inequality

Billionaires bear the burden of proof

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 15 JDN 2458743

A king sits atop a golden throne, surrounded by a thousand stacks of gold coins six feet high. A hundred starving peasants beseech him for just one gold coin each, so that they might buy enough food to eat and clothes for the winter. The king responds: “How dare you take my hard-earned money!”

This is essentially the world we live in today. I really cannot emphasize enough how astonishingly, horrifically, mind-bogglingly rich billionares are. I am writing this sentence at 13:00 PDT on September 8, 2019. A thousand seconds ago was 12:43, about when I started this post. A million seconds ago was Wednesday, August 28. A billion seconds ago was 1987. I will be a billion seconds old this October.

Jeff Bezos has $170 billion. 170 billion seconds ago was a thousand years before the construction of the Great Pyramid. To get as much money as he has gaining one dollar per second (that’s $3600 an hour!), Jeff Bezos would have had to work for as long as human civilization has existed.

At a more sensible wage like $30 per hour (still better than most people get), how long would it take to amass $170 billion? Oh, just about 600,000 years—or about twice the length of time that Homo sapiens has existed on Earth.

How does this compare to my fictional king with a thousand stacks of gold? A typical gold coin is worth about $500, depending on its age and condition. Coins are about 2 millimeters thick. So a thousand stacks, each 2 meters high, would be about $500*1000*1000 = $500 million. This king isn’t even a billionaire! Jeff Bezos has three hundred times as much as him.

Coins are about 30 millimeters in diameter, so assuming they are packed in neat rows, these thousand stacks of gold coins would fill a square about 0.9 meters to a side—in our silly Imperial units, that’s 3 feet wide, 3 feet deep, 6 feet tall. If Jeff Bezo’s stock portfolio were liquidated into gold coins (which would require about 2% of the world’s entire gold supply and surely tank the market), the neat rows of coins stacked a thousand high would fill a square over 16 meters to a side—that’s a 50-foot-wide block of gold coins. Smaug’s hoard in The Hobbit was probably about the same amount of money as what Jeff Bezos has.

And yet, somehow there are still people who believe that he deserves this money, that he earned it, that to take even a fraction of it away would be a crime tantamount to theft or even slavery.

Their arguments can be quite seductive: How would you feel about the government taking your hard-earned money? Entrepreneurs are brilliant, dedicated, hard-working people; why shouldn’t they be rewarded? What crime do CEOs commit by selling products at low prices?

The way to cut through these arguments is to never lose sight of the numbers. In defense of a man who had $5 million or even $20 million, such an argument might make sense. I can imagine how someone could contribute enough to humanity to legitimately deserve $20 million. I can understand how a talented person might work hard enough to earn $5 million. But it’s simply not possible for any human being to be so brilliant, so dedicated, so hard-working, or make such a contribution to the world, that they deserve to have more dollars than there have been seconds since the Great Pyramid.

It’s not necessary to find specific unethical behaviors that brought a billionaire to where he (and yes, it’s nearly always he) is. They are generally there to be found: At best, one becomes a billionaire by sheer luck. Typically, one becomes a billionaire by exerting monopoly power. At worst, one can become a billionaire by ruthless exploitation or even mass murder. But it’s not our responsibility to point out a specific crime for every specific billionaire.

The burden of proof is on billionaires: Explain how you can possibly deserve that much money.

It’s not enough to point to some good things you did, or emphasize what a bold innovator you are: You need to explain what you did that was so good that it deserves to be rewarded with Smaug-level hoards of wealth. Did you save the world from a catastrophic plague? Did you end world hunger? Did you personally prevent a global nuclear war? I could almost see the case for Norman Borlaug or Jonas Salk earning a billion dollars (neither did, by the way). But Jeff Bezos? You didn’t save the world. You made a company that sells things cheaply and ships them quickly. Get over yourself.

Where exactly do we draw that line? That’s a fair question. $20 million? $100 million? $500 million? Maybe there shouldn’t even be a hard cap. There are many other approaches we could take to reducing this staggering inequality. Previously I have proposed a tax system that gets continuously more progressive forever, as well as a CEO compensation cap based on the pay of the lowliest employees. We could impose a wealth tax, as Elizabeth Warren has proposed. Or we could simply raise the top marginal rate on income tax to something more like what it was in the 1960s. Or as Republicans today would call it, radical socialism.

White-collar crime dwarfs all other property crime

PNRJ inequality, public policy , , , ,

Aug 25 JDN 2458722

When you think of “property crime”, you probably envision pickpockets in crowded squares, muggers in dark alleys or burglars breaking into houses. But this is not the kind of property crime that does the most damage—not by a long shot.

Based on FBI estimates, the total economic value of all stolen property (in this conventional sense) is about $14 billion per year. This is less than 0.1% of US GDP.

Wage theft, in which corporations withhold pay that they are contractually obliged to pay, often by misrepresenting hours or not paying overtime rates, is by itself already $50 billion per year.

But this too pales in comparison to the real threat, which is white-collar crime. The direct cost of white-collar crime to the United States has been estimated at between $250 and $600 billion per year. This is about 1-3% of GDP; the average company loses 6% of its revenue to white-collar crime.

This is comparable to, and quite likely more than, the $280 billion total expenditure of all law enforcement and criminal justice in the United States—which has the highest total law enforcement expenditure in the world, and nearly the highest per capita as well.

This is only direct cost, mind you. If you include the indirect costs of all forms of crime, including violent crime, the total cost of all crime in the US rises to about $1.5 trillion. But this figure does not account for white-collar crime. Since the direct costs of white-collar crime are so much higher than those of other forms of crime, it’s quite likely that the indirect costs are higher as well. (Indeed, I think it can be reasonably argued that The Great Recession was an indirect cost of white-collar crime—and it cost about $14 trillion in lost economic output.)

And this is not including the approximately $300 billion per year in tax evasion (mostly in the form of unreported income and overstated charitable contributions).

The graph below compares these figures visually:

Value_of_crime

Crime pays quite well, as a matter of fact, as long as it’s the right kind of crime.

Our law enforcement system is designed to punish the crimes of the poor, and does so quite relentlessly. But it seems uninterested in punishing the crimes of the rich.

Some of the policies needed to reduce white-collar crime are quite obvious. The first is tax auditing: As the IRS budget has been cut, the number of tax audits has been plummeting, from 1.7 million in 2012 to only 1.1 million in 2017, a decrease of over a third. High-income returns—which are, obviously, where the worst tax evasion happens—have seen an even more precipitous decline in auditing. In 2011, a return over $1 million had about a 12% chance of being audited; now that probability is only 3%.

The budget cuts to the IRS make less than no sense; since 2002, they reduced spending by $14 billion and tax evasion increased by $34 billion. This is the opposite of fiscal responsibility.

Another obvious policy change is to increase spending on the FTC and SEC, the agencies responsible for investigating business transactions and rooting out securities fraud.

Meanwhile, we are actually cutting the SEC budget. This is beyond madness; the total SEC budget is a measly $1.5 billion, and collected entirely from banks, not taxpayers in general. The SEC budget does not contribute to the federal deficit in any way. And think about what madness was to begin with to allocate a budget of only $1.5 billion to regulate an industry with a market value of $26 trillion in this country alone. This is only 0.006%. Since a tax of 0.5% on stock trades, 0.1% on bond trades, and 0.005% on derivatives trades would raise a whopping $220 billion, this means that simply imposing a 0.01% tax on financial transactions would raise enough to increase the SEC budget by an order of magnitude. And this is low enough that it would be felt by basically no one. Frankly if you even care what happens to a single basis point of your rate of return, you are obviously over-leveraged. The difference between making 6.99% and 7.00% per year over 30 years is the difference between turning $1,000 into $7,590.94 and turning it into $7,612.25. That’s a difference of 2% over thirty years.

