I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

Yes.

But, what about, like, spiritual wealth, man? We're all like, totally bankrupt in the cosmic sense.

I do whatever I want whenever I want to, and as long as I say I'm invested spiritually I'm safe.

I wouldn't call any of that stuff (psp, clothes, etc.) wealth. Only because it strikes me as really weird to do so.

But I would call capital wealth. And capital has most certainly increased over time, as we become able to take advantage of it. For instance, satellite systems certainly constitute capital in our modern society, and they certainly didn't exist in the past. Internet networks, wireless networks, oil adventures, solar energy, etc. are all forms of capital that we couldn't take advantage of hundreds of years ago. Now we can in a meaningful way. Hence, wealth has increased.

(The problem is that it hasn't increased fairly for all classes--the richest man in the world owns telecommunications companies for a reason. :P)

That said, I don't really understand what we are debating here. Marx felt that capitalism would be necessary to establish the systems to properly make use of capital before a society could transition to socialism, so it's hardly something that's controversial on the right or left.

You just moved from discussing capitol to commodities. That was my point. Control over capital constitutes wealth, imo. Wealth allows you to take advantage of commodities. But commodities only constitute wealth insofar as they allow you to take advantage of capital.

Though, like I said, the average person is in a much better position with regards to capital than they were 150 years ago. Only the bottom bracket (such as the homeless) are really unchanged.

The telecommunications companies are rich because they have extreme control over one specific form of capital that's become a core part of modernity. What they charge only changes how that wealth scales (and charging nothing would constitute potential wealth). But the people who have a cell phone don't actually have any more wealth than the money they use to make use of the capital. The cell itself is a commodity, not wealth. Well, it's not a large source of wealth (it does have some resale value).

TBH I was just making a smart-*** remark.

This is part of what I'm questioning as well. What does a wealth gap really mean? And is that the most important thing to look at? I don't think so. The fact that a rich person has 1000x as much as a poor person rather than merely having 100x doesn't really affect the poor person at all. What does is whether the poor person can obtain basic necessities and even luxuries. What matters is the relative quality of those things as well. I don't think anyone can honestly argue that the condition of the poor is worse today (in those terms) than in the past.

We have better food (ok, processed is bad, but not-rotten is pretty good), better medicine (even without health insurance), better housing, better transportation, greater comfort, greater luxuries, and frankly a whole lot of things that the rich, much less the poor could not have dreamed of having just a century ago.


Why then insist on focusing on the distribution of wealth within the economy itself? Why does this matter? I just don't get the whole "I'm going to ignore my actual condition and compare it relative to someone else instead" position. It makes no sense to me.

With in the context of "relative wealth". Don't lose sight of the issue being debated here.



Nope. I even explained how net economic growth occurs. My point wasn't that economic growth never occurred, but that it occurred slowly enough and via methods that generally didn't directly impact the relative wealth question we're discussing that it could be largely ignored.

A nobleman who owned title to a large estate and surrounding lands gained control of the bounty of those lands. It could be correctly stated that the whole net sum produced on those lands was relatively fixed. It could thus be argued that if the nobleman takes a larger share of that bounty (makes himself more wealthy), then the consequence was increased poverty for those ho lived on and worked on his lands. This is the state of economics that existed more or less unchanged since man first started building cities and land titles and whatnot (a few thousand years). This was certainly the economic system with which Marx was familiar.

The industrial revolution changed that in one very obvious way: The rich guy who opens up a widget factory can gain a massively greater share of the wealth generated by the factory without actually making the people working in the factory any more poor. He pays them a set wage of $X/hour. Prior to industrialization, each worker produced some number of widgets over that time. Enter industrialization and each worker can be retrained to use the widget making machines and thus produce 10x as many widgets in the same amount of time. He's still paid the same wage, but the owner of the factory makes 10x as much, right?


