Yes, I was initially confused by the title and the content talking about two different things. I've edited my post with the correct numbers now. Even the household numbers are wrong, and the taxes and benefits numbers are very wrong.
The issue is that income/wealth compounds over time. If people in the bottom 40% have very little to invest, they have nothing that compounds. They dont even have an opportunity to risk anything, or make a better decision.
The prices of the essentials are largely out of any individual's control. So any lack of ability to save / invest beyond spending on those is also out of their control. It's a vicious cycle, where excess wealth compounds, and income needed to exist dries up.
Also the rich often see a larger return to their investments than poor people, so having wealth seems to aide in your ability to make more money. Exactly the sort of thing that you implied was unjust.
And your other points about mobility I agree with and are addressed in notes on the site.
What is the issue with wealth compounding? The bottom 40% have a very high value asset -- their agency and actions in the real world. (Working, starting a business (however small), self sufficiency et al.).
The prices of true essentials are exceedingly small. Essential is something like sharing a room with someone, eating rice beans frozen veg mix (ie very inexpensively), wearing clothes from thrift stores, exercising outside and using a library card, medicaid. Everything beyond that is, technically, optional.
Having wealth aiding the overall return doesn't negate my point. Using wealth to get an unjust return does. An example of a better return would be hiring a financial advisor that (somehow) creates better returns using smarter allocations. An example of an unjust return would be creating a monopoly, buying a politician, or extracting profits from unpriced externalities (pollution and bailouts to name a couple). (These do happen in the USA, and I'm all for ending them!)
There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating).
I do, however, like Scott Galloway's point that we need to find new ways to get the rich to spend their money, we need the poor to start 10000 businesses that gratify the rich and extract their money. Right now they're mostly accumulating it and bidding up investible assets (eg look athe P/E multiple of the S&P 500) .
You can configure what you believe to be the correct price of essentials on the site. The defaults are BLS group average spending data.
"There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating)."
Do you see how there is nothing stopping insane accumulation of wealth/power? (assuming returns continue to accelerate in this manner?)
There's nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth. I fully agree that Citizens united (not capitalism) has created a distortion and corrupting force in the market place.
It's not the wealth that is evil/wrong/unjust/immoral. It's the use of it to corrupt power.
But there's evidence that just having that inequality (not an absolute amount of wealth, but vastly more wealth than normal people) does, indeed, distort human perception and mindset in a way that leads to...well, where we are today.
The problem is with wealth comes the power to change the rules to your advantage. This is already happening for instance the large difference between capital gains tax rates and earned income ones.
Wealth is power, you're too narrowly focusing on specific applications of this power (like your mention of Citizens United) but if that wasn't a thing there'd be innumerous other ways for wealth to be leveraged as power.
Power accumulation is inherently unjust and immoral, it corrupts, the utopic benevolent benefactor is extremely rare in real life because power accumulation begets power, those who have it do not want to lose it.
Also wealth accumulation is inherently unjust even in your framework of meritocracy, its accumulation and compounding nature is not meritocratic.
Most new businesses fail. Then the poor are even deeper in the debt hole.
Some people can/should start businesses, but a lot of people are just not entrepreneurs - I include myself in that group. I realize that there must be ways to extract money from this economy - lots of people are doing it - but I don't think any of my ideas would end up doing that (they're generally too niche), more likely I'd end up losing a bunch of money trying to do that.
You're making a lot of assumptions of what I meant.
Gen-z seems to get this well, a lot of them are starting micro businesses where with very little capital besides their own labor and computer/phone they already own.
Getting a side hustle to $2000 a month can be the difference between trajectory to bankruptcy to trajectory to millionaire.
It's in that environment they're learning the skills that take them to the next level, when leverage/debt is something their equipped to dabble in.
For your case, if you do want to be an entrepreneur, perhaps read the book $100 startup? Its 14 years old at this point...
Housing and healthcare are both mentioned and covered.
> sharing a room with someone
> medicaid
in the top 10 CoL metros one can share a room with another person for about $600 a month.
