It seems the really horrible thing about income inequality is if people are actually starving in the street or have no where to sleep, I realize it isn’t ideal for economic health.
But as long as not able to work doesn’t mean death in a gutter, I’m not seeing just how disgusted and other negative emotions some feel over the fact there are outlandishly rich.
So one guy blows more on private planes to ferry his cat around than most will earn in a lifetime, at the end of the day so what?
Most people are ok with business owners and executives collecting a larger reward for their services. That is fine, business owners have to risk their money, and executives need skills that are not always easy to come by.
With this said, it seems to me that the rewards those owners and executives collected in 1960 or 1970, a time when the economy of America was quite healthy, are probably adequate to motivate them to do their jobs.
Technological advances - created by mostly workers, not executives and owners - have meant that the average worker can produce enormously more for the same amount of labor. This essentially has made the pie much larger. I’m totally fine with executives and owners collecting a big piece of the pie, I just think the share of the pie that goes to workers should be about the same percentage it was in 1960 or 1970. Back then, the head of the company might make 5 times what a worker makes. That’s totally fair. What isn’t fair is when they get to collect 10 million while the average worker collects 50k. Their skills at persuasion and the increased hours they work do not justify a 200 times pay boost.
In real numbers, then, median household income should be about $80,000, not $40,000.
That’s all it is. I think that “missing gap” between productivity and wages is essentially money stolen by crooks. The system is corrupt. *Why *it is is very complicated, but it is probably a failure of the police to protect the citizens of the USA from having their money stolen in various schemes. “Schemes” is the best way I can describe predatory banking, stacking executive boards so a company’s profits can essentially be robbed and given to the board and CEO, unlimited importing of foreign labor, trade laws that allow foreign factories that have to obey no pollution or worker safety standards at all to compete with minimal tariffs, various banking and credit scams, a national financing scheme that lets the rich pay less in capital gains taxes than workers pay on wages yet the national debt is used to fund everything, and so on and so forth.
That’s the problem. Naturally, these crooks - that is what they are, they are ultimately the same as those shady carnies that have you gamble on a pea under a cup - face essentially no sanctions whatsoever for their actions, even when they do get caught. Also many of the schemes I described above have been made legal by bribing politicians.
I’d also add that teeming masses seem contented when they have cheap food and entertainment.
Well don’t invest in those companies then. When the liquidity of a particular stock declines so will it’s value, which in turn will result in lower compensation for those executives, with options, etc. tied to the stock price.
Please list these particular companies that you feel have robber barons at the helm so we can all follow your exampling in not trading those particular stocks.
There is truth to this. And, the rich person at least has the possibility of spending his wealth in ways that benefit the poor and middle-class.
One problem is that, to the extent that both money is power and wealth is addictive, you sometimes get the already-rich using their money/power to further enrich themselves at the expense of the have-nots.
Income inequality is at its most benign when those with low incomes don’t believe their condition is necessarily permanent: by hard work or initiative or talent or education or luck they have the possibility of improving their circumstances and working their way up, rather than being permanently doomed to being at the bottom of society.
Ooh! Ooh! I got one. Jeff Immelt presided over one of the greatest stock collapses in history. From 2002 to the end of January of this year GE market capitalization dropped from $396 billion to 261.1 billion. The stock price dropped 61% in his first ten years.
Oh, but surely his compensation reflects that, right? Well, last year he made $18.8 million dollars. That’s $36.77 a second, every minute of every day for the whole year. Waking, sleeping, scratching his balls, pissing into his gold toilet, $2,150 a minute. You’d like to think tanking the stock price by that much would have some effect on compensation, but no. $7.8 million of that compensation was a bonus. GE stock price declined by 12.8% in 2014, while the S&P index rose 12.7%, and he gets a $7.8 million bonus? on top of his $6.2 million in stock awards and options and his $3.75 million base salary?
Because where the hell else can we find someone to run the fucking company into a ditch for that kind of money? You know, there’s a saying in investing that you should invest in companies that are so simple that an idiot can run them, because sooner or later one will. If Jeff has done nothing else with his life, he’s proven that adage.
The bigger the gap, the harder it is to leap across it.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to merely survive…not if I’m working a full time job. I want to experience nice things and creature comforts, but more than that, I want life to be more than sheer drudgery. Never being able to achieve any of one’s ambitions is just depressing.
Now if everyone is mired in the same mud, that’s one thing. But if one group of us are always stuck in the mud and another group is standing on the clean sidewalk, laughing at us, that’s another thing altogether.
Why do you think people don’t “die in the gutter”? They do. They freeze to death, or they get frostbite and go to the ER and/or hospital, which is never paid for its services to them.
And even if homelessness =/= death in a gutter, why is it acceptable?
That’s evidence that income inequality exists, not evidence that it is a problem.
I would not agree that the tech advances of the last twenty or thirty years are created by ordinary workers. They were created by people like Sam Walton and Bill Gates.
The median household income figures are affected by increases in the number of single-parent households (usually female-headed), where poverty and low income are markedly over-represented.
Regards,
Shodan
I dont think its so bad in the US but in places like Mexico where if your poor your basically poor for life no matter what. I dont think I could handle that.
