
The Return of the Super-Elite - raleighm
http://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/income-inequality-super-rich-economic-policy-institute/
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martythemaniak
I have a better idea. How about we just assert whatever it is that we want to
be true, repeat the assertion enough times and then just want until our minds
become warped enough to believe it.

Say you want better healthcare. Do we really want to go down the rabbit hole
of establishing metrics (infant mortality, obesity rates, whatever), having
wonks work out policy, have bureaucrats turn the massive Ship of State towards
that goal towards redistributing taxes and modifying lifestyles, spend years
following up on all this? It's insane, people can't have democratic control
over this, we can't expect them to put up with it.

Instead we can just vote in someone who'll us we'll be "beautifully covered",
then we'll all get together frequently to listen to him tell us how great
things are going, then we'll hype each other telling each other how great
things are. Who you're gonna believe, some rando egghead on TV yammering about
metrics, or your community? As long as we all believe, everything will be
great. And your shitty health? Well, you did what you could. _shrug_

~~~
askafriend
At this rate, we'll be left with no option but to go down your suggested path
anyway.

~~~
sobellian
The joke is that we are actively going down this path in the US.

~~~
wahern
We've been on that path since long before the advent of modern medicine. The
rate of diabetes and diabetic complications is so ridiculously absurd among
rural communities and among the poor precisely because those communities live
in the _old_ culture of "<shrug> he's sick, what can we do?".

Those communities embraced interventions like vaccines because they were easy,
cheap (or more often than not free), and didn't require changes to lifestyle.
Lifestyle interventions are the _preferred_ mode of the bourgeoisie precisely
because the poor are unable or outright unwilling to make those changes.[1]

The easy wins are over. Now we need to move the real mountains: hearts and
minds of the larger population. This is a _new_ fight. The regressions we see
are a regression to the mean.

But don't forget about or underestimate real wins, like cigarette smoking.
That's a radical _cultural_ shift with a tremendous impact to public health
and public finances, especially when you consider that through the 1980s and
1990s you saw the same conservative reactions (i.e. spiteful retrenchment)
that you see these days wrt to today's social policies.

[1] Consider the flavored "tobacco" ban in SF. From a public health
perspective there's very little to be gained. But the social elite were
arguably more invested in that campaign than in earlier campaigns to reduce
actual tobacco use precisely because it's fundamentally a lifestyle issue. And
the irony that the elite are for legalizing marijuana but increasingly
restricting vaping... don't get me started. I don't want to equivocate the
poisonousness fatalism of the right with the zealousness of the left, but it's
important to try to keep an objective perspective. Public health is a
marathon. And if we let the perfect be the enemy of the better we'll all lose.

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swframe2
To paraphrase Keyser Söze

"The greatest trick the Super-Elite ever pulled was convincing the world that
inequality is a desired outcome of a properly functioning economy".

~~~
barrkel
Inequality of outcomes is a requirement for incentives to improve. Correlated
variance in income in return for variance in production is just. Generally,
prices provide information about where more production is required, though at
the cost of obscuring how that production was obtained.

What we quibble about is (a) the distribution of the income function relative
to the individual's production, and (b) how much income gets distributed on
the basis of mere ownership, rather than production.

The super-elite benefit much more from (b) than from (a). Mobility of capital
means (b) is generally under-taxed.

~~~
windows_tips
>Inequality of outcomes is a requirement for incentives to improve.

What proof do you use?

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RhysU
I claim this is self-evident. What counterproof do you propose?

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windows_tips
If it were self-evident, it would not need to be stated.

Imagine the game monopoly. Then, imagine a house rule that says all players
receive $300 at the start of each turn.

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barrkel
That's not the only source of income in Monopoly though.

~~~
windows_tips
Yes, but the incentives improved equally.

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viburnum
Forget UBIs and other bandaids. Just simply taxing their wealth away would
transform society. Plutocratic governence won't end until there are no more
plutocrats.

~~~
cocoa19
Unless all developed countries organize to tax wealthy people, why would
wealthy people invest in countries that tax their wealth away?

If countries don't play ball with rich people, they can just move to another
country that is more "business friendly" (including low taxes). What am I
missing?

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maxxxxx
You are missing the fact that tax is not the only factor for people to stay.
California is an expensive state by most measures but somehow it doesn't seem
to have a problem keeping rich people in state.

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nine_k
How many big corps are incorporated in California? How many rich people
control their wealth via some Cayman islands subsidiaries, etc?

Having a nice $30M home in California is likely a small expense for the ultra-
rich the article talk about.

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maxxxxx
Are you saying California is not a state with a lot of people having well-paid
jobs and a lot of wealthy people? Would the state do better if it decided to
lower taxes for the wealthy?

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PowerfulWizard
I'm not sure that it is possible to analyze this, but I'd like to see a
breakdown of the >$10 million net worth range based on whether it was earned
in America or not. You can change the American tax code all you want, but if
it is only being used as a storage system (due to a good track record of
stability and maintenance of property rights) then I'm not sure it will have
much of an effect. For example, I think Venezuela was basically looted over
the past few years, and I'm sure a lot of that money went into i.e. Florida
real estate. I wouldn't credit any study of the super rich that is only
looking at one country.

An as far as using post-WW2 as an example, I'd like to see an example of a way
to reduce inequality that doesn't involve killing millions and destroying
Europe.

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ve55
This article should mention a lot of other factors that are important,
including changes in technology, automation, globalization, etc. It's too
short-sighted to simply say that the problem America faces is as simple as a
small group of people or laws, that if removed, suddenly would fix society's
ills. There are many other factors in play that should not be neglected.

