Irrational 1% Jealousy

[Vandroiy]

I was about to reply to this post and decided to make a new thread:

Capitalism is not as good as you think if it comes to the point where 1% of the population owns 90% of the money. It's hard to find examples of honest trade, rather more and more poverty and slave labour while the fat pigs get fatter.

I keep reading this complaint about the "top 1%" controlling too much. How do we know this distribution is suboptimal? I personally have difficulties imagining an efficient human-controlled society where the "top 1%" does not manage large amounts of resources. Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

The economy is not a cake that must be divided. We eat food cultivated, planned, farmed, transported and stored via markets that optimize through Capitalism. Wrecking the markets to try eat the dollars is not much of a plan. There are many problems for which more and less distributed solutions exist, with a different resulting wealth distribution and no simple answer on which is better. Take financial security: how much money should people hoard personally, how much should they pay to insurance? Insurance will give the insurance's manager tremendous power, hoarding will leave more to the middle class instead. But are they better off with the hoarded amount instead of insurance? Tail risks are bad, and you don't want to be the uninsured hospital patient who runs out of cash.

But more importantly, why is asset equality a goal? So people have no richer people to be jealous about? The problem of poor people is how well they can get out of poverty, not how the high-level part of society distributes wealth. Any redistribution in just Europe or the USA that decreases overall efficiency would just starve more people in poor countries. I don't remember seeing protest banners reading "We speak for the 1.29 billion", the people below the poverty line who are likely to die from lack of food and medicine. Is it not hypocrisy to call some exact distribution near the top "unfair" while neglecting over a BILLION people elsewhere?



A note on "slave labour" in the quoted post: Capitalistic slave labour in the West should be impossible by definition. Capitalism is roughly free voluntary human action; if a worker has no free choice of the best willing employer, this is not Capitalism. If he has that choice, he is not a slave worker. The only way to get classical slavery in Capitalism is to explicitly allow it. Poverty and slavery are not strongly connected: there could be a world with slavery but no poverty, as there could be a world with poverty but no slavery. It's not useful to mix up those two as they are totally different issues.

[Lethn]

It's not necessarily irrational jealousy, it's just typical jealousy that people are trying to rationalise and they seem to take the view of  "If that guy has it then why can't I?" when confronted with this situation I find it's best to try and put them in the position of being the rich guy, I bet you the majority of the time they'd dodge the question if they had that sort of money they wouldn't like the idea of people taking it away from them by force either.

I even see this kind of logic in government departments and such, here in the UK as most of you probably know we're facing a lot of cuts and all I ever see from all the groups is variations of "You can cut anyone else but not us" and it's that case again where they're happy to take money from other people but if you do it to them you're a scumbag.

[crumbs]

I was about to reply to this post and decided to make a new thread:

Capitalism is not as good as you think if it comes to the point where 1% of the population owns 90% of the money. It's hard to find examples of honest trade, rather more and more poverty and slave labour while the fat pigs get fatter.

I keep reading this complaint about the "top 1%" controlling too much. How do we know this distribution is suboptimal? I personally have difficulties imagining an efficient human-controlled society where the "top 1%" does not manage large amounts of resources.

You substitute "control" & "manage" for the word in your quote, "own."  That's the cause of your  misunderstanding. 
A factory boss manages scores of people, he controls them, though he doesn't own them. I think the objection in your quote is to 1% owning so much, not simply controlling it.  Have i helped?

Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

What is it you wish to distribute to 1% of the world's population?

The economy is not a cake that must be divided. We eat food cultivated, planned, farmed, transported and stored via markets that optimize through Capitalism.

You say "optimised," others say trashed beyond repair -- loaded words are loaded.

Wrecking the markets to try eat the dollars is not much of a plan.

I agree, not much of a plan.  Why propose it if even you find it lacking?  Eating dollars is sillier than burning them.  I understand there are pricey drinks made with gold flecks, my guess is minced goldleaf.  So it's not that rich folks don't try

There are many problems for which more and less distributed solutions exist, with a different resulting wealth distribution and no simple answer on which is better. Take financial security: how much money should people hoard personally, how much should they pay to insurance? Insurance will give the insurance's manager tremendous power, hoarding will leave more to the middle class instead. But are they better off with the hoarded amount instead of insurance? Tail risks are bad, and you don't want to be the uninsured hospital patient who runs out of cash.

You're mixing thing up again.  When you pay insurance premiums, your insurance guy doesn't pocket the money.  He controls it, his firm might invest or loan it, but there's no concentration of wealth -- the money's not his.
As far as insurance being a good or a bad idea?  That's debatable, though has nothing to do with the 1%.

