>And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern

Yes it is, history teaches us that it leads to dissastisfaction and in some cases violent revolution.

>And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter (since it means income is going to a small group of individuals, rather than a broader group of individuals who are swapped in and out of the top income groups).

Actually I have to disagree, a bifurcation in income is reason to worry in itself. In a society where everything is commodified this wealth gap allows the rich to opt out of normal civil society. A society where a small few can buy their way out of a crap education system, out of a crap healthcare system, etc. isn't just no matter how well we swap people in and out of that group.

A windfall (winning the lottery or some other one-off event) is generally considered a good thing, unless you don't know how to handle it and spend it all at once. Everyone getting a windfall, in different years: still not a bad thing, even if it makes inequality statistics look bad. In theory.

But that's not the world we live in. Most people don't get windfalls and have little savings.

The problem with the “inequality” framing is that your victory condition is dragging everyone down into the crap systems. Engineering greater total suffering so that you don’t have to be indignant at others suffering less, is not exactly noble.

We could end education and healthcare inequality today by shutting down all the good universities and banning all good health insurance. But that’s backwards.

>The problem with the “inequality” framing is that your victory condition is dragging everyone down into the crap systems.

Yes but that's good.

>Engineering greater total suffering so that you don’t have to be indignant at others suffering less, is not exactly noble.

I actually think it would reduce total suffering, just that it's a short-term vs long-term thing.

>We could end education and healthcare inequality today by shutting down all the good universities and banning all good health insurance. But that’s backwards.

You're sort of close to what I want but not quite. We'd shut down all education systems which allow you to buy good results, same for healthcare, it's not about absolute quality it's about the relative quality in exchange for dollars.

My point is that when you drag everyone into the same crap system, the most powerful in society who currently get to opt-out are stuck as well. They're forced to advocate for systems which are universally better rather than advocating for systems which are selectively better. By changing the incentives this way we stick everyone on the same side, inside of one side against another, it's better for everyone.

If you have the electoral majority to drag down the wealthy, then you have the electoral majority to lift up the poor. Using public policy to compel support for other public policy is nonsensical unless the former has broader support.

Will I believe you or will I believe the secretary-general for the OECD?

“We have reached a tipping point. Inequality can no longer be treated as an afterthought. We need to focus the debate on how the benefits of growth are distributed. Our report ‘In it Together’ and our work on inclusive growth have clearly shown that there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between growth and equality. On the contrary, the opening up of opportunity can spur stronger economic performance and improve living standards across the board!” OECD Secretary-General

http://www.oecd.org/social/inequality.htm

Hmm, I wonder ;-)

edit: We know that the USA ranks lower than almost every other OECD country in terms of social mobility, see pages 4 and 5 of this slide deck: https://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/NERO-22-June-2015-income-ine...

The previous poster is arguing metrics and the secretary-general is arguing ethics. You can't compare those two. Both statements could be true or false; the truth value of the statements is independent.

There have been several papers that show the US is last in income mobility while having other papers show it's in the top 3. Suffice to say there is no consensus.

Also, measuring mobility by income quintiles is challenging as quintiles aren't the same across countries. You could move from 1st to 4th income quintile in one country and have a higher wage than some moving from 1st to 5th in another country.

Yeah, I'm not disputing that. I was saying the statistics (in the Bloomberg article) don't support that argument.

> And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter

Cant they control democracy via increase access to speech though wealth.

>And an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets isn't in itself cause for concern, only if the members of the top income brackets are largely static does it matter (since it means income is going to a small group of individuals, rather than a broader group of individuals who are swapped in and out of the top income groups).

So a society in which there's competition to be among a handful of feudal lords, but where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning? How so?

We've been through this in American history. It was called the Gilded Age and it was a nightmare for all but a handful of robber barons, resulted in widespread social and political instability, and violence.

Uh...the gilded age resulted in massive industrial and income expansion, the rise of the US onto the world stage financially and the lowering of maternal death rates, raising of life expectancy and a general post-industrial boom. Wages and average per capita savings doubled.

