They do contribute more in a general sense. If I make $5 million a year after taxes, one of two things is going to happen:
I’ll spend it, thereby invigorating the economy, or
I’ll save it. In this case, the bank now has more money to lend out, thereby invigorating the economy.
No. However, his income will go up.
Because there are other factors that affect income besides productivity. If you want to argue that no other factors besides productivity should affect income, that is a possible but rather silly assertion.
You need to get past this Marxist malarkey about how it’s unfair that investments pay off. I can earn money by being productive at my job. I then take some of the money I earned and invest it. Thirty years later, I take the money and what it earned and spend it. I have done no one any injury, and I have benefitted a lot of people who used my money and paid me interest out of the results of that use.
Most millionaires in the US did not inherit their money. This notion of the idle rich leeching off the sweat of the workers is nonsense.
Regards,
Shodan
Okay, so now define goods and services since those are actually what you’re talking about. For example, what is the relationship between income and providing a service? You’ll also need to define income. Is cash in the form of a salary the only form of income, or can things like pleasure be included.
I ask that last part because I brought up volunteering–providing goods or services without getting paid. But if I really enjoy doing it, am I not getting something in exchange?
So that’s your definition of producing nothing then? One of them is a firefighter waiting for a fire, the other is a police officer waiting for a crime, let’s also add a nurse waiting to vaccinate a child, and an author thinking about a new book. Are they all producing nothing?
I need to know if you seriously don’t understand the answer to this question. You ask it a lot, you go around and around in circles, you start multiple threads. Do you really not grasp the concept of ownership or do you just not like it?
It’s hard for YOU to quantify productivity, because you’re goal is to quantify it in such a way as to prove your thesis. You very quickly and very easily quantified owners as unproductive but firefighters as productive.
Well, the two jobs are paid differently, meaning that the income derived from each activity is different. So answer your own question, what is the relationship between income and productivity?
One person picks apples, another person drives them to the store, a third person sells them.
None of the are evil owners, so we can clearly say all are productive.
Enormously? Okay, so you’ve defined creating a vaccine as enormously productive, so let’s actually walk through this and see where we lose you:
Salk started work a polio cure in 1938, but the vaccine wasn’t put into widespread use until 1957.
1 a. During that time, do you consider Salk productive? (ie before there was a vaccine)
1 b. Should he receive income for that productivity?
2. Other people were unsuccessfully working on a cure, were they being productive?
After Salk developed the vaccine someone else was given the job of mass producing it, for sake of clarity let’s assume Salk teaches a labtech how to make the vaccine:
3. Are they equally productive?
4. Should they both receive the same income?
After the labtech makes the vaccine, a nurse administers it:
5. Are they equally productive?
6. Should they both receive the same income?
By your definition, Salk is enormously productive, because he did one thing that you seem to value. So here is your last question:
In 1970, two people are sitting on a park bench, apparently doing nothing. One of them is Jonas Salk. Are both of them equally unproductive or does Salk’s productivity continue after he’s finished his research?
Let’s think big picture here for a second. Suppose somebody makes $5m and deposits it in a bank. Where did that money come from? Nowhere?
No. It came from someone else, right? Let’s call him “Mark”. “Mark” pays $5 mil to “Bob”.
So there’s two possibilities: either Mark and Bob use the same bank, or they use different banks.
If they use the same bank, the money is transferred from one account to another. They debit one account and credit another. But as far as the bank is comcerned absolutely nothing has changed. Its assets and liabilities are the same. Its ability to lend is the same. Its access to credit-worthy borrowers is the same.
The other possibility is they use different banks. In that case, Mark’s bank (Bank of A) eliminates $5 mil of liabilities (by debiting Mark’s account by $5m) and sends $5m of assets (fed funds) to Bob’s bank (bank of B).
Simultaneously (more or less - adding the time it takes for “settlement”) Bank of B receives $5m in its Federal Reserve account, along with instructions to credit Bob’s account by $5m.
So Bank of B now has $5m more in assets and liabilities, and Bank A has $5m less in assets and liabilities.
So, for the banking system as a whole, nothing has changed. There’s still as much money in the banking system as there was before. This true for Mark and Bob, and also for the banking system as a whole. So no matter how many transactions between Mark and Bob, and everybody else, the total amount of money in the system stays the same. For the banking system as a whole, the total number of assets and liabilities remain the same. The ability to lend remains the same, and the ability to find credit-worthy borrowers remains the same.
