Children of doctors often become doctors. Children of small businessmen often take over the business or start their own. Children of police officers and firefighters often go into those careers. Children of show business people often become successful in that business.
Going into the family business is not genetic. It’s a social phenomenon. You do what you know, and you often know what your family does really well.
Ah, so politics is a “family business”.
Of course it doesn’t make you more qualified . . . it does mean that you might a) be more apt to have an interest in a career you see being practiced in your family as well as b) be more practiced and comfortable in that field at a younger age.
See above. Everything is a “family business” in that children learn from their parents. Sometimes that makes them good at the same thing their parents were. You seem to think you caught RickG admitting to something sinister, but I think you maybe didn’t understand his complicated analysis vis a vis children following in parents’ footsteps.
You seem to be implying that there is some statistically significant group of people who think, for example, Hillary Clinton is more qualified to “rule” (not even going to try to unpack that one) than others solely because she’s married to Bill Clinton. Or that Bush Jr. was more qualified because his father was Bush Sr… Of course, being familiar with the political world gave them advantages against some opponents, but was not in any way a passport to political success.
It definitely gave them a huge advantage to “political success” to be an offspring/spouse to a high-level politician. Claiming otherwise is ignoring reality. Just the name recognition alone is worth quite a few percentage points in the polls. Add to that all the networks already built, all the connections already made, and all the favors already dispensed and owed… And here comes your dynasty.
Read what I wrote again. I am agreeing with you 100% that there is an advantage to the name recognition, as well as all of the things I said before (comfort and familiarity with the business of politics, etc etc). To claim I said otherwise is ignoring reality.
You said:
And I say, no, it does not make one more “qualified,” and having some advantages doesn’t mean that one is not deserving on his/her own merits . . . we vote for people, after all.
Are you insisting that the privilege and advantages conferred upon children of politicians by birth and circumstance somehow makes any of their own achievements less real?
It’s not an “achievement” when you get elected on your daddy’s name, connections, and favors. Like it’s not an “achievement” when someone becomes rich through inheriting.
What about Roger Clinton, Jr?
Sure it is. You still have to get elected. Sure, much of Hilary Clinton’s political success is due to the fact that she was First Lady to Bill Clinton. But I suspect she probably would have been successful at something else regardless. And it didn’t win her the Democratic nomination for President.
No. inheriting wealth just gives you the option to achieve nothing if you want to.
Is it your position that it’s only “fair” if everyone starts life with nothing and has to pull themselves up by their boot straps?
For that matter, are “dynasties” a bad thing? And if so, why?
msmith537 has said it, but I’m going to try to spell it out in an unambiguous way, because you seem to be really confused.
Despite numerous advantages, having a successful politician in the family does not guarantee political success. Nothing is “passed down;” the people vote for their elected representatives (direct appointments and such aside).
I’d like to bring this out of the realm of the hypothetical. Please point me to the large numbers of politicians who were handed elected positions. Or maybe demonstrate how lots of politicians were elected with no consideration for their political positions or ability, but just family name. There must be scads of mindless twits “inheriting” political positions who don’t have the slightest idea how politics work, but they get the job just because.
Or maybe I agree with you . . . maybe situational advantages need to be fought against and shown to be the sham that they are. Time to ramp up affirmative action, take money from the rich and give to the poor in the inner cities, because clearly white people and wealthy people aren’t achievers, they’re just inheritors.
. . . which is silly, right? You can’t point at one specific advantage/disadvantage a person has in comparison to another person, and claim that it puts them in an unfair position, while ignoring everything else in the equation.
Neither does inheriting $100M guarantee you will not go broke. But it certainly helps.
And as for the other poster asking whether dynasties are a “bad thing” - I didn’t pass judgment one way or the other. But there was an assertion earlier that the right want a “ruling, nobility class” - and I pointed out that that “ruling, nobility class” already exists.
I’m late to the party but I’m happy to pick and choose evidence that supports my pre-existing ideological beliefs.
A potential negative of income inequality that I have heard of is social instability. This is because the poor realize their lives aren’t improving, you have a glut of professional class people who are underemployed, and you have more rich people all vying to take over the country. I forget the author of this concept.
Think of it like this. The working class are angry and irate causing them to go further left and further right (the rise of socialism and the tea party in the US as examples both have a lot of factors involving stagnant economic growth for the majority as well as the capture of government by the wealthy).
The working class send their kids to college hoping for a better life, leading to a massive glut of educated professionals. Lowering their value. You then have a surplus of businessmen, lawyers, scientists, writers, etc. These people channel their frustrations into trying to fix/change the system (and they have the skillset to do it).
With the rich, it isn’t just that the rich get richer it is that there are more of them. The % of the nation who are multimillionaires grows, and each one wants to reform the nation to fit their ideology. The Koch brothers want a tea party america. The chamber of commerce wants a business friendly america. The democracy alliance wants a liberal america. Wealthy liberals want income inequality reduced. Conservative democrats want fiscially conservative, socially liberal policies. So each group is vying to fund enough think tanks, politicians, media outlets, etc to change the country.
All lead to an increase in instability.
What are some benefits of income inequality? The only one I can possibly think of is a reduced cost of capital, so maybe it’d be easier to start a business.
