There's a building body of evidence which indicates that returns are increasingly going to capital and not labour, however not as a result of "power-grabs" but rather technology (the same thing happened during the early part of the industrial revolution).
It's actually the cover story of this weeks Economist:
If you're a fan of harder data, you can read the UK Government report about how technology is responsible for driving the destruction of middle-income jobs and pushing up inequality:
Not true and it omits to mention that increasing the inequality was intentional. Not as in a consequence of technology but politicians mandated that more profits and less wages would be good for the economy and implemented policies that made it so.
Here is what happened in Sweden which you can see is third in increasing the 1%'s share. Sweden has lots of companies that export stuff to the US and other places. Now they get paid in dollar which they convert to Swedish kronor.
So a Swedish company sells cars to the US and gets $100 million/year. Convert it to kronor and you get about 1 billion. Government decides to help them so they decide that Swedish currency is only worth 50% of what it used to (yes they can/could decide that). Suddenly, they the company now makes 2 billion per year.
Meanwhile, Swedish people buy TV:s and game consoles from the US. All that now cost double of what it did since their currency is worth half of what it was.
So what should the Swedes do? Demand salary increases to offset the higher prices of course. Since the (exporting) companies makes double the profits, they should be able to double the salaries. Except it wasn't so easy in the eighties to just demand that especially not when the government opposed salary increases. Salaries did rose though, but not nearly as much as they would have to keep pace with the increasing profits.
Btw, this is not a simplification at all. There is a tape of the prime minister at the time saying that "salaries are to high and that's why the krona needs to be devalued." Similar things happened in other countries too.
There is a tape of the prime minister at the time saying that "salaries are to high and that's why the krona needs to be devalued."
Yes, it happens all the time and in many countries - it's called Keynesian economics and it's the dominant paradigm of modern economics. (Namely, inflate the real value of sticky nominal wages away to make hiring people more attractive.)
I have no idea why you believe this is some conspiracy to increase inequality. It's true that recessions reduce inequality, and ending a recession will increase it. But is it maybe possible that proponents of stimulus have ending the recession as their goal and increased inequality is merely a side effect?
Here's a thought that I was recently introduced to: All such discussions should always be prefixed with "Given that/As long as society's distributional mechanisms are accomodating, ...".
In this particular case: "As long as society's distributional mechanisms are accomodating, technology can lead/leads to returns increasingly going to capital rather than labour."
This is important because the distributional mechanisms of society are not natural laws and they are not set in stone. So much of our lives is already affected by technology, why not change those distributional mechanisms to minimize the negative impact of technology?
For example, there is a lot of debate these days surrounding policy proposals like the basic income or the job guarantee, both of which would likely have changed the impact of technological change.
So we can discuss whether or not the regressive changes in distribution of the last 40 years were primarily [0] due to technology or not until the cows come home. But I would argue that this is not the key question. The key questions are (1) are we happy with these regressive changes in distribution and (2) if not, what do we need to change to revert them?
[0] After all, power grabs by the top 0.1% very obviously happened in that period of time. Just look at Thatcher and Reagan and the like-minded political movements they inspired in other Western countries. The only question is about the extent of their impact.
Isn't it more about that the jobs that gain due to the technology are mostly in the top 1% range? I mean, the share of income going to the top 1% increases that's sure, but most of that are huge and ever growing salaries and bonuses of managers and high-end professionals - not stock dividends. If you see stock performance (at least public stocks), both in terms of cap growth and dividend yield, you see a pretty grim picture in the last 10 years compared to older times. Privately held companies are somewhat in the shadow here, but there is no big reason to think they are doing much better than public ones. Stock appreciation and dividends are what forms income of capitalists.
So it is change of the salary distribution to the top 1% (to the extent that it dilutes that said 1% of many smaller capitalists that used to be there with some ex-proletarians) from lower income groups, not shift of focus from capital to labor.
Personally all rich people i knew 10 years ago were business owners or co-owners, with addition of a few corruptioners. Now it is about even between business owners, corruptioners, and high-end professionals who don't even steal where they work. Maybe that is my personal experience/change of my contact circle, maybe a trend.
You have personal responsibility for your actions as a developer.
If you are using your skills in a way which primarily benefits the super-rich and is a net negative to society, you should take this opportunity to reflect on that: yes.
We are benefiting everyone. Technology improves the quality of life for everyone, the benefits may be concentrated right now but over time they'll be dispersed. We are freeing labor from tasks, the problem is that we are in a transition period where their new tasks are not well understood. Overall software eating the world will make everyone significantly richer.
Also, as always wealth is not a zero sum game. Just because someone has 100X the wealth you do, does not mean that they stole from you, or that you are poorer. In fact your standard of living has probably increased.
> Also, as always wealth is not a zero sum game. Just because someone has 100X the wealth you do, does not mean that they stole from you, or that you are poorer.
While this makes us sleep well at night, please consider that the top richest are often connected to:
- Externalizing costs to countries with corrupt/authoritarian governments
- Tax evasion
- Companies backed by strong governments' tax money (theft by the state), later privatized for pennies because the government is broke and/or corrupt
- Banking, which never follow free-market rules
- Oil and mining companies, which aren't taxed proportional to the intrinsic environmental and social impacts
While wealth doesn't comes from theft, wealth concentration requires a dose of unethical behavior and not observing some people's fundamental rights. When you're at that level of capital it's an entire different game.
Then the problem is not wealth inequality it's government intervention and government corruption. So we should stop talking about wealth and start talking about corruption.
I think they both merit discussion, as one enables the other. Ignoring corruption, the super wealthy can set the topic if not the tone of discourse for entire nations (and increasingly do).
I work on mobile applications at an investment bank so the rich can fiddle with their money from their diamond plated iPhones. Does that buy me a ticket to hell?
You are not expected to feel „white guilt”. You are expected to acknowledge the privilege you have, to avoid its abuse, and to avoid perpetuating that state (though of course keeping awareness of the costs and benefits of such actions - nobody benefits if you just burn all your money and remove other privileges by bodily harm, for example).
Why? Surely a state that allows some people a comfortable base on which to build wealth that benefits everyone is a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Don't forget that everything as an opportunity cost. Would you rather eg James Watt fretted about privilege, or used his to build the steam engine?
How do I find out what "privilege" I have? Do I have to work harder to actively offset this imaginary benefit society has somehow determined that I've been born with?
I'm sick and tired of this privilege bullshit. I didn't get to where I am now because of being a white male.
It's not imaginary at all though. Do you truly believe that there is no benefit in everyday life gained by being a white, straight, middle-class+, male? Is there not a benefit to going to a school that can afford up to date books? To not have being open about you sexuality be a real risk to your career and health? Is there no benefit to not having racial slurs yelled at you? To not have many people in society assume that you know less because of your sex?
Pretending that privilege doesn't exist because you haven't been on the wrong side does no good to yourself or society.
It is imaginary, its a guilt trip imposed by those who need it to profit off of or as an excuse. Oh it definitely existed, don't get me wrong, there were times every countries history where it did.
The real bogeyman is pretending that people don't discriminate against their own kind. Just as in society as in work people have prejudices against those they don't know any many are formed based on societal norms.
Assigning privileged just because of skin color is another form of racism. Its an excuse. Not every white person was born on the right side of the tracks, not non-white was either. Fortunately most of us don't think of privileged status based on color, unfortunately some only do.
I think its the loaded work 'privilege' that gets peoples' dander up. It intended to insult, and its the wrong word. Privilege is something given undeservedly, something that can be taken away, and exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others. Being born as whatever(white-male) is not a good fit for that definition. It wasn't given, it cant be taken away, and its not 'exercised' intentionally by any means.
The word is just used to make people feel guilty. So they lash back. Not a helpful discussion technique. Why not just say 'genes' or 'heredity' if that's what we mean?
> Why not just say 'genes' or 'heredity' if that's what we mean?
Because privilege derives from many sources and is much more complex than any one of them.
It is unfortunate that it is sometimes used, or taken, to shut people out. This is not the intention of the word. At its best it calls someone to take account of their unconscious biases.
Exactly, privilege is complex. The world does not work in absolutes.
The postmodern feminist has a very simplistic and Western-centric (particularly American-centric) worldview where being white and male makes you prosper, but being black or white and female makes you suffer.
This fails to address for countless nuances and by default simply stating "You're white, ergo you're instantly privileged." is just false and dishonest.
It's also funny how the end goal is to foster social equality, yet when you have every single slightly different group forming its own political advocacy and demanding radical shifts in human behavior/special accommodations, you're only stratifying things even further. I guess this can be warranted if people focused on actual issues, but instead most of our attention in the Western world is focused on people making ribald jokes in public places.
> This fails to address for countless nuances and by default simply stating "You're white, ergo you're instantly privileged." is just false and dishonest.
That’s not what modern (that is intersectional) feminism says. It says that whiteness gives you privilege over colored people. It says that being male gives you privilege over people who are female. And being rich gives you privilege over people who are poor. An interaction between a middle-class black man and a rich white woman can be a fascinating minefield, where either of them can be the „oppressed” side depending on the context. In fact it’s getting more popular to use the word „kyriarchy” to avoid the overly-specific „patriarchy”.
