[HN Gopher] A Random Distribution of Wealth (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
A Random Distribution of Wealth (2017)
Author : jacquesm
Score : 169 points
Date : 2022-06-24 09:55 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.masswerk.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.masswerk.at)
| mazsa wrote:
| Simulation of Norvig, same topic:
| https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics.ipynb
| tawktiem wrote:
| It's almost as though by allowing for this natural behavior,
| randomness gets more extreme (aims towards extremities).
| Wondering if there are ways this model collapses - for example,
| if any jump from one bar to the next gets too big (over a
| threshold), does that cause the whole model to collapse?
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Seems like wealth according to this model follows a roughly
| Gaussian distribution around $100; it is not a power law or some
| other grossly imbalanced distribution as others have conjectured.
| import numpy as np W = np.ones(1000, dtype = int)*100
| for _ in range(1000000): i = np.random.randint(1000)
| j = np.random.randint(1000) if W[j] == 0:
| continue W[i] += 1 W[j] -= 1
|
| yields the following distribution of wealth: $0
| | ##### $10 | ######### $20 |
| ########### $30 | ############## $40 |
| ############### $50 | #######################
| $60 | ################################# $70 |
| ################################################## $80
| | #################################### $90 |
| ############################################## $100 |
| ######################################### $110 |
| ######################################## $120 |
| ###################################### $130 |
| ############################ $140 |
| ######################### $150 |
| ##################### $160 | ################
| $170 | ######## $180 | ######## $190
| | ##### $200 | #
| chongli wrote:
| This is the Central Limit Theorem at work. Your random
| variables are independent and identically distributed so you're
| always going to approximate a normal distribution.
|
| Wealth in real life is not independent. People with more wealth
| have more investment opportunities and thus more ability to
| grow, tending to a power law. You can see the same phenomenon
| with craters on the moon.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Advantage compounds, so W[i] *= advantage * W[i]
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| In real life, absolutely. In the simulation, there is no
| compounding.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| The key difference here is that every player is forced to give
| money each tick, whereas in your implementation players are
| randomly selected to give money. The following implementation
| does yield an exponential distribution: for _
| in range(10000): for i in range(N_players):
| if W[i] > 0: j =
| np.random.randint(N_players) W[i] -= 1
| W[j] += 1
|
| Fwiw your implementation will also relax towards an exponential
| distribution (try 10000000 iterations); it just converges at a
| different rate.
| [deleted]
| 317070 wrote:
| So the crux of the difference between your model and the model
| posted above, is exactly what causes the imbalance seen!
|
| In your model, on every step a random person gives to another
| random person if he has money left.
|
| In the model from the post, every step everybody gives
| something, but a random person gets something. This asymmetry
| between getting and giving is enough to cause (large)
| inequality!
|
| Everybody goes down with the same speed, but dumb luck at some
| point can actually bring your wealth up really high very fast,
| and since the downward speed is limited, you will stay rich for
| a long time.
|
| At a higher level: the average behaves the same upward and
| downward, but the flukes behave differently.
| ramblerman wrote:
| > Seems like wealth follows a roughly Gaussian distribution
|
| You mean your toy simulation of wealth follows a Guassian
| Distribution.
|
| Most people I know are not randomnly giving dollars to the
| entire population pool, they are mostly giving them to already
| wealthy corporations.
| AQXt wrote:
| That's an interesting way to illustrate the myth of meritocracy:
| random luck is enough to create a society of rich and poor.
| eloff wrote:
| I find the outcome unintuitive. Each person has the same starting
| conditions and then randomly gives away a dollar each round.
| There's no interest or compounding factors mentioned. My
| intuition is that, given enough rounds each person could be
| expected to receive as many dollars as they give away. I guess
| pure chance would mean some so better or worse than that at any
| point in game, but overall I expected less variance and more
| people to be clustered around the starting amount.
|
| There's also the possibility the random number generator is not
| sufficiently uniform.
| yetihehe wrote:
| If you give dollars at random, wealth will be randomised (will
| have ALL values from 0 to 100).
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| There are several different versions of the model which you can
| reach by following the link at the bottom of the page. The
| simplest one (which is not the HN link) is purely random. The
| more sophisticated models add other factors like investments.
| In the most complex model, the inequality is very dramatic
| indeed.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| At each round when an individual is selected to transfer money,
| there's a 50:50 probability that they give a dollar or receive
| a dollar. A coin flip.
|
| The total number of heads after N coin flips follows a binomial
| distribution [0]. So too does the total number of times an
| individual will receive a dollar over N game rounds.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
| posix_compliant wrote:
| z = ( || Wi, t-1 || / Wt0 + || Wr, t-1 || / Wt0 ) / 2
|
| The weird thing about defining the amount of money given this way
| is that as people go further into debt, they give more and more
| money.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| This is the Boltzmann game! It's a classic classroom experiment
| that's useful in conceptualising thermodynamical evolution and
| the exponential distribution.
|
| It's quite sad to see it presented here without attribution; the
| appropriate reference is Michalek and Hanson, 2006 [1]. For the
| physically inclined, this [2] is a more detailed description of
| the underlying mechanics.
|
| [1]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed083p581 [2]:
| http://hyad.es/boltzmann
| darkerside wrote:
| Great illustration of systemic inequality
| political12345 wrote:
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Yep, the random part was interesting...
|
| Because in a "real" world, where you have people who are more
| competent and hard working than others, it is pretty much
| expected, that a few of them will offer services and slowly
| gather all the money from the rest, who just spend the money
| and don't do anything.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Ah yes. All those nurses, and bus drivers, and teachers and
| scientists, and retail staff just lording their enormous
| wealth over the poor people who merely inherited a bunch of
| houses.
|
| Your just world fallacy doesn't work when we're literally
| staring at an example of how blind luck is sufficient to
| lead to massive inequality.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Exactly. It's an experimental, easily reproducible, look
| into boundary conditions and wealth distributions in the
| total absence of merit or value.
|
| Basically a proof that simple exchange of value can and
| does produce massive immiseration that serves no purpose
| and signals no possible merit or value.
|
| Add any degree of either merit, or exploitation and
| criminality, to the mix and the distribution will just
| get even more ridiculous.
| cs137 wrote:
| _What more do you want, or will you blame some specific
| demographic + sex + sexual orientation for this ?_
|
| I'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you implying that
| all critics of inequality dislike cishet white males? Because
| I am a cishet white male and not only is that simply not
| true, but it misunderstands what we on the left are saying
| when we talk about systemic issues (e.g. systemic racism).
|
| To say there is systemic racism does not say that all whites
| are racist. It doesn't even say that most whites are racist.
| (I don't think it's true.) It doesn't even mean that most
| police are racist. (I don't think that's true, either.) It
| simply means that our society is configured in such a way
| that produces racist results, sometimes through emergence and
| sometimes through hidden intent.
|
| All that said, our society is way more classist than it is
| racist or sexist, but all those problems are intertwined,
| because the upper class benefits when the rest of us are
| divided.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > What more do you want
|
| For those who most can to help those most in need, regardless
| of how that came about.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| So in your view slavery is the reward for success?
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Why would you consider "luck handed me money" a personal
| success? You're falling straight into "if I have it, I
| must have earned it, and therefore I must deserve it more
| than you".
|
| Also, moneyed classes have working classes in lifelong
| slavery. The only escape from having to work your entire
| life to make someone else rich, is to be rich or to fall
| out the bottom of the system.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > Why would you consider "luck handed me money" a
| personal success?
|
| Meeting a need isn't a stochastic process anymore than
| having a need to be fulfilled is one. I assume you have
| an actual boss with actual needs and not a probabilistic
| representation of one. While this model assumes a random
| distribution as a driving force for wealth, that isn't
| representative of reality, where individual motivation
| and personal utility are much more significant factors.
|
| It isn't luck that hands one money ,but dedicating one's
| efforts to discovery, invention, or labor in exchange for
| a resource or product that one finds more useful. In this
| scenario one has earned wealth by dint of his efforts and
| abilities, not by mere lottery. Yes, I do deserve my
| income. I earned it by trading my labor for money. I have
| the right to trade my money something that I find more
| worthwhile.
|
| > You're falling straight into "if I have it,"....
|
| I would change the statement to "I earned it, I have the
| right to have it, and therefore I deserve it more than
| you". This is essentially what it means to own property.
| Your original formulation makes no distinction between
| burglars and creators.
|
| For example: It's likely that you're typing to me from a
| computer or phone that you currently have in your
| possession? Would you say this computer belongs to you or
| are you simply its steward? Is it wrong for someone to
| own a computer or must one share it with the world?
|
| > Also, money classes have working classes in lifelong
| slavery.
|
| Where does one draw the line at "moneyed"? Who in this
| country is "enslaved" when cashiers have more money and
| benefits than lawyers or doctors from half the countries
| of the world? Most people here can buy more computing
| power than the vast majority of humans every born on the
| planet. The only way for your premise to make sense is to
| assume that earning a salary is slavery in an of itself.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Excuse you?
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Your statement is a rephrasing of the old Marxist slogan
| "[F]rom each according to his ability, to each according
| to his needs". How is that not enslavement to others
| merely for being more able?
| guerrilla wrote:
| The burden of proof is on you since you're the one making
| the nonsensical claim. How is helping people in any way
| slavery? That sounds insane.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| In your ideal world, can people refuse to "help" or would
| they be forced against their will? If it's the latter
| then that is slavery.
| guerrilla wrote:
| No, that's just something you must have hallucinated,
| because it's clearly not something I said. You're arguing
| with spooks. Turns out anarchists aren't really into
| states, let alone states forcing people to do anything.
| Maybe prejudice as a mode of inference isn't that
| valuable after all. Who knew. Don't you dare put "help"
| in scare quotes either. People are starving and they need
| help.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > No, that's just something you must have hallucinated,
| because it's clearly not something I said. You're arguing
| with spooks. Turns out anarchists aren't really into
| states, let alone states forcing people to do anything.
| Maybe prejudice as a mode of inference isn't that
| valuable after all. Who knew.
|
| I concede that I've likely taken your statement the wrong
| way.
|
| > Don't you dare put "help" in scare quotes either.
| People are starving and they need help.
|
| Which people are starving? Where? How did they get into
| that position? Whenever I hear the word "help", it's for
| some pet project that is at best a bandaid and ,at worst,
| a con under the guise of a charitable act.
| spuz wrote:
| You are conflating equality with fairness. The simulation
| shows it's possible to have a fair game with unequal
| outcomes.
| Applejinx wrote:
| A fair game with power-law distribution unequal outcomes.
| The idea of inequality of outcome isn't itself an issue:
| problem comes when you start drawing inferences from this
| that aren't supported.
|
| Just because the distribution produces ultra-wealthy
| doesn't mean those ultra-wealthy are any good. If actual
| merit is distributed as some percentage of the population,
| this experiment PROVES that allowing the power-law
| distribution to develop, means you are most likely taking
| resources from those with potential merit and awarding it,
| through random chance and the power-law mechanic, to an
| undeserving recipient, more often than not.
|
| That's because the ultra-wealthy is just as likely to be
| useless as the ultra-poor, but each ultra-wealthy consumes
| resources equal to hundreds or thousands or millions of
| ultra-poor, some of whom would be useful and capable if
| they weren't at that lower boundary (which is a pretty
| crippling condition, as anybody knows who's been there).
|
| Doesn't mean the ultra-wealthy can't be useful and
| capable... but the odds are increasingly against them, the
| farther up they are on the distribution.
