That said, perception can quickly change and it very possible that the distance that Internet has makes it more vulnerable to collapsing. In an other lecture on stress it was pointed out that few things cause more harm than when false hope is found to be misplaced, so it very possible that if a individual perceive themselves as high ranked only to be proven wrong, then that can cause major health related issues. It was something that stress studies found out the hard way.
Because of the inherited status of M&P grades most of us where quite happy to take our toil - though this depended on your family's status as well.
Money equals certainty for a lot of people. It lets them count on certain things always being there. Having your own home, respect, clout totally builds your confidence and lets you face life with positivity. You can afford to be wrong more often, so you don't mind sticking your neck out - sometimes you lose, but often times you win big. In short, money removes a lot of anxieties.
A poor person simply doesn't have these luxuries, and the anxiety of poverty is a killer in its own right.
Our flavor of capitalism is also such that all the wealth ends up in a small number of hands. The winner takes all. I wished we could somehow enforce equality without negatively impacting innovation. Probably wishful thinking, but I wonder if society can be optimised so everyone can feel prosperous at the same time?!
Has to do with society functioning as a genetic algorithm: look into a-life like the work of Danny Hillis. You don't make gains when one 'solution' dominates over all others, that's called a plateau. Currently we're at a very low plateau where meddling with finance instruments or collecting rents of various kinds is the only effective way to wealth, and where most innovation will just get you broke and out of the game, because the risk of failing is far too severe.
In history we've had far better conditions for innovation (for instance, the dawn of personal computers) when people were generally more well-off but the disparity between extremes (Gini) was far smaller. This wasn't true for all populations, but I mean the populations that supported technological innovation.
You have to have whole thriving populations of individuals with bits of the eventual answer, including bits that aren't in themselves self-sufficient, in order for crossover and inter-pollination to give you new heights of innovation. Part of that is challenging (disrupting) existing 'best answers', something that's already in the DNA of silicon valley. Right now the best answer is just to get wealthy by any means necessary, preferably by collecting rents and bringing nothing to the table (to work or develop new things would be redirecting energy that can be used to just collect rent and extort money out of the system: it's disadvantageous to make anything new or better when you can engineer the existing system to your benefit)
There is no way Gini inequality helps innovation at all. Innovation has to do with populations of actors that are all reasonably capable of addressing a problem, not seeking a single optimal individual who will do all your innovating for you. Our incentives are literally backwards.
I don't think there is any level where more equality does not lead to more innovation (any evidence to the contrary is welcome).
The thing with innovation and inequality is that some government programs that help (or claim to) the first can harm the second at the same time. But AFAIK, there is no absolute antagonism between them.
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/10-countries-with-most-in...
When I was younger the lyrics of "Common People" by Pulp [0] really resonated with me on this point - that day to day background worry of making ends meet plagues communities.
Obviously once you reach a certain level of comfort, you get diminishing returns (and even negative returns once the money owns you), but we still need to work on getting more people up to comfort.
I think it works because Shatner's spoken work technique really brings out the lyrics.
I imagine having that whole weight lifted... and then I read articles like this. Maybe we're all doomed. Call the Buddhists.
I don't see how any of these would not have been true earlier though.
Do you have any resources that you recommend?
Looking at research and listening to experts in this fields, it is really fascinating how anything can be made into a value system for social status. Not only that but we can participate simultaneously in multiple social circles with completely different value systems, and as one researcher put it, we tend to channel most of our self worth based on the system where we are ranked highest.
Strangely, money seems like one of the hardest method but also one of the most effective method to achieve this.