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income inequality
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Daily Alchemy: a question to think on together
5h ago“If you suddenly had much more money than your neighbors, what would you feel pulled to do with it, and why?”
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this makes me think: I'm not a history buff, but a few years ago I read The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant, and it changed my mind about income inequality—I used to think, "As long as the lives of the lowest are improving, why does the gap matter?" But then the Durants... - reddeЯ...
Lets take a closer look at some of the claims in this post. Speaking as someone who has lived below the poverty line my entire life, the central arguments here completely miss the reality of what it’s actually like to survive on the bottom rung.... Is capitalism broken?: The Story
Two scoreboards, both true In 1990, roughly one human being in three lived in extreme poverty. By 2019, fewer than one in ten did — the steepest collapse of material misery in recorded history, and it ran through markets, not around them.... How do you avoid violent redistribution of wealth?: Structural reformers
The original extraction In 1879, Henry George published Progress and Poverty and asked a question mainstream economics has spent 145 years not answering: why does poverty persist alongside growth? His answer was land.... How do you avoid violent redistribution of wealth?: Redistributionists
The napkin Piketty published the number that mattered on a napkin: r > g. The rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. It has exceeded it in every century for which we have data except 1914 to 1975, when two world wars and sixty million dead temporarily... How do you avoid violent redistribution of wealth?: Gradualists
The slow way Look, I know what Sweden sounds like at this point. I know we cite it constantly. But here is why we keep going back: in 1951, Sweden’s top marginal rate was 58 percent, union membership stood at 70 percent, and the Gini coefficient was among the lowest in the... Why do racial disparities persist?: Institutional path dependency
The compound interest problem Take $24,000 and $188,000. Go back to 1960. Apply the S&P 500’s historical average return to both figures. Compound for sixty-five years. You land within striking distance of the current gap. We are economists.... Why do racial disparities persist?: The Story
$24,000 and $188,000 That is the median wealth of the Black and white families the Federal Reserve has been tracking since 1989. The ratio has not meaningfully changed. The number is not in dispute.... Why does wealth keep concentrating?: Austrian school
The Sunday heist On March 15, 2020, the Federal Reserve cut rates to zero and announced unlimited quantitative easing. Within two years, the balance sheet swelled from $4.2 trillion to $9 trillion. The S&P rose 40 percent. Home prices rose 34 percent.... Why does wealth keep concentrating?: Technologists
Thirteen to 145,000 In 2012, Instagram had thirteen employees and was acquired for $1 billion. Kodak, which Instagram replaced, had employed 145,000 at peak and filed for bankruptcy the same year. Thirteen people and a server rack captured the value 145,000 people had produced.... Why does wealth keep concentrating?: Democratic socialists
The steelworker’s math In 1970, a steelworker in Youngstown earned enough to buy a house, send two kids to college, and retire with a pension. He needed a union card and forty hours.... - hotrod213...
I'm a big student of history- 200BC-600AD mostly- and there were a lot of empires/leaders/kings/countries in a lot better shape than ours is now that folded.... revolted.... disintegrated.......