| ginko wrote:
| Surely this shows that even in a scenario where everyone is
| equal there will be people who succeed or fail purely by
| chance.
|
| The obvious takeaway should be that there needs to be a
| mechanism for wealth redistribution.
| Applejinx wrote:
| It shows specifically that a power-law distribution arises
| (which can be exploited, or taken as a sign of value or
| merit) in the COMPLETE ABSENCE of value or merit.
|
| When you then exploit the resources that have randomly
| piled up, turbo boost kicks in and exacerbates the
| condition as the wealthy throw their weight around to
| increase their weight and influence (as all classes will do
| within the context of what they're able to do)
|
| I've been aware of this simulation (or earlier, simpler
| simulations) for some time, and consider it significant.
| Even in the total absence of merit, properties will emerge
| that will look like merit when they're not. Confirmation
| bias does the rest.
|
| The take-away would appear to be 'eat the rich, but only
| when they insist they earned it out of their own obvious
| personal value'. The ones that are like 'lol, that's weird,
| how did this happen to me?' are probably okay ;)
| guerrilla wrote:
| > turbo boost kicks in and exacerbates the condition as
| the wealthy throw their weight around to increase their
| weight and influence (as all classes will do within the
| context of what they're able to do)
|
| Can I suggest you call this what it is: a set of positive
| feedback loops.
| Applejinx wrote:
| But the underlying experiment shows the effect in the
| complete absence of positive feedback, and that's the
| most important thing about it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, and then you said "[w]hen you then exploit the
| resources that have randomly piled up". This is where the
| positive feedback begins. The final graph in the
| simulation represents people who just sat around and did
| nothing with their money. In real life, they would use
| their resources to accelerate their accumulation of
| resources.
| Applejinx wrote:
| And that's where we stand, as a global population of
| humans and economic actors :)
|
| The idea that in real life the distribution would be way
| way 'worse'... is in fact heavily confirmed by
| observation of real life. I'm just trying to make sure
| people don't jump to the conclusion, 'it's positive
| feedback all the way down, this always represents merit'.
|
| It's quite shocking how little it represents merit. I
| would say it is equally likely to represent criminality,
| as merit. So even the 'positive feedback' ends up being
| pretty much a wash: we revert to the merit-less state of
| the distribution, only with an even more extreme power-
| law curve.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Oh yeah, it definitely has nothing to do with merit
| unless traits like being a psychopath is merit. Criminals
| would (and obviously do) exploit positive feedback just
| as well.
| chii wrote:
| > The obvious takeaway should be that there needs to be a
| mechanism for wealth redistribution.
|
| it doesn't sound obvious to me - esp. if the starting point
| was equal. Luck is also a skill.
|
| It is only obvious, if the starting point was unequal.
| ginko wrote:
| >Luck is also a skill
|
| No it's not.
| once_inc wrote:
| It sort of is. Given a game of chance, yes: luck is
| uniform.
|
| But people are people. Smart people don't waste their
| time/money on games where they don't have a significant
| chance to win. Lottery, sweepstakes, etc are all
| generally played by poorer people, and often in ways that
| aren't sustainable (gambling with borrowed money, for
| instance).
|
| Smart people invest their money wisely, which leads to
| 'lucky' breaks which compound over time.
| hhmc wrote:
| Unfortunately, due to luck, you were born as a
| subsistance farmer in the Central African Republic.
| 'Smart investments' are no option to you.
|
| Better luck next life.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Well, the first starting point was equal, but the
| subsequent starting points were unequal. To use a sports
| team analogy, when a team wins a game, the next game
| should start at 0-0. That team keeps the win, but that
| winning team should not be allowed to get a head start in
| the next game.
| chii wrote:
| the game is played for life - so you only get 1 game. I
| suppose if you believe in reincarnation, may be multiple
| games. In this simulation, they still start at equal
| (aka, the page refreshes).
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Do you understand what "luck" means? It is literally the
| opposite of a skill
| SMAAART wrote:
| Life is a game of chance where we control the odds.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Who is _we_?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is surely not sufficient. The probability matters. "You
| can always win the lottery" is obviously not enough to claim
| a system is equal.
| mkj wrote:
| If you plot it another way does it end up looking like a gaussian
| distribution (or something similar)?
| Mattasher wrote:
| It should. I suspect this sim is done wrong. If each round is
| independent and variance is constant the CLT should dominate.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Edit: my post below is not true. The overall distribution is
| indeed close to Gaussian; see here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31861089
|
| *******
|
| The CLT simply says that the distribution of a sum of random
| variables will be Gaussian (as the number of random variables
| being summed tends to infinity).
|
| It is not obvious to me that the agent-level difference
| equations in this simulation would naturally lead to the
| overall distribution of wealth being a sum of random
| variables.
| Mattasher wrote:
| The wealth each "person" has after N rounds is equal to N
| trials where the expectation is zero each time, and the
| rounds are independent, at least according to the setup
| described in the title and first paragraph.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That determines the distribution for each individual, not
| necessarily the entire population.
|
| However, I think you are correct and I am wrong about the
| population level distribution; I wrote and ran the
| simulation myself and got a Gaussian-looking distribution
| at the population level.
| mellavora wrote:
| Not if growth is cumulative/compounding. Central Limit
| Theorem assumes additive growth.
|
| Do some reading on geometric vs additive means, and on the
| log-normal distribution for finance.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Oh, no, absolutely not. The sim is a proof that even in very
| primitive economic simulations, Central Limit Theorem
| absolutely does not apply.
|
| 'should' has nothing to do with it. It provably doesn't. Even
| in the absence of any complicating factors or considerations
| of value or merit.
| PeterisP wrote:
| This sim is done quite right, with the key part of the
| article being "This model is the same as in the basic
| version, but includes basic economics, like debt (whithout
| interest) and investments that are proportional to the
| respective wealths of the spending and the receiving player"
|
| CLT dominates only if you do the sim wrong by making
| unrealistic simplifying assumptions (e.g. that each round is
| independent and variance is constant) that effectively
| eliminate the main parts of the simulated system and ensure
| that the simulation gets misleading results.
| Swizec wrote:
| I think it's a power law distribution. Power laws tend to arise
| naturally when winning a game/interaction enables you to play
| more games later.
|
| If everyone has an equal (random) chance of winning, the person
| who can play the most games wins in the end.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
|
| You see this in sports where Steph Curry isn't much more likely
| to hit any specific 3 pointer than any other NBA player. But he
| tries almost an order of magnitude more often. So now he's
| known as one of the highest scorers in the game.
| [deleted]
| hervature wrote:
| > You see this in sports where Steph Curry isn't much more
| likely to hit any specific 3 pointer than any other NBA
| player.
|
| Where did you get that stat from? He is almost in the top 10
| of all time in terms of shooting percentage [1]. What makes
| that understated is how much he shoots. The people above him
| on the list only shot them when they were "guaranteed"
| whereas he shoots them all the time.
|
| [1] - https://www.basketball-
| reference.com/leaders/fg3_pct_career....
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Yes. See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31861089
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I'd say the simulation shows the inflationary effect of debt-
| based money expansion at zero interest rates :-).
| roenxi wrote:
| I dunno. All models are wrong, some are useful.
|
| This tells me that having debt and no way to reliably pay it off
| is a really bad situation to be in. Consider income vs. expenses.
| If the first is consistently higher, life is relaxed. If the
| second, life is very stressful. If they match then life seems OK
| then falls apart following some reasonably short-term time
| horizon. This model bakes that in to the assumptions and sends a
| lot of people broke, as we might predict.
|
| The two interesting questions that follow from this seem to be:
|
| 1. How to convince people who are doing OK to consistently spend
| less than they earn?
|
| 2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or
| won't save money?
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > then falls apart following some reasonably short-term time
| horizon.
|
| Only if it's student debt you owe. It can still take years to
| foreclose on a house.
| dgb23 wrote:
| It is interesting that people spend their money more or less on
| the same things proportionally, regardless of their wealth and
| income. Two exceptions: Richer people spend more on education
| and long-term assets that generate further wealth.
|
| There is a threshold where you have enough so to speak and can
| start investing in the future. I would say this is typical for
| the middle class. There is potential to spend in a smarter way
| here. You get more opportunities, social currency etc.
|
| But being poor is expensive. You have to spend money on subpar
| quality products because you need them. You pay interest on
| different forms of debt, which keeps you down. You are
| constantly worried about the next large bill and are being
| pestered by bureaucracies and owners (banks, state, landlord
| etc.).
|
| So below the threshold you get pushed down, above the threshold
| you get lifted up. It takes incredible effort and discipline to
| pass the threshold from below.
|
| > 2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or
| won't save money?
|
| 1) There's two aspects to this. One I described above and I'm
| pretty sure this represents the vast majority of cases. Cover
| the basics with free education, cheap housing and good
| infrastructure and allow debt forgiveness or just give them
| money or interest free loans. Basically make sure that the
| lowest points in the graph (OP) is livable and dignified. This
| way everyone gets more opportunities to do really good stuff
| and everyone benefits from that across all layers. Plain and
| simple.
|
| 2) There are also people who are just wired to fuck this up for
| whatever reason, they need more support and care than anyone
| else. If they are uncooperative you have to let bang their head
| into the wall and hope they learn from the pain. You can't help
| everyone though. It has to be a two way street.
| bko wrote:
| > So below the threshold you get pushed down, above the
| threshold you get lifted up. It takes incredible effort and
| discipline to pass the threshold from below.
|
| At the very low end you could be pushed down. If you can only
| afford $5000 for a car, it'll be expensive in the long run.
| But its also true that on the high end you get pushed down as
| well. If you have a lot of money and feel the need to buy an
| expensive car that's no more reliable than a much cheaper
| car. Plus you have to pay more for insurance, maintenance,
| etc.
| dahart wrote:
| Expenses by themselves aren't what "pushed down" means, the
| term was referring to the discrepancy between income and
| expenses going negative, so whether someone on the top end
| is pushed down depends completely on their income, right?
| (And it might be reasonable to assume they're on the high
| end already because their income exceeds their expenses,
| no?)
|
| The reason the pushing down is asymmetric for rich & poor
| when it comes to cars is that cars have some _minimum_
| expenses that can be pretty high relative to a poor
| person's income, and below that minimum they lose access to
| a car (which in reality pushes them down eve further).
| Someone on the high end _might_ choose to spend more on a
| car than their income safely allows, but they actually have
| a choice of how much to spend on a car, whereas someone on
| the low end might only have the choice to spend slightly
| more than they can actually afford, in other words very
| little choice.
| Applejinx wrote:
| That really doesn't count as being pushed down. That's you
| burning money for fun. I know what that's like too but it
| sure doesn't count as the Man keeping me down, you're
| describing one hell of a 'first world problem' that doesn't
| really make sense in the context of this discussion.
|
| Wanting a 5 million dollar car doesn't count as getting
| pushed down. And its unreliability isn't really in the same
| context as depending on the $5000 (or $500) beater. If your
| 5 million dollar car conks out, you are more frustrated
| than endangered: no thing that you do is seriously at risk,
| as you'll have alternate ways to get to work etc.,
| including the random acquisition of the same $5000 car,
| which to you is pocket change, beneath consideration.
| hansword wrote:
| https://twitter.com/search?q=0th%20world%20problem - it
| seems like hundreds of people have independently coined
| '0th world problem' to name such non-inconveniences.
