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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to resolve this? Parents are going to want to help their children over others; people without that help will feel resentful. Seems like a consequence of human nature, and changing the tax incentives won't ameliorate what is essentially an emotional problem. (The issue isn't parents helping their kids, the issue is the reaction to it)

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I think there are a lot of policy changes that could make massive strides towards resolving this. A significantly higher marginal tax rate and a wealth tax would reduce the amount of wealth available to gift. Lowering the amount of money that can be gifted legally would reduce the amount of support that could be offered. Free education and healthcare (and potentially a UBI), forgiving student loans, and some combination of rent control and improved zoning laws (and possibly vacancy taxes) would ameliorate most of the problem areas that people get help with and that cause this resentment.

I disagree that this is essentially an emotional problem. This is essentially an inequality problem; the inequality (unsurprisingly) breeds resentment, and trying to fix the resentment without fixing the inequality is just slapping a bandage over a sucking chest wound.

What do you think would be the unintended consequences of the policy changes you mentioned? It seems possible that reducing inequality could have some side effects that might make everyone worse off -- less equality because everyone makes significantly less.

It's not an outcome I'm particularly worried about. There are a lot of countries with a median GDP per capita greater than or roughly equivalent to the United States[1] with more robust social welfare states and lower GINI coefficients[2]. I'm much more concerned about the effects of runaway inequality.

[1]: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/world-bank-poverty-statistics-lac... [2]: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm

Would you say that a person would be more motivated or less motivated to learn new things every day and work insanely hard if they receive UBI, get income redistributed to them from richer neighbors, receive free goods and services, and also know that most of their wealth, if they earn it, would be taxed away?

Well, first, I reject the idea that the only potential motivation for learning new things, building interesting things, and working hard is personal greed, especially given that virtually the entire tech industry is built on the hard work of open source contributors, who built and continue to build incredible things without any expectation of financial recompense.

But more importantly, I don't really care if a few people are slightly less motivated if it means that we can unlock the massive amount of latent human potential currently wasted in poverty, hunger, and desperation. The number of people like that would be massively outweighed by the people who aren't scrabbling just to survive, and whose intelligence and work ethic could instead be turned to learning and building the future.

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