In other words, the proportion of rich to poor is skewing further away from optimal, which could be measured by a curve showing the wealth one has as a proportion of the next-wealthiest person, or by a graph showing the percentage of global wealth owned by a given equal-sized fraction of all people (i.e. the top 1% owns X%, the next 1% owns Y%). A perfectly flat graph indicates perfect communism. A sharply inflected curve indicates oligarchic plutocracy. An unspecified (and likely undiscovered) shape would be optimal economic conditions for civilization as a whole. My concern is that we are moving further away from that presumed optimum in the direction of oligarchic plutocracy, which historically has resulted in violent rebellion, every time it has been observed.
But I agree with you that, for the most part, the rising tide of wealth has raised all ships. Inequality is a natural outgrowth of the massive influx of wealth.
A lot of people who have comparative wealth and have worked hard for it feel they have earned their wealth, disregarding the fact that a lot of other people work equally hard and do not have the same amount of wealth. This sort of thing muddies the issue.
Also muddying the issue is the fact that some people think that if X amount of money could lift Y poor people out of poverty, vs making rich person Z marginally richer, it is self-evidently the case that it is better and therefore right for X to be spent on the Y rather than person Z. I.e. as long as some people are below a minimum acceptable level of wealth, all wealth inequality is, in this view, bad.
>wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into.
I, like my father before me, am making sacrifices to benefit my future generations. It's not unfair, it's called being responsible and thinking about the future.
edit: changed delusional to short sighted.
Is it wrong to work hard to improve your children's future prospects?
Nothing is wrong it.
> I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this
It's a blatant strawman.
If you provide for your child 1000x what they need (during childhood and/or via inheritance) that is not bad (in the scope of this discussion, no other details implied). What is bad is if you have 1000000x what your children need and you built this on the backs of people who will squaler in poverty until the day they die and the only thing you use the wealth for is to acquire more wealth. That is bad. The strawman makes it sound like you are defending an average middle class engineer saving up for their children's college as if they were in the wrong, as if they were on the winning side of increasing income inequality.
Nobody here is arguing against a middle class person saving up for their kids college. They're against people who actually have ridiculous amounts of wealth and the rapid growth of that inequality.
A certain amount of inequality encourages economic growth and innovation. Zero wealth inequality would be perfect communism. A lot of people--myself included--presume that would retard growth due to a lack of incentives.
The maximum amount of wealth inequality would be for one person to own the entire world, and for everyone else to have nothing. This is practically impossible, of course. We can only approximate it, such as by 1% of Earth's population owning 99% of its wealth. This generally encourages the other 99% of the people to take some of that wealth by force, without regard to any increased productivity the current owner may be able to squeeze out via economies of scale or capital investment, or whatever.
A medium amount of inequality encourages people with less wealth to do neat and interesting things in order to become more wealthy (economic mobility), and for those with more to make capital investments that increase productivity, purchase luxury goods, and finance megaprojects (concentration of capital).
So the problem is when the amount of wealth inequality moves away from the optimal profile, which remains undiscovered. My perception is that we are moving away from the optimum, rather than toward it.
No need to presume anything, we have a number of examples to look at throughout history. Actually, stunted economic growth is the best case scenario for socialist systems. Most of them achieve no more than mass starvation and death of millions of citizens.
A certain number of socialist believers must be retained to keep a system of unequal property from running away into oligarchic plutocracy. It's like putting a harmonic damper on a pendulum, to keep it from swinging too far, while still retaining the same amount of energy in the system.
Ideological purity is murder. Don't waste your intellect arguing over the various types of extremism.
If there were no socialists, capitalists would be living in a hellish dystopia. If there were no capitalists, socialists would be living in a hellish dystopia. So just stick the chocolate in the peanut butter (or put the peanut butter in the chocolate) and enjoy your mixed economic system.
It can be argued that inequality leads to more utility being created overall, but I feel this justification is rarely scrutinised in much detail. Instead it is elevated to a moral premise that those who are able to earn more "deserve" their excess share of society's resources, regardless of how many suffer for their consequently smaller share.
Personally, it seems to me we have the resources to feed and shelter everyone in our society, and I'm highly sceptical that doing so would create less utility overall than whatever it is we're doing with those resources instead. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this argument extends to the world as a whole.
I could be mistaken though.
Dumb luck is also being born into a family where you'll inherit millions of dollars, but tell everyone you worked hard for it.
Also, maybe I was lucky to have been able to come across stuff like this in my life to better shape my view of reality:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
An 8% difference in either direction is acceptable to me. It's good enough to tolerate until it's worth revisiting for further improvements. So now that we have the gender pay gap (almost) sorted out, perhaps we should tackle a problem more likely to cause societal problems: the increasing measures of wealth inequality.