Simply increasing IRS and SEC audits would not eliminate white-collar crime, of course. It is far too ubiquitous and sophisticated for that. But the fact that we have been cutting these budgets instead of raising them speaks to a much more disturbing truth: These are not the policies of a government that is seriously trying to improve its budget balance. They are the policies of a government that is being corrupted from within, becoming tilted further and further toward the interests of the wealthy.

A more nuanced “Carousel of Progress”

PNRJ futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Aug 11 JDN 2458707

I recently got back from a trip to Disney World; while most of the attractions are purely fictional and designed only to entertain, a few are factual and designed to inform and persuade. One of these is the “Carousel of Progress”.

The Carousel of Progress consists of a series of animatronic stages, each representing the lifestyle of a particular historical era. They follow the same family over time, showing what their life is like in each era. When it was originally built, the eras shown were 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s; but over time they have updated the “present day” stage, and now they are 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, and 1990s. The aim of the attraction is to show how technology has made our lives better.

The family they show is upper-middle class; this makes sense, as most of the audience probably is as well. But to really understand the progress we have made, we need to also consider the full range of incomes.

In this post I will go through a similar sequence of eras, comparing the lifestyles of not just the middle class, but also the rich and the poor.

In what follows, I’ve tried to create that, using the best approximate figures on standard of living I could find from each era. The numbers are given in my best guess of the inflation-adjusted standard of living; obviously they’re much more precise in the 1980s to today than they are for earlier eras.

I’ve summarized all these income estimates in the graph below (note the log scale):

 

Carousel_of_Progress

This means that, after a bumpy ride through the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution, we did actually raise the floor—the poor today are about as well off as the middle class in ancient times. But we raised the ceiling an awful lot faster; the rich today are something like a thousand times as rich as the rich in ancient times.

 

50 AD: Roman Empire

Rich: Patrician

Life is good! My seaside villa is one of the finest in Rome, and my industrious slaves fulfill my every need. At my personal zoo I recently acquired a lion and an elephant. I dine on only the finest foods, including wine from my personal vineyard. An aqueduct feeds directly into my personal baths. The war in Gallia seems to be going well; I look forward to my share of the spoils.

Wealth: $4 million

Income: $200,000

Middle class: Plebeian

Things could be worse. My family has a roof over our heads and bread on our table, so I’m grateful for that. But working all day on the farm is exhausting, and we can’t afford servants to help. My oldest son is a gladiator, though so far he has not attained the highest ranks of the profession. My youngest son was recently drafted into military service in Gallia; I pray for his safety.

Wealth: $10,000

Income: $10,000

Poor: Proletarian

Wealth: $0

Income: $1,000

Living in a hovel I don’t even own with my four children and begging on the streets isn’t an easy life, but at least I’m not a slave. Most of our food is provided by public services. With the war raging in Gallia, one of our small blessings is that we are actually too poor to be drafted into service.

1000 AD: Medieval England

Rich: Duke

While living in a castle is nice, I sometimes wish an end to the frequent raids and border skirmishes that made these high walls necessary. Still, I can’t complain; I own plenty of land, and have plenty of serfs to work it. I am in good favor with the king, and so His Majesty’s army has helped protect my lands against invasion. I have all the feasts, wine, and women a man could ask for.

Wealth: $2 million

Income: $100,000

Middle class: Knight

I can’t complain. It is an honor to be a knight in His Majesty’s army, and I am proud that my family was able to earn enough wealth to buy me a horse, a sword, and the training necessary to reach this rank. I own a little bit of land, but my lord has called upon me for a new campaign, I’m hoping to buy a larger estate with the spoils I earn from it. My family has plenty of food to eat, though if the well runs dry I’m not sure where we’ll get more water.

Wealth: $5,000

Income: $5,000

Poor: Serf

Live grows harder by the day, it seems. My lord keeps demanding more and more work from us, but already the land is producing as much as it can bear. Though we are responsible for planting and harvesting the wheat, often the bread never makes it to my family’s table.

Wealth: $0

Income: $500

1600 AD: Renaissance Venice

Rich: Noble

With the advent of global trade and colonization, wealth has flooded into Venice, and I have had the chance to claim some portion of that flood. I dress in the finest silks, and eat exotic foods from lands as distant as India and China. Servants fulfill my every need. How could life be better?

Wealth: $10 million

Income: $1 million

Middle class: Merchant

I am a proud member of the trader’s guild. Though it our trade ships that carry wealth from across the seas, we often find that wealth passing on up to the nobles, leaving little for ourselves. Still, I have my own land, my own house, and plenty of food for my family.

Wealth: $10,000

Income: $10,000

Poor: The Pebbles

I had a good job working in construction until recently, but I was laid off. I could no longer afford my rent, so now I live on the streets. I feel as though I work constantly but never can find a way to get ahead.

Wealth: $0

Income: $2,000

1750 AD: Pre-Revolutionary France

Rich: Noble

Viva la France! Life is better than ever. Servants do all my work, while the wealth produced by my fields and factories all goes to me. I barely even pay any taxes on my grand estates.

Wealth: $20 million

Income: $2 million

Middle class: Bourgeoisie

I live reasonably well, all things considered. My family has a home and enough food to eat. Still, taxes are becoming increasingly onerous even as the nobles become increasingly detached from the needs of common people like us. Still, we may as well accept it; I doubt things will change any time soon.

Wealth: $15,000

Income: $15,000

Poor: Peasant

Life is hard. I work all day on the farm to make wheat, and then the nobles tax it all away. We have to make our own clothes even as the nobles luxuriate in silks from around the world.

Wealth: $0

Income: $500

1900 AD: United States

Rich

My coal mine has been a roaring success! I am now one of the richest men who has ever lived. I even have my own horseless carriage. Servants are getting more expensive these days, though; even though I’m richer than my grandfather I can’t afford as many servants.

Wealth: $1 billion

Income: $100 million

Middle class

“Well, the robins are back. That’s a sure sign of spring. What year is it? Oh, just before the turn of the century. And believe me, things couldn’t be any better than they are today. Yes sir, we got all the latest things: gas lamps, a telephone, and the latest design in cast iron stoves. That reservoir keeps five gallons of water hot all day on just three buckets of coal. Sure beats chopping wood! And isn’t our new ice box a beauty. Holds 50 pounds of ice. Milk doesn’t sour as quick as is used to. Our dog Rover here keeps the water in the drip pan from overflowing. You know, it wasn’t too long ago we had to carry water from a well. But thanks to progress, we’ve got a pump right here in the kitchen. ‘Course we keep a bucket of water handy to prime it with. Yes sir, we’ve got everything to make life easier. Mother! I was reading about a fellow named Tom Edison, who’s working on an idea for snap on electric lights.”

Wealth: $18,000

Income: $18,000

Poor

I live on the streets most of the time. I eat food out of the garbage. What little money I have is earned by begging. I’m not proud, but it’s all I can do to survive.

Wealth: $0

Income: $2,000

1920 AD: United States

Rich

Life is sweet. My electric company is raking in the dough these days; seems they can hardly find enough copper to lay all the new cables we need to supply all the folks buying into our grid. I have four automobiles now—all top of the line of course. The times, they are a-changin’: Can you believe they gave women the vote? Eh, well, I suppose they can hardly vote worse than us men do already.

Wealth: $5 billion

Income: $500 million

Middle class

“Whew! Hottest summer we’ve had in years. Well, we’ve progressed a long way since the turn of the century 20 years ago. But no one realized then that this would be the age of electricity. Everyone’s using it: farmers, factories, whole towns. With electric streetlights we don’t worry so much about the youngsters being out after dark. And what a difference in our home. We can run as many wires as we need in any direction for Mother’s new electrical servants: electric sewing machine, coffee percolator, toaster, waffle iron, refrigerator, and they all go to work at the click of a switch. Take it easy! You’ll blow a fuse! Queenie! Leave ’em alone. Well, the days of lugging heavy irons from the old cookstove to an ironing board are gone forever. With an electric iron and electric lights, Mother now has time to enjoy her embroidery in the cool of the evening. Right, Mother?”

