The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

This idea was completely debunked by a frenchman, who showed that the majority of wealthy people inherited the wealth. Enfant Terrible Trump of this thread is part of that same group: his dad was rich, he stayed rich.

Source?

I fail to see why this statement deserves a facepalm.

It was all over the news a while back?

Itll take some digging to get the artikel

Let's talk about how lazy those starving poverty stricken children are shall we?
...
Oh wait.

Let's talk about how lazy they were after having grown up, unable to go to college because they had no way to pay and having to work multiple minimum wage jobs for 80+ hours a week just to stay afloat?

They're so lazy, it's all their fault, if they had just worked harder they could have achieved the american dream.

To be clear: such groups do exist. But it's not the majority.

More generally, poverty, like wealth, is a positive feedback system: it's easier to make a million if you already have one, it's hard to save money if you cant pay the bills to begin with.

WTF
Not that bad?

Here's a visualization of it



It's terrible.

There is some truth to this, but at the same time it is just so wrong.
So at the very top of things, at the source of that river. Where does the source come from? How is it created?

If you want to use a river as analogy then to my understanding it is turned upside down.
The super rich sit at the end of the river and collect the whole outflow. At the source of the river sit the super poor. As the river moves downwards it collects wealth from all the people until it ends at the super rich who collect it.

In reality it's certainly not such a one-way thing, it is more like a circle.
And ofc if a person A's bank account goes up another person B's bank account goes down.
Ever made a transaction before?
If a person A makes a million dollars somebody had to give that million dollars to them. Either one million people each gave a dollar or 1000 people gave 1000 dollars, etc.
You get the picture?

I guess you could add that the huge ocean of wealth the rich keep for themselves in the sun condensates a little and creates a bit of rain that gives a little bit back to the rich. But that doesn't change the fact that the ocean stays the ocean and the land stays more or less dry.

Yeah again, it works in Germany since 1883. Seems we're all idiots. Somehow pretty successful ones. Probably we just stole it from the hard working Americans.

Again: The point of socialism as I understand is to make sure that even the people at the bottom of the rich-poor scale are not miserable. Everyone has a right for a place to live, medical treatment, decent stuff to eat, good education, etc. Totally compatible with a slightly controlled free market. It provides a safety-net for everyone, not more. No matter how hard you work, in the end you'll always have some unlucky part in your population that just fail at whatever their plan was to support themselves. The point of socialism is to help those people to stay on their feet. If you take this away from a society and go for unconditional capitalism you'll see the poorest of the poor will be little more than slaves to the super rich. An empty stomach and no money at hand = at the mercy of whoever has money in hand.

Communism goes much further, it's about totally removing the difference between rich and poor with all economics controlled by the state.

Yes movement of money is a good thing. Now explain how a super rich person who hoards multiple billion dollars in wealth is good for the movement of money.

Not stolen no, but somebody or some group of people did pay him one million dollars. They'll have one million less, Trump will have one million more.

You're willing to discuss? I tell you to consider there is a difference between socialism and communism, show you historical facts about Germany successfully introducing some of its concepts more than one hundred years ago and all you have to say is that socialism is communism for idiots. Quite a way to discuss you have there.

Again you say you want to discuss? All you're doing is basically telling me I am a poor envious leech who wants money from the rich. Sorry to burst your bubble, but if I had not decided to go study computer science I'd be totally financially independent right now, I had well paid work already and decided to quit to go study. My studies are going pretty well however, so I am very confident that once I am done I'll be even more independent than before. So nope, I am not envious at all. No need.

Did you miss the information-video and stuff a few pages ago? The "if the land were spread like money 40% of all Americans would live on that tiny dot" graphic? Did you already forget?
?!?!

A study on the topic is nice, but I'd call it common knowledge
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, unless the state works against it.
It's really the same as the economics in PA. If you have a ton of economy it is easier to build even more

Here we are again. No data, no reasoning.

Doesn't look too bad to me. It could be better obviously.

you're a funny guy. a real funny guy.

I'm confused. What point is trying to be proven here?

The the poor people are poor because their choices led to it or that lower income people are less likely to go to college?

College enrollment is not as strongly related to income as some people here think.

however, it is leagues more than what you seem to think.

In response to the Wealth is inherited thing:

The guy's name is Thomas Piketty. He wrote a book about it.
In video form:
https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_on_capital_in_the_twenty_first_century
In written form:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains

And if you're curious about more, googling that name should be enough. Book is titled "capital in the 20th century"

When there is a 10% drop between "low" and "middle" income, and a further 20% drop between "middle" income and "high" income (those terms aren't qualified in the "source" you provide, of course, so they could literally mean anything), and "low" income still only boasts a 50% college uptake rate . . .

. . . that's a pretty strong correlation. 50% of "low" income folk don't get college, compared to 20% of "high" income folk.

How familiar are you with statistics? A 30% range over a (presumably) large dataset is . . . well, huge.

Of course it's a strong correlation, that was expected. But compared to how much inequality is in the economy it's not strong at all. The wealthy people making 500k per year only (on average) have an extra 30% greater chance of going to college than the poor people making 40k per year. ON AVERAGE.

So there's a few things here.

1. You've set "high" at $500k (post-tax?) and "low" at $40k. Where does "middle" sit? Depending on the placement, it could skew the curve considerably.

2. Admitting it is a strong correlation after saying "it isn't as strong as some people here think" is self-defeating. So it's a strong correlation, but that strength isn't . . . between the definition of "strong" and "complete" (as no-one here claimed it was a complete correlation 1:1 involving no other factors). That's nebulous, and very poor semantics.

3. The graph has nothing to do with chance. The graph states the percentage of the relative population bands that attend college, grouped by undefined wage bands. This has correlation with the chance each person has to attend college, but that correlation is undefined. Every person in America could have a 99% chance to attend college, and the results could remain exactly as you see them in that graph.

Please don't misuse "chance", especially when relating to statistics. A 50% chance does not guarantee that 1 in 2 will attend. A statistic of 50% attendance defines that 1 in 2 of that wage band attended. The difference is therefore a static 30%, not a chance increase of 30%.

4. The graph makes no definition of population. We have no idea how many people are in the "low" band, and so on. There could be 50% of America's population in the "low" band, and 5% in the "high" band. Which is important data when evaluating the effectiveness of income on college attendance.

It's also conveniently-cropped from the article at hand (which isn't even linked), which is (doubly) disconcerting.

5. Finally, the graph makes no relation to other potential causes of not attending college. Rich individuals could be private tutored. Poor individuals by definition are unlikely to be. I chose that as an easy example because private tuition is something that factually only becomes available the more disposable income you earn, or manage to save at your own expense.

If the study is so incredibly biased as you're suggesting then I'm wrong. But considering its source, I can't imagine such a blatant statistical problem occurring.

I could play the bias and skew game all day long on graphs. Assumptions are always made.

And here's the source:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...w-income-students-still-trails-richer-groups/

I think it speaks for itself.

I didn't say it was biased, explicitly. I said the data lacks a lot of concrete information that affect the conclusion you're using it to support.

My post was more about attacking your logic than declaring the data invalid. Data is rarely invalid. It is often abused out of context to support an argument though, especially online.

But hey, you don't want to debate any of what I brought up, so I'll leave everyone with a quote from the article you provided for us:

There we have it.

Good point. I can't disagree with that, so I'm just going to accept it.

I think a better statistic would be a comparison between low income inequality and high income inequality and their impacts on college enrollment. We could compare countries but there are far too many other factors affecting that...

As for the thing about "chance" I definitely should have used a different word, but I don't really know very many statistical nomenclatures.