Of course yes, many feminists actively hate intersectionality, and others don’t completely grasp the context. But ignoring its existence in modern feminism shows certain amount of ignorance or bad will. The radical thought goes against the dominance-obsessed behavior in general.
It says that whiteness gives you privilege over colored people.
Not inherently and once again, very centric to Western culture.
It says that being male gives you privilege over people who are female.
Historically and still in certain areas, yes. But once again complicated and dishonest to inherently portray it as such. Especially in the West, where it can be completely false. That or the privileges of being male are equalized by the privileges of being female (and please don't tell me they don't exist).
And being rich gives you privilege over people who are poor.
Oh wow, and bears shit in the woods. No wonder people mock the social sciences.
In fact it’s getting more popular to use the word „kyriarchy” to avoid the overly-specific „patriarchy”.
Kyriarchy is a moronic term, as virtually all systems have some concept of power or control.
I think privilege is definitely meant to get peopled dander up so that they discuss it. Also, as I understand it, the privilege isn't being white, its the average benefit that being white will yield you
So, it gets white males upset, who have all the power. Not very constructive. Further the benefit is accrued through the actions of OTHER people. So who's the right one to educate?
I think the discussion is mostly confused and non-productive, when it resorts to using charged words over the correct ones, and seeks to insult those who admittedly wield more power.
You are right that other people have it worse often through no fault of their own, but this doesn't mean "privilege" is a useful concept. You are also privileged by being born into the late 20th century instead of a medieval village. You are privileged by not having any disabilities. You are privileged if you are attractive (which correlates with a lot of good things.) You are privileged by hereditary IQ (correlates with income.) Especially what country you are born into.
By comparison race and sexuality are only tiny factors. On top of this, even if you are white, straight, etc, you can still have a shitty life through random chance. What use is it to divide people into these specific categories when there are millions of other factors as well?
> that privilege doesn't exist because you haven't been on the wrong side does no good to yourself or society.
Know who is on the wrong side? Poor people born in 3rd world countries, with no food, jobs, infrastructure, nothing. On the top of that, a lot of them live in a freaking civil war.
People born in the USA, man or woman, who is middle-class+, is privileged beyond any dream of the majority of the world population.
Maybe that was true 40 years ago. Nowadays a median middle class natural-born U.S. citizen is a fat type with an old SUV, living in a cardboard house and getting maybe $60k a year. Such a quality of life is within easy reach of every person in the world except maybe totalitarian societies like DPRK (which are very rare) and extremely dilapidated sub-Saharan Africa countries, given he has some brains and will to work hard. We live in a global world.
I don't even tell many people in places like Eastern Europe enjoy better quality of life right now, with maybe somewhat less cash - in safe, walkable, well-designed cities, with better food and environment and less spoiled societies with a strong demand of democracy (nobody wishes to return to Soviet era and every government looking like doing so will be thrown out quickly).
I think this is very true, but no one questions the privilege of being born in America. However, people do doubt the average benefit that being male has on professional conversations within the developed world.
Looking at the high layers of society, i can see a lot of open gays, much more than i can see around myself. So being straight is probably not such a big advantage.
Women on freelancing sites definitely earn a lot more than men, i know a lot of men pretending to be women there to get projects easier, and not a single case of reverse. People who make their living of freelancing probably know what they are doing. And that is precisely due to (real or imaginary) positive sides of women as workers - being attentive to detail, better communicators, and more reliable - i can hardly imagine a girl forgetting about her unfinished gig and going drinking while that what's normally happens to guys all the time. If i was a customer i'd be that kind of reverse sexist either.
If I make generalizations of an individual of a class based on characteristics of the class as a whole, that is racism. Example: "A young black male like you is much more likely to be a criminal."
But if you do the same thing with privledge, that is considered acceptable (and an indicator that you are an enlightened) Example: "A white male is more likely to go to a school that can afford up to date books" (from macimumloam.)
Both things are true. But if go around saying the first one all the time whenever I speak to a black male I'll be ostracized, but if I say the second, everyone will feel good about themselves about showing some white male his place.
(Posting from a throwaway account because of just this reason.)
"A young black male LIKE YOU is..." vs "A white male is..."
Regardless, facts are facts. If (big if) black men are incarcerated more per capita than white men, it is not racist to say so. What is racist are the usual reactions:
* Calling on the "black community" to denounce the culture that supposedly causes this
* Discounting the idea that police might be structurally racist and arrest black men less than white men, or investigate crimes typically committed by people with low economic means more
* Discounting the idea that the justice system might be structurally racist and find black men guilty on sketchier evidence
* Discounting the idea that structural oppression plays no part in this and that black people "just decide to join gangs and commit crimes" without any insight into the pressures of their life.
* Pointing out to every black man you meet that they are more likely to be criminals (I am actually aghast at the idea that you think this is not a contemptibly rude thing to do), when you don't point out to every white man you meet that they are more likely to be paedophiles.
For some more clarification, I agree with the concept of privilege.
I completely would agree that I have privilege. I was brought up by two loving intelligent college graduate who put a high emphasis on education and nurtured my interests in technology from a very young age. Unlike some people, my race or gender did not make things harder for me.
I think it is very offensive to people when they are told to "check their privilege" and that because they are white they automatically went to a good school and etc., when in the case of rfnslyr he had nothing to eat and had to escape a communist regime.
I think the issue is this. In the first case you are attempting to pass judgement on the actions a person may or may not take based on their race. in your example, commit a crime, which is an unjust judgement of that person's character.
In the second case it is an example of how society will affect you based on your race, outside of the personal actions of that person. The sentence makes no judgment on that person's character.
Here the overarching problem with these statements. They are trying to pass judgment on a race based on certain statistics about them. Is it racist to say that black students on average score lower on the SATs? No, it is a statistical fact. Is it racist to proclaim these students as stupid because of that? Yes, extremely, because you are judging their intelligence base on race without understanding why that statistic might be true.
Instead of being so heavily concerned with what you "can" and "can not" say without being racist, its important to focus on why these statistics do exist and understand why they are true.
Your statement implies that the student is stupid because they are black. That is racist and strictly false. So why do these students score lower? Probably due the incredibly high level of institutionalized racism that they experience every day of their life.
We need to work towards building a better society together, and eliminating societal constraints based on characteristics beyond their control characteristics. By focusing on how you can't say racists things (and if you didn't know it would be racist, then not bothering to understand why), and how that is unfair to you takes focus away from the real issues. Black students are scoring lower on the SATs, and its because as a society, we have institutionalized racism towards them. That is the great injustice here, not the lose of anyone's right to remain ignorant.
"Probably due to the incredibly high level of institutionalized racism that they experience every day of their life."
I completely agree. I have seen first hand cops being completely racist to minorities. And there are numerous cases of African Americans having their race being a factor in getting a job (http://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/sum_fall03/bertrand.pdf). There are a million other difficulties they face. I wan't to do everything possible to remove those barriers.
I'm not implying people are stupid because they are black. That is just something you are picking up from nothing. What I said is the English version of:
P(scores is in bottom decile | student is Black) > P(score is in bottom decile | student is White).
Is there a difference between someone being "stupid" and someone scoring very low on a g-loaded intelligence test? The first definition of stupid on Google is "lacking intelligence". Is it wrong to say someone whose intelligence test scores are very low is stupid? I'd probably say test scores <25 percentile = stupid, between 25 percentile - 75 percentile average, >75 percentile smart. (Obviously you have to make sure the test isn't biased which is why I originally mentioned math).
If I changed from saying scored bad on the SAT to being illiterate as an adult does that make my statement any better. It seems like no one can say someone who is illiterate isn't stupid.
My point isn't to worry about what you can and can not say without being racist. I already know that judging individuals based on their race is wrong. I'm trying to use an analogy to say that if we can all agree that saying one thing is wrong, saying another thing about judging white people when it is also a generalization/stereotype is equally wrong.
No, I truly believe there is no such thing, it's something made up by the entitled. Why is it that I work alongside many tiny asian women and indian women that can barely speak a word of English and are in their 30's?
You are assuming I go to a nice school and I'm from a nice middle class family that can support all my stuff. I'm not. I dropped out because I had no money and I was born in eastern european ghetto filth.
Not have my sexuality be a real risk to my career and health? What do you know about my life, my career, my health, or anything, for you to lay baseless "privilege" assumptions?
Being white isn't a ticket to kingdom come and anybody who believes so has to do some deep self reflection.
I've been on the wrong side, the very very wrong side. What the fuck do you know about going to prison? Where was my white privilege when my teeth were being ground into the asphalt by 5 guys bigger than me?
What do you know about not having SHIT to eat for days at a time? Not seeing your parents for weeks at a time to just bring food to the table? What do you know about spending 5 years travelling through many different countries just to escape a communist regime, to leave your family behind, to have nothing?
"Privilege" is something created by the people that are already born into an upper class world and spend their days speculating upon the lives of the less fortunate which in turn sprouted this movement.
Do not fucking sit here and spout this poisonous bullshit, because it doesn't exist in the extremes of life, only in the made up comfortable society you've been brought up in, maybe.
Welcome to identity politics, it has taken over all discussion and derailed any hope of alternative political movements accomplishing anything except factioning, infighting and bullshit.
