Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem: Giridharadas
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The difference is the out-in-the-open, stark, startling, and seemingly completely baked in income inequality. I think people outside of academia are finally talking about the morality of a billionaire's mere existence.
maybe both?
It's all one in the same problem. Philanthropy comes from wealth accumulation.
If he owned 9% instead of 10% and I owned the difference of 1%, then I would be better off.
P.S. He owns 11.1% and had more before his divorce.
Look around where you live, at the things that you value. How many of them were created with human effort, versus just existed in nature? Look at everything from computer you're typing on to the chair that you're sitting in to the roof over your head. EVERYTHING that was created with human effort is an example of wealth creation.
Without dismissing your point, I would strongly push back against effort being synonymous with wealth creation. Having grown up in post-Communist Eastern Europe, there was no virtually correlation between the two.
In the United States, it's a different story. The tide is rising, but most boats have not been rising with the tides for about 40 years, and that's troubling.
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/
The figure you linked does not indicate adjustment for inflation and does not segment expenditures by wealth, which is important, because the US economy as a whole is growing, but more than 100% of the growth is flowing to the top. The rich get richer, the poor (and middle class) get poorer. You have to segment by income to see this trend.
Inflation adjustments are tricky because it’s not really obvious how to measure inflation. But even adjusted for CPI inflation personal consumption expenditures have been steadily increasing in the 20th century: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA
Tangent 1: Placeholder: I don't agree that consumption metrics are better.
Tangent 2: Rich people do consume (colloquially speaking) proportionally to their increased wealth, but after sating their material desires they turn to financial assets: dibs on passive income and future growth. More for them does mean less for everyone else. Both in the first-order sense of owning more shares and in the second-order sense of being on the winning side of prevailing trends in globalization, automation, tax law, and corruption.
Someone should tell the record companies who say when you pirate a song, you're stealing from the artist who will not be properly compensated for the time they labored to write and record that song. I see corporate spokesmen expounding the labor theory of value all the time.
As far as LTV is concerned, we know it to be a flawed theory today because we understand the time value of money. LTV will hold in the long run with constant returns to scale. Without constant returns to scale, only the marginal consumer matters. In simpler terms, demand will affect price, not just supply. Now, if we make the errant assumption that the supply curve is completely flat in the long run, then LTV does in fact hold. That is, the LTV is not a terrible description of economic reality, as long as you note that a) an isomorphic argument can be made for “the land theory of value” or “capital theory of value”, so labor is in no way special, and b) LTV can only apply for goods with flat long-run supply curves. In any case, there’s a reason the early great economists used it! Smith, Ricardo, and others were not all idiots. However, today, we know better and it flies in the face of modern science and understanding to promote its use.
As a result of the above, the value of a natural resource changes over time. For example, natural resources used in electronics and batteries are relatively more expensive now than they were 100 years ago.
So, you can be technically correct by saying that wealth is zero-sum, but that's pretty much the same thing as saying "the world's 'wealth' traded for natural resources sums up to 100% of all natural resources"
It's the same with everything. When you're not at your limits of your ecosystem - things aren't zero sum. However once you do hit your limits, things become zero sum.
You even see this with businesses. Industries go through a growth phase. In the startup-growth-adoption phase, all businesses in that industry can grow. However, once market matures and reaches saturation, businesses struggle to grow or change. The only significant way mature businesses can grow larger at that point, is via mergers and acquisitions of other businesses.
A limit is a limit, doesn't matter if that's a demand limit, or a production limit, or a resource limit. The effect is still the same. Being under limits, makes things zero sum. If those limits were suddenly removed or increased temporarily, things would return to not being zero sum - at least until you hit another limit.
>It is rare that it means that not more can be produced.
In practicality sure. I'm sure we could make more basketballs than we do now. But physically speaking, you'd eventually hit limits. The earth is not infinite... we certainly could not make more basketballs than there is mass of earth itself. At which point we would either have to make new basketballs out of old basketballs, (zero sum), or raise our limits (mine matter out of other celestial bodies).
Why do you think so?
> In practicality sure.
And that is what matters? Why is it interesting that there is a theoretical limit on how many basketballs that is possible to produce with the resources available on Earth when no conceivable situation exists when that limit ever becomes relevant?
On an individual basis there are multiple portions of the economy for which wealth could be modeled or interpreted as a zero-sum game. Examples include landlord/renter relationships in high rent burden environments, or other segments where an individual is unlikely to ever be able to afford a "share of future economic growth" in order to fund retirement etc.
Lots of markets (most markets?) aren't growing at any particular moment. We should really figure out how to fix our system in the low-growth zero-sum regime because it's common and important.
Jeff Bezos owning 10% of amazon does not place prohibitions on the amount of dollars you can spend.
Also, if Jeff's workers have more wealth, they don't have to spend a lot of their disposable income on paying student loans or mortgages, and they will have more money to buy more stuff.
There seems to be little correlation, much less causation, between the amount he pays his employees and the value of the firm in which he holds interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/business/the-economics-of...
The title "président des très riches" wasn't born out of nowhere, was it?
gdp (national wealth) is a made-up metric, it's aggregate, it's dynamic, incomplete relative to its stated rationale for existence, inapplicable to the discussion, and a whole host of other irrelevances to a real understanding of wealth and its distortions.
¿Por qué no los dos?
For a concrete example, a tremendous amount of money has recently flowed into sex education advocacy, some of which doesn’t have donor names attached to it.
Organizations that aim to provide resources around things like consent and healthy sexual behavior find that courting this new money involves adopting an abstinence-only approach as a mandate. As a result, it’s hard to know if the organization you’re donating to is actually doing the advocacy work they used to advertise, and they’re not always inclined to be transparent around who calls the shots from a donor perspective.
We like to think that political money lives only in super PACs and lobbying efforts, but this isn’t the case, and in some ways this makes the non-profit situation even more insidious. To be clear, I’m not denigrating all non-profit work, there are just some major transparency issues that need to be addressed.
George Soros and his 'Open Society Foundation' is another example.
But more generally, there is a whitewashing going on. Look at the Sackler family, which for decades got to put their names on museums, hospitals, etc. they get to go around spreading a story about how good they are while rotting out communities with their dirty opioid pushing. They got called out, sure, but how many other Sacklers are out there with their reputations unburnished?