|
| Edit for two Examples:
|
| * I want ice cream but I don't want to actually leave my
| apartment and none of the grocery stores have delivery
| slots open for the rest of the day.
|
| * Champagne cork flying damaged my priceless artwork
| bko wrote:
| > That really doesn't count as being pushed down. That's
| you burning money for fun. I know what that's like too
| but it sure doesn't count as the Man keeping me down,
| you're describing one hell of a 'first world problem'
| that doesn't really make sense in the context of this
| discussion.
|
| Maybe its fun burning money, working a job you hate,
| spending time away from your friends and family, working
| till you drop dead. I don't know I'm not rich.
|
| > If your 5 million dollar car conks out, you are more
| frustrated than endangered: no thing that you do is
| seriously at risk
|
| You have a very weird perception of things. First, there
| are no $5 million cars. Have you ever met someone with
| money? Are they chill about trashing their property? Oh I
| totaled my $150k car, no big deal! I have an infinite
| amount of money. People go broke all the time.
|
| Take it from a literal billionaire and former CEO of
| Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein:
|
| > "I can't imagine how all this is going to come out when
| you publish," he says, looking fleetingly concerned....
| Blankfein insists he is "well-to-do", not rich. "I can't
| even say 'rich'," he insists. "I don't feel that way. I
| don't behave that way." He says he has an apartment in
| Miami as well as New York. But he abjures most of the
| trappings. "If I bought a Ferrari, I'd be worried about
| it getting scratched," he jokes.
|
| No one has enough money or doesn't care about burning
| money.
|
| https://dealbreaker.com/2020/02/blankfein-sanders-trump
| hansword wrote:
| > I don't know I'm not rich. > First, there are no $5
| million cars.
|
| There are cars selling $4M new from the factory.[0]
| Because of the scammy economics of these limited edition
| hypercars, if you are eligible (!), you can buy these and
| instantly flip them with a million or two in profit.
|
| If you get into vintage collectible cars, there is no
| real upper limit. Here is a 1955 Mercedes for $140M: [1]
|
| If you think that is ridiculous, you are too mild. But it
| is real.
|
| [0] https://www.caranddriver.com/bugatti/chiron-2021 [1]
| https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/19/business/mercedes-
| worlds-...
| bluGill wrote:
| A $5000 car is about the cheapest in the long run - most of
| the depreciation is done with. There is still maintenance,
| which can be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as
| payments on a new car. Payments are easy to budget for
| $400/month, no maintenance for 6 months than a $2000 bill
| is hard to budget even though it is less total.
| xur17 wrote:
| Agreed. I had a car I paid $8k for, and I ended up
| selling it for pretty close to what I bought it for.
| Maintenance was very minimal. A brand new car absolutely
| is not necessary.
| dahart wrote:
| > It is interesting that people spend their money more or
| less on the same things proportionally, regardless of their
| wealth and income.
|
| Where are you getting this from? It's definitely not true
| when it comes to savings and investment. It's not true for
| food, as I linked below. Its not true for travel. It's not
| true for housing either. Why do you believe this?
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-
| summaries/housing-e...
|
| "Low-income families spent a far greater share of their
| income on core needs, such as housing, transportation, and
| food, than did upper-income families."
|
| https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-
| bri...
| dgb23 wrote:
| I wish I could pull it up, it had much more coarse grained
| categories than what you linked and long time periods. It
| might have been a meta study.
|
| For example in one of the links they discriminate food away
| from home etc.
|
| It's not the one I'm remembering but it looked a bit like
| this one: https://flowingdata.com/2018/02/08/how-different-
| income-grou...
|
| It looks rather proportional. But I have to admit, here
| housing is fatter at the low and. Personal
| insurance/pension gets fatter the more you move up.
| Education is interesting as it is fat at the very low end,
| gets thinner for a bit, but after the lower middle gets
| fatter again continuously. It also cuts off after 200k
| yearly income, so there's that.
| hansword wrote:
| > spend their money more or less on the same things
| proportionally
|
| I guess I must be misunderstanding you, because this seems
| obviously wrong. A very poor person spends ~100% of their
| income on nutrition and shelter, and their investment rate is
| 0%. A very rich person spends ~0% of their income on
| nutrition and shelter and their investment rate approaches
| 100%.
| dgb23 wrote:
| It's counter intuitive but its roughly the same percentages
| for most things. You'd be surprised at just how much a rich
| person spends on food, shelter transport etc. typically
| they will pay for very high quality, labor intensive and
| exclusive things. The difference is really just education
| and investment.
| dahart wrote:
| > It's counter intuitive but it's roughly the same
| percentages for most things.
|
| Do you have evidence for this claim? I don't believe it's
| true. Take food, for example, the US government publishes
| the fact that food spending as a share of income declines
| as income rises.
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-
| gallery/gallery...
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-
| statistic...
| bluGill wrote:
| A rich person lives in a mansion, and a poor person in a
| cardboard shack. And everything inbetween depending on
| wealth. Adam Smith observed years ago that when people get
| more money they typically spend it on 'better' housing.
|
| You will die, some religions will let you take it with you,
| but none that are popular today. So you may as well spend
| whatever you earn on things that you think will make you
| happy.
| dahart wrote:
| Adam Smith was well aware that the rich man spent a
| smaller percent of his income on his mansion than the
| poor man did in his shack. The rich person also has,
| statistically speaking, a year's income in liquid cash, a
| few mil in stocks and bonds, some expensive cars, maybe a
| boat, some expensive sports hobbies, a travel budget,
| good food at all times, and a will to divvy up all the
| wealth among their children.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| > How to convince people who are doing OK to consistently spend
| less than they earn?
|
| OR, rephrased
|
| How do you convince people who are doing OK to not increase
| prices so that other people's expenses won't exceed their
| incomes?
| bko wrote:
| > This tells me that having debt and no way to reliably pay it
| off is a really bad situation to be in.
|
| How do you get that from this model? In this model it's equally
| as likely to go from -50 to 50 as it is to go from 100 to 150.
|
| What I get from this model is there may be natural
| discrepancies in wealth not necessarily attributable to a
| systematic bias. It's what Taleb likes to call Mediocristan vs
| Extremistan. The tallest person won't be 100 times taller than
| the median person, but the richest person may be well over 100
| times richer than the median person.
|
| https://albertoguerrero.net/mediocristan-vs-extremistan/
| roenxi wrote:
| > In this model it's equally as likely to go from -50 to 50
| as it is to go from 100 to 150.
|
| It isn't. You can see that the distribution isn't symmetric,
| that the individual bars aren't random walks and the
| equations used are explained down below the graphs.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I think by definition it is, but people assume because it
| is, that means the distribution will be relatively sane.
|
| The whole problem is that it's just as likely to go from
| -50 to 50 as it is to go from 100 to 150, but this does NOT
| in any way change the fact that actors will exist within
| the system that end up at 1000 for no good reason, causing
| lots of other actors to be at -50 for no good reason.
|
| The fact that it's just as likely for one of 'em to
| randomly get lucky and start surging up to 1000, as it is
| for the actor at 1000 to go to 2000, is not the point.
| Point being, it's not about merit, it's about the automatic
| emergence of that distribution when it's not warranted and
| is in fact harmful.
|
| (assuming that the points being awarded in an economic
| model have anything to do with existence and the ability to
| function, create and innovate versus being stifled and
| unable to execute on ideas)
| t0bia_s wrote:
| "2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or
| won't save money?"
|
| Why save a money when they are worthless (inflation)?
| ginko wrote:
| Even without debt (i.e. if a person has no money for a round it
| won't give a dollar to anyone) the result is more or less the
| same: https://www.masswerk.at/misc/wealth/
| roenxi wrote:
| Yeah, that model is assuming everyone consistently spends
| about what they earn without people having a saving/spending
| personal drift. Which is cool enough, models can assume what
| they like.
|
| But that certainly isn't how people _should_ operate - if you
| spend what you earn, sooner or later a surprise will bankrupt
| you. Helpful tip: nobody should plan to get that outcome. It
| sucks. Save some money.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Of course! It's the Natural Distribution at work.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Death is natural too. As intelligent people, we're not only
| obliged but fascinated with the problem of overcoming
| harmful things in our environments.
|
| This distribution is without merit and counts as a harmful
| thing. I'm not sure why any intelligent person would be
| enthusiastic about it when by definition it represents
| nothing useful, and at worst damages potentially useful
| economic players for no benefit at all.
| caracustard wrote:
| 1. That's their personal choice. The only thing you could do is
| find them a financial advisor or tell them about investing.
| People change their financial attitudes when they understand
| that money can be used to make more money. 2. Analyze their
| spending and understand what skillset they have that would
| allow them to obtain either a higher paying job or become self-
| employed.
| SMAAART wrote:
| > 1. How to convince people who are doing OK to consistently
| spend less than they earn?
|
| I don't believe we can.
|
| Not sure under what premises we should, in a way we (society)
| already do, personal finance training is only a quick google
| search away. Free will has its price.
|
| > 2. How to deal with chronically indebted people who can't or
| won't save money?
|
| We (society) can offer tools, but then it's up to the
| individuals to use them, or not:
|
| * Bankruptcy
|
| * Personal Finance training that's only a quick Google search
| away.
|
| In both cases we need to thread carefully, Free Will and Agency
| are things that we (society) don't want to mess with.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > 1. How to convince people who are doing OK to consistently
| spend less than they earn?
|
| Rental prices increase to capture any excess income, on average
| you can't save money because the rental prices will increase to
| capture it all. One way to avoid this would be to take 10% in
| taxes and not allow access for X years, thus forcing everyone
| to save 10%, and thus allowing less money to be spent on rent.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Crime increases to capture any excess resources in the
| absence of functioning society, too.
|
| Generally, in a functioning society, price-fixing and
| collusion and extortion count as crime. I would say the
| distinction between this and collective rent fixing
| (coordinated, or as an epiphenomenon of the underlying system
| with self-interested rational actors) is pretty moot: society
| either decides to dictate the limits of this behavior, or it
| does not.
|
| The idea that exploding rent prices are inevitable and
| unquestionable is... well, it's an idea. One might contest
| the idea of building a functioning society on that
| assumption. Might consider that behavior being something in
| the way of criminal behavior, at least on the scale of petty
| larceny, if not something more serious.
| teekert wrote:
| There is an incentive against inequality: Fear of revolution,
| fear of crime, compassion (humanist) believes. There are also
| methods and apparently incentives to keep extracting even more
| money from the poor by influencing politics (lobbying).
|
| So I don't really see the usefulness of this incentives-less
| simulation, money never flows randomly. To me this does not
| really prove anything.
| imtringued wrote:
| The inequality also only exists on the distribution not per
| player, individual players constantly switch places.
| einpoklum wrote:
| That post describes a certain random process of wealth
| redistribution.
|
| It is not descriptive of social reality; and it is also not the
| desirable social reality. So, I don't quite see how it is useful.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| This is neat I guess, but 100% theoretical. Wealth distribution
| follows the Pareto Distribution, no matter what political system
| is enacted. As such it is only logical to minimize the the
| central authority and maximize upwards mobility as much as
| possible. Free market capitalism is the best system we have found
| to do just that.
| padjo wrote:
| Could someone explain like I'm 5 how a random process can lead to
| this sort of outcome?
| Applejinx wrote:
| There's a discontinuity having to do with how, as an actor in
| this sort of game, you can only give a dollar to one person at
| each step of the game, but by random chance ALL the other
| actors can give their dollar to you.
|
| There's also a discontinuity if you leave out the debt part,
| further aggravating the problem, but the bottom line is if it's
| random then you can have tons of people giving their dollar to
| one person for NO reason. And the person with all those dollars
| still (by the rules of the game) gives one dollar away each
| step.
|
| Pretty sure that's how it arises. Think of it as, the
| ultrawealthy actor is no different or better than the others,
| but they 'went viral'.
| padjo wrote:
| Thank you, that sort of makes sense to me but is so
| counterintuitive that I feel I'll have to do the simulation
| myself before I believe it!
| Applejinx wrote:
| Go ahead. It's a heck of a powerful insight to have, and
| indeed it is counterintuitive but makes sense once you
| understand how it works :)
| padjo wrote:
| 20 lines of JS later and yeah wow of course that's what
| happens!
