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> As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing. Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem b

> As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing. Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem but rarely hear a good reason. Just because one person is richer, does not mean another is poorer. Wealth is not a limited pie where everyone only gets one piece of it. Wealth is created. If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth.

wildrhythms 3y ago
'Wealth' is too nebulous a term to discuss anything socioeconomic related. When 'wealth' is measured in material- land, housing, money... these are all finite. You seem to be creatively measuring 'wealth' as immaterial things like ideas and actions. Be precise.
- jampekka 3y ago
  Money isn't finite or material and it's worthless in itself unlike e.g. land and housing.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
It does, because power is bought with money and if you buy a vote, the richest win. Also, resources are not infinite. Eg: There is a limit to the number of the best doctors and their time. Fresh air is locally finite, and jets do pollute more per person. So despite the fact that in theory we are not playing a zero sum game, practically at the scale of one life, many things can be approximated as such.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth. how would that be proved - that is to say there is probably a reasonably causal line to say that their ideas and actions brought up the standard of living for themselves, but the causal line to determine ideas and actions bringing up standard of living for other people would probably be difficult to calculate.
- soco 3y ago
  I guess they meant that elusive "trickle down economics" concept which always looks like Bigfoot - everybody talks about it but nobody has actually seen it.
lapcat 3y ago
> Wealth is not a limited pie where everyone only gets one piece of it. This is where you're mistaken, because wealth is not simply a collection of material goods. Wealth is power, and power is a zero sum game. You don't have power over someone else unless they have less power than you. The ultra-wealthy already have all of their material needs and desires met. They run out of things to buy with their money. You don't actually need a billion to buy all of the houses, cars, boats, and other stuff that you want. Beyond a certain point, the only thing left to buy is people. And that's what the ultra-wealthy do. They exercise power over other people. That's precisely why they're never satisfied with their level of wealth, and continue to accumulate it despite not needing to buy any more material things. The more wealth you have, and the less other people have, the more power you have over others. Wealth buys politicians. It buys laws. It can buy entire countries.
- stana 3y ago
  "Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be king." Bruce Springsteen
- giantg2 3y ago
  It seems corporations are the ones influencing laws with spending. Even then, it's the constituents that are the problem. Are they really so gullible that a new attack ad funded by donations to the politician will sway them? Are they even paying attention? It's the attention and strength of the constituency that will make a democratic society better. If you really want to fix the voting in a somewhat realistic way, you will completely do away with campaign spending, allocate a government website with a page for each candidate to display their positions, have the site searchable by your address, and have an alternative that you can request by mail if you don't have access to a computer. You also need to ban the news from reporting on the campaign to get around this, including the observation biases that come from all those early polls. Suddendly campaign funding becomes a non-issue, and we're likely to see less manipulation. Even if you eliminated the wealthy altogether, you could still have outsized impacts by many groups due to the most extreme people being willing to donate more. This is essentially what we see primary elections due to the low voter turnout - the most motivated/extreme people have a larger say.
- 3y ago
soco 3y ago
If we actually read the maths presented by the article, it looks like many people did get poorer. You could argue there's no causation between them, but if correlation gives us civil unrest, we go fixing correlation (unless we prefer street wars).
bitcharmer 3y ago
This comment reads as either trolling or a very naive take but I'll bite. Why obscene wealth is a problem? Even my 10yo knows that. Extreme asymmetry and inequality. From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences. How this has to be explained to someone on this forum is beyond me, but here we are.
- Kon5ole 3y ago
  >From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences All the things you mention are problems that need solving, but they are wrong in themselves separated from the wealth. A wealthy person might not be doing any of those things. Wealth in a free capitalist society is generally the result of increased economic activity which often benefits many more than the billionaires that appear as side effects. This is a good thing which should be kept, but we need to ensure that society isn't corrupted in the process. We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.
  - bitcharmer 3y ago
    > We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done. I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years. https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...
    - Kon5ole 3y ago
      >I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years. You mention disparity as if it is a problem but ignore that most of the population is much better off. Your source clearly shows that in 1800 the world population was mostly poor, while in 2015 it was mostly _not_ poor. This despite the population being 7x larger. Which is exactly my point - the system that generates billionaires has done so as a side effect of generating enough wealth to lift a several times larger world population above the poverty line. Is disparity itself so offensive that we should let everyone be poor just to avoid billionaires? I can't get behind that, but I do want better laws to prevent corruption.
mihaic 3y ago
> Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem but rarely hear a good reason. Historically, most societies where this happened ended up with large violent episodes as a response, so we should want to prevent that. While it's possible to enlarge the pie for everyone, to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy. In some cases the economy is zero-sum, especially with things that are inherently limited such as good real-estate.
- giantg2 3y ago
  " to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy." Land is very much a limited resource. But most of the problems today are due to the distribution and consumer wants. In much of the US, you could easily buy some land and put a trailer or small manufactured house on it (or buy forclosed, vacant, etc). The problem is the jobs, especially the good ones, are concentrated in a dozen or so major metro areas with higher population density. The. You have the preference of most people who want good public schools, yards, big fancy single family houses, etc. Most people don't want a small house, and due to the job distribution can't live in the less populated areas.
dgb23 3y ago
"Wealth is not a zero sum game" has some truth in it but is ultimately false. There's only so much inhabitable space, only so many resources and only so many people on earth. You only have so much time to live and even thinking over generational legacy, we're fundamentally limited by time. Infinite growth doesn't exist in any meaningful and practical sense of the word. And if we're coming back to the original argument: You can't be ultra wealthy without exploitation. Someone, somewhere has to generate all the value you feel entitled to have, because you inherited a bunch of wealth. And "someone" is a vast understatement. There is some line where power and wealth not only become completely unwieldy, because the disconnect between responsibility and power is too great, but also parasitical. I have no idea where that line is and how to solve this problem. But it _is_ a problem and I'm tired of hearing ideological platitudes that try to naturalize and defend it. I say this all with a caveat: I have nothing personal against people who are wealthy or even ultra wealthy. Ultimately they are just part of a larger, hard to solve issue like everyone else.
DFHippie 3y ago
In addition to the reasons others have cited, I think the corrosive effect of wealth inequality on social cohesion is under-appreciated. The wealthy fear their wealth being taken, so they live in gated communities and hire guards. The society they have walled out and the society they have walled in see their interests as diverging. Neither wants to invest in the other, protect the other. The less wealthy see that wealth buys power, which buys "voice." The government responds to voice, so however democratic their nation is on paper, they don't perceive the government as responsive to their desires -- and in fact it is less measurably less responsive to their desires -- so they have less stake in preserving its legitimacy and stability. Why preserve the tool someone else uses to cheat you? And so on. Unequal societies are low-trust societies. Low-trust societies are less capable of providing public services efficiently. They are less capable of making and achieving long-term goals. They are more prone to corruption and criminality. If you don't trust the agents of the state to keep you safe, you are more prone to taking matters into your own hands, less prone to cooperating with the agents of the state to address crime. And so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_societies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...