"Money talks, wealth whispers."
These problems sound like they have nothing to do with wealthy people standing up for one cause or another. The issue is that the wealth is so often created or amplified by greedily outsourcing these problems to the powerless. The wealth begets more power, and institutions that launder the story of that wealth into a whitewashed canvas of do goodery.
Look at how much more political activism there is in the US during the COVID crisis. People have more time since they're working from home, and they're able to actually participate for the first time in a long while. Imagine how many more people would be able to vote if election day was a national holiday. It's honestly criminal that it's not.
Any of these problems, can directly affect your children.
Let me tell you one example, my parents generation suffered much higher cancer rate than normal. That's caused by 40 years of rapid industrialization in China.
Think about it, these issues let limbo, will very likely make your retirement miserable in 20-30 years...
I have no time to virtue signal by participating in meaningless social activism. I will help individuals where I can because that is somewhere where I can meaningfully affect change with my actions.
Maybe it's my age. Maybe I'm cynical, I don't know. I used to care about these things. I bought a crappy house in a crappy neighborhood to save gas. I wasted money on a solar panel system. I planted native plants, composted and grew my own fruits and vegetables. I was worse off for it, and no change came from it. If I managed to save any resources, they were quickly consumed by some other wasteful excess of society.
Unless your activism is effective, it is useless. It is basically religion at that point.
You are also constantly bombarded by messaging telling you not to and to focus narrowly on short-term self-interest, from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
The one you view as “pestering” is just the one you haven’t internalized.
And a lot of those other issues have immediate, near-term impacts on the immediate prospects for families outside of the elites, (and without regard to divisions like race), so even from a narrow short-term self-interest standpoint don't make a lot of sense tongues as one-percenter problems even as much as political messaging from the Right paints them as elite distractions from immediate economic concerns.
Examples: Look at how people argue over fictional characters or franchises.
Worth billions, wanted to run for President, spent hundreds of millions on ads and got nowhere.
Bloomberg couldn’t even get his parties nomination.
I guess billions doesn’t get you that much power.
Only if the country is corrupt, a well functioning democracy can't be bought.
If Amazon or McDonalds paid their workers more and their CEO's less, the lives of many millions of people would improve.
If they were just printing money for themselves, and using inflation to lower the value of your money, you would see it and be upset.
They're doing the same thing with power.
http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-...
Jeff owns approx $166,500,000,000 in Amazon stock, at $3000/share, and 11.5% of the company (55,500,000 million shares). Lets assume that this is where ALL his wealth is (its not).
That 5% tax on that would be $8,275,000,000. Were Jeff to sell shares to cover this, it would cost 2,758,333 shares. That would reduce his ownership of Amazon from 11.5% to 10.75%. Hardly the loss of a controlling interest.
So by what moral justification can there be for the morality of having and holding $166,500,000,000 in wealth? That government is inefficient? That he can make better investments? Who do those investments benefit? Even assuming supply-side economics works to lift all boats (it doesn't, mostly), is it more moral to lift a middle-class person into the upper-middle class, a poor person into the middle-class, both, or neither?
What I think is more likely is they just don't have to ever deal with people who are suffering, and have justified it in their minds as themselves being greater and this is the way of things. Certainly those that end up with billions of dollars at their disposal don't hold the same moral compass. And constant reminders of abject poverty haven't helped billionaires in developing countries do more to help the poor.
2) Framing things as a one-off tax is probably not a great idea. Once it's done once, there will be demands to go back to the trough, and it would be better for everyone to have the certainty around when and how that will work, so a proposal to have an indefinite 0.5%/year wealth tax I think makes a lot more sense than a one-time 5%. (Imagine how lucky you'd be if you become an overnight billionaire in 2021 and dodged the bullet!) Furthermore, the real net needs to help our society thrive long-term are far more than a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax could capture. It reminds me a little of the meme that Mike Bloomberg could afford to give every American a million dollars. https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/123584359225130188...
3) Overall, a system more focused on taking wealth than creating it will itself crater. There's been a lot of dialogue roughly summed up as "eat the rich" that lays out all kinds of very exciting ways to spend money but just assumes that lots of wealth will magically get created, or that there's a fixed pie of wealth out there so we should just take it from those that have it. No, I'm not a Randian Objectivist (and yes, I've read Atlas Shrugged), I believe that society should intelligently invest in its human capital with a goal of maximizing everyone's human potential. A society that does well at that will generate lots of wealth and will have lots of good answers possible for how to share and spread that wealth. And the US is demonstrably not doing a good job at economic mobility, which is to say our branding of "anyone can make it" doesn't seem to be lining up with people's lived realities very well. So I find it less helpful to talk about "are you a bad person if you are a billionaire" and more helpful to talk about what factors are keeping portions of our society from achieving as much as they could and how we could collectively tackle these factors (or more to the OP's point, find effective ways to get out of these people's way instead of assuming we know how to fix their problems!).
4) A lot of the overall discussion about inequality decenters from the very real and tangible global progress that has been made on eliminating poverty. The data is staggering in its velocity, and wildly unreported since good news is nowhere near as exciting to link to and discuss as bad news. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin... - but the story in the US is much more grim, with poverty on the rise, stagnation in wages, and the hollowing out of the middle class. So we can say that the world (and China in particular) is trending in the right direction toward elimination of poverty and equitable wealth generation, and the US's policies and environment are trending the wrong way. There's some data to suggest that 90's era welfare reform is to blame, see https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2018/12/3/jg5hvxe1e4qpf... for more on that angle.
In short - I agree suffering doesn't need to be the way of things, we should halt policies that stifle opportunity to increase social mobility, and I don't think a one-time wealth tax is a good idea or gets us to where we want to go.
Of course, the reason that fallacy exists is because it works. Every argument against increased progressive taxation has been extensively focus-group tested, of course it works. But the need to consciously counter that messaging doesn't render the policy impractical.
Because when the income tax was introduced in 1913 it also was a small percentage of income only for the super rich (7% with the first 500K exempt, 1913's 500K was a bit more than 2020's 10M you suggested).
