On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Coincidentally, Joe Stiglitz wrote at article about inequality in the NYTimes yesterday. Some excerpts:
That American inequality is at historic highs is undisputed. It’s not just that the top 1 percent takes in about a fifth of the income, and controls more than a third of the wealth. America also has become the country (among the advanced industrial countries) with the least equality of opportunity.
[...]
Putting all this together isn’t the politics of envy, as Romney’s camp likes to complain, or even about shaking a finger at the country’s real freeloaders. It’s about cold, hard economics. Tax avoidance and low rates on capital gains — and the inequality they amplify — are weakening our economy. Were the rich paying their fair share, our deficit would be smaller, and we would be able to invest more in infrastructure, technology and education — investments that would create jobs now and enhance growth in the future. While education is central to restoring America as a land of opportunity, all three of these are crucial for future growth and increases in living standards. Tax havens discourage investment in the United States. Taxing speculators at a lower rate encourages speculation and instability — and draws our most talented young people out of more productive endeavors. The result is a distorted, inefficient economy that grows more slowly than it should.
The Romney campaign, however, has defended inequality or brushed it aside. To do so, it has employed a handful of economic myths. Here are a few of the most important:
(1) America is a land of opportunity. While rags-to-riches stories still grip our imagination, the fact of the matter is that the life chances of a young American are more dependent on the income and wealth of his parents than in any of the other advanced countries for which there is data. There is less upward mobility — and less downward mobility from the top — even than in Europe, and we’re not just talking about Scandinavia.
[...]
(4) The cost of reducing inequality is so great that, as much as idealists would like to do so, we would be killing the goose that lays the golden egg. In fact, the engine of our economic growth is the middle class. Inequality weakens aggregate demand, because those at the middle and bottom have to spend all or almost all of what that they get, while those at the top don’t. The concentration of wealth in recent decades led to bubbles and instability, as the Fed tried to offset the effects of weak demand arising from our inequality by low interest rates and lax regulation. The irony is that the tax cuts for capital gains and dividends that were supposed to spur investment by the wealthy alleged job creators didn’t do so, even with record low interest rates: private sector job creation under Bush was dismal. Mainstream economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund now recognize the connection between inequality and a weak economy. To argue the contrary is a self-serving idea being promoted by the very wealthy.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
"Why would the rich kids move downward ever?"
Is it so unthinkable that a rich kid may not be as successful or more than his parents? That some of them may be as stupid, lazy or unlucky as the rest of the country on average. Rich kids aren't some genetic super race. If it's so impossible in your mind that they might move downwards because the advantages of being a rich kid are so high (in terms of education, connections, startup capital etc) then perhaps you agree with the conclusions regarding mobility and class in your country.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
"Why would the rich kids move downward ever?"
Is it so unthinkable that a rich kid may not be as successful or more than his parents? That some of them may be as stupid, lazy or unlucky as the rest of the country on average. Rich kids aren't some genetic super race. If it's so impossible in your mind that they might move downwards because the advantages of being a rich kid are so high (in terms of education, connections, startup capital etc) then perhaps you agree with the conclusions regarding mobility and class in your country.
Maybe instead of trying to go hate all in, you should use you mind to think about such thing as inheritance and passive income?
Maybe because as long as you spend less than your income is, you basically can not become poorer, unless something like depression happens?
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
"Why would the rich kids move downward ever?"
Is it so unthinkable that a rich kid may not be as successful or more than his parents? That some of them may be as stupid, lazy or unlucky as the rest of the country on average. Rich kids aren't some genetic super race. If it's so impossible in your mind that they might move downwards because the advantages of being a rich kid are so high (in terms of education, connections, startup capital etc) then perhaps you agree with the conclusions regarding mobility and class in your country.
Maybe instead of trying to go hate all in, you should use you mind to think about such thing as inheritance and passive income?
Ofcourse stupidity is a factor, but that is something that should hardly be considered as a factor, since it is more or less random.
Go hate all in? I don't hate all ins, I think they have a place in your arsenal of strategies for when your opponent is being particularly ambitious or careless. I don't see how that's relevant to this though. Inheritance doesn't cause people to move up, typically there are expenses involved in being alive, you can inherit and you'll still drift down unless you inherit such an absurd amount that the simply existing without contributing anything is viable at which point there are other obvious problems.
Stupidity is evenly distributed across society because, as you say, it is more or less random. And yet despite the possibility of stupid rich kids you dismiss the possibility of stupid people being unsuccessful should they be born into the right family. A society is poorly constructed when the birth decides your fate rather than merit.
