The author specifically mentions the people making about $7 a day doing manual labor in Qatar, and that they were a lot shorter than he was primarily due to lack of nutrition. Do you believe that these people should only be able to aspire to making $14 a day? Maybe not all of these individuals are hard workers (by nature. I'm sure they are essentially forced to be hard workers to survive) or smart, but a lot probably are, and it's because of an unfair system that didn't give them access to food and education that they have to work in Qatar to make a living.

You may see this is simple economics, but I see this as a modern form of slavery: keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor.

Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing.

There is no conspiracy to "enslave" anyone, nearly all public health and wealth measures over the last 100 years are overwhelming up and to the right. That growth did not happened through magic or luck and certainly not from some misapplication of noble intentions (see communism), but through the slow accumulation of societal benefits, over time, across an open market economy.

It is not and will never be "fair", there will never be equality of outcomes, but jesus, we've faired a lot better under this system than by the whims of kings and politburos trying to distribute "fairness" with a clumsy iron fist.

Some people are born with nothing, others are born with just about everything. Many laws, regulations, etc exist so that JUST existing with nothing is not feasible.

It is nigh impossible to live in this world like the birds do, flying from one food source to the next, roosting wherever you find comfort. Those with means have entire departments to police the underclass off of their property and setup obstacles to make sure riff-raff does not even get on the public property next to their private property (just look at how public transport is set up in big cities).

We protect those with means, ensuring those without cannot even live without selling their labor. Die or work. It's a little like slavery (I KNOW there are large differences between traditional slavery), you must be able to see that?

>but through the slow accumulation of societal benefits, over time, across an open market economy.

Pretty sure most of the improvements we have made for the common man, at least in the US, have come at the behest of those born with nothing standing up and saying "we won't work unless the rewards are distributed better/we get a 40 hour work week/we get cleaner and less dangerous work conditions/etc."

>It is not and will never be "fair", there will never be equality of outcomes,

No one wants equality of outcomes, equality of outcomes would not seem fair to most people. Instead we want equality of opportunity.

We can improve, most of us know it, and even though most improvement will only effect our kids or grandkids, I will still keep bitching that we need to improve until we're AS GREAT AS WE CAN BE.

Yes. These improvements were won through the most thoroughly and deeply market behavior possible: raising the price on what you're selling.

Labor price-gouging capital is a beautiful sight to see. Usually only capital remembers it can do that.

And don't forget that a big part of why many Western countries started to invest more into welfare is because after 1917, their governments realized that the alternative could well be an armed uprising, and that they need to keep their citizens sufficiently content to prevent that - even if that means they have to force the wealthy to share more of their income.

(Note, I'm not saying that Soviets somehow achieved better results. The point is solely that the threat of a socialist/communist revolution was a significant factor in capitalist countries shifting away from unregulated capitalism and towards welfare state.)

This was a pleasure to read, although it made me wonder what the optimal unit of labor is to still have a functioning competitive market. If all capital was controlled by one entity, no market could exist -- that's basically why the US has anti-trust laws. The same is true for labor. Seems like for each market there must be an optimal unit of labor (number of workers in a union, for example), to balance well-being of an individual worker with functioning of the market. Hard problem, though.

Rubbish. Nothing stops you from wandering off into the wilderness, except for the fact that it's a crap way to live. You just feel entitled to the benefits of modern civilisation, without the costs.

As a species, once we reached apex predator status, we were already born with the entire Earth's resources as our inheritance, not nothing. Somehow those got divided up and almost never was it via the mechanisms of an open market economy -- only in exceptional circumstances did those mechanisms provide a modicum of mobility, especially during technological transitions. The rest of the uplift was through outright redistribution, either through the occasional enlightened king's edict, the politburo's fist, or the exercise of raw political power in the legislatures of the world.

An unfettered open market economy that gets farther and farther from initial conditions ends in a revolution.

Have you had a look at 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread? Here's an excerpt:

>For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people’s sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

...

>The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner’s grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp, rock-fall, or flood?

>In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work — though not always even that — only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.

I'd really recommend a read, I used to think as you did, that we are born poor. In reality, we are born with the riches of the world around us, yet ungraspable.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-c...

