| "assuming the economy incentivizes efficiency" In the long run it does. Today's stupid rich people are tomorrow's "my grandfather was x and now I'm middle class" Happens more and faster than you think. Economic disparity metrics suffer from selection bias. But beyond that I think that attitude come from misunderstanding and confusing an ideal of "fairness" with efficiency. Efficiency and fairness are far and away not the same thing. Autocracies, for example, can be very efficient. The same applies to economic competition. Scams and cons are efficient. Crime is efficient. Corruption... All are very efficient at redistributing wealth. So government is needed to enforce fairness. But when it comes to the example problem here of adding excess value to a low-value job, the efficiency of the market is usually acting at the level of the firm, rather than within it. People are naturally lazy, and for most people, the imagined ungratefulness of a company paired with an inflated view of their own value causes them to not even try and certainly not persist at innovating. |