Even my local anarchist space has been overrun by identity politics (not that I'm an anarchist, just they used to do some interesting things there until privilege spouting dictators took it over to constantly preach about identity politics). I'm thinking about funding an entirely new free space just to get rid of that cancer but I suspect they will just show up to protest how we aren't conforming to identity politics, because the left here cares more about policing and attacking each other than they do accomplishing anything.
Nobody is talking about you specifically, and nobody claims that white people are set for life or that no white people have shitty lives. The claim is that, all else being equal, and on average, being white provides a boost.
This doesn't mean that you personally have benefited from this; but my grandfather smoked three packs a day and lived to be 90+, does that mean that smoking doesn't shorten the life expectancy?
Sounds to me like that's more a result of your family, smarts, getting into the right college, etc than being white or male. Being white or male might have helped a bit, but I'm a white male and I didn't get paid 500k right out of school. If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true. But they don't. Perhaps it has less merit than you suspect.
Sounds to me like that's more a result of your family, smarts, getting into the right college, etc than being white or male.
Possibly, though being white (or male) has influence on whether you get into the right college (or go to college at all).
Being white or male might have helped a bit, but I'm a white male and I didn't get paid 500k right out of school. If EVERY white male make 500k starting the day they graduated I'd believe that your theory holds true. But they don't.
This is a baffling claim. So no one has any privilege over anyone else unless they are among the 1% top earners in society? I can't even comprehend such logic.
In any case, it's not my theory (I was just explaining it), and it's hardly without merit: this has been demonstrated in studies, such as [1] and [2].
I think your scale is a bit off; you're looking at how far you or others are from a cushy life near the top, but you really should be looking at the distance from the bottom.
Take, for only a small example, stop and frisk, and disparate prosecution and sentencing. It should really go without saying that there is a racial element to this -- police officers don't know how much money you make or how much class privilege you can truly bring to bear when they decide to stop you, pull you over, search you, or arrest you. Being black or brown in a predominately affluent (and chances are, predominately white) neighborhood doesn't make you exempt from being bothered - in fact, it makes you look more "out of place" and more likely to be stopped, and I say that both from a casual review of literature but also my personal experiences. And of course, just about every day we hear about all sorts of wealthy black people (Forrest Whittaker comes to mind as a relatively recent high-profile example) who get treated like criminals at stores because overzealous security guards have unconscious (or sometimes even conscious!) biases.
The fact that black & brown people are disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and sentenced means that white people are disproportionately not stopped, not searched, not arrested, acquitted, or given lenient sentences. It means that a lot of white kids have been given second chances / have had their illegal habits or decisions overlooked and gone on to still get financial aid (drug convictions can permanently disqualify you for federal financial aid), not be a felon, and get decent jobs in decent neighborhoods when the exact same doors are closed for many people of color who didn't do anything differently.
Yes, there is a class component to all of this - being wealthy may make it easier to get off after your arrest - but the biases in the criminal justice pipeline at and before arrest are really more race-based than anything.
I don't think that anyone thinks that being white affords white people the kinds of privileges that a $500k/year salary gives you. That's really a pretty absurd suggestion and I think most reasonable people who are not completely ignorant should be aware of all of the white poverty that exists to know that. But, even after controlling for everything else - including crimes committed - it does help to keep you out of prison and the criminal justice system.
That's not the only privilege, either. But in our overly incarcerated society, it's an important one.
Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?
It's not race that plays in so much as economic cues that sadly are not evenly distributed. A black guy in an M5 BMW wearing a suit likely faces no more prosecution than a white guy. The cops tend not to fuck with people who appear to have the means to buy influence or sue, irrespective of race.
If blacks are more poor than whites (on average) and thus have less education/family/friends/etc lottery to win, that happens not because they're black but because they're poor.
Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor. You can't try and find causation either way there. People are generally poor because their parents were poor and it's not terribly common for people to aspire to much more than what they're used to. But that has more to do with how people bias themselves than how society aggressively discriminates.
You can't win the lottery without buying a ticket and there are plenty of people white, black, asian, latino, etc who don't try to purchase tickets.
> Are there no affluent black neighborhoods where a white person might look out of place?
Can't say I've ever been to any neighborhood that would fit that description. Have you?
> Being poor sucks but people aren't poor because they're black anymore than they're black because they're poor.
I think the causal links binding race & poverty are a little more complex than you're giving them credit for.
Scale (e.g. how "much" one affects the other) is certainly up for debate. Arguing that they have no impact on each other whatsoever doesn't pass the sniff test.
No but I've mostly lived in rural areas, small towns, or suburbs far removed from the actually affluent areas or big cities. The richest people I know personally emigrated from India and obtained US citizenship as adults.
I agree that I oversimplified but not by a huge margin. We human beings are very nearly robots that are programmed by our parents and once on our own, we tend to do what they taught us. Not 100% of course, but to a large degree.
We are the product of our parents. They are the product of their parents. And so on, it's basically recursive. Yes that's a bit reductionist, but there is a lot of truth to it.
So how is it that blacks today are disproportionately poor? My outside-in theory is because their parents parents parents...parents were slaves and didn't really have any reason to plan for the future and figure out how to accumulate wealth or any of that. If you can't own property (and as a slave you couldn't) there's no point to figuring that out, only how to either escape or survive. And then after that add in 100 years of subjugation and you've got a pretty good recipe for not necessarily teaching your kids how to try to get rich or at least middle class.
So what I'm saying is that if you took someone who was black and poor (and thus didn't necessarily learn the skills necessary to escape poverty) and magically turned his skin white on the day he turned 20 he wouldn't all of a sudden get rich as shit because a bunch of white guys would suddenly shower him with money. Might his life be a little easier? Sure, but it wouldn't get dramatically better. Similarly if you took a guy from a white middle class background and magically turned his skin black he wouldn't lose all the things his parents taught him and be poverty stricken. Might his life be a touch harder? Sure, but I don't think he would immediately go to jail just because he's now black.
What do you think would happen if you took a black male from an affluent black family and turned his skin white? How much would that help him? What if you took a white male from a poor family and turned his skin black? How much would that hurt him?
I would argue that it's far, far more important to somehow get magically transplanted from a poor family to an affluent one than it is to have the color of your skin magically changed from black to white.
That's a really roundabout way to say that I don't think there are much in the way of causal links that bind race and poverty. Or that if there are, you have to go back quite a ways to find it. I think how you're raised and what skills your parents teach you are far more important than the color of your skin. Family and upbringing, 90%, race 10% or something like that.
If you disagree with me I'm very open to hearing what you have to say. This isn't a deeply held belief that's core to my being but rather some rambling thoughts I had on the subject.
Just because you, personally, aren't able to see the benefits of being white/male doesn't mean it's not there. I was getting paid half a million right out of college and the fact that I was a white middle-class male absolutely made a difference -- I don't think I would've broken into the old boys network at my firm without that. Or how about the time I was ticketed for going 105 on a highway in TX with a bag of pot in my car, but the officer decided not to search my car (or even bring up the idea). Or a million other advantages I've received from being who I am.
Yes, but you benefit for being in the same class as other white males, who are sometimes very powerful.
Because God knows powerful white males like nothing more than helping less powerful white males climb the next run on the ladder. Especially less powerful white males from Eastern European.
I apologize if my previous was worded in way that made it come across as assumptions about you, my intention was more rhetorical questions. No one is saying that any of these characteristics are a free pass to happiness and fulfillment in life. It is just to say that many people do feel the consequences of it within their society and that is unjust.
Privilege is most often applied to discuss life in a society that is already well off and thats true. I think this is because no one question the privilege of being born in a wealthy suburb rather then a shanty town. But the betterment of life people within and without of any society are not mutually exclusive goals.
Reading these constructively might require that you at least admit the possibility that you receive some help in life other than the effort that you directly put in.
Unfortunately these privilege checklists are hugely anecdotal and flawed (especially the "Male Programmer Privilege Checklist", which annoys me like no other, because it claims certain privileges when in fact the reality is the exact opposite).
The general logic that goes behind these checklists seems to be "I'm a woman in tech. Something inconvenient or unpleasant happened to me. Therefore all women in tech suffer from this institutionally and men are privileged not to experience it."
Most complaints make me believe the author(s) have some sort of narcissistic or histrionic personality disorder, with only a few legitimate points.
"I'm a woman in tech. Something inconvenient or unpleasant happened to me. Therefore all women in tech suffer from this institutionally and men are privileged not to experience it."
No actually, I've never been given a handout once in my life. I grew up in the shittiest of shit ghettos in eastern europe and I got out of there. Then I made a whole new life for myself from the ground up. I never had any "groups" to help me along, no support systems, no grants, no aid, nothing.
I do not have "privilege" and I think it's disgusting that people offset their own deficiencies with someone else's imaginary "privilege" rather than working hard.
Victim culture is poisonous. Do you see how my "privilege" just adversely affected me instead of imaginarily pushing me in the right direction as you so define it? Randoms on the internet telling me I had an invisible hand to help shove me in the right direction.
Does that not discredit my effort? Is that not ironic and counter to what privilege actually is in the context you are using it?
