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Its kind of sad how many people dont get this. Its like the first thing you learn when you study economics at any level.
@rholb depends on the group, there are many causes at play.
Black communities for example are generally suffering from recent racism that explicitly kept them poor for a long time. Even once the bulk of the racist policies were gone it takes a long time for a community to recover from that. Bad habbits of poor parents (not their fault but there all the same) continue to get passed down over time and takes time to break, not to mention that racism isnt completely out of the equation either.
In other cases where there isnt a systemic cause such as with some minority communities it is just a matter of the fact that some people are going to be better performers than other through a combination of genetic abilities but also, and more importantly, bad habits being passed down, just as people who perform well have the privilege of being raised with good habits to perpetuate that.
But doesn't that mean that there is always generally speaking less money for a certain group of people if the system puts them at a disadvante from the beginning of their lives?
Of course everybody can work through that, but it's a lot easier if you get taught good habits by your parents and maybe inherit something, isn't it?
No because you are operating under the assumption that wealth is like a pie, with a fixed amount and if one person has more than another has less.
Thats not how wealth works. Wealth is constantly being generated and destroyed in huge portions. One person can generate more wealth for themselves without, necessarily, taking it from anyone else.
I think I unterstood the concept now. Very interesting, thanks for the explanation!
But still, wouldn't you say that it is more easy to generate wealth for some people than it is for other people?
Sticking to one of your examples, for building your luxorious house, wouldn't you need a certain starting set/skills to be able to do that? Like some kind of wealth (ex. free time, health) without which one wouldn't be able to generate more wealth? Or at least not as fast as somebody with more wealth at the start?
Like if somebody that has all his time as wealth and somebody that has a lot of money start building houses next to each other, the one with money would surely finish the house (and therefore the wealth generation) a lot faster, wouldn't they?
Maybe I still don't fully understand the theory, feel free to elaborate/correct me on that.
Absolutely yes, somepeople will have an easier time generating wealth than others.
The point of this post is not "The system is perfect there is no inequality".. the issue is "Billionaires are not inherently a bad thing and do not, in and of themselves, represent an injustice done to others"
@freemo I've read the other thread
You don't see the earth as a unique system hence wealth can be "created" but that's not the case. It's not a pie: it's a global set of resources that we share between humans and with an entire ecosystem
When NIKE execs use slave labour in china they are taking their wealth, their time and their humanity for profit. Same goes for every capitalist enterprises.
@rholb resources is really just another word for wealth.
As I said a billionair **can** take wealth but they also may not. It also isnt always the fault of the billionaire even if they do benefit from an unfair situation.
While the NIKe executives using slave labour may be a good example of immorality it isnt really an example of them stealing wealthy. The labour they use is at market value, those people would have had no work if NIKE didnt use them, so instead of them starving to death slowly they gave them some (unfair) amount of wealth to ensure they die more slowly, or maybe even just barely life. This is unfair, but since those people did not have the opportunity to use their labour to make wealth otherwise, it isnt an example of stolen wealth.
Obviously the solution there lies in China not educating their people in the first place so they werent subject to that slave labour, not with NIKE. If china had done their job NIKE would have been in a position to pay them much more as their market value would have been higher.
Its important to differentiate between doing soemthing that is immoral and whether wealth is actually being stolen or not.
first:
- capitalism is immoral my dude
- those people are literal slave. they don't lack education, their government enslaved them.
For the sake of argument let's take a minium wage worker in whatever country. According to the market their skills provides them barely what they need to eat and sleep.
They could hunt, forage build shelter, grow crop if the land around them wasn't owned to generate wealth one way or another.
The idea "capitalism is immoral" just tells me you are probably too indoctrinated by dogma to be able to discuss the subject objectively.
Whether they are slaves are not is a matter of semantics, but what made them slaves in china's policies, largely china's lack of desire to help educate them and give them marketable skills so they can support themselves. So whether they are a slave or not is secondary tot he fact that they are in the position they are in because of China's policies, not NIKE's.
While in theory a minimum wage worker could forage or grow crops , again, they are not prevented from doing so by NIKE or any other mega corperation. Again that is the government and clearly unfair policies.
