Logically-speaking, poverty can't exist without inequality. It's a condition of "want" that requires others to "have".
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.
No. Poverty is not relative to what others have. Poverty is relative to baseline needs. So poverty absolutely can exist without inequality.
Inequality has no moral characteristics. It is not "insidious." The fact that disparate effort and disparate circumstance lead to disparate outcomes is just that; a simple cold fact.
That some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others is a moral issue. But again, this is orthogonal to disparity of outcome. Or do you claim poor people never steal from other poor people, or that rich people never steal from other rich people?
That's incorrect. The baseline need that poverty is calculated relative to is itself calculated relative to local conditions. Because inequality drives those local conditions, poverty cannot exist without it.
Your post is proof of the insidiousness of inequality. It allows for outcomes to be warped by the presence or lack of aggregated capital, without presenting a direct attack on outcomes. As long as you are able to limit the contextual scope, you are able to claim a "just world", even when clear injustice is extant.
It is then important to insist that the scope stay broad enough to involve all related implications.
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." This suggests that there is a functional relationship between the size of power imbalances and the amount of corruption that exists. It is not that some people use their power or wealth to take advantage of others; it is that inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
> Because inequality drives those local conditions...
That is not in evidence. You may be thinking of inflationary pressures causing the poverty income level to be adjusted upward. This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
> "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."
That is an aphorism, not a universal truth, and holds zero moral weight. You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
> ...inordinate power and wealth ensures that abuses will occur.
No. This is envy as evidence. It doesn't work that way. Your use of the word "inordinate" is also meaningless from an economic or policy stance. Who decides what is inordinate? What qualifies a level as inordinate?
There is only one equilibrium state with full equality: vacuum. In an economic sense this is where zero exchange of value occurs. It is system-death.
In a just world, you keep what you earn. You reap what you sow. When someone powerful steps out of line you punish them. If they do not, there is no reason to punish them. Pre-punishment because "they probably will" is propaganda from the dictator. We don't want that.
What if some people are just bad at doing things for themselves? We have a society, communities, families... ...because humans are truly pitiful on their own. (Said with a sad smile.)
Consider that you just haven't found something useful for me to do.
If it's too much for you, I guess you could stop. If wouldn't be your fault if I couldn't keep things together.
>This is not a result of income inequality. It is a result of supply and demand.
Incorrect. Inequality increases the pool of wealth with which "haves" may bid up the prices of commodities, real property, and services. And they do, effectively increasing demand. Transitively, inequality drives inflation, i.e., local conditions.
>That is an aphorism, not a universal truth
You might want to revisit the definition of "aphorism". (It generally includes the word "truth".)
>You may be judged as corrupt by what you do, not by what you have.
And have another: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Implicit is that you will hammer nails. Property is intrinsically tied with action. Held power is to be wielded, even when it's not warranted; the only way not to is to give it up.
>This is envy as evidence.
I would love to understand this obsession with envy among the elite. If I take your gun and immediately throw it into the ocean, was that envy?
It's funny to me that you deride a "system-zero" world and then immediately champion a "just world". They're the same thing. And though you may believe in it, I never said I did.
The practical solution to a world with increasing (wealth) inequality is to decrease it. It will never reach zero. That's not the point. It's to affect the balance of power so that when someone powerful steps out of line, it is possible to punish them; so that things earned can be kept (and so that he definition of "earn" may be reasonable itself); so that we're not forced to consider the farce of referring to a reaction to someone's previously-accumulated wealth as "pre-punishment."
> Inequality increases the pool of wealth with which "haves" may bid up the prices of commodities, real property, and services. And they do, effectively increasing demand. Transitively, inequality drives inflation, i.e., local conditions.
Impossible if there's competition between producers and it's at world scale.
> What if some people are just bad at doing things for themselves?
Tyrannies begin with those kind of ideas.
And inflation is a General increase in prices, not the increase of a specific good.
There's poverty without inequality. In some primitive tribes everyone was poor. When natural adverse conditions hit some regions, also poverty was widespread.
That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system. I don't think you would consider equal and just that every person could influence justice. The problem is the justice system.
If everyone is poor, there's no poverty, just an ubiquitous state of subsistence. Poverty is always relative to some existing state of abundance.
>That the justice can be persuaded in a certain direction with money is a weakness of the system
It's a weakness of any system with overbearing inequality. Equal societies don't face this issue to the same extent because those wronged can mount an equal defense or offense as those doing the wrong, at which point righteousness should prevail.
You redefined the word poverty there, that's not the common or dictionary definition.
Even with wealth equality, as long as there's scarcity, some people would try to gain advantages over others with means different than money: e.g advantageous connections with others, deception, etc.
There's corruption among poor people, and rich people also steal from other rich people.
An utopic idea of equality blocks the capacity of observing how things work.
>You redefined the word poverty there, that's not the common or dictionary definition.
He says, without citation.
>Even with wealth equality, as long as there's scarcity, some people would try to gain advantages over others with means different than money
No one says that wealth equality leads to an absolutely equal society; that's a straw man. What is incontrovertibly true, and empirically proven to be so, is that societies that are more equal in terms of wealth are less unequal socially, and see fewer negative outcomes that can be attributed to any disparity that does exist, wealth or otherwise. This is because we are talking about effects directly downstream of resource allocation, and monetary wealth is the primary way resources are denominated. Maybe if commodities were priced directly in Twitter follower count or bench press, you'd have a point.
The poor and rich are not equally corrupt (again, something shown empirically).
The terrible labor laws exist because of the inequality. The people with servants write the laws and, in their magnaminity, don't let the servants vote.
Inequality is a big factor. Story says the woman in this case felt she was compensated. Like feeling 'lucky' to enjoy (some) perks of living in a rich household. If that family had been as poor as her (or her mother), that stops being true. Then it becomes hard to keep a slave from walking away without resorting to violence.
Another big factor is the victim simply not knowing any better. Not being able to read might have helped with that (and I'd guess she probably wasn't allowed a phone, to keep her isolated from outside).
Point is there's a lot of space between "whips & chains" and "paying below minimum wage". Unfortunately some people are really good at exploiting that space.
Yes poverty is a factor. But inequality too - it helps to create [the powerless vs the powerful] situations. Even if those on the bottom may not qualify as poor.
> Education and a society's culture are certainly important too.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
Would you say USA is a developed country, considering for example Los Angeles slums? And there's a bigger inequality between Elon musk and a well paid software developer than between a poor person in a developing country and a rich politician from that country.
There's is poor people who exploit other poor people. Poor people that sends children to work for example. Only the rich can exploit? You are not using the definition of exploitation from the dictionaries. A stronger or armed person has a power differential with a weaker person. A smarter and less smart person too.
So, exploitation doesn't seem to be related exclusively to wealth inequality. It's a moral thing, not a matter of wealth differences.
A simple narrative of "us-good VS them-bad" is reductionistic.
Practically-speaking, inequality is insidious because it enables violations of rights and unjust denial of opportunity even when poverty has been eradicated. Cold comfort, to the middle-class family of people mowed down by a rich motorist who faces negligible jail time because the money they can spend on a lawyer is outside the scope of what the legal system is built to handle.