But let's say he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world. Is that more helpful? I think sometimes big problems take resources. My biggest complaint is that he has shown the ability to execute at scale and most of the companies they invest in don't. Spending even three months operationalizing one of these companies could be like a 100x on the money in.
No one is asking for such naive approach to redistribute wealth.
It's to find better ways to utilize the wealth, which Bill himself would also agree in principle.
What exactly the format requires discussion. But the first step is to allow such discussion to happen. And we are sure that a lot of the world people are not believing the meaningfulness of such discussion...
And that's a big problem.
A counterargument is that "nothing happens in a vacuum" and their lack of economic fulfillment is due to this wealth gap. But I think we owe billionaires this same level of uncertainty. They only exist because society doesn't want to know what would happen if they were forced to give their wealth away.
Side note, in my experience living in California many of my "broke" friends are actually terrible with money. I was talking to a guy the other day who spends $800/month on rent and $1500 on food. I'm sure it doesn't represent the whole, but in general I look at California liberals with a critical eye when talking about the wealth gap.
I think it's unfortunate that this part of the debate gets the focus.
What I think is problematic in the Gates approach and those like it, is that they view the world through so many institutional and market filters that they don't notice various problems bubbling up that can't be measured in these terms.
The most obvious thing is Gates' line "the world is getting better" which hinges on the fact the more people are moving from outside the money economy to inside the money economy (less people "living on pennies a day"). The problem is Gates can't see that people insider the money economy are in desperate circumstances.
The recent interview with Gates was distinctly sad. In one area where he sort-of has things right, he doesn't understand that the flood of irrational here is very pushed by other monied interests which have become used to fending off all spending on longer-term social interests since these serve as threats to their short term profits. See this article describing the similarity of climate denialist and covid denialists: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...
To reframe your point: maybe we should be careful to identify where the baby is and spend a little less attention on what billionaires want.
What percentage does that equal on the lower end? You say it does not justify messing with the system, but what is that based on? What would you feel is an equitable distribution of wealth within a country?
There are definite improvements (a fair amount of medical science), but I'm not sure on balance that the planetary destruction/extinctions/etc outweigh them. So, using made up GDP/capita numbers for justification that the world is "improving" is tenuous.
So don't compare the worse case subsistence farmer, with what was middle class in the US a few decades ago, where suburban houses on a couple acres were affordable my the top 70% of the population. We have more trinkets, but the price of basic necessities are becoming more "expensive" every day.
The middle class in the US a few decades ago lived pretty good lives, but were very much dependent on market economies and innovation for their standard of living.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-real-gdp-per-capi...
Day-by-day the world is zero sum.
If the world were just a bunch of fields with a static farm economy and no innovation in cultivation, then your point would be correct. But innovation increases the size of the pie. Yeah, the jealous may focus on the percentage kept by these innovators, but they really should be looking at the share of the pie.
Socialism is all about making sure that everyone is equally miserable.
We collectively are not done, yet. We can still make it better for everyone. Let's at least _try_ new ideas.
It's misleading to think of any democratic style government as being in stasis - the world is constantly in flux.
In my own country, free markets only started bringing prosperity after getting at least some semblance of liberal democracy and rule of law - before that, in the absence of a strong state, it was a very literal robber barons' paradise.
this is orthogonal to the economy being positive/negative/zero sum. if total real wealth increases over time, the world is positive sum, regardless of how that wealth is distributed.
positive sum doesn't imply that everyone gets wealthier over time, only that it's possible for people to get wealthier without it being directly at the expense of others.
Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.
I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this question. the homeless person could even be worse off today than they were fifty years ago, and the economy could simultaneously be positive-sum. suppose you have an economy with two people that each start with $100k. if after 10 years, one person has $500k and the other has nothing, this is a positive-sum game because the total gains exceed the total losses. positive sum does not imply that everyone, or even most people, will become wealthier over time.
> Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.
if you pick an infinitesimally small window of time where nothing can be produced, then sure, I guess you could say any changes in wealth would have to be zero-sum (assuming you could somehow transfer wealth instantly). I don't really think this is a useful analysis though. over the course of a whole day, the economy could be positive, negative, or zero sum. it depends on how much total wealth was created and destroyed on that day. even in an hour, I could create something of value that didn't exist before, or an explosion could go off in a port causing billions of dollars worth of damage.
LEDs. To take one very specific, simple example, though feel free to substitute in everything from computers to engines. Fundamentally, we have both increased our average energy budget per person and we can accomplish far more of what we want to do for far less energy. Taking the basic general goal of "I wish to have visible photons available to me at a sufficient level for my eyes to work well at arbitrary times and places", compare the total costs and % of resources converted to the goal vs wasted as heat/losses/externalities of say torches to oil/gas lamps to electric arc to early incandescent to later incandescent to halogen to fluorescent to LEDs. We can now do with single watts for tens of thousands of hours and pennies of silicon/impurities what would once have taken dozens to hundreds of watts to kilowatts and lasting just hundreds of hours, tens of hours, or even mere minutes.
Increasing abundance and efficiency for human goals is the definition of increasing overall wealth. Even given imbalance in ultimate distribution, the pie has absolutely grown larger. Massively humongously wildly larger. Positive spirals thankfully abound, such as better nutrition and knowledge of infectious disease at young ages yielding better outcomes and life expectancies for the rest of their lives. None of this is to downplay the importance of keeping inequality from going too far, but to even suggest it's a zero-sum game, that world economics are actually the same right now as they were a hundred or a thousand years ago, is frankly ludicrous.
Edit:
>E.g., a product costs $X, owners get too large of a % of that compared to employees.
That makes absolutely no sense as a standard or line of reasoning. The total sum has nothing inherently to do with how its divided, are you sure you're clear on definitions here? When something is zero-sum that means that for anyone to gain a larger percentage, someone else must necessarily lose a smaller percentage. But when the total sum itself is increasing then somebody could be gaining more and everyone else could also be gaining more, just not as much more as if it were equally split.
