Well it's not coincidence that money is thought to roughly coincide with the creation of the city state.

Gift based economies work fine for small tribes (well assuming you don't hit a drought, game doesn't dry up, the winter isn't particularly harsh.)

However even once they interacted with each other they engaged in barter.     Some gift based societies still work, but only in small numbers when largely isolated from the outside.

Once you want to get a society nearing or past dunbar's number... you essentially NEED a system beyond gift giving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

And why if it wasn't for the fact that I think he's totally serious i'd think he was weaving some sort of elaborate satire.

I said reduce, not eliminate. The dot-com bubble was nothing compared to the real estate bubble. Bubbles happen when the markets forget the fundamentals, or the fundamentals become hazy. The tulip/dot-com bubble were examples of the former, 2008 is an example of the latter.

And, who knows? Would there have been a dot-com bubble if there wasn't any inflation? Nobody can really know. 2008 is a good example because it was clear that the Government were involved, and it was clear that it was that involvement was what led to the bubbles.

I believe that we're actually heading into a dot-com bubble 2.0. The amount of money flowing into smart phones and social networking, and it is not yet clear whether these markets will pay off in the long run. I also believe a lot of this is due to inflation. I mean, look at the prices of some of these smartphones, and yet they're selling exceptionally well in a recessionary environment. People have clearly lost track of what is good value for money, and that is exactly what one of the results of inflation is. Could the same thing have played a part in the first dot-com bubble? Probably, but it's not certain.

I agree with you.

By A I meant more... if we decided we literally wanted nothing more then what we had.

Even those in gift based economies had wants, which led to the creation of larger groups, citystates, diversification of work... general society etc.

For such a society to work, you would have to pretty much completely stagnate innovation and development.

Which, going back to the original topic, is the same issue with income equality in general.

How many people per year in the United States have died from starvation not related to either a mental disease or being in a carcrash in the snow or something?

Aside from which, you seem to be ignoring the reasons income inequality are growing, which I outlined above, and have outlined for you multiple times actually... you just keep ignoring them.

The person turning a blind eye to something is you... which is sad because I KNOW you're smarter then your currently acting, letting yourself get swayed by data you know is incorrect but ignoring the reasons why it's incorrect.  The "problems of income inequality" he showed basically didn't control for ANYTHING.

well I think wealth is a zero sum game.

For some to be rich others have to be poor.

1. You are now venting like the only form of the way people are adversely affected by poverty is starvation, which the video didn't go into.  Starvation wasn't mentioned, yet you bring it up.

2. The video doesn't discuss the why of income inequality growing at all, just says that income inequality has bad effects.  What I made mention of there, in response to the other post was that the answers to issues in society are more than merely individuals showing gumption, and risking it all, and looking to get rich.

3. You accusations of me turning a blind eye, is interesting in that you by pass what I wrote, which wasn't to you, to jump in and get down my throat over something.  The initial post didn't get into it at all, and just listed something.  You jump all over and then accuse me of having a blind eye here.  We can play Stooges have their eyes poked out, but your comment of accusing me of willfulling ignoring things is not productive.  What I do get from you here is your desire to shut your mind to things here, claim to be right, and they end up slamming me because I don't agree.  I can come back and say, "no YOU turn a blind eye", but I really don't have times for such childishness.  

I will say in regards to this, just ignore what I have to say, because apparently you don't have an interest in discussing things at all, but would rather play who is really blind here.

1.  You were talking about people struggling to make ends meet, it had nothing to do with the vide.

2.  Except those bad effects are largely bad science, I mean, look at the video again and note that he isn't controlling for ANYTHING on that list, including culture, population size, population density, age of population and any number of other important factors and largely ignoring the fact that most of the stuff listed has totally different reporting methods based on country.  Like Infant mortaility rate.

Infant mortality rate is so high in the US because we consider every live birth an infant, while most other countries put a weight or length requirement on it.  When adjusting to other countries standards are infant mortality rate is better then others.

I mean, ask yourself why he put like 8 different things averaged together on that Y axis.  The only reason to do so is because you know they won't hold up individually and you need to bolster your points with data that does make your point (like infant mortality, which is, as stated above, flawed due to different reporting methods.) 

Or just in general, flawed due to completley different factors.  I mean, note the highest countries in the "Trust each other" method are also the smallest both in population and land and almost entirely homogenous culture wise.  Outside of like, Israel who has the whole Palestine thing to deal with.

Or just the social mobility study... which seems to be just outright made up, since pretty much all the studies i've seen hasn't shown much a difference in social mobility. 

The whole thing is pretty fairly off just by looking at the graphs individually and breaking them down.

I mean, as another example the "UNICEF Study of child wellbeing" counts one of the main factors as "Number of children below the 50% national median." 

Meaning that children who are richer in countries that make more money, are counted as poor when other kids aren't despite having less money since it's using relative povery of each nation individually!

So two nations where everything costs the same and one nation... where someone makes an average $100,000 someone who makes 25,000 would be considered poor.