Over the course of a day, the banking system processes millions of billions or transactions. Often, it more or less evens out. In other words, the individual banks within the system have about as much at the end of the day as they did at the beginning. But sometimes it doesn’t.
Fortunately, banks have a way to fix that. It’s the federal funds market. Banks who’d like to have a more in their Fed account borrow from the ones that have more than they need.
Of course, banks like to have depositors. A typical checking account pays 0 interest. The Fed funds rate is 0.25%. So a bank gains 0.25% when someone deposits a check, compared to borrowing at the Fed funds rate.
But the point is that, collectively, making deposits has no effect on the banking system as a whole.
It’s a bit like pulling pail of water from the ocean, walking down the beach, and pouring it back in again. It looks like you’re adding water to the ocean, but you’re really not.
I agree that spending drives production. But the same basic argument I made above also applies.
If Bob got the money fom Mark, then Mark is $5m poorer, and therefore has $5m less to spend.
A transfer of money from one person to another doesn’t increase the amount of money in the economy. Only banks and the government can do that.
More importantly, spending is consumption, not production. And we can only consume what we first produce. To put it differently, if someone spends $5m on a yacht, or whatever, he’s causing (or enabling) a lot of other people to be productive, but he’s not being productive himself. Consumption might drive production, but they’re still two different things.
This is completely and utterly false. Why? Because you said, and I quote:
“Mark” didn’t just give “Bob” $5mil, he paid him, presumably for something, which means that instead of having $5mil in cash, “Mark” now has $5mil worth of something else. That something else was a good or service that you conveniently left out of the equation.
Both before the transaction and after each had something of value, one of which was $5mil in cash. But “Bob” valued the cash more than the thing, whereas “Mark” valued the thing more than the cash.
Each player in the arrangement is now richer because each player now has something they value more.
The important point to note here is that neither of them give a shit what you or society values.
I’m glad we agree.
It depends on what you mean by should. If you mean in a moral sense, than I think that in general income should reflect productivity.
If you mean it in a practical sense - which is what I think you do mean - then I don’t think that’s realistic or practical.
Having said that, I do think there are some things - including very practical and realistic things - that could easily be done, and that would improve the situation.
I don’t think I ever said that: I said that income doesn’t reflect productivity.
Also, while I don’t mind being called a Marxist, I don’t think I’ve earned it. I haven’t read Marx since High School, and that was a while ago. My thinking is influenced more by The Wealth of Nations, where Smith said (I’m paraphrasing) that the wealth of a nation is not its gold, but the productivity of its workers.
In America, at least, many people seem to think that money itself is productive. That’s the kind of thinking that Smith was trying to debunk.
I’m not trying to keep anybody from saving or investing. I am pointing out that your money didn’t “earn” anything. Money doesn’t work or produce. People do.
If you collect interest, or rent, or capital gains or other unearned income, it’s not because your money “earned” more money; it’s because money was transferred from other people (borrowers and renters) to you.
Is that fair? You can make your own assessment if you want, I guess.
I would merely point out that some sort of balance needs to be struck between those who do the work, and those who live off the work of others. That balance has swung far out of whack in the US, and I’d argue that that’s happened because of specific government policies - policies that could easily be changed, and should be.
I’ve heard this a lot of times, and I’d be curious to know where you got it from.
However, it’s not directly relevant to this thread.
Dick Fuld earned half a billion dollars in the years leading up to the Lehman bankruptcy. Given that he led his firm into bankruptcy, it’s hard to say that $500 million reflected his productivity. I’d respect him more if he’d inherited it.
After all, you can’t blame someone for being born into money, anymore than you can blame someone for being born into poverty.
emacknight: You asked a lot of questions, but I notice you didn’t answer the one question I asked:
Do you care to answer it?
What is the transitive property of productivity? If I produce a widget, then give it to you, did you produce the widget?
No one can answer your question because you’ve defined owner as someone that isn’t productive. Ergo, when a person is made an owner, they are not productive. That’s what all your threads are about.
