I have an acquaintance whose main method of argument is shouting out names of logical fallacies without pointing out to the person he's arguing with where and how it applies.
This list is helpful as a guide to spot errors in reasoning. It is not helpful as a tool to facilitate discussion.
If you use this reference, do us all a favor and discuss how the fallacy applies in the current discussion, and treat the person with some respect at least.
It all depends on what you want to optimize for. But for me, and I suspect a lot of people, the happiness of society seems like a decent starting point (let's assume for the moment that most Americans / 1st world citizens are at the point where base survival is not in question)
The current rate of inequality is massively inefficient if you're trying to optimize happiness. The bottom 2 quintiles of Americans control so little wealth that keeping food on the table is their primary concern. Meanwhile, an extremely small and shrinking proportion of the population control an outsized amount of wealth, to the point where it's not reasonably usable in an efficient way by those people.
It's like saying that the proper way to divide 100 loaves of bread between 100 people is to give 1 person 95 loaves and every other person a slice of bread. No one is starving, but you're making 1 person very happy at the expense of 99 others.
The bread analogy doesn't make any sense. Inequality is a relative metric, not an absolute one. If I only need one loaf of bread to survive, who cares if my neighbor has 100 or 1000?
That depends on whether one loaf (my example was slice, which is maybe a bit more evocative) is the bare minimum to survive or enough to be fully satiated. At that level, it (and wealth inequality) can be viewed as an absolute metric. I absolutely care if my neighbour has 100 loaves if I'm emaciated and unable to think about anything but hunger, even if I'm eating enough to survive.
My argument is, for the bottom 40% of Americans, it is at that level. The fact that the top 20% holds a vastly disproportionate share of the wealth isn't bad because the 40% are losing a dick-measuring contest, it's bad because the lack of wealth of the 40% has a real effect on their happiness.
If the true intention of 'inequality' arguments is to highlight the plight of the emaciated and hungry, then it certainly doesn't come across. I don't know where you're getting the 40% number, but 40% of Americans are not 'unable to think about anything but hunger.' 14.5% of Americans are below the poverty line (that's about the same % of people on SNAP). 5% of Americans are considered 'extremely food insecure.'
I understand how '85% of Americans are doing just fine' isn't great political rhetoric, but don't you think it's disingenuous to pretend that 'inequality' arguments which mostly highlight what % of wealth the wealthy have compared to everyone else is really about the poor, and not what it's really about, which is soaking the rich and middle class for higher taxes? I mean, after all, that's why phrases like 'the 1%' exist in the first place, to create some sort of camaraderie of outrage amongst the 'proletariat' to pursue a particular economic policy, right?
In any event, if people who truly cared about the poor advocated for solutions to poverty, instead of focusing on 'inequality', they might find their arguments fall on less deaf ears.
Do you have any evidence that that will work? Can you point to a situation in history when a 'massive retroactive redistribution of wealth' has solved poverty?
True, but 'do not covet thy neighbor's goods' is also one of the oldest traditions we have. There's a reason such moral imperatives have developed in our culture; they are more often than not destructive.
I think the problem here is that people with a single loaf are looking around and seeing some guy with 1000 loaves of bread on the news saying that the fact that he has to pay 10 loaves to the government is immoral and that poor people would be fine with half a loaf.
Tax cuts and the cuts in government programs that come with them directly affect those with the least. Telling people not to covet and not actually addressing inequality is how you get things like the French Revolution.
You won't find an argument with me that the tax system should be fairer, or at least have fewer loopholes (fair is obviously a matter of opinion). But note that we have moved the goalposts here from a discussion about economic opportunity/inequality/what have you to a discussion about government policy and taxes...so I'm unclear if the original point is still being addressed.
It's in the article. In the 60's the CEO-worker pay ratio was 20:1. Now it's 354:1.
Do you think that this kind of disproportion doesn't affect the way the whole system works? I expect the voice of a CEO to be heard more than that of a ordinary worker, and at 20:1 maybe I can sort of keep up. But at 354:1, how will I ever keep up? That's stopping the CEOs of the world from banding up in a gang that distorts how democracy works up to a point where I don't matter at all?
Well, one possible reason is that we may have an inbuilt sense of "fairness" - capachin monkeys have been demonstrated in experiments to get angry if they get unfairly rewarded. So might not people feel angry in the same circumstances?
A valid criticism of socialism for running societies (rather than institutions) is that it doesn't align well with "human nature" - but it might also be the case where the "winner takes all" aspects of capitalism also have similar problems.
It's key that monkeys, like humans, object to unfairness--not 'inequality.' Turns out that relative contribution matters a lot to how monkeys/people judge rewards.[1]
But inequality arguably leads to unfairness though - is it "fair" that someone who is successful can get better chances for their kids through better environment, schooling and connections?
I'd argue that inequality pretty much always leads to unfairness.
Edit: And I say that as someone who pays for their kids to be privately educated at a prestigious private school because it is obvious that doing so gives them an unfair advantage.
And extreme economic inequality leads to people using their money to control politics and the media to stack the system in their favour. It's not simply the inequality that is the problem its what the rich choose to do with their money that is causing problems.
I'm not talking about the rich as a class. I'm in the UK where we have an unhappy combination of remarkably venal politicians (with some notable exceptions), media interests that are either overtly political (e.g. News International and the Daily Mail and related newspapers) or selected from a rather narrow privileged and biased group (e.g. BBC).
I'm not a Labour supporter - but the fact that a hard left party is within striking distance of winning the UK general election (despite the horrendously biased media coverage) shows that there things have got so bad for many people that extremely far left wing policies (by US standards) are starting to look attractive to an awful lot of people.
Not all rich people abuse their positions to obtain disproportionate political influence - but to get disproportionate political influence you have to be rich. Wealth isn't the problem - abuse of the power that wealth can bring is the problem.
Edit: Labour's motto of "For the many not the few" sums up the current political mess rather nicely.
How is society becoming more feudal? I've heard this from so many people and the evidence doesn't seem to support it. For example, ~64% of Americans own a home. What % of feudal peasants owned a shovel, let alone a home?
Never said that. But does the widespread ability of most Americans to finance a house, a car, and in general a better standard of living, without having to be rich, powerful, in the right caste or social strata not far trump feudal sharecropping/indentured servitude, one-step-removed-from-slavery conditions for a vast portion of the populace?
The claim was that society is becoming more feudal. I would like to see some evidence that is the case.
Not necessarily, as historical Communist societies show. It just could be more of the lower class, nearly zero middle class, and, unavoidably, some comrades that are much more equal than the rest of the population.
Reducing inequality down to the point of literal equality was shown to lower the quality of life.
That QM is random to us is no more correct on its face than a dice roll being random. A dice roll follows rules of classical physics and given enough information about the state of the system we can accurately predict /exactly/ how the die will land. It ceases to be random as we increase knowledge.
That QM has a limit to the knowledge we can acquire within the confines of our observations does not indicate some philosophical "true randomness."