It was also associated with the immigration of tens of millions of impoverished people, which is part of the reason for the massive inequality numbers - the population doubled during this period.

Excuse me but those benefits weren't result of the Guilded Age. Correlation, not causation. Both things were a result of the industrial revolution and globalization.

Exactly. The Gilded Age was also a result of the industrial revolution and globalization. It describes a period of history - during which, these things happened.

Exactly. As was communism for that matter. Ultimately almost all major economic change had technology at its root. And where that change has undesirable side effects it's the job of government to address them.

Wet pavements do not cause rain

You can't really support the argument that the Gilded Age actively caused these negative things by virtue of them taking place during the Gilded Age without supporting the argument that the Gilded Age caused positive things by virtue of them taking place during the period.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, but there are direct causal links between the Gilded Age and robber barons causing huge harms, like union busting using bullets, and absolutely no causal links between robber barons and global decreases in poverty.

Put another way, it's very easy to prove that without robber barons we wouldn't have had many of the terrible abuses during the Gilded Age, and also very easy to prove we would have had worldwide improvements in the human condition even without the robber barons.

No causal links?

No robber barons mean no railway expansion and no massive expansion of jobs west, so no immigration boom. Robber barons are also responsible for financial regulation, futures markets which allowed for much greater predictability and sustained farming output, increased ties to Europe and specifically the UK over Germany, the massive increases in production brought by low oil prices and standardization of performance, arguably unions and labor reforms and a standard wage.

And if you have morals, you can also say they weren't worth it. You could make the same argument about slavery, etc, but suggesting it was totally worth would be pretty bonkers.

Humanity can accomplish great things without dehumanizing or hurting most of the population, and being critical of the morality of these systems is a big part of that.

Are you actually saying that the advancements coming from a foundation built in the latter half of the 19th century aren't worth the cost?

I don't agree with that at all, and I'm not sure I would if I had to pay that cost myself, either.

Ignoring that it's very odd to retroactively justify immoral behavior because of unintended, positive side effects: I'm saying that being critical, like asking if the slave-like conditions of most of the population were actually necessary, is a pretty reasonable thing to do. This isn't black and white issue, like I have to pick between "a couple generations have horrible working lives" vs "antibiotics exist". I'm asking if both were possible, and I'd argue that they would be if the people at the top were willing to accept even a little less.

I think the phrasing of your first sentence is fascinating. Does that mean you think that the behavior (union busting, incorporation, or the creation of financial markets, for example) was solely intended to have malicious consequences, and that there were no positive motivations or intent?

Also, it's not that odd. It's a direct response to the criticism you levy - that these things are not worth it. How are you to judge if you only take the immoral acts in a vacuum? You brought up slavery again; their conditions were not slave-like, simply impoverished.

I agree that it's a good idea to question whether periods of chaos, destruction or immorality are actually necessary for progress. It's been pretty much taken as a given since Hegel, but it's a good thing to verify and even within those boundaries there may be some behaviors we can effectively limit while leaving the good bits.

As to your final argument, I don't actually know if that's true, but it's immaterial because that's not how people have done it.

The actions that led to the conditions of the gilded age were most certainly selfish acts of the ruling class. The conditions were not created for the sake of it, or because it was funny etc.

I sincerely doubt the people making all the money were not doing it because the poor people they were exploiting (or killing) might eventually get iPhones or penicillin

I also don't know why I can't criticize the conditions resulting from policies in the gilded age because there's a chance that the policies were maybe not "soley intended to have malicious consequences". Again, things aren't black and white. "Modern tech is nice" and "poverty is bad" are not diametrically opposing ideas.

I'm confused by what you're arguing here. People want to reduce inequality, and you're argument seems to boil down to "nothing really matters anyway" or "maybe them being poor is for the best" (which you insist is something we can never actually find out..?) If you're saying that human nature is inherently corrupt and humanity can't unite to make progress for broadly selfish reasons, I might actually agree. But talking about how this is shitty and / or how to fix it doesn't seem pointless, either.