That's the "problem" with Marx was talking about. He saw the owner gaining 10x more, but the worker making the same. His experience with economics was that such a great disparity, even if it appears on the surface to have no negative for the worker *must* actually have one in some way. The workers wage should become less worth relatively speaking, or some other effect would make his relatively low wage cause him harm. And if we were living in a past age where we just worked the laborers harder or longer hours to increase production, he'd have been right. But industrialization really did change economics in ways which the economists of the day had a hard time predicting.

The biggest change is that due to the increased volume of production now possibly from the same amount of labor, the predicted deflation of the value of wages those economists would expect was more than offset by the decrease in cost and increase in availability of products and services which average working people could not afford prior to that point. Suddenly, finely crafted (well, somewhat finely crafted) furniture was available to average people and not just the rich. Then things like running water, indoor plumbing and toilets, and automobiles, then washing machines, radios, telephones, TVs, computers, the internet, cell phones, and a host of other things became steadily available, not just to the richest people, but to even the modestly salaried workers.


He envisioned a future where capitalism would cause industrialization to focus wealth on the producers and poverty on the workers, with the workers lives getting progressively worse until eventually they would have to rise up as one and reshape the whole system. The reality, however, is that this didn't happen. The condition of the workers did not get worse. It got better. Even in the absence of unions acting on the assumption that if they didn't intervene things would get worse, things didn't get worse. They got better. It didn't happen all at once though. The positives took time.

What did happen is that enterprising people pointed at Marx's warnings, pointed at the dollar wealth gap (while ignoring the quality of life improvements going on all around them), and convinced people that if they didn't take some kind of drastic action, then the inevitable disaster for the working people would occur. They scared the people into supporting unions in some countries, adopting draconian laws in others, and in some into overthrowing their governments in some form of communist revolutions.

All of those things were unnecessary. The danger wasn't real. But it was (and still is) a means to gain power for those who can convince others to fear what might happen and give them power to help fight it. And I can forgive Marx for failing to see the truth. But it still boggles my mind that otherwise intelligent people still fall for the whole "If you don't join with us, those evil rich people will take everything!!!" arguments. The very process makes no sense. The economic system largely requires consumption of that increased production to work. It's in the wealthy's best interest to make sure that there are sufficient people with sufficient buying power in the economy to buy the things their factories make, right? Think about that. They want to employ as many people as possible, but they want them employed making useful things that other people will want to buy.


There's just no logical motive for the players in the free market to take everything away from everyone else and make them poor. I will point out for comparison though, that those who espouse socialist or communist systems absolutely do have a motive to make as many people poor as possible. It's their route to power and control. The free market tends to free those within it. And that's a threat to some people.

In an immediate sense no. A system that encourages and increases wealth disparity will have a long term negative impact on the people at the low end of the scale, and more importantly will push more people into that low end.

To use the lack of any immediate impact when comparing two people is a strawman, as this is not the problem.

Edited, Oct 24th 2011 6:25pm by Xsarus

You joke, but there's something to that. What good is wealth if it doesn't lead to prosperity? How can we have prosperity without happiness? That's why other countries take pride in their "gross national happiness" kicking our GDP in the ***.

This is exactly what Marx believed. But he was demonstrably wrong. That wealth disparity *didn't* cause long term negative impact on those at the low end of the scale. What it actually did was cause absolutely unprecedented prosperity and "real" quality of life gains.



And if I hadn't explained in detail how Marx's theories assumed a longer term growing harm which never actually manifested, you'd have a point. This is why I argue that Marx can be forgiven. He could not know for sure what would happen over the next century or so. He can be forgiven for so completely getting it wrong. The question though is what rationale those who have the benefit of having seen a century and a half of the greatest prosperity gain among the poor in human history use to continue to declare that his predictions were right *and* to justify some kind of action to prevent the things which haven't happened from happening?


It's pretty darn ridiculous, right?

Edited, Oct 24th 2011 5:36pm by gbaji