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Random distribution [1] does not equal uniform / even
| distribution [2].
|
| I don't know how the system handles debt - but it appears to
| compound & exponentiate the inequality (which is true in
| reality).
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_distribution
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_uniform_distribu
| t....
| cycomanic wrote:
| There is a very interesting model for wealth distribution (the so
| called yard sale model). You can find a excellent article about
| it here [1]. Essentially with very basic assumptions you end up
| with a system that results in a phase transition, where after
| some point (or if you make small changes of the parameters)
| wealth just comes completely unequally distributed (an
| oligarchy).
|
| Someone implemented the simulation for this as well so you can
| play around with it here [2]. It is definitely very interesting
| and shows how essentially a small element of luck will result in
| a situation where a single person becomes the owner of all
| wealth.
|
| [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-
| ine...
|
| [2]
| http://www.physics.umd.edu/hep/drew/math_general/yard_sale.h...
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is a science fiction story about this: a man owns the
| whole planet, allows his fellow human beings to be there on
| sufferance until one day he has decided he's had enough of them
| and - very humanely of course - asks them to get lost.
|
| I forgot author/title.
| LiveTheDream wrote:
| For the Benefit of Mankind, by Cixin Liu?
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, much older than that and a short story I think.
| Probably either Asimov or Clarke.
| imgabe wrote:
| The only rational thing to is to work towards a post scarcity
| society.
|
| There will always be inequality of talent , of effort, what have
| you.
|
| If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it to
| ensure the availability of life's necessities so that anyone else
| with a similar inequality can provide the maximum benefit
| regardless of the circumstances they're born into.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 'Post-scarcity' on a finite planet with a growing population?
| The only way out of that is to go off-planet and that's not
| plausible anytime soon at any scale.
|
| The ultimate scarcity is the scarcity of arable land and raw
| materials to host a human population. Some of the major
| conflicts over the 20th century in this area have revolved
| around land reform and land ownership, whether it was breaking
| up feudal estates and redistributing land to peasants (Russian
| Revolution) or expansionist ideologies (Germany's 'Push to the
| East' for 'lebensraum', aka 'settler colonialism' which was
| also a feature in America's 'Manifest Destiny').
|
| The United States is again setting the stage for such conflicts
| with the majority of young people being priced out of the
| housing market. Homeownership rates shot up after FDR's New
| Deal reforms, and there was a brief peak in 2004 before a
| sustained collapse that showed some signs of recent recovery:
|
| https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state...
|
| It's fairly skewed by age and this increasing (probably high
| student loan debt being a major factor), i.e. homeowners are
| getting older and fewer young people are buying homes:
|
| https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...
| fartcannon wrote:
| Off-planet is a great goal.
|
| Also educated, healthy populations tend to have fewer kids.
| This isn't an overnight fix, but a long term goal. So the
| first move is to learn to share like the toddlers we are.
|
| It's not easy and we dont have a solution yet. Greed is
| fundamental.
| danuker wrote:
| > is to learn to share like the toddlers we are
|
| As in, taxation + inflation is not enough? We spend 27.9%
| through government (a "shared resource"). How much more
| should we disincentivize work?
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.XPN.TOTL.GD.ZS
| fartcannon wrote:
| Ah, well, as a non expert in the subject, the way you
| phrased the question made me think, 'as much as we can'.
| Probably makes sense to work on making it so that no one
| has to toil just to starve at the extreme end. And
| probably good to make it so people who haven't
| accidentally found wealth can try out ideas.
|
| I think it'll have to be phases. The first goal would be
| fewer musks/besos/gates etc and spread that wealth
| around.
|
| Eventually maybe we succeed in automating most of the
| menial work and let humans collective imagination drive
| the future.
|
| Greed though. That's our races great filter.
| freemint wrote:
| > 'Post-scarcity' on a finite planet with a growing
| population?
|
| All populations we have which come even close to the living
| standard a post scarcity world would have are below
| replacement level and the closer they come, to lower the
| amount of children. I wouldn't see why you would assume a
| growing population.
| mjamesaustin wrote:
| The housing market is a perfect example of illusory scarcity.
| There are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless
| people.
|
| Our economy favors real estate owners maximizing their profit
| from owning property, regardless of how inaccessible that
| makes housing to a large portion of the population.
| xwdv wrote:
| First we have to build a society where energy is cheap and
| abundant. Then everything else will follow.
| [deleted]
| feet wrote:
| We already have that, the scarcity is fake. Induced to increase
| profits, that's why the oil/gas companies refuse to increase
| production. They've literally been saying this recently on
| earnings calls. They could drill more but they won't, the
| administration has been granting more permits than the last.
| They could refine more of what they have but they refuse.
| Again, all clear as day stated in their earnings calls
|
| This is just one prominent example, another would be the huge
| amount of food waste produced by grocers and other retailers.
| bluGill wrote:
| Oil companies know EVs are coming. Investing in oil wells -
| which won't start producing for several years is a stupid
| investment that probably will not pay off. The only sane
| investment in oil is to milk previous investments all the way
| to zero.
|
| Of course there are non gasoline car uses for oil, and those
| are worth investing in, but there is much less of them.
| kortilla wrote:
| This explanation is dumb. If the oil investments looked like
| they would pay off, companies would be incentivized to expand
| way more and capture more profit.
|
| You're suggesting they are refusing to increase production
| out of greed, but the greedy move would be to expand drilling
| and refinement to capture more of the high margin volume.
| Preventing this defector behavior requires an explicit cartel
| (see OPEC), which is not legal in the US.
|
| So your explanation for why oil companies don't increase
| production is lacking.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Two years ago, oil was at $0. If the war in Ukraine ends, oil
| will likely go back to $40 or less. Larger projects take
| years to develop and long term prospects are dismal since we
| won't be using oil anymore. Can you really blame companies
| for being cautious?
| feet wrote:
| They have essentially tripled their profits at the expense
| of _everyone else_
|
| This is what unbridled capitalism and profit seeking gets
| us
| osigurdson wrote:
| Were you petitioning for government bailouts for the oil
| industry when oil was at $0?
| ericd wrote:
| It's not easy/quick to spin up production. The demand is
| somewhat inelastic, and they sell it to the highest
| bidder. Not sure what you want?
| feet wrote:
| Its purposeful, go listen to the calls
|
| They have production capacity already and they refuse to
| use it
| pc86 wrote:
| I haven't listened to the earnings calls but I seriously
| doubt the content boils down to "we could drill more and make
| more money, but... meh"
| feet wrote:
| Huh? No they make more money by restricting supply, that's
| what I'm saying.
|
| Not drilling and not refining let's them jack up prices
| while blaming inflation
| pc86 wrote:
| This doesn't make sense at the micro level though. You
| have (let's say) half a dozen oil companies all producing
| roughly x BBL for $y/BBL. What's to stop Company A, who
| has the means to do so already, from simply producing
| 1.1x BBL and keeping its price at $y?
|
| At a macro level yes, if everyone increases supply 10%
| you'll see some price fluctuation, but that doesn't
| necessarily hold for an individual, self-interested
| company. Hell, that company could produce 10% more but
| sell it for $y-0.05 and presumably make more money
| selling for cheaper.
| feet wrote:
| Have you listened to the earnings calls?
| cs137 wrote:
| Not only will there be inequality of talent (relative to
| whatever talents are valued at a given time, because that
| itself is in flux) but simulations like this show that random
| inequality is not an aberration, but inevitable.
|
| The more precisely realistic one is his geometric-variance
| model, in which some end up in massive debt while others end up
| very rich--a permanent division of society into
| landlords/bosses and peons. In theory, the state is supposed to
| prevent this through taxation and policy, but what we observe
| in capitalist countries is that the wealthy inevitably corrupt
| the state that is supposed to constrain them. The US is already
| at third-world levels of corruption and inequality, and the EU
| is only 20 years or so behind on this neoliberal roller coaster
| to nowhere.
|
| Capitalism promises equilibrium, but it diverges. The people in
| charge will always have the power and resources to see to it
| that (a) they stay in charge, and (b) the gains from economic
| growth go solely to them.
| caracustard wrote:
| Talent is inherently "inequal" as you can't put any sort of a
| restriction or a cap on the skills or abilities of an
| individual so i'm not sure what you're trying to say there.
|
| The results of the "precisely realistic" model (according to
| you) are not taking into account the self-employed members of
| society but are also attempting to create an artificial
| divide in the aformentioned society by labeling them
| ("peons"? seriously?). So much for your seemingly pro-
| equality message.
|
| What exactly is the state supposed to prevent? Employment of
| individuals by other individuals? The ability of an
| individual to OWN property rather than being at the states
| mercy? Free trade between members of society?
|
| "...the wealthy inevitably corrupt the state..." golly gee,
| so that's why all of those non-capitalist, anti-wealth
| utopias of the past are...gone?
|
| "The US is already at third-world levels of corruption and
| inequality..." except the American perception of corruption
| and inequality is "i earn 70k per year, i drive Hyundai, my
| boss earns 200k, he drives Mercedes, very bad!!!" which is
| different from say earning 3k per year, not having any access
| to quality financing services (which would allow you to start
| your OWN business) and on top of that not having a vehicle at
| all (which in many countries, especially the post-antiwealth-
| utopias is still a pipe dream for most).
|
| No it doesn't. Capitalism promises and provides the ability
| to convert your abilities, wealth and products of
| abilities/wealth/wealth+abilities as an individual or a group
| of individuals into monetary units which are then used as
| "fuel" for facilitating trade/services in the society.
|
| Also i find it ironic that your last sentence perfectly
| describes every communist state of the past: they stay in
| charge (one party system, transfer of power between the Party
| members), the gains from economic growth go solely to them
| (the state is the only employer and services/products
| provider and as a result the Party becomes the main
| benefactor from everyones labour while the people recieve
| mere scraps without any way establish any business of their
| own) and how it also ignores that regardless of the system in
| use taxation is still a thing with the only difference being
| the percentage of taxes taken.
|
| Perhaps it's time to stop trying to make false equialences of
| hierarchy and capitalism, considering that the latter allows
| you to minimize your dependency on any sort of a hierarchy?
| imtringued wrote:
| What? The simulation proves that inequality is an abberation
| because it assumes a permanent money model where capital
| never depreciates.
| vsareto wrote:
| >but simulations like this show that random inequality is not
| an aberration, but inevitable.
|
| At least some of this wealth is completely inherited (maybe
| even most of it). There's not a good mechanism to determine
| how much someone should inherit, but I bet wealth being
| limited to the lifetime of one person would certainly change
| the model and make it not-so-inevitable.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should use it
| to ensure the availability of life's necessities so that any
| else with a similar inequality can provide the maximum benefit
| regardless of the circumstances they're born into.