But here’s my attempt: the thing you give is the cure for AIDS. You had been working on it in secret and it has finally proved successful. Before going to the park you sent copies of the research documentation to the CDC, giving full credit to “guy on the bench.”
So while he sits there doing nothing, he becomes the most productive man alive. You, on the other hand, go back to being the least. What you gave him was ownership of your productivity.
You defined Salk as enormously productive for producing the polio vaccine. From this it is logical to conclude that a person who produces a vaccine for AIDS is also [enormously?] productive. What is the transitive property of productivity? If the person who produces a vaccine gives the results to someone else, who do we consider productive?
If you don’t like this answer, my other solution was a music box. The guy sitting on the bench, now the owner of a music box, can sit there and produce beautiful music thereby becoming productive. Unless of course we consider the music box to be what’s productive.
Can things be productive?
If so, there are many things that are productive: wrenches, screws, hammers, factories, houses, TVs, computers, the internet, music boxes, and the cure for AIDS.
I would argue that things are tools or products, and the people who make or use them are productive; not the things themselves.
To my understanding, that’s the common way of doing it. BLS tracks productivity per worker; not productivity per wrench, or computer, or music box.
As for the cure for AIDS, I would argue the people who produced the cure were the ones who were productive, regardless of who they gave it to.
And I haven’t defined owners as unproductive. I’ve taken the dictionary definition of productive and applied it to owners. If owners produce something, they’re productive. If they don’t, they aren’t.
I’m not sure what you mean by the transitive quality of productivity. Producing something and then giving it to someone else doesn’t make the second person productive.
Or, to answer your question: the person you produced the widget is the person who produced the widget, not the person he gave it to.
Linusk,
Productivity, as used in industry, is an accounting term to measure output per individual worker:
Productivity = Gross Revenue / Headcount
Upper level managers (and farmers) are sometimes measured on a similar metric:
Productivity’ = Gross revenue / Capital Employed
So management prefers a modified definition:
Productivity’’ = Gross Revenue / Cost of Labor
They do not apply this metric to themselves because management believes:
Management is motivated by money
Workers are motivated by fear
Crane
And some would argue that people can be tools, hired to do a job. If I use a wrench to fix a leaky pipe, I’m productive–by your definition.
Okay, so let’s look at productivity per worker. Imagine a carpenter building a deck. He is using a rock to drive nails, and can drive 1 nail per minute. Someone gives him a hammer, now he can drive 10 nails per minute, his productivity improved dramatically. Then someone gives him a nail gun, now he’s driving 100 nails per minute, productivity is way up, he can finish a deck in a fraction of the time and with way better results.
3. His productivity has gone up, not because he’s any better, but because someone else provided him tools to do his job better. What is the relationship between his change in productivity and his change in income?
I asked this with Salk and I’ll ask it again here–when? You have defined the people who produced the cure for AIDS as productive, what I need to know is when the went from unproductive to productive. Timing is essential to your understanding of this concept.
Is there a point, after discovering the cure, that these researchers stop being productive? To use your example, one of the productive researchers goes out and sits on a park bend. Is she now an unproductive researcher?
Earlier you defined “feeding people” as productive. You also said a farmer is productive. So the “when” issue is significant. If a farmer plants an apple seed he has to wait 5-8 years before it will bear fruit. After that he’ll get 4-5 bushels per year for decades.
What I just describe is what we collectively describe as ownership. The farmer made a very long term investment in a tree, and as long as he takes care of it it will continue to provide income. It could be a tree or it could be an apartment. Watch this:
If a carpenter builds a house I believe you would say that she was productive. If that carpenter then rents it out for people to live it, she is providing a service, therefore she is still being productive. If she maintains the apartment it will fetch a high price, if she let’s it run down into disrepair it will eventually be unlivable–similar to an apple tree.
So what happens if the carpenter sells the house, can the new landlord ever be considered productive, or only the original person that built the house?
You started a thread asking about the relationship between income and productivity. If I make a widget, you consider me productive. If I sell that widget I get income, sell more or better widgets I get more income. So there is a link between productivity and income.
If I walk up to someone and GIVE them my widget, that person can sell it, and that person will have income as a result of my productivity.
