Income Inequality Is Worse Now Than It Was In 1774 - Even factoring in slavery s
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  Income Inequality Is Worse Now Than It Was In 1774 - Even factoring in slavery s
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Author Topic: Income Inequality Is Worse Now Than It Was In 1774 - Even factoring in slavery s  (Read 1879 times)
LastVoter
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« on: September 20, 2012, 03:18:55 AM »

http://www.businessinsider.com/income-inequality-higher-than-in-1774-2012-9
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opebo
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« Reply #1 on: September 20, 2012, 10:11:45 AM »

Due to laziness.  Why, back in them days people walked to work in the snow without britches.
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Gustaf
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« Reply #2 on: September 20, 2012, 10:24:13 AM »

Eh. Today's Gini coefficient is 0.47, the estimated one back then is 0.44. Given the uncertainty of the data, that's pretty much a wash. Also, they're not factoring in the slavery aspects of slavery into this. And of course, it's not that surprising - the US was very egalitarian back then, something which isn't news.
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Politico
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« Reply #3 on: September 20, 2012, 07:41:38 PM »
« Edited: September 21, 2012, 07:59:30 AM by Politico »

Yet homeless people receive better healthcare in an emergency room than President Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller would have received in the 1950s, the average person enjoys a higher standard of living than the wealthiest person in a number of countries committed to command-and-control elements, the poorest enjoy a higher standard of living than the average person in most countries, etc.

An individual's utility should NOT be a function of the difference between their income and other people who earn more than them. If somebody has that mentality, they're beating themselves up instead of enjoying life (after all, there can only be one person who is THE richest, and even that person will have extreme implicit/explicit costs that go hand-in-hand with the extreme benefits they enjoy).

Obviously there are quite a few who are struggling and cannot enjoy themselves right now, but a defeatist attitude has never led to happiness for anybody. It is not about where we are, but about where we are going next. Things will get better. The pie is not fixed; the pie must grow, and the left-wing, defeatist mentality that is infecting our society must be stopped.
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Spanish Moss
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« Reply #4 on: September 21, 2012, 10:49:47 AM »

Yet homeless people receive better healthcare in an emergency room than President Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller would have received in the 1950s, the average person enjoys a higher standard of living than the wealthiest person in a number of countries committed to command-and-control elements, the poorest enjoy a higher standard of living than the average person in most countries, etc.

An individual's utility should NOT be a function of the difference between their income and other people who earn more than them. If somebody has that mentality, they're beating themselves up instead of enjoying life (after all, there can only be one person who is THE richest, and even that person will have extreme implicit/explicit costs that go hand-in-hand with the extreme benefits they enjoy).

Obviously there are quite a few who are struggling and cannot enjoy themselves right now, but a defeatist attitude has never led to happiness for anybody. It is not about where we are, but about where we are going next. Things will get better. The pie is not fixed; the pie must grow, and the left-wing, defeatist mentality that is infecting our society must be stopped.

You go tell that to a single parent with two kids working three jobs in the inner city, and see what they have to say.
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opebo
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« Reply #5 on: September 21, 2012, 11:55:09 AM »

Obviously there are quite a few who are struggling and cannot enjoy themselves right now, but a defeatist attitude has never led to happiness for anybody. It is not about where we are, but about where we are going next. Things will get better. The pie is not fixed; the pie must grow, and the left-wing, defeatist mentality that is infecting our society must be stopped.

Precisely! We should hold out hope that we can get socialism, even though the chances are probably not that high.  Never give up - history gives us a few examples of the villains getting their comeuppance (Russia, Cuba, etc.).
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« Reply #6 on: September 22, 2012, 03:03:15 AM »

Of course it ing is. The economy in 1774(outside of the South)was largely based on Yeoman farming, and land was not a scarce resource at the time. The South with it's slavery obscures the extent of that- if you only took the North into consideration, it's Gini would probably be lower then ing Scandinavia's.
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Vosem
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« Reply #7 on: September 22, 2012, 07:46:27 AM »

As Politico points out, standard of living has significantly increased.
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #8 on: September 22, 2012, 11:25:11 AM »

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I've spent time in the Ukraine, and have met engineers with about the same standard of living as a Denny's waitress. Politico is absolutely right. We're better off to grow the pot than to divide it.
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opebo
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« Reply #9 on: September 22, 2012, 12:05:28 PM »

As Politico points out, standard of living has significantly increased.

Completely irrelevant.  People also smoked marijuana and visited prostitutes freely then, these have nothing to do with the question of inequality.
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Vosem
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« Reply #10 on: September 22, 2012, 10:26:30 PM »

As Politico points out, standard of living has significantly increased.