Wealth: $20,000

Income: $20,000

Poor

Life on the streets is still hard, but at least they’ve got these new soup kitchens to feed me and my family, and with running water in the city we can sometimes get clean water to drink. That newfangled electricity stuff is supposed to be the bee’s knees, but we sure can’t afford it.

Wealth: $0

Income: $4,000

1940 AD: United States

Rich

My steel company is doing extremely well, particularly with the war in Europe raising the price of steel. We just bought our very own airplane; isn’t that marvelous? With Britain under siege and France already fallen to the Krauts, I think we’re gonna end up in the war soon—FDR certainly has been making noises to that effect. If I were poor, I’d be worried about my sons getting drafted; but I’m sure we won’t have to worry about that. No, I’m just looking forward to my stock returns when they start churning out tanks instead of cars in Detroit!

Wealth: $2 billion

Income: $200 million

Middle class

“Well it’s autumn again and the kids are back in school. Thank goodness! Here we are in the frantic forties and the music is better than ever. And it’s amazing how our new kitchen wonders are helping to take over the hard work. Everything is improving. Electric range is better. Refrigerators are bigger and make lots more ice cubes. But my favorite is the electric dishwasher. Now Mother spends less time in the kitchen and I don’t have to dry the dishes anymore. Oh, I spend a lot of time here. Have to. Now that television has arrived, Grandma and Grandpa have taken over my den. Television has changed our lives. It’s brought a whole new world of culture into our home.”

Wealth: $24,000

Income: $24,000

Poor

The Depression was hard on everybody, but I think it was hardest on us poors. This New Deal business seems to be helping out a lot, though; on one of the new construction projects I was able to find work for the first time in months. I’m worried we’re going to be brought into the war soon, but if I get drafted at least that means three squares a day.

Wealth: $0

Income: $4,000

1960 AD: United States

Rich

Running an oil company is not for the faint of heart; they keep adding more onerous regulations every year. Still, profits are bigger than ever. I just wish Uncle Sam would stop taking such a big cut; Commies, all of them. I can barely afford upkeep on my yacht these days with all the taxes.

Wealth: $2 billion

Income: $200 million

Middle class

We just got a color TV at home, and we’ve been watching around the clock. We get all four channels! And my new T-bird is a real beauty; paid a fortune for her, but worth every penny. Society is improving, too; with Rosa Parks and whatnot, I’m guessing things are about to get a lot better for colored folks especially. After that, I’m thinking it’ll be the gays’ turn next; I wonder how long that will take.

Wealth: $30,000

Income: $30,000

Poor

Life is still hard, but I think it’s better now than it’s ever been, even for poor folks like me. Thanks to Welfare, I’m not even as poor as I could be. It’s tough to make ends meet, but at least I can afford a place to live and food to eat. And I’m pretty healthy too: Antibiotics and vaccines mean that we are finally safe from some terrible diseases, like polio. It seems crazy: Just a generation ago the President had a disease that now even folks like me are protected from.

Wealth: $0

Income: $6,000

1980 AD: United States

Rich

They told me I was crazy to invest in these “personal computing machines”, but I saw the writing on the wall. Computers are the future, man. They’re gonna be everywhere, and do everything. We’re gonna have robots and flying cars, and if I have anything to say about it, I’m gonna own the factories that make them.

Wealth: $5 billion

Income: $500 million

Middle class

We have our own PC now. I use it for work, but my kids use it mostly for computer games. I still can’t beat my daughter at Pong, but I can at least hold my own at Pac-Man these days. I hear that programming skills are going to be in high demand soon, so I’ve been trying to teach the kids BASIC.

Wealth: $50,000

Income: $50,000

Poor

Nixon’s Welfare “reform” really hit my family hard. If I don’t find work soon, they’re going to cut my benefits; but if I could find work, what would I need benefits for? Jimmy Carter made some things better, but it doesn’t look like he’ll be re-elected. Can you believe that old actor Ronald Reagan is running?

Wealth: $0

Income: $8,000

2000 AD: United States

Rich

I sure played my cards right in the stock market, buying those tech firms just before the Internet boom really hit. Now I have my own jet and I’m thinking of buying a yacht. Maybe I’ll diversify into real estate; it looks like housing prices are heading north.

Wealth: $10 billion

Income: $1 billion

Middle class

Our home has almost doubled in value since we bought it; we took some of that out as a home equity loan, which helped us buy laptops for our kids. It’s amazing what they can do now; we used to have a big clunky desktop, and these little laptops would run circles around it. We also installed a 56k modem; I’m a little worried about what effect the Internet will have on the kids, but it seems like that’s where everything is going.

Wealth: $60,000

Income: $60,000

Poor

I hate working in fast food, but it beats not working at all. I really wish they’d raise minimum wage though; once you figure in inflation, we’re actually making less than people did ten years ago. I think I qualify for Welfare or something, but the paperwork has gotten so crazy I couldn’t even deal with it. I’m just trying to get by on what I make at the burger joint.

Wealth: $0

Income: $10,000

2020 AD: United States, Present Day

Rich

I knew my app startup would be a success, but even I couldn’t have predicted we’d make it this far. Bought out by Apple for $40 billion? I could hardly have dreamed it myself. I am living the high life; I’ve got my own helicopter now, and a yacht 50 feet long (#lifestyle #swag!). I just upgraded my Google Glass to the new model; it is awesome AF. I think I might move out of the Bay Area and get myself a mansion in Beverly Hills.

Wealth: $20 billion

Income: $2 billion

Middle class

Why is rent so expensive? And how am I ever going to pay off these student loans? After college I managed to land an office job because I’m pretty good with Excel, but it’s still tough to make ends meet. Smartphones are cool and all, but it would be nice to actually own my own home. I think my parents had planned for me to inherit theirs, but we lost it in the subprime crash. Eh, things could be worse. #FirstWorldProblems.

Wealth: $62,000

Income: $62,000

Poor

Things were really bad a few years ago, but they seem to be picking up a little now; I’ve been able to find a job, at least. But it doesn’t pay well; I can’t barely afford rent. I don’t have what they call “marketable skills”, I guess. I should have gone back to school, probably, but I didn’t want to have to deal with student loans. Maybe things will be better once Trump finally gets out of office.

Wealth: $0

Income: $12,000

2040 AD: United States, Cyberpunk Future

Rich

I guess I picked out the right crypto to buy, because it gave me enough to buy my own AI company and now I’m rolling in it. My new helicopter is one of those twin-turbofan models that runs on fuel cells—I was sick of paying carbon tax to fuel up the old kerosene model. I just got cybernetic implants: No phone to carry around, nothing to get lost! I hear they’re working on going to neural interface soon, so we won’t even need to wave our hands around to use them.

Wealth: $40 billion

Income: $4 billion

Middle-class

I used to have a nice job in data analysis, but they automated most of it and outsourced the rest. Now I work for a different corp doing customer service, because that’s the only thing humans seem to still be good for. I have to admit the corps have done some good things for us, though; my daughter was born blind but now she’s got artificial eyes. (Of course, how will we ever pay off those medical debts?) And I really wish someone had done something about climate change sooner; summers these days are absolutely unbearable.

Wealth: $65,000

Income: $65,000

Poor

Wealth: $0

Income: $15,000

I lost my trucking job to a robot, can you believe that? But how am I supposed to compete with 22 hours of daily uptime? Basic income is just about all the money I have. I haven’t been able to find steady work in years. I should have gone to college and studied CS, probably; it seems like salaries in AI get higher every year.

