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 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?
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?
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].
> 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.
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.