|
| Well let me be the devil's advocate here and ask why.
| drekipus wrote:
| > Well let me be the devil's advocate here and ask why.
|
| because there's civil unrest otherwise.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Ok, let's permit ourselves to think the unthinkable through
| to the conclusion rather than immediately withdraw: Why
| can't there just be civil unrest?
| imtringued wrote:
| Civil unrest is a market clearing mechanism.
|
| When you think about that, there is no way declared to be
| free markets are actually free.
| city17 wrote:
| This is an example where philosophical questions get
| detached from reality. While it can be an interesting
| thought experiment, intuitively you already know the
| answer, and if you would live through civil unrest
| yourself you would stop doubting that answer for sure.
| malnourish wrote:
| I would personally rather live in a safe society with
| happy and comfortable people, to the fullest extent
| possible.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| I would personally like to live in a society that
| glorifies violence, and promotes survival of the fittest.
| A society filled with suffering and strength.
|
| I'm playing devil's advocate, but indeed there are those
| who agree with that statement. Who gets to decide which
| is right?
| imtringued wrote:
| We routinely abandon that strategy because it is highly
| inefficient.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| collectively societies decide and create laws to that
| effect. Some societies have laws that include
| decapitation, severing limbs, and stoning. Others see
| this behavior as inhumane.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| This is a really good example of how devil's advocate
| strategies don't actually add to furthering or
| strengthening a discussion. Categorically they add
| friction to the conversation without providing a benefit.
| Arguments from DA-proponents only provides more evidence
| of this position.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Devils advocate strategies have nothing to do with the
| post you are responding to. That was just contrary
| assertions- which is just bad argumentation.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > I'm playing devil's advocate
|
| Maybe you saw another post?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I saw it. He's not actually playing devil's advocate,
| just using the name. It's like the People's Democratic
| Republic of Korea.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| If you come across a devil's advocate let me know. I've
| only seen the People's Democratic Republic of Devil's
| Advocation and the I Actually Believe This But I'm Too
| Afraid To Say It types.
| imgabe wrote:
| There can be. It is a thing that can possibly happen for
| sure.
|
| The question is why would you prefer there being civil
| unrest to there not being civil unrest?
|
| And if you prefer the latter why would you not exercise
| whatever power you have to realize your preference?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've seen this sentiment embodied like this: if you could
| choose the shape of the world that you will be born in,
| but not into what house you will be born then that's the
| world you should strive to create.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The devil has enough advocates. Is it really necessary to
| argue against the very idea of goodness itself?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Is it unambiguously good to forcibly take from someone to
| give to someone else merely because the first party has
| more than the second? That's an essential element of any
| wealth redistribution scheme that seeks to reduce
| inequality.
|
| If you imagine a scale from [0, 1] where 0 is no
| redistributive mechanisms at all and 1 is perfect, daily
| rebalancing to exact equality of outcome, it's fairly
| obvious to me that neither extreme of 0 nor 1 is "the
| very idea of goodness itself".
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Who says civil unrest is inherently bad?
|
| Civil unrest led to women's suffrage, racial equality,
| and countless other things that are indeed good. Good
| things sometimes come from bad situations.
|
| There's very little to support your argument that "Why
| can't there just be civil unrest?" is arguing against the
| idea of goodness itself.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I'm definitely not opposed to goodness, I'm just not
| convinced by this line of reasoning this is.
| leereeves wrote:
| If your only concern is self interest, you should
| consider what happens to the "elite" in a revolution.
|
| The phrase "civil unrest" is far too tame; it doesn't
| even begin to conjure the horrors that people are capable
| of when they get angry enough.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Isn't the angry mob also acting in self interest? If the
| well-being of others is what they actually care about,
| why can't they enjoy the well-being of the likes of
| Richard Branson?
|
| Anyway, if death is the price you have to pay for living
| a life true to yourself, in accordance with your values,
| in accordance with what you think is right and not what
| you think will appease some hypothetical angry mob, then
| so be it. Surely it's better to live a short life true to
| what you believe, than a slightly longer life lacking any
| sense of integrity.
| imtringued wrote:
| They can't enjoy the wellbeing of starvation.
| leereeves wrote:
| Yes, the angry mob is acting according to the values you
| espouse here. That's the natural consequence of pure self
| interest.
|
| And that's why pure self interest is something to be
| avoided even by people who only care about themselves.
|
| Some elites might imagine that they can remain on top
| forever, unaffected by the violence and oppression they
| inflict on others. History suggests otherwise.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Maybe it's supposed to be a cycle of elites climbing to
| the top and being overthrown. Maybe that's like the
| seasons, it just happens every few hundred years. Sucks
| for those involved, but that's what human societies do.
|
| We even had the cycle of elite-formation and power-
| accumulation into civil unrest and collapse happen in the
| Soviet union, which was literally engineered to prevent
| this exact thing from happening, complete with profound
| socialist indoctrination of the population. They weren't
| supposed to be self-interested, yet when it came down to
| it, they were.
|
| Overall I'm fairly skeptical toward the notion that
| societies can be designed at all, to a meaningful degree.
|
| What fundamentally shapes the human societies is human
| nature which is self-interested and largely immutable.
| You can try to force it, to artificially make societies
| that contradict human nature through the imposition of
| rules, but that's if anything even more volatile, because
| that makes all their citizens unhappy, like animals in a
| zoo.
| leereeves wrote:
| Well, I think you've found the answer to your original
| question: why not ignore inequality?
|
| As you said: the "cycle of elites climbing to the top and
| being overthrown...sucks for those involved".
|
| Having acknowledged that it sucks, why not try to improve
| it?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've seen no credible evidence it can be improved, all
| attempts at doing so, and we've been at this for over a
| hundred years now, all attempts at doing so have sucked
| for those involved, in a real dystopian boot-stomping-on-
| face-forever sort of a way.
|
| The problem is that while you can convince someone
| briefly that your new utopia is a good idea, as the years
| go by, people start having other ideas, they start
| wanting things. Self-interest never really went away. So
| you need to stop them from thinking wrong and wanting the
| wrong things and having the wrong ideas, and the only way
| to do that is through oppressive totalitarianism.
|
| Human institutions ossify and start to serve the ends of
| their own power accumulation, no matter how noble their
| initial ideals and goals were.
| leereeves wrote:
| The original proposal wasn't "we should enforce a
| socialist utopia", it was:
|
| > If you have the benefit of this inequality, you should
| use it to ensure the availability of life's necessities
|
| That's an individual decision, not an oppressive
| dystopian institution.
|
| In fact, one way we could start working on reducing
| inequality is to reduce the oppressive dystopian elements
| of our current institutions.
|
| And toward that end, we should note that any elite
| privileges you may enjoy ultimately rest on the ability
| to call on the government to use force on your behalf.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| From my point of view (which likely differs from
| marzinalia_nu's) the question isn't really about why _we_
| think it matters and more about why the people holding
| the vast majority of money should care about it.
|
| My personal worldview is quiet bleak and I'm very glad to
| already be in the middle of my thirties, because I
| struggle to find a reason which would matter to _them_.
|
| I don't think there is any chance we'll avoid mass murder
| on the average people at this point, and I doubt the
| average software developer will escape unharmed either
| long term. Hopefully after I'm dead though.
| stavros wrote:
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| o rly? Should I notify the police that you've just made a
| death thread? I'm not sure _why_ you think such an
| escalation was necessary from that comment.
| stavros wrote:
| I'm pointing out that if you're hoping for stuff to
| happen after you die, you can kill yourself before it
| happens. I don't see why you think I was making a death
| threat, but feel free to notify anyone you like.
| yourgranny wrote:
| I'll assume if you had experience in a country with a
| significant amount of civil unrest, these "thought"
| experiments wouldn't be necessary.
| imgabe wrote:
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > To continue the proliferation of humanity and life in
| general throughout the universe. To oppose entropy.
|
| Right, but I'm a human being, I am not humanity itself.
| Humanity is just an idea, it has no agency or conscience.
| It cannot suffer, it does not want.
|
| As a human being, my primary responsibility is toward
| myself, to make myself happy, and to arrange the world
| according to the principles that resonate with my soul.
|
| Toiling to make other people happy at my own expense
| doesn't make me happy. Even if that was the way it worked,
| surely the best action would be to line up to work at an
| Amazon warehouse and bask in opportunity to contribute to
| the incandescence of Jeff Bezos' prosperity.
|
| > If that is not appealing to you, you should probably off
| yourself right now.
|
| I don't really see how that follows. I'll die regardless
| whether it's by my own hands right now or at the hands of
| external circumstance some years later.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| > to arrange the world according to the principles that
| resonate with my soul.
|
| What are the principles that resonate with your soul?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I can't list them, but I can try to explain through
| examples.
|
| There are certain vile things that when you see them or
| even think about them you shudder to the very foundation.
| It may be murder, rape, kidnapping, grievous torture,
| helplessness, and so forth. Nobody needs to be told this
| is not the way things should be.
|
| On the other hand, there are other things, when you see
| them, they bring you a sense that the world is as it
| should be. It may be things that are awesome, beautiful,
| or sublime. It may be good craftsmanship, self-
| sufficiency, human flourishing. It may be small things or
| large things.
|
| The former are such things I do not want to exist in the
| world, and the latter are such things I want to exist in
| the world.
| imgabe wrote:
| > On the other hand, there are other things, when you see
| them, they bring you a sense that the world is as it
| should be. It may be things that are awesome, beautiful,
| or sublime. It may be good craftsmanship, self-
| sufficiency, human flourishing. It may be small things or
| large things.
|
| Sounds good to me. Why not exercise whatever talents you
| have to encourage and promote such things?
| harry8 wrote:
| This is a terrible comment, unworthy of being said here.
| Maybe consider hitting the edit button and express the
| thought in a less vile way?
|
| If you disagree with me you should definitely continue to
| decide to live.
| imgabe wrote:
| If you are opposed to life, why continue to live?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If you truly are opposed to life, surely the best action
| is to stay alive so you can oppose it better than you can
| if you are dead. If you are dead, you can do nothing to
| oppose it.
| imgabe wrote:
| So you're commenting here to advocate on behalf of mass
| murderers?
| shuger wrote:
| Entropy cannot be opposed. That's fundamental law of
| physics.
| fny wrote:
| Sure it can, I decrease entropy locally and reallocate it
| somewhere else. Space is huge and it will take a long
| time to approach the limit.
| jacquesm wrote:
| In the long term. But in the short term there are plenty
| of loopholes, according to those laws of physics.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| You literally opposed entropy by writing this comment.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Entropy wins universally. Locally, lots of processes are
| anti-entropic. Look at a leaf.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Why not?
|
| Is there any compelling reason not to make the life of other
| people better? Is there any reason we should leave people
| work countless hours, suffer, and likely dying due to
| diseases that manifest out of stress (e.g. cancer)?
|
| Imagine for a moment a society such that there's no need for
| the proles to steal or hurt people. Criminality drops to near
| zero, world is safer, we all get to thrive.
|
| Edit:
|
| Kind reminder to argue for the position instead of downvoting
| out of disagreement.
| whiddershins wrote:
| The picture of humanity you give here isn't fact based.
|
| At least in the United States:
|
| No one 'has to' crime. People commit crime primarily
| because they have poor impulse control and lack long term
| thinking.
|
| Or because they just really don't like school and don't
| like working a job, and don't have any other ideas.
|
| We aren't living in medieval France where peasants are
| stealing loaves of bread. People aren't committing crimes
| _because_ they are poor. Lots of incredibly poor people
| commit no crime at all. Statistically it is a small subset
| of people.
| [deleted]
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Argue that free will exists, and provide some citations.
| pc86 wrote:
| Ignoring the obviously ridiculous implication that stress
| causes cancer[0], there can certainly be enough instances
| where making someone else's life better makes yours worse,
| at least enough that it's completely reasonable to just
| pause for a moment and ask "why," expected a better answer
| than "why not"
|
| [0] https://www.cancer.gov/about-
| cancer/coping/feelings/stress-f...