Its feels a bit myopic to pretend like the the miner mining iron ore 150 years ago used in the creation of a steam engine somehow only benefits from his direct wage, and not indirectly from the product he's helping to create. Yes, the direct monetary benefits accrue to the owners, but by and large those owners produce things of value (increasingly so) to society in a way that that makes that miner's great-grandson far far better off than a "lowest savage" today. I think this is the same false litany that tells us the world is getting worse and worse (especially for the poor), whereas data tells us the exact opposite.

So not everyone gets to be an owner and be directly rewarded, and that work is certainly hard, but we do all seem to share in the collective benefits ownership creates.

The big difference between Qatar/middle-east and the U.S. is that in the U.S. the business culture does not have as much recent history of indentured servitude, and has ever-diminishing use of unsafe practices (e.g., dangerous pesticides applied by farm workers without adequate protection). My father-in-law saw over the past 20 or 30 years many such Latin American workers come through furniture and manufacturing plants in North Carolina where he managed H.R. ... and they were paid very fairly and worked very hard, conscientiously, thoroughly. A fair number were found to have registered with false Social Security numbers and had to move on, but my father-in-law says it always was a loss for the plant. Those in the U.S. illegally still had to hazard the trip, and face deportation always ... but they mostly can leave any employment situation, or go back home, at any time.

Those workers stuck in Qatar / middle-east are unfortunate suckers reeled in by bastards and an uncaring system both in their countries of origin and in Qatar.

So ... on to the interesting part ... what are those Latin American workers in the U.S. doing with the majority of their wages? >>> They're by-and-large remitting that money back home to plow into joint RENT-SEEKING ventures with family / friends back home. They endure the hazardous journey, sub-standard housing, time away from family and their own comfortable culture, and two or three simultaneous jobs, because they have the initiative and need to build the nest egg so they can escape the "wage slavery". <<<

I'm curious about your use of the phrase, joint "rent-seeking" ventures. I looked up the definition of rent-seeking on Wikipedia: "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth", which tend to "result in reduced economic efficiency". Was that implied in your use of the phrase? If so, what kind of ventures did you have in mind? I imagine that migrant workers send their money home to invest, typically by starting businesses (or buying land..?) with family and friends - which isn't necessarily "rent-seeking"?

Provided that I am willing to concede this point for the sake of the argument: what makes you think that your redistribution model will actually allow everyone to achieve their maximum potential?[1] Given that similar redistribution systems have been tried before, where governing bodies were thinking they actually know what's good for "everyone/society", but all of them miserably failed, what differentiates your proposed approach from what have been already implemented?

[1] I don't even know what "achieving maximum potential" means. Is it achieving someone's goals in life? Producing the most widgets possible? Killing as many unbelievers as possible to get into heaven?

Of course, simply providing these services doesn't always cut it. Look at the generational poverty in the US "ghettoes" for obvious confirmation of this. But in general it's a good thing to do and it benefits people. It's certainly not impossible and definitely does not always miserably fail.

For maximum potential, I mostly mean the ability to do what you want in terms of jobs with only intelligence and work holding you back, not the circumstances you were born in.

What's your take on the current student loans situation where almost everyone is able to obtain resources to go to a limited number of colleges and pay for whichever degree they like? Should we expand this and instead of loaning money give it away for free, if this goes towards achieving maximum potential? In your opinion, how much would a regular 4 year degree cost in such a case?

Another model might be to increase subsidy for fields with more guaranteed profit centers, while decreasing the amount of subsidy for fields in which a career profit is less likely, such that loans are more likely to be paid off. This again may make college cheaper, and/or more accessible, but may fail to yield enough trained workers to deliver in necessary but unprofitable fields.

That said, I'm not just trying to poop on the idea, but to highlight that "cost" is not the only rubric of accessibility, and that "cheaper" doesn't necessarily yield the results you're looking for, and may actually result in contrary outcomes from what we expect.

If my value is $10 per day and someone makes my value $20 per day, there is $10 per day worth of value for us to negotiate over. We _both_ have an incentive to maximize my potential.

