Silence can save us
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Ever since my class, “The Practice of Silence,” I am convinced more and
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rap these...
3 weeks ago
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KC Friends
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3 comments:
Why does everyone try to compare the top 1% to everyone else? Think about it. It is the top 1%! Anyone who has taken a statistics course knows that you have to throw the outliers out. They are worthless.
The article compares the top 1% to the bottom 20%. One side includes the Bill Gates and Steve Forbes's of the world. The other side includes millions of homeless people who have no jobs, which is no doubt going to bring the numbers down.
"Hey everybody. I'm from New Scientist. It looks like rich people are making more money than they were 30 years ago, but bums haven't increased their wages at all! It's just like gas atoms!"
Oh really? Those numbers aren't economic indicators. You can't prove a point about economics with those numbers, or with a physics analogy.
"Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank"
No. They don't. They have our economy to thank. It takes money to make money. When you have it, there are a thousand different ways to make more of it with very little effort. When you aren't already rich, the only way to make money is to work for someone who has it. It is really as simple as that.
Is it fair? No. But it works. The rich invest money in businesses in order to get more money. Because of that, the rest of us can have jobs. You can lobby for equal distribution of wealth, but what happens afterwards? What forces are going to keep things equal? Greed and Apathy are both part of human nature and will always cause an unequal distribution of what ever it is we're after.
Why are rich people so greedy? Beats me. But I will say this: their drive for more of what they already have is what keeps things in motion. Another thing I'll say is that I'm greedy too. I just don't happen to be rich. I wonder how many of the bottom 99 percentile of income earners are any different. Greed is bad, but envy is less helpful than greed.
Sorry, I'm just in an argumentative mood today. Who wants to play Apples to Apples?
It is a bit too simple to reduce the disparity between the rich and the poor to Greed and Apathy. It is far more complex than that. It may not be like gas atoms but it is certainly not as easy as just Greed and Apathy.
I didn't really mean it like that. That would be silly to say that all poor people are apathetic and that all rich people are greedy. I don't think that is the case at all. I meant that no matter what economical system you set up, equal distribution of wealth is hard to do when you consider that some people are more apathetic than others, and some people are more greedy than others. There are other differences that I didn't mention that also come into play, but I highlighted greed and apathy because those are the two things that I think make it difficult to share wealth.
My main point though, was that we shouldn't look at the extremes. The top 1% and bottom 1% should always been thrown out of the equations. If you look at the extremes of anything, you'll always get an incorrect picture of the overall.
That transcends economics.
Sorry. I get really worked up when I'm rebutting articles. I raise my expectations for articles like this. I even thought the article did a poor job of hitting on it's own subject line. The difficulty to share wealth wasn't even discussed in the article. Or did I just miss it?
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