First, I think the process of globalisation, which has moved billions of people out of dire poverty, is worth defending loudly and proudly, even if it came along with a costly side order of dysfunctional American politics and policymaking. We have a moral responsibility to be very clear about what aspects of globalisation we think should change and why, because the cost of encouraging a broader backlash against the process of liberalisation, with all the great good it generates, is simply too high.
And second, it seems to me that an effort to restore the bargaining power of labour by having a showdown over outsourcing or by trying to reinvigorate the labour movement is destined for failure. The rise in worker bargaining power that occurred in the first half of the last century was a product of social movements, but those movements were enabled by the production technologies of the time, and it is the dissolution of those production technologies that has been most responsible for the weakening of labour's position. As Mr Krugman understands very well (his work on the topic helped earn him a Nobel Prize) the transportation technologies of the industrial revolution dictated in favour of large, industrial agglomerations. Geographic concentration enabled worker solidarity, and the benefits of the agglomeration meant that employers couldn't credibly threaten to move elsewhere. But the days of the large, urban industrial agglomeration are gone.
If labour is to capture more of the producer surplus—or have more of a say in Washington, for that matter—it will be as a result of a social evolution that matches the production technologies of today. That's a much, much harder process to think about and talk about than a call for the return of the glory days of labour. It's certainly not the sort of thing that lends itself to deployment in the binary dialogue of a presidential campaign. The truth is that Bain didn't really do anything wrong by outsourcing. It could have not done it, but that would primarily have created a profit opportunity for someone else. It may say something about Mitt Romney that he was the man who opted to take the profits. But the nature and distribution of economic activity is about the interaction between technology and institutions, and not about whether an individual capitalist tries to be fair or not. It's not Mitt Romney's fault that the median worker hasn't gotten a real pay increase in over 30 years. And Mr Romney's Bain experience might cost him the election, but that's not going to bring real pay increases back, either.
Here's what another article from The Economist says:
Does inequality really need to be tackled? The twin forces of globalisation and technical innovation have actually narrowed inequality globally, as poorer countries catch up with richer ones. But within many countries income gaps have widened. More than two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries where income disparities have risen since 1980, often to a startling degree. In America the share of national income going to the top 0.01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top 0.01% got in the Gilded Age.
It is also true that some measure of inequality is good for an economy. It sharpens incentives to work hard and take risks; it rewards the talented innovators who drive economic progress. Free-traders have always accepted that the more global a market, the greater the rewards will be for the winners. But as our special report this week argues, inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth.
The article you linked basically argues that globalization isn't a cause of inequality by quoting Krugman this year and comparing it to a Krugman quote from 1997. However, Krugman has changed his views since 1997.
Here's a video (from a earlier this week actually) where Krugman explains his views (go to 31:54):
Basically he says that 17 years ago he was arguing that trade with poor countries wasn't a major cause of inequality because there wasn't that much of it back then, but this is no longer true. He further explains, that the solution isn't protectionist policies because globalization is good for poor countries (which is part of what he argued in that 1997 article).
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
"Why would the rich kids move downward ever?"
Is it so unthinkable that a rich kid may not be as successful or more than his parents? That some of them may be as stupid, lazy or unlucky as the rest of the country on average. Rich kids aren't some genetic super race. If it's so impossible in your mind that they might move downwards because the advantages of being a rich kid are so high (in terms of education, connections, startup capital etc) then perhaps you agree with the conclusions regarding mobility and class in your country.
Maybe instead of trying to go hate all in, you should use you mind to think about such thing as inheritance and passive income?
Ofcourse stupidity is a factor, but that is something that should hardly be considered as a factor, since it is more or less random.
Go hate all in? I don't hate all ins, I think they have a place in your arsenal of strategies for when your opponent is being particularly ambitious or careless. I don't see how that's relevant to this though. Inheritance doesn't cause people to move up, typically there are expenses involved in being alive, you can inherit and you'll still drift down unless you inherit such an absurd amount that the simply existing without contributing anything is viable at which point there are other obvious problems.
Stupidity is evenly distributed across society because, as you say, it is more or less random. And yet despite the possibility of stupid rich kids you dismiss the possibility of stupid people being unsuccessful should they be born into the right family. A society is poorly constructed when the birth decides your fate rather than merit.
Oh,
It is funny, that the only thing you can basically come out, is stupidity. But, you know what, even that can be averted with proper parent care in terms of limiting the inheritance exposure to risk and wastes.
Then, you try to act as if i`m sort of stupid, while in fact, i think my position is pretty clear.
If we speak about the "social mobility", the upward movement can be vast, end more dependent on the country changing need for personell, but person fall from rich to middle or poor, is basically just a subject to random shit that happens to that same person, which can happen to everyone, hanse, the rich kid will never purposely fall from the level where it is, and so far, no societal system is designed around the idea of purposely grounding those people.
