In most of 78 countries studied people were less satisfied with their lives as their country became less economically equal.
The fall in life satisfaction occurred even where the economy had grown as a whole and people from all classes were generally richer, Dr. David Bartram will tell the British Sociological Association's online annual conference on Thursday 21 April,
[...] He found that life satisfaction in the U.K. in 2018 was similar to that in 1981, during a major recession, in part because inequality in the U.K. had increased so much. The U.K. was typical of countries that had lower life satisfaction over time as inequality had risen, falling from 7.7 in 1981 to 7.4 in 1999 as inequality rose, later recovering to 7.8 as inequality fell.
[...] "When inequality increases, people with high incomes don't benefit much from their gains—many rich people are focused on those who have even more than they do, and they never feel they have enough. But people who earn little really suffer from falling further behind—they feel excluded and frustrated by not being able to keep up even with people who receive average incomes."
[...] Countries where inequality had fallen were generally happier over time, including Poland, Peru, Mexico and pre-war Ukraine.
Dr. Bartram said his research contradicted some previous work that found that higher inequality could increase life satisfaction. "My paper finds the opposite—higher inequality depresses life satisfaction. Previous researchers have compared across different countries at one point in time, but comparing one country to another isn't a good way of learning what will happen as inequality increases."
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @01:04PM (10 children)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_theory [wikipedia.org]
tldr; If you print money and give it to the rich and powerful, then they will become ever richer and more powerful. It will also pump up the prices of whatever they buy. In the modern US that is various focuses of government spending (education, healthcare, real estate) along with stocks and other investments.
Any solution that ignores this is fake and will not work.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday April 25 2022, @02:00PM (9 children)
Why print money when you can simply have tax cuts for the rich?
Tax cuts for the rich always play better than printing money on Fox News near election time.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @03:04PM (5 children)
Also, printing money is totally fine too while (R).
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @03:44PM (4 children)
Nope, only fools still think there is a distinction. It is just a way to keep useful idiots arguing about pointless crap while everyone gets fleeced.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @03:52PM (3 children)
Correct. The rest of us realize it's one of the many tools at our disposal and should be used as safely as possible.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:15PM (2 children)
Republican vs Democrat is a useful tool, but I doubt you are one of those benefiting from its use.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:26PM
They're All Just The Same™.
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @04:29PM
The "Post Anonymously" checkbox is not a useful tool when every single post sounds the exact same.
It is, however, a useful feature for identifying tools!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @03:42PM (2 children)
You obviously are not familiar with the quantities involved. Keep in mind fractional reserve banking. For ever dollar printed by the fed, 10x more can be created in loans using that dollar as reserve.
Taxes are a rounding error at this point. They are not worth talking about except as a way to punish poor people.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:32PM (1 child)
> They are not worth talking about except as a way to punish poor people.
Ah now we're getting somewhere.
Poor people are morally inferior and behave like money-grubbing lazy mooches that expect a handout. Growing branches of Christianity now directly pair riches with closeness to God. People cheer at the prospect of poor people dying on the street for lack of basics - to motivate others, presumably. Poor people basically need to be treated like recruits in the army, and like it. Left-right left-right fetch my food, clean my house. You're *lucky* to have this opportunity.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @08:36PM
* except when we do it
(Score: 1, Troll) by HammeredGlass on Monday April 25 2022, @01:11PM (21 children)
what people don't have and who has what they don't have, instead of making the best of what you do have and not being thirsty for other people's stuff.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 25 2022, @02:50PM (5 children)
The entire consumer economy is driven on the human characteristic of desiring what others have. There are good reasons that the ten commandments include:
Do not let thyself lust after thy neighbor’s wife!
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor his farm, nor his cattle, nor anything that is his!
