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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> That's a valid view but I'm not sure it tackles inequality.

"Tackling inequality" comes from reading too many say-nothing articles by Mr. Brooks and not enough time spent reflecting on what we should be trying to do to get the best result for people.

We should not care how much money a neighbour has. In fact, the more the better. I don't want to have to offer them charity if there is an option for them to stand on their own. They could be billionaires next door for all I care and that doesn't harm me or anyone else in the city.

Inequality is one of a number of fake issues that are major unhelpful distractions. The focus should be on median and low living standards.

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> Inequality is one of a number of fake issues that are major unhelpful distractions.

Inequality causes crime in developed nationsp[0]:

> Comparing across industrialised societies, higher inequality—greater dispersion in the distribution of economic resources across individuals—is associated with higher crime and lower social trust. These associations appear empirically robust, and meet epidemiological criteria for being considered causal.

Inequality also has health impacts[1]. "The evidence that large income differences have damaging health and social consequences is strong."

0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02779...

Your 0 link is a computer simulation. It is literally reporting that researchers imagined a world and reported on it. That is an academically worthy thing to do, but not evidence of how reality works.

The second paper is difficult to argue about because I can't read it, but it is difficult to imagine that someone's quality of life could rise but their health worsens. That seems radically unlikely to the point where you need a pretty solid research base before taking the idea seriously. The paper is probably either making a mistake or says something different in the body text to what the title implies because it is likely that income inequality rose and living standards dropped.

It is the living standard that leads to outcomes. The inequality is a red herring. People are so bad at guessing relative income that they can't even detect real inequality. They usually pick up on poverty instead, which is completely different.

I both disagree and agree. We should be able to live happily without trying to keep up with the neighbours or covet their good fortune. But that's a macro level thing. Inequality is a real issue where too much wealth gets funneled to the folks who already have the most wealth and in such a way that it gets worse over time.

What you describe doesn't seem to be at odds with what I think of as the inequality problem - a larger proportion of economic value going to folks doing the work rather than the capital investors. It might not even be that drastic a change for that to have real effects over time, and the rich would still be rich.

Something I read today: Poverty exists because workers don’t have a role in the value chain of production.

Rings true.

> They could be billionaires next door for all I care and that doesn't harm me or anyone else in the city.

Unless, of course, they buy up a bunch of properties, making it unaffordable for the average income folk to own a home on a reasonable timescale.

When is HN going to learn that simplistic views like "rising tide lifts all boats" and "iTs NoT a ZeRO SuM GAme" are not helpful at all and blatantly false in most cases.?

If you can't afford your own home, that is a living standards problem. It can be improved while still having rising inequality. Indeed, the focus on inequality is a distraction from the large number of relatively normal people who own houses and want policies that push the price up.

Which is a problem, but the problem isn't the inequality. The problem is stupid housing policies that overemphasise debt and restrict construction.

> ... "rising tide lifts all boats" and "iTs NoT a ZeRO SuM GAme" ...

Using erratic camel case does not make an argument. It is obviously not a zero sum game or we'd all have Roman Empire era living standards.

I don’t see an answer to the example. How can less restrict construction policy solve the problem that a minority is able to buy all real estates? Unequally is a problem as the word says since power is distributed unequally.

For the same reason that people can afford food even though a minority is able to buy all the food.Just because a minority can buy something doesn't mean they will. If it gets easy enough to build more housing then it won't make sense to buy houses as an investment; the threat of oversupply would be too great.

FWIW, unrelated to this topic, I think we should adopt Georgist tax policies. That has nothing to do with inequality and it would resolve the situation of wealthy people buying property neatly.

Thats a really bad comparison since food is a consumable and most time not a investment since its expires (with exceptions like whisky).

Housing is a good example since our planet has a natural limit which can't be worked around. Otherwise please tell me why Bill Gates owns about 270,000 acres of farmland. There is a famous quote about it. “Buy land—they aren’t making it anymore.”

If you got spare money you are pressured to invest it, since the inflation will reduce the value. But not everyone is able. Thats where your financial gains are coming through you investments. By people who are not able to invest themself and the cake is getting smaller every year.

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