Now that we figured this out, maybe you can tone down, and speak with me like regular human, without trying to draw some stipid conclusions?
the best part, conserning the "grow of inequality":
First, I think the process of globalisation, which has moved billions of people out of dire poverty, is worth defending loudly and proudly, even if it came along with a costly side order of dysfunctional American politics and policymaking. We have a moral responsibility to be very clear about what aspects of globalisation we think should change and why, because the cost of encouraging a broader backlash against the process of liberalisation, with all the great good it generates, is simply too high.
And second, it seems to me that an effort to restore the bargaining power of labour by having a showdown over outsourcing or by trying to reinvigorate the labour movement is destined for failure. The rise in worker bargaining power that occurred in the first half of the last century was a product of social movements, but those movements were enabled by the production technologies of the time, and it is the dissolution of those production technologies that has been most responsible for the weakening of labour's position. As Mr Krugman understands very well (his work on the topic helped earn him a Nobel Prize) the transportation technologies of the industrial revolution dictated in favour of large, industrial agglomerations. Geographic concentration enabled worker solidarity, and the benefits of the agglomeration meant that employers couldn't credibly threaten to move elsewhere. But the days of the large, urban industrial agglomeration are gone.
If labour is to capture more of the producer surplus—or have more of a say in Washington, for that matter—it will be as a result of a social evolution that matches the production technologies of today. That's a much, much harder process to think about and talk about than a call for the return of the glory days of labour. It's certainly not the sort of thing that lends itself to deployment in the binary dialogue of a presidential campaign. The truth is that Bain didn't really do anything wrong by outsourcing. It could have not done it, but that would primarily have created a profit opportunity for someone else. It may say something about Mitt Romney that he was the man who opted to take the profits. But the nature and distribution of economic activity is about the interaction between technology and institutions, and not about whether an individual capitalist tries to be fair or not. It's not Mitt Romney's fault that the median worker hasn't gotten a real pay increase in over 30 years. And Mr Romney's Bain experience might cost him the election, but that's not going to bring real pay increases back, either.
Here's what another article from The Economist says:
Does inequality really need to be tackled? The twin forces of globalisation and technical innovation have actually narrowed inequality globally, as poorer countries catch up with richer ones. But within many countries income gaps have widened. More than two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries where income disparities have risen since 1980, often to a startling degree. In America the share of national income going to the top 0.01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top 0.01% got in the Gilded Age.
It is also true that some measure of inequality is good for an economy. It sharpens incentives to work hard and take risks; it rewards the talented innovators who drive economic progress. Free-traders have always accepted that the more global a market, the greater the rewards will be for the winners. But as our special report this week argues, inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth.
The article you linked basically argues that globalization isn't a cause of inequality by quoting Krugman this year and comparing it to a Krugman quote from 1997. However, Krugman has changed his views since 1997.
Basically he says that 17 years ago he was arguing that trade with poor countries wasn't a major cause of inequality because there wasn't that much of it back then, but this is no longer true. He further explains, that the solution isn't protectionist policies because globalization is good for poor countries (which is part of what he argued in that 1997 article).
Actually I was quoting him exactly because i think that trade with poor countries increases income inequality, and i doubt that a single country can do anything about it, that was the most importaint part of the quote.
Ofcourse, too much income inequality is bad, and i did write that myself. But how do you tackle it, without some sort of just punishing too succesfull people? and without infringing on their human rights? I for one would never support any idea that would try to deprive me from the ability to help my children to be succesfull as much as possible, eventhough, I`m a person that lives on a 600usd monthly income, in eastern europe.
Maybe incentivisiong them to have more kids and thus dillute the wast wealth could be way to go.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
"Why would the rich kids move downward ever?"
Is it so unthinkable that a rich kid may not be as successful or more than his parents? That some of them may be as stupid, lazy or unlucky as the rest of the country on average. Rich kids aren't some genetic super race. If it's so impossible in your mind that they might move downwards because the advantages of being a rich kid are so high (in terms of education, connections, startup capital etc) then perhaps you agree with the conclusions regarding mobility and class in your country.
Maybe instead of trying to go hate all in, you should use you mind to think about such thing as inheritance and passive income?
Ofcourse stupidity is a factor, but that is something that should hardly be considered as a factor, since it is more or less random.
Go hate all in? I don't hate all ins, I think they have a place in your arsenal of strategies for when your opponent is being particularly ambitious or careless. I don't see how that's relevant to this though. Inheritance doesn't cause people to move up, typically there are expenses involved in being alive, you can inherit and you'll still drift down unless you inherit such an absurd amount that the simply existing without contributing anything is viable at which point there are other obvious problems.