Thanks for answering, I come from the same place as you, so guess my perspective :)
1/States and companies are not completely separated, they can be really close, eg: lobby
2/One cannot grow crop anywhere they like because of the concept of private property. Which is indeed secured by the state but not owned by the state.
3/ back to the last toot.
if:
1. resource = wealth,
2. resource are limited (one earth and all that)
Then:
3. wealth is limited
States and government are no more or less separate than people and the government. Sure companies can influence government through money, but in the end its the peoples voting power that makes decisions. So the responsibility for the laws and conduct of any democracy rests on its people.
The fact that people can not just grow crops anywhere is a consequence of policies and education, as well as law. The ownership of private property, for example, wouldnt be an issue if there was enough land to go around, there isnt. But there was a time in the USA where private property laws existed and land was free for the taking. Blame population growth and peoples unwillingness to keep the population in heck if you want to really find blame for why we cant all have land.
Resources do equal wealth, but resources are not limited to those on in the earth, nor are all the resources accessible to us. There is a great deal of resources still in the ground no one has access to, by mining those resources only then do they get injected into the population. So the volumn of accessible resources is constantly growing and while there is an upper bound if we limit ourselves to earth it also ignores the fact that as we approach that limit asteroid mining and other techniques will likely be underway as well.
It also is ignorant to the fact that resources are not limited to raw resources. We often consume raw resources and create new more useful resources from it, for example taking silicon and making it into chips. So you have created a greater (more wealth) resource from a resource that represented less wealth by doing so.
ยง1 capitalism is global, democracy isn't. You shift the blame for inequalities from state to the people, from personal responsibilities to education. I point the same constants, across all my examples
ยง2 we are centuries later with a different economic order, but the USA were not a virgin country with no inhabitant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples
ยง3 To drill you need to own the land. You should look at the history of Congo to see how well the resource get re-ijected in the population
1/?
$3 mining resource is limited, you can only drill so much, you can only grow so much crop, ... Do you really believe asteroid mining will be old western gold rush? Only people with extreme wealth will be able to develop the tech and finance such endeavors, increasing again inequalities - if you like sci-fi watch The Expanse, it deals with those ideas and is a crazy good show.
2/3
@freemo
3/3
$4 The production of our computing power is extremely unethical... You create wealth by mining dangerous component in insecure facility, then assembling them in extreme working condition. Again I see inequality and unequal repartition of wealth.
@freemo
2/2
Wealth allow you and your heir to learn and grow in a stable environment, get those "good habits".
@freemo Uh. Correct me if I am wrong, but isnโt the whole point of currency that it is based on something that is scarce, and thus, by extension, valuable? This was essentially how the gold standard functioned in the US previously.
This obviously does not directly apply to fiat currencies commonly seen today, however even in that case there are penalties for producing unending amounts of cash, so in practice there is a finite cap on circulating cash.
As well, then there are the accelerating returns of capital ownership in modern property-oriented society. People with capital will always make better returns on their wealth than those who do not, and more capital generates more returns. This is one of the mechanisms underlying the growing wealth gap in the US and of course in many other places.
So I guess youโll have to explain what I am missing here. ๐ค
@freemo
Are you referring to Pareto improvements? Because, otherwise, how is it not pie?
I am not.
I think it is best understood with an example. You have to understand going in that money is not wealth, and that money is only a small portion of what determines wealth. a person can have no money (a room full of gold bars) and still be extremely wealthy.
With that understanding in mind it is important to realize that wealth is constantly being generated and destroyed. If I buy a shovel for 5$ and go dig up 10,000$ worth of gold in my back yard with it, I have just generated 9,995$ in wealth that didnt exist before. I did not need to take wealth from anyone else to do it.
This is a simple counter example but the idea of wealth generation is in every venture we do, sometimes it is more obvious than others however.
@freemo I see now, but I still find the statement in the image misleading.
Also, in the example, would not such events change the value of gold in the society making the gold of other people equal to less wealth than before?
@gioypi The number of dollars you have is not an indication of wealth. think of wealth as "how well can I live" not "how many dollars do I have in my bank".