But more importantly, why is asset equality a goal? So people have no richer people to be jealous about?

It's not a goal, really.  Some people just feel queasy when they have everything & others have nothing.  Latent religiosity maybe?  Or their folks taught them it's nice to share.  Some are just afraid that the poor might start sharpening pitchforks if the disparity got too great, so sharing becomes a cowardly act. 
And the poor are just jelly.  You know how those people are.

The problem of poor people is how well they can get out of poverty, not how the high-level part of society distributes wealth. Any redistribution in just Europe or the USA that decreases overall efficiency would just starve more people in poor countries. I don't remember seeing protest banners reading "We speak for the 1.29 billion", the people below the poverty line who are likely to die from lack of food and medicine. Is it not hypocrisy to call some exact distribution near the top "unfair" while neglecting over a BILLION people elsewhere?

Absolutely.  "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."  And "cast the first stone," and all that stuff.  99-percenters are just as rotten as 1-percenters.  And some are whinier.

A note on "slave labour" in the quoted post: Capitalistic slave labour in the West should be impossible by definition. Capitalism is roughly free voluntary human action; if a worker has no free choice of the best willing employer, this is not Capitalism. If he has that choice, he is not a slave worker. The only way to get classical slavery in Capitalism is to explicitly allow it. Poverty and slavery are not strongly connected: there could be a world with slavery but no poverty, as there could be a world with poverty but no slavery. It's not useful to mix up those two as they are totally different issues.

I'll save your footnote for later

[Vandroiy]

You substitute "control" & "manage" for the word in your quote, "own."  That's the cause of your  misunderstanding.  
A factory boss manages scores of people, he controls them, though he doesn't own them. I think the objection in your quote is to 1% owning so much, not simply controlling it.  Have i helped?

You're mixing thing up again.  When you pay insurance premiums, your insurance guy doesn't pocket the money.  He controls it, his firm might invest or loan it, but there's no concentration of wealth -- the money's not his.
As far as insurance being a good or a bad idea?  That's debatable, though has nothing to do with the 1%.

While making this distinction is meaningful in theory, not giving a company's highest level decision-maker substantial ownership yields very bad results. Top-down organization works to some extent -- mainly through high intelligence by organizers -- but just degenerates at the top. The reason for this is corruption, or game theory on selfish actors if you want to put it that way.

So I'm not mixing things up, but reducing the problem to feasible solutions. You need someone who owns a company so that you have someone who really cares about it. While very high intelligence might in principle find other setups with favorable incentive systems, that appears to be too hard for us humans right now.

So to answer the question:

Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

What is it you wish to distribute to 1% of the world's population?

It's not me who wants to make an assumption on wealth distribution. The "99%" crew wants to distribute a large amount of it well beyond 1% of the population.

My argument is that control over resources and personal wealth are strongly coupled. To reach their goal, the "99%" protesters must either decouple resource control from wealth, which does not seem to work, or have a whole lot of people trained in resource control, which we don't seem to be able to. This leaves them with no realistic options to achieve their goal.

The distinction between control and wealth blurs on large scales anyway. Nobody can consume a billion dollars right now. One can waste it, but a politician can waste it on funny agriculture laws as much as an oil exporter can build a ski resort in the desert. The difference between a communist party leader and the owner of a giant monopoly of the same size is irrelevant to a human starving on the street. Whether the person at the top owns or just controls something -- and what ownership even means -- is a question of control structure optimization, not reality in terms of power accumulation.

[crumbs]

You substitute "control" & "manage" for the word in your quote, "own."  That's the cause of your  misunderstanding.  
A factory boss manages scores of people, he controls them, though he doesn't own them. I think the objection in your quote is to 1% owning so much, not simply controlling it.  Have i helped?

You're mixing thing up again.  When you pay insurance premiums, your insurance guy doesn't pocket the money.  He controls it, his firm might invest or loan it, but there's no concentration of wealth -- the money's not his.
As far as insurance being a good or a bad idea?  That's debatable, though has nothing to do with the 1%.

While making this distinction is meaningful in theory, not giving a company's highest level decision-maker substantial ownership yields very bad results.

It depends on what you mean by "substantial."  A .01% stake in Google would be substantial enough for me to pay attention, if that .01% happened to be 99% of my net worth.  OTOH, my mind may wonder if i owned Microsoft & Apple, so even 100% ownership of Google would not guarantee my decisions to be motivated by the welfare of Google, exclusively.

My interest would be in the cumulative value of my three companies, so bankrupting Google would be in my best interest, as long as my other two companies are enriched by a greater amount in the process.  