Stupidity is evenly distributed across society because, as you say, it is more or less random. And yet despite the possibility of stupid rich kids you dismiss the possibility of stupid people being unsuccessful should they be born into the right family. A society is poorly constructed when the birth decides your fate rather than merit.
Oh,
It is funny, that the only thing you can basically come out, is stupidity. But, you know what, even that can be averted with proper parent care in terms of limiting the inheritance exposure to risk and wastes.
Then, you try to act as if i`m sort of stupid, while in fact, i think my position is pretty clear.
If we speak about the "social mobility", the upward movement can be vast, end more dependent on the country changing need for personell, but person fall from rich to middle or poor, is basically just a subject to random shit that happens to that same person, which can happen to everyone, hanse, the rich kid will never purposely fall from the level where it is, and so far, no societal system is designed around the idea of purposely grounding those people.
Now that we figured this out, maybe you can tone down, and speak with me like regular human, without trying to draw some stipid conclusions?
Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
On October 28 2012 20:08 paralleluniverse wrote: Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
They are the children of their parents. The parents decided to give them their wealth. If you`re arguing that people should not be capable of leaving all that they had, to their children, what is the point of having them?
Again, it is a right of their parrents, to distribute the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I know some people(not neerely you) think that people are just born from a random vagina, but genetic sugest otherwise.
The attempt to provide level field for every person, deprives the perents of that persons, to use the money they earned, the way they see fit.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
On October 28 2012 20:08 paralleluniverse wrote: Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
They are the children of their parents. The parents decided to give them their wealth. If you`re arguing that people should not be capable of leaving all that they had, to their children, what is the point of having them?
Again, it is a right of their parrents, to distribute the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I know some people(not neerely you) think that people are just born from a random vagina, but genetic sugest otherwise.
The attempt to provide level field for every person, deprives the perents of that persons, to use the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying children's purpose is so you have somewhere for your wealth to go?
I don't mind people leaving stuff to their kids, but I really don't think that's all there is when it comes to the choice to have a child. There is so much more to bringing life in to the world than that.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
That's like saying: apart from everyone that makes more money than burger-flippers at McDonald's, janitors are paid very high wages.
I said that the US has worse socioeconomic mobility than virtually every advanced country, and that's true. You said that: "US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world."
Disregarding the fact that I can barely make out what you're saying, you say that US is one of the best countries for equality of opportunity. But that's also not true. You also said that I'm confusing equality of outcome with equality of opportunity (it's seems you've retracted that claim now). And that's also not true. It's worse than the EU countries, worse than Canada, Japan, Australia and NZ, and that basically makes up the entire advanced world. Everything else is 2nd and 3rd world countries. So yes, the US has more equality of opportunity than 2nd and 3rd world countries like China. And that's suppose to be "The American Dream".
The graph simply measures mobility, i.e. movement from a low income percentile, to a high income percentile. Why should it matter whether the income is inherited through property or earned by work?
And if you want to be taken seriously, stop making things up and cite your sources.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
On October 28 2012 20:08 paralleluniverse wrote: Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
They are the children of their parents. The parents decided to give them their wealth. If you`re arguing that people should not be capable of leaving all that they had, to their children, what is the point of having them?
Again, it is a right of their parrents, to distribute the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I know some people(not neerely you) think that people are just born from a random vagina, but genetic sugest otherwise.
The attempt to provide level field for every person, deprives the perents of that persons, to use the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying children's purpose is so you have somewhere for your wealth to go?
I don't mind people leaving stuff to their kids, but I really don't think that's all there is when it comes to the choice to have a child.
Also BluePanther, Hillary is awesome
I`m saying is that if the parent chose to provide as much of (income) advantage their children, it is their right to do so, and it should not be infringed, that includes inheritance& other things.
While i do not see it as the only factor to have children, i surely want so that all i left after me, went to them, and only them.
And yes, i shamelessly say, that i will try to provide my kids as much of an advantage in life, as i can. After all, they are 1/2 of me.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
That's like saying: apart from everyone that makes more money than burger-flippers at McDonald's, janitors are paid very high wages.
I said that the US has worse socioeconomic mobility than virtually every advanced country, and that's true. You said that: "US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world."
Disregarding the fact that I can barely make out what you're saying, you say that US is one of the best countries for equality of opportunity. But that's also not true. You also said that I'm confusing equality of outcome with equality of opportunity (it's seems you've retracted that claim now). And that's also not true. It's worse than the EU countries, worse than Canada, Japan, Australia and NZ, and that basically makes up the entire advanced world. Everything else is 2nd and 3rd world countries. So yes, the US has more equality of opportunity than 2nd and 3rd world countries like China. And that's suppose to be "The American Dream".
