Re:Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
by ryandrake on Monday January 04, 2016 @07:23PM
(#10839967)
> It's not a problem if a person picked at random from the population makes 50 million dollars with a photo sharing startup. But it starts looking a lot more like a problem when we're not picking people at random, but instead picking them mostly from the ranks of the most privileged people.
Our system allocates/distributes wealth pretty much at random, but not uniformly random: the RNG is biased towards people with certain backgrounds and/or the already wealthy. So for every "Disadvantaged minority rags to riches" story, you'll find ten "Stanford grad with millionaire parents and prep school education makes even more money" stories. I'd argue that the root societal problem, though, is the jackpot-like randomness, not the skewed distribution.
Our system allocates/distributes wealth pretty much at random, but not uniformly random: the RNG is biased towards people with certain backgrounds and/or the already wealthy. So for every "Disadvantaged minority rags to riches" story, you'll find ten "Stanford grad with millionaire parents and prep school education makes even more money" stories. I'd argue that the root societal problem, though, is the jackpot-like randomness, not the skewed distribution.