I have never said and do not support a statement that 'maybe them being poor is for the best.'

You started out saying a moral person would say that the positive consequences of the gilded age were not worth its negative experiences. I disagree.

You then say: "Ignoring that it's very odd to retroactively justify immoral behavior because of unintended, positive side effects: I'm saying that being critical, like asking if the slave-like conditions of most of the population were actually necessary, is a pretty reasonable thing to do."

By saying this you are effectively saying that I am defending immoral behavior with the misconception that such behavior directly led unintentionally to positive consequences. I don't think that, and I'm not doing that. I'm specifically saying that removing 'robber barons' from the equation entirely removes both the positive effects and actions and the negative. The positive and negative are done by the same person, but the actions causing them were entirely different. This isn't simple, as you continue to point out (while, it seems, attempting to simplify it entirely)

People want to reduce inequality - ok, how? I think that's important to figure out. What kind of inequality? Wealth or income or some other kind? What is the consequence of inequality?

To find out, we need to view history as a complex thing and understand both the pleasant and unpleasant, as well as their consequences. Conflict has been a powerful tool, historically. The excesses of one group have often given rise to conflict with another group, which then created a system of greater equality. Could that have happened without the conflict? I'm not sure, I don't have many examples where that happened and a ton of examples where it didn't.

There are a lot of times where people did awful things and they either didn't result in positive consequences or what was positive was not worth the loss. The Gilded Age? Probably not one of those times.

Don't have a mock strawman argument this long. If you have a point to make, just make it. Don't write up a whole argument that includes weak responses so you conveniently 'win'.

Would Plato's 'The Republic' qualify also an overly long strawman?

I think you missed the point of the comment to which you're responding.

Also, why are you telling people how to have discussions?

>Would Plato's 'The Republic' qualify also an overly long strawman?

Yes, it's designed to illustrate a point and not engage someone in a discussion.

The comment I'm responding to just had a bunch of misrepresentations of people he/she disagrees with.

>Also, why are you telling people how to have discussions?

It's not a discussion, it's a lecture buried in a fake conversation without facts.

> Also, why are you telling people how to have discussions?

It seems like he thinks their argument is dishonest strawman and manipulative. The discussion is usually improved by people pointing that out, as it makes such argumentation less likely.

The problem is that he only thinks this, with hardly anything to back it up, and doesn't discuss the substance. He merely talks about his impression of the discussion.

The reply is correct, many discourses can also be considered "one sided", such as Socratic dialogues. However, it is also very possible that the commenter feels it's that way because they are biased to one or the other side of the debate themselves. I am not even sure which side they considered the strawman.

No, he's not the only one. Most of the arguments used are not the strongest possible arguments but are in fact extremely flawed, precisely in the ways you took them apart. fancy that.

You are wrong. I didn't mean to start a discussion. I meant to illustrate how people largely talk past each other yet make very good points overall. Both have ideological and pragmatic elements. Both make good points.

The fact that you think I took apart one and the other wasn't taken apart probably implies more about where YOU are on the political spectrum.

These are the actual arguments that people use. For example "China is one of the most authoritarian countries" is a great rejoinder to all the progress they have made using central planning. You may think it takes the position completely apart - since there is so much evidence lately of China's citizen ranking system and facial recognition and jailing dissidents, very reminiscent to the USSR, and China's history with Mao and so on. But it isn't such a slam dunk as you think. Because yes it is authoritarian but many people are OK with it the same way they are OK with anti terror laws here. They give up freedom for a temporary safety and prosperity, to quote Benjamin Franklin. But that is just one side of the story.

Or for example you may think "You support billionaires" is easily taken apart with "No, billionaires are the result of government." Which is pretty straightforward as most billionaires (in Russia for example) are in fact the result of government favors and being well connected. Libertarians are definitely arguing for eliminating coercive power structures and helping promote an environment where more can compete without coersion or licenses.

But I assure you that the other side's arguments are strong as well, you just dismiss them because they don't trigger in you all the supporting baggage that they would if you actually HELD that position.

