> Part of the problem is that the inequality leads to behavior that protects the inequality.

I do agree with you, but I think it's worth nitpicking the examples. Is the Disney case an inequality problem? I'm not sure that it is. Suppose we waved a magic wand, and suddenly all of Disney's employees and shareholders were middle class people. Would that change Disney Inc's incentives around IP lobbying?

I think that rather than an inequality problem, cases like Disney are something like a "concentrated interests" problem. Even if every individual person had exactly the same amount of money in the bank, they wouldn't all be equally invested in the exact same things, and competing interests would still emerge. Disney's incentives follow just from the fact that it has shareholders, regardless of how much wealth those shareholders have. And for what it's worth, as a society, this is definitely the problem we want! Concentrated interests solve huge problems, like how to make a $100 million movie that everyone wants to see, but that no one person could fund on their own.

>Suppose we waved a magic wand, and suddenly all of Disney's employees and shareholders were middle class people. Would that change Disney Inc's incentives around IP lobbying?

I'm not sure the shareholders are the actual issue, since it is Disney's concentration of wealth that allows it to change the laws (and gives it incentives to do so). It doesn't much matter who owns the wealth, since the chain from owner to actual employees carrying out the actions that change the laws ends up removing most impact of the share holders.

> Part of the problem is that the inequality leads to behavior that protects the inequality.

Oddly, that statement (which I completely agree with) has nothing to do with being rich or poor.

People in power want to stay in power - whether it's the US or a failing state like Venezuela, they use that power against others.

I'd much rather be in a rich but unequal society - it's much more peaceful.

I think the relationship isn't linear. Too much equality and there is no reason to go above and beyond, to innovate or to take risks. To much inequality, and we find the same result. Enough inequality to reward those who do more (with some understanding that there is elements of luck), but not so much inequality that people have to be lucky to succeed, if it is possible at all.

I feel this is similar to a game design issue.

You want a game in which early levels are easy enough that it won't take too much skill to get through. [Basics of society, access to housing, clean water, health care..]

As you get to higher levels, there will be challenges that some players can't get through [amassing enough money to buy a yacht], but that's OK.

Some players have cheat codes not available to other players [laws to help special interests] because they have an in with the game designers [government], and that's OK too as long as it doesn't go too far.

It's not a big deal if the most skilled players can get to really high levels - that's not the issue.

It's when the most skilled players make the game unplayable by the average player that you have a problem.

I think your example is too simplistic. There are more dimensions to equality than just wealth or money. People could be socially rewarded but still be on very similar wealth levels. There are some people actually persuing this as a life goal, it‘s called earning to give and comes from the effective altruism movement. They try to get into a really well paying position but give most of the earnings (like 50%+) to effective charities. It‘s not always about money for yourself but being able to work for something you believe in and a recognition of your efforts. How else would you explain suicide bombers and soldiers giving their life in unprofitable ways?

> a rich but unequal society - it's much more peaceful.

That's not true. Violence is caused by inequality. Areas where everyone's equally poor are about as peaceful as areas where everyone's equally rich. It's dramatic inequality that causes violence. This is true no matter whether you look at neighborhood level, city level, national level etc.

Do you have any sources for this? I don’t see how it can possibly be true.

For one thing I don’t see how you can define areas where everyone is poor. Even looking at a place like North Korea, the top government officials are very well off compared to the average person.

In general, poorer countries are much less safe than richer ones. Poorer neighborhoods are much less safe than richer ones. I can see the point that even in those cases it’s often related to inequality, e.g. theres gang related violence because gang leaders are much richer than the average person in the area. But that’s a tautology, because there’s nowhere that has absolutely no inequality.

Great paper by the way.

If you look at the graph on page 8, you can see obvious clustering of poor countries vs other countries. This study does not compare the overall wealth of the countries against crime.

The reason that is important, is that in a rich country, even poor people have many options. In a poor country like Venezuela, they don't. As a result, even if they had the same Gini coefficient, the crime would look much different.

So when you take that into account (which is what I tried to do in my statement, but probably could have worded better), then being in a "rich but unequal" society is much better than a poor country of either high or low inequality. I think the high clustering of OECD countries demonstrates this.

Did not read the paper linked to by sibling but there are diminishing returns to wealth for a person. So unequality might be perceived as more severe in low income countries than richer countries when the basic needs are met.

Violence doesn't have much to do with inequality. They might be weakly correlated, but you'd have to go far beyond that to establish causality.

>Enough information control allows government control

Yet the solution to income inequality is to increase government control of the means of production via confiscatory taxes and redistribution?

So some advocate increasing government's ability to take money from you a gunpoint through taxes in order to prevent the government from being able to control people?

> Overall, if things were constantly getting better, I doubt people would care.