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > there can certainly be enough instances where making
| someone else's life better makes yours worse
|
| And myriads of instances where helping others makes your
| life better. In-fact, not to help other people is
| unequivocally a horrible and myopic decision. For
| starters, we need exponential number of scientists to
| keep making linear progress. Furthermore, paying taxes
| which are used to fund education results in lower
| criminality [1]. Furthermore, we have that investing in
| education can give back a 5x ROI [2].
|
| [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4901649_The_
| Effect_...
|
| [2] https://about.ku.dk/facts-figures/value-for-society/
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Maybe not cancer, but ....
|
| > For example, it is now generally acknowledged that for
| heart disease--the nation's leading cause of death--
| emotional stress is a major risk factor, equal in
| importance to other such recognized risk factors as
| hypertension, cigarette smoking, elevated serum
| cholesterol level, obesity, and diabetes. Stress also has
| been recognized as an important risk factor in high blood
| pressure, ulcers, colitis, asthma, pain syndromes (e.g.,
| migraine, cluster, and tension headaches; backaches),
| skin diseases, insomnia, and various psychological
| disorders. Most standard medical textbooks attribute
| anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of all disease to stress-
| related origins.
|
| https://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-
| stress/s...
| grey-area wrote:
| Life is not a zero sum game. if you insist on treating it
| like one, you will lose.
| pc86 wrote:
| Platitudes aside, I'm not suggesting it is, and I'm not
| treating it like it is. I'm simply saying "why" is a
| reasonable question and "yeah well why _not_ " isn't.
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| One concrete disadvantage of _extreme_ inequality,
| specifically in a democracy like the US, is the erosion of
| your rights when they are inconvenient for those with more
| wealth/soft-power than you. When wealth inequality is
| significant, governments decide it's better to address the
| needs of a much smaller set of constituents and your rights
| become curtailed, implicitly or not, as a result. Unless you,
| personally, are an oligarch, you will be negatively impacted.
| This may manifest as minimally as living in a society that is
| worse than it could be.
|
| Separately, speaking as someone that spends a lot of time
| with optimizers, it seems silly to not have _some_ form of
| regularization. That doesn't mean zero inequality (that
| doesn't seem good either) but we should be wary of unchecked
| inequality.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Technology and innovation are also much more interesting that
| squabbling about government policy and income redistribution
| schemes. Let's find ways to drive costs to zero so everyone on
| the planet (to the greatest extent possible) can live like
| today's billionaires without causing any damage to the
| environment.
| dbingham wrote:
| Nothing happens with out squabbling about government policy.
| Government policy literally defines the rules of the market.
| It is government policy that allows investors to ask for
| equity ownership. Government policy defines the legal shapes
| organizations and business can take. Government policy
| defines the very existence of property (personal and
| otherwise).
|
| You cannot remove government policy from the equation. It's
| like trying to solve a problem with code while removing the
| computer. The code runs on the computer, with out it, it's
| meaningless.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| While I agree with your point to a degree, I think you are
| taking it to an extreme. Government policy may lay ground
| rules, like private property, but 99% of any given
| agreement, like equity for cash, is precedence and
| preference, not legislative decision.
|
| The government could stop passing any new laws and things
| would chug along fine for quite a while. I think that was
| the parent's point. We don't need anything new out g
| Washington, as driving prices to 0 is already pretty
| strongly incentivized.
| dbingham wrote:
| Driving prices to 0 is not incentivized at all, in fact
| quite the opposite. The current system incentivizes
| driving prices as high as humanly possible in order to
| allow the investors to take get as much of a return as
| they can.
|
| That's part of what's driving inflation. And that's what
| inevitably happens when sectors consolidate towards
| monopoly or small enough oligopolies where company's
| convergent interests can align and they start competing
| on things other than price.
|
| This is part of what we see driving current inflation.
| There's a lot of talk about how the labor market is
| driving inflation, or pandemic shocks are, and both of
| those are true. But corporate profits are still at record
| highs and rising. If supply shocks and labor prices were
| truly the main driver, then corporate profits should be
| near zero. They're not. Companies are taking advantage of
| the fact that inflation is already going up and that they
| have convenient scapegoats to raise their prices far more
| than they need to in order to cover labor increases or
| increase supply. There are reports of executives bragging
| about this to their boards. [1]
|
| Edit: To follow up, these ideas that the Capitalist free
| market system and competition incentivize innovation
| aren't actually founded in empirical research of any
| kind. It's pure theorizing and it's theorizing based on a
| house of cards of bad assumptions.
|
| One can zoom out and look at history and see that the
| standard of living for people has steadily increased, and
| humans have steadily innovated. But there's no empirical
| evidence to support the idea that it's a capitalist free
| market driving those advances.
|
| Yes they advanced further in free societies, most of
| which have up until now employed some version of a
| Capitalist free market linked to more or less social
| democracy. But you could just as readily theorize that
| those advances are just down to an innate desire in
| people to make the world a better place for everyone, an
| innate desire to innovate. And that authoritarian
| societies squash their opportunities to do so, while
| freer societies leave enough opportunities open that they
| enable them. But they don't necessarily add incentives
| for that innovation in addition to the innate incentives.
|
| [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/big-companies-keep-
| bragging-...
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > Driving prices to 0 is not incentivized at all, in fact
| quite the opposite. The current system incentivizes
| driving prices as high as humanly possible in order to
| allow the investors to take get as much of a return as
| they can.
|
| The two are actually not mutually exclusive. Each node in
| the market tried to push their own costs to 0 and their
| own prices to INF. The net effect is what matters, and in
| a competitive market the net is to move toward 0.
|
| Software is a great example. Tons of money pours into it
| specifically because products can be provided with near 0
| marginal cost.
|
| > To follow up, these ideas that the Capitalist free
| market system and competition incentivize innovation
| aren't actually founded in empirical research of any
| kind. It's pure theorizing and it's theorizing based on a
| house of cards of bad assumptions
|
| If you ignore the largest most comprehensive experiment
| on the planet, the global market, then sure. Markets with
| stable, enforceable, property laws do better than any
| other setup.
| osigurdson wrote:
| As long as government policy is focused on everyone living
| like the ultra-rich, sure. I'd like to see the average
| citizen of Burundi with their own private, zero emission
| jet which can be constructed from stuff lying around on the
| ground and powered by free solar energy. It's merely re-
| arranging atoms after all. Let's get better at re-arranging
| atoms.
| geysersam wrote:
| More interesting perhaps, but less effective. To get most
| benefit from our technical sophistication we need democratic
| decision making.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The interesting thing is that we were effectively there 50
| years ago: were (the rich West) were living like the kings of
| yesteryear (or even better in many cases). But we didn't
| exactly stop wanting stuff and further improvements, hedonic
| adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter what our
| position we will always want more so how this could happen
| without damage to the environment is a mystery to me. The
| environment doesn't vote, it doesn't lobby and every
| institution that claims to do that is first and foremost in
| the business of keeping itself alive.
| carapace wrote:
| Vaclav Smil says something like "Would it be so bad, going
| back to a 1960's level of energy consumption?" in the
| context of energy usages (and therefore roughly CO2
| emissions) of Western and particularly American lifestyles.
| (I'm paraphrasing: Vaclav Smil at Driva Climate Investment
| Meeting 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk )
|
| > hedonic adaptation pretty much guarantees that no matter
| what our position we will always want more
|
| There's an Indian holy man, now deceased, who said we need
| to learn to practice "ceiling on desires". It may be that
| only the expression of our higher values can clear this
| logjam?
|
| > so how this could happen without damage to the
| environment
|
| One thought that occurs to me is if we could create a kind
| of split-level economy. There would be a real-world
| ecologically-informed economy that met basic needs as
| efficiently as possible. On top of that substrate we would
| have a computer-mediated virtual economy where there were
| no (or very few) effective limits on hedonistic adaptation
| (or status-symbol seeking, or whatever). It seems like
| we're seeing something like that emerge "naturally" anyway,
| eh? NFT & "crypto", in-game purchases, whatever FB's
| metaverse becomes, etc.
|
| Eventually, people might submit voluntarily to enter "the
| Matrix": your physical body kept perfectly safe, and the
| only limits are your imagination? Not my cup of tea, but
| not insane on the face of it, eh?
| kbutler wrote:
| 50 years ago, half the population of the world lived in
| extreme poverty. This percentage and the total number of
| people in extreme poverty have made extreme declines since
| that time. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
|
| This is one of the great achievements of humankind, and
| while we have much more to do, it's good to recognize the
| progress we've made.
|
| And while I'm also skeptical about the amount of resources
| organizations use to maintain themselves, any organization
| or organism or community that does not have a primary goal
| of keeping itself alive will in short order cease to exist.
| If you think your organization has a long-term beneficial
| purpose, you better design it to be self-sustaining, and
| with a large margin of safety.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Strictly speaking, there will always be scarcity, since some
| things are inherently scarce. Some examples: front row tickets
| to a show, beachfront property, Friday dinner reservations at a
| popular restaurant, original pieces of art from a famous
| artist, sessions with a renowned therapist.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| Post scarcity society? I'm just going to say it because there
| is no point in beating around the bush. You are not living in
| reality. In reality the laws of physics dictate that such
| juvenile marvel universe type fantasy of a "post scarcity
| society" simply cannot exist in general.
|
| Even if you wanted to create it on a limited/bounded small
| scale, basically everything people with this type of mindset
| are doing and supporting, directly sabotages any ability to
| ever achieve it. For example; you cannot have "post scarcity",
| while increasing the demand on resources through immigration on
| a local level or in general through exponential population
| growth like in basically all non-European regions of the world.
|
| In broad strokes, Europe and especially the USA were not only
| "post scarcity societies" up until about 1970, but negative
| scarcity societies, producing excess of their needs and
| spreading that across the globe altruistically.
|
| It is precisely that negative scarcity state that elevated
| every other people of the world for so long; be it by feeding,
| sharing technology and knowledge, providing medical care,
| education, etc. to the whole of the non-European world.
| Essentially nothing we currently benefit from and enjoy in the
| whole world is not the product of Europeans that had produced a
| post and negative scarcity world by various means. Look around
| you, not a single thing you use and benefits you was not
| produced by some Europeans.
|
| That process has been poisoned, the micro-dosing of poison
| starting in about the turn of the 19th century in the USA, as
| groups started sabotaging, betraying, exploiting, usurping, and
| undermining the system of negative scarcity.
|
| I think there is some confusion that people are suffering from.
| We are not moving towards less scarcity, we are moving directly
| towards increased scarcity; largely precisely because of the
| confusion and distorted perspective you are looking at things
| from. You confused the short time scale view of the leveling
| curve as positive, when in reality it was becoming ever more
| negative and we are now approaching or at the turning
| point/apex.