In short you are reading a lot of your own bias into it. None of these arguments are slam dunk.

You didn't start a discussion. You lectured with a strawman conversation.

Why don't you respond to specific points yourself? I did have a mock argument because these aren't real people but all those are real (and relatively strong) arguments from both sides. The ones supporting IP are actually FROM Ayn Rand for example, paraphrased to include a reference to "you didn't build that".

>> "Well maybe if you abolished drug patents innovatio could come from all over the world instead of the chilling effects we have today. Open source beats closed in the long run and Open source Drugs would beat big pharma in the long tail whose plight isn't even worth pursuing for these guys. Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, why is medicine different than science?"

Literally no new drugs would be produced if there was no guarantee of sole distributor for some X number of years. What country has "open source" drugs?

Seems like a great place to nationalize the means of production! Why not? Economic incentives are inherently at odds with helpful medicine. If it helps too much you can't make money off it!

Modern day big-pharma would have shelved the polio vaccine in place of a daily pill one must take for the remainder of one's life.

Error, wrong, incorrect. Modern day big-pharma developed vaccines such as HPV. Current market forces incentivizes "best" treatment (heavily regulated of course as it should be). Don't spew false facts to try to push an agenda.

> Modern day big-pharma

the polio vaccine was released in 1955. My thought experiment literally cannot be "error, wrong, incorrect."

I'll solidify my thought experiment to Valeant. Valeant would have bought the polio vaccine, hiked the price, and reported significant growth in returns while the disease was not being eliminated.

Not to mention your assumption a pharma company created the first polio vaccine is false - it was developed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine with heavy backing by the U.S. government.

No, that's not what I said. I'm arguing for the same thing you are. But income inequality isn't itself a problem if there is mobility between the income groups. They statistics in the Bloomberg article show income inequality but don't show lack of mobility, and then say we've hit "a disturbing new threshold".

There may be lack of mobility along with income inequality, but the article doesn't demonstrate it.

>I'm arguing for the same thing you are. But income inequality isn't itself a problem if their is mobility between the income groups

I'm not sure how you can't be arguing the same thing I am. The income inequality is what creates the immobility. This is demonstrated by other developed countries where there is less income inequality and greater social mobility, as others have pointed out. Can you elaborate?

Are you sure the income inequality creates the immobility and isn't just linked to the immobility in other ways? The demonstration of other countries implies the latter, but even that is really hard to prove.

Yes, because history. There are no historical examples where wealth was held by the few and social mobility increased broadly. Only when resources are more evenly distributed among social classes has that ever happened.

>Yes, because history. There are no historical examples where wealth was held by the few and social mobility increased broadly

Uh... The industrial revolution.

You seem to be confusing wealth inequality with income inequality which might be muddying your arguments.

The graphed figure is not wealth, but income. The (great-)grandparent poster is suggesting that as long as people bounce between income levels, i.e., they have some higher paying years and some lower paying years, it has a smoothing effect on the net income inequality.

> There may be lack of mobility along with income inequality, but they article doesn't demonstrate it.

The article doesn't demonstrate it because that is not the goal of the article. But it is happening nonetheless:

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-upward-mobility-fallen-sharply...

US ranks very low on income mobility. Some people get bumped when they sell a business, but even selling a home will not put most people into the 420+K income range of the top 1% let alone the top 0.1% which at $1,600,000/year excludes even many lottery winners.

PS: Don't forget the median US home is only worth $188,900, which means 1/2 of them are worth less than that.

I disagree for two reasons.

1) What is mobility? The ability to move out of the lowest income group? How easily does that happen? If it's quick and easy, why doesn't everyone do it? And what about the reverse? How easy it for a person to move from a median income back into the lowest income. I think the idea of mobility is used as a reinforcement for the protestant work ethic / American dream sort of delusion that says "poor people can just work harder and save more and they won't be poor any more". But we have an enormous amount of evidence that points to that not being the case.

2) Also, you haven't provided an argument for why income inequality isn't a problem. If the lowest earners have extremely limited access to housing, healthcare or education, such as is the case in the U.S. I think that's a problem.