When the rich get obscenely richer while the poor lose ground more and more each year, then it becomes a matter of ethics to me. Sadly that is what has been happening as the middle class disappears. Where are those former middle classers going? Perhaps a few are drifting upwards, but by and large they are drifting downward. As the former middle class re-calibrate their expectations, they can reasonably expect to still survive, albeit on a lower level of comfort. But when you push the poor down further, they have very little wiggle room. One small economic push in the wrong direction can send people who are barely hanging on out into the street.
And (sorry, Republicans) they are not just going to lay in that gutter and die. They will be asking for monetary assistance from the gubmint and various charities and straining the existing social systems even more, while the former middle classers just above them in the poverty scale are no longer able to replenish such funds through charitable contributions or tax payments.
Noblesse Oblige was never a universally-practiced theory, but many of today’s rich don’t subscribe to it at all.
Personally, I don’t care how much money a person makes. But if you are going to rake in obscene amounts of income, I would wish that you would feel moral obligation to help those upon whose backs you stood to amass that income.
There is, in fact, no evidence that the middle class in vanishing, that poverty rates are rising, or that the average person’s standard of living is falling. All economic measurements moved in a bad direction during the “great recession”, but most have turned around and moved in the good direction recently.
However, the wealth of the richest members of society is increasing at a faster rate than everyone else’s wealth, and that’s been true for a number of years. Hence, economic inequality is rising.
This is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is that it’s getting harder and harder for those who start near the bottom of the economic ladder to work their way up. Laws and regulations are getting in the way of those who want to start their own businesses, work independently, or merely hire out to a decent employer. That’s the problem we should be focused on solving.
Using Bill Gates as an example, I’m not sure he literally created all that much. He didn’t create graphic interfaces, or the integrated circuit, or a computer mouse, or anything like that. That was created by normal engineers, whose ideas he bought and put together into a single device. The integrated circuit is probably the single greatest recent advancement in computing and it was invented by normal engineers. Considering the amount of patents engineers and developers get (albeit, often in a company’s name), I’m pretty sure they’re actually the workhorses of technological advancement.
Of course, you can argue that the engineers wouldn’t be able to do this without the rich man’s money to stand on, and I agree you have a point there. But the rich man has to be giving out the money for people to use in order for everyone to profit, and the rich man alone doesn’t create a whole lot.
With respect to the United States this is a purely hypothetical question as it does not have an adequate safety net:
Why would you expect this ratio to be static? Do you think the CEO and executive team at Barclays Global Investors needs to be more sophisticated than they had to be in 1970 to compete in today’s market?
What do you base this on? Why not $81K or $79K, or $300K? The only way I can see what you’re proposing is through a controlled economy - why not just control it so the median is much higher?
Did you read your cite?
I agree with this as far as it goes, but I’m a bad liberal (well, bad Occupynik), more interested in helping the poor than in punishing the rich for the mortal sin of having money.
However, I don’t think we’re yet at that point (except in the narrowest and most literal interpretation). Getting to that point may mean harming, relatively speaking, the rich. The desire to do this looks like anger to people who don’t (or won’t) understand what the goal is, or accept that goal as a valid one.
Ordinary workers also have to be more sophisticated. They just aren’t being paid more because the investor/executive class is robbing them. Partly it’s a matter of leverage.
I’m basing it on the concept that per worker productivity has more than doubled, but per worker pay has not gone up at all. A more equitable distribution, one that divides the benefits of economic advances more fairly, would give the workers a fairer share of their increased productivity, doubling their real wages.
Obviously, direct control by the government can’t work. I never proposed that as a solution. The most reasonable solution that comes to mind is to restrict profit taking by the investor class where they get to steal money from companies that are losing billions of dollars. The simple issue is that the stockholders of most companies can’t prevent themselves from being robbed.
Have you considered that your idea of equitable and fair are different than others? Why should anyone care what someone else thinks is fair or equitable? If you think 5:1 ratio is fair, what about the person who thinks 4:1 is more fair? What do you say to that person to convince him that your position is more fair?
I forgot that stockholders were forced into their positions and have no ability to sell their shares.
That’s a nice theory. Doesn’t work that way in practice. The board of directors in reality can rob a company and they do so routinely.
My definition of what is equitable is perhaps arbitrary. All I am saying is the current situation is not very equitable. Why should the middle aged white guy who gives speeches at the top collect a hundred times what all the engineers, architects, technicians, and other folks who actually do everything make?
The current system is blatantly inequitable and the evidence of this is overwhelming.
I know right? Like I said, stockholders have no ability to exit their positions and they are forced to buy the shares right from the get go.
Perhaps? It’s completely arbitrary. If the guy next to you says that the current situation is very equitable, what means do you suppose can be taken to resolve that difference? Does it matter if the person who gives speeches is middle aged, or white? What if it’s an elderly black woman, or a young Indian? Is it then okay in your mind for them to collect 100 times what the engineers and others make? If there is no difference, what is the value in introducing the middle aged white guy?
This is only true if you redefine equitable to suit your arbitrary position.
