[Symmetry]

I'm really not at all concerned about wealth inequality except to the extent that it causes consumption inequality.

Imagine a perfect world where everybody makes the same wages and invests those wages prudently. They're born, go into debt a little to pay for college, make money and save it, then eventually retire on their savings. In this world where everybody's lives are the same there would still be huge inequalities in wealth between people just starting out and people about to retire.

[hackinthebochs]

The difference there is that in your scenario income inequality would appear "fair" to most people. The problem with what we see around us is that it appears very unfair. This is where the real problem is.

Some people might want to dismiss the idea that things should be or seem fair, but this ignores the fact that fairness is a very important attribute of economic stability. The more unfair the system seems the more unstable it will be in the long term. Social unrest is detrimental to an economy.

[Symmetry]

I'm not sure what you're saying here. The point of the scenario is that you can have large differences in wealth while everybody has the exact same income. Certainly I wouldn't say that we shouldn't worry about matters of fairness.

I'm guessing that you think that I think that the scenario I gave says something about whether our society is fair or not. I don't think that. Instead what I think, and what I was trying to show, is that if you're concerned about fairness looking at wealth inequality is almost entirely useless when we could be looking at income or consumption inequality - because its very easy to have a society with large amounts of wealth inequality even if almost everybody would agree that it was fair.

[hackinthebochs]

Gotcha. Yeah I thought your point was that the current wealth inequality is OK because here's an example of a society with large wealth inequality that we would all agree is also OK.

I think when people mention wealth inequality they're understanding it in their minds as income inequality; I generally do.

[Symmetry]

I expect they do and I expect that the people in the survey who were asked what they thought the distribution of wealth in the US was gave something that approximated what they thought the distribution of income was. The fact that the two are easy to confuse is what made the article actively bad, rather than merely pointless.