Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think (Scientific American)

Spare me the sensational rhetoric. 40 million of this country's residents are immigrants. They're pretty much starting off at the bottom of the economic ladder due to a lack of social connections, cultural identity, education, and other factors that would give them familiarity with America's economic structures. Many of these immigrants are not afforded legal protection because they are illegal immigrants - that too may play a role in this disparity of wealth.

It would also seem that culture, geography, gender, age and education should factor into these kinds of studies and statements on wealth distribution. Anyone surprised that disparity exists on such a scale when these studies factor in such variables? Actually, if we were interpret these studies based on the content of the Scientific American article (which has more to do with perception of wealth distribution than wealth distribution) then none of these issues are (hardly) ever addressed. They don't seem to address any issue beyond just the distribution of income against the whole population. Hardly scientific but very American to gloss over such major details.

So go ahead and label me skeptical when I say that I doubt that one of the wealthiest countries in the world (a different kind of disparity?) will address wealth disparity "through violence in the streets". Besides, the article mainly dealt with people's perception of wealth distribution. So it's worse than thought, what's the big deal?

 

um last time i checked americans dont vote. i think turnout is like 20-40 percent of adults. there should be an app where you can check if someone went to the polls and call them out for b****ing and whining without voting. by radical and direct action if you mean protests and strikes and boycotts then yea that would help.

 

you know what happened in europe and russia 70-100 years ago? they used to be wealthy and educated but when 10 out of 100 get most of the food every year and even fewer hold the keys to the pantry where theres even more food, things get violent like bolshevik revolt or weimer republic. asians and whites who go to fancy colleges like A&M and harvard are getting the best of it. and the big deal is, you dont know what real hunger means and what my neighborhood [2nd ward] and 90 percent of us would do if they saw how y'all live. we watching every day though..

 

And also beware of the 'grass is always greener on the other side'. One of the US's greatest strength is entrepreneurship. Just look at the stuff that has come out of US: Facebook, Linkedin, Uber, Youtube, etc etc. The rest of the world would be envious of being able to come up with these innovations. Even here in Europe, the best city for the most successful startups is Stockholm, where Skype, Spotify, Mojang are the most successful.

Obviously there are always things the US can do better in terms of income inequality, and it should be addressed. But be careful of stifling innovation. Heck just look at France, or Italy. Workers are so entrenched precisely because they wanted to protect jobs. Until 2006, you needed a notary just to buy a used car in Italy.

 

First off the stock market is NOT owned by the majority of Americans. Less than half of Americans own any equities even indirectly.

Secondly I am using a extremely simplified example call it blunt if you want but Apple is just on of the many many culprits in the cash hoarding, excessive profit making, slave wage paying, job outsourcing middle class destroyers.

 

That's a new fact I never knew wow. Thanks for that link.

 

I work in tech and I can tell you "innovation" as you define it entails the elimination of most middle class jobs and quite a few upper class ones as well.

I constantly hear or say "scaling with technology instead of scaling with people."

What that means is: how do we eliminate the most laboursome aspect of most business models: paying a lot of people to do very little?

This could mean using natural language processing to eliminate the need for lawyers to parse through legal documents.

It could mean artificial intelligence that will eliminate medical specialists and travel agents alike as soon as we trust it.

Now, I'm a big believer in new freedoms giving rise to new desires, and that eventually we'll have a many-to-many networked economy with very little scarcity for base needs--if we play our cards right.

But in between, it's going to get messy. "Stifling innovation" isn't about trying to maintain some rigid notion of full employment. It's about confronting a reality where capital is trying to eliminate most if not all labour.

Look at how many employees Facebook has vs any other Fortune 500. That's what the future will look like with unstifled innovation: one engineer who can automate what thousands of people used to do.

 

I think the best way to fight is with money. And if a big percentage of people would only spend on necessity it could put a hurting on big businesses.