Five Spanish castles cheaper than condos in California

PNRJ inequality, public policy , , ,

July 21 JDN 2458686

1. Santa Coloma: A steal at 90,000 EUR ($100,000)

Area: 600 square meters (6500 square feet)

This one is so cheap that it can undercut even affordable condos, like this 1300 square foot one in Santa Ana for $200,000. Yes, it’s technically a castle ruin, but I’m sure it could be fixed up. And I could literally afford to buy it right now.

2. Cal Basaacs: 700,000 EUR ($780,000)

Area: 600 square meters (6500 square feet)

This castle is already more expensive than most houses in the US, but it’s still cheaper than this 1650 square foot $880,000 condo in Los Angeles. And this one isn’t a ruin; it’s a fully-functional castle. It even has central air conditioning!

3. Casa Palacio Cargadores a Indias: 1.4 M EUR ($1.6 M)

This 6-bedroom castle is also a fixer-upper, and without many listed specs or even a listed area, I’d be disinclined to buy it. But it is in a very nice beachside location, and it has a lot of history behind it. And it still makes it in under this 2400 square foot condo in Beverly Hills that’s going for $2.0 million.

4. Cáceres Extremadura: 1.6 M EUR ($1.8 M)

Area: 820 square meters (8800 square feet)

This is a lovely 7-bedroom castle with a guest house, and it’s in the historic region of Cáceres, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It even has its own pool. The only downside is that it’s a fixer-upper. But it’s still somehow cheaper than this $2.4 million 2150-square-foot condo in San Francisco.

5. Torremolinos: 1.8 M EUR ($2.0 M)

Area: 550 square meters (5900 square feet)

Though a bit smaller than the others, this 5-bedroom castle is fully renovated and ready to move in. If you’re looking for an income property, it is already licensed to be converted into a hotel. And it’s still a lot cheaper than this $3.2 million 2850-square-foot condo in Beverly Hills.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking maybe housing in California is too expensive?

How much wealth is there in the world?

PNRJ inequality , , ,

July 14 JDN 2458679

How much wealth is there in the world? If we split it all evenly, how much would each of us have?

It’s a surprisingly complicated question: What counts as wealth? Presumably we include financial assets, real estate, commodities—anything that can be sold on a market. But what about natural resources? Shouldn’t we somehow value clean air and water? What about human capital—health, knowledge, skills, and expertise that make us able to work better?

I’m going to stick with tradeable assets for now, because I’m interested in questions of redistribution. If we were to add up all the wealth in the United States, or all the wealth in the world, and split it all evenly, how much would each person get? Even then, there are questions about how to price assets: Do we current market prices, or what was actually paid for them in the past? How much do we depreciate? How do we count debt that was used to buy non-financial assets (such as student loans)?

The Federal Reserve reports an official estimate of the US capital stock at $56.2 trillion (in 2011 dollars). Assuming that a third of income is capital income, that means that of our GDP of $18.9 trillion (in 2012 dollars), this would make the rate of return on capital 11%. That rate of return strikes me as pretty clearly too high. This must be an underestimate of our capital stock.

The 2015 Global Wealth Report estimates total US wealth as $63.5 trillion, and total world wealth as $153.2 trillion. This was for 2014, so using the US GDP growth rate of about 2% and the world GDP growth rate of 3.6%, the current wealth stocks should be about $70 trillion and $183 trillion respectively.

This gives a much more plausible rate of return: One third of the US GDP of $19.6 trillion (in 2014 dollars) is $6.53 trillion, yielding a rate of return of about 9%.

One third of the world GDP of $78 trillion is $26 trillion, yielding a rate of return of about 14%. This seems a bit high, but we’re including a lot of countries with very little capital that we would expect to have very high rates of return, so it might be right.

Credit Suisse releases estimates of total wealth that are supposed to include non-financial assets as well, though these are even more uncertain than financial assets. They estimate total US wealth as $98 trillion and total world wealth as $318 trillion.

There’s a lot of uncertainty around all of these figures, but I think these are close enough to get a sense of what sort of redistribution might be possible.

If the US wealth stock is about $70 trillion and our population is about 330 million, that means that the average wealth of an American is $200,000. If our wealth stock is instead about $98 trillion, the average wealth of an American is about $300,000.

Since the average number of people in a US household is 2.5, this means that average household wealth is somewhere between $500,000 and $750,000. This is actually a bit less than I thought; I would have guessed that the mythical “average American household” is a millionaire. (Of course, even Credit Suisse might be underestimating our wealth stock.)

If the world wealth stock is about $180 trillion and the population is about 7.7 billion, global average wealth per person is about $23,000. If instead the global wealth stock is about $320 trillion, the average wealth of a human being is about $42,000.

Both of these are far above the median wealth, which is much more representative of what a typical person has. Median wealth per adult in the US is about $65,000; worldwide it’s only about $4,200.

This means that if we were to somehow redistribute all wealth in the United States, half the population would gain an average of somewhere between $140,000 and $260,000, or on a percentage basis, the median American would see their wealth increase by 215% to 400%. If we were to instead somehow redistribute all wealth in the world, half the population would gain an average of $19,000 to $38,000; the median individual would see their wealth increase by 450% to 900%.

Of course, we can’t literally redistribute all the wealth in the world. Even if we could somehow organize it logistically—a tall order to be sure—such a program would introduce all sorts of inefficiencies and perverse incentives. That would really be socialism: We would be allocating wealth entirely based on a government policy and not at all by the market.

But suppose instead we decided to redistribute some portion of all this wealth. How about 10%? That seems like a small enough amount to avoid really catastrophic damage to the economy. Yes, there would be some inefficiencies introduced, but this could be done with some form of wealth taxes that wouldn’t require completely upending capitalism.

Suppose we did this just within the US. 10% of US wealth, redistributed among the whole population, would increase median wealth by between $20,000 and $30,000, or between 30% and 45%. That’s already a pretty big deal. And this is definitely feasible; the taxation infrastructure is all already in place. We could essentially buy the poorest half of the population a new car on the dime of the top half.

If instead we tried to do this worldwide, we would need to build the fiscal capacity first; the infrastructure to tax wealth effectively is not in place in most countries. But supposing we could do that, we could increase median wealth worldwide by between $2,000 and $4,000, or between 50% and 100%. Of course, this would mean that many of us in the US would lose a similar amount; but I think it’s still quite remarkable that we could as much as double the wealth of most of the world’s population by redistributing only 10% of the total wealth. That’s how much wealth inequality there is in the world.

“Robots can’t take your job if you’re already retired.”

PNRJ futurism, inequality , , , , , ,

July 7 JDN 2458672

There is a billboard on I-405 near where I live, put up by some financial advisor company, with that slogan on it: “Robots can’t take your job if you’re already retired.”

First, let me say this: Don’t hire a financial advisor firm; you really don’t need one. 90% of actively-managed funds perform worse than simple index funds. Buy all the stocks and let them sit. You won’t be able to retire sooner because you paid someone else to do the same thing you could have done yourself.

Yet, there is some wisdom in this statement: The best answer to technological unemployment is to make it so people don’t need to be employed. As an individual, all you could really do there is try to save up and retire early. But as a society, there is a lot more we could do.

The goal should essentially to make everyone retired, or if not everyone, then whatever portion of the population has been displaced by automation. A pension for everyone sounds a lot like a basic income.

People are strangely averse to redistribution of wealth as such (perhaps because they don’t know, or don’t want to think about, how much of our existing wealth was gained by force?), so we may not want to call our basic income a basic income.

Instead, we will call it capital income. People seem astonishingly comfortable with Jeff Bezos making more income in a minute than his median employee makes in a year, as long as it’s capital income instead of “welfare” or “redistribution of wealth”.