Lets think of another example to illustrate that. this time I use an axe I own to go chop down trees and mix some concrete and I use my own man power over 20 years to build a luxury house on a mountain top. All of the wealth here is also generated. It has significantly improved my quality of living, beautiful views, luxury home, I am now "wealthy" where before I had nothing. However in doing so I have not made anyone elses home any less appealing or luxurious. Everyone quality of life other than me is exactly the same as it was before I built my home off in the woods.
So again this is an example of me generating significant wealth for myself without needing to take that wealth from anyone else. Even though having one more home in the world may have reduced the money value of everyone elses home by a few pennies they dont actually have any less wealth than they did before, because wealth is not dictated by the money value over time.
@freemo I get it, nice example. Thanks for the clarification.
However, I wish this was how very wealthy people acquired their wealth. The higher I look, the less relevant it appears to me.
@gioypi Well I wouldnt say its less common as you move up the wealth scale. Its just hard to see as things become more complex. Some wealthy of course steal from others, but there is a great deal of wealth generation from large companies as well. It really just depends on the details as always.
Not really, if the wealth you have is generated and you can demonstrate you are exceptionally good at generating wealth, then it is not hoarding a festering pile, your existance is in fact a service to others and the nation by allowing you to have so much wealth since you can continue to generate more wealth for everyone (including yourself) more so than other people (who have not proven their abilities) might be able to do.
@freemo it is a festering pile unless it is necessary for whatever your wealth generation scheme is, which is unlikely as you have generated it without the pile in the first place. If it wasn't necessary before but is somehow necessary now, it's not exactly your skill it is just a gold mine you happened to stumble upon.
@gioypi
Generally wealth generating schemes generate more wealth the more money they have as an input. So generally every step along the way as they generate wealthy they use that to generate more wealth and a large portion of it is used for wealth generation in increasing amounts, sure.
But also some of it, as you suggest, is just money you have personally for whatever you want to spend it on. But since this is money that would have never existed in the system without you having generated it in the first place, then there is no harm or negativity associated with spending it. Especially when you consider that the spending of that money itself ultimately can go to fund other wealth generating enterprises of other people and helps ensure new people come into the game by winning over some portion of your free funds.
Accumulating wealth you generated isnt bad, it just isnt as good as spending it obviously. But if you generate a billion dollars and then dig a hole and burry it, you've done no more harm than if you never generated the billion in the first place. In fact you've probably done some good because you probably generated money for others along side generating that money for yourself.
With that said, all money will eventually get spent, even if that may not happen till after the person dies.
@freemo Even assuming best case scenario that it helped some, It is still bad if there are more people out there that need help. It's like coming across some food and destroying it, when you know your neigbour is starving. Their money being spent after their death doesn't mean they weren't greedy assholes their entire life. Also it might not be spent for a few generations if they teach their heirs(yeah that's still a thing) to be just as greedy and useless as they were.
@gioypi
That analogy isnt accurate.. It is more accurate to say it is like spending your summer growing tomatoes and instead of giving it to your starving neighbor you can them up and give them to your child, who then uses the canned tomatoes to feed himself or feed a starving naeighboor.
Yea its not "nice" that you had food and let your starving neighboor go hungry and all. But your neighboor is no worse off now than if you never grew that food in the first place.
@freemo I mistakenly assumed that by burry you meant destroy, and not save to dig up later, which makes it worse in my optinion. It's not "not nice" it's bad, really bad.
Also in the analogy you are fed for life (or foreseeable future). Obviously if you have to worry about not having enough food for yourself or your family tomorrow(during a harsh winter) that changes things, but would also be out of context.
@gioypi
@freemo
But is it wealth or money you are generating? If it is wealth then the canned tomatoes analogy is great. Can you generate money without having a country/bank print them?
Thinking about huge multinational companies that keep money in offshore accounts and never spend them I get concerned about inequalities. And since they are companies they could be immortal, so the money never return to the market, but they can be used as leverage. I hope I am not going out of context here, this is what pops into my head when reading @namark 's argument.
@freemo Well as usual I guess we are dancing around the same argument, that might not even be an argument.
