By hoarding wealth, the richest prevent their own wealth from growing (out of risk aversion and greed), and they end up either voluntarily transferring wealth or it's taken from them by an angry underclass. You can see why (after the fact), they would've preferred the former. Posted this yesterday but Acemoglu and Robinson's Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy goes into this in depth.
http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/2006/01/book_rev...
Besides, it's really nice to be wealthy, but wealth can't protect the wealthiest from getting murdered by someone lacking mental healthcare or getting radicalized because they have no other option. Thus spreading the wealth does help everyone.
Also, you are misrepresenting what he said re Britain and the US.
I am British by birth, but I have lived in the United States since 2012 and became a citizen in late 2016. There are lots of reasons I have made America my home, but one of them is the American ideal of opportunity. I always hated the walls created by social class distinctions in the United Kingdom. The American ideal of a classless society is, to me, a deeply attractive one. It has been disheartening to learn that the class structure of my new homeland is, if anything, more rigid than the one I left behind and especially so at the top.
The only thing he's saying is that while Britain has a society with obvious class differences, the US has those differences hidden. It's not that it took years for him to figure out cause he's a clueless dummy.
Spreading the wealth helps everyone from a Rawlsian perspective. But if you're already rich you have nothing to gain from redistribution. If civil unrest starts brewing you can easily skip the country and wait for the storm to pass.
> the US has those differences hidden
Taxi drivers have missing teeth. There is nothing hidden about this. It's in plain sight. Just like the homeless in every city asking if you can spare a dollar. Just like the ostentatious displays of wealth in the "right" neighborhoods. It's impossible not to see this, unless you're a clueless dummy isolated by privilege.
This discontent is right in front of us. We often turn them into "racial" issues, but what is an event like Ferguson but a violent reaction to power? What is the rise of populists like Trump?
Spreading the wealth helps everyone from a Rawlsian perspective. But if you're already rich you have nothing to gain from redistribution. If civil unrest starts brewing you can easily skip the country and wait for the storm to pass.
If you are driving through a bad part of town and get mugged, you don't have the option to just skip the country. You can't seamlessly avoid random acts of violence which are rooted in inequality. Similarly, you can't avoid the effects of an apathetic workforce. If you want to be safe and live in a productive society, it benefits you to think larger than "I can just flee the country if things get bad".
Taxi drivers have missing teeth. There is nothing hidden about this. It's in plain sight. Just like the homeless in every city asking if you can spare a dollar. Just like the ostentatious displays of wealth in the "right" neighborhoods. It's impossible not to see this, unless you're a clueless dummy isolated by privilege.
Immigrants will always be poor. The author got here in 2012. Presumably his taxi driver grew up in a country with poor dental work and was a new arrival, too. It doesn't say anything about class.
> If you are driving through a bad part of town and get mugged,
Rich people don't drive through bad neighborhoods. People who live in gated communities don't get hit by stray bullets from gang wars. I don't think appealing to the self-interest of rich people works here. They're already looking out for themselves, and the trendline is pretty clear.
> Immigrants will always be poor.
Look, are you're really going to argue that immigrants having bad teeth is the natural order of things, and not a consequence of the availability and affordability of dental care? (And what about the dental health of Nascar fans? Not class related either, I presume!)
Most people have to struggle just to survive. The middle class worries about living in the right neighborhood with the right schools, so their children can have a good life. Nobody can afford to get involved in their community, or with local politics.
Noam Chomsky has written a number of interesting articles about apathy and alienation. I highly recommend The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber. Not directly about apathy in society, but related.
But sentences like "This is not an accident, people are pushed towards apathy because that serves the wealthy", without much additional clarification, might help you get perceived as some kind of conspiracy theorist.
Not sure what you mean by this. Isn't the goal here to destroy a lot of wealth? Wealth is a relative term - someone with $1B is not rich because 1B is an inherently big number, they are rich because $1B is orders of magnitudes greater than what most people will make in their lifetimes. Making people all have about the same in the bank other would destroy wealth.
- Almost everyone today (in western, developed nations) has more purchasing power than almost everyone did 100 years ago. Doesn't that mean that everyone is more wealthy?
- As new technology is developed, Alice's wealth depends less on Bob's poverty, because she can rely more on automation and less on Bob's labor. This might cause tremendous problems for Bob, but that's besides the point. Bob can now (if he manages to prosper) become immeasurably wealthy without reducing Alice's wealth in the least.
- You could make millions of dollars selling farm equipment. It seems clear that, in doing this, you are accumulating wealth. But it is not clear that your success needs to be at anyone's expense. Presumably your customers are buying your wares because your product helps them build wealth too. If the market is saturated, your success might come at the expense of your competitor's, but that seems like a different phenomenon from the idea of relative wealth that you've described above.
There are ways of gradually doing it that don't involve mass upheaval.
Making college free (or at least easily affordable) is highly redistributive and highly accretive. See also: public transportation, affordable childcare, and so.
You're not just wrong when you say that government efforts to redistribute wealth mostly destroy it. The opposite is true: funding the commons through progressive taxation makes modern society possible. Redistribution is at the absolute core of everything the government does.
> I fully support progressive taxation, free education, public transit, affordable health care
Choose one.
(Hint: all taxation is redistributive)
Healthcare transfers resources from the healthy to the sick. Government redistributes resources to children and to the elderly, because they can't provide for themselves.
We pay for roads we don't drive on. We pay for airports we don't fly through. We pay for parks and libraries we don't visit. All of this is redistribution from people who pay for the services to those who use them.
That these government services create wealth doesn't change that they are still redistributive in nature. In fact, the government has created and enforces the rules by which people can accumulate wealth in the first place. If the government makes the rules such that wealth automatically accumulates in the hands of the few, that's redistribution too!
It seems to me that you look at society as if there is a natural wealth distribution, and it's only redistribution when the government intervenes with that natural equilibrium by taking from some and giving to others. My perspective is that the government creates the very rules through which wealth can be created and accumulated (property law, IP law, incorporation, etc) and taxation is just part of this system.
The list of US' richest people nowadays consists of founders of Microsoft, founders of Google, founder of Facebook, founder of Amazon and founder of Oracle. So how many of today's richest became richest by hoarding and hoarding alone, Scrooge McDuck style?
Only if you don't consider a benefit to ones descendants.
One sentence from the article really sticks out: "The American ideal of a classless society is, to me, a deeply attractive one. It has been disheartening to learn that the class structure of my new homeland is, if anything, more rigid than the one I left behind and especially so at the top."
The author, a highly educated middle aged British guy who works at a think tank, needs years to figure out that the United States isn't the bastion of opportunity it purports to be? Come on! Literally the moment your plane lands at the airport you notice food is prepared by immigrants, and taxi drivers have missing teeth. The inequality is visible everywhere, and it stares you in the face. The author only barely recognizes the contradiction between his wish for equal opportunity for all and his desire to give his children a leg up.
Ultimately he concludes that hoarding opportunity by the top 20% "results in a less competitive economy as well as a less open society". In other words, he's _still_ arguing that the top 20% should be in favor of equal opportunity out of self interest, because it builds a better society for all. This is in direct contradiction with his earlier observations about the zero-sum nature of opportunity. Efforts to redistribute wealth and opportunity from the rich to the rest does not benefit the rich: it's called class conflict for a reason. Maybe in another decade or so the author will figure this out.