Comment by psychoslave a day ago
>If I would need to choose only between UBI and high taxes on the rich I would choose the latter
There no need to be exclusive, and actually having concentration of wealth in a few hands is already a social construct. A society can also thrive without high income disparities. Taxing the rich is just taxing on what was captured from the non-rich.
This is a good point, but a lot of ressources have a fixed or limited supply (arguably all of them); if wealth inequality increases, the poor fraction of the population will have a harder time competing for those.
Consider urban housing as an example (specifically price development in terms of median income, and how the supply side reacts to wealth distribution by "overdelivering" luxury appartments from the average citizens point of view).
Increasing inequality is also problematic because it fosters rent-seeking behavior which is self-reinforcing (because this siphons income from the poor side of your distribution to the wealthy one).
It might well be better to be less wealthy in a society with lower spread.
You could also argue that most wealth right now is accumulated/grown by "extracting" a bit of the value from the work of others. Consider Valve (the game distribution platform) for a very obvious example: They make something around $50M per employee in revenue. Are their employees working ten times harder than average game developers (by literally any reasonable metric)? I'd argue that their company became very good at extracting value from the whole market, instead. Absurd wealth does not come from doing lots of work yourself, it comes from taking a little bit from lots of people.
The cost of urban development has a lot more to do with regulation and limits on building rights than with income inequality. Zoning rules, permitting, height caps, and other constraints keep supply artificially low, which pushes developers toward higher-end units because the fixed costs are so high. If cities simply allowed more building by right, supply would go up and prices would come down. Things like limiting long-term vacancies can help deal with speculative ownership, but none of this is primarily an inequality problem.
RE Valve: using revenue per employee isn’t a meaningful way to tie this to inequality. High revenue/employee in a software distribution business just reflects scale. Developers use Valve because it gives them access to a big market, not because Valve is “extracting” in some zero-sum way. If Valve disappeared tomorrow, the distribution market would become less efficient, not more equal, and consumers or developers wouldn’t actually be better off.
People that can be taxed at several order of magnitude of wealth compared to a median income obviously didn’t work several degree of magnitude harder/longer/smarter. They more "efficiently" capture the benefits, certainly, but that’s it. And even there, mainly through network effect and pre-existing social forces.
If instead distribution of wealth was flatter in an equally wealthy society, a tax could still capture just as much.
When vladms speaks about high taxes on the rich, it already assumes the continuation of social structure which exaggerates the uneven distribution of wealth.
This is great in theory, but not practice and not practiced anywhere. You could site some EU countries with a very homogeneous population and a GDP < half of the states, but it's not convincing.
I don't think we currently have the most efficient tax vs productivity situation now, but I don't agree with equality being the goal.
Obviously no argument can convince a party which say literally that proofs will be rejected, even those which might be provided on some concrete example. All the more when this party doesn’t align with the underlying praised values anyway.
It is about the practicality of convincing people to do something. Many people I know are inert and would say no to change. Even those that want change have a favorite topic.
So, personally, when discussing economic topics I discuss the taxes part, which is so clearly unjust when explained (most countries tax less capital gains than work, which results in rich people able to accumulate things faster).
Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work - humans are complex. So while I hope that it is possible to have "A society can also thrive without high income disparities.", proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.
> Additionally, I am not convinced that me or you know exactly what will work
Sure. It doesn't mean anyone else know better from some absolute perspective that we should blindly trust.
>proposing too many changes at once might result in an undesired result. There are enough examples in history where good intentions led to catastrophes.
Not proposing any change, letting the same egocentric people with selfish intentions always have the last word on what should change or not, also proved to be a sure source of great human catastrophic outcomes.
>captured from the non-rich.
What do you mean by this? The economy is not zero sum, it is possible for everyone to get "wealthier", even if the spread increases.