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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: 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.