64
You have to be kidding, unless you consider wealth a “talent”. The top 1% have massive advantage because their wealth exceeds their needs. The bottom half of earners are living in wage slavery by comparison. The fact is that the wealthy have grown wealthier, and the poor are poorer. It’s math, not talent, that is the cause.
Wealth can never exceed needs. Sorry, that is ridiculous. It can exceed immediate needs, but then wealth provides capital for the needs of others through the wealthy individual’s investments in other enterprises and/or through inheritances being passed down. Allocating wealth to these investments is best done by the individuals holding the wealth, supported by a regulatory regime that makes things like Madoff difficult to impossible. Anyway, your analysis puts the cart “wealth” before the horse “talent”. Wealth doesn’t just show up one day and take up residence with an individual. People can be born into wealth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be equally talented as the individual who generated the wealth originally. It’s “regression to the mean” and it happens everywhere in nature. That said, talents do tend to be correlated due to the fact that subsequent generations are genetically related to the talented individual of earlier days. Other than winning a lottery, how has anyone in this world become wealthy without blood, sweat and tears? Even a Joseph Kennedy worked himself to the bone to get where he wanted to get, regardless of whether his activities were legal.
I agree that automation has had some impact on job security, but I would argue that the decline of unionized labor is a much bigger factor. It goes along with the offshoring of manufacturing. Purchasing power is a
measure of what one can buy with one’s wages, and is down as well. It’s not a problem of technology, it’s a problem of politics and policy.
And why did unionized labor decline? Because technological advances meant that manual labor was more easily replaceable by technology, which gave labor less negotiating power and forced those who in earlier days would have gone into industries utilizing manual labor into industries that required other forms of labor that were less easily unionized. Add to that the fact that in those new industries incentives were put in place so that the most talented (there’s that word again) were provided with compensation packages that rewarded excellence, not union organizing, and the end result is that the people who would have been leading the march on management’s office to demand a union were instead working on their next project to get that big performance bonus and maybe some stock options.
As for your contention that purchasing power as a measure of wages is down, there was a study done by the Dallas Federal Reserve on the number of week’s of a worker’s wage that it took to buy a number of common consumer goods over time. It showed a clear downwardly sloping curve across all categories. Unless you have better data than the Dallas Fed, I would state that you’re just empirically wrong, however much it may intuitively feel like purchasing power has gone down.
Health care costs are massively inflated to cover the costs of insurance administration and billing – most western countries provide equivalent or better healthcare for much less money. It is absurd to blame the cost of treatment, when we don’t address the massive money wasted on administration.
I keep hearing this over and over, but haven’t seen any good data. Plus, the orders of magnitude cost differences that are claimed (what was it, something like 98% lower billing and administration costs?) don’t jibe with either the labor cost differentials between private insurance companies and the government or the relative IT sophistication of private sector companies versus the government sector. Those are two huge factor costs in billing and administration, right? Labor and capital. You’re telling me that government workers get paid 98% less (pick your own number on the cost differential) than private workers? Or that government IT systems are that much more efficient than private sector IT systems? Your argument about cost differentials in billing and administration are the equivalent of saying that the DMV is the most cost-effective way of providing licenses, registering vehicles, etc. If you believe that, fine, but you can’t seriously expect everyone else to share your delusion, however nice it may sound.
Then, as far as the relative cost of treatment versus administration costs, one specialist in the health care field can make as much as ten or fifteen non-specialists. Think of what a brain surgeon or heart surgeon make versus what a medical insurance claims processor makes. Since the ratio of specialists to non-specialists in treating an individual will rarely be 1 to 10 or 1 to 15, the costs of having the specialist involved are actually a larger proportion of the final bill than all of the non-specialists supporting the processing of the billing, at least when direct labor costs are the measurement being made. There are other benefits-related costs that need to be accounted for that are more similar across specialists and non-specialists, e.g. the amount of money it costs a company to process the specialist’s paycheck and the non-specialist’s paycheck are the same.
I simply disagree about the reasons and morality supporting the distribution of wealth. There will always be losers, but there need not be so many losing so much.
Well, you can disagree all you want, since it’s a free country, but you have no facts to back up your disagreement. Put in that context, your disagreement is just stubborn ignorance. Read some facts and think about the logic underlying human interactions (try studying game theory, for example), otherwise you’re just going to be an ineffectual debater against someone who has actually done those things and you’ll end up losing to someone with superior command of those factors (like myself) every time you debate.
Plus, you’re too emotional in your writing. It lacks the crisp logic and smooth transitions from fact to conclusions that my writing exhibits naturally.
