrannical.

I may have opinions of what government should and shouldn't do.  But I don't measure them based on some predetermined criteria that automatically makes people that disagree with me "statists" and me a defender of all that is good, and how the slave owners that founded this country had The perfect political model for freedom.


And I'm not talking about having both perfect liberty or perfect equality (both impossible and not even really all that desirable), but a balance of the two.

[Pointedstick]

And I'm not talking about having both perfect liberty or perfect equality (both impossible and not even really all that desirable), but a balance of the two.

I actually totally agree… but it's the marketplace that turns out to be the perfect way to discover what that balance is. Case in point: we all claim to want privacy, yet use Facebook, Gmail, and other services that make their whole business out of selling our personal information to third parties. And we know this when we sign up! Turns out that in the aggregate, we actually want convenience a lot more than we want privacy. But--and this is important--any individual who does not want to be a part of that aggregate may at any point opt out and stop using those services to get their privacy back.

This why the marketplace is so flexible: it reflects the will of the group, but lets individuals make their own decisions that go against the grain. Contrast this with anything subject to political control, where the average is determined by a balance of what the group wants and what the oligarchs running it want, and most of the time individuals may not even attempt to opt out or else armed men will come to hurt them.

[doodle]

And I'm not talking about having both perfect liberty or perfect equality (both impossible and not even really all that desirable), but a balance of the two.

And the marketplace turns out to be the perfect way to discover what that balance is. Case in point: we all claim to want privacy, yet use Facebook, Gmail, and other services that make a whole business off selling our personal information. Turns out that in the aggregate, we actually want convenience a lot more than we want privacy. But any individual who does not want to be a part of that aggregate may at any point opt out and stop using those services to get their privacy back.

This why the marketplace is so flexible: it reflects the will of the group, but lets individuals make their own decisions that go against the grain. Contrast this with anything subject to political control, where the average is determined by a balance of what the group wants and what the oligarchs running it want, and most of the time individuals may not even attempt to opt out or else armed men will come to hurt them.

Does the marketplace figure out the perfect balance of wealth for a healthy economy and society?

[Pointedstick]

I think it does. I mean, the only alternative is for an individual or group of individuals to determine it by fiat. I have a lot more faith in the ability of everyone to make decisions that collectively wind up being optimal than I do individuals or small groups of individuals to make decisions about what's optimal for other people.

[Xan]

Doodle, I'm not understanding your various positions.  If you believe in your less-is-more, non-materialistic viewpoint, then surely the poor are better off being poor, right?  Wouldn't you want all the wealth to float to a few at the top so that more can enjoy being poor?

[doodle]

Doodle, I'm not understanding your various positions.  If you believe in your less-is-more, non-materialistic viewpoint, then surely the poor are better off being poor, right?  Wouldn't you want all the wealth to float to a few at the top so that more can enjoy being poor?

Oh yes, I agree voluntary poverty is certainly the most free and unencumbered way of living. Almost all enlightended people (Im not claiming to be one by the way) choose this particular manner of living. No, where my bone of contention is, is where those people doing their best and working their fingers to the bone within the system cannot escape from a hand to mouth existence while we lucky ones at the top have these little debates while sitting in our airconditioned offices. Why is it that a worker doing backbreaking labor to feed us is compensated so much less than a middle manager pushing paperwork around in an office? How does the market measure that price? All it says is that our education system has failed and that we have a huge number of people who are willing to sell their bodies for next to nothing. The fact that farm labor is cheap for example is a condemnation of our system.

[Pointedstick]

You're complaining about low wages for unskilled labor? Wages for unskilled labor are actually much much higher in countries like the USA and all over Europe than they are all over the world. That people who work with their hands make less money than people who work with their minds is just something that's been pretty much universally true. That's because this is essentially fallback work; anyone can do it if they ever really need to. Same reason why fast food workers make a pittance. The supply of people who can do it is very high. By contrast, very few people can fall back on being a middle manager, or an engineer, or a web designer. That's what makes their labor more valuable. If everyone knew how to make websites, then web designers would probably be paid peanuts, too.

[Benko]

"If you're anti-government, fine, but if you're only for limited government, then you can't make self-righteous cries about how any government act you don't agree with is tyrannical. "

Again, you could provide social nets for the poor and not f with the rest of us.  but it is as important to take down the rich people as it is to help the poor.

I'm for limited gov't, which does not include social engineering to impose your version of utopia. 

I have a lot more faith in the ability of everyone to make decisions that collectively wind up being optimal than I do individuals or small groups of individuals to make decisions for everyone else about what's optimal for them.