The basic income will instead be called something like the Perpetual Dividend of the United States, the dividends each US citizen receives for being a shareholder in the United States of America. I know this kind of terminology works, because the Permanent Fund Dividend in Alaska is a successful and enormously popular basic income. Even conservatives in Alaska dare not suggest eliminating the PFD.
And in fact it could literally be capital income: While public ownership of factories generally does not go well (see: the entire history of socialism and communism), the most sensible way to raise revenue for this program would be to tax income gained by owners of robotic factories, which, even if on the books as salary or stock options or whatever, is at its core capital income. If we wanted to make that connection even more transparent, we could tax in the form of non-voting shares in corporations, so that instead of paying a conventional corporate tax, corporations simply had to pay a portion of their profits directly to the public fund.

I’m not quite sure why people are so much more uncomfortable with redistribution of wealth than they are with the staggering levels of wealth inequality that make it so obviously necessary. Maybe it’s the feeling of “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, or “running out of other people’s money”? But obviously a basic income won’t just be free money from nowhere. We would be collecting it in taxes, the same way we fund all other government spending. Even printing money would mean paying in the form of inflation (and we definitely should not print enough money to cover a whole basic income!)

I think it may simply be that people aren’t cognizant enough of the magnitude of wealth inequality. I’m hoping that my posts on the extremes of wealth and poverty might help a bit with that. The richest people on Earth make about $10 billion per year—that’s $10,000,000,000—simply for owning things. The poorest people on Earth struggle to survive on less than $500 per year—often working constantly throughout their waking hours. Even if we believe that billionaires work harder (obviously false) or contribute more to society (certainly debatable) than other people, do we really believe that some people deserve to make 20 million times as much as others? It’s one thing to think that being a successful entrepreneur should make you rich. It’s another to believe that it should make you so rich you could buy a house for every homeless person in America.
Automation is already making this inequality worse, and there is reason to think it will continue to do so. In our current system, when the owner of a corporation automates production, he then gets to claim all the output from the robots, where previously he had to pay wages to the workers—and that’s why he does the automation, because it makes him more profit. Even if overall productivity increases, the fruits of that new production always get concentrated at the top. Unless we can find a way to change that system, we’re going to need to redistribute some of that wealth.

But if we have to call it something else, so be it. Let’s all be shareholders in America.

How much should we value statistical lives?

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , ,

June 9 JDN 2458644

The very concept of putting a dollar value on a human life offends most people. I understand why: It suggests that human lives are fungible, and also seems to imply that killing people is just fine as long as it produces sufficient profit.

In next week’s post I’ll try to assuage some of those fears: Saying that a life is worth say $5 million doesn’t actually mean that it’s justifiable to kill someone as long as it pays you $5 million.

But for now let me say that we really have no choice but to do this. There are a huge number of interventions we could make in the world that all have the same basic form: They could save lives, but they cost money. We need to be able to say when we are justified in spending more money to save more lives, and when we are not.

No, it simply won’t do to say that “money is no object”. Because money isn’t just money—money is human happiness. A willingness to spend unlimited amounts to save even a single life, if it could be coherently implemented at all, would result in, if not complete chaos or deadlock, a joyless, empty world where we all live to be 100 by being contained in protective foam and fed by machines. It may be uncomfortable to ask a question like “How many people should we be willing to let die to let ourselves have Disneyland?”; but if that answer were zero, we should not have Disneyland. The same is true for almost everything in our lives: From automobiles to chocolate, almost any product you buy, any service you consume, has resulted in some person’s death at some point.

And there is an even more urgent reason, in fact: There are many things we are currently not doing that could save many lives for very little money. Targeted foreign aid or donations to top charities could save lives for as little as $1000 each. Foreign aid is so cost-effective that even if the only thing foreign aid had ever accomplished was curing smallpox, it would be twice as cost-effective as the UK National Health Service (which is one of the best healthcare systems in the world). Tighter environmental regulations save an additional life for about $200,000 in compliance cost, which is less than we would have spent in health care costs; the Clean Air Act added about $12 trillion to the US economy over the last 30 years.

Reduced military spending could literally pay us money to save people’s lives—based on the cost of the Afghanistan War, we are currently paying as much as $1 million per person to kill people that we really have very little reason to kill.

Most of the lives we could save are statistical lives: We can’t point to a particular individual who will or will not die because of the decision, but we can do the math and say approximately how many people will or will not die. We know that approximately 11,000 people will die each year if we loosen regulations on mercury pollution; we can’t say who they are, but they’re out there. Human beings have a lot of trouble thinking this way; it’s just not how our brains evolved to work. But when we’re talking about policy on a national or global scale, it’s quite simply the only way to do things. Anything else is talking nonsense.

Standard estimates of the value of a statistical life range from about $4 million to $9 million. These estimates are based on how much people are willing to pay for reductions in risk. So for instance if people would pay $100 to reduce their chances of dying by 0.01%, we divide the former by the latter to say that a life is worth about $1 million.

It’s a weird question: You clearly can’t just multiply like that. How much would you be willing to accept for a 100% chance of death? Presumably there isn’t really such an amount, because you would be dead. So your willingness-to-accept is undefined. And there’s no particular reason for it to be linear below that: Since marginal utility of wealth is decreasing, the amount you would demand for a 50% chance of death is a lot more than 50 times as much as what you would demand for a 1% chance of death.
Say for instance that utility of wealth is logarithmic. Say your currently lifetime wealth is $1 million, and your current utility is about 70 QALY. Then if we measure wealth in thousands of dollars, we have W = 1000 and U = 10 ln W.

How much would you be willing to accept for a 1% chance of death? Your utility when dead is presumably zero, so we are asking for an amount m such that 0.99 U(W+m) = U(W). 0.99 (10 ln (W+m)) = 10 ln (W) means (W+m)^0.99 = W, so m = W^(1/0.99) – W. We started with W = 1000, so m = 72. You would be willing to accept $72,000 for a 1% chance of death. So we would estimate the value of a statistical life at $7.2 million.

How much for a 0.0001% chance of death? W^(1/0.999999)-W = 0.0069. So you would demand $6.90 for such a risk, and we’d estimate your value of a statistical life at $6.9 million. Pretty close, though not the same.

But how much would you be willing to accept for a 50% chance of death? W^(1/0.5) – W = 999,000. That is, $999 million. So if we multiplied that out, we’d say that your value of a statistical life has now risen to a staggering (and ridiculous) $2 billion.

Mathematically, the estimates are more consistent if we use small probabilities—but all this assumes that people actually know their own utility of wealth and calculate it correctly, which is a very unreasonable assumption.

The much bigger problem with this method is that human beings are terrible at dealing with small probabilities. When asked how much they’d be willing to pay to reduce their chances of dying by 0.01%, most people probably have absolutely no idea and may literally just say a random number.

We need to rethink our entire approach for judging such numbers. Honestly we shouldn’t be trying to put a dollar value on a human life; we should be asking about the dollar cost of saving a human life. We should be asking what else we could do with that money. Indeed, for the time being, I think the best thing to do is actually to compare lives to lives: How many lives could we save for this amount of money?

Thus, if we’re considering starting a war that will cost $1 trillion, we need to ask ourselves: How many innocent people would die if we don’t do that? How many will die if we do? And what else could we do with a trillion dollars? If the war is against Nazi Germany, okay, sure; we’re talking about killing millions to save tens of millions. But if it’s against ISIS, or Iran, those numbers don’t come out so great.

If we have a choice between two policies, each of which will cost $10 billion, and one of them will save 1,000 lives while the other will save 100,000, the obvious answer is to pick the second one. Yet this is exactly the world we live in, and we’re not doing that. We are throwing money at military spending and tax cuts (things that many not save any lives at all) and denying it from climate change adaptation, foreign aid, and poverty relief.

Instead of asking whether a given intervention is cost-effective based upon some notion of a dollar value of a human life, we should be asking what the current cost of saving a human life is, and we should devote all available resources into whatever means saves the most lives for the least money. Most likely that means some sort of foreign aid, public health intervention, or poverty relief in Third World countries. It clearly does not mean cutting taxes on billionaires or starting another war in the Middle East.