The graph simply measures mobility, i.e. movement from a low income percentile, to a high income percentile. Why should it matter whether the income is inherited through property or earned by work?
And if you want to be taken seriously, stop making things up and cite your sources.
The problem is 2d and 3d world is much bigger than "advanced" world.
For equality of opportunity, your graph provides exactly the equility of outcome measure , not equility of opportunity.
As for the metter of inheritance, a large amount of wealth and a good banking/investing system seriously cripple the ability of rich people to fall from being rich. Hence, the graph, while interesting, doesn`t exactly reflect how much impact you have on your own prospects of promotion/demotion.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
On October 28 2012 20:08 paralleluniverse wrote: Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
They are the children of their parents. The parents decided to give them their wealth. If you`re arguing that people should not be capable of leaving all that they had, to their children, what is the point of having them?
Again, it is a right of their parrents, to distribute the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I know some people think that people are just born from a random vagina, but genetic sugest otherwise.
Wow! So you are actually arguing that the main reason for having children is to offload your money? That is a bit cold. Edit: Maybe you meant "having it" and you are arguing that the material wealth is inconsequential if you cannot pass it on to your children, but while altruistic, material wealth is still worth something for elderly people and if they had no children the argument assumes that their money is meaningless.
Compared to the western world USA is a developing country when it comes to social mobility. It is easier for dictatorships and non-democratic nations to have sufficient corruption to assure a high gini-coefficient. It is relatively limited how many well-functioning democracies exist outside the west. Again, as Parallel alluded to, it is good to be critical about any material, but it is even more important to have something you consider a better measure, or the critique is more or less meaningless! I will give you a very simple source, where you can look for the best measure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality as always with wikipedia, you need to confirm many of the numbers independently if you want to trust it, but it should give you an idea about how to argue against inequality measures.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
On October 28 2012 20:08 paralleluniverse wrote: Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
They are the children of their parents. The parents decided to give them their wealth. If you`re arguing that people should not be capable of leaving all that they had, to their children, what is the point of having them?
Again, it is a right of their parrents, to distribute the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I know some people(not neerely you) think that people are just born from a random vagina, but genetic sugest otherwise.
The attempt to provide level field for every person, deprives the perents of that persons, to use the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying children's purpose is so you have somewhere for your wealth to go?
I don't mind people leaving stuff to their kids, but I really don't think that's all there is when it comes to the choice to have a child.
Also BluePanther, Hillary is awesome
I`m saying is that if the parent chose to provide as much of (income) advantage their children, it is their right to do so, and it should not be infringed, that includes inheritance& other things.
While i do not see it as the only factor to have children, i surely want so that all i left after me, went to them, and only them.
And yes, i shamelessly say, that i will try to provide my kids as much of an advantage in life, as i can. After all, they are 1/2 of me.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
That's like saying: apart from everyone that makes more money than burger-flippers at McDonald's, janitors are paid very high wages.
I said that the US has worse socioeconomic mobility than virtually every advanced country, and that's true. You said that: "US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world."
Disregarding the fact that I can barely make out what you're saying, you say that US is one of the best countries for equality of opportunity. But that's also not true. You also said that I'm confusing equality of outcome with equality of opportunity (it's seems you've retracted that claim now). And that's also not true. It's worse than the EU countries, worse than Canada, Japan, Australia and NZ, and that basically makes up the entire advanced world. Everything else is 2nd and 3rd world countries. So yes, the US has more equality of opportunity than 2nd and 3rd world countries like China. And that's suppose to be "The American Dream".
The graph simply measures mobility, i.e. movement from a low income percentile, to a high income percentile. Why should it matter whether the income is inherited through property or earned by work?
And if you want to be taken seriously, stop making things up and cite your sources.
The problem is 2d and 3d world is much bigger than "advanced" world.
For equality of opportunity, your graph provides exactly the equility of outcome measure , not equility of opportunity.
If you are able to leave a large inheritance for your children, it reduces their incentive to work, which is bad for the economy. That's one of the many reasons why inequality is bad. The other reasons that I've listed earlier, you've chosen to dodge and ignore.
The US isn't a 2nd or 3rd world country, it's a 1st world country. It's the richest country on Earth. It should not be compared to 2nd and 3rd world countries.
The graph essentially measures the extend to which kids that are born in to a poor income percentile, grow up to be in a richer income percentile. If there is high equality of opportunity, you'll see many poor kids grow up to be a lot richer, and if there's low equality of opportunity then you'll see many poor kids stay poor.
That's why it measures equality of opportunity.
Now can you stop making stuff up and provide some evidence behind you're claims? You're just pulling shit out of your ass, and it's all wrong.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
"Why would the rich kids move downward ever?"