Now I have to deal with people thinking I was skyrocketed into the good life simply because I'm a tall white male. The reality is I gave up a substantial portion of the beginning of my life to propel myself into the life I'm in.
It took countless hours of mental agony and breakdowns to finally repair myself to a point where I'm able to be a viable athlete in this hyper competitive concrete jungle.
I spent my nights and days studying finance, programming, and mathematics. I did not go out with friends. I kept to a very strict routine to better myself, and after years, it has finally fucking paid off.
Do not talk to me about privilege, I know what poverty is. You are disillusioning yourself and those around you.
Indeed, you may not be as privileged as someone born in an affluent suburb of
London. Hopefully someone that did have that background would take that into
account when making assumptions about your past and motives. Different people can have different privileges - you can't necessarily win at privilege.
If you at least skim read the checklists you will see that most of the examples
don't take the form of anything like handouts or support groups.
By telling me "Do not talk to me about privilege, I know what poverty is." you
are using the concept of privilege in your argument and are essentially telling
me to check my privilege. I'm ok with that.
Privilege isn't about discrediting anyone. It is about helping us understand
the experiences of other people.
Way to spin this in a nice tone, you must be great in sales. No I am not telling you to "check your privilege".
I am asking you to not discredit ME based on your definition of privilege, which is really just a generalization under a different name. You generalized and put me in the "white male" category, then applied blanket assumptions to that group as a whole.
There is no such thing as "privilege". There is bias, and it differs from person to person. One manager may care if they are hiring a short lesbian black woman, another may not, that is up to the dynamic of the two individuals and cannot be attributed to some sort of greater force, privilege.
At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters. If you come to me with a shit portfolio and a 2.0 GPA, and you happen to be a short black lesbian female, that has less to do with your privilege and more to do with the fact that your works sucks.
I hire people. I hire people old, young, black, white, transexual, poor, wealthy, gay, straight, anyone. It's the work that matters.
Anybody who patches up their own deficiencies with "privilege plaster" should steer themselves in a different direction.
When you say that bias differs from person to person, I don't think anyone would disagree. Do you believe that it differs such that the net effect is exactly neutral across the population?
At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters.
Which leaves you claiming that you are peculiarly immune from robustly observed cognitive biases. This may well be true for you particularly, but even if that is the case it is still not a widely followed effect (even among people who believe themselves to be gender-blind).
It's not about handouts. And you can have privilege in one domain and lack of privilege in others.
Are you a white male? The fact that you had a hard life doesn't negate the fact that you derive certains advantages from being white, and male.
You say you've had it hard. That's an absolute measure. Privilege is a relative measure. If you had had the same
circumstances, except you were black, your life would be hard-ER. A relative measure.
You should take a look at the linked privilege checklists. For each item that applies, ask yourself: would my life be hard-ER, in a relative sense, if this weren't true for me?
That's not my point. You cannot infer from the color of my skin how hard or easy my life has been.
What just happened was, someone commented that I have it easy because of my supposed white privilege. They simply just assumed I'm from a white middle class post-college family just because of my skin color.
Now if this was real life, and I worked at some nice company, now I have to fear people blaming my position and my state in life because of my privilege, when in reality it was me who struggled day and night with basic necessities to get to where I am today.
Nobody is denying that privilege exists in our little micro upper class bubble, which is my point exactly. Did some hiring manager have a better outlook on me when they first met me? Yeah probably, but that doesn't do shit for me if I can't back myself up with good work.
It's just such a dumb inane topic. I am now being discredited and disregarded because of "white privilege".
The benefits of being a white male in this society are negligible at BEST.
Despite commenting multiple times in this thread, you still do not seem to have looked at any of the privilege checklist, and you have not said that the privileges listed there do not apply to you or are not useful:
That's an article on white privilege. For numbers 1-50, would you make the claim that they either i. do not apply to you, OR ii. are of only marginal use, and you'd be fine with them not being true
Would you make that claim for all 50? Again, NO ONE is saying your lift hasn't been hard. Privilege is a relative claim. It can only make life harder or easier, not hard or easy.
I can't speak for the OP, but I'll give my own perspective.
Many of these items are nothing but restatements of "if I want to stick to my own (racial) kind, it helps to be in the majority." Since I have no particular desire to stick to my own (racial) kind, I'm fine with them not being true.
Of the remainder, I assert they are not a big deal. In a few days I'm travelling from a location where they are true (UK) to a location where they are not (India) and it was not a significant factor in my decision. I've devoted far more thought to things like the the weather, consistent running water or a gym than I have to anything on this list.
> Now I have to deal with people thinking I was skyrocketed into the good life simply because I'm a tall white male. The reality is I gave up a substantial portion of the beginning of my life to propel myself into the life I'm in.
This is a strawman. The concept of privilege isn't "white males are always fantastically successful"! Privilege means that, on average, someone identical to you but female, dark skinned, disabled, etc. would - again, in general - have a harder time of it.
Yeah, that's entitlement, not privilege. Look at the world we currently live in. Everything we do has already been done for us.
Look at it from my point of view. I now live in a world where:
- I don't ever have to think about money, or food, or basic necessities
- Everything I do is simply making use of all the shit that has been delivered right to my doorstep
Define "harder", because if you are struggling in the first world with such intangibles like race, skin color, and sexuality, then you really need to check yourself and realize how good you have it.
Because some random manager or someone formed an initial bias about you based on your outward appearance is not privilege, it's personal bias and we all have it.
The fact that I work at arguably the whitest place to work (largest investment bank in a first world country) that employs over 50% females of all varieties already wrecks your "privilege" assumption.
Do you know why? All those different people were hired solely based on their work and experience, nothing else.
I see all these articles and postings about what white privilege affords me, but none of it is concrete. I can't find anything tangible, where someone was explicitly discriminated against in the tech industry for their skin color or sexual preference.
I'm also gay as it fucking gets, yet I don't go around flaunting it and start making it a problem, to the point where my life revolves around my sexuality.
How many White Male Developers are on the world's 85 richest people ? You are diverting this issue towards race - I am not white - and I do not look up to people because they are White. There are attributes I care about - but every once in a while a dude comes and complains about race. I too felt others were mistreating me for my race - but when I changed my mindset - I did not see people mistreating me, so I guess its the VIBE not the race.
It's also important to realize that global poverty is at a historically low level at the same time. If you believe the Gates letter in the WSJ, then there will be practically no impoverished countries (with a few exceptions) left in just a few decades. That is unprecedented.
I would agree that many of the extremely wealthy have achieved their wealth through political power grabs (particularly, but not limited to Russia and China), but you should also expect great wealth to be created and earned honestly through a process that is lifting the entire globe out of poverty. Distinguishing between these two sources of wealth is important if you truly want to lift the quality of life around the world. Broadly fighting "inequality" of wealth wherever you see it is likely to slow or destroy this growth.
Holding one down does not lift another up. Letting one person rise tends to improve the lives of others.
"Poverty" is a much-abused and much-redefined word. Many rely on an expansive legal definition intended to include as many as possible. Consider that the USA definition of "poverty line" sets some 87% of the world's population as "poor", which is a practical absurdity clouded by emotion.
Using an objective definition of "poor" focused on one's sustenance (and unaffected by whether someone else is very comfortable) we find that, indeed, world "poverty" is declining substantially. A greater percentage of world population than ever is able to obtain more than sufficient nutrition, shelter, etc to live indefinitely - to wit, aren't "poor".
And yes, if someone can improve their income/wealth to a great degree, they are most likely improving the well-being of others in the process. For capitalism to be indefinitely self-sustaining, both parties in a transaction must benefit from the transaction in an economically sustainable manner. This persistent meme of the wealthy sucking the rest of society to death is absurd, as killing customers (or otherwise rendering their income negligible) is very bad for business. Yes, wealth inequality can help eradicate poverty by giving some a reason to improve the lives of others; total wealth equality (especially when forced by government) means nobody has reason to improve themselves relative to others, consequently institutionalizing poverty as the socioeconomic norm.
Society A: everyone has at least 1000 wealth somethings, which is plenty to live comfortably. Some people have 1,000,000 wealth somethings. It's very unequal.
Society B: everyone has 10 wealth somethings, which is not enough to live very well. There is no inequality.
How this all works out in the real world is the domain of economics research and is probably something of an open question.
A closely related and very relevant question is whether society C, where economic incentives and politics ensure that everyone has at least 2000 wealth somethings and some people only have 500,000 wealth somethings, is better than Society A.
I think you and others in this thread are arguing a moot point. Certainly it's relevant that the median human lives a better life today than 50 years ago, but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether today's income inequality is a bad thing or whether extreme income inequality makes many people's lives worse than they would be otherwise.
By capping incomes/ownership to 500,000 wealth somethings, you discourage the creation of productivity required to supply the extra 1000 wealth somethings to everyone, as required to transition from scenario A to C. By penalizing anyone making/having more than that cap, nobody has incentive to create another 500,000 (or even just 1) more wealth somethings which would, at some point, would be transferred to others anyway. In practice, such capping tends to turn scenario A into B because not only is anyone discouraged from producing more than a certain amount of value, what manifestations of wealth which exist decay and are eventually destroyed without sufficient resupply for the whole society; as wealth is consumed/decayed/destroyed, and productivity is effectively punished, the majority increasingly vote for forced redistribution of what remains, leading to stabilizing at 50 per person.
