Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans

Re:Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans by readams on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @06:04PM (#11492683)

That's the small view of humanity again. Nobody in the US is in the bottom quartile. You also see this as a zero-sum game: a process of extracting wealth from someone and handing it to someone else. Trade increases the overall amount of wealth. It's important for policy to recognize, as I said, that there are winners and losers and mitigate the negative effects for the losers. But this can come from the new wealth generated by the trade. Remember: this is new wealth, created entirely from nothing, that did not exist before.

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Re:Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans by p4wnc6 on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @06:19PM (#11492797)

> Nobody in the US is in the bottom quartile.

Did you read my comment? I said they are in the second quartile, and they foot the bill for a lot of the ways that wealth improvement reaches people in the first quartile.

Although, across the part of the country where I am from, Appalachia, there actually are people in the bottom quartile, especially after you take addiction-related QALY metrics into account. I'd argue your knee-jerk "just cause they are inside America's borders means they don't have it comparably bad" attitude, which sounds like you're just regurgitating some Giving What We Can blog post or something, is more of the small view.

> You also see this as a zero-sum game: a process of extracting wealth from someone and handing it to someone else. Trade increases the overall amount of wealth.

You really did not read my comment. I said that we translate the whole distribution to the right (that is the part about making everyone materially better off) but by doing so we shuffle some people from the second quartile into the first quartile, or at least shuffle them to lowered status within the second quartile.

In terms of ordinal status, it is, by definition, a zero-sum game. If, no matter how much total wealth there is, the thing people care about is where they rank in wealth, then it is zero sum. You can't manufacture more ranks. And, the evidence (which you don't seem interested in) really does suggest that it is the rank that people care about (especially when you are ranked second-to-last), even if preserving your rank means denying yourself better overall conditions from a material point of view.

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Re:Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans by idanoeman on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @07:14PM (#11493129)

But people don't only care about rank in wealth. I think you're focusing too much on that one aspect. A rising tide lifting all boats has a lot more impact to how nice it is to live in the world than a short-term shuffling of social status.

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Re:Obama Forgives Student Debt Of 400,000 Americans by p4wnc6 on Wednesday April 13, 2016 @07:54PM (#11493326)

I think relative to the kinds of wealth increases the bottom 50% of the world is permitted to realize (e.g. access to ad-drenched web services and internet devices, entertainment consumables, heavily processed food, clearly-second-class medical care), the loss in status matters more.

People might be willing to accept a lessened station in life if the offsetting overall increases in wealth that they get to see are significant in their lives. The fact that at least 50% of the population is more concerned with rank than with overall well-being is, for me, a shameful indictment of how little we actually use societal wealth to improve impoverished lives to any degree, let alone a degree that would justify setting aside primal Last Place Aversion.

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