I note that on your links the poverty wage is pretty close to the minimum wage. I'd contend that since contraceptives are widely available, including abortion in many places (or charities helping people get them in other states), we should expect the bottom quintile to not be adding to their expenses.
You should try stepping out of that academic ivory tower occasionally and visit a run down bar/pub in a working-class town and talk to the people who make up most of the population.
The context of the convo is the bottom quintile of earners.
I do think people in the bottom quintile should not have kids (until they remedy their income issues), I do think people in the bottom quintile should take more serious measures to both preserve their cash flow, and to improve their income.
I do think the bottom quintile should not be a "for life" sentence, and to the extent that I'm correct I've shared some paths for them to escape that.
It's definitely worth addressing that the US could use additional social mobility and mixing, but I think we're far from "people cannot move classes if they want to" as well.
>>I do think people in the bottom quintile should not have kids
I have some terrible news for you about birth rates and what this would do to society.
>>until they remedy their income issues
I'd like you to define "work", "necessary work for society to function", "low-skill jobs" and "value" (as it pertains to a human life). I have a feeling we have very different definitions and that leads us to very different conclusions about what people can do.
>>I think we're far from "people cannot move classes if they want to" as well.
Probably because you're not a social scientist/sociologist! We're talking about the bottom quintile, and it's very hard to become part of the upper crust, and it's very hard to leave American poverty[1,2]. But yea, some guy working a blue collar job can probably have kids that have white collar jobs.
> I do think the bottom quintile should not be a "for life" sentence, and to the extent that I'm correct I've shared some paths for them to escape that.
Skimming through your posts in this conversation, I really don't feel like you have.
And I think one part of the problem is you don't seem to have acknowledged that, for the most part, people in this quintile do not have the tools to move out of it by choice, and this is increasingly true as inequality grows (so, for instance, if you were lucky enough—and I do mean "lucky"—to be or know someone who made it out 20, 30, 40 years ago, you cannot assume that similar options remain available today).
When households are already spending literally every penny that comes in to afford rent, food, clothing, heat, medical care...which of those gets sacrificed on the off-chance that it might, some day, be enough to bootstrap themselves up out of that bottom quintile?
No. That is not a realistic or compassionate way to view the situation at all.
The bottom quintile is where many people will be their entire lives, and that is not going to change, so we as a society must ensure that it is a "place" where people can live healthy, comfortable lives, rather than a constantly-stressed squalid scramble.
Really impressive and creative research. I wonder if the leading labs do anything similar with their models? It doenst look like the open source labs do?
Google was at least trying. Wouldn't be surprised if the others were experimenting with it too. The bar is going to be a lot higher now for for any diffusion model to go from experiment to product since it needs to compete with stuff like glm 5.3 flash and Luna on cost/efficiency for a given quality of output, which is not going to be easy. If it was easy Gemini diffusion would have landed - if it requires a bunch of money and effort it has a much higher bar to make it to market, if it requires some clever breakthrough you have no way of knowing where that's going to come from or what it'll look like/if it'll even seem important when it happens
Weak "chain-of-thought" abilities, high error rates and a very bad ability to recover from errors. If they produce a non-sequitur somewhere (which they are highly prone to doing), that global refinement spreads it everywhere like a blood infection superhighway.
Diffusion text models are cool, but they're functionally much less reliable than autoregressive transformers... and man that's really saying something. Right now most research on them is trying to figure out what complementary systems they need to be reasonably useful.
Not comparable. Similar to Neo4j vs LatticeDB. Lattice's goals are simplicity, single file, super easy to start using. Surreal supports embedded mode, but my understanding is it is not a single file. Surreal supports a huge number of data models, Lattice is more focused. Surreal also appears to have a company behind it. Lattice is just me.
If you are looking for something lightweight and simple, choose Lattice. If you are an Enterprise looking for hosting, Enterprise support, and maybe a database that can handle all of your needs instead of a specific one, pick SurrealDB.
I hadn't heard of SurrealDB until your comment though, so take what I have to say here with a grain of salt.
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