Also, what is "too large of a %" and how do you know? And if the product costs $X, but previously other competing products cost 7*$X, and as a result the company is many times the size it would be otherwise, and in turn the % the employees get is still an absolute amount far larger then it would have been anywhere else, now what? Rather then thinking about fuzzy "proper %" it seems better to investigate power imbalances, human limit edge cases, information asymmetry, cost externalization, etc., that affect the equilibrium of the system. Of which there are many!
You can't bake pies forever, no. But the stars are vast and many. That's yet another semantic stop sign: a phrase you say when you don't want to think about things any more, just like "it's not zero-sum".
The fact that we can "bake another pie" for 1/100 the resources is the definition of positive-sum. There is now more to go around. Even if previously the pie was perfectly divided but now of 100 pies 20% goes to whomever came up with the better way and another 50% goes to whomever financed the better way, the remaining 30% to the masses is still 30x the pie. I'm really not sure what you're confused by here, unless you're getting really lost in analogies.
Again: a basic definition of increasing wealth is increasing core abundance and efficiency. There can be more useful energy/resources to accomplish goals with, and there can be more efficient ways to achieve goals. Either or both combined mean there is genuinely more to go around. How best to distribute energy/resources remains very important, but does not change that having more and/or having it go farther means more wealth overall.
For the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to stick to the United States. As the previous commenter explained, the introduction of LEDs (along with cheap methods of manufacturing them) lead to much cheaper and more effective lighting. Undoubtedly there were companies and individuals that stood to profit quite a bit from these inventions. I don't know whether it helped create any billionaires, but certainly there are similar examples which have. On the other hand, although it created more wealth for those individuals, it created wealth for the entire country. Now every American has more money to spend because they don't have to spend as much money replacing their light bulbs.
In this case, the fact that some people gained much more wealth from this series of inventions is not a bad thing because everyone also benefited. In fact, the reason that inventions like this even come into existence is precisely because there is high reward for the individuals or companies doing so.
There are absolutely certain markets where things are much messier, but overall it's certainly not zero-sum. The issue is that many Americans do not have high enough wages or benefits to meet their family's needs. We should be working towards addressing poverty, not towards some moral tirade against billionaires.
Edit: I honestly can't express these concepts nearly as eloquently as xoa has in their comments, so I'd suggest referring to those.
"Imagine four people got all the food, and the rest got another 20%" is still imbalanced, even with 120% of the food. And there still would be violence. The problem is that the benefits of anything not zero-sum disproportionately accrue to the people who already have more than enough. And that simultaneously zero-sum resources also disproportionately accrue to the ones who already have so much.
It's not "playing a zero sum game" when you question why e.g. Bezos should accrue another $40 billion in net value, while hospitals struggle to provide PPE to their health care workers.
It's not "a zero sum game" if you ask why we have a world where somebody can hoard $150 billion while 800 million people need to go hungry every day.
Hugely disproportional resource allocation will break civilizations, zero-sum or not. (I'm fairly convinced that some inequality might contribute to a better society, but we've exceeded reasonable limits long ago)
The question is then, how do you measure efficiency. Proponents of a more equal world argue that the current extreme imbalance is only "efficient" for a very small subset of the population, and likely inefficient both for the vast majority, and for long-term success of societies.
The long-term question is basically a result of economies being feedback loops - if benefits accrue inequally, and capital results in opportunities, any system that doesn't have some negative feedback loops ultimately will amplify the inequality more and more.
In extremis, that means one person with all the resources. I'd argue that this is an outcome that probably nobody wants.
And in the context of OP: unless the total cake grows faster than the inequality, this holds true for non-zero-sum games, too.
The world has experienced tremendous growth in the past. It doesn't right now (and it can't sustainably continue growth in many areas), so the question is, what feedback loops do we want in place.
Yes, totally support this argument.
Most people advocating for rich people's existence is that they can more effectively utilize the resources and power. But they never tough upon the imbalance itself.
The imbalance has 2 aspects to it: * Utility: Does imbalance proclaims efficiency. * Morality: Is it moral to have imbalance.
Of ucz, both aspects need themselves to be balanced. I.e., we do encourage people with the obvious talent to enjoy imbalanced power and fortune. Like the young Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and now Elon Musk. It is more utilitarian, and more moral to have these people enjoying more imbalanced power and fortune, then the older Steve, Bill, and Elon; in the sense, that when they are less talent, they should be pushed to be less entitled, and prefer a more moral position in the imbalance.
I mean, what Bill Gates does is not particularly more brilliant than a government directed research organization. Then why do we allow such a large fortune sit there without being spent for the people, after all, the fortunate was not earned by Bill the individual, it's a symbol of attribution through the capitalism system.
Places like Venezuela and Soviet Russia tried to distribute things equally and the richest people in those worlds had it worse than the 10th percentile in capitalist countries. This is why the Soviet Union had to build a wall to keep people in but the US is considering building a wall to keep people out.
Just
This system is a failure for everyone that isn't in the 1%
2. A stock price going up is not exactly getting "richer".
It's almost like capital ownership awards undue power that can then be used to further entrench power.
When the richest man in the US who happens to own the largest online shopping site and also uses his own newspaper to push more propaganda to push for more lockdowns - thus eliminating more competition from small businesses, is the richest man to be blamed or are the politicians listening to him and the people reading his propaganda newspaper and following orders to be blamed too?
When all the massive multi-national corporations that have questionable hiring, firing, healthcare, worker's rights, and safety track records promote and sponsor your cause and your Revolution has corporate sponsorship, you are not a revolutionary, you are a pawn.
It's just amazing how those who kept advocating for opening up small businesses and ending the lockdowns got called all sorts of names by the same people who complain about the rich getting richer.
Yes, the richest person on earth is absolutely to blame for the decisions he makes to hold on to his own power and wealth. Hope that clears things up
It is the fault of leadership, but the US leaders in particular seem to be an extremely wealthy bunch (or at least they claim to be). It seems to be the key attribute now.
There is a dire problem around the collapse of small businesses, but rich people usually get rich through capital markets rather than small business.
And "rich people usually get rich through capital markets" is just a fancy of way of saying they have ownership of everything and profit off of other peoples's labor
And yeah rich people own assets. That's like the definition of a rich person. Take your ax and grind it somewhere else.
This isn't some ax to grind. This is life under a system where the wealthy rule and the rest of us have no choice but to work for them or starve.
