This is not the appropriate way to respond when the poster was clearly incorrect in their main points. Dismissing people with arguments is the rational thing to do.

Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. No it doesn't and it shouldn't. Only work that provides value should matter - you don't deserve more money just for working 10x hard but when it doesn't matter to anyone.

Your entire comment hinges on a zero sum line of thinking and I don't abide by it. Things have improved for everyone as I have said above but I also acknowledged that inequality is increasing. Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.

I literally acknowledged that prosperity has increased for people in other parts of the world.

Why don't you rewrite my comment so that it's acceptable to you and then we'll discuss that?

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

If we acknowledge that everyone is more prosperous now than before (which completely contradicts the post I was responding to) what is your point? Inequality? I think it is a problem but not so much if everyone is getting prosperous in the mean time.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, as I pointed out in my original comment, inequality is my point.

If unaddressed - ie by dismissal - it doesn't go away. It simply festers. It will fester until it ruptures. Ignoring it or minimizing it doesn't make it go away.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure and I think solving inequality must be weighed along with increasing prosperity. Both have to be considered because often increasing one means increasing other - increasing taxes too much and there are no incentives to work and prosperity reduces. We need to find the right balance between both.

I do acknowledge that inequality can have unforeseen consequences and worth talking about and tackling today but only by considering the right tradeoffs.

	▲	kelseyfrog 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm trying to square these: > Increasing taxes too much and there are no incentives to work and prosperity reduces. > Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. If hard work doesn't matter, then why care what incentives are?

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keybored 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Productivity in the US has gone up steadily since WWII (“only work that provides value should matter”) but wages have stagnated since the 70’s.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wages have _not_ stagnated since the 70's. Nor has it stagnated since the 2000's.

Can you provide a source to backup your claim?

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

I investigated the first link with ChatGPT. All the percentiles have increased except 10th percentile. But they do not account for after tax wages and other benefits and transfers.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59510 shows this. Bottom 20% wages after accounting for benefits and taxes have significantly increased. If you want to answer the question: are the bottom 20% materially more well off at 1960's than now - this is your answer. Hourly wages without accounting for benefits is missing a crucial element so not really indicative of reality.

Caveat: this shows the bottom quintile (20th percentile) and after looking at the data it appears to be a change of ~60% of real disposable income from 1978 to 2020. 10th percentile would be similar.

TL;DR: if you use real disposable income that accounts for taxes and benefits (what really matters) the wages have not stagnated for anyone but increased a lot - by almost 60%.

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

you're putting in a lot of work (well, i guess you're farming out the work to a third party service) to prove a portion of your argument with a metric that ignores inflation (including whatever you want to call what's happening right now). why? why is it so important to you to try to dispel a notion that is nearly-universally shared among scholars, experts and those actually experiencing ill effects due to the rise in costs of living compared to their income?

	▲	simianwords 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not excluding inflation which means you didn’t put any effort into actual investigation. You just googled for what you wanted and posted three links without reading it. It’s very telling that instead of refuting my point you instead choose to derail the discussions into a personal attack. Were you discussing in good faith you would try to understand what I said and reply to it. It’s not universal at all that people are less prosperous now. Why don’t you do good faith research and try to answer whether the bottom earners are actually better off now than before? You will come to the same conclusion.