Black folks for instance spend around a trillion a year and a good amount of that is on bu77shyt. Do you know what type of hit Nike would take if black folks stopped buying their products. But many people have terrible spending habits in this country because they buy a bunch of stuff they don't need and or live beyond their means. It's many people with house hold incomes of $75k-$100k a year and live check to check because they have terrible spending habits and or live beyond their means.

This country is a nation of consumer slaves and American citizens sleepwalked right into this situation.

Wal-Mart doesn't pay their fair share of taxes because they get major tax breaks.. And with all that money they make many of their employees are on government assistance. Which mean the taxpayers have to help take care of their employees they under pay to go along with the tax breaks Wal-Mart receives.

The Waltons helped destroy small businesses and F over taxpayers and got filthy rich doing it... And they're not the only ones.

 

best way to fight is to organize and raise money and talk about things people dont want to talk about. consumer slaves only happen when you afraid of death. it feels good when you shop for a new truck or new tools. the hunt keeps you from thinking about the end. i met a few buddha and hindoo followers who are not into buying everything in sight. most blacks are missing that bigger sense of wonder and hope. they listen to [c]rap music, watch bet, think they will play in nba or nfl, buy jordans, deal drugs and get caught, sit unemployed on welfare, and cycle goes on.

 

you right. idk how to fight ballot access for 3rd Ps. maybe target a weak candidate from gop or dem who wants $ badly and will talk about 3rd parties more?

 

the problem with you tech ppl is you not talking about the big issues. there too many damn ppl on this planet. i go to grocery store and machines for self checking out do all the work and 60 registers have no one behind them. tell your boss you want to tweet about overpopulation and well see how that goes.

 

I am my own boss now (lol), and I not only tweet about this ****, I write and blog profusely about it as well.

Not exactly sure what you mean by not talking about the big issues. I'd look into Watsi, KhanAcademy, Theranos, Watson's medical applications and Github projects before I'd make such a rash judgement about the entire sector.

If you want a better condom, you could always start your own thing.

I myself don't think it's a great situation, but I'm not going to lie about what "innovation" really means by and large.

 

So what is the solution? If tech and automation eliminate a majority of the blue collar jobs or heck white collar jobs like lawyers as you mentioned how do you keep society going because this is the problem I see out there.

 

Assuming humanity survives the current rapacious consumption of resources, the solution lies in infusing time with purpose. All of the factors align to a post-scarcity material economy if we do manage that: the rise of networked individual industrialization with its roots in open source software and hardware, the need to optimize resource efficiency to survive, and the gradual elimination of "marketing"-driven wants.

Assuming you believe in some variant of Mazlow's hierarchy of needs, most humans will tend towards self-actualization once given the choice.

I see some probable situations, and I won't be stupid enough to assign weighting, predictability or probabilities to any.

1) Humanity is consumed by its own greed.

2) Humanity survives on its current pace by rapidly accelerating space research and travel. Nevertheless, in a few short decades or maybe even centuries, humanity is once again consumed by its own greed when faced like Cabot was with a sea of trout, the illusion of plenty kills the drive to deal with scarcity.

3) The economy shifts to time instead of money after a sublimation of excess material wants. Advances in nanotechnology, computing, and human augmentation allow people to live comfortably enough and people will either devote their lives to leisure, self-actualization, or the creation of new knowledge and legacies. A new economy will rise based on these new demands.

Any solution really lies in preventing the first two scenarios, and infusing your life with purpose and finding what self-actualization means for you in the third.

In the short term, that means advancing resource efficiency and providing for a strong welfare state to buffer people from technology-driven shocks.

In the long term, that means finding the most important way you can grow yourself and others.

 

the irony of automation is that it actually turns out replacing local blue-collar workers is one of the hardest tasks for capital. It's easy to automate document processing across a scale of millions of millions of documents but it's a lot harder to create full-out robots with the capacity to replicate what plumbers or janitors do.

the whole shabang about automating cashiers feels to me to be a desperate last-ditch attempt at propping up the unworkable business model that is the modern fast food chain