This all presupposes that the government is an efficient user of capital, when its pretty clear its not. Heavy taxes on the rich, means that capital investments that a rich person might finance, become government programmes and bureaucracies. Theres obviously a sweet spot here - but rich folks are good at creating capital and governments are notorious for wasting it.
Now in the US I probably don’t have to tell you where most of the money goes - hint military - so more rich folks money into the governments coffers - what industry do you think benefits the most from a policy like this?
> but rich folks are good at creating capital and governments are notorious for wasting it.
There is more than a little nuance here:
- governments are notorious for being called out on supposed inefficiencies.
Too often, it turns out that there were very good reasons for those inefficiencies, but the criticasters forgot the lesson.
- "rich folks are good..."
I wouldn't know. Superrich folks are good at manipulating the system and extracting wealth from others, that I can believe. We see that happen often enough - the superrich lose money if they were to pick up a 100 dollar bill (they make more money in that time if they work), while their employees have to pee in water bottles or are exploited in other ways.
I strongly doubt that the superrich are better than governments at creating capital for anyone else but themselves in an ethical, human-respecting manner.
I've never understood the argument. I've worked in several different private companies, and calling them "Efficient" is so off base as to be laughable. Remember, a private company will happily let an import engineer go instead of giving them a small raise.
Go work for the government then? Or wait, the government is way stingier with raises than private companies are! Engineers fight over jobs at private companies and shun government jobs because governments don't reward good work.
Most of our money does not go to the military. Defense spending is about 700b per year, while the budget is over 4t.
The government doesn't need to handle capitol allocation. We can simply shift the tax burden upwards. Poorer people get reduced tax, rich people get more.
Poor people already pay next to nothing in taxes - the bottom 60% of society, making less than $50k only contributes 7% of total tax revenue from income taxes, while 0.3% of those making more than $1M per year contributes 27%. [1]
I think the US has pretty good revenue structure in that regard. In my country 62% of federal budget comes from sales taxes (e.g. 23% VAT), which disproportionately affects poor people.
Your first sentence ignores what you say in the second. In the US, poor people pay a significant portion of their income in sales tax which is regressive.
Yes, I kind of missed that. On the other hand, sales tax in the US is very low compared to European VAT (0-7% vs 18-25% VAT), so it's much smaller issue.
I would suggest to think of this not in terms of contribution to the whole, but percentage of ($income - $housing - $food - $stdxpenses). With $stdxpenses covering standard living expenses including energy, water, basic insurance, basic commute.
I would be somewhat surprised (rather flabbergasted) if rich folks paid anywhere close to the percentage that poor people do.
In other words: if you want to compare by measuring contribution, measure tax rate to what's left for that individual's personal use.
The working poor pay into FICA which is a greater percentage of their cash flow. They get it back upon annual tax reconciliation. The same entitlement programs nonetheless have lots of unfunded liabilities so the money has already been allocated even if it's not currently "there" -- 'The Rich' are beneficiaries of entitlement spending too.
It's a simpler situation than that. Regardless of proportions of payment, we already have a percentage of the population whose public services are paid for by someone else, either directly through income or divided tax or indirectly through higher prices from corporation tax, or more indirectly through inflationary monetary policy.
In other words: we don't need to invent taxing people with more money more. We have that. Millions of people are partly or fully paid for by others. We might want to adjust it, but we don't need to pretend we're doing something revolutionary in doing so.
> This all presupposes that the government is an efficient user of capital, when its pretty clear its not.
It's not a presupposition. That's a separate discussion and should also be improved. We shouldn't say, "oh, we're bad at redistribution, so let's not".
You’re assuming an infinite perfectibility of human nature. The problem with government planning is that it’s removed from the best, local information and inherently has broken incentives.
By the best, local information I mean that in the market, the people with the need for the good or service, and the people who bear the cost of providing it, are the people with the best information and also the ones making the decision to purchase and produce and at what price. The market automatically aggregates this information and produces a price level, which creates the incentive to produce and purchase the appropriate amount of something.
