Wealth concentration beyond a point which would have resulted in widespread revolution 150 years ago, but that is now being tolerated because we've grown accustomed to a level of comfort we don't want to risk losing.
I'm not so familiar with the revolutions of 1848, but it seems like most revolutions happen when a society is suffering from severe economic crisis as well as food shortage. It seems that the 1840s was referred to as "the Hungry Forties" due to severe food shortages. I don't think many people are willing to upend their lives to change a political system that isn't failing to deliver their personal basic needs. I'm also not sure if the revolutions of 1848 were primarily about wealth concentration - weren't they rather about concentration of power?
Many successful and failed revolutions happened without an economic crisis. For example, the American Revolution was led by an oligarchical class upset about taxation. The American Civil War is another example where a portion of states felt economically threatened and initiated conflict. The Glorious Revolution was almost completely ideological in nature, revolving around royalty and religion. It simply requires some powerful fraction of the country to believe they'd be better off under another ruling party, no one needs to starve for it to happen.
People who are experiencing unrest and idleness are easy to recruit -- and if you hang out with people ages of 18-30, you'll see there's no shortage of them.
Because I believe we all deserve to have a relatively equal say in how society should function, and the existence of trillionaires is antithetical to that.
There are many more economic distortions that happen from having massive wealth inequality — too many to list in one comment — but the biggest one is that democracy isn’t possible with a certain level of wealth inequality.
In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.
Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.
As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.
I mean, this is measurable with the gini coefficient, yes. But if you generally handwave "people with lots of money", you don't have a story to tell, and then you don't convince nearly enough people of any one thing to accomplish it.
You have to pick a problem. Right now, quality of life basically keeps going up, so it's pretty hard to act on anything you might care about here.
Conjecturing standards of living is going up is overly reductive. Essential costs — housing, groceries, education, etc — have been going up for most people and hit everyday people the hardest.
Housing/medical/college etc are outpacing incomes. Loneliness has skyrocketed. People are voting for fascism and starting wars. Americans like to pretend with their big houses and fancy iphones, but things are NOT ok.
Also note on that chart: younger demographics in the US are reporting significantly lower life evaluations compared to older demographics. So if you think things right now are bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
I'm unconvinced that younger people have a harder time than the last couple of generations at the same ages, and would like to see evidence that this is not simply them overwhelming themselves with social media comparisons with others.
Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?
> Yes, housing, medical, and college are outpacing incomes. Which item would you want to work on if you only got to pick ONE thing?
Why would we intentionally narrow the discussion like this?
That's something that pretend political parties do to prop up the interests of the uniparty of capital interests while squelching actual progress for the majority.
Why? Because an individual can only positively influence one thing at a time when it's so far outside of their sphere. My goal is to help people make positive change, and the only way to do that is with focus.
> Because an individual can only positively influence one thing at a time when it's so far outside of their sphere.
Not true, but let's pretend it is: then pick the parent item that's affecting all of the child items: aforementioned faux democracy. Then everything else falls into place.
But based on your various comments here, you don't seem interested in solving the root issues.
They have social media in Finland too. Go talk it out with your favorite "pro" LLM.
You can't just pick one. The main problem is inequality is rising, which means those without serious capital (which includes the young) are much less likely to see anything from their efforts. It just pops up in different ways. All my money goes to [rent, inflation, student loans, hospital bills, .. etc].
Henry George made a compelling case that land is the inherent driver of inequality issues, and I think the work being done in housing now significantly supports that theory. If you want a bunch of those choose fixed, and they all are rooted in inequality, you may want to get rid of land use restrictions on housing development.
I'm asking genuinely, is there a connection between housing, education, and healthcare becoming so much more expensive and them also being the three parts of the economy that have the most government interference (in the US)? If so is it causal?
Well yeah. Key policy choices in housing/healthcare/education/banking/etc have financialized basic human necessities, forcing the working class to give up a growing percentage of their income to the asset-holding class.
I'm not saying "all government interference is bad". For example plenty of countries prove that if you want to control healthcare costs, you need more government intervention in drug pricing, not less.
We don't. It's not about being warm in winter. That's the least important thing as long as you're not actually freezing to death. We used to look forward to the future, now we dread it, and I don't think that's just me being in an existential crisis right now, other people have said it too.
If you're interested, I spent over a decade as a mass transit organizer, and I think there's a pretty clear path to high-speed rail in the US. But no one likes it!
As better education/tution leads to over achievement relative to natural ability. So you end up with people in positions of power that are beyond them, and low educated voter too
Yes, it's presumably a problem, but you also can't know why somebody is downvoting. They might believe a comment is dishonest or distracting or otherwise low-quality or non-curious, or breaks one of the subjective site rules.
I try not to make assumptions when I get downvoted. I think: Maybe I was a little sarcastic or aggressive or I implied something weaselly; or maybe the downvoter just disagreed with me. I don't assume either way, and I don't guess about moral high ground or whatever. All my comment's points tell me is what delta of people clicked the down arrow, not what was in their heads individually.
That's why it's best if everyone is roughly equal. Not exactly equal, mind, I'm sure a 20:1 difference between the richest and the poorest would be much better than the present situation.
What it boils down to is that a lot of the immense freedom Elon Musk has to influence our common future, due to his wealth, comes at the expense of our ability to influence our future.
Yeah, not all games are zero sum. But "power over others" is, and it's a pretty important one, and other people are playing it whether you want to or not.
That's right, causation goes the other way: many people have to be poor in order for one person to be rich. Where did Elon get his money, again? Being at the right place at the right time in PayPal and being so incompetent they paid him to leave; selling overpriced underperforming electric cybertrucks to his fanbase; billions of taxpayer dollars (which directly make us poorer) to SpaceX; and most recently tricking index fund investors to buy his IPO?