Top-down organization works to some extent -- mainly through high intelligence by organizers -- but just degenerates at the top. The reason for this is corruption, or game theory on selfish actors if you want to put it that way.

To me that's not immediately obvious, so i'd probably want a more reasoned argument -- based on empirical data & all that tedious stuff.  Corruption finds a way into every human enterprise, like rats find their way onto ships.  No rats?  Sailors panick -- sure sign of a sinking ship.
Once you agree that corruption is motivated by more than simple greed, the harbor rats scurry over the mooring lines, and there you are.

So I'm not mixing things up, but reducing the problem to feasible solutions. You need someone who owns a company so that you have someone who really cares about it. While very high intelligence might in principle find other setups with favorable incentive systems, that appears to be too hard for us humans right now.

I'm guessing that you model your assumptions on ma & pa companies, where owners are also the employees & as such most attune to the company's business.  In reality, the owner is no better versed in the workings of his company than an investor in pork belly futures is at raising pigs.  This is important.  Your reasoning leads to a dubious conclusion:  A dictatorship is the best way to run a country.  On paper, i would agree.  In practice?  Not so much.

So to answer the question:

Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

What is it you wish to distribute to 1% of the world's population?

It's not me who wants to make an assumption on wealth distribution. The "99%" crew wants to distribute a large amount of it well beyond 1% of the population.

My argument is that control over resources and personal wealth are strongly coupled. To reach their goal, the "99%" protesters must either decouple resource control from wealth, which does not seem to work, or have a whole lot of people trained in resource control, which we don't seem to be able to. This leaves them with no realistic options to achieve their goal.

Agreed.  Your alternative fails likewise, see dictatorship above.

The distinction between control and wealth blurs on large scales anyway. Nobody can consume a billion dollars right now. One can waste it, but a politician can waste it on funny agriculture laws as much as an oil exporter can build a ski resort in the desert.

The difference being that the politician, at least in theory, is held accountable, while the billionaire is free to waste his money as he sees fit -- it's his to waste.  Other than his own ethics, which are already put in question by the simple fact that he has accumulated such a hefty sum, there is nothing to stop him from doing so.  As far as desert ski resorts, i'm sure the oil sheiks & their shiksas are planning one as we speak  Responsible ownership in action -- watch it go.

The difference between a communist party leader and the owner of a giant monopoly of the same size is irrelevant to a human starving on the street.

I'm not sure how this serves your argument -- both are seen as oppressors, who rose to their positions by cunning & corruption.  The "human starving in the street" would like to roast both over a slow fire, smother them in BBQ sauce & chase them down with a cold brewsky.  

Whether the person at the top owns or just controls something -- and what ownership even means -- is a question of control structure optimization, not reality in terms of power accumulation.[/i]

If the difference is simply rhetorical, why is actual ownership (and not merely control) important to you?  I assume the 99-percenters are fine with the control part, it's the ownership that rubs them the wrong way.

[Rassah]

Hah, when I read this topic, I at first thought you would be talking about Bitcoiners being jealous of Winklevoses 

This 1% thing is really just cultural. When you point out to the 99% that this 1% wealth isn't money bags, but companies and businesses that those 99% work for and buy stuff from, and then ask them if they would have the knowledge and experience to run those things, and be willing to take on the responsibility for the lives of millions who work for them, they typically clam up, and resent you for such questions.

When you said a ski resort in the desert, were you referring to the ski resort in Dubai?

[Vandroiy]

Digging it up since I didn't answer anymore:

Whether the person at the top owns or just controls something -- and what ownership even means -- is a question of control structure optimization, not reality in terms of power accumulation.[/i]

If the difference is simply rhetorical, why is actual ownership (and not merely control) important to you?  I assume the 99-percenters are fine with the control part, it's the ownership that rubs them the wrong way.

I did not say the difference is rhetorical. It is a difference of control structure optimization: ownership optimizes because the owner has an incentive to optimize. Plain control lacks this optimization and thus requires an actual optimizer on top to prevent corruption.

It might fail at times but this is part of the competition -- and thus evolution -- amongst investors. If they have others conduct their business their job becomes ensuring the productivity of these executives. If they close one company to strengthen another in excess of the loss, this is still a net benefit.

Not quoting more than this since the answers would either boil down to the same argument or dilute the discussion.

When you said a ski resort in the desert, were you referring to the ski resort in Dubai?

Heh, I guess that's where the thought came from. I admit I don't know much about it and whether it's profitable, if it's a bad example take excessive personal cruise ships or jets instead.

[CasinoBit]

I second everything, first of all the 1% owns 40%, not 90%, secondly read Atlas Shrugged, if you are a lazy c*nt no one owes you squat!