Just how poor is poor?

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

June 2 JDN 2458637

In last week’s post I told you about the richest of the rich, the billionaires with ten, eleven, or even twelve-figure net wealth. My concern about them is only indirect: I care that we have concentrated so many of the resources of our society into this handful of people instead of spreading it around where it would do more good. But it is not inherently bad for billionaires to exist; all other things equal, people having more wealth is good.

Today my topic is the poorest of the poor. Their status is inherently bad. No one deserves it, and while for much of history we may have been powerless to prevent it, we are no longer. We could help these people—quite substantially quite cheaply, as you’ll see—and we are simply choosing not to. Perhaps you as an individual are not making this choice; perhaps, like me, you vote for candidates who support international aid and donate to top-rated international charities. But as a society, we are making this choice. Voters in the First World could all agree—or even 51% agree—that this problem really should be fixed, and we could fix it.

If asked, most people would say they care about world hunger, but either they are deeply ignorant about the solutions we now have availble to us, or they can’t really care about world hunger, or they would have voted for politicians who were committed to actually implementing the spending necessary to fix it. Maybe people would prefer to fix world hunger as long as it didn’t cost them a cent; but ask them to pay even a little bit, and suddenly they’re not so sure.

At current prices, the official UN threshold for “extreme poverty” is $1.90 in real consumption per person per day. I want to be absolutely clear about this: This is adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. They account for all consumption, including hunting, fishing, gathering, and goods made at home or obtained through bartering. This is not an artifact of failing to adjust for prices or not including goods that aren’t bought with money. These people really do live on less than $700 per year.

Shockingly, they are not all in Third World countries. While the majority of what we call “poverty” in the United States is well above the standard of living of UN “extreme poverty”, there are exceptions to this; there are about 5 million people in the US who are genuinely so poor that they are accurately categorized as at or near that $1.90 per day threshold.

This is such a shocking and horrifying truth that many people will try to deny it, as at least one libertarian think-tank did in a propagandistic screed. No, the UN isn’t lying; it’s really that bad. Extreme poverty in the US could be fixed so quickly, so easily that the fact that it remains in place can only be called an atrocity. Change a few numbers in the IRS code, work out a payment distribution system to reach people without bank accounts using cash or mobile payments, and by the end of the year you would have ended extreme poverty in the United States with no more than a few billion dollars diverted—which is to say, an amount that Jeff Bezos himself could afford to pay, or an amount that could be raised by a single percentage point of capital gains tax applied to billionaires only.
Even so, life is probably better for a homeless person on the street in New York City than it is for a child with malaria whose parents died in civil war in Congo. The New Yorker has access to clean water via drinking fountains, basic sanitation via public toilets (particularly in government buildings, since private businesses often specifically try to exclude the homeless), and basic nutrition via food banks and soup kitchens. The Congolese child has none of these things.

Life for the very poorest is a constant struggle for survival, against disease, malnutrition, dehydration, and parasites. Forget having a refrigerator or a microwave (as most of the poor in the US do, and rightly so—these things are really cheap here); they often have little clothing and no reliable shelter. The idea of going to a school or seeing a doctor sounds like a pipe dream. Surprisingly, there is a good chance that they or someone they know has a smartphone; if so it is likely their most prized possession. Though in Congo in particular, smartphones are relatively rare, which is ironic because the most critical raw material for smartphones—tantalum—is quite prevalent in Congo and a major source of conflict there.

Such a hard life is also typically a short one. The average life expectancy in Congo is less than 65 years. This is mainly due to the fact that almost 15% of children will die before the age of five, though fortunately infant and child mortality in Congo is rapidly declining (though that means it used to be worse than this!).

A disease that is merely inconvenient in a rich country is often fatal in a poor one; malaria is the classic example of this. Malaria remains the cause of over one million deaths per year, but essentially no one dies of malaria in First World countries. It can be treated with quinine, which costs no more than $3 per pill. But when your total consumption is $1.50 per day, a $3 pill is still prohibitively expensive. While in rich countries antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is a real danger, for the world’s poorest people it doesn’t much matter if the bacteria are resistant to antibiotics, because nobody can afford antibiotics.

What could we do to save these people? A great deal, as it turns out.

Ending extreme poverty worldwide wouldn’t be as easy as ending it in the United States; there’s no central taxation authority that would let us simply change a few numbers and then start writing checks.
We could implement changes through either official development aid or by supporting specific vetted non-governmental organizations, but each of these options carries drawbacks. Development aid can be embezzled by corrupt governments. NGOs can go bankrupt or have their assets expropriated.

Yet even with such challenges in mind, the total cost to end extreme poverty—not all poverty, but extreme poverty—worldwide is probably less than $200 billion per year. This is not a small sum, but it is well within our means. This is less than a third of the US military budget (not counting non-DoD military spending!), or about half what the US spends on gasoline.

Frankly I think we could safely divert that $200 billion directly from military spending without losing any national security. 21st century warfare is much less about blowing up targets and much more about winning hearts and minds. Ending world hunger would win an awful lot of hearts and minds, methinks. Obviously we can’t eliminate all military spending; those first two or three aircraft carrier battle groups really are keeping us and our allies safer. Did we really need eleven?

But all right, suppose we did need to raise additional tax revenue to fund this program. How much would taxes have to go up? Let’s say that only First World countries pay, which we can approximate using the GDP of the US and the EU (obviously we could also include Canada and Australia, but we might not want to include some of Eastern Europe, so that roughly balances out). Add up the $19 trillion of European Union GDP and $21 trillion of US GDP together and you get $40 trillion per year; $200 billion is only 0.5% of that. We would only need to raise taxes by half a percentage point to fund this program. Even if we didn’t make the tax progressive (and why wouldn’t we?), a typical family making $60,000 per year would only need to pay an extra $300 per year.

Why aren’t we doing this?

This is a completely serious question. Feel free to read it in an exasperated voice. I honestly would like to know why the world is willing to leave so many people in so much suffering when we could save them for such little cost.

Just how rich is rich?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 26 JDN 2458630

I think if there is one single thing I would like more people to know about economics, it is the sheer magnitude of global inequality. Most people seem to have no idea just how rich some people are—and how poor so many others are. They have a vision in their head of what “rich” and “poor” are, and their “rich” is a low-level Wall Street trader making $400,000 a year (the kind of people Gordon Gekko mocks in the film), and “poor” is someone who lives under a bridge in New York City. (They’re both New Yorkers, I guess. New Yorkers seem to be the iconic Americans, which is honestly more representative than you might think—80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas.)

If we take a global perspective, this is not what “rich” and “poor” truly mean.

In next week’s post I’ll talk about what “poor” means. It’s really appallingly bad. We have to leave the First World in order to find it; many people here are poor, but not that poor. It’s so bad that I think once you really understand it, it can’t but change your whole outlook on the world. But I’m saving that for next week.

This week, I’ll talk about what “rich” really means in today’s world. We needn’t leave the United States, for the top 3 and 6 of the top 10 richest people in the world live here. And they are all White men, by the way, though Carlos Slim and Amancio Ortega are at least Latino.

Going down the list of billionaires ranked by wealth, you have to get down to 15th place before encountering a woman, and it’s really worse than that, because Francoise Bettencourt (15), Alice Walton (17), Jacqueline Mars (33), Yang Huiyan (42), Susan Klatton (46), Laurena Powell-Jobs (54), Abigail Johnson (71), and Iris Fontbona (74) are all heirs. The richest living woman who didn’t simply inherit from her father or husband is actually Gina Rinehart, the 75th richest person in the world. (And note that, while also in some sense an heir, Queen Elizabeth is not on that list; in fact, she’s nowhere near the richest people in the world. She’s not in the top 500.)

You have to get to 20th place before encountering someone non-White (Ma Huateng), and all the way down to 65th before encountering someone not White or East Asian (the Hinduja brothers). Not one of the top 100 richest people is Black.

