
Economic Inequality (2016) - bobrenjc93
http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html
======
Barrin92
seems to be the fairly common take among economists/tech folks about
inequality being fine along as wealth grows, we're not living in a zero-sum
world etc.

Problem with that attitude is that it's mostly circular and asserts its
conclusion. Inequality does not matter because social well-being and so on is
only a measure of absolute wealth, so the only thing left is to show that
wealth is growing etc.

It's worthwhile to question the assumption which people like Robert Sapolsky
have done.[1] One thing that he figured out is that even when one accounts for
the worse material outcomes of inequality like worse healthcare access, _there
is an extremely large difference in outcome based on inequality itself_. Gaps
in social hierarchy matter and inform how people perceive their environment
and their place in society. Compressing inequality itself may drastically
increase social and individual well-being as inequality appears to induce
significant stress in human populations.

The same is true for many studies about happiness. Happiness is indeed
influenced by material wealth, but to a significantly smaller degree than one
might imagine. Countries like Germany and Nigeria, for example, report similar
levels of happiness even despite being magnitudes apart on some wealth and
econ metrics.

the key point I want to make is that, even if one disagrees with some
particular data points or conclusions, the effect of inequality must be
studied at a biological/social / well-being level if one wants to make
meaningful statements. Asserting that humans are _Homines oeconomici_ and
using it to justify inequality is a tautological exercise.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-
ineq...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-inequality-
inflicts-real-biological-
harm/?error=cookies_not_supported&code=c3cbc5b9-01dc-4ca8-8a23-537f4a6d5da0)

~~~
closeparen
Thank you for saying this. I'm bookmarking it for the next time I hear "no one
is saying we should make everyone poor." When I talk about the anti-inequality
people preferring a third-world standard of living as long as no one else has
it better, they typically call it a strawman. I appreciate the admission that
this is actually your belief.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Exactly nowhere in that post did barrin92 say that we should make everyone
poor. You seem to be reading into it something that is not actually there.

In another post, you refer to this comment and say that it said that we should
go back to being hunter-gatherers. That is even less there.

~~~
closeparen
The argument about Germany and Nigeria is to say that absolute standard of
living doesn't matter much, and the rest of the post argues that relative
position does.

What part of the characterization "preferring a third-world standard of living
as long as no one else has it better" is unfair?

To be charitable, I'm sure the parent would appreciate a _high_ uniform
standard of living even better. But he seems to find the situation I describe
preferable to the current state of things, which is pretty wild.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The argument about Germany and Nigeria is to say that absolute standard of
living doesn't matter much _to happiness_.

> What part of the characterization "preferring a third-world standard of
> living as long as no one else has it better" is unfair?

All of it? Barrin92 explicitly notes "the worse material outcomes of
inequality like worse healthcare access".

> But he seems to find the situation I describe preferable to the current
> state of things, which is pretty wild.

Not at all. That's you reading into what was said; Barrin92 said no such
thing. What he _said_ was that inequality, by itself, causes worse outcomes.
He didn't say "therefore go back to hunter-gatherer societies". He didn't say
"therefore go to third-world societies". He said that, _even after you account
for the negative effects of poverty_ , there are _additional_ negative effects
from inequality. No actions were proposed other than to stop assuming that
inequality itself has no consequences. _Everything_ beyond that is you reading
into Barrin92's comment, and is on you, not him.

------
emeerson
PG, this is a thoughtful essay. Yet I'll point out a flaw in this thinking
below.

Intellectually Honest merits here: \- you want to incentivize people to create
value for society and optimize globally by raising the quality of life of
(most) humans. \- Wealth creation itself is not by default at the cost of
others.

Intellectually Dishonest: \- That startups and wealth creation converge on a
quality of life optimization function for humanity.

In other words: startups and wealth creation operate within the randomness of
free market. And most software technology in the last 30 years has not
unlocked some kind of massive step function value in global problems.

If we could align more Venture Capital funding and R&D output to solve
fundamental problems (in other words: can we solve access to affordable
nutritious food, reduction of common disease, reducing cost of housing ahead
of 5-minute media formats or SaaS Invoicing Applications?)

Housing has continued to become less affordable and poverty still prevalent in
the US.

\- That there is a binary debate: "should there be wealth or not?"

Social Programs, funded by government, funded by taxes on higher earners and
large capital gains, are one lever to address this.

