I love the way toothsayer makes up other people's opinions/claims and then types out page long diatribes against them. u roc!

Even the data on inheritance and wealth is pretty amazing.

The rich are rich because they're better at generating wealth through focused intelligent effort, high level organizing ability, and voluntary transactions with others. The data couldn't be clearer. And in fact more and more of the rich have become self made as time has gone on.

It's pretty bizarre to talk about economic unfairness on a poker forum - a game predicated on purely taking advantage of the stupid, the lazy, the undisciplined, the mentally ill (gambling addicts) and directly depriving them of their wealth while providing nothing in return. You can only be a poker player and a hater of the wealthy if you're seriously hypocritical imo.

I'd say society carries the wealthy owners by giving them a UBI for doing absolutely no work.

toothsayer looks at a dude born on third base and shouts NICE TRIPLE!

What is bizarre is talking about personal economic results on a poker forum and not believing in any sort of variance.

That doesn't even make sense. The wealthy work much harder than the poor, the data on that is very clear.

And the idle rich have usually accumulated wealth through creating it for others. Who are you to say how they use it?

Besides, it's good in our society that some people be idle. People who didn't have to work for a living have done tremendous disproportionate good for society through the ages.

How do we determine who the idle should be? Lottery? Marxist decree? Eye color? To me it seems the fairest way to be idle is have a system of work credits that people can accumulate through hard/intelligent work, and then use those as they see fit. Oh wait, that's the system we have. Why do you like it less than the other ways, which seems far less fair and far more arbitrary? No system is perfect, but at least this one incentivizes contribution and what's more, intelligent ecosystem building contribution with positive externalities.
So because there is variance, it's unfair? We need to shut down the poker, casinos and lotteries immediately. I wonder if you feel the same disdain for poor lottery winners as you do for the working rich. I'll bet you don't.

I don't accept your premise that third base leads to a home run. A baseball analogy doesn't work here. Most inherited wealth is lost by the second generation. Unless you're highly economically productive, or prudent, you don't just get and stay filthy rich.

The real unfairness in life is an unfair distribution of talent, not wealth. Beauty, intelligence, conscientiousness, emotional stability/degree of neuroticism, innate social abilities, determine far more of your life's outcome and happiness than inherited wealth. And most are largely inherited qualities. If you really care about unearned inequality, you would be shouting down and de-privileging the beautiful. Why don't you?

It does seem that if we were to pick who should be idle it shouldn't be those who are so productive but rather those who aren't very productive. But people will desperately oppose a UBI because then the poor will be idle and defend the idle rich as being justified.

Rather, it seems the best way of doing things is to capture the UBI of the rich, capital income, and then disperse that in some democratic way.

We can imagine an alternative scenario where, instead of creating a sovereign wealth fund, Norway let their oil supplies be privatized and then we'd be talking about how Mr Private Citizen of Norway was so visionary and industrious that he deserves his billions to do with as he pleases, but instead Norway captured the ownership of the oil for the benefit of the whole population. Seems like that would be possible to do for many more things.

The wealthy work much harder than the poor

It kind of gives away the game when you look at how people become incredibly wealthy. It isn't through work itself, that only gets you so far. There are some CEOs and sports stars that are paid a flat salary after all and they're getting paid millions. Hardly the top of the top. It's the ownership of things; rents, dividends, etc. that really accelerates the wealth. You work to get enough money to buy ownership of things so that society will force others to give you money.

This is a fact. If you don't know basic facts, no wonder you get everything wrong.



Apart from not knowing the statistics, I can't imagine how disconnected from the world you'd have to be, how hopelessly confirmation biased, to not have simply picked this up as a life observation.

That's precisely the idea the Maoists and Bolsheviks had. What could possibly go wrong?

I think the fundamental flaw here is that people don't understand that the effective allocation of capital:

a) drives the economy
b) takes tremendous and unusual skill

And the people who best have the skill to use capital to satisfy external human wants are the ones with the money already. To a first order approximation, that's how they got it. They won the competitive game of who can best satisfy external human wants rather than their own, with the least resources and the money is their prize.

If you sold off Intel to the Chinese and gave the proceeds to the bottom 20%, what, economically, do you think you'd have to show for it? Something as enduringly economically valuable economically as Intel?

That little example is the core of why what you're suggesting is folly.

Dont take my money government says mr rich guy. Here mr government official as he hands over millions in "campaign contributions" bribes.

If emperor trump and the bikers let us have another pres getting the bribes out should be right up there on the list.

oh, it's a fact. well since you put it that way you must be right. kudos to you for providing an anonymous unclear chart when not necessary because it's a fact.


Min wage worker doing two jobs to support kids def not working as hard as eric trump. IT's A FACT!

Not to mention hard work is relative. I would say one guy i worked with who lost half his lungs in a foundry using chemicals the owners made them hide from osha worked harder then the owners. Measuring it by time alone is dumb and shallow thinking.

4400 hours is literally two full time jobs. 100k is about 1/4th the actual amount needed to be in the top 1%. Did you even look at the graph you posted?

