SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Income inequality in America has been growing rapidly, and is expected to increase [PDF]. While the widening wealth gap is a hot topic in the media and on the campaign trail, there's quite a disconnect between the perceptions of economists and those of the general public.
For instance, surveys show people tend to underestimate the income disparity between the top and bottom 20% of Americans, and overestimate the opportunity for poor individuals to climb the social ladder. Additionally, a majority of adults believe that corporations conduct business fairly despite evidence to the contrary and that the government should not act to reduce income inequality.
Even though inequality is increasing, Americans seem to believe that our social and economic systems work exactly as they should. This perspective has intrigued social scientists for decades. My colleague Andrei Cimpian and I have demonstrated in our recent research that these beliefs that our society is fair and just may take root in the first years of life, stemming from our fundamental desire to explain the world around us.
http://theconversation.com/lifes-not-fair-so-why-do-we-assume-it-is-45981
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @08:10PM
that's blind luck and thus fair.
That doesn't follow. Even if it is blind luck, they are still in a position where they have immense privilege and far more opportunities than anyone else, just because they happened to be born into a certain family.. That is not fair in any reasonable sense of the word, regardless of how much blind luck was involved. I noticed you did not respond to my point about there not truly being equality of opportunity.
You don't get to shit on the ones who've earned it either because they've earned it.
When did the discussion become about the mythical people who earned their positions in society? It didn't.
Who's left to blame? Your own ass and nobody else.
So being born rich is fair because it's blind luck, but not being born rich is an individual's fault? Interesting.
I wonder how many of these blind luck rich people could succeed if they were born into an extremely poor family. Not very many, I would imagine. It is blind luck, after all.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday September 10 2015, @08:51PM
You have to understand where The Mighty Buzzard is coming from. This isn't even the just world theory. This is the just world axiom.
According to the just world axiom, it's absolutely fair that some people are born to immense privilege or win the capitalism lottery and can sit around or party in Ibiza while making more money off interest than most of us will see in a decade! Anything else would be trying to equalize outcomes! Didn't you know that how hard you work can be measured by your net worth?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:03PM
Don't forget your self-worth, too. And your social value.
By that standard JP Morgan is the greatest human who ever lived, and Mother Theresa was a worthless hippie and drain on society.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:30PM
You say it sarcastically but I'll say in all frankness that not your net worth but your increase of net worth can very much be used to gauge your value to society. A man who employs a hundred people is worth a thousand times what any one of his employees is to society because he's created a means for those hundred people and their families to not starve.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 10 2015, @11:25PM
That depends. What is the quality of life for those hundred employees? Is the boss just exploiting those employees, or does he treat them like friends? Does he give the smallest damn about their problems in life? Might he get involved if one of them has a medical problem?
I've witnessed employers going the extra mile, and helping good employees. I've also witnessed the corporate attitude - use the employees up, then throw them away.
Being an employer isn't an accurate measure of your value to society. Some employers aren't worth the powder it would take to blow their brains out. Other employers should be nominated for sainthood. And, more often than not, the real SOB's are more successful than the best employers.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 11 2015, @12:20AM
Runaway points out one complication of this idea.
The other is the reason why those hundred people have decided to become employees. Is it because the job-creator has a true vision and working for him is a great deal? I see that when considering Elon Musk.
The question at hand isn't one of individual merit, however. We are talking about record corporate profits. We are talking about wage stagnation. We are talking about tech employees being asked to train their own H1B replacements.
Here are some preliminary results from trials of a basic income scheme [wikipedia.org]. In my mind these results highlight the basic problem we face in a society with growing income inequality. Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat right up until somebody with vastly more resources confines his fishing territory to some pond that doesn't have any fish, and then he'll have no choice but to sign up as a hand on Ritchie Rich's big fishing boat for half a fish a day (not the head if he's lucky). Give a man a fish a day instead of the alternative of wage-slaving to Ritchie Rich, and he'll invent a better fishing net and perhaps better husbandry methods to increase the amount of fish available to be caught. (Is there such a thing as fish husbandry? There is now!)
I'm not saying the USA or especially humanity as a whole is ready for a basic income. Maybe in 50 years. I haven't run the math. As it stands, however, soaring corporate profits and stagnant wages represent a “something's not right here” situation. If the job-creators are so benevolent, then surely they'd like to see the lives of those hundred people and their families improve as well, or at least say the best and brightest 10 that enable the boss man to be worth the thousand times they are.
Now, that's not to say that there's a whole lot wrong with the notion that a fool and his money are soon parted. In this case, the fools are any worker who would work Ritchie Rich's fishing boat for half a fish a day. Instead, they should be picketing. Ritchie Rich catches a thousand fish per day with his operation, but the workers only get a half a fish? The guy who gets three quarters of a fish to invent the fish net that improves the operational capacity of the fishing boat and gets a whole fish instead of ¾ as a bonus one day is a fool for thinking he's better than the line workers getting half a fish. Thanks to the unintended consequences of 2nd wave feminism, both husbands and wives need to work on board the SS Ritchie Rich now from can see to can't see and have to split a whole fish between themselves and their child? Now here comes Obamacare, and they're forced to split the fish four ways now so the insurance industrial complex gets its cut too all while screaming “religious objection!?”