The reason the inequality gap matters is less that its a metric of the _delta
in absolute wealth_ but more that opportunity and livability of average
Americans has a worse outlook in the last 20 years, not a better one.

~~~
bransonf
I agree with your overall sentiment, but want to expand on a few points.

Housing: It seems this is largely a policy issue rather than an economic one.
Restrictive zoning and a misaligned incentive structure come to mind. Places
like SF are the face of the housing shortage, but it’s a problem of supply and
demand. To make affordable housing, you need a lot more housing. First, you
have to satisfy the needs of all of the wealthy buyers, and this isn’t even
clearly achieved. Even with subsidies, there isn’t a financial interest for
developers to sell affordable housing. We need to build a ton of housing to
meet demand. Policy is the inhibitor here.

Food: Food deserts exist entirely because of sprawl. The suburbanization of
America means lowered density in certain Urban cores. (The Midwest and south
especially) Lower density, particularly among lower income residents makes
traditional grocery stores unviable. To sell produce you need sufficient
traffic or else your stock will go bad. To make things worse, low income
residents have less access to transportation. Thus, lower traffic. It’s not
profitable to run a grocery store in the middle of urban sprawl, especially
given the lack of access to transportation. Transportation is a matter of
policy, again.

Healthcare: The problems here are directly correlated with housing and food,
but extend to education. There is significant over—utilization of emergency
services for non-critical medical services. I believe some universal access to
healthcare should exist, but not if we don’t first address the inefficiencies
that exist due to a lack of health education. Education is again, largely the
fault of policy.

It’s not lost on me that wealth increases access to all of these things, but I
don’t think we can blame venture capital and founders. These are deeply
societal issues, given poor policy decisions in our history. They aren’t
attractive investments because you cannot change them in a matter of a couple
of years.

A higher tax on the wealthy would incentivize focusing on these issues, but it
would also slow the pace of economic growth. It’s a matter of compromise.

~~~
gzer0
If we are to assume per average per capita GDP, and standardized GDP year over
year growth rate for the OECD countries, there is no indication of a higher
tax rate slowing the pace of economic growth, it is actually the opposite for
some of the countries.

Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Luxembourg all have much higher per capita GDP
and overall GDP growth YOY [1] versus the United States, yet these 4 countries
have wildly higher overall tax rates. [2]

Germany, Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, and Iceland are all within 5% of the
USA per capita GDP, yet, their taxation is also much higher than the average
tax burden of the USA.

This is a wildly polarizing topic because of the sheer number of statistics
available to everyone, and the amount of cherry picking everyone does to prove
or argue their point. There are facts, and then there is misrepresentation of
the facts. I'm not an expert but the raw data truly does not suggest a higher
tax rate will lead to a slower pace of economic growth.

Where have I gone wrong in my analysis (if I have done so?)

[1] [https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gross-domestic-product-
gdp.htm](https://data.oecd.org/gdp/gross-domestic-product-gdp.htm)

[2] [https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-
highl...](https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highlights-
brochure.pdf)

[3] [https://www.epi.org/publication/ib364-corporate-tax-rates-
an...](https://www.epi.org/publication/ib364-corporate-tax-rates-and-economic-
growth/)

Edit:

I utilized the 2015-2018 data available from source [1], however, it can be
backdated to 1960 but I didn't have the time to tinker around with it much.

Source [3] provides a somewhat reasonable analysis of US corporate tax rates
and economic growth since 1947 but not a comparison to the OECD countries.

~~~
bransonf
Thanks, I appreciate this. I didn’t really have data to support my
conclusions, but echoing rhetoric I’ve heard before. Glad to know I was wrong.
It’s not surprising that it’s polarizing when the end result is taking money
from people.

That said, I’m really curious of the causation of higher tax rates on economic
growth. Like, if you want to still be just as rich, you have to work even
harder.

Personally I think slightly higher taxes would be acceptable, but I don’t at
all trust the economic efficiency of the federal government right now. We need
food, transit, houses, healthcare and education... but I don’t think these
would be spending priorities.

------
shams93
We heavily tax income and hardly touch capital gains, we discourage work, even
if you get a decent salary the tax system obliterates that income. If you
gamble with stocks you make money without doing anything productive and your
lack of productivity is richly rewarded by the tax system.

~~~
imgabe
Short term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income. Long term are taxed
lower, but for capital gains of any kind you have to risk capital, which was
already taxed when you earned it the first time.