Wealth somethings don't just grow on trees, ya know. They don't last indefinitely either, much less increase commensurate with population growth & needs despite lack of sufficient incentive to create them.
> I think you and others in this thread are arguing a moot point.
I didn't think I was arguing any point beyond the fact that inequality in and of itself is not necessarily bad, and that absolute levels of wealth count for something too. I have no idea what the optimal levels of those things are, nor how best to achieve them.
What's going on in this thread is people saying, "Thank goodness we aren't Society B, Society A really is better". I don't think anyone would prefer A over C, but A is clearly attainable and we are getting there- so let's celebrate our victories moving towards A, where everyone has enough, and then worry about getting to C instead of trying to take a shortcut. Because the benefits of everyone having enough are much higher priority than everyone having the same.
>You're arguing that income inequality helps to eradicate poverty?
No, I wouldn't argue that income inequality is what helps to eradicate poverty, but I would argue that much (not all) income inequality is created as a result of the same process that helps to eradicate poverty.
In fact, the facts in the original article and headline would suggest that the two can in fact occur at the same time: 1) the 85 richest people are as wealthy as the poorest half of the world and 2) the world has never had as little poverty as it does now, down to a level that would have been considered unbelievable a couple of decades ago (and continuing to improve dramatically).
That doesn't mean that income inequality itself eradicates poverty (that doesn't follow at all), but it could mean that the two processes naturally happen together and that trying to prevent income inequality could also slow the world from lifting itself out of poverty.
Here's what my Chinese teacher said on that topic: 'We found that everyone being equal and poor is bad. The plan now is to let some people get rich first and go from there.'
How she reached that believe I'm not sure of, but I could follow her line of thought.
That might work in some cases -- but I doubt that it works so well in places like China.
Poor people stay poor -- even when they have now working places, since most work is lowly paid. It is in fact so low paid, that people don't rise from poverty but they will fall back as soon as the boom is over.
In many countries today, because of globalization, they have jobs, but their wages are so low, that they merely can live from it.
Broader wealth in European countries or the US was created, because workers fought for their rights and better working conditions. In the US once, the state fought side by side with the workers for the common good. That was the time, the US build the wealth of its own country. Today it dumps its own wealth.
In countries like China, this is prohibited by the state.
I did not read the article, but in my opinion, sentences as "inequality is sign of health" is nothing else than capitalistic propaganda.
There is no evidence in my opinion, that given, that common wealth all over the world has grown (what I even would doubt a little), that it is because of our capitalistic way of thinking and exploitation.
I agree, that some degree of inequality might be inevitable, but that degree of inequality we have today is ill in my opinion.
If (and I mean "if") common wealth has risen, than it might be more likely because of state of technology today. To what degree our capitalistic system does contribute to it is just unclear. Our world might be more wealthy without it. But nobody can prove either side, since we only have one world! And comparing roman times to our days today is just ill thinking.
I have no issue with the rich, however I'm guessing 'most' of the super-rich have achieved this through acute business acumen.
However 'acute business acumen' can translate into squeezing maximum profits out of a business. Justification for this practice can be found everywhere. Particular "legal requirement" to maximise profits for shareholders.
The problem starts when "acute business acumen" involves active participation in political processes in order to gain special advantages or avoid duties which are placed on other members of society. In spite of being a Norwegian, I agree with the capitalistic premise that economic inequality isn't in itself a symptom of a problem. But when the richest minority avoids taxes thanks to legal loopholes, lobbies with politicians to get useful laws enacted or gains special contracts with the government to the detriment of others, there is a very big problem.
In fact, this is corruption, which is in many of these cases endemic. We like to believe that the educated world has a level playing field, but this is far from the case. The tech world isn't representative for the world at large when it comes to being fair in this respect. (And even the tech world is far from innocent in this regard - e.g. Google et.al.'s smart dodging of taxation by keeping assets overseas. This practice is legal, but it is exactly the kind of problem where the richest are given an unfair advantage due to their wealth).
I guess you've probably missed Bill Gates and Warren Buffet talking about the sperm lottery? If they were born in the slums of Brazil, for example, they probably would not be successful.
There are 7 billion people on the planet and the article cherry picks the poorest 3.5 billion. I imagine that there is little opportunity at that level. I doubt if anyone in the United States is on that list.
Of course many Americans number in the 3.5 billion most poor people on earth. A lot of the homeless people I see everyday have about zero wealth. Hopefully many of them have something but I don't know what it would be.
Also, many middle class people, such as myself, have negative total assets due to debt. Because 'wealth' can refer to not only money but general capital (including human capital, which is what I have invested in) I would not say that my total wealth is less than zero, and I definitely have a lot of opportunity, privilege, and comfort. But if I was writing an article for the Guardian in order to rile people up about inequality, I think I could not incorrectly state that I have negative wealth, and by net $$ standards far less money than many of the world's destitute.
Of course many Americans number in the 3.5 billion most poor people on earth.
Source?
The actual data on this appears likely to refute your claim:
Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. [1]
That's at least the better part of a billion right there America's poor are wealthier than in India. According to the graph in the article, America's poorest are also wealthier than nearly all of China (1.3 billion officially, 1.5 billion unofficially), and 2/3 of Brazil. Not including the rest of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Have you seen poor people in other countries? Many are much skinnier than your average homeless American. I've seen homeless people charging their cell phones in public areas in the US.
And I'm not sure what to say about your negative wealth debate. First world problems?
> I guess you've probably missed Bill Gates and Warren Buffet talking about the sperm lottery? If they were born in the slums of Brazil, for example, they probably would not be successful.
They probably wouldn't have been billionaires, but they would have had a good chance at becoming middle-class in Brazil.
No one becomes super wealthy because of acute business acumen. They become super wealthy because they are lucky that their products/services/investments pan out properly.
Bill Gates, who I have a lot of respect for, didn't become super wealthy because of his business skills (although they obviously had a lot to do with it) but because the industry he happened to be in exploded.
Thats all fine and good. I have no issue with that. But it does point to what I would consider a flaw in the way wealth is distributed. But what that flaw is I am still not sure of.
Even Buffet claims (and knows) that he was VERY lucky to be in the places he was, with the connections he had, at the times he was. The formula for success requires a great deal of luck. There is a really interesting section of Thinking, Fast and Slow — By Daniel Kahneman which addresses this in great detail.
We can go on and on about how they were lucky and it would all be true. The fact that they were born where and when they were, the connections that fell in to place, etc. are all opportunities they were afforded. But you still can't have the success that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates had without also being incredibly talented and hard working. You could then go on to say that they were born with higher than normal ability (another form of luck). However, it all just sounds so cyclical. So I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes which I think boils it down very simply:
“Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" -Lucius Seneca (Roman Stoic Philosopher)
What is being argued is that they where lucky to be born in a society where their skills could make them millions.
I.e. they didn't create all those money in isolation, they made them in a system that made it possible.
Thats the point. Not that they aren't brilliant at what they do. Just that no one in that end of the wealth scale is that brilliant that they created purely based on their own skills.
Even more to the point, you can be incredibly hard working and intelligent, but without a good deal of luck (outside of being born into our society) you may not make it. Luck is a HUGE factor on many different levels when talking about wealth/success.
Again, not taking anything away from Buffett, just pointing out that luck is a really big deal that doesn't get much air time.
I was talking about money. I read a few years ago that Buffet was able to raise a huge amount of fund (equivalent to about 1million in today's money) when he was very young from a few of his dad's friends. Cann't recall the source at this moment.
The truth is that nobody took young Buffett seriously and he had a tough time raising money but once word got around in a couple of years that the "kid" knows what he is doing that is when he started getting big money.
Warren Buffet strikes me as the exception that proves the rule that most wealth is inherited or gained through illicit means. He's brought up so often as a model for the American dream, but he's typically the only one.
Amancio Ortega Gaona allegedly profits from child and "slave" labour across the world. High street fashion is commonly manufactured in factories that have particularly awful welfare standards. e.g. http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG9970846/Zara...
I can't believe I'm about to do this, but here's me sticking up for sweatshops...
I'm not sure what to make of the allegations of them keeping workers captive. But assuming the work is voluntary, sweatshops are not all bad. In fact, they're the fastest way we have to bootstrap an industrial economy in a developing nation.
Yes, these factories have terrible work conditions by modern, western standards. But compared to other local job opportunities, the factories are an abundant source of relatively well paying employment.
I say 'relatively well paying' because, despite how poor the pay is, the alternatives in the local economy are worse. Often, a so-called 'sweatshop' pays at least 2-3x the average local pay. It's almost axiomatic that a person would not work in a sweatshop if they didn't think the pay was worth it. So if they have workers in their factories, then it must be worthwhile to them. (That's assuming, of course, the work is voluntary.)
Once enough factories have appeared so that they have absorbed the excess labour capacity of the local population, the wages start to rise as the factories need to compete for the available labour. They also compete on non-monetary terms, through better working conditions.
Wages will stop rising when it becomes economical for foreign companies to move production to a cheaper place (after expenses related to building an entirely new supply chain there). If that starts to happen, then excess production capacity appears, which gets absorbed by local companies. At that point, the bootstrapping is complete and you have a self-sustaining industrial economy.