The anonymous unclear chart is just funny. It's an opportunity for you to show your incredible ignorance yet again in the post above. It's a scientific fact that higher incomes work far longer hours.

On average, lower incomes work far lower hours. It's an incredibly strong correlation. The hard working competent guy who can't get ahead is just bull****. Most poor people in America fit into one of the following categories:

- Lazy
- Incompetent
- Children out of wedlock/a stable relationship
- Stupid and hence of very low economic worth/possibly net negative.
- Impulsive/not conscientious
- Mentally or physically ill
- Prefer a life of less work and more time for other activities

The reason that min wage worker gets paid screw all is because the market doesn't think their work is worth more than they're being paid. It's that simple. And the market consists of other poor people. For example, someone waiting your table has very low utility compared to other options if the price went up (eating at home, having fewer wait staff/poorer service). Compare that to say the poor people desire for iPhones, which is extremely high. Thus programmers and hardware designer get lots of money as there's very high demand from poor people for their services, way higher than supply.

As for whether the people with the above traits should be paid more anyway, perhaps. I'm strongly sympathetic to that argument coming from a very high minimum wage country myself and liking how it works. But let's not be douchebags about this. All of your sad childish anti-factual bull**** about "the rich don't work harder!" and "the rich don't deserve their money" and "it's not fair!" isn't earning your argument any points.

Did you look at the graph I posted?

And yes, the highest incomes work 60+ hours/week on average. High paid lawyers work 60-70 hours/week. Many successful entrepreneurs do even more than that.

I don't know what any of this is supposed to mean. There is a difference between the work of allocating capital and the, by definition, non work premium of ownership. They're not the same thing. That's why there are wealth management companies who specialize in allocating capital. The companies themselves don't own the capital, the owners do.

Those goalposts i think they just shifted from harder to longer.

Rekt

4400 hours for a household isn't that much though

What's with this dumb anecdotal thinking? And it's probably not even correct that he "worked harder than the owners". He certainly had more negative consequences from his job than the owners did.

So we should compensate people not for hours doing something productive at the rate the market values their work, but for their enjoyment or lack thereof?

If so, why not compensate very ugly people by taking money off beautiful people? That's a massive massive unfair discrepancy, and it goes directly to not just enjoyment but actual self worth.

The answer is that you don't really care about suffering, or injustice. You just hate the rich and are whipped up into an anecdotal frenzy about unfairness (the bits you cherry pick!) that's not rational or moral or consistent.

How about this: You get to spend your time typing on a computer on the Internet while about 300 million children are malnourished and went to bed hungry, in far worse suffering than US job guy ever had. Why is that "fair"? Why is that a less pressing "fairness" than giving the low skilled guy more money? It seems you have your priorities backwards if you want to make the world more "fair".

So you're against the non-work premium of ownership? Doesn't that lie at the heart of the economic system? Even the Chinese with their hard communist ideals realized that economics don't work without ownership and wealth/capital hoarding by private individuals.

The thing is, who's doing the allocating if you take the capital off the people who won the competitive game of who can best satisfy external human wants rather than their own, with the least resources? People who performed more poorly at that game, that's who. And that's good why?

I think this is the heart of what you're not getting. It's extremely easy and in fact the base condition to deploy capital either destructively or sub-optimally. It is a small percentage of highly capable people who can deploy capital highly competently for the benefit of all. Moreover, the best thing they can do is to develop large ecosystems of wealth generation that they control. You want to disrupt this system that's worked amazingly well because...? So poor people can have a bit more stuff for a while? Which (by definition, or else they wouldn't be poor) they're going to waste on capital destroying activities?

The above seems like a stupid thing to do, frankly.

If you think the only measure of hard work is time. Ok i guess.


FWIW im ok with the capitalist system and rich people even super rich is fine. Just think there should be a better safety net. I do enjoy watching you beat up the strawman version of me though.

I think it's more a language use thing. I'm in full agreement with Bertrand Russell:

Is this unjust? Maybe. But it's been the way of the world for >2000 years and was worse in socialist systems than in capitalist ones.

What should you morally do about the problem of the underprivileged (in every way) is an interesting question. I think it's something that will solve itself as our economic system continues advancing. Already, there is far less of the unpleasant work thanks to smart people who've made automated factories, tractors, white goods, etc. The poor owe these people thanks on their knees for their externalities. That trend of less unpleasant work will only continue until there's nothing but brain work and personal services left. We're only just a few generations from crawling out the swamp of poverty, despair and early death that we'd been in for all of history. I'm happy to let the system play out and not mess with it, as long as we live in a world where someone not-totally-stupid working hard from 18 can easily get to the middle class before 30 - and we do.

Come to think of it sometime working harder on some jobs gives you more free time to slack then your longer working coworkers. Sometimes the boss just gives you more work.

That's ridiculous. The poor are paying more than their fair share of tax (see the graph in my previous post) into the system relative to their share of wealth. The wealthy became rich in part because of the "poor's" financial and labor contributions into building a nation of laws, education, military, and infrastructure-- upon which wealth was built in the first place. Some wealth needs to be redistributed through taxation to fund and maintain critical social, economic, military, and government institutions to ensure continuous prosperity.