Just how rich are these people? Well, there’s a meme going around saying that Jeff Bezos could afford to buy every homeless person in the world a house at median market price and still, with just what’s left over, be a multi-billionaire among the top 100 richest people in the world.

And that meme is completely correct. The math checks out.

There are about 554,000 homeless people in the US at any given time.

The median sale price of a currently existing house in the US is about $253,000.

Multiply those two numbers together, and you get $140 billion.

And Jeff Bezos has net wealth of $157 billion.

This means that he would still have $17 billion left after buying all those houses. The 100th richest person in the world has $13 billion, so Jeff Bezos would still be higher than that.

Even $17 billion is enough to spend over $2 million every single day—over $20 per second—and never run out of money as long as the dividends keep paying out.

Jeff Bezos in fact made so much in dividends and capital gains this past quarter that he was taking in as much money as the median Amazon employee’s annual salary—which is more than what I make as a grad student, and only slightly less than the median US individual income—every nine seconds. Yes, you read that correctly: Nine (9) seconds. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, Jeff Bezos probably received more in capital gains than you will make this whole year. And if not (because you’re relatively rich or you read quickly), I’m sure he will have in the time it takes you to read this whole post.

When Mitt Romney ran for President, a great deal was made of his net wealth of over $250 million. This is indeed very rich, richer than anyone really needs or probably deserves. But compared to the world’s richest, this is pocket change. Jeff Bezos gets that much in dividends and capital gains every day. Bill Gates could give away that much every day for a year and still not run out of money. (He doesn’t quite give that much, but he does give a lot.)

I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is a medium-sized city of about 120,000 people (230th in the US by population), and relatively well-off (median household income about 16% higher than the US median). Nevertheless, if Jeff Bezos wanted to, he could give every single person in Ann Arbor the equivalent of 30 years of their income—over a million dollars each—and still have enough money left to be among the world’s 100 richest people.

Or suppose instead that all the world’s 500 richest people decided to give away all the money they have above $1 billion—so they’d all still be billionaires, but only barely. That $8.7 trillion they have together, minus the $500 billion they’re keeping, would be $8.2 trillion. In fact, let’s say they keep a little more, just to make sure they all have the same ordering: Give each one an extra $1 million for each point they are in the ranking, so that Jeff Bezos would stay on top at $1 B + 500 ($0.001 B) = $1.5 billion, while Bill Gates in second place would have $1 million less, and so on. That would leave us with still over $8 trillion to give away.

How far could that $8 trillion go? Well, suppose we divided it evenly between all 328 million people in the United States. How much would each person receive? Oh, just about $24,000—basically my annual income.

Or suppose instead we spread it out over the entire world: Every single man, woman, and child on the planet Earth gets an equal share. There are 7.7 billion people in the world, so by spreading out $8 trillion between them, each one would get over $1000. For you or I that’s a big enough windfall to feel. For the world’s poorest people, it’s more than they make in several years. It would be life-changing for them. (Actually that’s about what GiveDirectly gives each family—and it is life-changing.)

And let me remind you: This would be leaving them billionaires. They’re just not as much billionaires as before—they only have $1 billion instead of $20 billion or $50 billion or $100 billion. And even $1 billion is obviously enough to live however you want, wherever you want, for the rest of your life, never working another day if you don’t want to. With $1 billion, you can fly in jets (a good one will set you back $20 million), sail in yachts (even a massive 200-footer wouldn’t run much above $200 million), and eat filet mignon at every meal (in fact, at $25 per pound, you can serve it to yourself and a hundred of your friends without breaking a sweat). You can decorate your bedroom with original Jackson Pollock paintings (at $200 million, his most expensive painting is only 20% of your wealth) and bathe in bottles of Dom Perignon (at $400 per liter, a 200-liter bath would cost you about $80,000—even every day that’s only $30 million a year, or maybe half to a third of your capital income). Remember, this is all feasible at just $1 billion—and Jeff Bezos has over a hundred times that. There is no real lifestyle improvement that happens between $1 billion and $157 billion; it’s purely a matter of status and power.

Taking enough to make them mere millionaires would give us another $0.5 trillion to spend (about the GDP of Sweden, one-fourth the GDP of Canada, or 70% of the US military budget).

Do you think maybe these people have too much money?

I’m not saying that we should confiscate all private property. I’m not saying that we should collectivize all industry. I believe in free markets and private enterprise. People should be able to get rich by inventing things and starting businesses.

But should they be able to get that rich? So rich that one man could pay off every mortgage in a whole major city? So rich that the CEO of a company makes what his employees make in a year in less than a minute? So rich that 500 people—enough to fill a large lecture hall—own enough wealth that if it were spread out evenly they could give $1000 to every single person in the world?

If Jeff Bezos had $1.5 million, I’d say he absolutely earned it. Some high-level programmers at Amazon have that much, and they absolutely earned it. If he had $15 million, I’d think maybe he could deserve that, given his contribution to the world. If he had $150 million, I’d find it hard to believe that anyone could really deserve that much, but if it’s part of what we need to make capitalism work, I could live with that.

But Jeff Bezos doesn’t have $1.5 million. He doesn’t have $15 million. He doesn’t have $150 million. He doesn’t have $1.5 billion. He doesn’t even have $15 billion. He has $150 billion. He has over a thousand times the level of wealth at which I was already having to doubt whether any human being could possibly deserve so much money—and once it gets that big, it basically just keeps growing. A stock market crash might drop it down temporarily, but it would come back in a few years.

And it’s not like there’s nothing we could do to spread this wealth around. Some fairly simple changes in how we tax dividends and capital gains would be enough to get a lot of it, and a wealth tax like the one Elizabeth Warren has proposed would help a great deal as well. At the rates people have seriously proposed, these taxes would only really stop their wealth from growing; it wouldn’t meaningfully shrink it.

That could be combined with policy changes about compensation for corporate executives, particularly with regard to stock options, to make it harder to extract such a large proportion of a huge multinational corporation’s wealth into a single individual. We could impose a cap on the ratio between median employee salary (including the entire supply chain!) and total executive compensation (including dividends and capital gains!), say 100 to 1. (Making in 9 seconds what his employees make in a year, Jeff Bezos is currently operating at a ratio of over 3 million to 1.) If you exceed the cap, the remainder is taxed at 100%. This would mean that as a CEO you can still make $100 million a year, but only if your median employee makes $1 million. If your median employee makes $30,000, you’d better keep your own compensation under $3 million, because we’re gonna take the rest.

Is this socialism? I guess maybe it’s democratic socialism, the high-tax, high-spend #ScandinaviaIsBetter welfare state. But it would not be an end to free markets or free enterprise. We’re not collectivizing any industries, let alone putting anyone in guillotines. You could still start a business and make millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars; you’d simply be expected to share that wealth with your employees and our society as a whole, instead of hoarding it all for yourself.

Green New Deal Part 3: Guaranteeing education and healthcare is easy—why aren’t we doing it?

PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 21 JDN 2458595

Last week was one of the “hard parts” of the Green New Deal. Today it’s back to one of the “easy parts”: Guaranteed education and healthcare.

“Providing all people of the United States with – (i) high-quality health care; […]

“Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.”