Advertising taps into these human desires and constantly drives people toward desiring what they don't have, and purchasing as much of it as they are capable of.
and that's just media advertising spend for purchasing, for every dollar spent on those channels, ten more are spent indirectly on internal marketing, sales, market development, etc. Ratios vary wildly from company to company, but I doubt there is a single company in the Fortune 500 which spends less than 20% on marketing and market development, and many that spend more than 80% of their gross income on "focusing society" on purchasing more of their product at the highest net profit possible.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday April 27 2022, @01:39AM (1 child)
Nonsense. People want to live, and in order to do that they buy food, shelter, and clothing. They also buy the tools of their trades and vehicles for obvious needs, and nice things for comfort and joy. Often people want things like what other people have, and shallow observers conclude that the motive is jealousy. In fact the motive often comes from "that guy seems to enjoy his stuff, I want to enjoy life also, so I'll consider similar things."
I have neighbors with boats and offroad vehicles and other toys that they enjoy. I don't want those things; I don't want the clutter and the maintenance. I decide independently. My observations are data, not Pavlov's bell.
Advertising provides suggestions, not control. A person who is controlled by advertising is at fault, not the advertiser if he's honest.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 27 2022, @01:49AM
Nonsense. People want to live, and in order to do that they buy food, shelter, and clothing. But marketing and sales don't push food, shelter and clothing that people need in order to live, they push restaurants, processed sensory overload foods, fast fashion, and McMansions to hold an excess of toys and amusements.
Suggestions are effective, whether they control or not, they work. We plough an eye popping percentage of GDP into advertising because without it most of the crap that drives the consumer economy wouldn't sell.
Good for you. If you are as masterfuly in control as you portray yourself, you rank at least two standard deviations from the mean in terms of susceptibility to marketing.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday April 27 2022, @04:58AM (2 children)
Can't we just share? Sharing is caring, after all.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 27 2022, @02:49PM (1 child)
What are you? A Communist?
In all seriousness, we already feed the hungry (SNAP, etc.) house the poor (Section 8, etc.) provide for the disabled, elderly, etc. but... the current system is wrapped around itself determining need. We're all human, we all have basic needs, and society is bountiful enough that we can provide for everyone's basic needs. Proof? We already do for the vast majority - and for those who we don't, they could easily be provided for by splitting the wages and other costs of employments of the benefits micromanagement bureacrats' system. Universal Basic Income (UBI) - isn't a thing yet, but it would be a dramatic simplification of the current system, a dramatic increase in efficiency, a dramatic increase in security for those scraping by on the bottom of the system, and a dramatic power grab from the employers of the working poor.
I say: provide UBI (maybe $600 per month) and decrease minimum wage by $450 per month, from $15/hr to $12. (What, it's not $15 already? Well it damn well should be.) Let employers of the working poor pay less, because their taxes already provide UBI, and let them make their jobs attractive enough that people want to work rather than have to work to survive. Get UBI high enough and we can drop the minimum wage to 0, and I think that would be a vastly superior society to live in. The transition would not be without bumps, but we've already got bumps and we're going nowhere good as far as I can see.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @08:21PM
Oh for the love of sweet bell peppers, this again ...
UBI runs into a nest of trouble, starting with - how universal, how basic, and how delivered?
If it's truly Universal, turning into a no-questions-asked handout for everyone from Musk to the latest dude swimming the Rio Grande, that's great, but then you're instantly multiplying your per-person cost by a factor of around 350 million. If you're means-testing it, applying it to citizens only and otherwise getting clever then you don't pay as many people, but then you need paper-pushers to actually do it.
If it's truly basic (i.e. a bunk in a shelter, a daily canteen of soup and a blanket) then that's one thing, but it it's supposed to cover more than the bare minimum of daily survival, that's quite another.
You're proposing $7200/annum/person, which works out to roughly two and a half trillion annually, but isn't enough to replace medicaid, medicare, social security, or frankly damn near anything else so you won't get much in savings by either displacing them, or saving on their bureaucracies.. It's not a breadline income unless aggregated over a large family, so you'll still need your various forms of food and housing assistance ... so in essence, you're proposing a big fat expenditure with no functional saving attached.
This is not a winning formula.