Also in your OP you neglect to mention a major tool of reducing income inequality is increasing the power of the working class in the business and political market. You can do that by public funding of elections, labor unions, etc. Right now the well off have pretty much obtained a firm grip on the political and economic system. Even under ‘communist’ obama, the wealthy are doing amazing while everyone else suffers.
Also income inequality is not because of the rise of automation or globalization. Canada has not seen the growth in income inequality that the US has. Our inequality is more due to politics.
I know Spongebob told you to use your imagination. But this isn’t what he had in mind.
I was already clear. That’s why I gave those examples. They illustrate my point.
This is how people debate issues when they’re not delusional.
I don’t see a lot of evidence here. Mostly just a lot of conjecture and opinion. And in my opinion, it doesn’t really address the real issues of income inequality.
The main issue with income inequality has nothing to do with some people making a lot more money than others. It’s the perception that “Wall Street”, by which we mean not only Manhattan investment banks and hedge funds, but their law firms, accounting firms and management consultancies as well, exist for no purpose other than to generate wealth for themselves. Educated at the most elite schools, these people run companies that provided services incomprehensible to the general public (AKA “Main Street”) and earn far above what the average family makes. In many cases, the services these companies provides seems to actually create significant harm to regular people with terms like buyouts, offshoring, mergers, downsizings, rightsizings, strategic realignments and paradigm shifts.
This is not a bad thing, in and of itself. However, after decades of scandals and bailouts, including S&Ls in the 80s, the dot com crash, Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Madoff, Lehman, Bear Sterns all leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, the perception is that these people are not only full of shit about the “greater good” they are doing for the economy, they are in many cases outright con artists. And not only do they never seem to get punished, often they are bailed out or manage to have legislation enacted to actually protect themselves in the future.
Your chart shows that income inequality has gone up for every country on that chart. If you look at the OECD (pdf) from 1985-2008 income inequality increased in 17 countries, held steady in three countries, and decreased in only Greece and Turkey. I don’t think the economy of Greece is one the rest of the world should be emulating. It is not just the US but a worldwide phenomenon.
If you look historically income inequality has not been a source of social and political instability. Rather times are most unstable when the economy is expanding and a group of people is growing richer and challenging the previous elite for political control. In the US the 1960s was a time of much more political and social foment than the 1930s even though the economy of the 1960s was great and the economy of the 1930s sucked. The source of the instability were groups such as blacks, women, and the young who were acquiring economic clout and wanted political and social clout to match. This does not reflect our current situation.
Globalization is the source of the rise in income inequality. Technology has made it easier for businesses to be bigger and sell more products. Ford, Coke, and Microsoft, Warner Brothers, etc, can now sell their products to the growing middle class of China, the asian tigers, south america, and eastern europe. That was not possibly thirty years ago since those places were either closed politically or too poor to bother with. Thus it becomes more important to hire the right executives since billions of dollars ride on their every decision. Since the number of people with the correct background to serve as executives in these companies has not grown as fast as markets have their compensation has gotten higher. Plus since laws started to limit the amount of executive pay companies could write off, companies started to pay executives more in stock. Globalization has made the stock market soar and executive compensation allong with it.
Meanwhile at the bottom of the job market, globalization means having to compete with millions of chinese peasants who are just glad to have food to eat and a place to sleep. Low skilled americans used to have a huge advantage because of their proximity to the rest of the economy. Now communication, IT, and transportation advances make the proximity not so valuable. Huge increases in immigration have also brought in low skilled workers to compete with American workers. This has hurt the market for low skilled workers and kept wages low.
Think of the NBA, Lebron James makes tens of millions of dollars more than Magic Johnson made in his prime. This is not because he is better at basketball, or because of who is in government, but because he can sell jerseys and sneakers to kids in China, Russia, and India who can see him play on the internet. Whereas the person who makes those jerseys has to compete with garment workers, in China, Vietnam, and Haiti.
The ironic thing is that while income inequality grows inside countries. If you look globally incomes inequality has not been lower in at least a hundred years if not ever. During the 1950s and 1960s Americans were undergoing an unprecedented level of prosperity while tens of millions of Chinese people were literally starving to death. Globalization has brought economic advancement to the poorest of the poor around the world while flattening the incomes at the bottom of the rich countries.
Re: I’m not sure why Nehru’s fellow founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, Josip Broz Tito, never convinced (if he even tried) Nehru that the USSR wasn’t really as inspirational as it looked. Instead, devolving economic power to the workers themselves (workers’ councils, autogestion, etc.) was far more efficient.
I mostly agree with you here, in my ideal society most enterprises would be run by worker’s cooperatives, and we’d have a market-socialist system something like Yugoslavia. I have hope that that model could lead to a better society than either capitalism or Soviet-style command socialism.
Outside of a few states though, India was never all that ‘socialist’: they had a large state sector, and a heavily regulated, state-directed economy, but there were no massive expropriations of private property in most of the country. Their most socialist phase was in the 1970s-1980s under Indira Gandhi, before she was killed. The most thriving state today, Kerala (with the highest human development index in the country) is one of the most socialist. (For what it’s worth, its economy does revolve largely around exporting labourers to the Middle East who send money back home. Still, though.)
I don’t think it’s at all true that the parts of the country where the British ruled the longest, are the least developed. In fact, I’ve heard the opposite argument made, that the south is more developed and socially progressive today because it was exposed to European influence (trade, colonies, etc.) before most of the north.