|
| To illustrate; the whole world's population in 1850 was the
| same as is projected for Nigeria lone by 2100 that has a
| supposed population of 218M, which is currently increasing at
| about 9M per year, or about 20 more people if it took you 1
| minute to read this far. And that's just one country of Africa,
| who's overall population is expected to increase by 1.5 Billion
| by 2050, or about 100 people by the time you read this far.
| Tonight, if you watch a movie for roughly 90 minutes, by the
| end of it, there will be 9,000 more people in Africa than when
| you started the movie. Is the world, let alone Africa producing
| just alone enough food to feed 9,000 more people all their life
| by the end of the movie you watched? I don't know, but it seems
| unlikely. Let's ask the billionaires who want you to eat bugs
| so they can continue eating beef.
|
| Ironically, that is largely due to the "post scarcity society"
| that the USA and Europe had produced, largely due to the
| generosity and incentives destroying principle of "post
| scarcity society", aka utopian fantasy.
|
| A grain silo is also a "post scarcity society" for mice, until
| the population explodes, they ruin the grain, and the
| population collapses amidst either a massive die off or a surge
| of mice that scour the countryside and spread the devastation.
|
| Scarcity is generally a good thing, it forces prioritization
| and self-regulation. We are today seeing the effects of "post
| scarcity" in rather real terms as inflation eats through our
| economies due to "post scarcity" caused by currency printing
| that is deflection of realty at best and fraud at worst. The
| laws of physics remain in effect all throughout though.
| imtringued wrote:
| Ok but the Fed must "print" money in proportion to people
| "deprinting" money, otherwise the division of labor collapses
| and your losses will exceed those incurred by the
| depreciation of stockpiled capital.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We live in a post-scarcity society now. We've just invented
| artificial scarcity to keep our current economic and social
| structures going.
|
| For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire world,
| but some people still go hungry. There is plenty of land and
| buildings to house everyone, but some people are still
| homeless. There is far more than enough clothes, but some
| people still have to wear rags.
|
| I don't have the answer. But I know there's more to it than
| technology and innovation. Because those have already given us
| what we need, in many cases. But we have so far failed to
| leverage them fully.
| chii wrote:
| > We live in a post-scarcity society now.
|
| people say that, but it's not true.
|
| We barely have enough to launch stuff into space. There's
| plenty of limits of resources, and are hard to obtain (e.g.,
| rare earth metals, fossil fuels, etc).
|
| Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food
| production such that some people are looking at starvation -
| of course, not in the western countries, but that's not what
| a post-scarcity society looks like.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Thank you. OP statement is at odds with basic facts. We
| have nothing like the technology from Star Trek that allows
| for easy generation of goods or even Transmetropolitan. We
| have some level of current population satisfied, but even
| that is at a pretty high cost.
|
| I genuinely do not understand how people can claim 'post
| scarcity' ( unlimited ) access to resources on a, clearly,
| very limited resource that is Earth.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Very simply, "post scarcity" does not mean unlimited
| availability of everything.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| That feels like a redefinition or at least like a huge
| asterisk is being added. If you need a term to mean "only
| the basics are covered" you could do better. Post
| scarcity naturally implies no limits even if your
| semantics differ.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > Even a small shortage of fertilizers will reduce food
| production such that some people are looking at starvation
|
| This is only because we pretend that the free market can
| solve these kinds of problems. If it weren't for supply
| chains that optimize in cost efficiency and nothing else,
| these sort of problems don't necessarily have to exist.
| willcipriano wrote:
| It's kinda true, it's just a monkey's paw, careful what you
| wish for sort of way.
|
| We could absolutely give everyone on earth the median
| standard of living. If we divided everything up equally
| (84.71 trillion [global GDP] / 7.753 billion [world
| population]) we are talking about something like 11 grand
| per person, per year, total overall spending. That's
| housing, food, healthcare, fire, police, roads, schooling,
| etc.
|
| For most people on earth that would be a big raise[0],
| although virtually everyone in the west would be
| dramatically poorer.
|
| [0]https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-
| low-inc...
| einpoklum wrote:
| Just remember that divvying up money doesn't have the
| effect of ensuring a decent standard of living. If you go
| to some person living in a slum of some under-developed
| city in an under-developed country, and you gave them 11K
| USD, they would be able to buy some consumption goods,
| rennovate their apartment etc. - but they would not be
| able to buy decent education for their children (let
| alone themselves); nor decent health care services (they
| would be able to afford a few visits to an overpriced
| doctor); etc.
| willcipriano wrote:
| 11k probably isn't enough to provide much by way of
| public health or education anyway once you buy all the
| essentials, I was just making the point that the number
| includes government spending so if you increase that you
| lower the amount of income each person will get.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Also, giving one person 11k is very different from giving
| everyone 11k.
| II2II wrote:
| Post scarcity should not imply that people live in material
| luxury. It should mean that people have their fundamental
| needs met, both materially and psycologically (e.g. having
| enough food is insufficient if there is no food security,
| say due to droughts).
|
| People can still lead a good life by focussing upon social
| rather than material facets. We do not need communications
| networks to socialize, nor do we need overpowered silicon
| chips to entertain. This is not to dismiss the positive
| roles of those technologies. Better communications and
| computation certainly help in everything from agriculture
| to medicine. It is just that using them as a proxy in
| applications where they do not contribute to human welfare
| can be tremendously counterproductive. The same thing can
| be said for space exploration, perhaps even more
| assertively since it is a huge drain of resources with a
| disproportionately isolated gain.
| geysersam wrote:
| Not being able to send things into space is _not_ scarcity.
| Food, education, transportation, housing, healthcare, life
| 's necessities.
| chii wrote:
| if you were able to send things into space (which should
| be easy to achieve for such a society), then it's
| evidence we're in a post-scarcity society.
|
| By the lack of being able to send much to space, we must
| not currently be in a post-scarcity society, because
| space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to
| do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get
| accomplished by a post-scarcity society.
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| That isn't what post-scarcity means. It doesn't mean
| there is zero scarcity. It means basic needs are easily
| met: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
|
| You're making claims about how space things align with
| post-scarcity that doesn't match up with the accepted
| meaning.
|
| Even still, we _can_ send stuff into space, now cheaper
| than ever. What is the threshold for "send much to
| space"? Any person can order up a rocket payload on
| Amazon.space and have it placed in orbit? That doesn't
| sound good even if it were free. Especially if it were
| free...
|
| > space exploration is such a good and exciting thing to
| do, you'd expect that it's one of the first things to get
| accomplished by a post-scarcity society
|
| Why?
| qez wrote:
| > Not being able to send things into space is not
| scarcity.
|
| Strictly speaking, this is false.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| We went from being 95% farmers to 2% farmers. Meeting our
| physical needs used to be hard. Now it's easy.
|
| Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up,
| because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we
| can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the
| problems down the social pyramid. When the system
| experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid
| and crunches the people at the bottom.
|
| We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what
| post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out
| how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the
| ability to change the system, the more incentives they have
| to not change the system.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| You forget that those 2% of farmers are now supported by
| the entire bulk of an industrial economy. The work hasn't
| disappeared, it's just moved to other sectors like
| tractor and fertilizer production, genetic research, the
| petroleum industry, shipping networks, refrigeration and
| all the other things that make it possible to produce so
| much food with a small number of farmers. Until we
| automate all of that we're no where near post scarcity.
| imtringued wrote:
| Profit implies scarcity. Hence once you have abundance people
| come up with the broken window fallacy, because nobody has
| figured how to reduce the return on capital to something a
| saturated economy can support.
| carapace wrote:
| > We live in a post-scarcity society now.
|
| This.
|
| I repeat this over and over again, so sincere apologies to
| those who are tired of it, I'm a Bucky Fuller fan boy. He was
| an engineer who had a kind of epiphany one day, and he
| realized that he could maximize the benefit for humanity of
| his personal skills and talents if he did his best to work on
| behalf of all humanity. He went on to invent things like the
| geodesic dome, and was one of the most famous Americans world
| wide in his time. He traveled around the world something like
| eighty times (not eighty days, eighty times.)
|
| Anyway, he calculated (remember he was an engineer) that _if_
| we applied our technology and resources efficiently to
| solving our basic human needs (the lower tiers of Maslow 's
| pyramid, eh?) then by sometime in the 1970's it should be
| possible that people could have careers of only two years
| duration and then retire, having accrued enough wealth to
| live "happily ever after" for the rest of their lives.
|
| > ...there's more to it than technology and innovation.
| Because those have already given us what we need, in many
| cases. But we have so far failed to leverage them fully.
|
| Yes. The technology arrived right on schedule, but the
| (relatively simple) logistical arrangements have not yet
| materialized.
|
| This seems to me to be a straightforward social/political
| movement. But it seemed that way back in the 60's with
| Bucky's "Design Science Revolution" as he called it, yet here
| we are.
|
| So, yeah, we have all the technology we need, we just have to
| organize and apply it efficiently and everybody on Earth
| could have food, shelter, clothes, energy, etc. Not only
| that, but we could do it in ecologically harmonious ways so
| that we're increasing the healthy and vitality of the world
| rather than grinding it down (as most of our systems do
| today.)
|
| It would be fun and easy.
|
| I have no idea why it's not more popular.
| ryandrake wrote:
| To quote the man:
|
| "We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that
| everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one
| in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough
| capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are
| absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a
| living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea
| that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery
| because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must
| justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of
| inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to
| inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be
| to go back to school and think about whatever it was they
| were thinking about before somebody came along and told
| them they had to earn a living."
| danuker wrote:
| Land will always be scarce. People multiply until that land
| gets to the limit of what it can provide.
|
| Energy is also scarce. A limited amount of solar energy falls
| on the Earth, and if you need more than that, it gets very
| expensive (from space somehow).
|
| Food is limited by labor (which scales with people) but also
| by energy and land (which do not).
|
| As such, there will always be scarcity, signalled through
| prices. One way of making resources more abundant per person
| is capping/reducing population.
| qez wrote:
| I don't think solar energy is the only type of energy. And
| if you are at "we are running out of square meters of land
| to put solar panels on", space might actually be viable at
| that level of advancement.
|
| Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any
| more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it
| will always require labor at all.
|
| Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have
| an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily
| saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably
| zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.
| zdragnar wrote:
| It's the only type of renewable energy. All other
| renewable energies depend on the heat from the sun to
| work. The earth's core doesn't generate enough to fully
| satisfy our current needs, there's a finite quantity of
| uranium, plutonium, coal, oil, etc.
|
| Of course, all of this is on a scale well beyond what we
| need to (currently) be concerned with- we don't have the
| technology to fully utilize what we have to fully
| eliminate scarcity in the first place.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > People multiply until that land gets to the limit of what
| it can provide.
|
| One of the big things we learned during the 20th Century is
| that this is not true. As basic needs are met, and people
| (especially women) are educated and socially empowered,
| population growth slows regardless of how much land is
| available.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Also, as the danger shrinks. It's similar to, but not the
| same as, basic needs being met. But as medicine reduces
| the need to have 17 kids to have one survive to
| adulthood, people have fewer kids.
| gfaster wrote:
| Another way to make resources more abundant that sounds
| less like the start of a 1960s dystopian novel is simply
| using resources more efficiently.
|
| So much of society in western nations and especially the US
| is seemingly optimized to be as wasteful as possible. We
| live in mansions surrounded by unused land so we have to
| drive our personal gas-burning suit of armor everywhere,
| and then we store it in fields of asphalt at our
| destination. We put resources subsidizing foods that no one
| will eat, and then ship them to people in ways that
| maximize the labor to goods transported ratio.