Poverty rates in the United States have been between 11 and 15% consistently since 1965. However, worldwide absolute poverty has dramatically dropped over the past 100 years. There are 3 times fewer extremely poor people in the world today than in 1970. So things are absolutely getting better -- dramatically better in fact.[1]

If people were unaware of how much "rich" people have and just looked at their own ability to buy food, housing and small luxuries, wealth inequality wouldn't even be a thing worth mentioning. Why should it matter what my neighbor has -- as long as I have what I need.

This whole "income inequality" cause is little more than Marxist class warfare rhetoric [2] rebranded for a modern audience: people are jealous that some people make more than them. So what. No matter what policies are enacted, poverty in the United States is practically unchanged since 1965 and vastly lower than it was in the 1950s when it was first measured. [3] The same crowd that cares about inequality also happen to be the same people who demand governments address climate change by essentially changing the balance of the means of production. Nobody cared about climate change in 1986. The first mainstream book on the subject wasn't even published until 1989. However, the industrial revolution started a low time before that. Apparently the climate change wasn't a catastrophic threat until someone wrote a book about it being a catastrophic threat? Were scientists simply sleeping for the past 100 years until some far-left journalist wrote a book about it? [4] But 1991, it started becoming a big thing. What happened between 1986-1991? Hint: something to do with the Soviets. Interesting more still is that the Palestinian cause is also supported by those who care about climate change and wealth inequality -- and the Palestinian cause was supported in a very big way by the Soviet KGB.[5]

Interesting how climate change, income inequality, poverty and even the Palestinian situation all feature the same "cure" -- the end of US-dominated, global capitalism. Convenient how that all fits together so nicely.

Fascinating how everything that was important to the Soviets has become the lightning rod of the left wing of American politics -- but those causes weren't even on the radar before 1998. Actual environmentalists were trying to save whales and the rain forests in the 1980s and not trying to restructure the entire world economic system. Anti-Capitalism didn't become a semi-mainstream idea until mid 1990s. I honestly miss the Greenpeace of the 1980s.

Should the goal actually be 0% poverty? Is that even possible? If you took 100% of the wealth of the worlds 1000 richest people and distributed it equally among the poor -- it wouldn't make a dent. let's say that the world's richest combined assets were worth $2 trillion. And there are 2 billion people living in extreme poverty, that gives each of them about $500. But that's it. Because there'd be no more wealth to redistribute from those rich people because it would be all used up. So you go to the next 1000 rich people and so on until eventually everyone has just enough enough money to buy a pregnant chicken and five carrots -- with no pot to cook it in since nobody's going to bother making anything since it's just going to get taken away.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/ [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2562423?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... [3] https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un... [4] http://environment.harvard.edu/news/huce-headlines/social-mo... [5] http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/103576/the...

>Yet the solution to income inequality is to increase government control of the means of production via confiscatory taxes and redistribution?

There does seem to be an issue where the government having more power results in things going even worse when the government gets corrupted.

Is it better to have the FDA/DEA approve what drugs are legal which allows them to be abused by outlawing competitors, or is it better to not have the FDA/DEA able to ban drugs, which let's meth be sold freely where ever a business chooses to do so? Most everyone I've seen discuss this issue gets caught up in the trap of wishing for a happy medium that won't last. They want a government that does good but won't be corrupted to do bad.

>So some advocate increasing government's ability to take money from you a gunpoint through taxes in order to prevent the government from being able to control people?

In the end, we will always threaten each other with violence. I've yet to see an alternative, as even extreme libertarian solutions just give way to fertile ground for governments to rise anew.

No matter what you do, a group of people which binds together will have more power than the strongest person who doesn't, and part of that power will be dedicated to keeping the group bound together (as groups that don't will eventually fall apart).

>worldwide absolute poverty has dramatically dropped

Looking world wide isn't really relevant when people make decisions based off of local ideals. Countries where poverty is going down will likely not have issues, and countries where wealth for the lower class stagnates or even reversed will.

>This whole "income inequality" cause is little more than Marxist class warfare rhetoric

And you have to fight class warfare with class warfare. Consider those who supported a culture where sharing one's salary is taboo, while businesses share the salaries of their employees quite openly (at least to other businesses on the inside).

>However, the industrial revolution started a low time before that. Apparently the climate change wasn't a catastrophic threat until someone wrote a book about it being a catastrophic threat? Were scientists simply sleeping for the past 100 years until some far-left journalist wrote a book about it?

Well look at how child abuse wasn't a significant problem up until the 1900s either. I wouldn't consider that evidence that child abuse isn't actually a significant problem.

>And there are 2 billion people living in extreme poverty, that gives each of them about $500. But that's it.

What is $500 in terms of their actual income? I'm not advocating seizing the wealth of the wealthiest, but to think that for the world's poorest $500 is the same as $500 is to even a poor American isn't quite right.

What I will say is that rights and morals and laws are all social constructs, and the true reality is we have never left the jungle. People will continue playing at society as long as certain conditions are met, and one of them is for things to be continually improving over the long term. If that doesn't happen, people will use what ever power they have to change the system, often to the detriment of those at the top. This isn't right or wrong, this isn't moral or immoral, this isn't legal or illegal.