Capital gains are not only the result of "gambling". If you found a company
and later sell it, that is a capital gain. The shares are virtually worthless
when you start the company, and later become valuable when you sell it.

Do you consider founding a successful company that provides a useful product
and employs many people doing nothing productive?

~~~
michaelmrose
What percentage of total capital gains are paid out to founders of new
ventures?

~~~
gnicholas
Don't forget the qualified small business stock exemption — 50% tax break on
founder stock held for more than 5 years, or you can roll it over into another
qualifying small business and defer the gains even further. I believe you can
do this as an angel investor also — it doesn't have to go into your own next
startup.

------
ec109685
Is there a name for the phenomenon where someone that is amazing at something
(e.g. investing and helping to grow startups) then somehow is given more
credibility to talk about everything else?

The exact opposite is true with under represented folks — their “take” needs
to be 10x better than than the rich guy with a popular blog to be listened to.

He should write a post on influence inequality.

~~~
closeparen
The article is pointing out the existence and dynamics of wealth creation,
which is _exactly_ what PG is amazing at. Many of his articles do suffer from
that problem, but not this one.

~~~
claudiawerner
I don't really have a position either way on whether what PG says is true, but
it's wrong to say that PG is amazing at "existence and dynamics of wealth
creation". He's amazing at "wealth creation", that does not make him an expert
on the effects of that wealth creation on society, or the work done in society
as a prerequisite for that wealth creation. If I am a programmer, it does not
make me an expert on the dynamics of the open source software community, nor
does it even make me an expert on the theoretical underpinnings of the type
system I'm using.

We don't need PG to point out the existence of wealth creation, nor do we need
him to tell us about the dynamics of it, when we have multiple sciences with
their own experts (economics, economic sociology, world political economy).
It's also a dubious assumption to say that economic inequality only relates to
wealth creation. Even if that was the only relation, writing about economic
inequality and the actual fact of wealth creation are still not identical,
they are only related.

PG is more qualified than most to talk about this, but he's certainly not the
most qualified, and the study of the matters of inequality are tangential to
his work at best.

~~~
closeparen
>We don't need PG to point out the existence of wealth creation

But we do, because so much of the popular discourse around inequality assumes
a zero-sum economy.

I will be happy to disqualify PG's opinion here if you will also disqualify
all the economically illiterate populist takes on the other side.

------
meow_mix
> "You can't prevent great variations in wealth without preventing people from
> getting rich, and you can't do that without preventing them from starting
> startups... Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating
> startups"

I feel the opposite. What keeps many people from starting startups is
financial risk (the prior probaility of success is quite low!). Increasing the
safety net, even if it means decreasing the gains, might cause more people to
take the risk.

> "For example, let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the
> process."

How does this not contradict his earlier point about driven people no longer
wanting to start startups if they can't get rich doing it?

> "One of the most important principles in Silicon Valley is that "you make
> what you measure."

I'm completely behind this statement. Attacking wealth inequality by, say,
robbing the rich, is not the right approach. But I think he's mixing up what
people _mean_ when they say they don't like inequality and what they actually
want to do about it. Nobody is claiming we all go back to being
hunter/gatherers.

> "I think rising economic inequality is the inevitable fate of countries that
> don't choose something worse. "

This is a _huge_ statement. I'm happy to see PG has iterated over every
possible economic system under every possible level of technology and come to
this axiom though; this will save the economists of 2532 a lot of effort they
might have spent running this simulation :)

> "The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley has been
> happening for thousands of years... You do not want to design your society
> in a way that's incompatible with this curve"

What acceleration? Uber and Instagram are hardly quantum leaps from what we
had > 10 years ago. The iPhone I have in my pocket today is functionally not
all that different from the one 5 years ago. What's even worse is that it's
questionable as to whether or not the things churning out of the valley are
even good at all. No one is betting a curve: the curve is in his imagination.
Change feels linear lately.

Also, where is the talk about externalities?

~~~
closeparen
> But I think he's mixing up what people mean when they say they don't like
> inequality and what they actually want to do about it. Nobody is claiming we
> all go back to being hunter/gatherers.

The top comment on this thread, which predates your comment by an hour, is
saying essentially that. Doesn't matter what the absolute wealth level is,
only that the variance is small.