While if the nation next door has an average of $200,000... $50,000 is consdiered poor for them, even though everything costs the same.

This is well before the causation methods you mentioned.

Like whether poverty creates single parent families, or being a single parent makes you poor.

3.  Look at his actual charts and methodology and you should see the problems with his methods... or just read the number of this one.  That's what I mean when I'm saying your blind.

I've pointed out factual methodological errors (in earlier posts) in his study which you haven't even tried to rebut, yet still present the video as if it were true... all while pretending you actually want to have a conversation about something.

By in large the studies he sites are studies that would get you flunked out of a statistical methods class in college for using non-normalized, non-standardized data.

Also, he sorta leaves out the most important factor.  Actual income of families in income inequality.

He uses the Per Capita numbers, but then doesn't actually adjust for what the people actually make.

Even if he had used reputable data,(which you can tell because he completly skirts the question by presenting it and saying "That's our sources problem!" claiming that actually looking at if a source is valid would put bias in their study... seriously?  Would you argue that by asking if a Fox News report is reptuable it shows bias?) you wouldn't actually know if he was proving that

1) Income inequality causes these problems

or

2) Low income causes these problems.

Since he doesn't really seem to show what a "Poor" person in one country makes compaired to a "poor" person in another.

Essentially, he doesn't actually care if gini coefficent is the actual cause of this... because he didn't even bother to try and sort out the biggest confounding variable and has decided that if he actually tried to analize the valdity of his datasource... that would be showing bias.

Which is just... I don't even know.  In short, I think he uncritically found some studies with charts that supported his point of view, didn't bother to actually read them, or did and intentionally and dishonestly used plenty of factors he knew were just wrong and then built his study/analsis/presentation around it.

He's completely booted the question of valdity when valdity is what he's trying to argue.

Anyone could make a presentation like his, saying anything, by quoting whatever half assed study that should of never been released they want, and claiming that questioning validity would show bias.

The fact that someone who had to pass a college class in research methods would create a study like that should really piss off anybody who's passed a college class like that.

It's studies like that which give statistics a bad name... blatntantly transparent, stupid studies that almost nobody pays attention to because its easier to look at a graph then consider the methods.

For a description of a better...  (yet harder) study with no forgone conclusions i'd suggest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/outliers.htm

Not even one with pure data, but one that actually tries to control for validity, and is taken skepticly.

Income inequality is more common in corrupt very low taxing nations ruled by militaristic dictatorships.
When taxes are at the right rate: society as a whole is better off and government budgets are balanced. Public infrastructure requires taxes to build and maintain. More services that benefit the whole society can be provided when the government raises appropriate taxes. There is a huge difference living in a western world nation compared to a developing/third world nation.

There will always be income inequality in all societies due to the laws, rules and regulations that allow the big corporations to gain more market control and power. People do not like to freely distribute their wealth, taxes must be raised by governments to provide law & order, military, police and public infrastructure/government services.

Money is a human illusion. Money is created by Federal Reserves out of thin air and is put in to circulation by the Fed Reserve Bank. The value of money depreciates over time due to inflation. 

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community-the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with-has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

Synopsis

Outliers has two parts: "Part One: Opportunity" contains five chapters, and "Part Two: Legacy" has four. The book also contains an Introduction and Epilogue.^[6] Focusing on outliers, defined by Gladwell as people who do not fit into our normal understanding of achievement,^[3] Outliers deals with exceptional people, especially those who are smart, rich, and successful, and those who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically plausible.^[2] The book offers examples that include the musical ensemble The Beatles, Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates, and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the introduction, Gladwell lays out the purpose of Outliers: "It's not enough to ask what successful people are like. [...] It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."^[2] Throughout the publication, he discusses how family, culture, and friendship each play a role in an individual's success, and he constantly asks whether successful people deserve the praise that we give them.^[2]

The book begins with Gladwell's research on why a disproportionate number of elite Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. The answer, he points out, is that since youth hockey leagues determine eligibility by calendar year, children born on January 1 play in the same league as those born on December 31 in the same year. Because children born earlier in the year are bigger and maturer than their younger competitors, they are often identified as better athletes, leading to extra coaching and a higher likelihood of being selected for elite hockey leagues. This phenomenon in which "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is dubbed "accumulative advantage" by Gladwell, while sociologist Robert K. Merton calls it "the Matthew Effect", named after a biblical verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."^[7] Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on the athletes' natural abilities.^[7]

A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the "10,000-Hour Rule", based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles' musical talents and Gates' computer savvy as examples.^[3] The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, "so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, 'they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.'"^[3] Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.^[3]

The book Outliers is an interesting one, that lends to much debate on the subject.  I am not going to post the entire Wikipedia article at this point either.

But the more you produce the less valuable money becomes.

