Hacker Cinema
Inequality for All
2013 · Film · documentary · 88 min
Directed by Jacob Kornbluth
Based on Reich's 2010 book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, the film examines widening income inequality in the United States. U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich tries to raise awareness of the country's widening economic gap. He publicly argued about the issue for decades, and producing a film of his viewpoints was a "final frontier" for him. In addition to being a social issue documentary, Inequality for All is also partially a biopic regarding Reich's early life and his time as Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton's presidency. Warren Buffett and Nick Hanauer, two entrepreneurs and investors in the top 1%, are interviewed in the film, supporting Reich's belief in an economy that benefits all citizens, including those of the middle and lower classes.
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9 comments on Hacker News
> That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range.
It sounds like you're airing a general grievance against sampling, but I'm sure that's not what you mean, so please elaborate?
> And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.
I don't see how that renders anything 'incoherent'. Are you interpreting "unanimous public support" to mean "literally every single citizen supports this policy, including corporate decision-makers and legislators"? Such pedantry aside, it's entirely possible for an overwhelming majority of the public to want a particular policy decision irrespective of whether "corporate decision-makers" or legislators find themselves in the majority or minority.
In whatever case, the statistic I'm thinking of is from former labor secretary Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" documentary. I don't care to skim it for exact phrasing or numbers. Similar information can be found here: https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.
Outrage is clickbait gold. So, that is production in for-profit blogging or pseudo-journalism, and also in the business of social media.
That said, Bill Gates is both a public figure and a billionaire, so is fair-game for a lot of criticism. He does set a good example, in general, with immense contributions to global public health and policy.
Also, there's no U-haul's behind Hearses, so I would buy 50 Singer Porsches and a 747-400ER and crash them into each other with a trebuchet. If someone has more money than they could ever spend, invest or give-away in a scalable manner, then why the hell not buy an aircraft-carrier or a hydrogen yacht?
Furthermore, balance sheet inequality is beyond severe in many countries yet there are people in various economic strata who seem to blissfully revel in denying the real pain of others; "Upton Sinclair effect" (paraphrasing: It's difficult to get someone to accept facts when they benefit from pretending they doesn't exist.). For more details and because it's not worth getting into politics online, I suggest Robert Reich's channel [0] and his brilliant documentary Inequality for All [1] and the Infographics video on the disconnect between perceived distribution, desired distribution and actual distribution [2].
0: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuDv5p8E-evaRSh542hDV5g
1: https://inequalityforall.com
2: https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
It's a pretty well understood and accepted fact at this point. It's been a major talking point in economic and political circles for the past 5 - 10 years.
The sources below are from a quick Google search. They mostly reference income stagnation and are about the US. But income stagnation leads to wealth stagnation and there are similar trends world wide. Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century is largely about this issue, as is Robert Reich's documentary Inequality for All. There are those who challenge the conclusions drawn in both, but few seriously contest the data they point to.
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/02/349863761/40-years-of-income-inequality-in-america-in-graphs [3] https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/incomes [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/sunday-review/americas-productivity-climbs-but-wages-stagnate.html
The problem that these people are experiencing is that they are in a very special privileged position (weather through their own work or through inheritance), yet they realize that most people they will interact with will never attain their status.
It is not about hard work, or "bootstrapping" yourself. Its all about the luck. And they have been lucky. They are reaping the benefits of their luck at a disproportionate rate then the these other people. And they aren't doing anything about it.
It is ridiculous that people who make $250K or more a year (and I don't care where you live) think that they are "middle class". Bullshit. You are wealthy. Most other people are not. The quicker you admit to it - the more the economic disparity becomes obvious and something has to be done about it.
In Inequality for All—a 2013 documentary with Robert Reich in which he argued that income inequality is the defining issue for the United States—Reich states that 95% of economic gains went to the top 1% net worth (HNWI) since 2009 when the recovery allegedly started. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_for_All)
By continuing to state that they are 'normal' or 'middle class' or 'frugal' - they are really trying to convince themselves that they are not the on the "taking" part of society.
Recommend Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" on this subject: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215151/
The income of people has diverted more and more in the last decades.
It is a fact, that countries really flourished (USA, Germany, other countries) with a bigger part of the society in the middle class and having a better living and education, when those countries managed to bring better income also to working-class people.
Today's wealth in the US is for a big part because of the flourishing middle-class of the country shortly after the 2nd World-war. The same holds for Germany and other countries.
Today, all over the world, the income diverts and education already is going down for normal people in many countries. Middle classes are melting away.
Wealth of a society is not only to be measured by the wealthiest people in the society, but by the wealth of the middle class (and worker) people.
Today, we waste the wealth created after the war and give it away to the <1% of people.
Everybody should see this film: Inequality for All [1] that shows, the connections, that many are just ignoring today.
To my opinion, to help poor people, raise wages of workers in all the world (thus making an end with a Globalization that just helps the rich).
By raising the wages, you will not have people that just live on welfare, but that can be proud again for their work they do.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215151/
For anyone interested in learning more about the growing inequality gap in America, I recommend watching the documentary "Inequality For All" (http://imdb.com/title/tt2215151/).
That, in combination with the ~50% tax rate on income and capital gains. Turns out, when you redistribute wealth, consumption increases so rapidly that the economy takes off.
That no longer is much of an option, as wealthy individuals have not only managed to reduce capital gains to ridiculously low levels, but also diversified their holdings throughout the globe. This makes taxation a poor tactic, as capital will just flow to tax havens as the rate increases.
Turns out that feudalism is the natural state of man, and reprieves from it are quite temporary anomalies.
For those interested in details, Thomas Piketty's Capital is an excellent reference on the subject. Also, the movie Inequality for All is a far more approachable presentation based on the book.
Inequality for All is a movie worth checking out - http://inequalityforall.com