Also: >we should ...

thats a morality statement but without a canonical source of ethics that some do not ascribe to. But, I would assume that "self interest" is more or less universal, and thus we can build systems that use self interest to ensure good outcomes for all.

To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Also yes of course I used "should", as I am giving my opinion on this situation.

To act as though governments can magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Well, yeah; for one thing, given that Austrian economics is more normative than predictive, I'm not sure what such a simulation would do.

That's absolutely true, and if anything the assumptive concepts that underly how government creates regulations are more dependent on "economic" principles than the assumptive concepts that underly how businesses work.

"people don't always do the most rational thing" is so often used as an excuse for government to intervene and make choices for people. As if government itself is not made and run by people who also don't necessarily (individually or collectively) make 'rational' decisions, only now given a really big stick.

There are other ways besides government to provide for people, even when doing so does not fulfill an obviously incorrect model of human as the hyperrational self-maximizer.

Humans are naturally competitive. Humans have tribal instincts (which include a default hostility to known outgroups). Humans have a fundamental tendency to hoard resources to ward off the mortal dangers of scarcity and decay, visible in our dietary inclinations just as much as in the way we handle the abstraction of money. Like most other successful animals, we have an instinct to secure resources not just for ourselves but for the generations that will follow after us.

These are inborn instincts and impulses, installed by millions of years of evolution. They cannot be hand-waved away. As a species, we are stuck with them, for better or worse.

Throughout the 20th century, we see the rise and fall of economic policy that refuses to acknowledge these realities. This willful blindness inflicts a large amount of suffering on the populations that fall for the delusion that we are now superhuman.

The argument is not that physical impulse does not need restraint, nor that society shouldn't have structure and authority. It is merely that our social systems need to exist as background processes that optimize and refine our basic natures instead of trying to pretend like they don't exist.

Just as denial of the underlying structure of computer systems will, at best, seriously impede performance, denial of the underlying structures of human psychology will, at best, bottleneck any society.

Hardcore socialist redistribution systems are so denialist that they result in the equivalent of a nation wide Blue Screen of Death shortly after bootup. Let's take notice of the blood and agony of the 20th century and not install SOCIALISM.DLL anymore.

In the words of jack nicolsons character in as good as it gets sell crazy someplace else we're all stocked up here.

Useful social systems contemplate typical human behavior and account for it in a reasonable way, instead of pretending that it won't apply.

When you create a central chokepoint for all ownership and economic resources, the distributors show massive favoritism for the ingroup (generally government bureaucrats and their relatives), while the rest of the population is essentially left to starve.

Anyone who claims the purity of their political philosophy or their strength of character or the quality of the education of their central planners will prevent this from occurring under their implementation of centralized resource distribution is essentially claiming to hold a trump card over human biology, and they should be immediately discounted, because that's not how it works. Instead, we keep trying to reboot it, hopeful that this time, the superhumans are in charge.

It is disappointing to see that juvenile dismissals like yours are apparently now countenanced on HN, especially when they're the result of a misreading in the first place.

Although I totally agree with this, individuality also plays a big role in development. The unfairness for someone is the good luck of another one thanks to his parents or grandparents. All conditions been equal, individuality will always makes society unequal. I think we should at least guarantee a worthy life to everyone.

But then what you do with someone that can't make a living but don't want to get educated? If you give him enough to live, he will still be a second class citizen.

Yes, a piece of property earns rent because it has 'value' to someone else; however, who gets to earn that value? At some point, this piece of land was 'unowned', and then someone came along and said 'I own this'. Do we let them keep that forever? Do they have to pay society a fee for being able to claim it as their own? Can they give it to their kids for perpetuity? Can they do anything they want with it? What about the air above it, or the ground below?

These are all very important questions, and there isn't some 'true' moral answer to them that is the right way to govern property rights. There are easier moral arguments to make about ownership of property I produce, but not about land or natural resources.

But who gets to rent out the apartment building? Well, the one who put an apartment building there, that's who. Why should anyone else get to?