~~~
mruniverse
Why is it short-sighted to say if inequality or laws that cause inequality are
removed, then societal ills will be fixed?

If we can make laws that cause ills then we can remove those laws and their
ills.

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jumelles
Extreme solution: wealth caps. Outlaw billionaires.

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downrightmike
Eat cake

~~~
downrightmike
This downvoted comment is exactly what I expected, because as much as we have
changed and advanced as a people, with all the events since the French
revolution, humanity will continue to struggle against oppression.

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jchanimal
I don’t think policy can fix this. The only peaceful solution I can imagine is
a general rebellion against the use of money to organize our economy. If you
are reading this you are a prime candidate to implement alternatives. Hint:
bitcoin isn’t it.

~~~
pmoriarty
The elimination of money would be one of the most disruptive events in the
history of humanity. It's likely that many millions if not billions of people
would die in the ensuing turmoil and our society as we know it today would
cease to exist.

Consider just two critical aspects of our society that require money to run
smoothly and efficiently: modern medicine and industrial agriculture. Billions
of people depend on them to survive, and the reason people participate in them
as they do is mostly for money.

If you replace money with, say, barter, how many sheep or goats are you going
to pay for a modern hospital or for a pharmaceutical factory, or the network
of roads and airports needed to deliver food and other goods? How are you
going to transport all those sheep and goats throughout our ever more
interconnected world? At the very least, the infrastructure is just not there
for us to switch to barter anywhere in the foreseable future.

Even if we could/did switch, all sorts of new power structures would likely
arise and overthrow existing ones, and it's far from guaranteed that the
transition will be bloodless. More likely, a lot of people would oppose it and
it's not inconceivable that wars could be started over it -- especially as the
change would probably not happen globally at once, but some countries would
convert to barter first while others will still have money, leading to power
imbalances, migration of money and the people who have it, massively
influencing the economies, societies, and politics of the countries involved.

If the switch from money is not to barter, then to what? It's good to think
about these things, and it's critical that our world change from the
destructive course it's on now, but I for one don't see a way to extract money
out of the equation without massive suffering.

My own slim hope rests on consciousness change, perhaps through education,
increased communication, and maybe even psychedelics. The psychedelic
renaissance has begun, and these substances are one of the most effective
means of attaining radical changes in perspective and increasing creativity.
Perhaps through them some solution that's not yet evident could arise, and if
enough people change their mind maybe we could change our society towards a
more positive and inclusive model.

~~~
jchanimal
Barter has never been how economies were organized, except under duress like a
prison camp. If you are interested in the topic I suggest David Graeber’s
Debt: The First 5000 Years. The takeaway- relationships and reputation among
groups of people who know each other have organized economies far longer than
money has. IMHO social media should allow us to act like a global village, and
villages don’t need money to coordinate.

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galaxyLogic
Once you have enough wealth to control the media, you've "made it". You could
say that people like Putin have accomplished that. So it's not that rich
people want more money because it allows them to consume more. I assume it is
because more wealth allows them to control other people.

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tzahola
A spectre is haunting...

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foxhop
We have a minimum wage to prevent absurd exploitation, I see no reason to nit
have a sane maximum wage (and networth)

~~~
gnicholas
Sounds like an invitation to shell games and shell companies. And exodus to
more tax-friendly jurisdictions. Source: I used to be a tax lawyer.

Even if this weren’t the case, people would be disincentived from working hard
jobs if there were a maximum wage.

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mnm1
> Sommelier and Price found that so far during the recovery from the Great
> Recession, the American top 1 percent has captured nearly 42 percent of all
> income growth.

Is that surprising? The people that created the recession also benefited the
most from it at the expense of everyone else. It wouldn't surprise me if the
recession was created on purpose for this exact reason. Regardless, we know
the solution (high taxes especially corporate taxes and regulation) that can
reverse this trend peacefully. We unfortunately also know the solution that
can reverse this trend violently. At this point, it's just a matter of waiting
and seeing which solution the US will pick. I have my non US passport ready to
go at a moment's notice. I'm pretty sure I know which solution the US prefers,
the one the US has always preferred in its history: violence.