|
| In the US at least, there really just isn't much motivation
| to be more efficient because the past couple of generations
| have been raised on perpetual abundance.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It's a bit dystopian (if not wrong) to say that people
| will multiply until land is scarce, but to a large extent
| the problem is that cows and cars have multiplied until
| land is scarce. Removing/reducing those woudl go a long
| ways.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Cows are not making land scarce and cars could be said to
| increase the supply of land because they allow you to
| access more of it.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Cars are one of many ways to increase land supply and
| probably the least resource and fiscally efficient way to
| do it. If we want to make mobility and housing cheaper
| then we need to make these both more efficient. Car
| dependency is expensive, but changing it is one of the
| many things we need to do before we can become a post-
| scarcity society.
| freemint wrote:
| Space habitats are not really land limited. Yes our sun has
| a finite amount of power but by the time we use percent of
| it we can colonize other stars. Labour can be automated.
| Plants are not growing more complicated with time so at
| some point robotics can handle it.
| samatman wrote:
| Land, sure, they aren't making more of it.
|
| Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of
| travel for people who have been in an airplane one time,
| and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations.
|
| Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to
| split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and
| lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well.
| That's not scarce energy.
|
| It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.
| kortilla wrote:
| > Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of
| travel for people who have been in an airplane one time,
| and I've done the equivalent of several
| circumnavigations.
|
| This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just
| once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If
| you've done several circumnavigations you're outside of
| the category of flying once or twice for major life
| events which puts you in the top 1%.
|
| > Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget
| to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and
| lately they can have a small solar panel and light as
| well. That's not scarce energy
|
| This is a really uninformed view of the energy
| requirements to sustain human life. Transportation,
| getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this.
| Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.
| samatman wrote:
| It's not the energy to run a cell phone. It's the
| embodied energy of a cell phone and solar panel. It's the
| 20 kilo bags of grain which come off the boat in Egypt
| from Alberta. It's the cell towers, it's the bulk shipper
| which brings the grain, it's the container which
| transports the cell phones and panels.
|
| A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world
| in dozens of passenger jets _several times_ just in the
| course of living has an enormous amount of available
| energy relative to any time in history. If this is
| scarce, we don 't have a word for what it was like
| before.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Related on HN this week:
|
| > A lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31834627
| imtringued wrote:
| The existence of negative interest rates empirically
| disproves that there will always be scarcity.
|
| After all, a zero percent interest rate implies the non
| scarcity of capital.
| api wrote:
| The only people who live in an _almost_ post-scarcity society
| are people living in rich regions of rich countries. Most of
| humanity is nowhere near there.
| sahila wrote:
| I think OPs point is that we could be living be a "post-
| scarcity" world today if we simply distributed existing
| resources equitably to everyone.
|
| The problem isn't we haven't solved how to make enough food
| to feed everyone, it's that it's not profitable to feed
| those that can't pay for it.
| danenania wrote:
| "...if we simply distributed existing resources equitably
| to everyone"
|
| There's nothing simple about distribution. It's at least
| as hard as producing stuff in the first place.
|
| Solving distribution in a way that is both fair and
| economically sustainable has also proved to be extremely
| hard--much harder than just producing enough.
|
| Despite the moral problems inherent to market-based
| pricing (the poor go to the back of the line), all the
| alternatives we've tried so far have led to far worse
| results.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| >For example there is plenty of food to feed the entire
| world, but some people still go hungry.
|
| This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere is
| not the same thing as growing enough food, on the aggregate,
| to be able to feed everyone. That's not even half of it.
| Distribution and logistics are key, particularly making it
| robust to all sorts of shocks (droughts, conflict, etc). A
| lot of areas experiencing famine/hunger are places with very
| bad governance and infrastructure. Fixing that is Hard and
| Expensive, and once you do they'll never go hungry again
| because existing food available for sale elsewhere in the
| world will make its way there, either always or when needed.
|
| >I don't have the answer. But I know there's more to it than
| technology and innovation.
|
| The answer is in _social_ innovation, and half the issue is
| letting go of ideological baggage. Socialists need to stop
| having pavlovian responses to the word 'capitalism' and
| 'markets', and economic liberals need to stop treating
| markets as a sacred cow and instead think of them as one tool
| in a toolbox. Most importantly, we need _way_ more
| experimentation.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Socialists need to stop having pavlovian responses to the
| word 'capitalism' and 'markets', and economic liberals need
| to stop treating markets as a sacred cow and instead think
| of them as one tool in a toolbox.
|
| Suppose I were to suggest that we think of Feudalism as a
| tool in the box, or Slavery/Forced labor. Some economies
| used to be run like that. And nobody said you have to use
| that "tool". The thing is - it's not really a tool, which
| "we" can collectively apply towards reaching accepted
| social ends. And neither is Capitalism.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| By that measure then neither is socialism due to the
| massive harm it has caused throughout history. So I guess
| we have no tools.
|
| I hate how people push centralized government and
| economies without a single shred of evidence that they
| have ever produced anything other than misery.
| imtringued wrote:
| >So I guess we have no tools.
|
| What kind of nonsense is that? We already have the tools,
| land value taxes and negative interest rates aka
| demurrage money.
|
| The solutions are trivial, and that is exactly why curing
| the symptoms can be nothing but complex.
|
| Demurrage money results in the neutrality of money and
| thereby activates a lot of economic theories that free
| market advocates take for granted when there is endless
| evidence that they don't work in a permanent money aka
| non neutral money system.
|
| Full employment is the default in a market economy, there
| is no such thing as a business cycle. It is only once you
| add non neutral money with the artificial zero lower
| bound that you get monetary cycles.
|
| If money is neutral, then debts won't have to grow
| eternally and there is no need to erode them with
| inflation.
| pydry wrote:
| >This is because having a reliable food supply everywhere
| is not the same thing as growing enough food, on the
| aggregate, to be able to feed everyone.
|
| It's more that the people who cant get enough food dont
| have anything that the people who have an excess of it
| really want.
|
| Global wealth distribution is more the issue than logistics
| and that wealth includes legal monopolies on all the worlds
| most arable lands intrinsically backed by the threat of
| violence.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Food aid is a thing. There are already organizations set
| up to distribute surplus food production. The problem is
| not that they developed world is greedy, it's that the
| developing world is run mostly by criminals that are
| willing to steal the money and food that charities and
| governments try to give to people in need.
|
| What are these legal monopolies on arable land? Do you
| mean the countries that contain the land or something
| else?
| guerrilla wrote:
| > It's more that the people who cant get enough food dont
| have anything that the people who have an excess of it
| really want.
|
| Sure they do. It's just that forefingers own everything
| of value in their countries and every time they elect
| someone to do something about it, the US violently
| overthrows them, covertly or overtly.[1]
|
| 1. https://github.com/binka/essays/blob/master/us_atrocit
| ies.md
| anotherrandom wrote:
| There is only artificial scarcity in some places. Ensuring a
| plentiful food (and other resource supplies) in many, many
| places of the world would require a great many invasions and
| occupations to root out corruption and snuff out local
| warlords, abusive military juntas, etc.
|
| It isn't as simple as "just send other places more food" when
| the local power-tripping dictator will just seize the foreign
| aid
| kortilla wrote:
| > We live in a post-scarcity society now.
|
| Not if you include the population of the world outside of a
| few rich western countries.
| qez wrote:
| No that's their point. We could provide for everyone but we
| do not. I disagree with that like you might, but you're
| missing the point.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| That depends on whether you are a collectivist or an
| individualist. Selflessness is not a default, psychologically
| speaking. It's not very well selected for, in evolutionary
| terms. Why should we optimize for collective availability of
| life's necessities? I'd rather optimize for my own outcomes,
| and judging by their behaviour most other people feel
| similarly.
|
| Forcing someone into a collective against their will is
| indistinguishable from a degree of slavery. This by far the
| greater sin for those who believe in the primacy of individual
| will and choice.
| mtkhaos wrote:
| Inside that society and with the direction of our technologies.
| Is not only post scarcity, but post talent and ability. As soon
| the individuals ability to compete will be eclipsed by AI.
|
| The argument should be to form a society that embraces that
| fact. But there are certain inefficiencies within out late
| stage that may stop this an equitable form from happening. As
| well as be catastrophic if not handled as infrastructure. As
| the question is what game are we using these AI tools to solve?
| Profit? Beware of offering stock in market dominated by AI
| actors that can willingly create disinformation in seconds to
| pump or short your companies stock arbitrarily. Etc...
| whiddershins wrote:
| The United States closely resembles what someone 100 years ago
| would have termed a post scarcity society.
|
| The potential for consumption is infinite.
| random314 wrote:
| If you ignore health care, student loans and housing, sure.
| rabite wrote:
| > health care
|
| Most heart disease and cancer, the two biggest cost
| centers, are somehow self-inflicted. People choose to eat
| badly and take drugs. In fact, moving away from a post-
| scarcity society would be the best at mitigating healthcare
| costs. If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny
| servings of grain and produce, they would have less health
| problems and live longer.
|
| > student loans
|
| This is also self-inflicted. People do not need to get the
| vast majority of degrees that they have. Most people are
| attending college to get the college experience. They want
| to party and waste time because stacking up loans is easier
| to them than actually working a job they are fit for. The
| degrees they are choosing to get are not serving to
| increase their employability, and burdening society's
| balance sheets for the debt they never pay off. We should
| start aggressively denying "education" to those that cannot
| be educated.
|
| > housing
|
| Housing is extremely cheap. It is not extremely cheap in
| the Bay Area, but if we forced the chronically homeless,
| criminals, and indigents on section 8 to move to affordable
| locales we would not only no longer have a housing crisis,
| but we could restore the cities that have been lost to
| their degeneracy.
| pc86 wrote:
| Most cancer is definitively not self-inflicted, it's
| actually a fairly natural consequence of aging.
| random314 wrote:
| This is probably the worst take on all of these issues, I
| am trying to figure out which one is the most absurd.
|
| Is it - cancer is self inflicted or homelessness
| disappears if the homeless are removed or kids get 100K+
| loans to party for unemployment.
| vsareto wrote:
| >If people were too poor to afford anything but tiny
| servings of grain and produce, they would have less
| health problems and live longer.
|
| One small disaster that disrupts the food supply chain
| and they'll quickly be starving and turn to violence.
|
| >We should start aggressively denying "education" to
| those that cannot be educated.
|
| I don't even know how you would begin to definitively
| determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less
| denying something which is handed out freely in other
| countries.
|
| >but we could restore the cities that have been lost to
| their degeneracy.
|
| Income inequality is vastly more responsible for city
| degeneration than the homeless.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > I don't even know how you would begin to definitively
| determine that for the lifetime of a person, much less
| denying something which is handed out freely in other
| countries.
|
| I believe there is already data out there that correlates
| a specific college degree with average income post-
| graduation. Lenders should require degree focus and
| inversely scale interest to expected income. Getting a
| loan at 14% to major in history might steer people
| towards engineering, nursing, or go into a trade.
|
| Think of it like how the US does credit scores: the lower
| the score the higher the interest rate.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Pretty sure health problems, debt, and shelter are
| universal problems that you'll find in every society since
| the dawn of civilization. I've yet to see evidence that
| these problems can be solved at scale, for every person. So
| unless you can solve these timeless, hard problems at scale
| for everyone (which I don't think you can), then we're
| DEFINITELY a post-scarcity society.
| Alducer wrote:
| this seems more of an argument that a post-scarcity
| society is impossible than an argument that we are
| already in one!
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