Income gap is a good thing.

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bluefrog

bluefrog

Go Blazers, GO!
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PBS

RICHARD EPSTEIN: What's good about inequality is if, in fact, it turns out that inequality creates an incentive for people to produce and to create wealth, it's a wonderful force for innovation. So let's just go and take somebody like Bill Gates again or any entrepreneur.

Guy earns $50 billion, right? How much consumer welfare has he created by selling products? We can estimate the amount of gains to purchases, because everybody who buys one of his products or one of Steve Jobs' products, in effect, values it more than he receives.

The social gain from inequality to consumers of those goods probably dwarfs the entrepreneurial gain by a factor of 10-1 or 20-1.
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Gates is one side of the coin. He was a producer and clearly directly hired a huge number of workers. Many of his employees got rich since the company had stock options. Indirectly, whole markets and industries were created around his products.

Compared to Soros, who has made a fortune manipulating politics and betting on the markets' response.
 
I just read yesterday where Gates said, basically, that money isn't what motivated him, and that there is no useful difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire because there aren't things to buy that will enrich your life that cost billions.

barfo
 
With his wealth, he could buy just about anything. Including a space shuttle. A millionaire can't. At $100m, you can own your own private jet and pay pilots. Like AlGore does.
 
Denny Crane said:
With his wealth, he could buy just about anything. Including a space shuttle. A millionaire can't.
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I think the point is, no one actually needs a space shuttle to be happy.

barfo
 
Bill Gates might not care about a shuttle, but Bronfman does.

Maybe an exact replica of the Eiffle Tower would make him happy.
 
some people are so depressed that they need spaceships barfo, and how dare you say otherwise :lol:
 
tell me what makes me happy baby, but do it in the voice of a wookie
 
3RA1N1AC said:
tell me what makes me happy baby, but do it in the voice of a wookie
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The problem is finding somebody strange enough to give you what would make you happy. Money (a lot of it) would help the search.
 
blazerboy30 said:
You should TOTALLY be the person who decides what each person needs to be happy.
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I think you are confusing an observation with a decision.

barfo
 
barfo said:
I think you are confusing an observation with a decision.

barfo
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The problem is when you want to use govt. to reach out and touch someone very far away from you, who has little to do with you, because your observation leads to a bad decision.
 
The problem is when you want to use govt. to reach out and touch someone very far away from you (financially), who has little to do with you (self absorbed), because your observation leads to a bad decision (fair taxation?). :dunno:
 
Denny Crane said:
The problem is when you want to use govt. to reach out and touch someone very far away from you, who has little to do with you, because your observation leads to a bad decision.
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Uh, what decision has my observation led to?

barfo
 
Whether it's good or not depends on which side of the gap you stand.
 
blazerboy30 said:
The problem is finding somebody strange enough to give you what would make you happy. Money (a lot of it) would help the search.
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money can buy me a wookie!? oh god it really DOES buy happiness! :lol:
 
Paying for the ad at the bottom is pretty typical behavior!

[video=dailymotion;xex9rz]
 
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Denny Crane said:
Interesting paper from NBER, the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER is the entity that determines if and when the economy is in recession or not.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15351.pdf
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The paper requires a subscription...

Denny Crane said:
Another good read.

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4049
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Thanks for posting. The articles are a few years old but I'm going to read them when I have some free time tonight.

Income/wealth disparity in America is a complex topic. I'm interested in the explanations Fitzgerald proposes.
 
It's easy to believe the talking points and hype.

Bill Gates having so much money has never bothered or affected me, except that I got the benefit of using Windows for all those years. My pay went up over the years as I gained experience in my field. My homes all sold for more than I paid for them. The longer I stayed in a home, my discretionary spending increased.

I don't think I'm extraordinary or atypical in those regards.

As I've always seen it, the rich can have all the money they can amass as long as the rest of us do better over time. It sucks that I didn't productize MSDOS and make a fortune, but I'm satisfied there's always a chance for anyone to do so. Nobody was able to prevent a couple of college kids from making Google or Facebook.
 
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