The thesis of PG's article is that it's important to be precise about what we
mean, because many _are_ talking about the "robbing the rich" meaning, and the
way it ought to be treated is _really_ different.

I'd say the recent shift in terminology from _poverty_ to _inequality_ , and
in measurement from "% below an objective threshold" to "ratio between
quantiles," is happening explicitly to accommodate the meaning you're
disclaiming here.

>Increasing the safety net, even if it means decreasing the gains, might cause
more people to take the risk.

Sure, but the operative thing here is _increasing the safety net_ , which you
could do without substantially closing the gap between rich and poor. In fact
a stronger safety net might lead to more entrepreneurship and thus more
founders getting rich, making the inequality stats worse.

EDIT: clarity about top comment.

------
JDiculous
> "let's attack poverty, and if necessary damage wealth in the process."

This is a pretty good article as Paul distinguishes the "good" (creating
wealth) and "bad" (rent seeking) sources of economic inequality, and suggests
addressing the bad and attacking poverty vs. simply punishing the rich.

Consider the current presidential candidates - Bernie and Warren seem to talk
a lot about punishing the rich, while Andrew Yang emphasizes a more bottom-up
approach of giving every American a dividend of $1,000/month. The former
sounds more like a vindictive blanket punishment, the latter is directly
eradicating poverty and helping people.

Given Paul's focus on the value and promotion of entrepreneurship, it would
seem that Yang's $1,000/month would do more than any other policy being
discussed to further that cause. I'd imagine way more people would start
businesses and take greater risks in general if they knew worst case scenario
they'd have $1,000/month to fall back on.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
You could say the same thing about eliminating private health, dental, and
vision insurance (or at the very least, making it so that all providers are
required to accept public insurance). Making coverage a right instead of a
privilege would at least lessen the foothold that employers have on the necks
of their employees.

~~~
closeparen
The only people who can be "required to accept" a price set by the government
for their labor are criminal convicts and military draftees.

But yes, the government could procure services from providers on your behalf
the same way it procures everything else, and that would greatly reduce
dependence on employers.

------
rjkennedy98
Wow just wow. What an incredibly awful piece of writing. Where are the facts
to support any of his claims. Most of them are provably wrong. Economists
study these things. Picketty for instance wrote a gigantic books showing that
rates of return on Capital vs productivity growth are a huge reason for
inequality. We can see that as a huge percentage of the wealthy inherited
their money. We have extremely low rates of productivity growth in the US
right now by historical standards. We have huge rates of corporate stock
buybacks that outpace research and development for the first time ever.
Startups are not representative of the economy. In fact we’ve never had a
period with fewer startups than now. New business creation is at a low peak in
the US. Paul graham may be a great tech investor but he clearly has no
understanding of macroeconomic trends in the US.

------
dvduval
It is natural to have winners. In time the winners come to dominate the system
such that inequality becomes a bigger problem. A question to ask is how can we
rebalance it? Shall we wait until there is social unrest or strife? Or shall
we create methods to rebalance before this happens?

~~~
thrwaway69
"Winners"

I would go open a business today which has a fairly good chance of being
successful (there is a huge demand) but I don't have money neither the
connections to get it. I know kids from rich folks who do nothing all day and
sleep on their phones, waste cash on microtrans online. I wish, I had folks
like that. I could take risks to start different ventures, afford moving out
and getting necessary medical treatment, going to a good school, attending
events, hire a personal trainer for improving communication skills, posture,
public speaking, learning different languages, etc. I can do some of them
right now but it's learning on hard mode with increased worrying about
everything else in life because you can't afford to lose. Years are lost on
one loss while others with family capital gains or connections can afford to
stand back up again immediately.

One thing is absurd is poor environment forces you to decide on poor life
choices. So the claim that poverty and difficulty may make you stronger is
dubious or based on survivorship/exception bias. Poor people don't know how to
manage their finances, search for valid information, not to fall for scams or
make long term plans because they have been trained not to.

~~~
bryan_w
> I don't have money neither the connections to get it.

I'm pretty sure you can get money from the bank. You just have to put together
a business plan and convince some people that your idea is viable.

For more information Google,"How to start a business".

Happy winning!

------
gnicholas
A related piece on income inequality: [https://reason.com/2020/01/25/the-
truth-about-income-inequal...](https://reason.com/2020/01/25/the-truth-about-
income-inequality/)

------
tehjoker
Inequality is bad because people with more money have power over people with
less. Ideally, we would live in a democracy (understood by the Greeks to mean
rule by the poor, given they massively outnumber the rich), but we don't. We
should change this.

Stated another way, your boss has power over you. Why? It could be because
they earned a lot of money through their own labor, or it could be because
they had access to capital that you do not. Uber loses money hand over fist,
but Uber management has more power than their drivers. Why? Management has
access to capital, and drivers do not.