Honest question: compared to what?
* everybody has equal control of the nothing,
* no value → no economy → no economic decisions made for you by others,
* anarchy → no political decisions made by others
yet is clearly inferior to what we've got now.
I have zero problem with the cops stopping violent protestors. That’s a basic function of government.
Of course, the most "loyal" communists got the best land...
As always, the answer is in a healthy balance.
The question (the big one that America is super divided over) is which actor is better at allocating goods for public well-being, a billionaire who has proven (probably) they have good business acumen or the government that (ideally) exists to work for the benefit of the people.
I have my personal opinion but I wanted to neutrally (I hope) highlight that this is the heart of the issue.
Especially in the developing world, governments are more likely to piss away money given to them than to invest that money to the benefit of citizens.
If governments were good at investing money communism would have worked. There would be no point having companies like Apple develop cell phones if the government could do it just as well without enriching shareholders in the process. We’d just have a government agency in charge of building cell phones and giving them away or selling them to citizens at cost. We don’t have a private sector for funsies. We have it because we recognize that governments aren’t good at investing money and producing results.
I don't know which approach is better but I know that both roads contain pretty significant dangers and both contain benefits.
Additionally, I'm not particularly interested in going down a path towards communism - the leninist soviet system was an utter failure but germany and scandinavia seem to be doing pretty alright - in fact, on the topic of cell phones, Nokia started out in Finland which is a pretty heavily socialist country. I think there are a lot of options on the spectrum between 1637s Dutch Capitalism and Leninist Soviets - both extremes result in failure and, IMO, all centrist solutions are constantly being pulled toward the nearer of the extremes and need to actively work to stay from slipping into those dark places.
Yes, and Germany and Scandinavian countries are liberal capitalist economies where the means of production are predominately owned by the private sector. In fact, Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US.
The west does know better. Not because they’re better, but because as a matter of historical accident they stumbled upon a set of winning ideas. Colonialism was bad. But that’s in the past. The choice people in former colonies are faced with is what to do now. And as someone from one of those countries, I think we’re fucking stupid if we reject the west’s winning ideas just because we’re bitter about colonialism. That’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.
People who talk about decolonization make me livid. I’d like to be able to take my kids to see Bangladesh some day without worrying about them getting sick from the water. Decolonization won’t do that. Capitalism, the rule of law, and liberal democracy will do that. I don’t care who came up with it first.
Governments routinely punish the poor for nothing more than being poor. In the US this is done through fees, penalties, licensing, direct taxation, and embedded taxes. Government routinely targets the poor for enforcement efforts because the officials know they cannot afford to fight back, hence why so much forfeiture in the US is of that class.
You can take all the wealth of every US Billionaire and not fix anything because the political class will not fix what is already wrong with their spending. More money just means more likelihood of more money spent wrong.
The only source of wealth that can pay for all the promises being made this cycle is from the middle and upper classes combined.
TWO TRILLION Dollars comprise Social Security, Medicare, and Medicade, tell me who giving them more will solve anything when they cannot care for Americans with two trillion dollars. Worse this is on top of state aid programs and programs coming out of another nearly 1.5 trillion dollars in various aid programs.
The choices are not just between concentrating an obscene amount of money with individuals vs concentrating an obscene amount of money with a handful of bureaucrats.
Why have a system that allows so much money to be concentrated with any kind of entity in the first place and put everyone else at the mercy of their philanthropy? MHO handing all that money to the government instead of a billionaire class is just changing from private trickle-down economics to nationalised ones.
As soon as your having someone deal with billions of dollars a couple thousands become a rounding error and your local concerns become benign, small picture issue. But for you having that 3000 available to finally fix that pothole on your street is critical.
Worker co-ops, taxes on municipal level and wealth taxes might be ways to prevent extreme concentration with any entity.
Let's imagine a scenario where 400 people each have $1, the average wealth is therefore $1 per person. If, however, we have 1% of people (4 in the same scenario) have $2 each, the overall wealth is still $1 per person on average, however the 1% would have $2 per person and the remaining 99% would have $0.99 per person. If we skew that a little more, let's have 50% of the total wealth ($200) in the hands of the 1% (again, just 4 people). The average for the population is still $1 per person, but the 1% now have $50 each and the remaining 99% have just over $0.50 each.
I get that this is an exercise in explaining what zero-sum is, something you don't believe this situation reflects, but it's important to recognize that people build wealth by acquiring it from somewhere else. If there was an infinite supply of money (there isn't), then we could have a conversation about this not being zero-sum. I don't think it's a good faith discussion to start with the assumption that money is infinite.
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman
Money is also the most fungible element of the economy. Given monetary policy, particularly the Fed's policies of the last decade or so, it is also not good faith to assume money as a constant.
Agreed. It's not constant and it's not infinite. The question then becomes at what rate does it grow and is that rate higher or lower than the stratification of wealth. If it's higher, it's either hyperinflation or wealth accumulation appears logarithmic in growth. If it's lower, it's either deflation or wealth accumulation appears exponential in growth.
It appears to be lower and wealth accumulation does, indeed, appear to be exponential. We're also completely glossing over just who it is that's likely to be wealthy and suddenly it's not just an economic issue, but a socioeconomic one.
Is it not true that when the books are balanced at the end of a period, wealth resulting from economic activity within the period ends up distributed among the public such that not every person does not end up with an identical amount? If so, is it possible to state this without simultaneously believing that economics is a zero-sum game?
A zero-sum game is one in which no strategy changes the amount of wealth available. There are clearly strategies that create or destroy wealth. Therefore, it's not a zero-sum game.
(This does not imply that every player has ever-increasing wealth each turn.)
>> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence,"
"economics is not zero sum game", "correlation != causation", etc - certain ideas seem to be kind of like catnip for humans.
It was not that long ago (a year or so? Just when the trade war rhetoric with China was heating up) when "lolololll, economics is not a zero sum game!!!" seemed to be a satisfactory dismissal of Trump's issues with China's trade practices, both in the media and in forums. Shortly after, when the various media outlets seemed to all have a spontaneous change of heart on the matter and get onto the same page of noticing that there actually is a fair amount of complexity involved in international trade, and since then I've read very little "zero-sum" talk on the matter. Perhaps a media blitz on this issue might help illuminate more of the unseen complexity in this situation, although that scenario seems a bit less likely to me.