> How easy it for a person to move from a median income back into the lowest income.

Many people do when they retire. Or when they take time off between jobs (intentionally or not).

That's not what's happening though. First off, social mobility is declining, so let's get that out of the way:

http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-on-the-dec...

Second, I think it's still a problem if the income of 90-98% of the country stagnates for decades, while the top earners get higher and higher income. Of course that affects inequality.

I'm also not sure it matters that much if the players at the top switch around if they have increasingly larger leverage on society.

For instance, we're seeing CEOs get rewarded larger and larger amounts of money every year, even if the companies lose money, like in this absurd case:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/22/snap-ceo-evan-spiegel-got-...

Where's that money coming from? The employees' potential salary increases? The retail investors' money? It seems to me that the rich keep siphoning off money from everyone else, and that's not sustainable.

They also get larger and larger amounts of money even when they get kicked out of the company for failing. This doesn't make sense to me at all. And I think the excuse that they need such amounts of money or otherwise they wouldn't take the job or something is utter BS. I'd more likely believe the board is giving them the money so the CEO doesn't sue the company, or better yet because the CEO was the one writing their checks before that, or something along those lines.

And this is just the corporate world. The US Congress seems to get crazier every year and listening more and more to corporations and their interests, and less and less to the people and solving real problems in the country (healthcare, infrastructure, etc).

It's like the whole American society is on the brink of collapse, and everyone just doesn't know it yet. Eventually, people will "suddenly" start to violently riot because of all this stuff added together, and it won't be pretty.

I think it's easy to explain why wages have stagnated. The time wages started to stagnate coincides with women's lib, immigration policy changes, and free trade changes. Women's lib dropped an extra 40% more people into the labor pool. Of course that's going to put downward pressure on wages. We changed our legal immigration policy to favor more poor people while simultaneously changing our illegal immigration enforcement policy to keep tons of illegal aliens in the country pushing wages down for the American poor. Trade policy has gutted a huge portion of the country in favor of the already wealthy elites on the coast.

The big economic question of the day should be asking how we've managed to keep wages at only the "stagnation" level rather than precipitously falling in the face of so much downward pressure.

Under that theory, by 1960s there shouldn't be almost any jobs left, since the population grew 25x since the foundation of the country.

You're arguing against a straw man. It's possible to support social and economic policies while recognizing that they have both positive and negative aspects to them.

What I'm saying is that having more workers is not by itself sufficient explanation. The US always had more workers YoY.

Do you believe that illegal immigrants have the same income distribution as the general population in the US?

No. Can you clarify the connection?

If you dump a bunch of people into the low end of income pool it's going to move the distribution curve.

And yet, despite massive immigration (from low income countries) for centuries, the US is one of the countries with highest salaries.

Sure, once the people here today have had a century of assimilation I suspect they will not impact the income distribution curve.

If you were happy with the income equality from a century ago, I'm willing to adopt the welfare and tax systems of that time so all the incentives are the same.

Your explanation presumes fixed demand.

No it doesn't. Here's at least three alternative presumptions:

1. Demand is not perfectly elastic

2. Demand is perfectly elastic, but supply was increased more on the lower end of the income range which reshapes the income distribution.

3. Trade policy reduced demand in the middle of the income range.

One thing I've never understood- in a fair society in which people are not artificially limited, wouldn't we expect social mobility to decrease over time as successive generations "sort" themselves into the spots allowed by their genetics?

Let's say we've got a feudal society with dumb nobility that rules over a smart peasantry by force. If that society becomes free, we'll expect smart peasants to move up and dumb noblemen to move down across the first few generations... but once they've moved, they've moved. Ergo, declining social mobility.

> "sort" themselves into the spots allowed by their genetics

There's an extreme amount of assumption baked into that.

1. Genetics is the only factor that determines merit for wealth?

2. Genetics merits extreme differences in income/wealth?

1. No of course not, but if it's a factor at all we'd expect to see the pattern I described.

2. We're talking about social mobility, not the level of inequality.

I tried multiple times to try to refute all of the assumptions made in this post, but I gave up.