Over the past 60-70 years we've seen goods (clothes being a good example because it's labour intensive and not particularly capital intensive) being produced in a succession of countries. In no particular order, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam have all had their day as the primary producer of garments. Currently, they're made in places like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
So I don't consider sweatshops to be a bad thing in and of themselves. But they are breeding grounds for all sorts of abuse (including but by no means not limited to confining workers to the factories), which is a problem. So we should be pressuring corporations to ensure safe and non-abusive work conditions in their factories. We should not be discouraging them from operating factories in low-cost-of-living locations, or trying to artificially increase wages.
Well he did inherit a great deal of influential connections, education, benefits, and (not as much) money. Given that his Father was a successful politician.
Not to say he didn't also work his ass off and have a great deal of luck. Buffett doesn't seem like a bad guy at all. Seems like a very 'grandfatherly' type.
Buffet isn't a bad guy per se, but it's worth noting that a lot of the businesses Berkshire Hathaway owns are benefiting from inequality. Wikipedia mentions jewelery and uniform manufacture as two industries they're involved in, neither of which has a squeaky clean record. Does anyone know if his companies are involved in any activism?
I think it's both, by the way. I'm not too impressed by the pg's and billg's of this world as thinkers but I think they know how to aggressively pursue opportunity.
However, if we want a system based on something other than free enterprise, you're heading either toward Communism or royalism. The former scares most of us half to death, if we've been attentive to history.
Why does it always have to be one extreme or the other? Why can't inequality be curbed, instead of getting worse, without nightmares of "everybody being made the same", or Stalinist Russia? I've been in situations where everybody shared, it wasn't scary at all.
Because Communism is bad mmmkay? Remember what happened to Russia? Remember what they forced McCarthy to do to our own people? /s
The gray scale between political extremes is really so often ignored that it is almost scary. The real issue comes down to concentration of power in one subsection of the population. Be it a communist/facist/what have you dictator, plutocracy, or even entrenched political elite backed by corporate lobbying.
"The real issue comes down to concentration of power in one subsection of the population."
Yeah... that sounds really good in conversation. But let's pick it apart.
Any political system is going to concentrate power because otherwise any act will require buy-in by vast numbers of people. Imagine a committee of 300 million and you'll see why democracy delegates power.
The problem then is more that these groups are the wrong people (selected badly) or that there's not a clear communication to them as to what they should be doing. I'd say both of these are huge problems in our society.
"Everybody sharing" is one thing. I already give the bulk of my paycheck (which already has nearly half my income confiscated before I see it) to 3 other no-income people. "Curb income inequality" doesn't recognize the sharing already occurring, but instead promises to put a gun to my head if I don't "share" more, which I do indeed find very scary.
Before taking from "the rich" while on this income-redistribution crusade, find out how many others they're already supporting, by contract or charity or responsibility.
> "Curb income inequality" doesn't recognize the sharing already occurring, but instead promises to put a gun to my head
Even not riding a train without a ticket is ultimately enforced with a gun pointed to someone's head, as is paying taxes.
I'd be in favour of taxation that works like air friction does, the faster you move, the more friction increases, reaching a hard limit at some point. Instead of the opposite, the super rich and corporations effectively buying loopholes.
Corruption/bribery is always a problem in politics. The US Constitution was written to grant the government limited powers; over time, explicit limits have been worn down to corrupt plain meaning of key terms ("interstate commerce", "general welfare", etc) and normalize the very perversion they were intended to prevent.
The ultimate solution to such problems remains intact: vote. Lobbying and voter persuasion is quite effective, so vote out those who create/preserve such loopholes and vote in those who close them. For all the whining consternation people exude about such problems, very few actually direct that energy toward meaningful solutions; the super rich and corporations have learned to direct such energy and exploit it accordingly.
Wait, I tought we were talking about what we would think would be a desirable state of things -- how to achieve that is an entirely different subject.
Not that I disagree with that part, though of course one problem is what a politician promises before election, and what they do afterwards, is often not correlated at all.
The simple answer is that political systems aren't as varied as you might think. There's egalitarianism, which is either unsubsidized (libertarian) or subsidized (socialism). Then there's those who think that some order should come before the individual, and those are either royalist, paleoconservative, "social conservative" or some form of meso-conservative (incl. neoconservatives).
But, as you might guess, there's a catch. Any political system picks up inertia like a ball rolling downhill. Thus whatever direction you go in, you keep going in... and so unsubsidized egalitarianism usually becomes subsidized (as in the 1960s in USA and Europe) and moderate conservatism eventually gets more conservative as it did under Reagan. The reason for this is that, believe it or not, political systems aim at visions of society. The more power they get, the closer they get toward realizing that vision, which is actually what the people who believe in them want.
Conservatives and liberals, by the way, have radically different visions for what they want out of society:
"become super wealthy because of his business skills"
Bill Gates saw the potential in the industry before it exploded, which is why he is considered skilled in business. This is pretty much the same with most super-successful business people.
I really don't like this attitude that success is mainly due to the luck of the draw. Sure there is luck, but it's the same luck involved in pretty much everything you do in life (you're lucky you didn't get hit by a car when you crossed the street), which makes it a moot point.
Its not a moot point at all, you are just simplifying it and thus end up creating a strawman no one ever argued.
It's luck in the way that BG happened to be at the right time at the right place as an entire industry exploded.
That does not mean he wasn't skilled, it doesn't mean that anyone could do it. It just means that the success it ended up becoming was not because of Bill Gates but because he happened to sell a product at the right time.
Hadn't he done it, someone else had.
So no its not a moot point unless you make a moot strawman.
I think the problem with the concept of having "acute business acumen" is that it is basically orthogonal to moral concerns, but there seem to be plenty of people who consider making money using one's business smarts morally good an sich, no matter how ruthless and unethical the means. King Leopold II can certainly be said to have had "acute business acumen"...
By the way; this isn't snark towards Russia but snark against the notion that the threat of violence doesn't play a significant part in the distribution of wealth anymore.
Much as I personally dislike Paris Hilton and the related series of celebrities (the Kardashians come to mind), I have to respect the business acumen.
A lot of people have made sex tapes, some of them professionally, but very few have made that much money from it. Partially that's because they were rich already, and maybe they just had a good manager/marketer/whatever, but they still managed to make a lot of money from something that is not typically well compensated.
There is nothing wrong with squeezing maximum profits out of business, assuming it doesn't create negative externalities. Justification of this practice is found in the fundamental welfare theorems of economics, which state that an algorithm for maximizing total wellbeing is to let the free market work, and only intervene by redistributing income (under a more realistic set of assumptions, the government should also provided many services).
I consider the responsibility of maximizing shareholder value to be a moral one primarily. If people invested their money in a company, it's not for the management to decide that actually they investors don't need that much return on their investment.
I guess you're all missing the MSFT grew so big b/c for a good portion of its existence it was an illegal monopoly. So, yes, business acumen, but also being very effective at keeping the long arm of the long at bay.
I find the opposite, that the most adult and mature folks I know are interested in fulfilling their social responsibility.
They may not be interested in the straw-man version you've proposed, but your definition is not the end-all, be-all of what "social responsibility" is.
We need a clear definition of "social responsibility", as many use the term to mean "collective responsibility", which really means 'foisting the costs on the politically powerless".
I see "social responsibility" as personal, which means that you are personally responsible for the society you live in; this is difficult when the government crowds out charities, and gives many people reason to free-ride.
The ever-expanding wealth gap is primarily a function of what Warren Buffett has called the most powerful force in the universe: compounding. The "problem" is that some people are simply better at growing their wealth. This minority of people, either through intelligence or luck or some combination of the two, are able to earn very high returns on their wealth, typically via creating businesses. Then once they have some wealth they become creditors, and can earn additional returns.
I encourage anyone to throw together a spreadsheet to see how this happens in the real world. Start with 100 people whose wealth is identical, set to $1. Then make a corresponding column that's a normal distribution to represent growth rate (I start at 25%). Then fast forward 50 years, compounding everyone's wealth at their respective growth rate. Voila, through the magic of compounding, despite the growth rates being normally distributed, the wealth distribution is now basically logarithmic, and the wealth gap has effectively exploded. Despite everyone beginning with the exact same wealth, the top 15 people now have almost 80% of the wealth. The longer the time horizon, the greater the imbalance becomes. Welcome to compounding...Buffett gets it.
Today's wealth gap is not a capitalistic conspiracy nor is it racism or anything else. It's just algebra. Even if you use a normal distribution with a very small variance, over time the wealth imbalance will grow significantly. It is inescapable.
Most of that money isn't stored as a pile of cash under the bed. It's capital invested in other activities: think machinery, think infrastructure, think capital (and we know in some industries like banking and insurances they need to have capital, don't we?).
The fact that these people "have" it doesn't mean it doesn't produce value. You need to understand that liquidate all that worth WILL put people on the street and will disrupt the economy as we know it. Namely, maybe at that point you won't do much with those 15k.
The problem is different. The problem is that even if you gave everyone $15,000, a year from that you would see some with a lot more than 15K and even more with almost no money.