What I was really hoping you’d arrive at on your own is that ownership is the central pin in the relationship between productivity and income. If I make a widget, I own it, and I get to sell it for income. If I hire someone to make a widget, I own it, and I get to sell it for income. The person I hire gets income for providing me a service. Both of us are productive, both of us receive income. We are not equally productive, and we will not receive equal income.
“If I hire someone to make a widget, I own it, and I get to sell it for income. The person I hire gets income for providing me a service. Both of us are productive, both of us receive income. We are not equally productive, and we will not receive equal income” (above)
If you hire labor, you are measured by:
Value = Gross Revenue / Capital Employed
The product of labor is:
Value = Gross Revenue / Headcount
In this case productivity is:
Productivity = Gross Revenue / 2
It makes no difference whether you hire a person and let him do all of the work or whether you and the employee share the work equally.
Crane
Well, it depends on whether you’re talking about an owner or manager hiring an employee, or a customer.
The manager has to review resumes, interview applicants, etc. She wants to find someone who will be skilled, responsible and honest. Finding good employees (sometimes called HR, in big companies) is important in any business. I’d say that it’s productive work. (Not that it’s always done well; but in principle it’s important, productive work.)
A customer who hires a plumber, on the other hand, isn’t doing anything productive. He’s the beneficiary of a service - a consumer. In the same way as if I go to the store and buy something - I’m a consumer. I didn’t produce the thing that I bought.
Now obviously there’s a connection between consumers and producers. Without consumers, there’s no point in producing anything. Conversely, without producers, there’s nothing for consumers to buy.
But they’re still two different things.
I’ll start by saying that increases in productivity are what drives increases in standards of living. I’ll also say that tools - the invention of tools, the mastery of tools, and the improvement in tools - is a huge part of increases in productivity.
Both the carpenter who works more efficiently because of better tools, and the people who make the tools are productive. The question then becomes, when productivity increases (in this case because of better tools) where should the value of the increase in productivity go?
Here’s a chart showing the relationship between productivity and workers’ pay. What you’ll see is that, although productivity has increased substantially, wages have stagnated, or fallen. The gap began to appear in the late 70s, and has increased progressively since then.
If you look at the proportion of all wealth held by the top 0.1 percent, on the other hand, what you’ll see is in inverse pattern. The proportion of wealth was lowest in the late 1970’s, and has increased substantially since then. In fact, they now own more a greater proportion of all wealth than at any time since 1929.
If the income of workers - people who design and build tools, and the people who use them - has stagnated or fallen, and the proportion of all wealth owned by the top 0.1% has approximately tripled, I’d say that allthe increase in productivity over the past several decades has gone to the rich.
Now in terms of whether the income of carpenters or toolmakers should go up 10% or 30%, I don’t have an answer for you. But I would argue that at least some of the increase in productivity should go to the workers, and not all of it should go to millionaires and billionaires.
Actually, let me revise my answer: I think most of the increase in productivity should go to carpenters and toolmakers, and only a small (in fact, as small as possible) amount of the value of the increase productivity should go to millionaires and billionaires.
If the increase in productivity had mainly gone to carpenters and toolmakers, they’d make about twice what they do now. So my answer is they should be making about twice as much.
Yes.
Although I’d make a qualification: if she’s just sitting on a park bench, she may have once been a researcher; now she’s just sitting on a park bench.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Whoever is responsible for producing the apples - whether it’s by planting seeds, irrigating, or whatever, is responsible for producing the apples. Even hiring people (and/or overseeing their work) is a form of production (management).
If somebody buys the orchard, and does absolutely nothing afterward, he’s contributed nothing to production (assuming there is any).
I think that scenario is unlikely, though. If you buy an orchard, you’re probably going to need to make sure that it runs right: that the apples are picked when they’re ripe, that all the trees are irrigated and not just some of them, that the trees are healthy, that all the ripe apples get picked, etc.
The only part that is ownership is owning the ground. Everything else is work: picking, planting, watering, managing, etc.
Merely owning the ground doesn’t produce anything, except (possibly) rent.
Assuming the new landlord does things like market the house, screen tenants, maintain the house and generally manage the property, then she’s being productive.
If she does none those things (in other words, she does nothing, other than buy the house) she’s not being productive.
I get it. If you own XYZ corporation, you own everything the employees produce: widgets, patents, copyrights, or whatever else. If someone comes up with the cure for cancer, you get all the profit from selling the cure. The employees gets none of it. If someone comes up with a better way of making widgets, you get the profit fro that as well.