However, you are proposing to fill the shortfall with taxes amounting to a 60+% boost over the current total federal tax take. Not just income taxes; everything from import duties to capital gains, everything from fuel taxes to immigration paperwork filing fees - in the process, either tightening the screws massively on the people already paying the bulk of taxes, pushing more of them nearer the breadline, or alternatively trying to spread the tax burden over people who currently don't pay much in direct taxes at all at the federal level.
This, too, does not smell of winning formula.
The funny thing is that we have yet to see any kind of proposal for a UBI that comes close to plausibility. You see, if you start a conversation with: "A family of four earning net $50K before tax should be paying $10K in tax to the federal government." your chances of getting within laughing distance of election are basically somewhere between zilch and squat. On the other hand, if you want to provide any kind of serious UBI ($600/month isn't it), then that's the kind of tax expansion that you need.
So what do you have that's politically plausible, and what are your thresholds of funding?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @03:06PM (5 children)
Because in a capitalist society the cost of a good is based on what billions of people OTHER THAN YOU can pay for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @08:52PM (4 children)
But in our society the cost of a good is based on what thousands of people RICHER THAN ME can pay for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @02:18AM (3 children)
So you're arguing for price controls, then? Seems as if this idea has kind of a poor track record.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @02:37AM (2 children)
We already have price controls. Should only the richest among us be the ones setting them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @02:53AM (1 child)
Price Control:
Someone from the government comes along and says: "This thing shall cost exactly so much. Failure to comply is a punishable offence."
Being outbid:
Someone else offers the seller more than you were offering. Happens on Ebay all the time. Government isn't involved unless they're somehow sponsoring bidders.
See the difference?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @05:19AM
And in Congress. Business is the same everywhere. Dot gov is just another player
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:11PM (8 children)
Seizing and redistributing the wealth of people more successful than yourself is an important aspect of certain ideologies.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:25PM (1 child)
Ah yes, like those lazy billionaire's that do no work themselves while paying off politicians to cut their taxes. Damn capitalist moochers externalizing all their costs on to the tax payers, then hardly paying any taxes themselves!
Thank you kind stranger for helping us see truth clearly!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @06:52AM
Ah yes, capitalism is not perfect and therefore must be discarded. It would be great if there was an alternate system scalable to the same levels and proven to accomplish as much, but alas the existence of such is distinctly lacking.
Perchance if such a system were to exist then surely the vast majority of people would willingly flock to support it after clearly demonstrating its alleged superiority for all to behold.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @04:33PM (5 children)
Yep, the "ideology" being that of a Constitutional Democratic Republic where the power of taxation is explicitly granted to the Congress by the Constitution.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @09:24PM (4 children)
The concept of taxation is on a significantly lower scale than the myriad examples of communists murdering people and then seizing everything they owned. Try again tankie.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @10:13PM (3 children)
Yes we know, you like your civilian casualties to only occur when furthering imperialistic goals of western capitalists. Maybe stop cheering on Nazis while simultaneously saying socialists are Nazis, makes your propaganda too obvious. You can Venmo my teaching fee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @03:47AM
Again with the claims about "Nazis" yet woefully deficient on evidence that they exist in the US in any sizable numbers like 10's or 100's of thousands. Actual klanners are dying out. Joe Biden's eulogizing one is well documented.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @09:39PM
The Nazis from World War II era Germany were the ones who self identified as socialists. Your "no true Scotsman" inability to comprehend the nuances of that fact is on you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27 2022, @05:17AM
Another false equivalence. The number of deaths directly resulting from violent communist revolutions is many orders of magnitude greater.
Wide-scale murder and property seizure is an inseparable defining characteristic of revolutionary communism. The same is not true of capitalism.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @01:26PM (4 children)
Search for:
inequality in Russia
and pick your source. It looks like Russia may currently be the worst major country in this respect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @02:03PM (2 children)
Income inequality has been tracked for a long time with a measure called the GINI coefficient
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country [worldpopulationreview.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:13PM
Surprise(?) -- Ukraine makes the bottom 10 on the Gini link you provided -- one of the 10 countries that are "most equitable".