Is it so unthinkable that a rich kid may not be as successful or more than his parents? That some of them may be as stupid, lazy or unlucky as the rest of the country on average. Rich kids aren't some genetic super race. If it's so impossible in your mind that they might move downwards because the advantages of being a rich kid are so high (in terms of education, connections, startup capital etc) then perhaps you agree with the conclusions regarding mobility and class in your country.
Maybe instead of trying to go hate all in, you should use you mind to think about such thing as inheritance and passive income?
Ofcourse stupidity is a factor, but that is something that should hardly be considered as a factor, since it is more or less random.
Go hate all in? I don't hate all ins, I think they have a place in your arsenal of strategies for when your opponent is being particularly ambitious or careless. I don't see how that's relevant to this though. Inheritance doesn't cause people to move up, typically there are expenses involved in being alive, you can inherit and you'll still drift down unless you inherit such an absurd amount that the simply existing without contributing anything is viable at which point there are other obvious problems.
Stupidity is evenly distributed across society because, as you say, it is more or less random. And yet despite the possibility of stupid rich kids you dismiss the possibility of stupid people being unsuccessful should they be born into the right family. A society is poorly constructed when the birth decides your fate rather than merit.
A society is poorly constructed when the birth decides your fate rather than merit.
Are you denying this is not the case in the usa? Birth decides your fate to a big extend in the usa, the differences in birth and the differences in opportunitys it gives you are huge in the usa, way bigger then in europe. The amount of people able to move up is such a small percentage that it might be considered irrelevant. They are the so called "exception that prooves the law" Moving up from middle classs is possible i guess, as you have acces to decent education Moving up from the lower class in the usa is extremely difficult i think, and only a verry small percentage of the people manages to do this, they start with a huge disadvantage due to bad schools in bad nabourhoods,and a verry bad social environment.
"The US isn't a 2nd or 3rd world country, it's a 1st world country. It's the richest country on Earth. It should not be compared to 2nd and 3rd world countries"
I dont know about this annymore, manny economic and social statistics of the usa dont differ that much from the statistics of other 2nd world countries. The uk, germany ,scandinavia and japan are considerably more wealthy then the usa. Nearly every american on this forum is middle or upper class i asume,and they off course see the wealth of the usa They are not represatentive for the usa as a whole though, the middle class is becoming a minority or it is already.
the best part, conserning the "grow of inequality":
First, I think the process of globalisation, which has moved billions of people out of dire poverty, is worth defending loudly and proudly, even if it came along with a costly side order of dysfunctional American politics and policymaking. We have a moral responsibility to be very clear about what aspects of globalisation we think should change and why, because the cost of encouraging a broader backlash against the process of liberalisation, with all the great good it generates, is simply too high.
And second, it seems to me that an effort to restore the bargaining power of labour by having a showdown over outsourcing or by trying to reinvigorate the labour movement is destined for failure. The rise in worker bargaining power that occurred in the first half of the last century was a product of social movements, but those movements were enabled by the production technologies of the time, and it is the dissolution of those production technologies that has been most responsible for the weakening of labour's position. As Mr Krugman understands very well (his work on the topic helped earn him a Nobel Prize) the transportation technologies of the industrial revolution dictated in favour of large, industrial agglomerations. Geographic concentration enabled worker solidarity, and the benefits of the agglomeration meant that employers couldn't credibly threaten to move elsewhere. But the days of the large, urban industrial agglomeration are gone.
If labour is to capture more of the producer surplus—or have more of a say in Washington, for that matter—it will be as a result of a social evolution that matches the production technologies of today. That's a much, much harder process to think about and talk about than a call for the return of the glory days of labour. It's certainly not the sort of thing that lends itself to deployment in the binary dialogue of a presidential campaign. The truth is that Bain didn't really do anything wrong by outsourcing. It could have not done it, but that would primarily have created a profit opportunity for someone else. It may say something about Mitt Romney that he was the man who opted to take the profits. But the nature and distribution of economic activity is about the interaction between technology and institutions, and not about whether an individual capitalist tries to be fair or not. It's not Mitt Romney's fault that the median worker hasn't gotten a real pay increase in over 30 years. And Mr Romney's Bain experience might cost him the election, but that's not going to bring real pay increases back, either.
Here's what another article from The Economist says:
Does inequality really need to be tackled? The twin forces of globalisation and technical innovation have actually narrowed inequality globally, as poorer countries catch up with richer ones. But within many countries income gaps have widened. More than two-thirds of the world’s people live in countries where income disparities have risen since 1980, often to a startling degree. In America the share of national income going to the top 0.01% (some 16,000 families) has risen from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the top 0.01% got in the Gilded Age.
