What is wrong with “personal sadness provider”?
the higher the income inequality the lower the social mobility. capitalism works better than the medieval feudal division, but more capitalism/less government does not give better class mobility
(src)
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It’s true that Capitalism has the potential to be better than, say, monarchy. In fact, looking at capitalist countries all around the world you see lots of social mobility. In Denmark intergenerational correlation in earnings is only 0.15, in Canada it’s 0.19. But in the US it’s 0.47 (2011 numbers). In the US
I like saying “down with capitalism” but realistically the it’s more like, “it does seem like letting people make their own decisions about employment, housing, spending, etc. makes a better society than dictating those decisions centrally by an aristocracy but we have a pretty good understanding now of how unfettered individual decision making concentrates wealth and therefore power, so and we need to have rules in place to make sure that doesn’t happen or capitalism basically self destructs into a new aristocracy.”
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Back in the 90s, I was told that I should invest my money in a mutual fund. Things were going swimmingly in the stock market as you may recall.
There was this one month. I opened up a report and found that my mutual fund had made more money, just sitting there for a month, than I had by working a brain-damaging day job. You should try to imagine the disgust I felt while looking at that column of numbers. I dare say the only way to not be disgusted by such an outcome is to not ever work or have anything remotely like a job in your life. I guess I’m not cut out to be wealthy.
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As a career, people keep expecting you to do it for free “for the exposure.”
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You stay classy, wealthy white elites.
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Why should we care if “the system” benefits people with money more than people who make advancements? The point is to benefit lots of people because of the advancements.
That said, “the system” does a shitty job of benefiting lots of people because of the advancements. I just think this post (and, apparently, the book) is asking the wrong question. Fuck envy.
If a system does a pretty good job of making everyone’s lives great and simultaneously makes a few “undeserving” people fabulously wealthy, it sounds great to me.
Again, not that it actually does the former. :-/
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Allowing demigods like Gates, Thiel, or the Kochs to walk among us poses an active, ongoing threat to justice and democracy. Depriving them of their riches would benefit society even if we took their money and threw it down a well.
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Exactly! Because rich, white trust-fund brats would never waste money on such frivolity.
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Don’t worry - you aren’t qualified for the position and they are actively looking for an H1B visa holder to replace you - you will of course be required to train them.
This will be legal of course because they won’t hire the person - they’ll just setup a consulting company that hires the person - then hire the company.
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I don’t begrudge Gates for his wealth. The Gates Foundation has done immeasurable good in the world - especially in Africa. And he has pledged to donate much more…
The point is not that Bill Gates is evil. He is not. The point is simple: it takes money to make money. And that’s true; no matter the scale.
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First this is Bill Gates not Steve Wozniak - Bill never worked out of his garage - that’s the Apple story.
Second - Bill Gates came from a rich family that gave him money - he didn’t come from a net worth of ‘zero’.
" Bill Gates attended an exclusive prep school while growing up, and
then he attended Harvard, although he didn’t get very far. He spent most
of his time with computers. In fact, from the time he first saw a
computer while at prep school, he was fascinated with computers and
spent as much time as possible with them.
When the time came that he wanted to start a company with some of
his old school fellows, Gates turned to his parents, who provided support
for him. Even though Gates’ company probably would have been successful
anyway, and even though there were plenty of partnerships, the fact
that Gates had wealthy parents to fall back on helped immensely as he
built one of the most successful companies in the world."
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I don’t begrudge Gates his wealth either. The thing is, while his foundation does good, it’s only one organization that is channeling the wealth being generated by the systemic biases of capitalism to the needy. Many other wealthy persons (cough Waltons cough) aren’t as generous, and are instead just sitting atop an ever-growing pile.
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Yeah, I hear ya.
I DO begrudge the Waltons! (chuckle).
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Yep!
But the irony, and hence the illustrative aspect is, even with the Gates Foundation channeling away immense fortunes, greater than 99% of the planet will ever know… his pile continues to grow. And that just illustrates how biased the system is.
And that immediately begs the questions of “If he is able to give away all of that money and still have a growing fortune, why don’t his peers in wealth follow suit?” and “If Gates’ peers are not giving away that much money, but are instead sitting on it, how much have they accumulated that way?”
