You don't directly redistribute. You set taxes and economic policies to target free-market wealth redistribution. That is, find instances where there is significant distribution of money from the poor to the rich and find ways to add friction to those markets. Like landowners renting out housing.

Suck large amounts of money out of the housing market by taxing commercial loans used for residential real estate, doubling property taxes for non-owner-occupied residential real estate and vacant real estate, and putting caps on mortgage vs income though some means or another. Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices. So much money and effort is sucked away from people into bank interest and "cost of capital" for people who already have lots of it. Maybe go to the extent of statutory redistribution of ownership of housing, 2% per year. If you rent a house for 50 years it's yours. This can't raise rents because rent pricing is based on maximizing what the market will pay.

> Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices.

I imagine the costs would still get passed down to the tenants.

Ignoring that for a second, rental housing isn’t “an evil thing that needs to go away.” Rental housing is very much a fundamental need for a lot of people. Military members who move every 3 years, college students, city residents who don’t plan on buying in the city but want to live there for some years while in the workforce, separated spouses need 2 places to live, the list goes on.

This snap judgment of “down with landlords, let’s destroy the rental market” doesn’t seem like a great idea.

The amount of people who "need" to rent for whatever reason is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the amount of people who are forced to rent because all available housing is for rent instead of for sale.

For example, there are a lot of people buying cars, and a lot less people renting cars, and for similars reason you stated above. If the housing market was balanced (as in not "completely cornered by landlords"), i'd expect a similar ratio of housing rental vs ownership, even taking into account the depreciating nature of cars.

There are loads of people leasing cars, which is basically a fixed term rental.

People build houses all the time. It's not just rent or buy.

The problem with rental housing today is that most of it is turning being bought up by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) run by the likes of Blackrock and Vanguard and not “mom and pop pension fund”. These same investors actually pay >15% above market value effectively inflating prices, and monopolizing entire neighborhoods.

> rental housing isn’t “an evil thing that needs to go away.”

I disagree, rental housing is a thing that does need to go away, or at least be severly limited.

Because there's a strong trend towards corporations owning all housing and then everybody must rent from them.

(as a milenial my chances of owning the place I live in are small... specially in big cities; I looked into it, I would need to get a loan and then pay the loan amount twice over for the next 30 years to buy a shitty small appartment without a real kitchen).

You’re contradicting yourself. Where would you live right now if you weren’t renting?

You’re also creating artificial limitations. Nobody said you’re entitled to own the place your currently live, you’re creating that restriction. 200k gets you a whole lot of house in the south and Midwest. Choosing to live in a city and bitch about affordability is quite a millennial thing to do though, since you’ve already self-identified.

> You’re contradicting yourself. Where would you live right now if you weren’t renting?

my parent's house? a friend's couch? My own appartment or house? (I suppose even millenials could inherit property).

I do not understand why you are saying that I'm contradicting myself. What I do see, is that you seem to be defending the custom of having to pay a recurrent fee to have a roof over your head, a custom which I stand against.

I’m not defending it, simply pointing out glaring holes in your logic

It's not "no more landlords", but removing many of them from the market, reducing competition. Many people want to own but are priced out of the market, and many people who do own end up leaving very large chunks of their incomes as bank profits. I'm focusing on the middle of the market where people would buy if prices were more affordable, not edges of the market where people would only buy if housing was basically given away.

Private landlords are basically lenders. The houses are there for anyone to buy. The landlords-to-be have the cash, or credit rating and scope for risk taking, to buy these houses and rent them out.

I’m not saying they are some kind of godsend, rather that they are present precisely because renters wouldn’t buy the houses they live in, for whatever reason. If you take away the private landlords, you’d need to find that capital elsewhere, and it seems poor people don’t have it.

State-owned housing? Mutual housing? Promoting good transport so people can live further out? Lots of solutions I think, but not sure adding friction to the current set up will do anything.

Landlords compete with aspiring homeowners, raising prices. Raising prices benefit landlords as what they get to charge for their “cost of capital” gains a higher proportion vs their cost of actually maintaining the property.

I’m talking explicitly about lowering the cost of housing by reducing the amount of capital in the market from landlords.