~~~
tempsy
What? The fact that your boss has power over you within a company has nothing
to do with how much money they personally have relative to you. There is no
correlation.

~~~
iamkroot
My boss also only has power over me in the context of my job. They have
exactly zero power when it comes to all other aspects of my life.

~~~
duhast
Rich people can make political donations, lobby, run for office, dictate
private law (corporate policies), fix wages etc. Wealth is power.

------
ripvanwinkle
While wealth creation isn't a zero sum game, certain important markets are
zero sum.

Housing is an example. If a bunch of founders make a pile of money, they can
(and do) suddenly outbid everyone else (like say the school teachers and
firemen) buy a bunch of land and build mega mansions that squeeze a lot of
other people out.

The issue today is that the gains/rewards for certain ideas (at certain times)
are disproportional to the actual utility to society.

An example of that is the contrast between Tim Berners-Lee's networth and Mark
Zuckerberg's

~~~
closeparen
_Land_ is zero sum. Single family homes consistent with neighborhood character
are zero sum. Housing is not.

------
zongitsrinzler
While I agree with much said, I believe there seems to be a flaw in how he
groups wealthy individuals based on how they create wealth.

> In the real world you can create wealth as well as taking it from others. A
> woodworker creates wealth. He makes a chair, and you willingly give him
> money in return for it. A high-frequency trader does not. He makes a dollar
> only when someone on the other end of a trade loses a dollar.

In a market economy, people and companies are rewarded if the market sees the
given service or product worth the price. The woodworker didn't create wealth
out of thin air, and he gains wealth by taking it from the people that buy his
wares. Same goes for a high-frequency trader, even though she doesn't build
anything with her hands, the process of trading is seen as valuable by the
market and if done well rewarded accordingly. The only groups that can "create
wealth" are national treasuries which can print money.

~~~
randomcarbloke
Additionally he doesn't understand trading, just because they lost a dollar on
a trade (likely on another index) doesn't mean they lost a dollar over all,
they presumably listed the sell-order because that price is already itm.

------
xwowsersx
This is an incredible essay and one of PG's finest in my opinion.

------
cuchoi
This essay makes me uneasy. I feel PG builds a straw man. He takes, in his own
words, the most naive take on inequality and ends up concluding that
"Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups".

A simple example, would a tax on wealth above 100 million USD discourage
startup founders? I don't think so.

~~~
caseysoftware
$100 million, probably not. But that begs the questions: _Is that the real
number and would it stay there?_

The AMT was put together to hit the top ~150 people in the 1960s. Because of
how the underlying system changed and it hasn't, the AMT now regularly hits
people under $100k and is only likely to drift lower.

Congress has a bad track record here.

------
buzzkillington
How can someone technical write a whole essay without a single number?

>If the rich people in a society got that way by taking wealth from the poor,
then you have the degenerate case of economic inequality, where the cause of
poverty is the same as the cause of wealth.

He could have saved himself the time it took him to write that article by just
looking at the wiki page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States)

In summary the bottom 50% of Americans have lost all their wealth since 1989
and then gone into debt to the tune of 25% of their former wealth.

So in short Paul, yes, we are in the degenerate case and a round of
guillotining is in order.

~~~
anonsivalley652
There's an infographic video on Youtube that describes and compares:

\- what people think the economic distribution is (extreme power law)

\- what people think a fair economic distribution would be (somewhat somewhat
smooth but increasing)

\- what it actual is (absurd hockey-stick, power law)

------
raspasov
This is a good insight from the essay:

"I'm sure most of those who want to decrease economic inequality want to do it
mainly to help the poor, not to hurt the rich. Indeed, a good number are
merely being sloppy by speaking of decreasing economic inequality when what
they mean is decreasing poverty. But this is a situation where it would be
good to be precise about what we want. Poverty and economic inequality are not
identical."

~~~
tempsy
I don’t think the progressive leaders who have been championing a wealth tax
have been unclear about that though. The point of a wealth tax as described by
Warren, Sanders, etc. is specifically to fund programs for poor and struggling
middle class, not just as some penalty for being rich.