1) One does not have to be intelligent to be wealthy.

2) Those born wealthy do not have to be intelligent to remain wealthy - they just need not be a consumeristic imbecile.

3) Genetics has such a small impact, if any, on social mobility - quite the opposite. If I am born a Kennedy I am more likely to never fall below my birthright social class because of my family lineage.

4) You contradict yourself. You say the nobility rules by force, then immediately follow that with "If that society becomes free" - how exactly would that society magically free?

1. Of course not, I referenced unintelligent wealthy people ("dumb nobility") in my post.

2. 70% of rich families lose their wealth by the second generation, 90% by the third. [A]

3. IQ is a greater predictor of income than parental SES. Someone in the 95th percentile for IQ has a higher EV for earnings than someone born into the 95th percentile for wealth.

4. A number of revolutions have happened. If you don't believe that modern France or Japan are freer than their feudal predecessors then I agree that we are probably not on the same page.

A. http://time.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/

I would not use the Time article as a reliable source, it cites the 70/90% figures a study by the "Williams Group wealth consultancy", which of course is trying to sell its services to wealthy clients.

I've seen the statistic quoted in so many places, yet have never found a link to the actually study. No info on sample size; we don't even have a definition of 'wealth' used in the study.

The sample size is 2000 families over 20 years. Better submarine piece here [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324662404578334...

Other comments have brought additional evidence about declining wage mobility. I'll add that the article's stats about the impact of race demonstrate lack of mobility. Working while black seems to mean a 20% pay cut, regardless of education.

As an American, I've always based a lot of national pride on our history as a (relative, for some groups) meritocracy with a lot of mobility. It's really sad to see rapid erosion of this over the last 20y.

Most opportunities for mobility were linked to America being a nation of rapid growth, not because of the kindness of some national ethos. As our growth opportunities slow, you can be sure the haves will do everything in their power to prevent loss of ground to the have-nots.

Meritocracy in the U.S. is a myth in civilian life. The military almost approximates meritocracy but it is by design not egalitarian or democratic. Without extreme discipline, again found in militarism, meritocracy results in the formation of elites who define what the metrics are for merit, they quickly become corrupt with nepotism, lowering the ladder for family and friends to the exclusion of people with actual merit, and it becomes incompetent.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/th...

I don't think you understand what feudalism was/is...

No, I think I do. And so do a number of Silicon Valley "luminaries":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

I have no idea why you linked that. The two comments you have posted make absolutely no sense. Non sequitors. Why did you use feudalism first, and then some weird alt right stuff second? What's going through your mind?

There is an idea circulating that the political system in the US is turning into a "neo-feudalism", pushed by a mix of those alt-right "theorists" and some of the new rich.

How much of this "neo-feudalism" shares with actual feudalism is not clear to me.

See

https://www.thedailybeast.com/californias-new-feudalism-bene...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/07/new-feudalism-fred-ba...

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/the-age-of-n...

National review and Huffington Post agreeing on something. Wow.

The idea is that feudal ideologies are making a comeback with the rise of an aristocratic class. These ideologies are finding support amongst the (conservative/reactionary) lower classes as they try to process why their lives are getting shittier without being provided a clear logical explanation. Thus they reach backwards for older more authoritarian models to try to restore their power. What is missing is the narrative of class struggle.

From the linked wikipedia article:

"It broadly rejects egalitarianism and the view that history shows inevitable progression towards greater liberty and enlightenment (thus, it is in part a reaction against "Whig historiography").[1][2] The movement favors a return to older societal constructs and forms of government, including support for monarchism or other forms of strong, centralised leadership such as a "neocameralist CEO"[3] of a joint-stock republic,[4] coupled with a right-libertarian, conservative or other approach to economics."

> nightmare

It was a time of massive improvement in the standard of living across the board. You can see this objectively in annual statistics on infant mortality, longevity, and average height.