Right, and where do the renters live? Someone needs to own the houses. Not every renter is on the cusp of buying.

If you make houses more expensive for landlords and don’t introduce some other source of housing, at best it’ll be a wash: lower prices for houses but extra taxes meaning landlords charge more or less the same rent. Or maybe prices won’t move much but landlords will charge more rent to cover their higher costs.

We are not at risk of an abundance of empty housing with nobody to live in it.

You lower prices by reducing competition from landlords, then more people who rent will buy. There's a long way to go before you get to the point of people who don't want to buy a house feeling forced to do so because they can't find a rental.

I don't know the name of the logical fallacy, but the argument you're making is imaging a far away extreme situation being undesirable and using that to justify not making moderate changes.

No, this is just what happens the world over when lawmakers make buy-to-let more expensive. Rents go up...

The problem with “just raise taxes solution” is that there is no guarantee that money from taxes is going to be evenly and correctly distributed and spent.

This might work for relatively small and single-nationality countries.

What if you raised property taxes with the expectation that the tax isn’t often actually paid? For example, if every piece of real estate had to be traced back to the natural person owner(s) and the property is taxed at the individual level but graduated. Significantly. So no tax at all on the least valuable property you own, 50% tax on the next least valuable property, 100% tax on the next least, etc. With the goal being to significantly disincentivize the hoarding of housing (which is both a necessity and a form of “wealth” building) rather than to collect and redistribute wealth? Even though the ultimate outcome would (hopefully) be redistributed wealth.

Yes, a progressive tax over all your possession is a much better solution than just raising prices. People with high income don't really care about high prices and have enough opportunity to delegate these costs to others.

The taxes wouldn’t be intended to raise money but to distort markets. Instead of worrying how the extra money could be spent a raised tax could offset a compatible tax break. I.e. raise taxes on landlords, lower taxes on owner occupied housing.

> Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices.

I don't think we need to model that... we have plenty of examples of what happens when cities don't build enough housing.

You could institute Land Value Tax. Don't need to double property taxes and disincentivize construction, but the tax on land will be much higher.

> My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages.

Former educator here, the problem with this idea is that educational outcomes are dominated by three factors:

1. More individualized education (smaller classes or tutors)

2. Children having a safe, well resourced home life

3. Smarter, less stressed teachers

To get an idea of how strong (1) is it is useful to know of a result called Bloom's Two Sigma which roughly says that a student at the 50th percentile for their class is tutored, they will perform like students in the 95th percentile (the most recent literature I read pegged the effect slightly weaker than this, but not that much).

These results on inequality tell us several things: Increased inequality reduces the quality of home life for children by making parents stressed and unhappy. Increased inequality plus the fundamental economics of public education mean that smart and capable people are less likely to become teachers, and those who do will be more stressed Increased inequality means that richer people can afford to hire the services of tutors for their children, drastically improving outcomes.

As someone who sold my educational services to rich people, and gave it away to poorer students when I could afford to, I can personally testify to the massive difference this kind of resourcing makes. I don't think there's any way to get away from that aside from actually reducing inequality.

I don't follow how (1) is an indicator(?) of inequality.

Aren't all the students capable of learning more with tutoring?

Measuring by percentile seems like a problem if everybody improves.

It's a good thing to try and make sure everyone performs to some minimum standard for their age, but are you suggesting equal outcome as a goal?

If kids are learning at home, are you suggesting they should receive fewer school resources?

I'm lost on what the goals are here and what you'd consider success to be?

A lot of poorer students don’t get any homework help at home. None. Their parents are working several jobs and don’t have time. Some of the parents might not have the ability. If you had two identically intelligent and capable students and one gets thirty minutes of one-on-one homework help from a parent every day after school and the other didn’t I can definitely imagine there would be a significant difference how much they’ve each learned by the time the school year ends.

But difference shouldn't matter as long as both make sufficient progress and graduate. If that requires help outside of school to do, it's still a "more education" argument.

Performance/success in high school might help get into college, but even with that advantage, it's not an indicator of relative success later in life.