This is true even if you didn’t know you even had an employee working on the cure for cancer, or a better widget. In fact, it’s true even if you didn’t know you owned XYZ corporation.
LinusK,
You are correct. About 25 years ago corporations removed the link between ‘productivity’ and wages. The justification is that corporate capital underlies the productivity increase as opposed to greater effort by the employees.
Today wages are based on national standards that are determined by polling organizations.
Crane
This doesn’t make any sense. A person can own land, they can own an apple tree, they can own an apple, and they can own an apple seed. You could also have two different people, one owns the land the other owns the tree. I’m beginning to think the real issue here is that you are working off a definition of ownership that differs from every other human on the planet.
But I really want to get back to the issue of timing. You described Jonas Salk as enormously productive, but I don’t understand the when. From 1938 until 1957 he was an unproductive researcher producing nothing, then one day the human trials of his vaccine prove effective and he becomes enormously productive, having produced a very important vaccine.
To celebrate he goes for walk, sits down on a park bench, then suddenly he’s someone that used to be a productive researcher. Fuck you Salk, what have you done for us lately? All those lives saved means nothing once he sits down on that bench. Help me out here, at what point in his timeline does he go from unproductive, to productive, and back to unproductive?
We have the same problem with the farmer. He plants an apple seed and then waits 5 years. During that time he produces nothing, nada, zilch. And although he may do some work (watering, pruning, hand pollinating each individual flower, etc) he hasn’t produced anything and therefore receives zero income.
Then one day an apple appears, and the farmer finally feels productive. But according to you, the only productive person is the one that picks the apple ie labour. The person responsible for providing the tree is irrelevant and deserves none of the profit, or as you put it as little as possible. In your world, the person that picks the apple is the one that produced an apple, and therefor the one that deserves income.
Now to be fair, you did say that taking care of the tree counted as work, but you’ll notice that it doesn’t produce any revenue, and therefor doesn’t produce income. Do you see the disconnect yet? If the farmer hires a grounds-keeper you would define that person as productive, and therefor worthy of income. But where is that income supposed to come from? The farmer doesn’t get any income, why would the grounds-keeper?
I also want to point out that there is no guarantee that a seed will ever become an apple. The farmer took a {gasp} risk {/gasp} planting an apple seed, in the hopes of some day having apples. And while he waited those 5 long years, the plot of land couldn’t be used for much of anything. It was tied up in growing a tree. The farmer had to make a choice about what seed to plant. He could have planted a tomato and had fruit in the first year. He could have planted a pecan and waited more than ten.
Collectively, we as a capitalist society allow the farmer to “own” not only the tree but also the apples it produces. The farmer is then entitled to sell the apples and receive income, something you seem to be okay with. The farmer can also sell the tree and receive income (or give it to someone on a park bench). But here we have a wrinkle: how much is the tree worth? The farmer paid $0.01 for the seed. So is the tree only worth $0.01? Any number higher than that will be considered {gasp}capital gains{/gasp}.
Year after year this tree will continue to produce apples. The farmer may not even need to do much (although worms are a major concern). He could quite literally put a park bench in his orchard and sit there watching the tree produce apples for him. If placed right an apple might fall right into his lap. How dare he receive an apple while sitting on a park bench!
You’re right. I was going to say, so far as I know, if you own the land, you own the trees. (Anyway, that’s my understanding of how that works.) But perhaps that’s not the case, or maybe the laws are different in different places; and anyway laws are subject to change. And you can certainly own apples or apples seeds.
Whatever time he spent developing the vaccine, he was doing something productive. If he decided to retire afterwards, and spend his time doing nothing, then good for him. Personally, I enjoy doing unproductive things, and spend as much time doing them as possible.
But I wouldn’t say, “Fuck you, Salk.”
I’d say, “Good job curing polio Dr. Salk. Enjoy your retirement!”
But he is being productive: he’s planting seeds, watering, pruning, and otherwise making sure they thrive. But that’s the thing about being productive. You can be productive without an income, and you can be unproductive with an income. In fact, you can be anti-productive (destroying the work of others) and still get an income.
