https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...
Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.
What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials?
Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money.
Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly.
Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.
Here are just a few massive differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos that have nothing to do with buying luxury goods:
1. Jeff Bezos can get an audience with any Congressperson, any State governor, most countries's heads of state and probably the President of the US, with a telephone call and likely with less than 24 hours notice. That person will listen to and likely be influenced by what he says.
2. Jeff Bezos's public statements can move global financial markets.
3. Jeff Bezos can (and does) own and control mass media companies which can amplify and downplay political issues and shape the outcomes of elections.
4. Through philanthropy, Jeff Bezos can, if he wants, simply decide what counts as a "public good" to be funded and supported, as opposed to the public deciding through the democratic process. Bezos is capable of offering an amount of support for his causes that dwarfs government-funding. We are merely lucky that billionaire philanthropists have so far focused on good things like curing malaria and not on evil.
Basically, when you remove money, something else becomes the currency you're describing. Taking away billionaires wealth might actually make it harder to identify the people who have this influence. Rather than news outlets writing articles every other day about Jeff, you'd have some shady person high up in some unelected bureaucracy getting to wield this power. How is that better?
Can he?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/debgordon/2021/10/13/50-of-amer...
Americans are the people who complain when the wifi goes down or someone says the wrong word.
Well, then, surely it doesn't matter if we tax away 90% of Bezo's wealth, right? His living standard will be same.
Beyond that, though, you can only tax away 90% of billionaires' wealth once. That whole game depends on them continuing to produce the same amount of wealth, even though they won't receive any of the returns. (Remember also that most of these people reinvest the majority of this money into their ventures, meaning that taking these dollars will have a compounding negative effect on future productivity.) Look at history. Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.
Why would they keep taking on so much responsibility? To raise your standard of living? Why should they care about you?
Any of those guys are capable of becoming a surf bum, living on $30k a year, but instead, they build massive companies that deliver incredible value to the rest of us — they get their money because we pay them for that value. Would you rather incentivize Elon Musk to keep working on Tesla or would you prefer him to retire?
So you are advocating 0% taxes?
That argument (of type Econ 101/Ayn Rand) is misguided, because the world is not as envisaged by Econ 101 (or Ayn Rand, who famously enjoyed Social Security and Medicare).
Counter arguments:
1. Society has made available the gift of the limited liability company, to encourage risk taking and entrepreneurship.
2. Society has made available streets, canalisation, schools, defence, police, fire fighters, certain forms of insurance, etc., for a simple reason: market failures. Those goods would be provided in insufficient (suboptimal) number by the free market due to: strong positive externalities, non-excludability, adverse selection, and many other reasons.
For those (and many other reasons) government does have the right to taxation. The question then is the optimal level.
> Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.
Yeah, the poor Northern Europeans, starving to death... Somewhat higher income, capital gains, estate, and maybe even wealth taxes won't result in mass starvation.
> they get their money because we pay them for that value.
Again, a neat Econ 101 idea that fails to take into account reality. "salary = marginal product" is only true under entirely idealised assumptions of perfect competition [1], in particular no economies of scale and no network effects. That is most definitely not the case for today's tech companies, which quite obviously have monopolistic tendencies, thus extraction of monopoly profit (rent) which accrues, guess to whom, the boss.
And, for what it's worth, if Elon becomes a surf bum, or twitters full time, we'll still get great electric vehicles, maybe a tad later.
[1] Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...
> Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.
From the paper below:
"This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income"
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/technology-and-dev...
When we get 3days work week and 4 days of „time for my stuff” we can go back to discussing that.
The ruling class will happily soak up all spare productive capacity - and as the amount of work necessary to keep someone clothed, sheltered, and fed went down, that spare productive capacity grows, and more of it flows upwards.
Landlord was lending land to peasents - rich peasents, because bottom cast did not even have a chance to talk to landlord.
For the land peasents got, they had to work for the landlord specific number of days in a week. For some time it was 1-2-3-4-5 days per week. Most common was 3 days.
Thing is - the peasent was not obligated to do that work himself. He could have sent a son, family member or even hire someone.
That way it was super easy to keep his agreement with the landlord while mostly focus on his own farm.
Who had it terrible were bottom, poor peasents that worked for other peasents.
They did not have their own land and were at mercy of their “master peasents”.
They most likely had to work whole week or 5-6 days.
They were more of a slave than a peasent tbh, but its a hard disregarded truth.
Current middle class in our times could be translated to “master peasents” back in time. Slave peasents would be the slave-wage ppl.
When I discuss or compare medival peasents to current corporation workers I always compare master peasents to corposlaves.
And master peasents had it super better than corposlaves do now.
To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week" is nonsense. They worked hard af for all sunlight hours for some seasons, and had plenty of leisure in times like the winter. On average, maybe that's 4 days off, but let's not pretend that working the land is not back breaking work. It's not leisure. If you really think some 40 hour wfh coding job is harder work than farming for your life, then there's no law saying you can't buy some land and go off grid. You're welcome to subsist. Hell you could land a few million subs on youtube airing the experience, that category is all the rage these days
Well.. noone said that. If you mind reading the comment again.
But its true that peasents had a lot more time to work on their own stuff than on what master told them to do.
Either way most peasents worked for higher tier peasent because landlord often has hubdreds of hectars of land.
But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.
Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.
Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)
>Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.
So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".
No... why do you think that?
> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth.
That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there.
Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question.
> "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years"
I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.
Well, according to your first assertion we're not supposed to cover only your country for the past 1,000 years. We're supposed to cover all of human history - every nation, as far back as at least 10,000BCE.
> Someone came back and pointed out that it hasn't always remained that way and there have certainly been blips
The blips didn't change the ratios though. Ratios have stayed the same.
> You then responded by saying "not in my country" for the past "1000 years".
Yeah - my country hasn't really had those blips. And the blips in other countries didn't change the ratios anyway, just transferred who owned them, so it was a separate point.
> Well, according to your first assertion we're not supposed to cover only your country for the past 1,000 years.
No it was a separate comment and point!
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.