Money buys political influence. Income inequality thus leads to political inequality. The government is corrupted to serve the interests of the superrich.
You're right, Paul, there's no evidence of any of this at all.
There's no evidence of pharma companies lobbying for more lax FDA regulations.
There's no evidence of the automative industry lobbying against higher CAFE standards.
There's no evidence of utilities companies lobbying against net neutrality.
There's no evidence of the last midterm election cycle seeing an amount of private spending nearly double the previous record.
Meanwhile there's an abundance of evidence that poor people are successfully lobbying for a higher living wage, longer unemployment benefits, and access to quality healthcare.
If you find yourself saying something so obvious as that lobbying exists, you should wonder whether it supports the point you're claiming.
What this discussion is about is the purported "systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else." Merely pointing out that lobbying exists doesn't support that. In fact, some of your examples are actually counterexamples: e.g. the companies lobbying against net neutrality are less controlled by the superrich than Google, which is lobbying for it. What you have to show is that lobbying is increasing, and that it's increasingly being driven by the agenda of the superrich (rather than merely large corporations).
I'm not sure if you are disputing the claim that lobbying is increasing. Here's some data:
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php
Looks to be trending upwards fairly quickly with the exception of 2010. I would assume that represents information not publicly available due to the effects of the Citizens United decision.
Is lobbying a result of income inequity? I think it has more to do with the increasing power and competition between corporations than individual wealth. The more competitors one has, the more likely that one has to match their lobbying efforts just to keep the playing field even.
Beyond that, the effectiveness of lobbying enables the rich to exert more influence over the election process. It may be because our election system is not insulated against this influence that the income distribution seems so unfair. This would imply that we should reduce that influence or reduce the inequity of wealth. Which one is more fair, if they can even be done separately, is not clear to me.
Read "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" by Larry Bartels. He gives some evidence of the harmful political effects of income inequality. I don't know why it matters whether the scale is increasing - I think it's enough to show that it is harmful. It's honestly a pretty boring book, so more work needs to be done on this.
The city I live in, Berlin has an area of ~821 km^2
Let's suppose that one city block is about 0.2 km x 0.2 km
This implies that there are on the order of 10 km of road per km^2 of area. Thus the length of road is O(10^4) km for one major city. Now if we drive 30 km/h, and there are ~25 intersections per km^2, and the average wait time to turn is 1 minute (I have no idea), then we need 20 + 25 ~ 45 minutes to cover 1 sq km - In reality we will not have a perfectly efficient travelling salesman route and will have to cross some streets more than once so let's say it takes 1 hour per km^2. Thus the entire city can be covered in about 821 hours per car, or about one month / car. If we only allow a 40 hour work week, then it takes about 5 months.
Thus with a modest fleet of 5 cars the city can be updated about once a month. Does this sound right? If so not bad.
Of course streetview isn't working here for legal reasons, but this logic should apply to other similar cities.
Maybe some day they will be able to get updates from any old photographs or video taken by anyone. Automatically figure out what part of the world is in view with overlaps, like Photosynth does today, then incrementally apply updates if something is new or different. For example if a restaurant owner snaps a picture of the specials board on the sidewalk, it will figure out what exactly is new and patch just that board in the virtual world.
I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere.
So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.
"Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the second derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day.
What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.
"For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day."
No, but it does mean there exists a point where you should stop eating more calories.
Another issue: perhaps the increase in happiness with income (I) reported for I < 75k is due to the fact that jobs with higher income have nicer work conditions and colleagues. If this is true it should be possible to make people happier without paying them more. Just arrange matters so that their jobs are more pleasant.
It was always puzzling to me as a child that the people doing the hardest work are paid the least money. (hard in the sense that it physically drains you, and your whole body aches)
I don't understand what you are saying. Who is marginalizing the ambitions of others? Why is it easy? I take it you think that the study is invalid because you called it "crap" and a "joke". I'm honestly not sure - why is it a joke or crap?
Did the poster in the classroom provide any of the many examples of fortunes that began with crime? To say that "every" great fortune began with a crime is false, but certainly many did.
I've re-read my article several times now, because your comment (particularly its score) has made it clear that I must improve. For that, though, I need more feedback. Do you mean that the logic isn't good, that the language isn't good, or both?
The heart of the article is the expectation that whoever can bring a complete, seamless experience to the mobile platform will be the big winner through the next few years, and that they will probably be a large incumbent.
All the rest is meant to be framing for the conversation. Not tools for prediction, but for explanation.
Please, if you can express what I need to fix to make this article better than "gibberish" or "unintelligible", let me know, because I want to be capable of expressing my thoughts. I want to improve.
It reminds me of that "news consumption over time" strata chart that made the rounds last year, whose data source was its author's own perception of history.
I would Love it if referee reports were published with papers. Why waste all of the unpaid time and research of the referees by compressing their opinions into a yes/no/revise decision? This would improve the quality of the reports, and make the process of reading papers much easier. One of the most difficult parts of reading a paper is trying to decide for yourself if the methods or conclusions of the paper are flawed. The referee reports are a valuable counterpoint from people who probably know more about a topic than you do!
The Journal of Brain Research does that, and did so for decades. But there is a bias: only papers with good reviews are published. What happens to good papers with bad reviews is that they don't get published, or get published elsewhere.
"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge."
Discovering new solutions and ideas often involves a lot of naivety - Making progress often requires a willingness to approach a problem with a truly fresh perspective, free of the prejudices and blindness that come from having too much depth in a field.
While I can't always find the discipline for this - I like to try and attempt a problem on my own, even when I strongly suspect that there is an existing solution better than anything I could invent. I am surely less competent than someone who knows the existing solution and applies it without hesitation, but the more competent expert is less likely to improve his methods unless he is willing to move beyond established methods where he risks screwing up.
Intelligence can emerge from stupidity.
This is actually a heuristic for solving the reinforcement learning problem: there is a known tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. If the vast bulk of the solution space is crap and you know this then you are less likely to explore and find a better solution.
Money buys political influence. Income inequality thus leads to political inequality. The government is corrupted to serve the interests of the superrich.
Sounds like systemic damage to me.