The industrialization of America was not producing luxury yachts for the overlords. It was producing consumer goods for everyone.

>So a society in which there's competition to be among a handful of feudal lords, but where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning? How so?

To be fair, he did say it's concerning if the top income brackets are static, so as long as we shuffle out our feudal lords from time to time, we should be okay.

yes, but he just made that idea up, and it doesn't make a lot of sense, also probably never happens.

He certainly didn't just make that idea up. You can find plenty of research on it by googling "turnover in the 1%".

For example:

http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.htm...

The 'feudal lords' are not the 1%. They would be the .1% or the .01%. I imagine the latter two remain a much more static environment.

Also, the 1% in this article is not even defined. After some digging it looks like it is Gross Adjusted Income. There are CEOs who wouldn't be considered in the 1% because they take salaries of $1 while making millions in stock options - it is such a ridiculous metric.

Inequality is about wealth as much as, if not more than, wage.

Stock compensation is rolled into AGI. But I agree with you that 1%ers are not feudal lords.

It's almost like the haves want to try avoiding being the have-nots.

"to be among a handful of feudal lords"

Is it helpful in a discussion like this to use exaggerated rhetoric? Wealthy people aren't in any meaningful way feudal lords.

"everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation"

But that doesn't describe Americans either, where absolute poverty levels are below 3%.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/09/17/americas...

Just for reference, feudal lords didn't have wages. If it was discovered that you worked for money, you were basically expelled from aristocratic society.

That kinda depends on which version of feudalism we are talking about. They were not same.

Nevertheless, feudal Lords did competed among each other and parent talked about competition not about wage.

>> an increasing share of wages going to the top income brackets

> robber barons

You mean, like, people who did productive business? How dare they!

How dare they ruthlessly exploit a powerless serf class and the natural environment for their personal gain! Wait, that's exactly what we're saying.

Welcome to the mid 1800s, where almost everyone is a serf almost everywhere, and the only way that'll change is through a revolution in industry, supported by uncoerced but nonetheless low-brow, hard, and nearly thankless labour.

Well, that and the invention of the living wage concept and a complete shakeup of the nation's economy from the great depression and two world wars.

"where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning?"

Capitalism in the US has created more wealth and lifted more people out of poverty than any other nation in the history of mankind. Your statement applies to third world countries... not the United States. Oh, we're also the most free and most prosperous nation ever. That helps.

>Capitalism in the US has created more wealth and lifted more people out of poverty than any other nation in the history of mankind

citation needed

>Oh, we're also the most free

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_b...

>and most prosperous nation ever

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/02/the-worlds-most-prosperous-n...

Non sequitur. Capitalism requires some income inequality, but runaway income inequality will not be beneficial. Eventually, people get sick of eating rotten cabbage and the guillotines come out.

Side note: "most free nation ever" is a total fiction as part of American exceptionalism. For just one example out of many, there are still religious blue laws on the books in towns across the country, and many are still enforced.

We have laws against trading on Sundays here in Norway too. They might well have started as religiously justified laws but they are nonetheless popular here where the vast bulk of the population is non-religious and a substantial fraction avowed atheist. We don't want our day of quiet disturbed.

No matter how much you love a law, limiting someone's ability to do something peaceful* is limiting their freedom.

*Peaceful here means there ability to do something that doesn't harm others. We can start deep diving on the value of having a quiet day, but the idea that you can't buy a bottle of Gin on Sunday is a choice some people might not find is worth the quiet

work a job making 12/hr and tell me how uplifted you feel. that's the reality for a lot of people in this country.

> If you control for age and whether women have children the gap shrinks a lot (in some areas it reverses).

I generally agree with this line of thought, but you're also missing the higher level question: why, in our society, do we have to control for women who have children, but we don't have to control for men who have children?

Because women get pregnant and are the primary caregivers in most families?

Edit: Basically you have to control for what's causing women to work less when the have children. And the obvious answer is because if you're a woman it's hard to work when you have a child at home. If you're a man that's not really true since typically your wife/girlfriend takes care of the child. You can argue that maybe men should take more responsibility for raising their kids, but that's more of a social/political issue than an economic one.