(The actual phrase comes from Jonathan Wallace, near as I can tell, but he was using it to talk about religion, not thinking in general.)
Would the other 396 look at the elite 4 in envy? Awe? Hate? Appreciation? Would they enjoy the 400 meals in a fairly equal way, or would they fight over allocations? Would the elite 4 encourage fair distribution of the 400 meals, or would they encourage in-fighting among the other 396, causing sufficient turmoil to distract the other 396 from organizing their own elite-and-profitable meals? There are a lot of scenarios that don't end in violence, even if a lot of people leave with a bad taste in their mouths.
I think it's a really interesting analogy, and it might even bolster the author's points about the importance of how elites behave and what systems they promote. It's too bad that the analogy was cut short with a reductionist assertion.
The government comes in and gives people who have little food, enough food. And of the food distributed, 70% of it comes from the top 50%.
If it was because they planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment.
That depends on whether they are starving.
Hence my point that this is a bad analogy.
1) I am certain there are laborers who get paid more than they produce.
2) Labor never takes the risk of providing capital.
> If it was because they [enslaved or underpaid people who] planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment.
All of a sudden it doesn't sound so reasonable and yet comes off a fair bit truer than the original.
However, I believe I've stated more than just slave labor. It's a very relative thing, but it appears many people are certainly underpaid compared to the wealth they generate for the few. It's starting to feel like people in tech believe otherwise because they're compensated better than average and therefore might be "above it all". I think that's alarming and short-sighted.
There wouldn't be violence. 396 people would say "forget this guy," and find somewhere that they could get food. People vote with their feet (and their wallet).
It’s worth pondering whether the same (limited) perspective that caused several problems is sufficient to fix some problems without exacerbating others. The whole point of democratization of power is to distribute decision-making so people could make the right choices as locally apt.
Now of course we (the people) look at things differently so me going carbon negative (for example) may encourage others to pollute even more because hey u/kshacker is going to fix it so I know the thought process needs further evolution.
I never saw any individual who are less qualified for an opportunity, where the inequality in opportunity cannot be fixed by strong social support in his or her earlier life through education and community.
It of cuz will be slow. But that's precisely the time scale we need to think about to make addressing inequality possible to start. I.e. we don't want Bill gates or Jeff bezos to think we want to deprive their personal fortune. Instead, we are looking for better ways to help them use the resources when they themselves lack the means or techniques.
One problem I see in pointing at the billionaires and claiming wrongs is it’s obviously an attack and puts them and anyone who feels they could be pointed at on defense.
Instead, point out how people are held back by the systems and positions of power.
When I had a particularly abusive management chain (4 managers for 9 workers) they could ask just about anything of me. The corporate policies gave them wide rights over even my personal liberties. For one, they could change my schedule at any time. Meanwhile, I could be lawfully terminated for varying my work schedule in excess of an 8 minute tolerance. That termination would mean all sorts of things - like owing back rent on an apartment I would have left - because I had no way to pay it. The way that particular industry worked, too, meant one termination likely meant I would never again work in that industry. That screams inequality to me.
Edit-That inequality has the effect of making any order my management gave me as a functional threat of my ability to maintain my very way of life. Without that job I would have been homeless shortly.
Effective altruism is clearly an important topic but this is a pretty bad analogy. If we're discussing billionaires a (slightly) better reformulation of the analogy would be something like:
"We've got about 400 people in this room... Imagine if there were 40,000 meals carted into this room and four people got 39,000 of those meals"
However, this reformulation is also pretty bad. The way both of these are phrased "dinners" are basically a stand in for "dollars" (or whatever your currency of choice is) - and while "dinners" are generally perishable, "dollars" are not.
Setting those quibbles aside - how did Anand come to his diagnosis of the problem, and what is Anand's proposed solution? There's so little detail in this article that I'm honestly scratching my head.
As a thought exercise - how would Anand fill in the blank for a statement like "The world should follow the shared government, community, and decision making model of <insert_location_here>"?
Thinking for just a few minutes, there are so many facets and nuances to the issue of improving the world for others that the above sentence is a complete throw-away. One could get involved and sign up, but as the article already points out, how to know if the group you are joining is doing good or doing more harm? Did you join a group of virtue signallers or will you roll up your sleeves for Habitat for Humanity, or Doctors without Borders?
A couple of notions:
- How do you know if your effort is more like bailing water from a sinking ship, or, towing the ship into dry dock for repair? Maybe you have to bail at the same time you're towing.
- What is the actual goal? To ensure that people are able to eat today? Are you trying to right a wrong, like human trafficking or environmental crimes? Are you trying to create a level playing field so people are able to go as far as their determination will take them? If you want a level playing field, what system are you modeling?
The desire to do something is invaluable. I'd suggest two things: 1) keep it close to home. The farther the served are from you the harder it will be to see the results. If your aspirations are far from you, make it a goal to get there and see first hand what you're trying to aid, at least once. 2) Make it something where you can directly observe the results and know that your efforts are having a positive effect overall.
Meanwhile, socialists like Giridharadas have done nothing but hold the country back, trying to keep us in poverty. Millions of children are dead because of the multi-decade detour socialists line Giridharadas took India and Bangladesh in during the 1960s-1990s.
while people complain about the disparities in income, its really the power to warp society in ones own favor that is dangerous
Out of curiosity what would you call China's mode of production?
See also: https://www.cato.org/policy-report/januaryfebruary-2013/how-...
China under Xu has more in common, economically, with say Korea under Park Chung-hee or Chile under Pinochet than with China under Mao.
As I read it, his main point is a valid one. If you want change, you have to participate in making that change. That participation is not limited to once every 4 year vote ( in US ), but rather an ongoing participation in society.
There are some valid criticism of this approach ( demoracracy doesn't scale well; it does work well on more local level, but you don't want to have a vote for every little issue ).
You can have a disastrous democracy and a neighbour dictator that mounts an attack and wipes your democracy off the face of the earth.