By broken incentives I mean the entire body of work that is public choice theory. Don’t think about government agents as benevolent actors. They are on the whole not good or bad, just about as self-interested as anyone else. They don’t make decisions based on what produces the best outcomes for the public. They make decisions based on what advances their own immediate and long term interests as individuals and social groups. Democracy tries to align those but it doesn’t do a very good job since most decisions do not rise to public political issues, the public can only have a limited understanding of, and elections are too blunt an instrument for adjudicating, the propriety of thousands or millions of public sector decisions.
Broken incentives? What about Boeing with their 737 MAX? That is a prime example of broken incentives costing human lives. What about stock trading causing famines? Our current way of doing "economy" is massively broken and affects everything.
Who said anything about people being infallible? Amusing to nitpick market failures when planned economies have all led to mass poverty and famine. And market economies have created, in the last 200 years, unparalleled prosperity.
And if they’re poorly run, the company goes bankrupt or gets bought out by a stronger company. The government isn’t subject to that kind of check, except in the most catastrophic case.
The Yard sale model in this post demonstrates that rich people are not necessarily better at allocating capital even if/as they accumulate and compound it faster.
The military is NOT where most spending goes - most spending goes to the entitlement programs: social security and Medicare.
It does not demonstrate that at all. It assumes everyone, rich and poor, is exactly equal at allocating capital because they all have a flat 50% chance to make money on every investment.
In reality some poor people are savvy investors and become rich and some rich people are foolish investors and become poor.
What it demonstrates is that people with equal investing skills will see radically unequal outcomes, based entirely on their pre-existing wealth. Presumably you could update this model to give some people “better investing skills” and others worse skills. (In practice you’d just bias the coin flip against the ‘worse’ investors.) I suspect that once inequality has crept into the game then even having “better investing skills” is outweighed by the advantage of being already-rich. But I haven’t run the simulation to see how much investing advantage gets wiped out by wealth inequality: seems like it would be a fun project to code up with my 15y/o.
> What it demonstrates is that people with equal investing skills will see radically unequal outcomes, based entirely on their pre-existing wealth.
Well, duh. Did anyone think otherwise? Obviously a great investor with $1,000,000 will make more money than a great investor with $100. That's not some nefarious plot of evil capitalists to keep down the poors, it's just the math of how percentages work.
What system could possibly eliminate that advantage without destroying the incentive to invest at all? If you're managing a million dollars and you are unable to make any more money than you would investing $100, then why would you invest? What would people do with their money in that case? Hide it under a mattress?
TFA talks about all of this. The point of the article is that in a system with a finite amount of wealth, even a society that starts equal will eventually become highly unequal: as long as there is continued betting/competition where all parties have an equal risk tolerance corresponding to their income. The concentrating effects of these bets is the important lesson. TFA describes some ways to avoid this outcome.
But TFA article is completely unrelated to the real world.
There is not a finite amount of wealth. People create new wealth through innovation.
People do not mindlessly continue the same investing strategy when incentives change. If you reduce the expected return from an investment, they stop investing in it.
So any strategies that might be useful for the contrived game described in the article are not relevant to the real world.
Nearly every economic action you take can be viewed as an investment or bet. Getting up in the morning and going to work represents a bet that your compensation will be worth the time spent. Sending your kids to school/college is an even more obvious example. For self-employed people all of this gets much more literal: every job involves a tradeoff of time and resources that could be spent on different projects. Even open-source hobby projects are can be a time-investment in building your resume. These "bets" have counterparties as well: for example, your employer can afford to negotiate much harder than you can on salary, because you need a job and health insurance more than they need you.
I also agree that this is a simplified model. But its simplicity is what makes it elegant: you can see the effect in a model that lacks all of the complexity of real-world economic activity. In the real world the "bets" are more complicated and the odds more variable, but you can't just claim "this effect must go away" without articulating a clear reason that it would.