Now, I am not saying that the building itself doesn't have value, or that the person who built and owns the building shouldn't be compensated for that investment and work, but it is disingenuous to pretend that the majority of the value is from the building and not the land itself (at least for most places where rent is high)

I am not in any way, shape, or form arguing that we should seize all private property in some kind of communist revolution; I am simply saying we need to think about how we divide up the value of something like real estate to fairly compensate and encourage development without promoting unfair and ineffecient rent seeking.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

In most areas, yes. There is a property tax that is charged as a percentage of the land's value. If the owner fails to pay this fee to society, society revokes his ownership, forcefully seizes the land if necessary, and resells the property to another person who is willing to pay the imposed fee.

We also do have taxes on income produced by capital - that's capital gains - but, as the article points out, we tax them significantly lower than regular sweat-of-the-brow income, and offer more loopholes. In effect, our economic system incentivizes rent-seeking over labor.

Using the phrase "They provide more value" as an umbrella phrase for why people get rich is understandable, but something just doesn't seem quite right about it.

They value their own, certainly, but that value is reflected by the enormous sums we collectively pay to have our garbage removed. The garbage industry is worth a lot more than Oprah.

You also pay (indirectly) your garbage worker a lot more than you pay (indirectly) Oprah, so things might be working out closer to how you value them than you'd expect.

(pardon the napkin math) If you live in a town of, say, 25k people and your town has 10 garbage collectors (napkin math: each pair covers 1000 people's trash every weekday) each earning minimum wage 15k/year (if it takes 1min to pick up trash for an average household of 2, we get just over the standard 2k work-hour year. To me this sounds like fast operation and low house size. But the low end of the trash costs demonstrates the point), then each person in town is paying $6 to their garbage collectors. Even more considering benefits and non-labor costs. If healthcare, garbage truck maintenance and, I dunno, landfill fees (are those a thing?) cost the city a mere 100k/year, every person is paying $10 for garbage collection.

So in the napkin scenario, for each individual, garbage collectors are valued at 10x what Oprah is. And that's with all my napkin math assumptions choosing the lowest costs. Plausible scenarios could go as high as 100x individual value for garbage collection over Oprah mic talking. But Oprah can do her less-individually-important job for 1000x more people. It's an issue of reach.

If Oprah dies tomorrow society lives on and for the most part nothing changes.

If all the sewer treatment plant workers die there is a scramble to replace these invaluable workers to abate a national health crisis.

Why does Oprah make more than these individuals?

Is it because she provides "More value" ?

If you believe she does.... then fine.

If society, through implicit acceptance does...then fine.

I don't, and I don't understand the logic. I believe I understand some of the psychology around it...but not the logic.

If I build a local website and sell access to it for $10 in, say, Monaco (population: approx. 38,000 people) then I'll be making less money in comparison to the same situation but where the entire US is the market for said website.

The sewer treatment plant workers don't matter to me, unless I'm living in the town where this stuff is going down. If I'm not however, those workers have zero value to me.

"...predicts that employment in this industry will increase 7 percent, adding 9,400 new jobs by 2024... Median Salary $33,800"

If we assume median salary ~ average salary, then $33,800* (9,400/.07) = $4.5bn. Oprah net worth is estimated at around $3bn.

In other words, if the average person was forced to choose to either "get rid of" Oprah Winfrey or 2/3's of the countries garbage collection workers, which one would the average person pick?

*edited

You could easily replace Oprah with some other person. I am simply using her as an example because she is wealthy, popular and her creative output isn't easily quantifiable the way someone like Bill Gates might be.

*edited

Also your above comment even says that "to the person paying them."

I pay Oprah and the garbage man, respectively, what they're worth to me.

I guess it hurts your feelings that Oprah has more value than your local garbage man, but it's just a fact.

You can probably come up with the reasons yourself: personality, name recognition, how easily replaced, etc.

This is marginal value, the stuff that someone would give up in order to have one more of a thing.

A celebrity often makes money because, for whatever reason, nobody can easily and reliably produce an equivalent one on demand.

Folks working for wages in less-glamorous positions are doing valuable things for society, but fundamentally their pay is based on how easily society could replace them.