If attention and stability at home are the issue, then that problem needs to be fixed, but its not an economic one. Plenty of poor parents make the time for their kids, and plenty of wealthy parents ignore them.

Parents spending time with kids is tied more to family makeup, with financial security just being a symptom. Having a two-parent home is still the success factor that is in a league of its own, and is an obvious solution to literally doubling parental supply. Presuming a significant number of these poorer students are from single parent/ broken homes, that's the direct solution to "needs parental help at home", not money.

(1) is not an indicator of inequality but it does imply that in a very unequal economic system (where the rich can afford lots of private tutoring) "more education" is not a very good solution to inequality because only the top few percent of poor kids will be able to compete with the median rich kid.

Also it's not clear how to "do this correctly". The us spends more per Capita, inflation-adusted on education than it ever has in the past. Outcomes are not really getting dramatically better. The places that spend the most per pupil are often the worst school districts.

Spending numbers are not super informative, I'll ramble off a few things I find are non-obvious to people outside of education that relate to inequality.

1. Parents farther down the social totem pole are more unhappy and stressed as a cohort. The negative effects of a bad home life on kids is enormous and education is often impossible without dealing with some of these issues. You either spend your resources addressing those home issues are try to ignore them and throw good money after bad. (this also complicates cross-country comparisons because many of our social programs for kids are funded through the education budget where other countries put them in a health or social well-being budget).

2. When it was easier to achieve a higher quality of life on a single above average income you get higher quality teachers. A pattern you see amongst the best teachers who are now in their 50s or 60s is that their significant other had a good job and the teacher sacrificed a higher paying career for better hours for raising kids and the ability to easily move to almost any location with their spouse without their own career disruptions (since everyone needs teachers). This is no longer a good option unless your partner is earning a lot of money.

3. Funding numbers often fail to capture various types of donations in cash, materials, and/or labor. I grew up in a fairly rich neighborhood and my public school received thousands of hours of unpaid labor per year from parents, construction projects built cheap at high quality by parents who owned massive contracting businesses, an art program taught by rich moms who took minimum wage to just fill their day (to be clear, they were good teachers), and a whole host of other benefits. These benefits can be worth thousands of dollars per child per year.

Completely agreed on all fronts: my point is that the "problem" is so complex that I think expecting a bureaucracy (which is guided by a political class that campaigns on basically one metric "how much did you spend on education") is unlikely to make much headway at all. If you want a reductionist soundbyte, as a political system we have goodhearted education spending and neglected truly important things which you have bulleted (and more important things in addition).

I'd simply start a progressive wealth tax at a high enough threshold so that a person could provide themselves with a reasonable nest egg. Pulling numbers out of the air, maybe 1%/year for the first $10 million, up to 10%/year for $100 million. (Note that if you live in a house, you're already paying some wealth tax). This would leave most people with both good and poor standing with enough to live comfortably, and the ones who got there by working will probably continue to make more to cover the tax.

Reducing inequality would hopefully have the benefit of aligning political goals with the interests of the population, in which case politicians would be more motivated to score things such as universal health care, workplace safety, education, a safety net, and so forth.

If the government were to be burdened by too much money, they could give some of it back to the poor. ;-)

You start a business, and against the odds it’s successful! You hire employees as it grows to scale operations, only now it’s now worth 11 million dollars. Now what? Do you have to pay 100k in taxes to cover a totally illiquid asset? Who is doing the buying here that isn’t subject to the same tax? Do you give away shares to family? Do you sell off ownership and lose control? What’s the point of taking any business past that threshold? Seriously, now what?

You take 100k out of the kitty and pay the tax. Your investors knew up front that this could happen. The point of taking a business past that threshold is that it can make enough money to cover the tax while also growing itself. What does a homeowner do when they don't have the cash to pay their property tax?

In this scenario, I can only assume that corporations are not subject to the same tax, less you would destroy every medium to large business that competes internationally? This would be all domestic manufacturing for instance.

If so, I don’t imagine that funneling even larger amounts of capital into corporations is what you have in mind.

The point isn’t that the tax couldn’t be paid for, it that it’s an extremely perverse incentive against growing your business. Why bother trying when you will be forced to divest, or take on millions in personal loans on bad terms (illiquid asset), inevitably losing control? This policy would be a disaster.

