I mean, duh. Half of the US federal income tax comes from 1% households. The rich disproportionately pay tax. If poor people had enough money to pay significant amounts of tax they wouldn't be poor; they only get charged anything to enforce a perception of fairness and give them some skin in the game.
Any tax break is going to favour the wealthy; because as a rule the median tax dollar came from someone wealthy.
It’s not luxury but isn’t it major progress vs 100 years ago?
Sure almost everyone in this country has a computer in their pocket, they also very often have no access to fresh groceries at the same time. The town I grew up in is 60% below the poverty line and the nearest grocery store with fresh produce is a 30 minute drive away. That's over 800 people in one city who eat frozen gas station food on a daily basis. Do you think their wifi access and cable television is a good measure of their quality of life? They've also had to shutdown the local hospital recently. Meaning their already-terrible access to healthcare just got that much worse. Most people there only visit a doctor once every 5 years.
And I can already imagine the replies to this "well, times are changing, they're living in a dying region". Which... while true... doesn't come close to forgiving the systemic problems that put them in this situation. Systemic problems that by no measure had to come to fruition, if we had only had a stronger system of wealth distribution and thus physical and educational support for the people at the bottom of the pile.
Also, for the record, they're actually closing the library in my hometown.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
USDA estimates that 12% of households qualify as "food insecure": https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
Adult Medicaid recipients often have only "emergency services", aka having your teeth pulled, as part of their benefits: https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/benefits/dental/index.html
All-in-all it's not pretty being poor in America, even if you have cable TV and heat to distract you from the mountain of paperwork where you have to repeatedly state how much help you need and the gaps in your teeth and the "joy" of paying with food stamps at the store.
We can have major progress and still not have sufficient progress. We can make major improvements and still feel like we have a long way to go.
Just because we're better off than our grandparents doesn't erase that some of us are relatively badly off against today's standard, and we could be doing more to help those who are at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder.
Yes, it is. There is hyperbole on both sides of this debate. Being able to show we've made historic progress makes future potential progress look more realistic. It shows our institutions are capable of solving this problem.
I should amend my statement to say, "Is that a reasonable metric to use to declare success?" I regularly bump into folks who say, "Well, what more should we do? We're already better than we were 100 years ago."
Got it. I think there may be confusion between a metric and a threshold. The metric being certain objective measures of quality of life. The thresholds being where we were 100 years ago, where we are today, and where we should be today.
More broadly, anyone "declaring success" on such a broad question is--at best--deluded. More common is people throwing their hands up at what looks like an insurmountable problem. I've found pointing out the often-unappreciated magnitude of recent historical performance to be useful in that respect.
If you keep moving the goal posts, you'll never get there.
AC, Heat, cell phones, internet are all easily achievable, sometimes with an RV or a car. But housing has been hoarded to an extreme, locking out all sorts of people.
Yes, by many measures, life for the poorest in the first world is far less miserable than it was 100 years ago. But still pretty miserable as anyone who has been poor - really poor - knows. Dickensian quality of life shouldn't be used as a the baseline against which we measure ourselves in the 21st century.
We're not comparing today's poor to yesteryear's.
We're comparing today's poor to today's robber barons.
Or, tl;dr- "Better" still isn't good enough.
Not entirely. A lot of the VCs (and also hedge funds, private equity) get money from regular people like us in the form of pension funds. Think of retired teachers, firemen, grandmothers, etc. E.g. the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund was one of the investors in Union Square Ventures.
Yes, some money does come from wealthy family offices like the Vanderbilts but the huge pension funds trying to meet their obligations have even more money to invest.
Your comment is quite literally just wrong. Your average American has relatively no direct stake in financial systems. Notice the word "average". Most people on HN tend to mistake that for meaning them. You are not average if you have enough wealth to think that investing money is normal, even in pensions. Estimates of the percent market investment tied up in pensions is something between 5% and 15%
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2013/ted_20130103.htm https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/13/heres-how-many-americans-hav... https://protectpensions.org/2018/01/02/united-states-without...
In the case of Union Square Ventures, the majority of the money in their 2004 fund came from pension funds. It's all public information.
>Estimates of the percent market investment tied up in pensions is something between 5% and 15%
Your 3 links and the "5 to 15%" math are not relevant to my point. Let my try to put it another way. Let's say you looked at the LPs (investors) of a VC fund that raised $400 million. The list of wouldn't be filled with just the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. The money sources do not entirely from the concentration of wealth.
Instead, a lot of the money comes from retirement pension funds, charities trying to stretch out their donations, university endowments, etc. And it's not just the public & private pension funds in the USA. Canada and Europe pensions also invest in VC funds.