It's about competency, not political ideology. Until people get it in their heads that competency and science are two fundamental tools that move humanity where most people would unambiguously want to be headed, we are going to have an endless problem.
They call it corruption - it's just people who don't understand what moves the needle for them and others, resorting to moving the needle for them first, the rest maybe later.
That's what these Bill Gates and every other rich person in America is about - nobody has a unifying plan to move humanity forward, so they get rich and by the time they become rich, they've made friends with a bunch of other rich people. Now people like Anand come and say hey, you know all those friends you have? They're all doing bad things and you are too, you are bad.
What is rhetoric of this sort going to accomplish but separate us into us vs them even further?
Until people understand how to move the needle for most people including them, they will always resort to moving the needle for them and their family first and that is where we currently are.
If you want a different world - it has to come from a unifying message, not a message of blaming other people for your plight. This call for democracy is really a call for de-throning rich people and unless you want a dictator to come into power and start a civil war - this is not the rhetoric you want to promote.
Still, his main point stands that elites should feel bad about their concentrations of power and that the link between money and political power should be weakened.
In developed countries, less than 1% of the population do that, if it's 50% of the population, it's a total game and climate changer
Read http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html for an explanation of what that is, and why it is a fallacy.
The actual problem is social relations. The heir expropriates the surplus labor time of the worker. That is the real problem.
Wealth redistribution is, in a dialectic sense, a goal of those who own the most wealth. It is a goal set by this elite. Workers controlling our own labor time has been the clear goal of the worker's movement for at least a century and a half, if not longer.
Violence is unethical. Half of the food is theirs who is the rest to take it away from them?
I realize this is twitter and not a well developed thesis, but that just means twitter is a terrible platform to meaningfully engage in nuanced topics. It is a great platform for shallow thinking and insults, though, akin to the excuse, "I have a wonderful proof of this but the margin it too small to contain it."
So no, it's not just a bumpersticker retort. Growing up in a poor south asian country, I was taught to only care about the food on my plate and not be jealous of the food on someone else's plate. That made me work hard at putting more food on my own plate without being jealous and stealing from another's plate.
Any attempt to use the Christian bible to justify massive inequality is a bastardization of Jesus' teachings.
We're not talking about inequality in the sense that people deserve all the same things. Everyone deserves at least to be fed, housed, and taken care of when sick. A society capable of such but unwilling is disgusting.
Maybe you could debate to what degree we could provide for each other. We don't have limitless resources and capabilities. But certainly, we have the ability to provide everyone with clean water, food, and housing at this point.
Everyone who's willing to put a tiny bit of effort can get food and shelter thanks to food banks, shelters etc. Back in my country, we don't have that luxury yet but a lot of religious places are trying their best at providing that.
I am not religious myself but I do think they should play an important role at feeding those who don't have the resources yet.
Once your basic necessity like food and water have been solved, it's up to you to work your way up.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/07/18/hunger-and-obesity-jessica-fa...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-17/how-hu...
Long story short is that a better concept isn't starvation, it's food insecurity. More than 10% of Americans are food insecure.
That’s a bad thing? I understand that eating healthy food is important, but if you’re obese, you should go hungry, that’s one part of losing weight.
Decent healthy food is not expensive. I have lived through it myself and plenty of us have.
The first is that politicians are selected by the rich. Since a Supreme Court Ruling (Citizens United), unnamed donors are able to give infinite money to political campaigns. So the rich buy the politicians and then the politicians decrease regulation and increase subsidies for the rich people's companies who elected them.
The second is that there is lots of aid and available resources but the government makes it hard to access this aid. Part of the government (the Republicans) doesn't want this aid to exist so they purposely make the administration of the aid very difficult to get. It becomes a full time job just getting free things creating a cycle of poverty and dependency. You can see the Republican party doing this with the US Postal Service right now. They mess up the program and then claim it doesn't work.
For America to improve, money must be eliminated from elections. We need a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Next, we must make programs simple and easy to obtain the benefit from. It shouldn't take multiple hours a day to get "free" food. This is why some people support the idea of a universal basic income. It would help the poor the most with the least amount of government overhead.
I do think this is an interesting topic. Effective altruism has lots of ongoing internal discussion about the efficacy of pushing for systemic change.
But I think the claims made in the article would have to be made a lot more substantive. See Scott Alexander's take here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billio...).
Overall, I think parts of this approach might throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even if we do restructure the way that society works, presumably we'll still care about interventions to improve well-being. I think effective altruism (https://www.effectivealtruism.com/) has provided a lot of traction on how to think about these issues. Even if you disagree with their moral stance, I think it's hard to deny that people in the EA community have been very thoughtful about quantifying interventions and thinking about impact.
And I don't think these sorts of questions are going to go away, come a social restructuring. There seems to be a lot that we can salvage from the EA viewpoint, even if we decide systemic change is the way forward, and I think that's worth emphasizing.
If you look at what these larger companies do, they embrace complex regulations.
Individuals and smaller businesses with innovative ideas cannot enter the marketplace because these complex regulations act as barriers to entry.
Folks on this thread seem to be falling over themselves arguing that billionaires are justified to even be billionaires at all.
The issue isn't that billionaires exist, its that billionaires have cornered all the decision making abilities of the public.
We _do_ live in a democracy (well, a republic -- in the USA). The government/legislature does seem, to a large extent, to be beholden to the wants of the immensely wealthy, but that's only because the electorate at large won't hold their representatives accountable for that behavior.
Despite having more resources and more leisure time than has been possible throughout most of history, people don't stay informed, contemplate policy, engage in activism, interact with their legislators ...
The laws of human psychology may simply not afford people people enough agency for a large democracy to be fair and effective.
There probably isn’t even too much difference over the ages either. It’s just in America’s democratic-republic with capitalism the billionaires aren’t royalty.
In a government managed system, you have a MASSIVE amount pooled resources controlled by whoever activated (or coerced) the most voters. What is the worst case scenario? Whoever is in power has a narrow list of buddies with businesses. Lucrative government contracts with little oversight on spending are taken to people who have some favor with the elected officials or their family members (and pay officials back in insider stock trading, or planned small stock dumps, or some other form of laundering). Money accrues to the family tree of those in power and those in power make all important decisions, eventually draining the country. Read the news in Eastern Europe for a while to see a live simulation.