Something has gone massively awry here, but the people are complacent. It's just odd. A fool and his money are soon parted. The fool is every 99.9%er in man's world. Perhaps even every 1% ≥ $income_percentile > 0.1%er who believes themselves a temporarily embarrassed billionaire providing jobs for temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The economy is not a fixed quantity. It's growing. It's being automated. Workers are more productive than ever. We're building Burger-G, almost literally, but the proceeds don't seem to be trickling down.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday September 15 2015, @02:49AM
(Re-evaluating previous comments. For the reader of archived threads: there is such a thing as fish husbandry also called fish management [bridgwater.ac.uk]. This is an important technique for the fish-based economy in my expansion of the given-a-man-a-fish analogy. See also Fisheries management [wikipedia.org], which is based in fisheries science. Science!)
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2015, @03:21AM
> You say it sarcastically but I'll say in all frankness that not your net worth but your increase of net worth can very much be used to gauge your value to society.
You are only as good as your metrics.
That your metric of value is limited to dollars really shows how under qualified you are to decide the value of a person.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 10 2015, @09:32PM
> I noticed you did not respond to my point about there not truly being equality of opportunity.
Equality of opportunity is only about equality pre-conception. Anything after conception is equality of outcomes. Being born is an outcome, so being born into a rich family is something a child earns by hard work.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday September 10 2015, @10:58PM
Ah, here's somebody who understands the just world axiom, and the supporting theory of karma and reincarnation! Read all about it in Matheson's What Dreams May Come (don't be confused by the movie of the same name and watch that instead, not that it's a bad movie).
Basic synopsis: souls reborn in 3rd world hell-holes had it coming to them. They were probably lazy or violent in a past life. They're probably murderers or traitors like that (trigger warning!) Chelsea Manning. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time!
So, after several lives of hard work, eventually a position will open up in the 0.1%. You get something of a choice most of the time. Do you want to be somebody like Brianna Wu and use your hard-earned karma to work to expose the evils of all assigned males except herself? Do you want to be somebody like Notch, strike it rich by selling a game that people like for the wrong reasons, and experience the anguish of a $70 million dollar mansion with silence in the halls? There are more conventional routes that might involve actually being good at something. Take the Trump for instance or Bill Gates. Want to be a part of the new aristocracy with your hard-earned karma? Look no further than Chelsea Clinton, surely a modern day princess merely awaiting her coronation after her mother's reign, or Paris Hilton, the more vapid kind of aristocrat.
So, citizen, keep your nose to the grindstone. Work harder, save up that karma, and just choose better parents next time!
(Score: 1) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday September 11 2015, @03:50AM
Is this what you believe, or is it a sarcasm bomb? Not being snarky here, genuinely wondering.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 11 2015, @10:53PM
Thanks for asking. I do have a vague belief in reincarnation and enlightenment (not going to pretend I have a shred of evidence), but the rest of the post is pure snark and a misrepresentation of what Matheson postulates in What Dreams May Come about the nature of death, existence after death, and reincarnation. If anything, I'd wouldn't be surprised if most of the people I named are in for a rude spiritual wake-up call in a 3rd world hellhole next life. Even if that's the case and one would extrapolate that and conclude (using the just world axiom again) that people born in 3rd world hellholes deserve what they get for being greedy assholes in their previous life, we would still fail for being equally lacking in the compassion department compared to the greedy assholes and and we would completely miss the point of the cycle of death and rebirth (if there is a point).
That's also assuming individuality is preserved on the journey to the other side during death. The alternative is seeing death as being dumped back into some life stream after the container (the living body) is no longer able to function as a container and birth is the process of dipping a freshly made container into the stream of life. Maybe who one has a lot of the same life-stuff as somebody who had just died, say, minutes before one was born (who knows if that means conceived or delivered), or maybe one has the mixed and matched life-stuff from hundreds of others, like something out of Dark City [imdb.com]. (See also the representation in The Matrix of the power plant, especially when they beat us over the head with the metaphor in Revolutions—love it or hate it—when we learn the manager of the powerplant is a program called Rama-Kandra who's married to an “interactive software” programmer program called Kamala!)
I've haven't made a formal study of Buddhism, but if I understand the legend, Prince Siddhartha achieved enlightenment despite being born vastly privileged (and it may be possible that enlightenment may only be found when tempted at that level to be attached to the material world), not because of it.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday September 11 2015, @11:03PM
Please forgive the typos! Should have used the preview button!