Inflation.
Think about most currencies in the world. When the Nintendo 3DS came out it cost $250 in the U.S. In Japan, the thing cost ­¥25,000.
Listen to how that sounds. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Twenty five thousand yen.
At one time the yen was equivalent to a dollar. Then 1873 happened & more importantly World War II happened & the yen seriously lost its equivalence with the dollar to say the least. Reminds me of most currencies in the world where you have to have a ridiculous amount just to buy simple things. Always some unwieldy number that sounds like a lot until you check the exchange rate. "I'm a millionaire! I got 1,000,000 Mexican pesos!" That won't even buy a house in California.

Here's a quick Wikipedia history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_yen#Fixed_value_of_the_yen_to_the_US_dollar

"The yen was therefore basically a dollar unit, like all dollars, descended from the Spanish Pieces of eight, and up until the year 1873, all the dollars in the world had more or less the same value...
...Following the silver devaluation of 1873, the yen devalued against the US dollar and the Canadian dollar units since they adhered to a gold standard, and by the year 1897 the yen was worth only about US$0.50...
...The yen lost most of its value during and after World War II. After a period of instability, in 1949, the value of the yen was fixed at ¥360 per US$1 through a United States plan, which was part of the Bretton Woods System, to stabilize prices in the Japanese economy."

You gotta think ratios. Print all the money in the world but if the same people own the same ratio of that money, nothing has changed. Instead of a U.S. where rich folks get $99 out of every $100, with the new printing the rich get $990 out of every $1,000. More money is produced but the ratio remains the same.
That's why it's not as simple as just printing more money. It's the ownership proportions of the money.
If the non-rich who used to have $1 out of every $100, then $10 out of every $1,000, had ratios change to having $5 out of every $100 or $50 out of every $1,000, then the rich would become logically less rich. Pump that up to $10 out of every $100 or even $50 out of every $100 & the rich become even less richer.

That's why I insist that money is by design a ZERO-SUM GAME. Somebody has to be poor for somebody else to be rich or money loses its value. It is directly responsible for economic segregation which naturally leads into social segregation. This is why we have economic classes & different behaviors according to what class you belong to. And by setting access to power based on how many money pieces you control, this is why you have essentially different rules for the rich & the poor. The rich write the rules in the first place to control the poor ones. To control them to protect their greater ratio of money ownership, power ownership.

And speaking of land, there ARE a finite amount of houses that can be built. The Planet Earth has limits. It has a certain size, certain livable land masses. Rich buy up a lot of land to have the least dense amount of population living in that vast land. Mansions & estates where only a small handful of people live. While in poorer neighborhoods population density is greater because of more people living in that lesser sized land. You notice that the rich always find their way to the best land in the area? The poor live under polluting factories, noisy railways & airports.

I laugh at Al Gore & his ridiculous carbon footprint crap. This rich bastard probably uses more energy in a day then a whole neighborhood uses in a week! THAT'S an inconvenient truth. His mansion, his private jet, his cars, his yacht, all of that uses vast amounts of energy everyday. And uses this vast energy for less people at a time. It's only for him & his family. The same energy he uses can supply multiple families (plural!) of a neighborhood or even neighborhoods.

Oh & your analogy with Wii & the games. Don't you know that for used game value the rarer the game in demand the higher the price will be? Super Mario Galaxy is a masterpiece so it will be in demand but because it's plentiful that offsets the ability to charge a premium for it. Can't find one, you're sure to find another. How much did that rarely produced Nintendo World Championships 1990 cartridge cost? Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_World_Championships#Collectible_value

"The Nintendo World Championships 1990 game cartridge is considered to be the rarest and most valuable NES cartridge released.^[5] Because fewer gold cartridges were manufactured, they are rarer and command a higher price than the gray cartridges. The gold version is often described as the "holy grail" of console game collecting^[6], similar to items from other collectible hobbies, such as the T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, or the Action Comics #1 comic book.^[7][8][9]

On March 18, 2007 a listing appeared on Myebid.com in which a cartridge appeared to have been inadvertently included in a bereavement sale of 24 NES games. According to the auction, a father was selling the possessions of his deceased son. The auction ended at $21,400,^[10] though collectors have speculated that neither the listing nor the bids were legitimate.^[11][12]

^[13] In 2008, a cartridge went for $15,000,^[14] and the next copy to surface sold in June 2009 for $17,500.^[15] Most recently, in December 2009, JJGames presented a copy on eBay as part of a charity auction for World Vision; the auction ended with a winning bid of $13,600.^[16] The high bidder failed to pay and the cartridge sold privately for $18,000.^[17] "

Think you'll ever be able to fetch 5 digits for Super Mario Galaxy as long as it's so plentiful?
Our enjoyment of games like Super Mario Galaxy are not rooted in the money. We're enjoying what that game provides for us in entertainment, more importantly what that game provides for our inherent human needs.

And that underlines my previous declaration that money is only valuable by proxy, by association with the things of real value. It's only a middleman, a velvet rope, a club bouncer inbetween that which we truly value.

You can never figure out income inequality until you come to terms with what money REALLY means.
You won't get far until you recognize in your heart of hearts how FAKE it really is.
John Lucas