And you are guessing wrong. From what I've read she is probably one of the better people I would like to see in the role if "Billionaire"

I live in the middle of nowhere, don't have trash service, so I used to take it to the dump myself. Then my dad retired, and now I pay him a few bucks a month to take mine when he takes his. If this wasn't an option, I'd go back to doing it myself. This is why your local garbage man doesn't make as much money as Oprah. It's simple math and econ 101 supply and demand.

If your garbage man cost the community $80k per year, there would probably be 100 other dudes, all just as good at collecting refuse, offering to take his job and only charge $50k. That doesn't mean the disposal of all that waste disposal is not worth $80k (or $250k) to the community, but competition allows the community to pay less than the value it places on the service.

I bet there are also 1000 people lining up to underbid Oprah on whatever deals it is she is making with her partners(broadcast networks? advertisers?). But none of those people will attract nearly as many eyeballs. From the partner's perspective, it's simply a matter of choosing which TV personality will bring the most revenue (over and above their fee), and that's Oprah.

Garbage collecting is not winner take all. No single garbage collector can corner the market because the role doesn't require unique talent in the same way that being a famous talk show host does. Oprah's value is her unique personality, brand, style, mannerisms, business savvy, etc rather than any sort of utility (like removing up your rotting trash) that she may or may not provide.

* It's possible that garbage collectors as a whole create more "value" than Oprah Winfrey. The difference is that the value created by garbage collectors is dispersed amongst millions of garbagemen and other people, while Oprah Winfrey gets to keep most of her value.

* There's an oversupply of people willing and able to pick up garbage relative to the supply of jobs. This puts downward pressure on the wages, ensuring that the compensation for their work is less than the true value generated.

She can't appear on camera 24-7, but that media empire she now owns chugs along even while she sleeps. That's why owners win.

Your garbage pickup person doesn't even own the route they clear. They can be replaced at the drop of a hat by someone else, or by a semi-automated garbage truck. They cannot effectively capture the value they do create. The guy who "owns" the routes via their contracts with the municipal/county council is the one that can suck most of that up.

It isn't those who create value that get rich, but those who can best capture created value.

The point being made that the rentier class, usually applauded for their success, in many cases does not take the risks so widely ascribed to it, and creates wealth for select few beneficiaries simply by having more wealth.

Surely you will agree that in a given locale, the amount of land is a fixed amount. A single entity is able to extract more value from land simply by denying others use of it, which is of dubious value to the society at large. I won't go so far as to declare property = theft, but you can't help but wonder about the negative externalities of a few parties owning the vast majority of land and developments in a given area.

Without ill intentions, people are forced to pay rent, allowing the rentier class to accumulate more and more wealth by simply doing nothing. This is in contrast to innovative companies that provide real value to customers and create wealth for all involved (e.g. a farmer buying a piece of machinery to produce more food)

The article is mainly about a subset of capitalism where money is produced for the owner class without the tangible value exchange for the people from whom that money is extracted, and about how surprisingly well it scales.

Do you see it as unfair that there are people stuck making $1 a day?

This article gives a bit of background about that figure: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17312819

I was talking about the second part of the comment: $1 doesn’t provide you shelter/food/etc.

I definitely agree that a 0 probability despite maximum effort is unfair. In between is a grey area though.

Do you think that if you'd been born in a slum you would have a decent chance of winning in the IQ test & optimal choice events in your life? I would imagine that almost anyone reading these comments has been unbelievably fortunate to be born into relatively wealthy circumstances & had things like "books" around to help bolster their IQ.

A strong signal IQ is not, maybe a nice tailwind, but that doesn't help much if you are born in the bogs.

Perhaps you failed the IQ test too?

Rather, the phrase rent-seeking refers to seeking money without actually providing any economic value. It would be more accurate to view such payments as taxes (often levied by a private entity). Adam Smith categorizes income into profit, wages, and rent. Rent-seeking refers to the last one of these.

In a traditional residential lease, the landlord is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property along with property taxes and, sometimes, some of the utility payments. Residential rent is based upon the value of the property as a residence, along with maintenance, taxes, etc that the landlord is responsible for. The income the landlord receive, according to Adam Smith's classification, is profit rather than rent.

