Sorry to bore you. Its just, you know, we're living in the middle of history's largest income inequality[1]. Yes it is a problem for civil society and the rule of law when money and power get to elude justice and equal rights. People who unfairly abuse privilege are problematic, they are not 'the problem'. Not being held accountable is a privilege, and it is leads to highly anti-social behavior. It means laws exist only for lower classes. It means laws don't really exist, only power. Carry on, my beleaguered friend.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/aracheology-wealth-in...

I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. But it is besides the point. OP was making generalizations regarding people of "privilege." I respectfully disagree. I feel that you find dishonest people in all walks of life. More importantly, I think this type of prejudice and "demonizing the other" is quite damaging to our society. "Privileged" is such a vague, subjective basket to throw people in. Who's privileged? Anybody who has something (physical or abstract) you don't? Let's attack ideas not people.

There is actually some interesting research on this.

Paul Piff had some findings that rich people are more likely to break rules to get ahead for example (he has a nice Ted talk btw). However, more recent research found that this is largely/likely due to wealth but being "primed" to think about money, i.e. if you think about money your less likely to help other etc..

Here's a BBC article that summarises the research quite well https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31761576

I definitely concur there is a broad distribution of dishonest behavior and it can't be monopolized by a certain caste.

The practical issue I'm concerned with is around the ability of a minority of people to afford 6-8 figure legal and PR bills and avoid accountability for all manner of issues. When you can tie up courts for years to play financial triage and get the best reputation money can buy, you aren't likely to be held accountable.

I know a person who drove their car into a wall while drunk and high in college. Their parents paid $5000 to an attorney and their DUI charge was eventually dropped. Another friend's life took a different course when they got their DUI under similar circumstances but without an attorney, and despite their earnest efforts it's been hard to overcome within the job market.

I'm arguing that the defacto disparity of legal budgets is quite damaging to the fabric that holds our society together, which is equal treatment under blind justice. It means an equal distribution of dishonesty is punished disproportionately according to familial wealth.

I think you'll find this definition of privilege quite in line with OP's meaning: https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Priviledge >A particular benefit, advantage, or Immunity enjoyed by a person or class of people that is not shared with others. A power of exemption against or beyond the law. It is not a right but, rather, exempts one from the performance of a duty, obligation, or liability.

I encourage people to read "The Life of Greece" by Will Durant. It resonates with our times.

They also had wealth inequality. Sometimes, it resulted in the poor and wealthy fighting. This fighting was often very brutal with each side putting the other to death. Once in awhile, an enlightened leader would come who would put into place a system for greater prosperity for all.

The suggestion that modern society has greater inequality than we had under feudalism is certainly the most laughably ridiculous thing I’ve heard today.

First, let me say I do think I interpreted that article's data incorrectly as the US at .81 Gini coeficient, when in reality its probably closer to ~.45. Medieval Europe was closer to 40, but definitely not the magnitude I took from my initial source.

There are several ways to look at inequality. The most simplistic way to so do is looking at relative wealthy by decile and comparing the ratio between the top and bottom. In feudal society, everybody was relatively poor, and the wealth gap may be on the order of 10-100X. In modern times, that ratio may be far larger and under a certain definition that would be mean higher inequality. I'll concede that this approach fails to capture the practical experience of the haves and have-nots over time, and having our's hit all-time highs isn't immoral if there is some baseline of sufficiency at the bottom. It also doesn't account for social mobility, which we exceptional at.

Still, we live in a novel time where orders of magnitude of wealth that haven't existed before. It is hard to fathom, and calls into question what is and isn't a de-facto privilege of enjoying.

I found this article which offers some more nuanced approaches to measuring inequality in different societies than Gini. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5388/1/MPRA_paper_5388.pdf

Not commenting on the rest, just wanted to say something about you claim that "our" (I assume you mean US) mobilty is exceptional. That is an often repeated myth, and in fact part of the US "folklore" ("rags to riches").

However this is not based on reality, the US ranks behind most European countries and canada on social mobility: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...

Interesting, thanks for sharing. You're right about the folklore, and while there are some strong outliers that have done quite well in the US, but those would be hard to attribute to anything special about US education and support systems.

Although the ranking is named "social mobility" it isn't clear that that is what is measured; the report seems slightly confused.

The visual capitalist provides a definition of social mobility - children having a better life than their parents or being unconstrained by their socio-economic status. But the index they reference doesn't measure that. It measures more general Quality of Life metrics like prevalence of malnourishment or quality of the social safety net.

So while a high score reflects an easier life for the low end of the social ladder it doesn't actually measure their ability to move up it. I could on paper come up with a country that scored quite well on most of the index measures and had a rigid caste system where children could never outperform their parents and cannot escape their birth status.

at least in feudal times the peasants knew they didnt have a say in the matter

Our society should stop feeding children lies about systemic inclusivity.

Your additional suggestion that corruption in modern democracies is somehow comparable to the representation afforded to feudal peasants is only very slightly less laughably ridiculous than the parent comment about economic inequality.

I didn’t say anything about corruption, didn’t imply anything about corruption, and I am now clarifying that I am not referring to anything about corruption.

Children are fed lies about their role in this society and spend a lifetime acting surprised that their ideas never happen. We could also just stop doing that. Its not corrupt that we don't have a direct democracy, we just dont have a direct democracy. And the system we do have has different rules, which simply don't include the capability of “the proletariat” to have the same effect as immortal organizations with enough resources to maintain focus.

I didn’t say that. I was simply pointing out an exception: Poor people doesn’t know how to game the system and always follow the rule; while privileged do the opposite.

Even if rich people only abuse their power at the same frequency as poor people, the fact is that rich people have more power to abuse.

Studies show the rich are more like to be dishonest - it’s literally been studied and proven lol

It would be more convincing if you cited some of those studies

There is a lot of research from Paul Piff that you can Google. However, more recent research is a bit more nuanced and found that it has likely to do with a focus on money, a bit further up the thread I linked to a BBC article which gives a good overview.