You have put your finger right on it. Inequality is emergent in a functional economy. So if equal opportunity for everybody is desired, redistributive mechanisms are needed.
"The problem with rich people is they don't spend their money"
They don't sit on piles of cash (i.e. literal bits of paper) - they own (purchase) assets of various kinds and even if they do have large quantities of cash sitting in a bank then this is put to work by the bank.
I should be clearer with what I mean; the problem with rich people is that, relatively speaking, they don't spend their money. Poor people spend all their money, fast. Rich people seem to have a lot of money tied up in swapping things with each other (for exmaple, stocks, which are not investments in the company except for the first time they're bought).
If there wasn't a downstream speculative market in shares then the value they would get when sold initially would presumably be far less so the companies or individuals getting the money at that stage would be worse off.
It's not inherently a problem; it's relatively a problem, given that swapping shares around each other creates no value (i.e. nothing of use to the world has been created), but the rich could instead blow it all on actually creating something or rather, paying for people to do work that leaves the world more actually wealthy (by which I mean, not "has more money" but "has more value"; Bill Gates stumping up cash to help wipe out Polio will leave the world phenomenally more wealthy, but with the same amount of once-owned-by-Bill-Gates cash in it - this is an extreme example of how to do it, but with the very rich it has to be extreme, because unlike poor people, the very rich simply can't spend a significant amount of their money feeding themselves and having a room redecorated and going to the movies).
Also, would it really be so bad if the stockmarket was less speculative and the benefit from owning stock was expected to come in the form of dividends? Everyone would have an incentive to make companies reliably, long-term profitable instead of prone to boom and bust.
Edit to answer the below: Yes, that cash does come from some very wealthy individuals, and what they're doing there is paying for people to do work that leaves the world more actually wealthy (hopefully - if the business crashes and burns when it turns out the world doesn't want shoes that are also electric bananas no new wealth was created). They're hoping to get a lot of that new wealth for themselves, true, but lots of it goes elsewhere too. They're not just swapping shares around; they're actually paying people to do things.
1) A year with money and the rest without is better than always being without. You might as well argue "we all die eventually so why do anything".
2) For a year they did have money. There is a lot you can do with a year of having money to radically improve your future chances.
3) The money will not have all been sucked back into the hands of a few people. There will still be billions of people with money, and that money will continue being spent and going round. If you have no money and everyone around you has no money, you've got a big problem. If you have no money and all around you are people with money to spend, you can now get money, because that's what creates jobs; demand for goods and services and the ability to pay for them. The redistribution wouldn't vanish back to the original situation for a long, long time, and quite possibly never given the precedent set.
I am not sure why you would think that wealth wouldn't skew back into in-equal distribution.
Maybe you didn't read what I wrote very carefully.
I said: "The redistribution wouldn't vanish back to the original situation for a long, long time, and quite possibly never given the precedent set."
Let's break that down.
"The redistribution wouldn't vanish back to the original situation for a long, long time" - hey, looks like I do think the wealth will skew back to in-equal distribution! I simply think it will take a while to return to a handful of people holding half the world's money, and given that the rest of my third point is about what would happen when some people with no money find themselves surrounded by people with money, it seemed pretty fucking clear to me that I was talking about an in-equal distribution.
"and quite possibly never given the precedent set." - because once it's been made clear that at the point a handful of people hold half the world's money it all goes back again, nobody will be stupid enough to get that rich because they know they'll lose it all.
Some math here is fucked up. These people don't have an average of over a trillion in assets each (assuming that tn stands for trillion...) My guess is that they have something like two orders of magnitude less, and the world's population would get $150 each. Then again, that sounds low, given some people with tens-of-billions fortunes. Anyway, $110 trillion and $15000 is way, way too high - between one and two orders of magnitude.
Look at Uruguay. Since some years ago, the government started giving free money to below-poverty-line people. It has been happening complete the opposite. As people receive money, they don't feel the need of working and progressing in life, including when the are offered to work in street cleaning duties or similar. The thing is that the tax payers are starting to feel that their money is not been well spent, until nobody knows.
Just watched In Time, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/, the other day; it looks at financial inequality through a lens of equating money with time. Quite reminiscent of Logan's Run.
Spoiler: they ultimately initiate a collapse of the system by a violent redistribution of wealth [ie time]. The movie ends at this point without considering the fallout.
Instead it should be entirely spent in AI development, infrastructure, sustainable energy and manufacturing, automatization and climate change prevention. All major problems humanity has will be solved by that.
It's easy to see how 67% of people would agree with the sentence: "the rich have too much influence over where this country is headed". What's might not be as easy to see is why 2% disagreed with that sentence strongly. It might be related to http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html with its conclusion copied below.
If you try to attack wealth, you end up nailing risk as well, and with it growth. If we want a fairer world, I think we're better off attacking one step downstream, where wealth turns into power.
I am really not sure how to make that distinction. It seems to me that to prevent "wealth turning into power" we would need essentially complete transparency on spending of the wealthy.
Also, I would probably much rather nail some risk (by limiting personal wealth to some reasonable amount) than risk "a leak" between wealth and power. Most founders, it seems to me, don't start overly wealthy; they would probably still risk starting their own business even if the "supergains" had zero probability (as opposed to really small probability).
Coupled with a good social and liability system (that will allow you reasonable life in case of business failure), financed from taxing of too much wealth, this can even increase the risk people are willing to take.
The problem is, how do you define them? What prevents the wealthy to produce a parallel structure which has the real power?
I think this goes back to what other people said about the wealth and power, that it's really hard to separate. I think it's possible, but at the cost of strong suspension of personal freedom (of what to do with money).
Still, even if we had what P.G. is proposing, it would be a step forward.
Also in a world with less wealth inequality, the wealth on the 'fail' side of risk taking would be less disparate. Risks would be less dangerous as there would be more to fall back on.
I'm getting old enough (which is surprisingly young) to watch top-tier super-solid blue-chip businesses crash and burn. Smith Corona, once the most recognized brand in the world? most of you respond "who?". Kodak, with world domination of imaging? dead, just hasn't stopped moving yet. Pan-Am gone, IBM a shell of what it was, a host of other leading super-profitable businesses either crawling on broken glass or gone entirely.
Likewise I've seen a lot of big-name big-wallet people likewise go to nothing. I haven't studied the financial dynamics of wealthiest individuals (in terms of this topic's top 85), but as their hoard is based on business I can presume similar turnover for many. They may be at the top _now_, but for how long?
This growing consternation over income/wealth "inequality" consistently fails to look at the dynamics of those involved, focusing instead on a mere snapshot selected for maximizing political outrage. Fact is, some 85% of those in the bottom quartile move out of that bracket within a few years, with 15% jumping to the top 25%. The only financial help most of them need is for the government to get out of their way. Some do need active assistance, yes, but even most of that is better served by voluntary private charity - and certainly not massive economic changes inflicted by self-righteous & ignorant politicians.
Never mind the oft-overlooked fact that the top 85 spend and invest and donate a tremendous amount, way beyond what is publicly known. They may have half the money in the world; don't ignore how much money they move and thru whom. Confiscate their wealth by taxation in the name of "income equality", and you'll deny those who live on the movement of that wealth.
Insofar as social mobility may be stifled now, many contend it's in large part to government administration causing a sharp increase in taxpayer liability (you may not be billed for it yet, but your share of the debt is enormous and growing fast) and economic uncertainty (sporadic currency pumping, encouragement of class envy, and rule thrashing on healthcare etc). Hard for employers to hire & give raises (the core of social mobility) when economic future is so unpredictable and depressing.
I call this current phenomena inequality blow out.
The world is now wealthy enough such that the rich truly can be so much wealthier than the poor (deserved or not - mostly NOT), because there is so much excess wealth already in circulation. The "have nots" in most developed nations usually have enough to not need to riot in the streets so long as their governments are doing a decent enough job. Before modern times, we generally kept inequality in check through periodic bloody revolutions, and only more recently via government enforced transfer payments.
Nowadays there is no longer an upper limit to wealth accumulation since bloody revolutions have been more or less capped by social programs funded by transfer payments. The poorest in developed nations today often have access to enough food, water and shelter to live a fairly decent life (not all nations obviously, just those with high HDI coeffecients). Now, so long as this global poverty floor continues to rise through time at a decent enough pace, then societies will remain stable. However, if the rich make that rise falter with ever more aggressive tax policies (0% rates which negatively affect social programs), rent seeking behaviour (squeezing the middle class out of existence, and destroying the mass consumption/tax base), or political power grabs (Koch bros' who don't like to pay for negative externalities), they'll lose their heads. Pure and simple.
As I sit here today, and watch our "ever so progressive" Syria (by Middle Eastern standards) falling apart as it goes through a horrific and bloody civil war, I really do wonder how much of a value the rich put on their heads. How far are the rich willing to go in their game of class chicken with the poor? Because as far as I can see, the poor will always win.
The poor will eventually redistribute the wealth to equalize opportunity, and mitigate the catastrophic failures inherent in capital markets that allocate wealth to owners as a proxy to the actual wealth generators (engineers/scientists/workers). The question the rich should consistently be asking themselves is whether or not they'd rather bleed to death slowly by paying for orphanages and food for the poor, or quickly at the end of an orphan's machete.
