Comment by squirrelicus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by squirrelicus | Hacker News Reader

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Okay, that's my point.

If you have a thousand wealths and I have one wealth, that's worse than if I have a million wealths and you have a quintillion wealths.

No, not trickle down economics. It's history. The standard of living of the impoverished is dramatically higher than the rich of yore, and continually rising. And the reason is unequivocally capitalism.

Your view of the wealth gap is just not relevant because economics is not a zero sum game. The pie is not a fixed size. The promise of capitalism is that we get to grow the size of the pie. This isn't speculation or opinion. It's one of the few things we know for certain in economics.

Yes, the wealthy are getting wealthier faster than the poor are getting wealthier. But the one thing people who think that's a bad thing cannot explain is why that's a bad thing. It's not obvious that it's even possible to dramatically enrich everyone like capitalism very definitely did in the past without disproportionately enriching the few. That just may be a consequence of the only process of collective enrichment that appears to have ever existed on the planet.

I volunteer to explain why. Because people are envious, and status and by extension happiness are to some degree determined by relative prosperity, not absolute.

That is to say, there exist people who would be happier if everyone was equally a medieval peasant, rather than today's status quo.

Given that scarce goods exist and will always exist, you can't even say this viewpoint is irrational. When the range of status is minimized, it makes status mobility easier. Human happiness is also adaptive to a sort of baseline norm; it's not clear that increasing prosperity in Western countries actually makes people happier past a certain point.

I'm not on board for designing economy based on the happiness levels of the envious. Besides, the literature is clear that rising in status has very little long term impact on happiness.

Edit: it kinda goes like this

"I'm not happy because i don't make enough money"

"Here's some money"

"I'm not happy because i don't make enough money"

"Here's some money"

"I'm not happy because i don't make enough money"

"Ummm.... Maybe you should find a better metric for meaning in your life, because we're getting nowhere."

Beyond a certain point, which appears to be "bill collectors aren't knocking down your door", more money does nothing for your mental health. Look up Jordan Peterson to find the non-controversial reasons why.

Edit 2: the great tragedy of the leftist economic designer seems to be that subsidizing the poor seems to have no effect. If you do that, the labor costs of goods rises to meet it. So all you did is eat into already-narrow profit margins to, at best, raise prices for everybody including the middle class, or at worse, kill local small businesses.

The real darkly funny part about this whole thing is that, in America, controlling for factors like disability, poor individuals don't stay poor very long. You work hard, you're not poor for much longer. If you don't work hard, you're poor forever.

Edit 3: I often hear a politician say a thing that's false, that people "can't get ahead". It might be true that they can't get ahead as fast as they would like. But so what? We can't fix that problem. Literally, it's not possible. How fast you get ahead is a function of how hard you work. That's how capitalism works.

It's a complicated subject. I think you're too quick to dismiss income redistribution based on the happiness levels of the envious: this is a fundamental part of human nature. Just as we exploit human greed in our capitalistic society, so too we must mollify human envy so there aren't riots in the street. Uncontrolled wealth inequality leads to a breakdown in the egalitarian ideal (or fiction, if you are more cynical) we have of our Western society. Insofar as wealth represents power and influence, this was a topic of concern even to the Founding Fathers.

Status seeking is something you see in all animals, not just humans, and we shouldn't deny the effects of it on happiness. Trying to make social policy without considering it is ignoring a valuable piece of information.

I make no comment on the effectiveness of the US' current social safety net and income redistribution policies. Just that there is a principled argument for having them.

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