Capital owners typically receive profit by controlling profitable assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.

You might imagine a residential lease where you agree to perform maintenance and upkeep and pay property taxes in return for a reduction in the lease cost. But this wouldn't reduce your lease cost to $0 - you're still paying for the privilege of being allowed to live there, so doesn't this fall under the traditional definition of "economic rent"?

Is there anything specifically you think the author has done to "keep the poor in their diminished condition"? Or is the act of owning rental property oppressing? What should the author do in his circumstance? He could stop investing in rental property, but would his investment in other areas be oppressive? Should he quit teaching rich people in Qatar so that he doesn't earn enough to engage in investments?

How would you suggest slave-labor in Qatar, who's lives are literally disposable to our global society, create this leverage? [serious]

The slave who manages an important man's affairs is himself an important man.

Concubines frequently wield power through their well-placed lovers. At the historical extreme, Wu Zetian was a concubine who worked her way up to being formally crowned emperor.

The Mamluk Turks were slaves. This didn't stop them from taking control of the government and even enacting a requirement that the Sultan be a Mamluk (children of Mamluks, not being slaves, were not eligible).

Chinese eunuchs were also slaves, and also took control of the government on multiple occasions.

No, this is uncommon, for the same reason beasts of burden were generally not worked half to death, beaten, and generally abused. They are valuable.

That was seen as a major problem by slaveholders, though, not a feature. If they'd known how to stop the slaves from dying, they would have.

Sorry, I wasn't looking to shoot you down. I read some very interesting research into this some years ago and I basically participate here to get some chance to talk with people.

Because what you just wrote sounds an awful like a defence of slavery.

What's awful about slavery is not the treatment of the slave. It's the fact that they are slaves in the first place.

>> How have slaves ever historically created leverage?

They do it in all of the ways that other people do.

> Because what you just wrote sounds an awful [lot?] like a defence of slavery.

I will note that in another thread from today, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14651019, you can see people speaking with approval of a company that funds training for its employees with a provision that, should they leave the company within a longish period of getting the training, they owe a large lump sum to repay the training costs. This differs in no way from a traditional contract of slavery, under which, if you want to leave your current employer, you must pay them a large lump sum.

We don't say someone who has taken out a loan is a slave to their lender. And giving that person the option to pay that loan off more efficiently via labour doesn't make it slavery.

There are plenty of high-value activities that go undervalued -- a general class of these are termed public goods. There's also the confusion of financial value with economic value.

If a good cannot either capture the value it creates (nonrivalousness, non-excludability), or if it creates economic value, but not to a class of direct users who have what Adam Smith called "expressed demand", that is, discretionary or available liquidity, then it produces no financial value, and, in a market system, is underprovisioned.

At the micro level, your decisionmaking is going to be determined by financial aspects. At a macro level, we should focus far more on overall economic value. Alternatively, structuring the micro world to reflect the macro more appropriately (basic income, employer of last resort, generalised support of public goods) might work.

Both are exceedingly difficult politically.

I think given the distinction you're making, it would be better to say these activities are underpriced.

But I agree with your point. Far too many proponents of capitalism seem to believe the economy is somehow inherently fair because all prices reflect utility creation.

Another factor here is that demand is distorted by wealth. Things that provide value to rich people will be priced higher than things that provide equivalent value to poor people. A yacht seems unlikely to be as valuable to its individual owner as an equivalently priced amount of food is to many different people.

Some of these are underpriced, in the sense that the price doesn't repay the contribution.

Some are overpriced, in the sense that those who would benefit highly from access cannot afford them. (Though that might also be considered an inssuficient provision of income or spending power.)

The overall outcome is that a resource allocation which would improve net social common weal isn't made, that is, the goods or services are underprovisioned as a whole.

Basically, the claim is "money is not wealth" (or as put above, money is not value). Money is a tool, used for three things:

1. making it easy to trade if you can't barter (i.e., be a medium of exchange) 2. store wealth (i.e., store value) 3. measure wealth (i.e., be a unit of account)

Wealth on the other hand deals with actually making the economy better off. Creating a startup that makes widgets faster and cheaper then ships them out over the interwebs moves the needle forward. Both of these scenarios create wealth.

