http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/

This is concerning stuff

My point is with the methodology the author employed to derive his “single eye-popping statistic.”
So he subtracted out ~20% of the bottom 50%’s assets (Consumer durables) but left in ~40% of their liabilities (Consumer credit) to get our eyes a poppin.

The P From the article:

Quote:

Consumer durables are things like cars and fridges that many academics who work on wealth distributions do not consider wealth.

I assume that he doesn’t include these as wealth because they’re depreciating assets. However, they certainly are indicative of the standard of living that people have. Compared to a third world country it is a big step up. I’d also point out that the prices and availability of consumer non durables is also a strong indicator of the standard of living. Again, in the USA this is a huge step up from third world countries. The whole wealth inequality “issue” is about how wealth should be distributed in the USA, a first world country. My experience on these forums is that if you ask what distribution is fair, you won’t get anything but a vague response at best.

Is it reasonable to expect anything that isn't vague? I really don't have anything like a non-vague answer but I know I want a lot less wealth inequality.

1970s Nordic countries are a good way to start. It should be pointed out that the Nordics, at their most unequal, have always been more equal than the US.

I'm not too sure about that Bret Stephens

https://nyti.ms/2WJ5fFE

To reduce wealth inequality a lot would require getting a lot more people to spend and consume less and save and invest more. Not to sound overly cynical because people have done just that in the past but good luck with that with our present consumerism mentality.

Seems like it'd be a lot easier to do the equality part in the post market income transfer stage. Just tax more and then transfer more and you don't have to worry about making sure every one of millions of people is penny pinching to add more to savings.

Well that would certainly reduce wealth inequality—by making it more difficult for the wealthy to acquire more wealth. But I doubt doing so will reduce wealth inequality much because the recipients will mostly spend the money and hence their net worth won’t improve much. But even if they did save it and over a period of time the bottom 50% of households increased their net worth by say $10K, that’s still less than a 1% increase in their share of total wealth.

I don’t think it’s true that poor people would spend all their money if you gave them more. I remember seeing some research about that issue not too long ago, but can’t find it to link now. Iirc the conclusion was that along some metrics poor people made much better financial decisions than wealthy people.

We don't have to dorm room hypothetical our way into thinking that taxing and transferring doesn't work. We can just look at the world. Do you think the top industrial countries who have less income inequality tax and transfer more or less than the US?

That may well be the case, idk. But the poor as in low-income households are a subset of the bottom 50% in wealth. For example (and just ballpark numbers), the average asset value of the bottom 50% in wealth is around $100K. My guess is those aren’t the poor you’re referring to simply because they couldn’t afford the debt service on those assets. In other words, a good chunk of that 50% is comprised of average income households with a lot of mortgage and consumer debt, not just low-income households.

Not really, at least in the sense of wealth redistribution. Mostly those countries have a much more compressed wage scale resulting in less income inequality. But in terms of wealth distribution, we’re really not out of line with our peer nations at least in regard to the upper end of the spectrum:

From the graphs the answer seems to be yes (and it is), countries that have lower inequality do tax and transfer more as well as compress the pay scale via bargining, which we should be doing too. Luckily the answer to "what should we be doing?" is D. All of the Above

The most notable thing to me about those charts is that all the countries except the US have between 5.5% and 5.9% of wealth owned by the bottom 60%. The US has 3.1% of wealth owned by the same percentile.

Imo it is this (and I believe it's similar for income distribution) that is the major issue when it comes to inequality in the US - namely the general increase in standard of living over the years has been seen strongly by the upper percentiles in wealth/income, while hardly being seen at all by the lower percentiles. If the inequality in the US was somewhat more uniform (i.e. a more linear difference across the population as a whole) then it would probably be less of a problem but the large percentile of people at the extreme low end is something that needs to be fixed.

All that economic stuff is of secondary importance at best. Our primary problem is our dilapidated education system that is so far away from our peer nations that it would be funny if it weren’t. But remedy that and most of the other economic issues will take care of themselves.

ECONOMIC GAINS FOR U.S. STATES FROM EDUCATIONAL REFORM
6.8 Overall Summary
We have presented a wide range of improvement scenarios. Table 8 provides an overall summary of the aggregate effects. The overall effects of the various scenarios for the United States as a whole range from $32 trillion for bringing just the lowest performing students up to a basic level to $76 trillion from bringing all states up to the best performing state....

Finnish students, however, on average achieve 6 percent of a standard deviation above Minnesota, or 44 percent of a standard deviation above the U.S. average. The aggregate economic impact of bringing all students up to Finnish levels would be $89 trillion in present value or 10.5 percent of the discounted future GDP, again with substantial variation across the U.S. states.

point of order: not dilapidated, by design.

If by design you mean intent, I don’t agree. But if you mean something like an inherent feature of the design, then I do think something along the lines of what Robert Nozick described in Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? pretty much describes what we’re seeing.

Interesting article that I mostly completely disagree with. I love Freud but I think applying Freudian ideas about the nature of schools and the effect that it has on its participants might be a little much. I felt like the shark jumping moment was when he argued that the "numbersmiths" don't turn anti-capitalist because they didn't receive as much emotional nourishment from their teacher's (aka mommy) as the more verbally quick-witted. It really is Freud on a mass scale. I think there are better explanations* but I don't want to hijack the economic discussion.
*especially the idea that Intellectuals don't actually oppose capitalism.
Overall I wasn't referring to the system of higher education in my "by design" comment but more the public K-12 school system--which yes I do think is created not with the benefit of the students in mind.

This seems like potentially a big deal if it continues:

Big businesses paying even less than expected under GOP tax law

The elites and their periphery can pay to have their kids oppressed at Disney Land.

You can pay to pay to practice resisting oppression.

You can pay to make-believe you’re an “illegal”.


https://youtu.be/sjgyPw1_zWU

The Germans possibly have their own Jo Cox

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...s-to-far-right

The article has some close pictures of the gunman. Apparently there was a photographer at the courthouse when it happened

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crim...owntown-dallas

I don't really understand what all this Facebook Libra cryptocurrency paypal v2 stuff is about, or if it's actually important at all, but I enjoyed FT being snarky about it.

Been out of the loop for awhile, but probably good to take a break once in awhile.

Anyways, on his podcast Jordan Peterson interviewed Joe Rogan recently in a 2 part podcast, which I thought was really good. Was really interesting to hear Rogan talk about his own life and psychology.

The first part was mainly about his childhood and teenage years being super into fighting sports. The second part was his adult life. Between the 2 parts I thought the second part was a lot more interesting.

At the end of the podcast Peterson also teased a podcast he did with Milo that he said focused mainly on psychology, especially how Milo processed being a victim of sexual abuse and how he was punished by society for it, because he didn’t do it in a politically correct fashion. I haven’t listed to the Milo podcast yet but sounds interesting.