[squirrelicus]

Generally you get downvoted for doing so, but people still try to argue. I have a lot to say on the subject, but one thing I still need an argument for is why inequality is bad intrinsically. I'd love to hear a cogent argument that addresses that fundamental point, but what I end up seeing in the wild is camps of people who think inequality is some intrinsic evil, and those that don't think it's relevant to anything.

[abdullahkhalids]

(1) A political system is a distributed decision making process that a community uses to, well, make decision that affect large sections of the community. One characteristic of a good political system is one where everyone gets roughly equal say.

(2) Most current politico-economic systems across the world have the feature that any given rich person has much more say in the political process than a poor person.

(3) It doesn't take much of a study of history to ascertain that, at least in the last century, rich people have used the additional power they have over the political process to make decisions that make them yet richer. Which then increases their political power even more. And the cycle repeats.

(4) There are at least two obvious solutions to (2) and (3), and which a lot of people subscribe to:

* Either, pass laws and pursue policies within the current system that make it very hard for anyone to become too rich or too poor relative to the average. This is what you will usually see a lot of regular people espousing.

* Or, redesign the politico-economic system so that rich people don't have a disproportionate influence on the political process. This is, perhaps, the motivation of some people working on crypto-currencies, even if they are misguided in their efforts.

The reason you find people who think "inequality is some intrinsic evil" is because many people believe that the second solution is not possible, i.e. it is human nature to exploit others and they will exploit in any unequal system and, hence, inequality is always an undesirable state.

[erentz]

No one would be talking about it if everyone was still earning a good wage, able to live a decent middle class life, have a family, had no issues visiting a doctor, etc. etc. But they aren't. People in the bottom 90% (or whatever) are feeling very much like they're falling behind, while they watch the top 10% (or whatever) get richer and richer.

If the system were working for most people and they felt they had good lives, I don't even think people would be particularly concerned about the concentration of power that comes with the concentration of wealth because they would see the system working for them.

Certainly we should talk in terms of ensuring there is an adequate floor, rather than in terms of bringing down the ceiling. What's the point of lowering that ceiling if the people at the bottom still can't see a doctor? And raising the floor is indeed what a lot of progressive proposals do aim for (Medicare for All, or Living Wage, or UBI, etc.). But providing that floor requires funding. Funding anything is always redistribution of some kind with the wealthier paying more because that's where the money is.

[DoreenMichele]

I don't think inequality is inherently evil. I also don't think it's simply irrelevant.

What I've always seen suggested is that extremes of inequality are bad for society. That idea seems to be an implicit assumption behind this article.

[lanstin]

Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable? More envy and less feeling of being part of a group? It is good that poverty in the world is much less and there are more people in the middle class but it is also a problem that wages in the US are stagnant for large swath of the population that feels like it isn’t part of the group anymore and makes trouble because of it.

[squirrelicus]

When you convince people they're being robbed because of inequality, it's a problem. Envy is the problem. It's a cognitive defect. There's a reason it's a considered a sin. You are not entitled to what other people have, and justifying that feeling is how you destroy prosperity for all.

[majewsky]

> Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable?

Yes. However, too much equality also makes society too static, because no one is incentivized to innovate anymore. The problem, as always, is maintaining the right balance.

[yesenadam]

>However, too much equality also makes society too static, because no one is incentivized to innovate anymore.

Sorry if this is a naive question, but is that really true? What's the evidence for believing that, much less treating it as fact?

[tatersolid]

> Sorry if this is a naive question, but is that really true? What's the evidence for believing that, much less treating it as fact?

The economic collapse of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact counties, Venezuela, North Korea.

By allowing a free market invasion in their Communist utopia, the Chinese Communist Party long ago abandoned their core ideology in favor of “pragmatic authoritarianism.” They get to stay in power, while reaping economic benefits impossible in a truly communist economy.

[yesenadam]

So you see all those places as having "too much equality"? And that, particularly, caused lack of innovation which made them too static?

[tatersolid]

Yes. There was essentially zero upward economic mobility in those societies, except for the party elite. When only 0.001% of your society has any possibility of bettering their circumstances, innovation stagnates.

It is still true that most anybody can get rich in a capitalist economy if they’re some combination of smart, hard-working, or lucky. This causes lots of people to try.

[james_s_tayler]

I'm with you. Inequality seems to be baked into the natural world. Look at power law distributions and the preferential attachment model as one of the ways they arise. There is mathematics to suggest the notion of inequality is a fundamental part of life.

The Polya process is another thing that comes to mind. In that model, if you were picked in the past then you are more likely to be picked in the future. That's the classic competitive exclusion "rich get richer" at work.

But here's the equalizer: Every distribution of possible outcomes under the Polya process has an equal probability of happening.

That strikes me as very interesting. Basically, if you were to run history forwards from the same starting point again and again, in some of those iterations your life would turn out significanty better than others. So, there is equality for everyone in that sense, but on a case-by-case basis it's more of a better luck next time.

[dlp211]

Inequality of wealth is the same as inequality of power in our system.

[_vufv]

One argument: influence of big money on the shaping of politics.

Economic stratification is effectively a stratification of people's degrees of influence over the natural world, so unchecked economic stratification necessarily means that there's a breaking point where a system which was previously democratic stops being so.