It is also true that some measure of inequality is good for an economy. It sharpens incentives to work hard and take risks; it rewards the talented innovators who drive economic progress. Free-traders have always accepted that the more global a market, the greater the rewards will be for the winners. But as our special report this week argues, inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth.
The article you linked basically argues that globalization isn't a cause of inequality by quoting Krugman this year and comparing it to a Krugman quote from 1997. However, Krugman has changed his views since 1997.
Basically he says that 17 years ago he was arguing that trade with poor countries wasn't a major cause of inequality because there wasn't that much of it back then, but this is no longer true. He further explains, that the solution isn't protectionist policies because globalization is good for poor countries (which is part of what he argued in that 1997 article).
I can agree with the point that the inequality that arises "naturally" from capitalism (and what not) has helped drive us forward technologically (and in other ways) which has again had a benefit on living standards across continents. But imo this speaks nothing of "unequal opportunities". Like was pointed out earlier, there can be stupid rich kids, and they will especially have education available to them. Smart poor kids not so much. US has drawn its line on how they value money vs personal merit. I'd argue that 'keeping' such a large part of its population "down" from birth on does not help further growth, where education is most likely a key factor to driving society forward. Do you want the few educated elite, or rather everyone to be educated? In a way (just a thought experiment) we could automate all the "low end jobs" by machines and robots and human kind could focus its full attention elsewhere. But not when "flipping burgers" is all that some are qualified for. Only when a certain threshold of equality is reached, can you raise the floor level.
I agree that inequality is one of many reasons the American dream even exists. But when do you 'raise the bottom rung'?
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
On October 28 2012 20:08 paralleluniverse wrote: Please write properly. So you're basically arguing that if you're born rich, you should stay rich, even if you do nothing to deserve that wealth.
People who argue against inequality as a problem believe in individualism. That people should work hard and earn what they get. So you're a hypocrite to argue that rich kids should stay rich just because their parents are, without doing anything to deserve it.
They are the children of their parents. The parents decided to give them their wealth. If you`re arguing that people should not be capable of leaving all that they had, to their children, what is the point of having them?
Again, it is a right of their parrents, to distribute the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I know some people(not neerely you) think that people are just born from a random vagina, but genetic sugest otherwise.
The attempt to provide level field for every person, deprives the perents of that persons, to use the money they earned, the way they see fit.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying children's purpose is so you have somewhere for your wealth to go?
I don't mind people leaving stuff to their kids, but I really don't think that's all there is when it comes to the choice to have a child.
Also BluePanther, Hillary is awesome
I`m saying is that if the parent chose to provide as much of (income) advantage their children, it is their right to do so, and it should not be infringed, that includes inheritance& other things.
While i do not see it as the only factor to have children, i surely want so that all i left after me, went to them, and only them.
And yes, i shamelessly say, that i will try to provide my kids as much of an advantage in life, as i can. After all, they are 1/2 of me.
On October 28 2012 18:09 naastyOne wrote: I do not get the "inequality" thing.
The point of the goverment is to advance the falt value not attempt to make everyone at same level.
Not everyone is as disciplined, determined and focused, the near-to-perfect equality is impossible to achive in realistic world, and generally attempts to achive equality only made life worse for everyone involved.
The reason we are the cociety we are, is that we are striving to get better ourselves, and compete with eachother.
There are harder jobs, that require time, effort and means of sustaining yourself to master, If you will only get same, as the unqualified labour, why waste time and efforts getting into harder field?
Why innovate, when everyone has more or less the same things, and other people will not like that you got ahead of others?
The inequality is absolutely nececery for progress, and increase in quality of life for everyone.
Who says anything about making "everyone at same level"? We're not asking for communism here.
The fact is the current level of inequality in terms of income, consumption and opportunity in the US is unprecedented, compared to both other advanced countries, and compared to the US in the past. Inequality has exploded.
While some small amount of inequality is good, a large amount of inequality is bad. For example, it's a waste of human capital when poor, smart kids don't get the opportunity to fulfill their potential (yes, social mobility is extremely low in the US compared to other countries), it allows the rich to more easily buy the political process, and it reduces aggregate demand because rich people save a greater proportion of their money whereas poor people must spend a greater proportion.
You can read about the stats that back this up in that wikipedia article linked earlier.
Again, I`m argunig that having inequality reasonbly large is a good thing. Not a small amout, but a very noticable, but not extreeme amount.
US is nowhere near to poorest country in the world. In fact with (probable) exeption of Northern Europe and Canada, US have the best opportunities for poor.
The immobility is an obvious problem brought by expencive and low quality education.
In most of the countries in the world, you can hire college graduates for less than 1k US dollars per month, that will have similar education quality as US universities. Try that in US.