The tax could be imposed on the owners of corporations. It boggles my mind that a 1% tax is a cap on the size of a business. The other way to raise the money is that the business could sell something, such as a product.

A tax on capitalization is fundamentally different than one on profit or income. A chip fab is a 20 billion investment over 3 or more years. They'd pay out upwards of a billion dollars before they begin to sell anything. Any domestic industry that is capital intensive with low margins or high risk would die.

A wealth tax is a terrible incentive for investment and growth of local businesses.

The only people who benefit from yet another tax is the accountants who get paid to help the wealthy avoid those taxes.

The 1% already manage their affairs to reduce the amount of tax they pay, why would adding yet another tax change that?

Why stop at education? Basic health coverage and housing when not accessible add up to the overall stress level of a low income family and affect their life quality and capacity to dedicate to a profession.

> Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Fund these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education.

That’s a very American attitude - that money will solve everything. The school itself with great teachers (assuming money buys great teachers) cannot be enough. There needs to be parental involvement and a culture of advancement to push these kids to their actual capabilities. That’s in addition to everything else in their environment. If parents are stressed or there’s food insecurity, no one is attempting to get to grad school. If gangs are all around and violence is everywhere, few will make it to college.

Culture is the most powerful force, and that has to come as a collective set of ideals. It also doesn’t have to cost anything.

I’m not in any way American. And I’m not talking about buying iPads for students.

Too hungry to study? Fund school meals. Are free school meals stigmatising? Fund them for all students.

Teachers not good enough? Pay more for better ones.

Gang violence competes for mindshare? Fund proper, attractive activities for kids in the age group so they can do something better.

You can’t solve problems by burning money but you can spend money to solve problems.

I thought the point was that it was not level of poverty that was the problem but the level of inequality... These are of course related, but I would assume that the causality runs from inequality causing poverty rather than the other way around.

Giving people with no or little power a bit more money is not going to allow them to magically take control of their situation. If somebody is flat broke and struggling to pay the bills, giving them a little bit more money may improve their economic situation in the short term, but over the long term with more people having some disposable income, supply and demand will increase prices and good old inflation will balance things out.

If you ensure that people have more equal opportunities by improving access to education, improving access to services independent of location and remove barriers based on sex, race religion health care etc (look I don't have the answers to this) then at least a persons has a similar chance to everybody else to achieve their goals in life.

Trying to solve social problems by just moving money around is a very simplistic solution and can only ever work for simple problems. Inequality is a very complex problem with origins based in history and human nature. If you want everybody to have the same chance to achieve their personal goals then you have to give them the same baseline to start from, and only a small part of that is how much money they have in their pocket.

You have to treat people equally under the law and I don't think there can be any exceptions to it as nobody can objectively determine fairness in each case. You can revise the law to force compliance on topics like accessibility and participation and it certainly should.

Otherwise I agree. Education is the best remedy. Since logistics of knowledge is very cheap today, it is also a manageable problem. At least in higher education. But you have to look at the whole economy and there might not be opportunities for everyone.

Racial or sex quotas should not be used because they would be more unfair than the former solution to treat people equally, even if the unscientific accusation of bias were true. Governments in Europe are obsessed with it though. There would be an end goal and it is only toxic people that decide what is allegedly fair. A Robin Hood tax would show the same faults.

I believe the Nordics use a progressive tax with individual taxed subjects. I would not call that redistribution. Within the EU we actually have a redistribution towards allegedly poorer countries and it is an extremely toxic and unfair system. The most profitable behavior for a subject is to spend money as quickly as possible and put the externalities of bad behavior on the state.

Plus, the inequality in nordic countries is very high, so they also do not have a solution against that. They have a solution for the people that have nothing and that is a strong welfare state (which is accused to foster inequality, but that is not based on sane arguments).

There is no or next to no empirical correlation between school funding and outcome in the US. I’d go so far as to suggest this proposal has cause and effect reversed. The push to send everyone to college at literally any cost has been a generational disaster. The value of a college degree has steadily declined while the cost has increased faster than any other sector of our economy. It’s very hard for me to imagine more education is the solution.