wildrhythms 3y ago

'Wealth' is too nebulous a term to discuss anything socioeconomic related. When 'wealth' is measured in material- land, housing, money... these are all finite. You seem to be creatively measuring 'wealth' as immaterial things like ideas and actions. Be precise.

jampekka 3y ago
Money isn't finite or material and it's worthless in itself unlike e.g. land and housing.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

It does, because power is bought with money and if you buy a vote, the richest win. Also, resources are not infinite. Eg: There is a limit to the number of the best doctors and their time. Fresh air is locally finite, and jets do pollute more per person. So despite the fact that in theory we are not playing a zero sum game, practically at the scale of one life, many things can be approximated as such.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

>If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth. how would that be proved - that is to say there is probably a reasonably causal line to say that their ideas and actions brought up the standard of living for themselves, but the causal line to determine ideas and actions bringing up standard of living for other people would probably be difficult to calculate.

soco 3y ago
I guess they meant that elusive "trickle down economics" concept which always looks like Bigfoot - everybody talks about it but nobody has actually seen it.

lapcat 3y ago

> Wealth is not a limited pie where everyone only gets one piece of it. This is where you're mistaken, because wealth is not simply a collection of material goods. Wealth is power, and power is a zero sum game. You don't have power over someone else unless they have less power than you. The ultra-wealthy already have all of their material needs and desires met. They run out of things to buy with their money. You don't actually need a billion to buy all of the houses, cars, boats, and other stuff that you want. Beyond a certain point, the only thing left to buy is people. And that's what the ultra-wealthy do. They exercise power over other people. That's precisely why they're never satisfied with their level of wealth, and continue to accumulate it despite not needing to buy any more material things. The more wealth you have, and the less other people have, the more power you have over others. Wealth buys politicians. It buys laws. It can buy entire countries.

