Dat inequality

[rong]

I don't really see many reasons for it not too happen there but I do see some contradictions in your argument. I need my laptop to respond thoroughly though, only have phone right now.

But let me put this another way.

We all agree it's not right to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex or sexual orientation (i assume), yet we find it acceptable to discriminate on the grounds of wealth. A kid from the poor side of town is far more likely to have less face time with parents, eat less healthily, go to a worse school, get a lower quality education, get less years of education, have lower quality healthcare, have a lower paid job and continue this cycle.

How is this fair? It's just pot luck who your parents are, not that different from race discrimination, especially when you consider the correlation between socio-economic status and ethnicity. But forget that really because race shouldn't be part of this argument.

This is what I was thinking about resolving with the free food thing. It would mean no need for poor families to work as long hours which would mean more time for to spend with kids, kids guaranteed healthy food, parents able to spend the money the earn on better quality housing and children having a more equal start.

Now sure, food prices go up, but anyone who is too bothered by that doesn't pay it because they eat for free.

This doesn't address some of the larger issues I think capitalism creates, which is waste on an extraordinary level. You claim that capitalism is efficient and any allocation method not based on a demand and supply pricing mechanism creates massive waste , yet how does toys r us exist if capitalism is about the efficient allocation of resources? People struggle to make ends meet yet there are like 5000 different types of child's doll to choose from. Capitalism created that, which is ridiculous and kinda sick really, but money realised targeting kids with marketing was effective. That is not efficiently allocating capital, it's manipulating a natural market to avoid an efficient allocation of resources and instead maximise the amount the individual has. It's about a transfer of wealth, not efficient resource allocation.

[Renton]

We all agree it's not right to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex or sexual orientation (i assume), yet we find it acceptable to discriminate on the grounds of wealth. A kid from the poor side of town is far more likely to have less face time with parents, eat less healthily, go to a worse school, get a lower quality education, get less years of education, have lower quality healthcare, have a lower paid job and continue this cycle.

How is this fair? It's just pot luck who your parents are, not that different from race discrimination, especially when you consider the correlation between socio-economic status and ethnicity. But forget that really because race shouldn't be part of this argument.

It's certainly a problem, but most policy measures against this that have been implemented in industrialized countries tend to WORSEN the problem, not improve it. This is an issue that needs to be attacked with a level of finesse that states seem incapable of demonstrating.

As I stated above, the goal is to improve mobility, not equality. And social mobility is strongly correlated with the wealth of an economy. In the United States there is strong evidence to suggest that the great majority of people move through several different income brackets over the course of their lives, and this is what mobility is: the ability to move upward (or downward) in income.

Rich economies foster a demand for high productivity workers, which results in higher incomes. Higher income result in a stimulated supply of those workers, and when this supply is short, businesses become desperate to hire ANYBODY with a pulse and to train them to do the work. So creating an environment that encourages economic growth goes a long way towards achieving this goal, even in a completely anarchic society with no free education or housing or anything. Rich countries = richer (by comparison) lower and middle class people.

This is what I was thinking about resolving with the free food thing. It would mean no need for poor families to work as long hours which would mean more time for to spend with kids, kids guaranteed healthy food, parents able to spend the money the earn on better quality housing and children having a more equal start.


Now sure, food prices go up, but anyone who is too bothered by that doesn't pay it because they eat for free.

When you take a commonly traded resource and make it free, it causes a great deal of problems for the entire economy. There are just a ton of benefits of the profit and loss system that are crucial to the system, benefits that do not exist when a product is deemed free. Food with a price tag is always produced in accordance with the demand for that food. The price-coordinated demand is always accurate or a great deal of suppliers stand to lose a great deal of money.

Suppliers have huge incentives to innovate the product, either by making it more appealing to consumers or by making it cheaper to produce. These innovations ripple throughout the economy and affect things that may be vaguely related or unrelated at all to food. It is inevitable for a public food distribution enterprise to fall behind in innovation, and a couple of decades down the road be completely inferior to store-bought food, in price and in quality. And huge amounts of resources are wasted in the interim.