How is that not economic issue? That is just ridiculous claim. It may be issue that is not caused by her employer sexism, but impact on her retirement or perspective in case of divorce or simply buying power or what not is absolutely economic.

People have a choice in whether or not they procreate. If you can't afford to do it or are unwilling to sacrifice the extra income to focus more on your family, then you shouldn't have children.

Just as if I chose to go live in the wilderness, it would only make sense that my income would drop. No one would be at fault and I wouldn't expect the government to make up the difference for my "lost" income.

And a lot of people going into wilderness would be economic issue with economic consequences.

Your first paragraph applies equally to men - but men are statistically less willing to sacrifice extra income to focus more on familly. Maybe men should not have children (?!).

Nevertheless, ignoring judgemental moral in previous paragraph, it does not make theoretical "men with children earn less" something that needs to be discussed as not economics.

You can. Last I read, men who don't have children end up making less than men who do, and for young men in cities it has become less than women in the same demographic.

The same could be said for the racial-based statistics, since race might be tied to cultural opinions which could impact how many hours a week or years in a lifetime someone works.

Why should we care the reason people make their choices? What if I like surfing, so I decide to work part time which allows me to surf more? Does my skin color or gender matter? If I want to participate in this "surf culture," why would you feel the need to either force me to work more or demand that others subsidize my surfing habit?

I’m just saying there is a factor that could impact the statistics and that how much a person works should be taken into account for all the findings. Not just the gender-based one, so that we have accurate data from which to make decisions from.

I didn’t say anything about forcing anyone to work or subsidizing habits. I think these charts are trying to claim that discrimination is happening and if how much someone is working isn’t taken into account, they don’t support that claim very well.

To be clear I’m not stating that discrimination is or isn’t happening. I’d just like better data.

Well, the difference between race and gender is that most women have children, which take up a lot of time and require taking at least some time away from work. If the difference is due to cultural issues then maybe it makes sense to worry about the differences and try to address them, but if the difference just comes down to women have children so they work less that's a less compelling reason to try to equalize men's and women's wages (and as I noted, in some areas young women out earn men already, partly because they tend to be more educated).

Men have children too. There are not many kids that have no biological father.

I mean these comments talk about it as if kids and work around them had zero to do with men and we're some kind of female hobby. Among some men it is so as they don't care, but many men do actually care and do spend time with them.

Taking numbers from Norway, there is twice as many childless men than there is childless women. 24% vs 12%.

If that has a impact on the economical state of everyone involved is up to debate, but there is a distinctive difference.

You cant take numbers from Norway when talking about Americans incomes. Norway is way less christian and way more socialist. Precisely this kind of statistics differ between countries. I have no idea how America compares. (For example Norway has similar suicide rates for women then America, but less of them for males. That is the one on top of head.)

Also, male incarceration is much higher then female one, that is another difference that should push income the other way round. And some babies without fathers are due to incarceration and people in prison are not earning all that much.

I mean, I get argument that women are more likely to do kids work and more likely to say no in work because something kid related, but it kinda rubs me wrong when people talk about kids and female only thing. I see too many good caring fathers around me and also fathers who did made choice to spend more time with kids in expense of career. They deserve a bit of recognition too.

You don’t need to know the reason why someone isn’t working or is working less to have better claims for or against discrimination. I’d just like to see something that says that a certain demographic who work a certain number of hours a week differs from a different demographic who works the same number of hours a week.

If you only ever hear men mention this, maybe you surround yourself with not very intelligent and/or not very honest women.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-g...

> One of the best studies on the wage gap was released in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Labor. It examined more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the 23-cent wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.” In the past, women’s groups have ignored or explained away such findings.

What are you implying? Is there some point you want to make about being a man and its relation to gender studies, or was that a sexist statement trying to call out sexism?

It strikes me as somewhat hypocritical. Let's try not to be facetious while simultaneously undermining our own argument with poorly veiled prejudice.