Many Americans seem to think that providing universal healthcare would be prohibitively expensive. In fact, it would have literally negative net cost.
The US currently has the most bloated, expensive, inefficient healthcare system in the entire world. We spend almost $10,000 per person per year on healthcare, and get outcomes no better than France or the UK where they spend less than $5,000.
In fact, our public healthcare expenditures are currently higher than almost every other country. Our private expenditures are therefore pure waste; all they are doing is providing returns for the shareholders of corporations. If we were to simply copy the UK National Health Service and spend money in exactly the same way as they do, we would spend the same amount in public funds and almost nothing in private funds—and the UK has a higher mean lifespan than the US.
This is absolutely a no-brainer. Burn the whole system of private insurance down. Copy a healthcare system that actually works, like they use in every other First World country.
It wouldn’t even be that complicated to implement: We already have a single-payer healthcare system in the US; it’s called Medicare. Currently only old people get it; but old people use the most healthcare anyway. Hence, Medicare for All: Just lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 18 (if not zero). In the short run there would be additional costs for the transition, but in the long run we would save mind-boggling amounts of money, all while improving healthcare outcomes and extending our lifespans. Current estimates say that the net savings of Medicare for All would be about $5 trillion over the next 10 years. We can afford this. Indeed, the question is, as it was for infrastructure: How can we afford not to do this?
Isn’t this socialism? Yeah, I suppose it is. But healthcare is one of the few things that socialist countries consistently do extremely well. Cuba is a socialist country—a real socialist country, not a social democratic welfare state like Norway but a genuinely authoritarian centrally-planned economy. Cuba’s per-capita GDP PPP is a third of ours. Yet their life expectancy is actually higher than ours, because their healthcare system is just that good. Their per-capita healthcare spending is one-fourth of ours, and their health outcomes are better. So yeah, let’s be socialist in our healthcare. Socialists seem really good at healthcare.
And this makes sense, if you think about it. Doctors can do their jobs a lot better when they’re focused on just treating everyone who needs help, rather than arguing with insurance companies over what should and shouldn’t be covered. Preventative medicine is extremely cost-effective, yet it’s usually the first thing that people skimp on when trying to save money on health insurance. A variety of public health measures (such as vaccination and air quality regulation) are extremely cost-effective, but they are public goods that the private sector would not pay for by itself.
It’s not as if healthcare was ever really a competitive market anyway: When you get sick or injured, do you shop around for the best or cheapest hospital? How would you even go about that, when they don’t even post most of their prices and what prices they post are often wildly different than what you’ll actually pay?
The only serious argument I’ve heard against single-payer healthcare is a moral one: “Why should I have to pay for other people’s healthcare?” Well, I guess, because… you’re a human being? You should care about other human beings, and not want them to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases?
I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

Single-payer healthcare is not only affordable: It would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing. (In fact, almost anything would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing—Obamacare was an improvement over the previous mess, but it’s still a mess.)
What about public education? Well, we already have that up to the high school level, and it works quite well.
Contrary to popular belief, the average public high school has better outcomes in terms of test scores and college placements than the average private high school. There are some elite private schools that do better, but they are extraordinarily expensive and they self-select only the best students. Public schools have to take all students, and they have a limited budget; but they have high quality standards and they require their teachers to be certified.
The flaws in our public school system are largely from it being not public enough, which is to say that schools are funded by their local property taxes instead of having their costs equally shared across whole states. This gives them the same basic problem as private schools: Rich kids get better schools.
If we removed that inequality, our educational outcomes would probably be among the best in the world—indeed, in our most well-funded school districts, they are. The state of Massachusetts which actually funds their public schools equally and well, gets international test scores just as good as the supposedly “superior” educational systems of Asian countries. In fact, this is probably even unfair to Massachusetts, as we know that China specifically selects the regions that have the best students to be the ones to take these international tests. Massachusetts is the best the US has to offer, but Shanghai is also the best China has to offer, so it’s only fair we compare apples to apples.
Public education has benefits for our whole society. We want to have a population of citizens, workers, and consumers who are well-educated. There are enormous benefits of primary and secondary education in terms of reducing poverty, improving public health, and increased economic growth.
So there’s my impassioned argument for why we should continue to support free, universal public education up to high school.
When it comes to college, I can’t be quite so enthusiastic. While there are societal benefits of college education, most of the benefits of college accrue to the individuals who go to college themselves.
The median weekly income of someone with a high school diploma is about $730; with a bachelor’s degree this rises to $1200; and with a doctoral or professional degree it gets over $1800. Higher education also greatly reduces your risk of being unemployed; while about 4% of the general population is unemployed, only 1.5% of people with doctorates or professional degrees are. Add that up over all the weeks of your life, and it’s a lot of money.
The net present value of a college education has been estimated at approximately $1 million. This result is quite sensitive to the choice of discount rate; at a higher discount rate you can get the net present value as “low” as $250,000.
With this in mind, the fact that the median student loan debt for a college graduate is about $30,000 doesn’t sound so terrible, does it? You’re taking out a loan for $30,000 to get something that will earn you between $250,000 and $1 million over the course of your life.
There is some evidence that having student loans delays homeownership; but this is a problem with our mortgage system, not our education system. It’s mainly the inability to finance a down payment that prevents people from buying homes. We should implement a system of block grants for first-time homeowners that gives them a chunk of money to make a down payment, perhaps $50,000. This would cost about as much as the mortgage interest tax deduction which mainly benefits the upper-middle class.
Higher education does have societal benefits as well. Perhaps the starkest I’ve noticed is how categorically higher education decided people’s votes on Donald Trump: Counties with high rates of college education almost all voted for Clinton, and counties with low rates of college education almost all voted for Trump. This was true even controlling for income and a lot of other demographic factors. Only authoritarianism, sexism and racism were better predictors of voting for Trump—and those could very well be mediating variables, if education reduces such attitudes.
If indeed it’s true that higher education makes people less sexist, less racist, less authoritarian, and overall better citizens, then it would be worth every penny to provide universal free college.
But it’s worth noting that even countries like Germany and Sweden which ostensibly do that don’t really do that: While college tuition is free for Swedish citizens and Germany provides free college for all students of any nationality, nevertheless the proportion of people in Sweden and Germany with bachelor’s degrees is actually lower than that of the United States. In Sweden the gap largely disappears if you restrict to younger cohorts—but in Germany it’s still there.
Indeed, from where I’m sitting, “universal free college” looks an awful lot like “the lower-middle class pays for the upper-middle class to go to college”. Social class is still a strong predictor of education level in Sweden. Among OECD countries, education seems to be the best at promoting upward mobility in Australia, and average college tuition in Australia is actually higher than average college tuition in the US (yes, even adjusting for currency exchange: Australian dollars are worth only slightly less than US dollars).
What does Australia do? They have a really good student loan system. You have to reach an annual income of about $40,000 per year before you need to make payments at all, and the loans are subsidized to be interest-free. Once you do owe payments, the debt is repaid at a rate proportional to your income—so effectively it’s not a debt at all but an equity stake.
In the US, students have been taking the desperate (and very cyberpunk) route of selling literal equity stakes in their education to Wall Street banks; this is a terrible idea for a hundred reasons. But having the government have something like an equity stake in students makes a lot of sense.
Because of the subsidies and generous repayment plans, the Australian government loses money on their student loan system, but so what? In order to implement universal free college, they would have spent an awful lot more than they are losing now. This way, the losses are specifically on students who got a lot of education but never managed to raise their income high enough—which means the government is actually incentivized to improve the quality of education or job-matching.
The cost of universal free college is considerable: That $1.3 trillion currently owed as student loans would be additional government debt or tax liability instead. Is this utterly unaffordable? No. But it’s not trivial either. We’re talking about roughly $60 billion per year in additional government spending, a bit less than what we currently spend on food stamps. An expenditure like that should have a large public benefit (as food stamps absolutely, definitely do!); I’m not convinced that free college would have such a benefit.
It would benefit me personally enormously: I currently owe over $100,000 in debt (about half from my undergrad and half from my first master’s). But I’m fairly privileged. Once I finally make it through this PhD, I can expect to make something like $100,000 per year until I retire. I’m not sure that benefiting people like me should be a major goal of public policy.
That said, I don’t think universal free college is a terrible policy. Done well, it could be a good thing. But it isn’t the no-brainer that single-payer healthcare is. We can still make sure that students are not overburdened by debt without making college tuition actually free.