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 26 2022, @03:37PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday April 25 2022, @02:08PM
Define major country. I wouldn't be surprised, if China or India are worse in that regard. Also, some places like Venezuela are hitting rock bottom. https://www.history.com/news/venezuela-chavez-maduro-crisis [history.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday April 25 2022, @01:59PM (8 children)
I suspect that a degree of wealth disparity actually helps people feel better. But not an intense degree. Also intense degrees of wealth inequality are harmful to democratic institutions. But note that in classical Athens the wealthiest citizens had a wealth of about 50 times that of the least wealthy citizens. For a larger society the range should probably be greater, but not a million times, and there's also no reason the believe that Athens was at an optimal level. Still, human societies (as we know them) seem to require hierarchies to be stable. And also the ability at each rung to move higher (if it's worth the additional effort). To the extent that this is blocked, one should expect forces favoring social instability to be strengthened. But if you're going to allow people to move up the hierarchy, it's clearly necessary that there are also mechanisms to lose ones position, and that those become stronger as you move upwards. (Losing one's position in the hierarchy, though, should often just mean descending one rung.)
This is clearly just a sketchy outline of what is needed, and there's also the question of to what extent stability should be favored, but it's one of the things that helps make lots of people happy.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Monday April 25 2022, @02:48PM
I'm currently reading Ray Dalio's The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail which discusses the rise and fall of empires. He looks at a number of indicators where wealth inequality is one of the indicators (I won't list all of them but military, reserve currency status, and education are examples). In particular when the decline of an empire matches civil unrest, wealth inequality is a major driving factor.
I can't do the thesis justice, I recommend checking the book out from your local library. He also has prepared the same content in YouTube format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8 [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 25 2022, @04:03PM
Inasmuch as "getting ahead" makes people feel better, sure. But in the long run that's a zero-sum game. Unless you can convince people of delusions like: "You're a millionaire! Your parents never could have hoped to have a net worth of a million dollars." when, of course, their parents were actually wealthier in real terms and the numerical "millionaire" threshold continues to become more attainable due to inflation. In a relative sense: for every person who gets ahead, another falls behind. Again, if you can delude people that they aren't falling behind, or that they are getting ahead when they aren't, then that can work, but it's not something that works when everyone is aware of the reality of the situation.
People are happier when their "basic needs" are met, but that threshold of "basic needs" varies dramatically, usually based on perceived peer comparisons.
Some people are happy when they have a roof over their heads, with a mud floor and three walls to keep out most of the rain when it falls, and a pallet to keep them out of the mud when they lie down to sleep. They feel fortunate because they used to not have a dry roof, and they see many of their neighbors who still do not.
Of course: people are unhappy when they are hungry, but what foods satisfy that hunger? Are they happiest eating doughnuts for breakfast, steak for lunch, and ice cream for dinner? Or are they happier when they have easy access to healthy foods? Or are they happy when they simply get enough calories to quell their hunger pangs even if that's just potatoes all day long? This, of course varies by region, individual persons in those regions, and even the age and current thinking of those people as they are influenced by various ideas of what would make them happy.
Many (most? these days) people consume globally distributed A/V media which gives them a global set of peers to compare themselves with, and many people (especially children of all ages) end up basing their ideas of "happy" relative to those images which often come from extremely rare and unrealistic to attain lifestyles.
At least, based on the surviving literature, it would seem it was.
Historically that has been true, but I wonder if it is a true requirement, or a historical buffer against the barbarians at the gate and the masses in extreme (dramatically life shortening) poverty that don't exist (as much) today?
Why would that be? And should this privilege extend to offspring?
My sketchy outline of what is needed for happiness would include:
1. Sufficient food of adequate quality to both alleviate hunger and promote health - at all times, not just feel-good spotlight Thanksgiving charity dinners.
2. Adequate shelter to "sleep in peace and safety" and in extension the general Montesquieuian principle: "that no man need be afraid of another," day or night.
3. Freedom to communicate as they feel the need to.
4. Freedom (including the ability) to travel and/or relocate as they wish.
Due to the limited size of the earth and increasing human population, 4. is in opposition to 2. We can't all winter three days a week at Chalets with a view of Mont Blanc, and the other four on isolated Caribbean beaches. Not at current population levels certainly.