Increase in quality of education is something different than push for college degree just for sake of it.

Mentioned polarity in Poland, comes not from lack of college education, but from extremely poor understanding of economics, lack of basic personal budgeting skills, lack of critical thinking, vulnerability to cheap propaganda and manipulation techniques.

High school material at best.

It’s kind of incredible that we now treat income inequality as this impossible to tackle problem with insurmountable difficulties, as if we don’t have over a century of experience of how policies can increase and decrease inequality in this country, let alone in other countries. We’ve literally done this before.

I've found that American Exceptionalism is now defined as things we cannot do rather than things we can. Look at problems like gun violence or access to affordable health care. You'll be told that it is impossible for America to solve these problems that most other advanced countries have long had solutions to.

Do we? When was the last time a country decreased its Gini coefficient?

The period between 1945 and 1970 in the United States really stands out. Improving wages, narrowing gap of health outcomes across racial groups. It wasn’t a perfect time, but clearly metrics were getting better.

Conversely, we can observe the effects of policy since the 1970s and declare it to be a failure. Despite long periods of economic growth, income inequality continues to grow.

Post war America was a truly unique time and place. Literally the entire industrial world was destroyed apart from the US. I’m not so quick to blame bad policy. The world was going to catch up eventually and start competing, right?

there's also a similar period between 1850 and 1920, and 1850 and 1900 in sweden. IIRC (i could be wrong on this) even the nordics with their progressive redistibution policies aren't actually decreasing their gini coefficients, it's just static.

Also IIRC the US improved it's gini coefficient for the one year 2009? 2008?; a lot of rich people suddenly got less rich until they got bailed out.

I don't think education is a money problem at this point. Maybe it can be gamified more but in the end I think it is a cultural thing. Victimizing everybody doesn't help and stopping it would probably have a better outcome than throwing money at it.

Totally agree with this. There is no shortage of ideas/ideals, practical ways of achieving said goals are few and far between. The problem is that many of these problems are very complex and empirical solutions don’t win elections.

I think that we all agree with education part.

But that is very hard to implement.

Let’s take an example of San Francisco: public schools were closed all of 2021 and that really hurt low income families. Of course private schools were open.

And San Francisco is very left - so I don’t know.

>My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Find these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education. Provide professional courses for adults, financial support to those who want to upskill.

Success in schooling is much more than just providing a good building, teachers and resources(computer/books/etc.). It is also a function of what the child has to go through in his/her day to day life. Those early years cement what kind of person the child becomes so you can provide all the Adult education you want, it is too late. Is the family around to provide support outside of school hours? Is the neighborhood stable enough so that you are in an environment to not fall into the edge cases of our society (ex: Are there groups that discourage breaking out of a specific mold?)

Hell this happens even with minorities in suburbs that provide them with all the resources needed for success. As a muslim living in a upper class right wing leaning suburban town I ingrained a self defeating mindset after 9/11 that I cannot achieve specific things and fulfill my wildest dreams. Despite this I ended up relatively successful thanks to the environment I was in giving me multiple chances after I failed time and time again.

Others don't have as many chances. The school is not the only problem. It is the system around the school that resulted in the school being in such a poor state to begin with. Some of this is being brought up(and subsequently banned) in topics such as Critical Race Theory (CRT). These talking points that you have expressed are sometimes brought up in Libertarian and right wing circles. It will not lead to this issue being solved in my opinion.

I have seen it with my own eyes in others as well. One of my many failures led me to being put on probation at my University: A school that prides itself on helping the largest # of minorities achieve STEM degrees in the country. I ended up at community college where I saw first hand how they ran many dozens of entry level math, physics, history and english sections that end up being empty by the end of the semester because there are huge swaths of the population that just cannot get past the first courses in a college level program. So they re-run these sections in all possible schedule combinations to maximize the chances of success. Still a majority students don't make it and give up. Keep in mind many of these people also get enough of a grant to likely be getting their tuition covered. The system failed these people years ago and just free education does not make up for it. They needed a stable environment from childhood in all aspects to maximize the chances of success.