This doesn't address some of the larger issues I think capitalism creates, which is waste on an extraordinary level. You claim that capitalism is efficient and any allocation method not based on a demand and supply pricing mechanism creates massive waste , yet how does toys r us exist if capitalism is about the efficient allocation of resources? People struggle to make ends meet yet there are like 5000 different types of child's doll to choose from. Capitalism created that, which is ridiculous and kinda sick really, but money realised targeting kids with marketing was effective. That is not efficiently allocating capital, it's manipulating a natural market to avoid an efficient allocation of resources and instead maximise the amount the individual has. It's about a transfer of wealth, not efficient resource allocation.

I really hate that I already have a text wall because this is the paragraph I really wanted to tackle and I'm afraid you'll nod off by the time you get to this, but here goes:

Your toys r us rant falls under a broad category of anti-capitalism that I guess I'll call anti-consumerism. The problem with the anti-consumer argument is that I've rarely seen it argued in an objective manner, and thus I find it difficult to respond to. Yes, to you, that there are 5000 different varieties of toy in a world where some people want for food and shelter is ridiculous. But you need to understand that need and desire are very subjective things that evolve for individuals. I'm sure there are products you consider to be needs that I would find to be ridiculous. I "require" high speed internet or I would go insane, but a rickshaw driver in Nepal would likely find my need to be ridiculous.

That humans in a growing economy take on additional needs as their wealth increases to accommodate the costs of those needs is a beautiful thing, and not to be disdained. This is what we call "standard of living," and for the vast majority of people in growing economies on Earth, it has skyrocketed over the last 200 years. I hope in 2114 that everyone in the world can afford a personal robot assistant that they just can't live without, along with a retinue of robot sex servants and robot gourmet cooks.


Middle class families spend thousands of dollars on their children at toys r us every Christmas because it makes them happy, because they want those toys for their children more than they wanted the money in their wallet. They also were able to do this thanks to a world where they were able to make enough at their jobs that they had a comfortable cushion of income after buying food and shelter that they could blow it on items for pure pleasure. How is this not amazing for everyone involved? It creates jobs, stimulating free trade that is rapidly pulling countries like China and Indonesia out of abject poverty, and makes people happier than they would be otherwise.

And it is efficiently allocating resources. A plastic manufacturer had the choice of selling his plastic to a meat packing company or a toy manufacturer and the toy manufacture had the higher bid. The price of plastic went up a tenth of a penny, and plastic was thus distributed to its greatest need for the most accurate price. A teenager put in applications to work at a grocery store and toys r us, but toys r us chose to hire him more readily and at a slightly higher salary because they had a profit bump last quarter and found themselves shorthanded dealing with the increase volume. The going wage of a department store clerk went up a few pennies to accommodate the increased demand vs supply.

[wufwugy]

I'll try to not hit on anything Renton responded to

We all agree it's not right to discriminate on the grounds of race, sex or sexual orientation (i assume), yet we find it acceptable to discriminate on the grounds of wealth.

FWIW I think discrimination by actors in competitive markets is awesome because it benefits non-discriminators. It also better allows those who are discriminated against to vote with their capital. Anti-discrimination laws are just a window dressing and don't punish discriminators. I think a week or so ago I mentioned Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate who recently died who was most popular for explaining this and similar phenomena

Being discriminated against makes people feel bad and we all immediately go to the government to try to fix the problem. But as we've seen, it doesn't fix the problem, and it hinders the market from truly fixing it. Imagine what would happen if McDonald's didn't hire black people. Fucking bankruptcy ahoy! Not only would they be crushed by consumers who disagree with the policy, but productivity would lag far behind Burger King's and Jack in the Box's because those businesses would now have ample opportunity to hire better workers from the pool of black people while McDonald's is forced to hire the remaining slag from a pool of exclusively white people

I propose that we still have a bunch of racism today precisely because we've gotten the state involved and haven't let racists let their racism destroy them in the marketplace

A kid from the poor side of town is far more likely to have less face time with parents, eat less healthily, go to a worse school, get a lower quality education, get less years of education, have lower quality healthcare, have a lower paid job and continue this cycle.

