As technology enables expansion of the right-side tail for the relatively most wealthy, it seems like a reasonable utilitarian goal to say that we should adjust the left-side threshold more and more to the right, in a "optimize the well-being of the least well off" sense.

So I'd view this ever rightward moving threshold as a very good thing that represents exactly what we want in terms of progress.

If we ever got to a point where we said, welp "poor people" are now above the magic threshold (e.g. because the people on the left tail of the distribution mostly have hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix), so what more do they want? ... why are they complaining? ... this would be incredibly frightening. Essentially the wealthy would be deciding at which threshold upward human progress gets to stop, in favor of creating skewness in the distribution that concentrates more wealth into the right-side tail, as long as that left-side threshold stays above the "hot showers, cell phones, and Netflix" line.

No, that's not what that would mean. It means the producers of society get to determine at what point they wish to stop providing government mandated subsidies through either taxation or deficit spending to the non-producers or those who produce far less value.

There should be absolutely nothing wrong with people deciding that they do not wish to handover any more of their wealth. If your opinion is that the "system" is the culprit and these people are being squashed by bad laws, policies, etc., the proper recourse is not to legally rob others to help those people - the solution is to fix the bad laws and policies that may benefit the rich unfairly.

Underlying your claim appears to be some baseline assumption that the poor have some sort of legitimate claim on the productivity of other citizens. I strongly disagree with this assumption. I personally do not believe that anyone has a right to the fruits of my labor. The government, however, says otherwise and demands that I fork over non-trivial amounts of money to other people - individuals, to be clear, not public goods. I'm fine with the idea of taxation to provide for public goods like roads, military, etc.

The modern poor in developed nations (and especially the US) have a standard of living that exceeds what the average family experienced in most of the 20th century. This concept of poor is obviously relative and it is the Keeping Up With The Jones' mentality that drives this nonsense of ever-increasing handouts.

There was a great video I saw once by a guy who used to be homeless and on welfare. He said that when he was on welfare he was never grateful for anything he received because he was just mad others had more. He gave the analogy of imagining that your boss came over and said you did such a fantastic job you are getting 100k for a bonus. You're ecstatic and grateful. Then you find out that everyone else in your office got 200k bonuses. You immediately turn to anger and resentment, despite the fact that you are now 100k wealthier.

Helping thy neighbor is great. But legally mandating it is a terrible idea and has been terrible in practice.

How do we fix bad laws when the wealthy are paying good money for those bad laws?

>Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/without-the-right-p...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-...

The wealthy only account for a small percentage of the overall population. It is very easy to change the law if and only if people care enough to do so. But they don't. Because that involves work like protesting, writing to representatives, organizing community events, and maybe recalling mayors of congressional reps with votes of no confidence. They'd rather pretend to be outraged on Twitter, so that they don't have to actually do anything and instead watch Dance Moms or binge watch Netflix.

The fix is simple conceptually, but it is society's collective refusal to demand that laws be changed or for existing laws that are being broken to be enforced. If society really, truly wanted to fix the whole "paying good money for those bad laws" issue, it could do so relatively easily. But it's much easier for people to pretend it's not that big of a problem since things are relatively stable and people have what they need for the most part. Why rock the boat, right?

The problem isn't just the wealthy - it's all of us in our refusal to demand the law be enforced, as-written, without exceptions given based on wealth or size of the company/organization. Why was Wells Fargo, for example, allowed to just pay a fine for millions of fake accounts that were created which ripped people off? Those are clear cut felonies. If I opened a small, local bank and did that I'd be rotting in Federal prison right now, guaranteed. The only reason the employees that engaged in this and/or the Wells Fargo executives are not in jail is because society didn't demand the DoJ do it's damn job and indict them at the individual level. Hell, society at large didn't even withdraw their funds in bulk. Why would any retail customer hold deposits with an institution like that when this is a proven, admitted fraud, and was well-publicized? That's the real question. And it's the heart of the matter. And that's just one outrageous scam upon the people that comes to mind. There are many more.

I like the idea, but that's not how it works. We don't even have mandatory time off for voting, and not all states have mail-in ballots. People in the US work way too much for the average person to set aside time to understand complex issues. For those with an interest, sure, they'll set aside the time. But, the blue-collar worker from the Rust Belt can be easily tricked into thinking freeloaders, immigrants, and colored people are the reason they're poor, and that's a very basic, obvious issue. Combine that with the attack on the educational system (some Southern states have/are trying to remove Slavery from the Civil War portions of textbooks), and you have America - an ignorant, confused, disinterested public. The time spent on mindless activities (imo) indicates a level of tiredness. It's sad, and people should do better, but when we know they won't under these conditions, it's time to look at the conditions.

>I’ll let the researchers speak for themselves: “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

>Main Street alone does not matter. Nor do interest groups that purport to support the general welfare. The data show that politicians cater to rich people and groups organized to advance their own narrow interests. Worse still, those interest groups tend to lobby for positions that are “negatively related to the preferences of average citizens.”

>Again, I quote: “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/charles-wheelan/2014/04...

>The problem isn't just the wealthy - it's all of us in our refusal to demand the law be enforced, as-written, without exceptions given based on wealth or size of the company/organization. Why was Wells Fargo, for example, allowed to just pay a fine for millions of fake accounts that were created which ripped people off? Those are clear cut felonies.

I agree, but how many politicians do you think Wells Fargo owns? The average person doesn't matter to those politicians. The money and perks do. Also, again, people don't have the time/energy to hold these people accountable. Manipulation by the media also contributes to this - outrage fatigue, etc..

>And that's just one outrageous scam upon the people that comes to mind.

There are too many to keep track of. I appreciate the well-thought response. I think you're basically right in theory, but, in practice, I think you're expecting too much of the average person.

Economics is not a zero-sum game.

Just because good-natured "regular" people participate in the broader system of exploitation does not mean that they are earning what they get, not at all, myself included.

I benefit from huge luck. Luck about when and where I was born, luck about education opportunities, luck of genetics. In addition I benefit from direct effects and side effects of government spending, publicly funded university research, basic infrastructure, and all manner of support staff.

The cumulative "product" I make is not my own. It's a function mostly of just how lucky I am, and also significantly a function of the whole Lorentzian field of infrastructure/productivity/opportunity/civility that I'm enveloped in because of a whole bunch of people doing jobs that they are deeply underpaid for.

Except it happens all the time by unelected leaders of major corporations.

For example, when there is no alternative to say Comcast in your neighbourhood and they can charge whatever they want and you need internet access for work, they are taxing you.

And I don't know about you but I must have missed the election where I get to choose who is in charge of Comcast, or any of the other regional monopolies[1] run by "producers" that we sadly depend on.

[1] Health insurance, banks, pharmaceutical companies, grocery store chains...

That sounds great except in practical terms there's little that can be done.

Who cares if it's government to blame or the corporations, the problem remains the same.

I wish more people had the humility to admit this.

My comment was couched in terms of creature comforts that we have in most parts of the first world, but that's not necessarily the specific standard I'm advocating for, and the more general idea is just that people towards the left of the distribution should never be made to feel like they "shouldn't have" the comforts further to the right -- basically that we all should see progress as somewhat tied to both driving the mean to the right, and reducing the variance so that people at least in the far left tail are continuously brought closer to the far right tail.

There are other better ways to resolve the vicious psychological cycle you describe, but they're not material.

Do you think you can get a fair price if the other side knows you have to sell with a gun to your head?

I suspect most people would work for reasons you mentioned, but I also suspect that the price for undesirable unskilled labor would be much much much higher than it is today.

Which would incentivize automating this type of labor first. As it should be.