The wealth might a be a pie or might not be a pie, dependent on the situation. You might be doing some good, no harm, or some harm. Regardless of all of that, once you have accumulated more than you need (that is can reasonably plan to spend in foreseeable future), it is immoral to not share/spend, if there are people in need.
Mostly agree, but the more than you need being immoral might need some clarification.
A billionair who uses much of their money to create programs to feed the hungry, even if they still have billions in their bank account is acting perfectly morally as they are using those large funds to generate some good for others. So even though they may own far more than they need to survive, it is all perfectly ethical because it is put to good use, even without exhasting that collection of funds.
@freemo @gioypi I agree that wealth can be โcreatedโ from outside of the existing financial system in that basic sense, but in practice, I think it is fair to say that most of what we see today is the shuttling of wealth from one person (or persons) to another within what is fundamentally a finite pool which slowly expands.
I also agree that wealth is not money, but frankly that is somewhat beside the point when money exists solely to act as a means of making wealth liquid/transforms led into other kinds of wealth. This is why we left the bartering system behind.
As well, wealth creation becomes far easier the more wealth you have to begin with. Anyone, hypothetically, can mine asteroids for untold billions, but itโs a lot more accessible when you have the resources to build an asteroid mining company with rockets and mining equipment and staff rather than starting with a few sticks and a rock, metaphorically speaking.
So I find your statements somewhat practically misleading. ๐
@freemo @gioypi As well, of course you took your wealth from someone else when you dug it up. You took it from the environment, from other organisms, etc. It simply wasnโt known or tallied wealth before that, and arguably is only โfreeโ to take because humans really only recognize property ownership as something attributable to other humans, at best.
The Earth is essentially a closed system, more-or-less, so there is no new wealth being created, only unfinished accounting being updated.
In the purest sense, one could perhaps argue that knowledge creation is perhaps the purest form of โwealth creationโ, as the efficiency gains and reworking of existing wealth in ever-more-valuable forms is perhaps one of the most powerful ways to take low-value resources and convert them into higher-value resources.
Not really, it only seems that way until you start trying to model actual economies and make predictions. It breaks down really fast when you try to take that assumption and actually prove it out through models.
The fact is, if we want to accurately model how money flows and changed over time we inevitably wind up with massive wealth generation at every level.
It is really just that its very hard, perhaps impossible, for most of us to see past the indoctrination that has been drilled into most laypeople suggesting money as a finite pie is somehow remotely accurate, in practice, it is not.
I would say your initial posit that most of wealth today is through theft rather than generation isnt really true. Not to say it isnt a significant factor, but I'd say there is a mix of both and much of the wealth that is moved rather than generated is not always the fault of the wealthy person either, it is nuanced.
generally speaking if two people involved in a trade are both acting within their best interests, and are responsible, then wealth is generated through that trasaction. For example if I buy a shovel off a shovel conglomerate, and I use that shovel to go build things with it, then the person who sold me the shovel helped me facilitate the generation of wealth. so the big company selling shovels is helping the world generate wealth more so than stealing it.
On the other hand if I go buy a video game and spend all day playing that video game, and pretty much waste my life away buying and selling video games, then no wealth will be generated by the big company trying to sell video games. But is that the fault of the video game salesman or the person buying it and using it to waste their own time? After all if you just play video games occasionally, as a way to relax, they may ultimately cause you to work harder and better when you are on the clock as you are well rested and energized.
Long story short, as long as people are making responsible choices in their purchases and invest, mostly, in buying things that enable them to generate wealth, then the big companies selling the goods that enable that are themselves generating significant wealth in their communities.
As for the "wealth is not money" argument, you seemed to mis the point... Money is wealth, wealth is not money. Money is a small subset of wealth.
I do agree that as you generate wealth it becomes easier to generate more wealth as well. but thats a good thing because as I stated above the wealth large companies generate is not solely their own, when people are buying responsibly they are also enabling that wealth generation for others. that says nothing of the share holders, of which any one can be one with only a few dollars to their name. So that wealth generation is something we all benefit from and have access to usually.
@freemo
Yes, but also no.
what's your reasoning for wealth inequality?