'Does Bezos have a moral responsibility to use his wealth to help others?'

No but we have a moral responsibility to fight a system that produces such absurd inequality.

All the fruits created by the state funded research that led to Facebook are already there for the taking. You don’t even have to nationalize it, which is just dumb. Create a wikiface social networking site that doesn’t take advertising money and is run off donations. I mean I’m not going to do that or look to financially support any efforts to do so because I’m fine with FB as a casual investor and casual user. But if you’re morally opposed to it, it seems like by far the easiest tech giant to topple and replace.

You are making the classic mistake of thinking that because you can't come up with a use case for it no one can. The tablet market seriously disrupted the PC market and may hasten it's demise and yet you still can't see any use for them? I question your judgement even more now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

You have to wait until the dust settles to find out who won the zero sum network effect game. Then nationalise it.

LOL. Earlier I said here’s a link to an article with some links to papers in it and I thought your earlier post without the links was meant as sarcasm. But good find. Even though I’ve been on the productivity bandwagon, I agree “other factors” are in play. As Huehuecoyotl succinctly put it:
Nonetheless, I’ll stop implying that merely increasing productivity will increase wages. Instead, more like if we raise productivity but do not address “other forces” then those productivity gains will not result in higher living standards. One thing I’m unsure about is if addressing those other factors may also increase productivity. Hard to say without identifying them. What I am sure about has to do with the paper’s final words:

Our results suggest that productivity growth still matters substantially for middle income Americans. Nonetheless the evidence of the past four decades, with stagnating compensation for the median worker and production and nonsupervisory workers, demonstrates that productivity growth alone is not necessarily enough to raise living standards. As such strategies that focus both on productivity growth and on labor market or redistributive policies are likely to have the greatest impact.

The conjunction is “and” not “or.” Some proposed solutions to increase pay would severely hamper our ability to continue productivity growth. They’re essentially telling the factory owner to sell some of his manufacturing equipment (capital goods) and give the proceeds to the workers. Not optimal.

Huey said increasing productivity not an increasing rate in the increase of productivity. Are you getting that those things are different? 1% or 2% or anything about zero productivity growth is still productivity growth. Your previous position is that growth in the growth rate of productivity is a necessary condition for rising income.

Otherwise, you are basically coming around to the opposition here and congrats. Productivity is increasing but wages aren't = wtf?

I don't know who really said productivity and wages have to be fundamentally linked, but it worked out well for the population and the prospect that we can produce everything everyone needs and still have stagnant or even declining standards of living (which we could - why not? labor supply and demand isn't obviously linked to productivity) is the distopia we may be heading towards.

If a system resulted in wages doubling and inescapably Bezos' wealth increased tenfold, I wouldn't care.

Productivity is a rate (output:input). So it's accurate to say increase the rate of the productivity rate when comparing two segments, even though it sounds weird.

Ok, well the rate of productivity has increased non-stop since 1947 at least.

I guess that's where we differ. Some comparable equality is necessary for a healthy societal structure. When we get to a million to one + income ratios, people starving and dying from easily treatable diseases, while there are trillions of dollars in unused, unproductive capital being plowed back into stock options or just sitting somewhere avoiding tax, something has gone badly wrong.

But hey, good luck with your late capitalist dystopia.

Your moral self-exculpation is noted.

What about a system that increased Bezos' wealth by X% but reduced his worker's wealth by some amount?

Not Max, but it's always odd that when talking about Facebook or these other tech near monopolies that their defense is always an Econ 101, if you don't like it you can always click/make another website, when virtually all you hear when these guys talk among, again not Max, but tech guys amount themselves are the, I guess you'd call it, Marketing 101 of "network effects", "hooks", "locking in" etc basically drawing on human psychology. Facebook spends enormous money not the basics of inputs like servers (though they do spend a lot on that too) but on surveillance and monitoring, not exactly Econ 101 stuff. The basics of Econ 101 barely fit into the picture because the economics of the tech industry on the social side are basic, but no one wants to put their advantages in non Econ 101 terms when talking to people outside their industry.

Econ 101 exists in economics classrooms and nowhere else.

Status Quo supporters itt are basically arguing a complete strawman itt.

There are plenty of ways of keeping entrepreneurship etc whilst removing, or limiting the effects of capture of the finance system.

I am in favor of a reverse-progressive tax whereby lower income brackets pay a higher tax rate. I figure it will motivate them to work harder and make make more money so they can keep more. Win-win as far as I can see.

The beatings will continue until productivity improves if you will.

Lots of people on low incomes work "harder" than most if not all people reading this thread.

We should also let them eat cake.

I agree. That wasn't meant to be taken seriously.

MAX SRS QUESTION WTF R U EVEN TALKING ABOUT


I feel wholly unsatisfied that the answer is looking like it's you have little to no idea what you're talking about.

I’m not sure that’s true for reasonable definitions of lots. Most low income jobs are not physically demanding and are only done for like 30 hrs a week. I worked a couple under the table style jobs in high school for a friends uncle ( roofing, replacing an AC unit, changing a transmission etc). Really more dangerous because of lack of proper equipment than”hard” and also not really low income if you could manage to work 4 days a week.

I would say most all low income jobs require more physically demanding work than sitting at a desk thinking and typing. Don't be that guy who says playing cards is harder than being a garbage man.

Yeah, roofing is not hard work. Right.

.

I mean what's really going on is John21 is wanting optimal tax theory to be applied with the criterion being motivation, but people's motivation via taxation is probably minimal. No one says they want to be a billionaire to avoid excessive taxation, they want to be a billionaire to be a billionaire. Likewise you usually take a better job because it pays better and the increased taxation comes in a bit later. On the other end having the more wealthy pay higher taxes probably isn't going to depress their output that much. It's not like Jeff Bezos is hyper tuned to taxation, he probably doesn't think about it much at all. He just has the wealth to pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars to save him millions or whatever.

So the idea that we should have high marginal taxes on the poor and low ones on the rich don't hold much water. The end result isn't going to be what's imagined, lots of entrepreneurship because so many people want to avoid higher taxes that they become millionaires. Most likely it's going to be that the poor get poorer via reduced income because of the increased taxes and the richer get richer.

So the whole idea of "hard jobs" vs "easier jobs" is a bit moot.