The dangerous ones (better than statist?), know what is best for everyone, and are in the process of transforming the country into what they wish.  How many countries with free health care are stupid enough to do what is about to happen if immigration passes as the dangerous ones wish?

[doodle]

You're complaining about low wages for unskilled labor? Wages for unskilled labor are actually much much higher in countries like the USA and all over Europe than they are all over the world. That people who work with their hands make less money than people who work with their minds is just something that's been pretty much universally true. That's because this is essentially fallback work; anyone can do it if they ever really need to. Same reason why fast food workers make a pittance. The supply of people who can do it is very high. By contrast, very few people can fall back on being a middle manager, or an engineer, or a web designer. That's what makes their labor more valuable. If everyone knew how to make websites, then web designers would probably be paid peanuts, too.

That isnt my argument. My argument is that the reason why there is so much unskilled labor is that 1) our system doesnt provide equality of opportunity for its citizens 2) there are many people who are not capable of anything more than basic labor. Neither of these is in my mind a justification of someone having trouble paying the rent and putting food on the table in a society where there exists so much surplus among just a few individuals.

As I have made the argument before, the capitalist market system has disrupted traditional human social relationships. This system runs counter to our evolutionary development and our psychological needs. Isnt it a bit telling that great wealth does nothing to increase an individuals happiness?  Doesnt this say that this wonderful system that we have designed (while incredibly productive) is failing to improve our lives in so many countless ways?

There is nothing wrong with free economic transactions and getting wealthy. There is an issue however when five people sit at a table after all putting in a full days labor and the person who knows how to operate the oven takes 4/5th of the meal and the people growing and picking the food share 1/5th between all of them.

[Pointedstick]

Wait hold up a second… you're blaming capitalism for there still being people who do manual labor? The history of capitalism in the west has been the history of people learning more and more skills so they don't have to do manual labor anymore! You have it precisely backwards!

Before the industrial revolution, the majority of us were farmers and that's all we did, farm. Farm farm farm, all day. I've lived in a primitive African village where everyone is a farmer. Manual labor is just something that everyone does, all day, every day.

Now, you also seem to be making the case that manual labor is emotionally freeing, and that all this brain work is actually making us miserable, so I'm not sure what exactly you're point is. Are you trying to argue both that we should be doing less technical brain work and that the rewards of manual work should be higher? In societies with less brain work to go around, it's more valuable, not less.

If you want to make unskilled labor more valuable, you should actually be cheering on the accelerating trend of people becoming more educated and doing less and less manual work for themselves--which is exactly what's happening! I mean when I make 10 million bucks from my technical capitalist enterprise, I can afford to hire someone to wash my house, raise me grass-fed cows, make me hardwood furniture by hand, etc.

[doodle]

Youre right, Im getting mixed up in a bunch of different critques of capitalism and things are beginning to become muddled.

Listen, let me first start that like Marx, I see capitalism as an amazingly productive system that creates incredible innovation and material wealth. With that, you will find little argument among almost all brands of economists.

However, there is a trend towards ever greater disparity in our system that is slowly beginning to resemble something of an aristocracy when you look at increasing concetrations of wealth and social mobility together. You might not think there is a problem whem 20% of the population owns 80% of the wealth....but what about if this trend continues and 1% of the population owns 99% percent of the wealth? Do you think that this might be a cause for concern?

You know, up until about 100 years ago...wage labor and slavery were almost synonymous to many people. If we reach a point where a small fraction of the population owns all the land and resources (as the trend suggests is happening) how is this any different from feudalism or a landed aristocracy?

Interesting wikipedia entry on this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Does this argument sway you at all? Maybe even emotionally a bit? After all, his argument concerns freedom...

The first articulate description of wage slavery was made by Simon Linguet in 1763:
The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him . . . They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market . . . It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live . . . It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him . . . what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him ?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune . . . These men . . . [have] the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. . . . They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?[19]

[Pointedstick]

It does make sense to me. It really does. That's why I'm trying for ERE so hard. I feel very, very strongly about this. But I also recognize that I only have the opportunity to pursue ERE because of industrial capitalism. In a pre-industrial-capitalist society, what opportunities were there for me if I wanted to avoid working?

None.

Everybody worked. They worked in the fields. They worked in the forest. They worked in workshops and studios. But they all worked, day in, day out, every day until they became too old and then their children took care of them. Women and children worked too. There was no escaping it, because their labor was not productive to generate a sufficient surplus that they could live off it for years.