stana 3y ago
"Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be king." Bruce Springsteen
giantg2 3y ago
It seems corporations are the ones influencing laws with spending. Even then, it's the constituents that are the problem. Are they really so gullible that a new attack ad funded by donations to the politician will sway them? Are they even paying attention? It's the attention and strength of the constituency that will make a democratic society better. If you really want to fix the voting in a somewhat realistic way, you will completely do away with campaign spending, allocate a government website with a page for each candidate to display their positions, have the site searchable by your address, and have an alternative that you can request by mail if you don't have access to a computer. You also need to ban the news from reporting on the campaign to get around this, including the observation biases that come from all those early polls. Suddendly campaign funding becomes a non-issue, and we're likely to see less manipulation. Even if you eliminated the wealthy altogether, you could still have outsized impacts by many groups due to the most extreme people being willing to donate more. This is essentially what we see primary elections due to the low voter turnout - the most motivated/extreme people have a larger say.
3y ago

soco 3y ago

If we actually read the maths presented by the article, it looks like many people did get poorer. You could argue there's no causation between them, but if correlation gives us civil unrest, we go fixing correlation (unless we prefer street wars).

bitcharmer 3y ago

This comment reads as either trolling or a very naive take but I'll bite. Why obscene wealth is a problem? Even my 10yo knows that. Extreme asymmetry and inequality. From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences. How this has to be explained to someone on this forum is beyond me, but here we are.

Kon5ole 3y ago
>From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences All the things you mention are problems that need solving, but they are wrong in themselves separated from the wealth. A wealthy person might not be doing any of those things. Wealth in a free capitalist society is generally the result of increased economic activity which often benefits many more than the billionaires that appear as side effects. This is a good thing which should be kept, but we need to ensure that society isn't corrupted in the process. We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  > We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done. I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years. https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...
  - Kon5ole 3y ago
    >I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years. You mention disparity as if it is a problem but ignore that most of the population is much better off. Your source clearly shows that in 1800 the world population was mostly poor, while in 2015 it was mostly _not_ poor. This despite the population being 7x larger. Which is exactly my point - the system that generates billionaires has done so as a side effect of generating enough wealth to lift a several times larger world population above the poverty line. Is disparity itself so offensive that we should let everyone be poor just to avoid billionaires? I can't get behind that, but I do want better laws to prevent corruption.

mihaic 3y ago

> Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem but rarely hear a good reason. Historically, most societies where this happened ended up with large violent episodes as a response, so we should want to prevent that. While it's possible to enlarge the pie for everyone, to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy. In some cases the economy is zero-sum, especially with things that are inherently limited such as good real-estate.

giantg2 3y ago
" to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy." Land is very much a limited resource. But most of the problems today are due to the distribution and consumer wants. In much of the US, you could easily buy some land and put a trailer or small manufactured house on it (or buy forclosed, vacant, etc). The problem is the jobs, especially the good ones, are concentrated in a dozen or so major metro areas with higher population density. The. You have the preference of most people who want good public schools, yards, big fancy single family houses, etc. Most people don't want a small house, and due to the job distribution can't live in the less populated areas.

dgb23 3y ago

"Wealth is not a zero sum game" has some truth in it but is ultimately false. There's only so much inhabitable space, only so many resources and only so many people on earth. You only have so much time to live and even thinking over generational legacy, we're fundamentally limited by time. Infinite growth doesn't exist in any meaningful and practical sense of the word. And if we're coming back to the original argument: You can't be ultra wealthy without exploitation. Someone, somewhere has to generate all the value you feel entitled to have, because you inherited a bunch of wealth. And "someone" is a vast understatement. There is some line where power and wealth not only become completely unwieldy, because the disconnect between responsibility and power is too great, but also parasitical. I have no idea where that line is and how to solve this problem. But it _is_ a problem and I'm tired of hearing ideological platitudes that try to naturalize and defend it. I say this all with a caveat: I have nothing personal against people who are wealthy or even ultra wealthy. Ultimately they are just part of a larger, hard to solve issue like everyone else.

DFHippie 3y ago

In addition to the reasons others have cited, I think the corrosive effect of wealth inequality on social cohesion is under-appreciated. The wealthy fear their wealth being taken, so they live in gated communities and hire guards. The society they have walled out and the society they have walled in see their interests as diverging. Neither wants to invest in the other, protect the other. The less wealthy see that wealth buys power, which buys "voice." The government responds to voice, so however democratic their nation is on paper, they don't perceive the government as responsive to their desires -- and in fact it is less measurably less responsive to their desires -- so they have less stake in preserving its legitimacy and stability. Why preserve the tool someone else uses to cheat you? And so on. Unequal societies are low-trust societies. Low-trust societies are less capable of providing public services efficiently. They are less capable of making and achieving long-term goals. They are more prone to corruption and criminality. If you don't trust the agents of the state to keep you safe, you are more prone to taking matters into your own hands, less prone to cooperating with the agents of the state to address crime. And so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_societies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...