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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

We all only have so much time on this earth. Why is it fair for some folks to spend a disproportionate amount of that time toiling away for basic sustenance while others spend their days on their personal hotel sized yachts?

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For the same reason that it's fair when one seed falls on asphalt and dies when another seed falls in shit and thrives: it isn't. Fairness turns out not to be one of the forces of the universe.

Wealth inequality isn't some random thing though, our government and economic system enables it. It's not like we have no control over it.

Wealth inequality broadly follows the Pareto distribution, which is natural and does derive from randomness. We could define fairness as a flat distribution and redistribute accordingly, but that requires continual work to be done against the random Pareto distribution or it reverts. It's do-able, but it requires a long term consensus that doesn't currently exist.

There is no one pareto distribution — it is a family of distributions, with different parameters meaning different intercepts, and therefore different levels on inequality.

I guess the question is is wealth inequality/income inequality something to be targeted? Also, there's the question of whether the living standards of the poorest improve faster if we target wealth/income inequality?

Empirically, the only working paths to wealth equality is that everyone is poor.

For a society to become wealthy, those who produce more wealth need to get to end up with more wealth.

To some extent. If you vote in a rep and he lies about his policy, then the people are stuck with him for 2 or 6 years. We don't have mechanisms to impeach someone like that (some states might, but it's not a federal mechanism); his colleagues need to impeach him, which they hesitate to unless something dsmning occurs.

At the most fundamental level it is. Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity, and therefore wealth. As the economy becomes more globalized and more knowledge-based, differences in ability are magnified even more. A skilled antelope hunter can at best hunt 5x more than the median hunter, but someone who makes a killer app can make billions. Sure, government can play a role in redistributing that wealth, but that's an intervention, not the default state of things.

> Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity, and therefore wealth.

Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.

I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery, entry into which also requires some level of wealth and not a tiny amount of it either.

>Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.

This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid", because the statement basically becomes "show me literally any study that correlates salary with wealth". However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work", and would rather have some subjective measure like "social value" or whatever. As imperfect market wage is, it's as objective of a measure as we can get, and letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.

>I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery.

My claim isn't that wealth right now is distributed 100% meritocratically, only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.

> This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid"

I do not even remotely accept your premise. A short list of jobs that are crucial to modern life that are chronically underpaid:

* Teachers

* Nursing/care staff

* Daycare workers

* Janitorial staff

* Delivery/logistics workers

FAR from an exhaustive list.

> However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work"

Considering how many working poor there are I'd say there's a solid reason for rejection. If people are working full time hours and still unable to meet their needs, clearly something is wrong.

> only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.

This is an utter non-sequitur to anything I was talking about. You assert that value of work is tied to the wealth of the one doing the work. I challenged this by pointing out numerous whole categories of laborer that are and have been underpaid for some time. You assert that this is a subjective measurement. I don't know what to really say here.

If doing work that needs doing for the understood full time hours we as a society have stated is not a path to at least a stable life, if not a particularly luxurious one, then what's the point of working? And, more concerningly, why would anyone take up that job that being the case? Nurse and teacher retention right now is horrific specifically because the pay isn't very good and it's a very demanding job, and as a result we have a shortage of both. But we still need them.

>letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.

> Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.

Not too long ago I dug a large hole, and then filled it back in again. It was very difficult and tiring, and entirely useless.

If you accept that I don’t deserve money for this, then you reject the premise that effort/work is the only factor determining value, and “utility” or value to others also matters

There’s no objective way to determine how much of a product’s utility is created by whom. For example, if I invent a thingamajig and hire people to build and sell it, how can we determine what percentage of the value comes from me, the workers, or the users who find new ways to use it? We can’t.

As a result, money gets distributed based on the relative power of those involved in the process. Business owners typically hold the most power, in-demand workers have some leverage, and others have less. So being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a lot of value for others, it may just mean you’ve held positions of power.

Getting rid of these positions of power is the way to create a more equal and prosperous society.

> Abilities of individuals varies wildly, which translates into productivity

Even if I accept your premise, it doesn’t explain why some places have far more wealth inequality than others despite having similar differences in abilities in those places. There might be some innate differences in abilities, but the magnification of those differences is socially constructed. It’s not a fact of nature.

You also are discounting luck. Some people are lucky. They were born with enormous inherited wealth. Or, their business happened to be in the right place in the right time.

so what, what's wrong with luck? you are pretending that inherited wealth came from nowhere. someone did it and they love their family more than randoms. so of course their family benefits.

why should i work hard for strangers who vilify me?

It’s at odds with meritocracy. We should reward competence and hard work, not membership in a dynasty.

Do you have kids? If so, are you going to send him/her to a private school, assuming you can afford it? What about stumping up money for extracurriculars or tutoring? Or if you're not really wealthy, what about giving immaterial aid like tutoring yourself? All of these things are "at odds with meritocracy", but that doesn't mean it's a slam dunk argument against them.

You seem to think that rich people don't win because they are better. Seems like cope to me to imagine they are outside of merit systems.

Family relationships are just compound interest.

Government plays the interventionist role of enabling the killer app maker to make billions of dollars, rather than zero antelopes - or more realistically, a meager amount of food doing menial labor for the local warlord. That's the thing many app makers have seem to forgotten.

I'm coming from a libertarian perspective, so I'm certainly not trying to use that to justify no-exit totalitarian thinking. But it's still important to remember that base truth when analyzing the overall outcomes of our current system.

For the most part, it's not people who are making killer apps that make billions, it's people who hire those who make the apps.

But that unfairness is itself based on forces of the universe, in this case: a seed can grow in shit, a seed cannot grow in asphalt.

To extend your metaphor, we have tons of the available "surface area" for people to fall on paved with asphalt, to suit the preferences of those sitting in shit. These are not fixed things. We placed the asphalt. We can tear it up, if we so choose to.

We have the surface area for the next generation, but since unconstrained life grows exponentially, it runs out within a few generations. Isn't some kind of homeostasis preferable to repeated booms and busts?

If unconstrained life grows exponentially why is it every developed country is having a birthrate crisis? It seems most populations tend to naturally stabilize once parents realize they don't need to have like 7 kids hoping 2 or 3 survive childhood.

When someone asks how something is fair - coming back with life is like that or life isn't fair is not a valid response. Humanity should strive to make the systems as fair as possible while accepting the fact that unfairness will still exist. Why will theft etc be a crime if not for the idea of fairness. You can make the same life is unfair argument to defend theft but that's not the way it should be / is.

>Humanity should strive to make the systems as fair as possible while accepting the fact that unfairness will still exist.

The standard argument against this is that "inequality is a good thing because it leads to innovation" or whatever.

So the question is "why is life unfair?"

Or is it "why do bad beginnings with lots of drudgery not lead to yacht ownership?"

The question is rather "why do we accept that life is unfair rather than try to make it more fair?"

It’s not fair, just like most of life due to the genes/parents/geography/etc you are born to.

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