Completely irrelevant.

How so?

  People also smoked marijuana and visited prostitutes freely then, these have nothing to do with the question of inequality.

This is what seems to be irrelevant...
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Miamiu1027
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« Reply #11 on: September 23, 2012, 05:34:54 PM »

Obviously there are quite a few who are struggling and cannot enjoy themselves right now, but a defeatist attitude has never led to happiness for anybody. It is not about where we are, but about where we are going next. Things will get better. The pie is not fixed; the pie must grow, and the left-wing, defeatist mentality that is infecting our society must be stopped.

Precisely! We should hold out hope that we can get socialism, even though the chances are probably not that high.  Never give up - history gives us a few examples of the villains getting their comeuppance (Russia, Cuba, etc.).

Haiti 1804 the craziest one.
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bgwah
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« Reply #12 on: September 23, 2012, 09:06:54 PM »

The Tea Party only likes some aspects of 18th century America.
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Franzl
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« Reply #13 on: September 24, 2012, 06:07:22 AM »

We're better off to grow the pot than to divide it.

Or you grow it as much as you can and then divide it to an extent. There's no reason both can't be done.
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Politico
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« Reply #14 on: September 24, 2012, 04:41:07 PM »
« Edited: September 24, 2012, 04:46:08 PM by Politico »

We're better off to grow the pot than to divide it.

Or you grow it as much as you can and then divide it to an extent. There's no reason both can't be done.

Economists have established an essential trade-off between efficiency and equity. Furthermore, to use the words of Milton Friedman:

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."

"Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair — there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being born with sight. There is nothing fair about one man being born of a wealthy parent and one of an indigenous parent. There is nothing fair about Mohammed Ali having been born with a skill that enables him to make millions of dollars one night. There is nothing fair about Marleena Detrich having great legs that we all want to watch. There is nothing fair about any of that. But on the other hand, don't you think a lot of people who like to look at Marleena Detrich's legs benefited from nature's unfairness in producing a Marleena Detrich. What kind of a world would it be if everybody was an absolute identical duplicate of anybody else. You might as well destroy the whole world and just keep one specimen left for a museum. In the same way, it's unfair that Muhammed Ali should be a great fighter and should be able to earn millions. But would it not be even more unfair to the people who like to watch him if you said that in the pursuit of some abstract idea of equality we're not going to let Muhammed Ali get more for one nights fight than the lowest man on the totem pole can get for a days unskilled work on the docks. You can do that but the result of that would be to deny people the opportunity to watch Mohammad Ali. I doubt very much he would be willing to subject himself to the kind of fights he's gone through if he were to get the pay of an unskilled docker."
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Franzl
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« Reply #15 on: September 24, 2012, 05:21:02 PM »

Unfortunately, that's bulls**t.
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LastVoter
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« Reply #16 on: September 25, 2012, 12:10:30 AM »

We're better off to grow the pot than to divide it.
For that to happen, certain people need to let the working class use the oven.
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ag
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« Reply #17 on: September 25, 2012, 07:58:08 PM »

Eh. Today's Gini coefficient is 0.47, the estimated one back then is 0.44. Given the uncertainty of the data, that's pretty much a wash. Also, they're not factoring in the slavery aspects of slavery into this. And of course, it's not that surprising - the US was very egalitarian back then, something which isn't news.

The data are not very comparable, that's for sure.

I would add (mostly for pedantic purposes) that Gini is a somewhat arbitrary measure of inequality. It is about as good or as bad as any other measure that would satisfy Lorenz criterion. There is really nothing particularly intuitive about it, except that it is a) a measure of something about incomes; b) anonymous (just counts people and their incomes, ignores their names); c) scale-invariant (doesn't depend on absolute levels of income, just on its distribution); and, most importantly, d) it satisfies the transfer principle: if you transfer the money from the poor to the rich it grows. All those are desirable properties of an inequality measure, but there are many measures other than Gini that satisfy it as well. Hence, even if the data were perfect, minor differences in Gini are not very likely to mean much, unless you can show that other possible measures (such as enthropy) show the same.

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opebo
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« Reply #18 on: September 26, 2012, 07:12:01 AM »

"Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair."

Absurd straw man argument.  Fairness has nothing to do with it.  We are talking about power struggles here, and this whole business about mentioning legs and brains is pure subterfuge.
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Gustaf
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« Reply #19 on: September 28, 2012, 04:03:25 AM »

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I've spent time in the Ukraine, and have met engineers with about the same standard of living as a Denny's waitress. Politico is absolutely right. We're better off to grow the pot than to divide it.

Generally speaking, I think you're better off smoking the pot than growing it.
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