I think there's still an argument to be made over the apparent inequality between how much work is required to create a certain amount of wealth. And certainly, owning wealth while doing no work is another story entirely.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

If you travel a real desert, you'll realize that water is always offered for free[1] to people in need. As is bread. And that is the very idea of basic income: Provide essentials for free.

[1] Disclaimer: I did about 20k miles by car in Western Sahara and the south of Morocco in the last 4 years.

We live on a planet of finite resources, without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system, this and human nature are fundamental issues with the idea of Universal Basic Income

By the time water and bread are this rare you have long stopped thinking in economic terms, armed yourself and probably got killed. If it is a temporary outage, you can count on people to help each other.

> Without controlling the number of people drawing from said resources you will over load the system

From an economic point of view we don't have to worry about food and water, just about its distribution.

Realizing that I'm going halfway Godwin on you here: "Controlling the number of people drawing from said resources" is a very.. weird thing to say when the resources in question are water and bread.

You are over-generalizing the "basic necessities/basic income" to "resources". People who only have their "basic income" won't be able to purchase rare resources, they just won't have to worry about a roof over their head, water and bread. Why does everyone assume that people don't want more? You want to go on a holiday? You work. You want that bigger TV, a car or just a new game? You work.

That's an asinine assumption, UBI is never restricted to simply bread and water, you ignore the reality that UBI is free to be used, however. Arguing for a basic sustenance program is entirely different than UBI models.

No reason to bother delving deeper into demographic issues

That's the whole point of the article.

"Those rules are not some natural feature of the universe. People made them. People can change them."

In the developed world today's poor live like kings of old. In 1000 yrs I would imagine that their poor will live better than our wealthy "Playboys" of today. I see nothing wrong with people being in different places, so long as they have the ability to better their circumstances.

The ability (and actuality) of improving circumstances is more or less happiness, happy lives are definitionally worth living.

This is nothing like a king, who could have a large family, and was well fed, had permanent shelter, didn't pay rent, etc etc. How ridiculous.

It turns out electricity, air con, motor vehicles, and the internet are not the source of happiness, as much as advertising would like us to think otherwise. I bet your average homeless person in America would happily trade for a life in time past if it meant family, community, offspring, and the like. So much of our work today is meaningless, the same can't be said for our evolutionary history as apex predators.

Along many facets, yes, life is much better. But let's not pretend that we haven't regressed in many ways, for much of the population on Earth.

The New Republic has a pithy way of putting this: money doesn't buy happiness, but poverty increases sadness. In other words, you may not be happy just because you have 3 square meals a day and a roof over your head, but you would be a lot less happy if you didn't.

https://newrepublic.com/article/120859/money-doesnt-buy-happ...

80% of the hierarchy of needs is immaterial, so at best your argument is weak. In many cases people will actually sacrifice physiological needs to fulfill the spiritual, intellectual and social ones (flipping the need pyramid)

I admit its hyperbole. But some things are comparatively like magic. Cellphones/computers, vaccinations, Internet, democracy for example.

i also dont dismiss standard of living arguments, i think they are valid. but i think they aren't the whole picture. i think alot of how we feel depends on how we compare to those around us. 100 thirsty people in a desert are much more pissed off if you add 1 person with excess water standing right next to them not giving them any. so, some consideration to the overall shape of the distribution of wealth is necessary in my opinion.

The analogy isn't entirely correct. If the thirsty people got all the water they could drink and a guy joined that owned a lake... They shouldn't really complain.

It's literally better for everyone, even if the wealth distribution is worse.

and tis is why I feel that there is an active oppression of access to quality education. The sentiment you share above is NOT shared by MANY and likely most of the deca-billionaire class...

Keeping people stupid has value to those who would benefit from stupidity (governments, institutions, corporations and entrenched wealth) -- thus platitudes and "foundations" with very very slow if any progressive impact are the true status quo...

The trick is to keep people holding themselves down by providing them the baggage to keep their minds off the unlimited and focused on the limitations.

/tinfoil