One almost gets the impression that right-wingers praise the huge gap between rich and poor in America, as proof that the free market is working properly.
Those who think income inequality is good might want to read this.
Income inequality is bad, but many of the solutions for it are worse.
Over 90% of people in Japan believe they are ‘middle class’. While Japan probably does have less income inequality than in, say, the US, the band is no where near that wide.
It’s not happiness - I see it as complacency: a society where people ‘accept’ their lot in life, are willing to put up with mediocracy, as long as everyone around them is in the same boat with them.
I’d rather have equality of opportunity and risk such ‘unhappiness’ even if it meant inequality of outcome.
The question is too vague. It’s good that a brain surgeon with amazing skills and 10 years of training has a higher income than a janitor. But when you get into situations where money buys power which buys more money, you get a runaway effect at the top. I’m not sure if it’s economically healthy for a country to have (pulling numbers out of my ass) 50% of the wealth to be held by half a percent of the population, and it’s certainly not utilitarian in the greatest happiness for the most people sense.
Intuitively it strikes me that when wealth is that concentrated, you lose total economic output because most of the people in your society cannot contribute much to distributed spending, and so we have the double whammy of having less wealth and having fewer people have any part of that wealth.
Googling I get this quoted several places:
List of countries by income inequality is here.
What I notice is, the poorer the country, the greater the inequality. At the bottom of the list (i.e., countries where income is most unequal): Namibia, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Botswana, Bolivia, Haiti, Columbia, Paraguay, South Africa, etc etc etc.
At the top of the list: Denmark, Japan, Sweden, Czech, Norway. Germany is near the top. Canada, the US, the UK and Frane are in the middle, more or less. I’ve lived in Japan for almost half my life - and they idea that the average businessman in Japan is actually ‘happy’ with his life is downright laughable. He’s not happy, he’s resigned to knowing exactly what is role in life is and will continue to be.
That said - income disparity may well be a problem: I think the linked article may have a point in how disparity might have an adverse impact on society. Perhaps one reason crime in Japan is lower is because there is less perceived ‘unfairness’?
septimus, despite the ‘question’ phrasing of the thread title, your OP makes it fairly clear that you have an opinion, and you think income inequality is bad.
Why do you think so, and what do you think we should do about it?
The “free market” isn’t about solving income inequality. It’s about freedom of choices.
We also have a “free market” in picking our spouses. It simply means each of us is free to choose who we want to associate with. Some girls are prettier than others and will attract more suitors. You’re saying that if the “free market” doesn’t make every girl equally pretty in the eyes of men, the system is broken. You’re saying that if every man (ugly wimps and handsome alpha males) don’t have the same success with pretty girls, then the “free market freedom” of spouse choices is broken.
But a large enough income inequality drastically limits the choices of most people.
For that matter, the definition of the “free market” seems to change as proves convenient. A short while ago I was being told on the forum that economic coercion still qualifies as the “free market”, and that hardly increases choices.
Quite so. The FM is all about assuring that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. It’s ok to rob banks as long as you do it from a board room.
And the FM touches the meat market. My understanding is that a fat wallet makes just about anyone smell better.
So… even though people are not equal… and some people have greater intelligence, drive, talent, and ambition than others… we’ll all be happier if that greater talent, drive, intelligence, and ambition doesn’t actually produce much in the way of different results in life than the dumber, untalented, lazier, more complacent neighbor?
Um… I’m gonna say no.
And gorgeous young supermodels command the attention of alpha males every where. This severely limits the choices of average men to catch a supermodel wife.
The “free market” doesn’t have have any objective to keep men out of the wealth of pool of pretty girls. It’s just one of the side effects. You allow men and women the freedom of choice to choose each other and inequality is what you get. There’s no way around it.
The sum total of everyone’s choices (soda vs lemonade, movies vs plays, pretty girls vs ugly ones, etc) leads to inequality. There’s no way around it.
If you allow the freedom to choose (products, services, people), you will end up with inequality.
If you (try to) institute equality, you must take away freedom of choice to enforce it.
You cannot have BOTH equality and freedom of choice.
The only way for equality to arise out of society is for our human brains to perceive all products and work effort equally. Since our brains don’t work that way, now what?
I don’t think anyone would object if this was the case. But a lot of people up at the top did not get there by merit. They got there by being born there. Take that one percent that owns a third of the wealth in the country - how many of them had parents in the same top one percent? Don’t confuse an aristocracy for a meritocracy. In an aristocracy, the people with greater talent, drive, intelligence, and ambition are less rewarded than dumber, untalented, lazier, more complacent people who just happened to be born in the right place - the exact situation you say you’re against.
Um… What I’m going to say is that it’s really pathetic how right-wingers sneer and cackle about the slightest ellipsis in a rationalist’s argument, and yet produce the sort of egregious misconstructions that Bricker does here.
PS: Since right-wingers have a reputation for thinking they “already know all the answers,” I’d like respondents to indicate whether they bothered to read the cited article.
Thats a very misleading way of putting it.
A better description of the flaws of income inequality is:
As wealth concentrates in the hands of a few individuals and companies, those groups have more ability to manipulate the levers of power (politics, the media, religion, the military) to enforce laws and social customs enriching themselves and expanding their influence further, creating a runaway cycle leading to plutocracy and oligarchy.
I don’t know of anyone who wants talented people to not succeed. However when you have a situation where a handful of individuals can buy and sell political parties and media outlets with their pocket change, then you have a problem.
Of the 4 things I listed, I’d say 3 have been coopted by the wealthy. Politics, the media & religion. The military seems unaffected, but is fundamentally just a tool of politics anyway so in that regard is affected. ie, how much of the war on communism was just a war to protect the interests of private corporations vs a war to protect US national security?
Both parties are seen as corporatist (just that the GOP is open and proud of it). Religion isn’t so much about social justice as it is about culture wars which encourage people to vote for politicians who support supply side economics. I don’t know if it is a coincidence that Christian religion is now a major promotion tool for supply side economic policy, but that is what happened.
I read the article. Nothing earth shattering there.
However, he does try to stress one point which is worth repeating:
"But we can’t just rely just on taxes and benefits to increase equality—the next government can undo them all at a stroke. We’ve got to get this structure of equality much more deeply embedded in our society. "
That’s the best sentence among his comments and I underlined “deeply embedded.” Unfortunately, most egalitarians with skip over that and look for government redistribution schemes.
True equality starts with everyone’s brains (the “deeply embedded” part). If everyone’s brains favor all products and talents equally, you get equality.
Actually, Bricker’s comment is more accurate than yours because it addresses the OPs reference to the “free market.”
Your complaint deals with a separate issue: the accumulation of savings and the treatment of inherited wealth. This is a separate issue from the free market of choices. For example, Sweden has more aggressive income redistribution but they abolished their inheritance tax in 2005.
Yes, I read the article.
If you want to discuss the implications of income disparity, have at it.
If this is going to be one more partisan rant about how the opposite side of the political spectrum is evil or stupid (or both), I’m just going to slide this over to the BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
Well, it depends on what you mean by “different results in life.” I recall an 18th-Century abolitionist, accepting arguendo the assumption that blacks are less intelligent than whites, commenting that “Sir Isaac Newton might have been more greatly gifted than his fellows with reason, but he was not therefore lord of the persons and property of other men,” or words to that effect. If you’re smarter than I am, does that mean you should be the boss of me? In the FM system it often seems to work out that way – even if I don’t actually work for you.
Do you have an example of how rich people can boss you around in some way that is analogous to slavery?
Regards,
Shodan