But I never said that. In fact, I said the opposite. This is me, from two posts up: ***Whoever is responsible for producing the apples - whether it’s by planting seeds, irrigating, or whatever, is responsible for producing the apples. Even hiring people (and/or overseeing their work) is a form of production (management).
I don’t understand what you mean by “providing” the tree. I already said the person you plants it is productive. Are you talking about someone else?
I don’t understand your point here. My argument is that you can do something productive without getting income. That seems to be what you’re saying, too. If so, we’re in agreement.
I think your point is that farmers have to make decisions about what to grow, that there’s risk involved in any decision, and that the decision about what to grow is important. I agree with all that.
I think you’re misunderstanding my argument. You seem to think I’m arguing a person who invests in the future is doing something lazy, or that being lazy is evil. I’m not asserting either thing. I’m asserting that income and productivity are not the same. Or, to put it differently, you can’t measure a person’s productivity by his income, or his income by his productivity.
I’d also say (although this isn’t strictly part of the thread) the whole point of increasing productivity is to allow more people to do more things they like, and fewer things they don’t like.
If the day comes when we have robots who can do everything, I say “hurray!” That means all of us can spend our time doing what we like, rather than things we don’t like: picking apples, or mulching compost, or driving trucks, or whatever. (Unless you like doing those things, in which case you could go on doing them, if you like.)
My point is that the billionaire class is not particularly productive, yet enjoy a disproportionate share of what everybody else produces. The counter-argument - that billionaires super-productive, and therefore ‘deserve’ their status - is not only factually wrong, but morally corrosive.
Potato potato. What you’re really saying is that he is no longer productive, that there is no residual productivity. Earlier you said saving a life is productive, whenever someone received Salk’s polio vaccine it only seems fair to give Salk a bit of credit. Perhaps 0.01 units of productivity for ever shoot administered? Why should he cease to be productive simply because he’s not actively researching? His work was built upon by numerous other researchers, isn’t that worth even a little bit of productivity?
Alright then, maybe we’re making progress. Could we consider providing financing as something that is productive? Farming is a very capital intensive activity, and we already agreed that there is no income generated during the 5 years the farmer is waiting for an apple. The farmer needs to eat, he needs to pay his employees, he needs to buy supplies. I asked before if money/cash could be considered a tool, or perhaps a resource. So what if someone provides the funding to keep the farm operational during the 5 years it isn’t generating any revenue. Could we consider that person to ultimately be responsible for producing the apples?
Sure you can, well not you. The rest of us do it all the time. What you’re really trying to say is that you disagree with how OTHER PEOPLE define productivity. And so you start with a list of people you like (firefighters, teachers, farmers) and try to define them as productive. Then you go through a list of people you don’t like (landlords, bankers, stock brokers) and define them as unproductive (or now anti-productive). Then you line up their income and proclaim the system broken. To put it bluntly, capitalism doesn’t give a shit who you think is productive.
Yes, I know, because this is what they 8th thread with exactly the same goal. The problem is that your’e trying to define productivity in such a way as to prove your thesis. You don’t think the billionaire class is particularly productive, well too bad, capitalism doesn’t give a shit what you think.
When a 16 year old writes an iPhone app that sells millions of copies he will receive millions of dollars, and at no point will he or the millions of users ever stop and ask if you approve. It would have been nice if he had provided that app for free like Salk. It would be even nicer if those millions of users gave $1 to their local school instead.
The fact that you refer to it as the billionaire class says it all. But what you fail to realize is that they are the ones responsible for providing the metaphorical apple tree, not the idiot that shows up late to help pick.
Here it is again: “Whoever is responsible for producing the apples - whether it’s by planting seeds, irrigating, or whatever, is responsible for producing the apples.”
Now who do you think is actually responsible for producing all the things we have in our society? The guy on the factory floor putting part A into part B? Or the owners who provide a factory full of equipment and supplies?
No, I’m saying once someone is no longer productive he’s no longer productive. The things he’s produced don’t necessarily disappear.
In Salk’s case, the cure for polio outlived him, and its “residual productivity” is indefinite.
While Salk’s income from eliminating polio was modest, Dick Fuld’s income from bankrupting Lehman’s was half a billion dollars.
Salk’s work depended on a great number of other scientists, perhaps including Edward Jenner, who helped eradicate smallpox.