How is this fair? It's just pot luck who your parents are, not that different from race discrimination, especially when you consider the correlation between socio-economic status and ethnicity. But forget that really because race shouldn't be part of this argument.

It isn't fair, but it also can't be fair. Without post-scarcity technology, this is a reality we have to deal with. Capitalism deals with it quite well since it raises opportunity for people in these situations. Before capitalism, if you were born poor, you stayed poor. After capitalism, all sorts of opportunities began springing up in such a way that poor people now can climb the ladder.

Some respond by saying that if wealth was just redistributed, it would pay for the good of the poor already. But the accounting says otherwise. If we redistribute wealth significantly, it's not nearly enough to do much. The only possible way to reduce poverty is by growing the economy. Redistribution will just make the median poor, put everybody at that median, and the business environment would collapse due to supply-side problems. Again, my go-to is the USSR. This is basically what that empire did.

This is what I was thinking about resolving with the free food thing. It would mean no need for poor families to work as long hours which would mean more time for to spend with kids, kids guaranteed healthy food, parents able to spend the money the earn on better quality housing and children having a more equal start.

I'm having trouble digging into this causally. I think somebody trained in economics could explain why this would create some pretty destructive distortions, but they would also be able to point out that fixing the problem right now isn't necessarily strictly a supply issue, but a political one. So I'll make a different point

This problem, along with many others, are solved by open borders. Open borders policy is hyper-free-market and eliminates a swath of government regulations. It's also uber liberal, yet I suspect most liberals would hate it. Regardless, geographic mobility fixes this problem by allowing people to move where their capital is best allocated. Most of the "working long hours and can hardly pay bills" is because they're living in the wrong place. Cities are fucking expensive, and municipal planning regulations have basically created the problem of poverty within cities by entrenching occupants who get priced out of the market for any variety of reasons.

Open borders would let people move to where jobs and shelter that their capital skills can afford are. This would create all sorts of immigration as well as emigration. For example, we would see vast capital flow into beachfront properties in Mexico as the new retirement communities and vacation homes and even just regular homes for the increasing internet-connected business world. This would make Mexico a much better place to do business, and immigration into US would plateau and eventually fall because the influx of capital would make for all sorts of indigenous opportunity

A ginormous problem of government is the hindrance of effective resource allocation. The question is often asked: "why is efficiency so important?" The answer is because it gets things where they need to go. We do have the technology to feed the entire planet cheaply, but people are still starving, mainly because of government-enforced regulatory capture by voters behind the walls of closed borders

This doesn't address some of the larger issues I think capitalism creates, which is waste on an extraordinary level. You claim that capitalism is efficient and any allocation method not based on a demand and supply pricing mechanism creates massive waste , yet how does toys r us exist if capitalism is about the efficient allocation of resources? People struggle to make ends meet yet there are like 5000 different types of child's doll to choose from. Capitalism created that, which is ridiculous and kinda sick really, but money realised targeting kids with marketing was effective. That is not efficiently allocating capital, it's manipulating a natural market to avoid an efficient allocation of resources and instead maximise the amount the individual has. It's about a transfer of wealth, not efficient resource allocation.

This is a demonstration of how incredible the wealth creation power of capitalism is, and also a demonstration of the kinds of problems created by lack of efficiency due to regulations like closed borders. Toys R Us is largely a suburb phenomenon. The suburbs are a bunch off people whose living standards are skyrocketing and are cut off to the rest of the world. We're so naive that we don't even know about the suffering of the world, and this naivete is maintained largely due to government policy like closed borders and construction regulations that keep suffering away from us.

Seriously, I think the Toys R Us point shows the opposite of what you do. Capitalism is powerful as fuck. So powerful that it creates a working middle class that lives better than kings a hundred years ago. When poor immigrants are allowed in, they don't do "the Toys R Us" thing. They remember the suffering back home or in their current lives, and they allocate their newly earned capital towards that. Without capitalism, the opportunity to improve position in life wouldn't really even be a thing.