And yes, pretty much every pension fund[0] invests in a mix of alternative assets including private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital. Pension fund managers can't meet their financial obligations by only parking their billions in T-Bills or only investing in a passive index. They need the higher returns of those alternative investment vehicles.
[0] examples of public pension funds with funding shortfalls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_employee_pension_plans_...
Pensions were eliminated in most employers in favor of 401k or other types of investment vehicles, and so Pension funds will get more rare and smaller over time.
The day of the Pension Fund is largely over.
The difference is that Hedge Funds are created by the ultra-wealthy, for the ultra-wealthy. And their only purpose is to generate massive amounts of more wealth, for the ultra-wealthy.
Right, but that is sort of the point I think. Sure you may have collapsed the economic structure for the moment, but when you say "but look at what I'm going to do with all these resources!" its because you (assuming good faith) intend to use the hoarded resources to make some lasting improvement. You have the resources, so you can make a discovery or something that leads to not as many resources needed for the future. Its obviously not the best methodology, but it is one.
As an analogy: if you were living in an isolated tribe of 300 people and the smartest 5 people got together and said: "we have an idea! if you give us 50% of the tribe wealth we can make the lives of our great-great grandchildren wonderful. We've done the math and we acknowledge that 60 people will die unnecessarily and 50 families will lead miserable lives for the next few generations... but we're going to do great things!" I would much prefer if someone stood up and said: "how about we do this slowly, live happy lives now, and then our great-great-great grandchildren can live great lives".
As in: what do individuals and small groups of individuals see such need to be the personal figurehead of success in a society, especially at such great costs to those below them? I refuse to accept that it's OK to moralize someone's actions by letting them say "but I'm going to help everyone from my throne." It sounds more like justifying greed and less like benevolence to me.
Also, I'm of the cynical belief that the phrase 'assuming good faith' is a pretty goddamn big assumption.
In that trip of 300, I don't think what you set up quite aligns with the way things are. If it were more realistic, 50 people already are going to die unnecessarily anyways, and 40 of those families will already lead miserable lives for the next few generations. The point is, things are bad in a lot of ways, but making them temporarily worse can making things incredibly better in the future.
Now, of course, the fully realistic scenario there, is that the 5 smartest people end up deciding later on "hmm, well we do have half of the wealth in the whole tribe, we kinda hold the power here now...we could just keep serving ourselves...what's that? 180 extra people will die as a result and every family but those of the 5 smartest will live miserable lives? Sucks to be them I guess!"
Or even if they had good faith life-long, their children may not.
So I agree with you in practicality - its best if someone stands up and says "hey lets just work together as a tribe and do this as fast as possible but avoid ever purposely causing harm, so not as fast as those 5 say"
In principle though, if there was some magic way of good faith staying true, then the 5 people ruling could end up being the best case scenario.
"The 1% are just normal successful people (who happen to also be the NIMBY ladder pullers who often perpetuate inequality in unintentional ways), it's the 0.1% we should be talking about!"
"Don't blame smart, motivated people for making money (and pursuing growth-at-all-cost companies that often provide little value to people who aren't yuppies), anyone could learn to code and pull themselves up by their bootstraps!"
And my favorite, "These authors don't understand basic economics! Tech people are expanding the economy and creating wealth for everyone (when your definition of 'everyone' is mostly people with enough money to be investors or enough youth to be startup employees), so of course it makes sense that we're getting richer faster than 99% of the population!"
If we were to equally distribute resources among the entire population, over time we would see those resources begin to bunch up into the top 20% of society due to superior abilities (intelligence, business instinct, skills, etc.)
As time continues, then resources continue to pile up at the top 20% of the initial 20, and so on, and so on...
Make each generation work hard for their wealth, and you avoid the concentration of wealth that occurs because it is also a concentration of political power, at which point the sole purpose for that wealth and power is to accumulate more wealth and power and give their kids an insurmountable advantage over the next generation of kids.
But they are redistributing the money precisely by investing it in startups.
And whenever someone makes the point I'm making in this post, people rush in to point out that you can do so much good with lots of money. As if that somehow runs in opposition to hoarding it from being used by the broader population in the first place. It's as if you caused the collapse of an entire economic structure and then said 'but look what I'm going to do with all these resources!'.
Also: for me, the most interesting part is that I would have no problem with this system if there wasn't such a miserable bottom rung beneath them, i.e. the poorest of poor in the USA. If we had actually reached some post-scarcity conditions and the poorest among us were still well off, then I would be much less concerned about the ethics of startups. But as it stands, I think the startup/VC world needs to have a reckoning with their place in all of this... not that it will actually happen.
edit: it was downed off the front page in an hour.