The reasonable point you do make is that in our current economy the "pie" isn't fixed: new wealth is being created all the time, and this is one reason we don't collapse into permanent inequality the way this model does. This doesn't negate the model, however, it just means there is something counteracting it. Unfortunately the fear is that in the future (or perhaps even the present) new wealth creation will no longer keep up with this underlying concentrating effect, and we'd better think hard about what to do then.
> but you can't just claim "this effect must go away" without articulating a clear reason that it would.
If the effect is that, all else being equal, people with a lot of money can make more money in an absolute sense than people without a lot of money, then of course it doesn't go away. It's not that that isn't real (it's simply how percentages work) it's that it's not actually a problem because the model is so far removed from reality as to be irrelevant.
The real world is not a 1v1 adversarial game where people are betting against each other. More often they are collaboratively betting together and both benefit if they succeed.
Young, poor* entrepreneur brings an idea, maybe specialized domain knowledge, and time and energy
old, rich investor brings capital, maybe business experience and network, and gives it to entrepreneur to execute.
If all goes well old, rich investor and young, poor entrepreneur both make a lot of money. Young, poor entrepreneur becomes old, rich investor for the next generation.
If the venture fails, old, rich investor loses money (which went to pay some number of employees and vendors, who get to benefit from it), but old, rich investor expects this to happen for some or most investments. Young, poor entrepreneur loses time but gains experience and connections.
Nobody tricked anybody or stole anything from anyone or "lost a bet" like they are playing a rigged game in Vegas.
If you tell old, rich investor they aren't allowed to make any money by investing in young, poor entrepreneur any more, they don't just keep on doing it and allow you to redistribute their profits. They buy T-Bills instead. Young, poor entrepreneur goes to work for some other company (that old, rich investor probably funded in the past and owns) and gets a mediocre salary instead of getting rich and the world is deprived of whatever innovation they might have had.
This is pretty much fine for the old, rich investors, they're already rich. But it screws over the possibility of getting rich for anyone who isn't already. Which, if you were trying to reduce inequality, is the opposite of what you'd want.
* - or more realistically, middle or upper-middle class
Another unrealistic part about the model is that people keep betting a fixed percentage of their net worth. If you have a million dollars, maybe you can invest $100,000 into the seed round of a startup. If you have a billion dollars, it's unlikely you can invest $100 million into one investment. You spread it across multiple investments, maybe hundreds, and the average return is less than what you would get from succeeding on one big investment, because there simply isn't an opportunity that can make use of that much capital at once.
Again, you are talking about a world where the economy is not static: where there is room for overall economic growth that exceeds the wealth-concentrating effect. That’s the world we’ve lived in for at least the past few decades. But there’s no immutable law that says we’ll be able to maintain 3-10% GDP growth forever. There have been many periods of economic stagnation in the recent past where wealth concentrated exactly the way this model suggests. And there will be similar periods in the future, whether that’s the near future (demographic decline) or slightly more distant future (exponential growth can’t continue forever.)
In either case it is useful to understand the underlying concentrating effect even if one believes it is tolerable because other effects dominate.
Rich folks are only so seemingly "efficient" and good at creating capital because they decline to do what the government does.
The ultra wealthy property developer only builds what is profitable, and so slices off to serve only the most profitable part of the market to serve, and accordingly only builds luxury condos.
Meanwhile the government is obliged to serve everyone, the disabled, the poor, etc, and so with its housing whatever profits are gained by its market priced rents to the middle class are leveraged toward sustaining the unprofitable housing it is obliged to create, and the whole enterprise isn't profitable and needs outside subsidy to continue. We disparage this as "inefficient" government yada yada.
These two different groups aren't working on the same problems.
Now in the US I probably don’t have to tell you where most of the money goes - hint military - so more rich folks money into the governments coffers - what industry do you think benefits the most from a policy like this?