At current levels of global wealth and population, I sincerely believe that 1. through 3. and a reasonably modest 4. can be met through UBI, and that human labors required to support the existing wealth levels would be sufficiently incentivized by the desire to have more than basic UBI, better housing in more desirable locations, more services / servants, etc. Of course, UBI is a somewhat radical restructuring of the established economic order of things (maybe not as radical as it is made out to be when social security / disability / etc. is acknowledged), and changes like that should be introduced gradually to avoid radical destabilization of the existing systems, but: it's really just an extension of Montesquieu from "no man need be afraid of another" to "no man need be afraid of another man, hunger, exposure, censure, or confinement."
Will this cure unhappiness, depression, suicide, etc.? Absolutely not, but it should raise baselines to a point where fear of suffering is no longer a behavioral tool employed to control the masses - and I would consider a society that could achieve that to be far superior to what we know of ancient Athens.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @05:53PM (5 children)
All we know seems to be them. Kant had some pretty good ideas, and one of them was that the collective self-abdication or responsibility (e.g. hierarchical deferral) was a huge force for evil, wherein institutions would attempt to infantilize their constituents, and their constituents would seek to be infantilized. Early advocates for laissez-faire or capitalism; whatever you want to call the market revolution that lead to what we've got now. But it's also highly contagious when paired with techniques that increase efficiency, it has become the de facto universal mode, not because it's efficacious, but because it becomes virtually necessary to endeavor in trade. Vitally, a segue away from it has been made a considerable danger. The US alone houses 330+mn people, issuing a sweeping rules change is... Dangerous. And it's not just dangerous in the US, it's dangerous globally because of the interdependencies efficiency has borne with it. Moving this shit around on a human-tangible timescale, at this point, may well have been pressed into the realm of impossibility, given one values human life. There's also some weird logical fallacies that play into the whole narrative we've been issued, and people are really attached to the concept that it's hard work that makes you Jeff Bezos, the reality is more nuanced than that, though. You need a dotcom bubble, a Stanford degree, upper-upper middle class parents and et cetera to be Jeff Bezos. And how many Amazons can the world support before it's not characteristically different? None. The processes are subtractive, land owned, patents filed, vacuums filled, and all the low hanging fruit has been picked. So the attainability of even a reasonable modicum of wealth is pocketed. As that narrative is increasingly disproven, the rules are going to be want to change.
But there's a huge variety of organizational models outside of this one, which yes, is predicated almost entirely on constructing an artificial "gradient of desire" which the masses blindly follow, which is massively detrimental to most of humanity when considered in whole.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @06:24PM
In other words, you hate America. Why do you hate America, friend?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 25 2022, @07:34PM
The old lie "in America, anyone can be President" has been yet again demonstrated false. Anyone whose father was President, anyone who is more politically connected than 99.99% of the population, anyone who is rich enough to bankroll a campaign (money need not be earned, a slow squandering of inheritance is good enough) can pull it off with backing from strong enough foreign powers...
We all read the stories, but so few can live the headlines - and so many don't seem to understand that.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @08:44PM
A lot of it is also based on luck. The dotcom bubble was a part of getting lucky. Mark Cuban got lucky because he sold his company for several billion dollars right before the dotcom bubble burst, so the timing was a big part of that luck as well. People who are wealthy can afford to take more risks with their money than a person who has less wealth, allowing them to get ahead even more. It's like playing poker and having one person at the table who has way more money than everyone else. Having the money to begin with helps them get ahead later.