US just got ahead, in post-WW2 world, and now the third world is catching back.
Untill US reaches the similar cost efficency as most of the world, it`s poor`s quality of live would only increase due to life becoming cheaper.
And if you think that in US money influence politics too much, try looking at most of the world where there is no fundrasing from the base similar to US, and political parties are on 100% payroll of the very rich people, with public not taking the idea of funding political campaings good.
Did i mention the billion of virtually unacountable parties, politicans that come to steal as much as they can and often not even seek reelection, and huge, corrupt goverments.
It's simply not true that the US has the most opportunity for the poor. When measured in terms of poor kids moving upwards or rich kids moving downwards, the US is on par with Pakistan, it has less equality of opportunity than every advanced country except UK and Italy according to this graph (y-axis): Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_United_States
Why would the rich kids move downward ever?
Than, as i said,and you should actually read everything, US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world.
Besides, you need to factor in the incomes, since the "middle class" citizens in a lot of countries are still worth off than the poor in US.
Then, the gini coeficent is a very much subject to bad calculations, especially considering that it is not clear when it is tax adjusted or not, and does it factor the grey economy, or not, so sorry if the data posted, is not impressive.
Then, you as so many people mistake the equility of outcome to the equility of opportunity.
Where are you getting this idea that the US has good socioeconomic mobility, i.e. that it's easy for smart, poor people to get ahead? Cite your sources.
You keep saying it's true, but the graph I've posted shows it's not true. The US has never bad socioeconomic mobility, as bad as Pakistan, and worse than almost every other advanced nation.
Why are you talking about the GINI coefficient? I'm talking about the y-axis which shows mobility, not the x-axis, but if you want to go there, the US is also very bad.
I'm not mistaking equality of outcome with equality of opportunity. I pointed to the y-axis of the graph -- socioeconomic mobility, that is a good measure of equality of opportunity, and it shows that US has bad equality of opportunity.
How about your own grapth? I said, that apart from EU and Canada, US is better than most of the world. Ok, i forgot Japan&Australia&NZ.
Again, can you actually factor in how the inheritance factors in income, since the majority of rich people income comes from holding property, because when we speak about households incomes of 300+ thousands a year, that sum mostly come from the savings income, not your direct wage & earnings.
What your graph fails to distinguish, is the income dependent on personal work, and income that is independent from it. Hence the problems.
But. I mostly agree with you that due to far greater taxes, and some other things, EU has better social mobility than US.
And i`m also blaming the third world competition for that, that sucks the high pay employment into it.
Still, US has not so bad social mobility, and is very far from being a bad place to live in.
That's like saying: apart from everyone that makes more money than burger-flippers at McDonald's, janitors are paid very high wages.
I said that the US has worse socioeconomic mobility than virtually every advanced country, and that's true. You said that: "US is not the best, but still one of the better part, besides countries you side are nowhere near the entire world."
Disregarding the fact that I can barely make out what you're saying, you say that US is one of the best countries for equality of opportunity. But that's also not true. You also said that I'm confusing equality of outcome with equality of opportunity (it's seems you've retracted that claim now). And that's also not true. It's worse than the EU countries, worse than Canada, Japan, Australia and NZ, and that basically makes up the entire advanced world. Everything else is 2nd and 3rd world countries. So yes, the US has more equality of opportunity than 2nd and 3rd world countries like China. And that's suppose to be "The American Dream".
The graph simply measures mobility, i.e. movement from a low income percentile, to a high income percentile. Why should it matter whether the income is inherited through property or earned by work?
And if you want to be taken seriously, stop making things up and cite your sources.
The problem is 2d and 3d world is much bigger than "advanced" world.
For equality of opportunity, your graph provides exactly the equility of outcome measure , not equility of opportunity.
As for the metter of inheritance, a large amount of wealth and a good banking/investing system seriously cripple the ability of rich people to fall from being rich. Hence, the graph, while interesting, doesn`t exactly reflect how much impact you have on your own prospects of promotion/demotion.
I think that's exactly what it does.
It shows how well protected the rich are, and have every door open to them, regardless of what they do with their lives.
Not that they should "fall from the rich", but they are set, while the poor are not. Hence the graph reflecting how much impact you yourself have on your own prospects of promotion/demotion (to use your own words "against" you). Money and inheritance are MUCH bigger factors in the US than in for instance Europe. I think that's what people have been telling you all along..
I'm not saying that everything is completely rigid. But we're trying to tell you that things are MORE rigid.
Point is. If you are poor, you'll have better opportunities "making it" in Europe. The trade-off is that you probably won't become the new JB. We don't cultivate these the same way you do.
EPT![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/The_Great_Gatsby_Curve.png)