Foundations. Anyone can start one, fulfill a mission, work to make the world a better place. A lot of foundations are doing a lot of good out there, so where does that model leak? With stringent requirement to hold no profit at the end of the day, worst case scenarios with foundations look like this: Similarly to government, the distribution of large quantity of pooled resources can go to the team running the foundation. In some, the executives collect whatever money is left at the end of the day (can't leave a profit after all). In others, a foundation on the side of a lucrative business gets the profits to reduce the tax burden on the business, but then distributes those to friends as contracts or generates sales from that business at increased margins, etc. How do you know this is happening? If you look at the ever increasing number of foundations, there are no incentives to create economies of scale in giving, despite the high fixed costs of running of foundation. Where are the foundation mergers that would make giving more efficient? Thus the tax incentives given by government can sometimes turn foundations south.
Where do Billionaires come in? A actually self-made billionaire has presumably lost the need to be corrupt. They have also proven themselves able to lead people to execute projects efficiently. The combination of resources, networks, and lack of misaligned incentives makes them more likely to focus on the impact of the work, than on self-enrichment with it. The down sides can happen if the original billions were a con-scheme and not actually acquired (Madoff), or if the billionaire is completely incompetent in the field they are giving in, or if they do it for the attention and ego boost, and social favors that may come from being asked for money. With all the attention paid to one person, however they can be more easily scrutinized than the other two models.
Please do feel free to contribute to this analysis tree.
2. Conversations about the 1% often betray an underlying pathology of envy. Many hate billionaires because they're envious of what they have. Why would inequality of material goods be a problem per se? You can see that it isn't when you compare someone with an upper middle class household income with a billionaire. Does that upper middle class family really have a reason to shake their fists at the billionaires when it comes to income? No, of course not. Who cares if some guy makes X times as much as you? (If you have a problem, then perhaps you ought to check your envy.) The problem isn't inequality. It's poverty. And the boorish worship of Mammon.
3. The belief in zero sum wealth is utterly false. Everyone who understands basic economics knows that the economic wealth of the world today far outstrips any other epoch in history. The idea that billionaires only have what they have because they effectively stole it from you is exactly the kind of agitation that communists would engage in in Soviet Russia and Maoist China and the tumultuous years that led to their creation. It's the politics of envy and it's a hideous affair.
4. There are of course problems associated with billionaires that is not intrinsic to the wealth they possess. For example, the influence billionaires have over politics and society through the media, through education, through lobbying, and so on. They may be dealt with in various ways, such as actual committed and personal involvement in improving your local community in some way instead of raging ineffectually on Facebook and Twitter. A lazy, effeminate populace that only knows how to complain, and yell, and emote deserves what it gets.
5. While socialism is a tyranny, a grotesque perversion (and no, the Scandinavian countries aren't socialist), rapacious and ideological capitalism is likewise unnatural and perverse. By "rapacious and ideological capitalism", I really mean one that is laissez-faire in a doctrinaire way, where the market is the dominant social institution and the consequent ethos one of consumerism and commodification of everything, one dominated by powerful corporations unanswerable to government or public opinion, doctrinaire about the minimalization or elimination of social welfare institutions even in the absence of a sensible private alternative, and globalist of a kind that is opposed to corporate and individual loyalties to the nation state.
6. Sure, billionaires can run self-serving philanthropies. I doubt it stems from a feeling of guilt, but I don't know the individual consciences of billionaires (and conscience need to be formed to feel guilt, something that has been categorically discouraged by our culture along with shame and the concept of sin). Some may wish to genuinely do good. Some may be interested in their next conquest. Some may be afraid of the mob. Certainly, Zuckerberg's "free internet" plan for India was a patently obvious move to magnify his own power. The guy seems pathetically oblivious to how transparent he is. Social skills aren't his strong suit.
7.
However I do also support creating a more functional market with enough room to enter so that other innovative, motivated entrepreneurs can effectively compete. That doesn't require some kind of destructive ground up rethinking or abandonment of capitalism. It requires a tweak - namely updated anti-trust laws that are actively enforced. This would achieve a different distribution of wealth and power while retaining the mechanisms we have in place to reward success precisely.
The richest three Americans have more money than the poorest 50% of Americans combined. However hard those three worked worked, there is no way that they worked harder than half the country. As COVID-19 has shown us, you don’t get far without the jobs we value the least. We need supermarkets open, bins taken away, rest homes cleaned etc. Wealth is further concentrating too, exacerbating the issue.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...
https://www.mintpressnews.com/super-rich-see-wealth-rise-282...
Shame has its function. Personally, I'm more worried about people who are proud to not use morals and are not hypocritical about it, than the do-gooders who put the bar higher than they can live up to.
Yes, they are more often hypocrites. That's great, you can point to that and expect some kind of feedback loop to have effect.
People without shame, who apply no morals to their deeds, are not to be applauded. I hope you agree when it comes to things like child beating. Now the questions is where to draw the line for cancel culture. Not if cancel culture is a 'bad thing'.
* Probably people load the word 'cancel culture' differently. I see it as pointing out morally bad behavior, and asking other people to also notice it, hoping there will be repercussions.
However, there is another problem: a “dark side” of people being willing to call others out on their shit. Clickbait.
It's surprisingly easy to make it seem like arbitrary person X is an evil evil person, regardless of whether they actually are. If you're familiar with person X, you might be able to spot a lie… but being universally sceptical will protect you from legitimate call-outs as well as fake ones. The average person has no real way of knowing, even if it's occurred to them that they might need to check.
So, yeah: overall, I think this is probably a good thing. But it's set back the lives of some good people.
(There's a rather simple way to turn this around: remove guilt by association. It should be okay to defend cancelled people. Defending bad actions doesn't need to be okay, but if it's costless to lie / “bend the truth” for social media clicks and costly to rebut them… calling people out on their shit becomes a much less useful force for good.)
Media and companies should not 'cancel' just because a group of people is demanding it, but it could be reason to look into something and then make up their own mind.
Wanted to rant on about lots more, but I'll let it go :)