It's pretty scary how people seem to think that someone owes them anything for no apparent reason, to put this into perspective:

You have person A (we'll call him Kanye West) and you have person B (Bob), Bob has hurt his knee and unable to work for a month and support himself in a theoretical society without welfare, Kanye West has more money than he could EVER spend in a lifetime (spending money is his fulltime job!), is it moral to take 300$ from Kanye West and give it to Bob so he will be able to support himself for the month?

I don't think so, I don't think that it would be moral to even take a cent from Kanye even if Bobs life depended on it, because putting your hand into someones pocket in order to save another persons life is no better or nobler than theft and it reduces Kanye to slavery, after all the working definition of slavery is precisely that: the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

Plus no laws are as strict and as true as the ones written on the hearts of men, chances are Bob would still survive the month because the rich are also givers and he would likely be supported by his community as long as they aren't poverty stricken too and they see that Bob is NOT a slob who's doing tattoos with their money.

/thread

[wachtwoord]

But more importantly, why is asset equality a goal?

The exact right question.

Socialists (basically all parties in my country) regularly intermix 'equal' and 'fair' and call for a 'fair' distribution of wealth, while meaning 'equal'. This really "grinds my gears" as to me, an equal asset distribution is as unfair as it gets.

[p2pbucks]

  We have a Pyramid human society struture , it's true. 99% people can't get to the top.

[wachtwoord]

We have a Pyramid human society struture , it's true. 99% people can't get to the top.

A society with only hero's doesn't work. We need many people doing 'normal' labour

[Ekaros]

We have a Pyramid human society struture , it's true. 99% people can't get to the top.

A society with only hero's doesn't work. We need many people doing 'normal' labour

Problem in my mind is that are we possibly yet in point where regular person or tad below average can get reasonable living for working 40 hours a week? And by reasonable, I mean sufficient nutrion, living space and healthcare without many very special luxuries. In my mind we should be there in west, with current productivity... Though somehow it just doesn't seem to work out...

[4mherewego]

Yeah, the leftist have way too much money, they should give 90% of their income to poor africans. Not so fun anymore?

[luv2drnkbr]

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

[crumbs]

Digging it up since I didn't answer anymore:

Whether the person at the top owns or just controls something -- and what ownership even means -- is a question of control structure optimization, not reality in terms of power accumulation.[/i]

If the difference is simply rhetorical, why is actual ownership (and not merely control) important to you?  I assume the 99-percenters are fine with the control part, it's the ownership that rubs them the wrong way.

I did not say the difference is rhetorical. It is a difference of control structure optimization: ownership optimizes because the owner has an incentive to optimize. Plain control lacks this optimization and thus requires an actual optimizer on top to prevent corruption.

"Control structure optimization"?  You start with the dubious assumption that since [partial] ownership increases a party's interest, and thus work performance (a doubly dubious notion:  Surgeons do not do surgeries on their family members, actors get stage fright during performances (in which they're fully invested), not rehearsals (in which they're not), etc., etc.).  As i pointed out earlier, incentivising work (oh, let's say a salary) improves performance, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in early, and, as i've pointed out, .1% of Google would be enough to keep me *riveted* -- at 50% my ego might get the better of me & i'd start treating the company as a toy (i wouldn't be able to spend that much money in my lifetime anyhow, so why not?)
  

It might fail at times but this is part of the competition -- and thus evolution -- amongst investors. If they have others conduct their business their job becomes ensuring the productivity of these executives. If they close one company to strengthen another in excess of the loss, this is still a net benefit.

Net benefit?  To whom?

[...]

[Lethn]

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well.

[crumbs]

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well.

You realize that outside of Ayn Rand books, the poor protecting the rights of the rich to get richer are just dupes to be laughed at, right?

[hawkeye]

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well.

You realize that outside of Ayn Rand books, the poor protecting the rights of the rich to get richer are just dupes to be laughed at, right?

You realize that many of the rich use the government (ie. the average taxpayer's money) in order to protect their wealth.  Right?

[Equilux]

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well.

You realize that outside of Ayn Rand books, the poor protecting the rights of the rich to get richer are just dupes to be laughed at, right?

You realize that many of the rich use the government (ie. the average taxpayer's money) in order to protect their wealth.  Right?

you realize that the same goes for the poor and everyone on between right?

[crumbs]

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well.

You realize that outside of Ayn Rand books, the poor protecting the rights of the rich to get richer are just dupes to be laughed at, right?

You realize that many of the rich use the government (ie. the average taxpayer's money) in order to protect their wealth.  Right?

What's your point?