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I totally agree. If we could cut the cord to the balloon economy and basically say to the rich people, “Look, we don’t care if you want yachts and mansions and whatever, we’re rich enough to build that shit for you, but you don’t get to say who lives where or what infrastructure gets built or how we educate our kids anymore,” I’d be fine with that. Who cares if a few people get a bunch of stuff. The thing is, I don’t think they would be okay with that. The majority of them are motivated by a desire to be socially dominant, and money is just the way to do that.
Also, while we live in a society where the development of an AIDS vaccine was largely dependent on the whims of a random person empowered to direct the labour of hundreds of thousands of people, we also live in a society where vaccine research was nearly non-existent because other random people were empowered to make the same kind of decisions and didn’t want it to happen. We need a benevolent dictator to save us because our kleptocrat dictators are screwing us. How about democracy?
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Bill & Melinda Gates have previously pledged to donate 95% of their wealth to charity. So at the current $90 billion evaluation, that would mean donating $85.5 million with around $4.5 billion left over. Bill Gates has also said that when he & his wife pass away, his kids will only inherit a few million each.
However, a lot of that money is going world wide rather than just the US often dealing with global health issues such fighting against polio, tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS. When money has gone specifically in the US, it seems to mainly go towards libraries and education. However, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is so huge donating to so many different charities that it’s hard to sum it up quickly.
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Incidentally, Gates did an interesting interview with Chris Hardwick in early 2015 about the Foundation: http://nerdist.com/nerdist-podcast-bill-gates/
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A critical point worth shouting from the rooftops.
Late Stage Yadda Yadda Yadda
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I think you can look at it different ways. But basically the banks were able to give out loans that far exceeded their assets. That’s normal, you don’t expect a bank to buy able to pay all of it’s depositors all at once, but the ratios got really crazy and the loans were never actually going to be paid back. People uses “financial innovation” to make it look like they were doing sensible things (and ratings agencies straight up lied about how secure the investments were) but what they did isn’t that much different than if I agreed to sell you someone for $1B that you didn’t have, then you said, “Hey, I’ve got a $1B asset now!” because that’s the market value of the thing, and I said, “Hey, I can sell of this debt for $1B”. It was just inventing money out of nowhere.
In accounting you are supposed to have assets and liabilities and they are supposed to balance, so adding $1B to each doesn’t really make any difference, but if you can somehow convince people to pay you more interest on the asset than you are paying on the liability than inventing assets is good business. By doing useful things with money you can cause value to be created and under system where people own property it’s hard to say that the owner of the money doesn’t deserve some cut of the value. But real money making is in flipping the bits in the computer that say how much money you have.
The question is more how we agreed that someone should be that rich in the first place. Adam Smith said wealth was the power to command the labour of others. If you think about the income of the Waltons (income, not wealth, which is hard to calculate but you can google esimates) they could hire tens of thousands of people to do whatever they felt like. If they wanted a great pyramid built on the same kind of labour the ancient egyptians used, they could do that. You can think of it as stochastic coercion - there is enough wealth in the society that everyone could have homes and food and ipods, but the wealth is distributed in such a way that there will be people who are desperate enough for homes and food and ipods that someone with money can always find people to boss around even though on an individual level we can always say that each person made their own choices.
I think higher taxes or taxes on capital are good ways to say, "You didn’t contribute so much to this that you deserve to have more coercive power available to you than King Tut.
The problem with any of this, redoing the code, raising taxes, whatever, is that we are in the situation we are in because money is power and money wanted rules to let money grow. Power just keeps consolidating itself. But doom and gloom aside, yes, the existing tax law needs to be crushed, I can only imagine that US tax law is even more complicated than Canadian tax law, which is already a disgusting mess. Ordinary people should be able to understand how their taxes work. It’s completely absurd that capital gains are taxed less than income from work.
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I find it pleasantly ironic that an article written to criticize and demonstrate the “failure” of an economic system is written and read on the very technology at the root of the article.
I think you could make the argument that a lot of the important innovations weren’t started by a thirst for money. Facebook. Tesla Motors. All of Nikola Tesla’s work. But isn’t that the point of free market capitalism? The freedom of each to pursue his own interests with his resources? You can’t do that in a planned economy. It doesn’t happen in socialist systems. And that’s why very little innovation that benefits the common man comes from those systems.
If Piketty’s point is the magic of exponential growth, count me as a believer. If it’s that Gates is an example of anything other than success, I’m not buying it.
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