Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
When you say things like "there is no evidence of trickle-down", you're rewriting economics by your own parameters. Earlier I tried explaining why the misnomer "trickle-down" has been pulled out of consensus economic theory of growth.

Us going back and forth isn't going to yield any fruit. Your points are reasonable from several logical perspectives, but that doesn't mean they are reasonable from an economics perspective. For example, you say "That's assuming that building a luxury yacht is better for the society than shopping groceries for the same amount." The answer to this statement is that the incentives behind this spending is what makes one better or worse. To the non-economist, groceries obviously look more productive than yachts, but because the behavior is economic in nature, groceries aren't always more productive than yachts, and the non-economist perspective is simply wrong. This is why I have often said "economics doesn't care about our morals". Economics is a science just like physics. Physics doesn't give a fuck what we think it should do. It does what it does and that's the bottom line and we just have to conform. Economics is no different.

Physics is a more obvious experimental science than economics, so it's easier to not disagree with physics and economics has more unknown holes than it otherwise would. But they're both still sciences dependent on the same type of methods of discovery and theory development.
I think I was unclear about what I meant with that. From what I understand the argument is that in order to help the poor, we should give more money to the rich. I have let myself be told, that this only increases income inequality, that while it may be the best thing for the growth of the economy as a whole, it will only give marginal benefits for the majority, while giving enormous benefits to the rich. If you look at the Gini coefficients of countries, you'll find that the countries with the lowest value (least income inequality) are the western prosperous countries, and the highest values are found in the third world. Looking at the trends you'll see the Gini coefficients lowering linearly with economic growth. If we measure overall well-being with the size of the economy without looking at the distribution, we're getting a distorted view.