Industrial capitalism has freed us of this. We now have a new option: work very hard for a period of time and use capital (phones, computers, robots, etc) to generate such a gigantic surplus that you never need to work again. In older times, no common person had the ability to generate the types of surpluses we can today! It would have been unheard of.

You talk about a widening wealth inequality; it's a myth. In olden times, 99% of people had nothing. No significant wealth. No land (at least in Europe). Here in the USA where common people did have land, before industrial agriculture, producing a large surplus with it was impossible. The fact that 80% of the people control 20% of the wealth today is actually the miracle. Again, you confuse the disease with the cure: industrial capitalism is the very thing that empowered the 99% to have anything at all!

Prior to factories and mills and railroads, these people lived in their small farms, barely produced enough for themselves, had no monetary or financial wealth to speak of, and had almost no routes for the acquisition of it. They had to build their own houses, build their own tools. Raise their own animals, and so on and so forth.

It's easy to fall into a certain romance when we look back on this, but there's a reason why large numbers of these people decided to move to the cities and work in mills and factories as soon as such opportunities became available. It represented the opportunity for the acquisition of wealth, better then they had on the farms.

I mean heck, why am I living in California, working at a high-wage corporate job when I would prefer to live in a pastoral mountain cabin? Same reason.

[doodle]

There is some debate about pre-industrial work...

One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/r ... kweek.html

[doodle]

Also, while ERE might be a solution for a few...it would never work as a systemic solution. Although I pursue it, I also realize that if everyone did...it would cease to function.

[Pointedstick]

Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time.

If this is true, there's nothing about it that a modern person couldn't reproduce at will within our industrial capitalist society, simply by living like one of those people. There's not much stopping someone who wants to work part-time at an auto body shop and live like a 18th century peasant in a handmade cabin with goats, chickens, and a garden full of heirloom vegetables. And to the extent that you would encounter difficulties, it would be due to things like building codes, regulations on livestock, central land use planning, property taxes, etc. It's mostly the government that would get in your way, not any private company.

But my personal theory is that by and large people want the luxury and gadgets that capitalism provides, and are mostly willing to trade their time for indoor plumbing, expensive hobbies, pre-cooked food, SUVs, laptop computers, and trips to Vegas.

I know, a real shock, right!?! 

[doodle]

Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time.

If this is true, there's nothing about it that a modern person couldn't reproduce at will within our industrial capitalist society, simply by living like one of those people. There's not much stopping someone who wants to work part-time at an auto body shop and live like a 18th century peasant in a handmade cabin with goats, chickens, and a garden full of heirloom vegetables. And to the extent that you would encounter difficulties, it would be due to things like building codes, regulations on livestock, central land use planning, property taxes, etc. It's mostly the government that would get in your way, not any private company.

I think it is a little more complicated than that though. Capitalism depends on consumption to provide jobs. The worker is bound into comsuming (on a macro scale) or losing his job for lack of demand. Without a job in our present system, one basically has no other means of survival than to beg. It isnt really as if he could just walk off into nature and build a cabin and create a little self sufficient community. The worker in some ways bears the same relationship to the capitalist as the slave to the slave master.

All in all, I dont take issue with the productivity of capitalism....Im just saying that in our striving to become ever more productive and innovative, we might be missing the point. Sure people, are free to abandon the system, but that would be analogous to being free at anytime to jump out of a car racing down the highway at 80 miles an hour.

[Pointedstick]

I think it is a little more complicated than that though. Capitalism depends on consumption to provide jobs. The worker is bound into comsuming (on a macro scale) or losing his job for lack of demand. Without a job in our present system, one basically has no other means of survival than to beg. It isnt really as if he could just walk off into nature and build a cabin and create a little self sufficient community.

Why not? On a micro level, he could do just that. Like I said, the only things really stopping him would be government laws that restrict what you can do with your own land. Of course he needs land first, but rural land is ridiculously cheap in this country of ours. A friend of mind bought a lot out in the middle of nowhere for $800 and happily lives there with her husband in a house they built together. They have no TV, no internet, no iPhones, and no vacations to Paris. And they're happy living this way, too! It's not impossible. People do it all the time.

Now, on a macro level, yes, if we all did this, it would radically change society and probably the general level of wealth would fall as demand dried up and capital lay fallow. But let's face it: we're not all going to do it. We all like our cell phones and Priuses and HBO and collections of commemorative presidential plates. Imagining that an entire society would spontaneously--or even gradually--revert to a prior state of being is just as fantastical as the hypothetical anarchist paradise IMHO.