Monopoly is a really frustrating game that's mostly luck, but it was created as a criticism of capitalism. Here's a story about exactly that: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170728-monopoly-was-invented-to-demonstrate-the-evils-of-capitalism [bbc.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @06:59AM (1 child)
On economics and wealth distributions? Prey tell! We need citations, for your attempt to steal intellectual cred! (Pre-response notice: You are full of shit. best leave now.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @06:09PM
No you fuckwit, on heteronomy giving rise to systemic perversions because an immature population. E.g. people being conditioned in public education systems later to be shit adults because all they can possibly conceive of is coloring in the lines, and then cowering in fear on cue at every point, following in line, and then following corrupt institutions while granting them ultimate power. Which of course is the same system that gave rise to business in America, and proceeded to bend at the will of every dollar thrown their way to accommodate the totally obscene wealth distribution seen today. But you probably can't connect those dots, too much cognitive load.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @04:47PM (3 children)
wrong or right i dunno.
for some crazy ass reason i keep coming back to "energy". maybe because i am not a tree with photosynthesis capabilities.
just to get one thing outta way: we are not equal at birth. some are tall and fair, some bulky and strong or weak or whatnot.
so next up then: who controls and has access to energy? if the late romans elite only used their slaves to endulge themselfs, instead of also getting sunburn overseeing the fields and new ditches and trenches, then soon the " energy" will go hungry and ... revolt.
today, we have brainless robots -aka- means of production. if it's just "money" and no plan for general improvement then ofc we're going down the road of the late roman empire.
"means of production" should enable more "means of production".
it means to enable a possible competition or evolution. " means of production" also includes energy (which the marxists just lable "workers"?). we are uniquely positioned to liberate this part of " means of production" to everyone that can get a sunburn (energy-electricity from the sky).
woo-this is getting long in the toothe. basically run the brainless robot for free.
but nevermind that. let's make 50 electricity standards. 30 different screw standards. leave all oil equipment in foot-pound-inches and never agree on any a standard.
now excuse me, i gotta puke, i aet too much ... or raked in too many evenly distributed ownership shares when communism morphed, thru the stroke of a pen, into uber-capitalism?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @06:31PM (2 children)
I see your point buried in there.
Without some sort of societal goal (such as rebuilding after a world war), we revert to institutional decrepitude as exemplified in the film classic Ikiru. I.e. an aimless bureaucracy that values superficial orderliness and appearance of being busy. Eventually this spiteful organization cannot extract enough reward from micromanagement of inferiors and needs to actively antagonize them to demonstrate its power over them. Instead of helping, it actively harms in order to steepen the gradient of the hierarchy. Nazis. That's where I'm going. Nazis. Nazis. Nazis.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @07:36PM (1 child)
communism wasn't really a problem in japan methinks. they can think and read and prolly just scratched their heads (or maybe more polite "shook their heads") and just thought how the village rice mill was ever anything other then a machine belonging to the village?
i suppose a complex.machine nobody can build alone to be owned by one person is a gajin thing?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @08:26PM
Yes, and a very stupid short sighted approach it is! Allowing someone to corner a market with patents and monopolybpower, thus becoming a parasite that extracts wealth from others while doing nothing more than having their name on the right pieces of paper. Somrhow that is the lauded goal in western societies, and the selfishness permiated and ruined much of society, just look at the US where public spaces are hard to come by, and constantly under attack from conservatives that want to privatize and extract even more wealth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @05:05PM
OK, so we have a few problems:
a) correlation/causation?
Why were people dissatisfied? There's some shadowplay about envy, but is that really it? For example, let's say that people's wealth, on balance, improved but that the substantial body of measurement included improved health care options owing to advances although those were expensive. If they were nonetheless covered by various benefits schemes (public or private makes no odds in context provided that the recipients have them) and yet what people valued were a higher degree of disposable income flexibility - what then? People wouldn't have their preferences met despite the numbers going up.
b) confounding factors
They drew a parallel between the UK of the early '80s, and the UK in 2018. Great, but how many people gave a damn about the GINI coefficient compared to the coal miners and the noise about Brexit? Would everyone have been happy as a clam if the wealth distribution had been flat as a strap but Brexit were achieving it by impoverishing the nation to grinding levels of misery? Probably not, but the article doesn't even raise the point.
c) strength of correlation
Look for the weasel words. "Most" countries - why not all of them? Is this a smoking gun? No? Why not? Were there other explanations? Not in the article.
This whole thing raises more questions than answers, and the questions that it raises say more about the political mood than about the state of the science.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @06:18PM
Haiti, Argentina, Ivory Coast, and Papua New Guinea.