~~~
jb775
My initial thought with this is that the rich would find loopholes around this
tax, the upper middle class would pay it, the struggling middle class and poor
would barely be taxed....so basically the upper middle class would be dragged
down towards the struggling middle/poor, therefore making the underlying issue
worse.

~~~
tempsy
Not sure how that would work. Warren’s tax starts at a net worth above $50M.
How would someone who is upper middle class pay for it.

~~~
ghufran_syed
The same way the AMT started as a tax on "the rich" and now regularly affects
middle class earners

------
cryptoz
None of this makes any sense to me at all. I'm reading through it but there
are logical fallacies abound. In the first few paragraphs..

> Which means by helping startup founders I've been helping to increase
> economic inequality. If economic inequality should be decreased, I shouldn't
> be helping founders.

No. Just...no. Founders should be starting companies that reduce inequality.
By definition. The idea of a healthy marketplace for both startups and for
regular people doing regular things implies a reduction in inequality. Not
just a reduction in poverty, but a reduction in inequality. That is easiest
done by lifting the poor out of poverty.

PG's take is to stop all progress because he is straw-man arguing against
something that nobody is even taking the position on that he's arguing
against. The logical fallacy count in the first few paragraphs alone make this
piece difficult to read.

What happened? :(

Continuing to read...

> But some are good, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting the company you
> use to find things online.

No conversation at all about the pitfalls and issues that Google has also
caused in the world? This is a carte blanche to Google that 100% of their work
has been positive and it's not worthy to discuss anything they might have done
that would hurt people in the world? Not everything about Google is "Good".

These takes are all so one-sided, close-minded, and _wrong_.

> The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that
> the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.

Wait. What. PG thinks that _this_ is a fallacy? I'm going to have to stop
reading to protect my sanity. The rich are _definitely_ getting richer at the
expense of the poor. The world did not start on some level playing field. The
rich had privilege and status and help that the poor do not.

Every action that a rich person takes to enrich themselves rather than trying
to level the playing field is by definition taking from the poor.

~~~
raspasov
"Every action that a rich person takes to enrich themselves rather than trying
to level the playing field is by definition taking from the poor."

"Taking"? When a "poor" person chooses to buy an Android or an iPhone, did
Google or Apple "take" his money from him? No, the person "chose" to give
money to the company because she thought that it provides some utility for
her. Alternatively, you can argue that designing a smartphone is leveling the
playing field, which would make more sense.

What you seem to get wrong is that BOTH can occur at the same time - leveling
the playing field AND enriching themselves.

~~~
paulryanrogers
> What you seem to get wrong is that BOTH can occur at the same time -
> leveling the playing field AND enriching themselves.

Agreed, it's possible and these win-wins do happen. Yet there is also plenty
of rent-seeking which does enrich the wealthy and often at the expense of
those poorer than they.

------
blobbers
"The great concentrations of wealth I see around me in Silicon Valley don't
seem to be destroying democracy."

........<really?>

------
irishcoffee
“It’s ok”

------
S4M
(2016)

------
avocado4
Why is this post flagged?

~~~
anonsivalley652
I would guess HN guidelines-ishness. Plus, the well-off don't like discussing
sex, money, religion (spiritual or favorite programming language) or politics
online, and that hits two buckets. I would wager that the _average_ HN reader
is far from poor, although may have been in the past. Better to seem to stick
our heads in the sand than have real conversations if doing so benefits us,
because it fulfills the objectives of the site. This doesn't preclude
enthusiastic discussions elsewhere.

 _It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends on his not understanding it._

\- Upton Sinclair

------
remarkEon
The Iron Law of Oligarchy strikes again. There will always be a class of
people who, either by luck or by brute force competence, will have
disproportionate power over everyone else.

Also, why is this flagged?

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ronilan
This phrase just popped up into my head a while back:

 _“The minimum wage should be the median wage”_

I’m not sure if it should be a rule or a goal or be anything at all, but
thought it’s a thought worth putting out there.

Edit: thinking in context of country, or province but also in context of
company or group.

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icelancer
How is this mathematically possible?

~~~
tryptophan
Say the min wage is 10$. In a population of 100 people, if 51 made 10$, than
the median would be 10$. Obviously that is ridiculous...