They didn’t make money either from curing polio either.
That doesn’t mean they were unproductive, just that there’s little connection between productivity and income.
Yes.
No. “Providing funding” is only one factor in the production of the apples, not the “ultimate” one.
Actually, I said that landlords are productive a few posts up. Bankers provide an important service (just not the "ultimate one), and brokers serve as middle-men, who put buyers and sellers together. That’s often (although not always) a productive service.
Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about what anyone thinks (or about anyone) because it’s concept (and a poorly defined one), not a person.
This isn’t Davos, or Congress, or the Federal Reserve. Nobody outside these threads cares what anyone here thinks.
You didn’t say what the app was, but let’s say it was something like “Angry Birds”. It’ll give some people some pleasure for a while. But whether it makes a one dollar, a million dollars, or a billion dollars, its productivity is the same. The income, on the other hand, depends on the nature and rules of the marketplace: things like delivery systems and copyright law, for example. And whether the 16 year old works for someone else, who therefore owns what he produces.
You haven’t supplied facts, arguments, or anything else to back up this statement, so all I can say is I disagree: it’s the people producing the apples, the cars, the houses, and everything else who’re responsible for producing all those things. The billionaire class, on the other hand, produces very little, but takes a wildly disproportionate share of what everyone else produces.
The owners don’t “provide” the factory, the equipment, or the supplies. They were produced by architects, designers, bricklayers, engineers, and other people doing work. Not by owners merely by owning things.
Merely owning something never produced anything.
[QUOTE=LinusK]
The owners don’t “provide” the factory, the equipment, or the supplies.
[/QUOTE]
Did the magic factory, equipment and supplies fairy ‘provide’ and pay for them then? Who paid the ‘architects, designers, bricklayers, engineers, and other people doing work’ to ‘provide’ it all? Did they just spontaneously start building factories, equipment and supplies out of the ether?? I seriously have no idea where you are coming from on all of this except you want to make some artificial distinction between people YOU think are productive verse people you don’t feel are. But you admitted above that there is residual productivity or whatever at continues to accrue after some arbitrary level where you say someone isn’t directly productive anymore…or something. Salk’s polio vaccine continued to do good after he was done with that project and all. So, an owner who provided the capital to build this factory, equipment and supplies should be productive by the same logic.
Right? How is this different? The owner of a factory either provided the capital to make said factory or provided the capital to acquire and operate it (to PAY for all those architects, bricklayers and such).
Can you give a real world example of someone who, in your estimation, merely owns something by never produces anything? Because I can’t grasp what you are getting at here. If I provide the capital to fund operations, I’m ‘merely’ an owner…yet that capital provides the jobs for all those folks you were talking about earlier…and whatever it is my company produces would seem to contradict your assertion here, let alone the jobs I would have also ‘produced’.
And? I’m sure this means something to you but I don’t see the issue or the connection. Salk wasn’t working for himself and he wasn’t self funded (nor did he capitalize the vaccine nor did he cover the other legal fees)…nor did he have the resources to pay for scaling up and distributing his discovery to the millions of children around the world who needed it.
I click on this thread every now and then and am dismayed. If the Board is about Fighting Ignorance, this thread is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Both sides have some validity; it would be enlightening to both sides to “split their differences” and find a common ground. I’ll ask yet again: Is SDMB a Board for fighting ignorance? Or is it a personal debating club? If the former, and someone states a view inarticulately or exaggerated, it is the other’s duty to rephrase the viewpoint in a better way!
For example
Would it not have been helpful in moving the debate forward to acknowledge (if you agree it to be true) that Mr. Fuld’s income was poorly correlated with his production? Indeed, Fuld’s production had negative value both for Lehman Brothers and for U.S. society and the world economy.
And trying to divvy up the value of polio vaccine is too futile to be worthwhile. Many scientists sought vaccines; employees worked for $X they could also have gotten elsewhere. The “entrepreneur” drug companies who developed and manufacutred vaccines were operating in response to demand from governmental and quasi-governmental bodies. The main “risk takers”, in a sense, were the collective bodies politic.
My suggestion for moving the debate forward:
Enunciate a few very specific and well-defined questions about a few specific income-earners or producers and debate those. OP is too diffusive to have easy answers.