Answer: They are clustered either side of the USA's WB Gini, one measure of income equality. [wikipedia.org]
This doesn't mean that extreme inequality doesn't make a difference; but I think perhaps there's a range with in a kind of "normal bounds" where it's not a dominating factor. I'll take the country that's not in perpetual recovery from hurricanes, earthquakes, and unstable politics amidst extreme poverty (Haiti).
Looking at high inequality gets us a cluster of countries in Southern Africa, which would seem to bolster the idea that it matters a lot since there can definitely be severe poverty and instability there.
OTOH, looking at countries that do well gets us a curious mix of places that are generally regarded as models--Scandinavian countries, but also Belarus.
(Score: 3, Touché) by MIRV888 on Monday April 25 2022, @06:34PM (2 children)
Water is wet.
Plutocracy is the norm the world over.
Functioning democracies are the exception, and even then money talks,
and bullshit walks.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Monday April 25 2022, @06:39PM (1 child)
No numbers for Saudi I see.
The country, excuse me kingdom, we dance for.
Shocking.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 25 2022, @09:11PM
Hard to conduct a representative survey when the Sheik doesn't like you or your kind.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @07:48PM (3 children)
People are unhappy because they are jealous and envious. People should understand that
Fairness != Justice
Fairness != Equality
If one person works hard and another person is lazy and wants to do drugs then it's not fair for both to be equal. The person that works hard should make and have more than the lazy person.
This is not to say that too much inequality is necessarily good. The economic basis behind tax brackets, originally, had to do with the backwards bending labor supply curve. If someone is rich enough/makes enough money additional income becomes less valuable than additional leisure time so they may decide to work less. So tax brackets are meant to reallocate some of that money towards people that would work more in exchange for some of that extra money making everyone better off.
But, at the same time, I would rather live in a society where I am well off even if I am worse off than some much more well off people than to live in a society that I am struggling even if everyone else is also struggling.
We need to get rid of this culture of envy and jealousy. The goal should be make society as a whole better off not to make everyone equal. You can make everyone equal by giving everyone nothing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @08:16PM (1 child)
Pretty much no one argues for absolute equality, go punch some more straw men to work out that teenage angst.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @03:35AM
They unironically argue for equity by factors such as racial demographic instead. Then act surprised when the preferentially treated but under-qualified do not succeed as much as their better-prepared peers.
How about enacting programs to raise up all disadvantaged people and prepare them? Nope. Just more of the same half-assed tripe to pat yourself on the back while doing nothing to address underlying problems.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 26 2022, @05:27PM
What if it's an intrinsic and unavoidable property of upper mammalian neurochemistry?
Are you suggesting universal trepanism as the solution?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @07:58PM (5 children)
Is khallow dead? Not even wild horses would be able to keep him from making the "oblivious rebuttal" to all this commie talk. Where is he?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @08:19PM (4 children)
He and runaway are posting AC to keep from losing karma from their frequent lies.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday April 25 2022, @08:42PM (3 children)
(this one is actually pretty clever, see if you can spot why)
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @06:53AM (2 children)
Oh, dear! We have fallen for yet another aristarchus post, only because it was clever, and true. How long must Soylentils be bombarded with truth and reason! I, for one, demand the banning of this aristarchus poster, and the eradication of Banksy, and the hemlock poisoning of Socrates. History will prove us wrong! All Hail Trump, with real hail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @07:57AM (1 child)
“Any man who must say 'I am clever' is not truly clever at all.”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @06:36PM
That means it was clever! Thanks!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 25 2022, @09:07PM (3 children)
I wonder how the three measurements of demographic inequality, economic inequality, and happiness all interrelate.
For example if the primary cause of economic inequality is demographic inequality, then policies to encourage the latter should prevent the former thus improving happiness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 25 2022, @10:15PM (2 children)
Whitesupremacist says what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 26 2022, @12:37AM (1 child)
So the khallow supporters are here, even if khallow himself is obliviously absent. Great. What the heck is "demographic inequality"?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 26 2022, @05:31PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves