Re: Two Types of Distributions Found In Nature

So? By that logic, the superrich shouldn't mind relinquishing almost all their wealth.

Wrong.

Yes, the _Marxist_ view of how the rich exploit us is incorrect. But that doesn't mean the rich---well, a large fraction of the rich---don't exploit us.

A large fraction of the rich are rich because they collect economic rents (land rent in particular). Those rents are collected by right of owning a government title. There's nothing just or efficient about rent collection.

Take land rent in particular. Landowners in their role of landowner contribute absolutely nothing to production; they just collect rent from the rest of us, using a government-granted license to steal. (Yes, land ownership _per se_ is extremely broad in the US, but if you look at rent collected, it's far from uniformly distributed.)

For more, see e.g. "Are you a real libertarian or a Royal libertarian?" at

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Except for the fact that landowners are wealthy through no effort at all.

Depend on whether they actually create something of value.

Landowners don't.

Uh, you have that backwards. Landowners loot from _everyone else_ by charging a fee for access to what was already there, irrespective of the landowner's existence.

Some, yes.

You're just as blind, albeit in a different way.

Reply to
sinister
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Yes.

Reply to
alexy

By being not as useful for a given purpose. Median is more meaningful in describing where an individual might fit in with the majority or people. Mean is more useful in measuring how income disparity might relate to that person. Depends on the purpose.

Reply to
alexy

and

Actually, that's a pretty good question: "what conclusions can we draw from the fact that wealth is very, very unevenly distributed in the United States:

specifically: 71% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of the population. More or Less. And somewhere between 20% and 40% of the wealth is controlled by just 1% of the population.

Well, they could all be smarter and harder working than everyone else. Possibly.

But is Bill Gates really a million times smarter than the average American? Or does he work a million times harder? I don't think that's possible.

There's luck. They might be lucky. Probably, they are, to some extent.

Wealth is often inherited. I think this is a critical point. A wealthy background gives access to the best schools, and resources to start business enterprises. It takes money to make money.

I think if inheriting money were made illegal, a better case could be made for "merit" based wealth. But how many rich people give all their money to charity in their wills? They want their children to have an advantage, don't they?

I have argued that the rich are greedier than most. They just want money more. Is this good, or bad? That depends on what they do to get it, I suppose!

Reply to
Jerry Kraus

Disparity of wealth is an indicator of a not too recent loss of democratic freedom which is even more to be feared than poverty.

There's a time lag with freedom preceding equality of wealth and loss of freedom preceding disparity of wealth.

The time lag for obesity is shorter which is why obesity is working its way up into higher and higher income groups in the U. S.

As their freedom evaporates they start to eat when they aren't hungry.

Ken Burns unwittingly revealed his ignorance of democratic freedom as well as mid 19th Century America when he presented U. S. Grant's several fortunes as an interesting aspect of the man in his Civil War documentary.

According to DeTocqueville making and losing several fortunes in your life time was par for the course for a democratic society.

Burns was completely ignorant of this fact yet DeTocqueville made a big deal of it back in 1833 contrasting life in a democracy to life in an aristocracy where not just an individual, but generations in one family were always rich or always poor.

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

Where can I find examples of this?

Reply to
pico

Ozturk's method wouldn't seem to help here because the data instances are so close. Settle for the ratio. But then, we don't have the data!

Reply to
pico

The Supremes are scheduled to take that ruling on soon, aren't they?

Reply to
pico

The mean represents a "distinction with a "difference" that being a notable frequency along a distributional gradient. Many people from some trades have a wage that is situated along a frequency relationship and share a limited range of wages compared to other trades.

In mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean (or simply the mean) of a list of numbers is the sum of all the members of the list divided by the number of items in the list. The arithmetic mean is what students are taught very early to call the "average". If the list is a statistical population, then the mean of that population is called a population mean. If the list is a statistical sample, we call the resulting statistic a sample mean.

When the mean is not an accurate estimate of the median, the list of numbers, or frequency distribution, is said to be skewed.

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Reply to
Immortalist

In actual fact, none of these things are contributed by rich people. Such things may, indeed, be _produced_ or _supplied_ by _SOME_ people who are attempting to become rich or by people as they attempt to remain rich. But being rich contributes NOTHING in and of itself.

That also is a lie. For the most part, the existence of private ownership in earned property is a moral principal that is universally recognized by the American people. For the most part the enforcement of such recognized "rights" by force or the threat of force is unnecessary. Only when the distribution of ownership in UNEARNED wealth becomes extreme is the use of or threat of force needed at all.

Not until that victimization can be defined and illustrated as it is by Henry George. Not until it is recognized that natural resources are naturally occurring thus unearned and separate and distinct from the earned "capital" means of production is it possible to illustrate the rip off in very clear terms. The distinction between "earned" and "unearned" is difficult. But it is not impossible and it lies at the heart of economic justice and thence at the heart of justice et al. The argument is not based on altruism or even on utilitarianism (though the latter would suffice). It is based very easily on simple justice.

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Of course not. That is the moonbat position.

Agreed! That is the moonbat koolaid. But let us not close our eyes to the rightard koolaid (that rashly assumes that all wealth is earned or awarded by the luck of the draw) either.

Every now and then we see this sort of stuff and it is good. But how does his _BEING_ rich in and of itself do anything? What if all of his dough was distributed differently? What proof is there that the dough would not end up doing something as good or better?. I am speaking economics here, not religion, or altruism. Why does the disparity exist in the first place? Are we to believe that Mr. Buffett actually earned and paid taxes on his accumulated wealth? If we assume that Mr. Buffett would have paid a lot more in taxes then must we also assume that Mr. Bush or some other prancing authoritarian pig would have just created more wars? Do we fall in the trap of assuming that it is better for the world that Mr. Bush and Mr. Buffet are around doing the things they do? While Mr. Buffett may set a fine example, that does not lead me away from the pursuit of simple justice or from the knowing that too much power in the hands of a few individuals is a threat to the existence of freedom and liberty for the many. Nowhere is there a better example of this rent in the fabric of justice than in latter day America.

Oh, that's not true, and there still are some. But then, there are all sorts of people. Not good to let too much more be vested in just a few of them.

Reply to
The Trucker

There's no need to obfuscate the point -- it's rather simple. The OP said "rich people contribute nothing". Is this not a "contribution"? Is this "nothing"?

"Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago announces $100 million gift from philanthropist Ann Lurie

Children's Memorial Hospital announced today that philanthropist Ann Lurie has pledged $100 million to help fund the new facility planned for Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. This gift is the largest given by an individual to a children's hospital in the United States."

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If venture capitalists fund a group of entrepreneurs who develop a new medical device that saves lives, is that not a "contribution" to the betterment of mankind?

Just be honest -- to say that rich people "contribute nothing" is a foolish thing to say.

Straw man. Did I say anything about whether force was necessary or whether the wealth was earned or unearned? Please re-read my very simple sentence.

If someone breaks into an apartment in a housing project to steal a TV, he does so under the threat of force. Period.

Straw man.

Understatement. The fact is that these types of things are under- reported (it's too easy and too popular to hate rich people).

What if the moon were made of swiss cheese? I'm just debunking the myth that all rich people are greedy bastards who hide in their basements counting their dough all day.

The reality is, there are wealthy people, and they do good things. To deny that fact is to be unfair.

If you want to start a thread on how rich people cause poverty, be my guest.

That is up for debate -- start a thread.

Of course -- why would we believe otherwise.

Huh?

Please explain how Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey having billions of dollars poses a threat to freedom and liberty for the many.

You'll have to take that up with the poster who actually wrote that. It wasn't me.

Reply to
ta

lovely and

So? There is no algorithm for determining how much wealth one should obtain. There is no natural law that dictates how wealth is accumulated. You can wish that were the case, but that does not make it so. Not all effort produces equivalent wealth in the marketplace. Lots of really smart people work very hard and go bankrupt -- them's the breaks, as they say.

Warren Buffet, for example, was not lucky -- he worked hard and failed at alot of things before becoming successful.

Certainly there is some element of luck, in the sense that some of us are born into better circumstances than others. But there is no shortage of real life "rags to riches" stories either. These "unlucky" people were able to obtain great wealth.

This is a myth. In the USA, only about 20 percent of millionaires inherited 10% or more of their wealth.

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Another source estimates about 15% of millionaires inherited their wealth.

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Too many hollywood movies out there that portray the opposite.

That's true, but it is no guarantee by any stretch. No doubt though, the children of wealthy parents have a distinct advantage in that sense.

So that's life -- who said it was fair? You can whine about it and get sucked in by the victim-mongers who would benefit from your victimhood, or you can refuse to use that as an excuse.

Nope. Lots of people in this country have become successful businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, etc. starting from nothing.

Well, that's their right. They earned the money, the can do what they want with it.

How many wealthy people do you know?

Reply to
ta

US Census.

There's a more frequent collection instrument called the CPS ([something] population survey).

Also look at IRS statistical reports.

I don't know exactly which instruments are top-coded, but I'm sure lots of them are.

On the one hand, superrich people might argue that they have special security concerns. (Know exact location ==> kidnapping etc)

On the other hand, I think a lot of this data is hard to get even at the national level. Particularly wealth data (rather than income).

Reply to
sinister

I appreciate your motivation in citing this article, but I think it's a mistake to justify the wealth achieved by businessmen based on their charitable or philanthropic efforts. While it's true that they do it in vast amounts and at least some of it is actually of value (though I don't think the Gates Foundation is one of them), the real value of businessmen is their productive achievements - and that far outweighs by an order of magnitude anything they may give away to charities.

JD Rockefeller did far, far more for the people of this country by lowering the price of oil 90%, standardizing and vastly increasing its production, and making it widely available all over the world, than anything ever achieved by his philanthropic efforts. His efforts laid the foundation for the automobile and airline industries. (He earned every penny of the fortune he made).

Buffett made many thousands of people very wealthy who trusted his judgment and who invested in his company (Berkshire Hathaway). He continually claims that he was just lucky. Well, you don't achieve that kind of wealth as a result of shrewd investment over that span of time by luck.

Fred Weiss

Reply to
Fred Weiss

Don't get me wrong. I'm mindful that you have also cited their productive achievements.

Fred Weiss

Reply to
Fred Weiss

Can you tell us where we could find that data?

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

False.

Most mainstream economists make no effort to keep up on the philosophy, methodology, or sociology of science. If they did, they would know how naive the following distinction would sound to many:

Reply to
Robert Vienneau

National Weather Service. But I wouldn't expect it to be assembled in any useful form. It would be a LOT of work to examine a huge sample of recorded weather forecasts, looking for a statistically significant sample of reports like described above, and then finding the next rainfall for those locations.

And if you succeed, the voices will probably start screaming "HiltlerStalin Mao".

Reply to
alexy

Can you tell us the quantities that would be plotted on the x-y axis of the distribution?

Then why do you think anyone would believe that the average mean isn't as "meaningful" as the median?

Bret Cahill

Reply to
Bret Cahill

x: time to next rainfall y: frequency

The average median tells you a lot about the prospects for rain that day, while the average mean describes longer range weather patterns. One can do something relative to the current (decide whether to carry an umbrella), but little about the latter.

Reply to
alexy

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