The past wasn't all that long ago. I can still see its shadows on the wall.
If the level of wealth redistribution via taxes was higher, than the average member of the society would be better off, that's almost for certain. Reasons for that:
- Let's say A earns $1000 day and B earns $20/day. If A was force to give $20 of his earnings to B, this 2-person society would be better of. Because the standard of living of A would decrease slightly but the standard of living of B would increase significantly.
- There's a rich get richer and poor get poorer effect.
- Lot of wealth gain is a result of pure luck. Wealth redistribution serves like an insurance policy. Examples: bitcoin mining, finding a gold mine.
(Of course, there are lots of negative effect of wealth redistributin. What I'm saying is that the optimal level of w. r. is higher than the current level.)
But - while I know that the society would be better off, as a developer I would be worse off, so to be honest, I'm not really in favor of higher taxes.
+1 for being honest. Nobody likes taxes, I don't either. But you are right: Taxes that increase with income have positive effects on society itself. We had one of the most well balanced societies in the world, as I think, because we have (or better: had) a taxation system that favored little incomes. Since our system changed in favor to the rich, our society begins to erode.
The countries with the luckiest people in Europe are those with the highest taxation. The reason is, that a brought middle-class of people exist.
You could really say, that taxation (that increases with income) is good for society, since differences are leveled out and middle-class is more likely to establish.
If wealth was a linear fuction of skills or hard work, the wealth inequality would be way lower. Most of the current unequality is actually caused by the rich-get-richer effect and luck.
(And skills or hard work are just luck too if you think about it.)
If we are looking for inequality and focus on outliers, we will always be able to find unfairness. Over the last 30 years, large portions of the world population have seen dramatic increases in per-capita income. If the masses are benefited, it seems natural that the outliers will lie out even further.
Taking the two most populace countries over the last 30 years:
- China per-capita income, in 2011 dollars:
1981, US $282
2011, US$8,319
30x increase in per-capita income
- India per-capita income, in 2009 dollars:
1981, US $472
2009, US$3,203
7x increase in per-capita income
A large portion of the world population is benefiting from economies that grow with technology as the catalyst.
It's easy to create alarm over inequality. Compare the people who has built up wealth to the people who has no wealth because what they earn gets spent every month. This way even most of the middle class looks dirt poor.
The problem is not technology, but the problem is our economic (particularly "money-") -system.
The system with interest rates and profits from money (stock) is leading us into rapidly increasing imbalance of property and incomes. Today you can make thousands times more money just by making money from other money -- without any benefits for society involved (in many cases, the results are even devastating for society, e.g. food speculations) -- than any well paid office worker who uses much creativity and produces real values (like an architect or designer) even, if it is not your own money you speculate with.
That should make us think for a moment.
This spiral even has gotten worse in the last decades, because profit margins have been increased and increased. Everybody is crying for "investment opportunities" and pressure is on the stocks to generate more profits. That was also powered up by the globalization.
Normal human labor has been devaluated this way and just making profits from your possessions is increasingly making more and more money.
The people with money also have managed to make the rules in nearly all the world so, that earnings increase.
At the same time, more and more companies and rich people have brought their money or profits into tax havens, so the countries are starving on taxes ... the lower paid people have to pay them alone.
It's an downward spiral, taking the whole human kind down!
Think about it that way: 85 richest people own only about 1.6% of the total wealth of top richest 1%. Which is probably about 0.3..0.5% of total worldwide wealth. And 85 people are not some monolithic force, even as they have some similarities, they can't agree on anything (see U.S. Senate which has about as many people - can it agree on much?). So the threat of these rich guys to the world is purely imaginary.
It is unfair to compare capitalists to proletariat in their wealth. Capitalists make money from capital, so a capitalist without capital is no more. Proletarian does not need any money to get his income. If you compare incomes of those 85 guys to poorest people they will make up a combined income of some poor 3rd world country like Cuba or Belarus, or at biggest like Romania (implying average returns on capital, inflation adjusted, of about 6-8%). Not half the world, not even close.
Top 1% will be yes, more like like Japan, but hey, Japan has under 2% of the world's population. So again there is little 'threat' or rich.
Unless a distribution is completely flat (every person has the same wealth), then it is mathematically necessary that the top N% will have >N%.
If the distribution is also not flat within subranges of the possible wealth, then as N gets smaller, the fraction of wealth owned by the top N% divided by N necessarily gets larger.
The rise in income inequality is driven by technology and those who know or can embrace it.
The rise of the super rich is driven by people stealing money out of the ground (commodities oligarchs) and tax loop holes (carried interest being the most notorious) creating a regressive tax policy at the very upper end of the income spectrum. Zero % interest rates help both parties b/c they are big users of capital. Plant/equipment/storage costs for commodities and HF/PE crew borrows a lot of money.
The super rich like everyone (The Economist, in this example) to focus our energies on point 1, so we don't mess with their loopholes and 0% interest rates.
This is a good innumaracy test. The level to which it pisses you off is a good indicator of how well (or rather, poorly) you understand how money works.
It's along the same lines as telling somebody that it costs more than $0.01 to make a penny.
Inequality is an important topic to discuss, but unless I skimmed too quickly I haven't seen this factor addressed in the article or the comments here:
I'm pretty sure that a significant number of poor people essentially have 0 assets or even debt, so if you own virtually anything you already "own" or "control" more "wealth" than millions or maybe even a billion-plus people.
It's the same thing when you see statistics about the Waltons having more wealth than the bottom third of America or whatever.. technically true, but also so do you and so do I.
The key take away for me is, far too much of the world's population is beyond the reach of those who may/would help them. So many people are in the state they are in because of defective governments that run the countries they live in.
This wealth disparity is more of a geographical disparity, where you live matters a whole lot towards whether you will ever have wealth.
I just cannot feel upset about the fact that 85 people equal half the world when its far more than half the world that these 85 can probably never help because of rulers or lack thereof where these people live
just makes me wonder why our leaders aren't robbing these people down into 'moderately disgusting' levels of wealth inorder to equalise our varying national debts and deficits... and why tax havens aren't being threatened with severe action if they don't cease their tax havenry.
i don't agree with theft, but i have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who can lose 95% of their wealth for the greater good and still live a fantastically luxurious lifestyle and ensure one for two or three generations of offspring as well.
In the late 1800s, a half-dozen or so super-wealthy would regularly vacation together on Jekyll Island (Georgia USA), representing some 1/6th of the world's wealth. Expanding the total to include the top 85 would probably produce about the same results as Oxfam's report over a century later.
That a few of the richest (with vast holdings) out-value half the world's population (with zero, or negative, holdings) at any given point in history is not surprising.
I'm not going to argue against restraining these rich people. But what I will argue against is the type of answer given and the level of awareness that brought the answer. If people realized that there can be economy without money (i.e. resource-based economy) then all these rich people lose their power. Assuming that an RBE society would be more fairer for the populous.
To me, the main reason for this wealth inequality is currency devaluation and economic inflation. The middle class and the poor use much more of their money for everyday things, and the price of these everyday things has increased tremendously over the last 75 years. Take a look at this US inflation chart (and that is if you believe the US Gov inflation data, which I don't):
Notice that prior to the 50's, there were balanced periods of inflation and deflation. Since the 50's, there has only been inflation. When the price of housing and food goes up, the middle class and poor people take it up the ass, while rich people who are making money via loans to the MC and poor and raking in much more in interest (for example).
When the top 15 US banks are about to go under, the government and Fed buy all their bad assets (loans) with currency the create by pushing a button. Nothing useful or productive is done to create this "value". That new currency is used by the banks to further increase their wealth by manipulating the stock and commodities markets. And yeah, sure - the upper middle class people who have money left over from their paycheck can invest in these markets and increase their wealth. Well, they can until the rug gets yanked out. And when that happens, you can bet the large pension funds, banks, government officials, and those 85 rich bastards will be given plenty of notification before the big crash. But the average Joe invested in the market won't: he will take it up the ass. It's just another way the rich and influential profit from the masses.
Think about the cost increases in food, higher education and the medical system for example. Way, way higher than general inflation. These higher costs force middle class people into lower class, and force lower class people onto government assistance.
ANd please don't say Bitcoin is going to fix this. Digital currency is the ultimate wet dream for the rich, because they will be able to track AND TAX every single transaction, including those to your babysitter or yard guy. Eliminating all untaxed financial transactions and monitoring every transaction is the overloards' ultimate goal.
I'm not saying technology is not a factor - clearly it is. One accountant can do much more with a computer than several accountants could do before computers, robots in factories obviously displace workers, and outsourcing jobs to countries with extremely low wages is a problem. But I think these pale in comparison to currency devaluation over the long term.
i would love to see the statistic on how many direct and indirect jobs are the top 85 responsible for. Their wealth is after all mostly a stake in their company, valued that high by the public (if publicly traded) or an analyst.
It's actually the cover story of this weeks Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays...
If you're a fan of harder data, you can read the UK Government report about how technology is responsible for driving the destruction of middle-income jobs and pushing up inequality:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
[Edit: Given the number of up-votes this is getting I've submitted the Economist link as it's own story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7089531]