More recently I’ve come around to embracing the notion that peoples’ emotional state regarding their relative place in society and their future prospects is as important as their absolute standard of living.
Sure, as it's been argued by PG and many others, in material terms even the poorest in modern western societies are far better off than wealthy people of hundreds of years ago.
But everyone still has some degree of need to better themselves, improve their circumstances, and aspire to live more comfortably and prosperously. And crucially, the ability of young people to find a partner and have a family is strongly influenced by their prospects for upward mobility.
So if societal inequality is such that a young person trying to make their way in the world sees no opportunity for meaningful improvement of their circumstances, and therefore no real prospects for finding a good partner, raising a healthy family and achieving a good level of status in society, then the motivation to remain part of mainstream, productive society can easily be lost. This is what leads to people "dropping out" and ending up in a life of unemployment, depression, substance abuse, crime, violence, etc.
So, sure, some level of inequality is inevitable and healthy, to the extent that it rewards people for effort and ingenuity and gives people something to aspire to. But too much inequality becomes more of a de-motivator and a source of resentment, and can cause societal breakdown, and I think this is what is happening to some degree across the western world.
The reality is that if you were born somewhere poor, odds are overwhelmingly that you would earn a tiny fraction of what someone born somewhere where they are provided proper education and an environment where better alternatives are available.
So maybe you are compensated in proportion to the value you generate, but the problem with this is that this is only superficially connected to the effort you put in and how effective you are.
Some people who do well do so in part because they put in exceptional effort, but the biggest predictor of your earnings and success in life is how where you live and how wealthy your parents are.
This is the problem we have with inequality: It has very little to do with effort or skills, and a lot to do with pure chance.
This is one of those things that is worse in Europe than in the US. Inequality is perhaps less in absolute value, but it's more sticky. The upper class of the US has plenty of immigrants and people who were born poor. Yes, being born rich still provides advantage, but it's clearly not impossible.
In the EU, the upper class has
zero immigrants
very few people born poor (upper middle class minimum) (out of the top10 riches Frenchmen, one was born to a family with less than 100 million francs at the time they were born. One. And he wasn't poor by a reasonable definition at all)
Of all OECD countries, only in Slovenia, Chile, Italy and the UK are the intergenerational correlations between the earnings of fathers and sons stronger, for example.
The rest of the OECD, including most of Europe, does far better in that respect.
Representation of immigrants is something I haven't looked at, and it may very well be that the US does well there, but there are a number of confounding factors, and it in any case doesn't change the fact that social mobility is poor in the US.
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobil...
My uncle became a surgeon, and my parents become engineers, through the means of a free public university, which propelled them to upper middle class.
There is still much to achieve in French social mobility, but these kind of stories are plenty. Having spent some time in the US now, and seeing the stories of people who go on to go to engineering/medical/etc schools, I can't say that I see comparable things happening. Everyone I know who went to med school comes from upper middle class family AND had to take on tons of debt.
You shouldn't be looking at the top 0.001%, but the top 10%, perhaps even 20-30%, and how they live/what kind of social protections they benefit from.
Let us make an experiment and drop Paul Graham in a rainforest to see how much value he manages to extract.
Then, once he has starved to death or died from some random infection, let's think again what makes IT jobs more valuable than garbage collector jobs.
The point he and Mr Graham are trying to make is simple. People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
The fact is that this inequality manifests itself in far more different ways before it appears as income/wealth inequality.
Far before some one is rich and poor, they are good and bad at playing the piano, writing a book, programming or anything for that matter. Wealth inequality comes far later.
If you are poor enough, chances are fairly good you will never get to touch a piano to even find out if you can be good or bad at it.
So no, it does not come far before someone is rich and poor. If you are poor, a whole lot of avenues close off to you early regardless of skill, and the odds of you remaining poor is overwhelmingly higher than that you will be able to overcome it, irrespective of how hard you work or how smart you are.
You attribute far too much of a person's wealth accumulation with skill. Is Bill Gates the best programmer of all time?
>People are not same, and by that definition are not equal.
It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
Bill Gates is good at a lot of other things including programming.
And I'm not talking about skill. Its also work, persistence and variety of other things that add up.
>>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
People are only equal by rights. They are definitely not equal with regards to hard work, persistence and range of other skills.
Isaac Newton being better than me in Physics, isn't exactly racism.
According to the metrics our society uses to reward him, he's quite litterally the 85.000.000.000x dev.
And here's us thinking 10x devs don't exist...
>It's hard to argue with this, but I don't see it coming up much in the gender or race discussions. I wonder why.
Because in "modern" society it's not politically correct to recognize, let alone discuss, any differences whatsoever between age, race, sex, education, skill, etc. If you have the gall to try, you'll immediately be torn apart by the howling "progressive" masses.
What I'm questioning is not whether people's merits are unequal, but the tool used to measure them. My point is that a measure is inherently relative.
The thought experiment I offer is another way of measuring someone's utility. It is inherenthy flawed and unfit to the needs of our society. But again, the person I responded to didn't establish that his measuring tool is an optimization function for our society either.
Also this is not related to whether two people are compared on their job, but to whether two people good at different jobs are compared.
Few people object to higher rewards for those more talented or harder working.
Inequality is the result of people earning different amounts, such being compensated in proportion to the value they generate - rather than everyone earning the same irrespective of that.
Inequality is the result of reaping the rewards of your own work: someone is more effective, so they earn more. Why is it bad? How can any market economy even function without it?
If an author writes a really good book, then it will sell and they'll make a lot of money. They earn a lot more than the author who writes bad, unpopular books. That's an example of income inequality.
A great comedian will draw large crowds and his shows will fetch a high price. That's an example of inequality too. What's wrong with that? How will anything work if it were otherwise?
Inequality is arguably not the right economic easure to care about for social issues. Imagine every human in year 7000 is rich enough to own entire planets, but the super wealthy own 100 planets. Who cares? Why is that a problem? If your concern is about a particular class, then you should look at their standard of living and progress in it over time, not compare against how much someone else has.