This isn't to say there are no problems with income inequality, or that there shouldn't be proper safety nets or taxation, just that income inequality doesn't seem to be an evil in my judgement. Some people are just going to end up more successful than others for whatever reasons, and as long as it's done within the law, I don't see the inherent problem with it. I do see a big problem with trying to make economic outcomes equal, and I don't think it works.
The lower bound of inequality means you go hungry/thirsty or become homeless. If the lower bound meant you just lost a cool opportunity (but could go chill until the next one), then I think most of us would be okay with that.
See this chart: piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F0.I.1.pdf This is the income inequality in the USA in the 20th century. The slump in inequality coincides with the post-war "golden era of capitalism". On the other hand, its return to gilded age levels heralded the decline of the working class, overfinancialisation, and eventually the catastrophe of 2008.
>All attempts for a perfectly equal economy, that I'm aware of, have ended in disaster. Sometimes horrifically.
There can never by any such thing as a "perfectly equal" economy, so it's useless talking abou it. But we can see that most of the best countries in the world to live in (economically) have comparatively low levels of income inequality.
If all you have to share is “I guess the status quo is as good as I’m willing to allow”, just say that instead of trying to browbeat those of us who have the ability to believe a better world is possible.
If all you can do is dress your FUD up as shrewd analysis, at least recognize that you aren’t actually sharing anything new and are just defending the status quo. I’m sick of this kind of dishonesty and, frankly, fear mongering in defense of a machine that operates on greed and suffering by design.
How many times do we have to try it before deciding it doesn't work? If you have a good idea, feel free to describe it, and explain how it would not suffer the same failures all past attempts have. I can't see how it would work, and if you're convinced it can, show your working.
I don't defend the status quo either. I said SOME level of inequality. I personally think that inequality has gotten out of hand in the last few decades - the gap between the rich and poor has become absurd. Scandinavian nations and others have shown that a nation with less income inequality than UK/US is possible and may be desirable - though there are definite limits to how comparable Scandi countries are to countries like UK/US.
Broadly equal societies may be possible at extremely small scales when in a state of abundance. Once you go past the limit where everyone knows and trusts each other, things seem to rapidly fall apart without hierarchy and inequality.
On the other hand, optimizing for a better balance than we have currently is possible. We had much lower levels of income disparity in the middle of the 20th century and we could certainly aim to restore those levels.
However, that would be difficult in our globalized economy of the past 40 years. This is the part of neo-liberalism that is causing the most problems for the non-elite. Globalization is leveling the field for the non-elite of the world, American wages are stagnant or dropping by real value, while wages are rising in east and southeast Asia(for example). The global elites are winning no matter what. The only way to change this is to restrict globalization and international corporations, just changing US laws to tax the rich more or break up us companies won't change much as global elite will give up their citizenship and international companies will detach from their us divisions. You will need a global effort at this point to affect any change to the system, and even then you will have serious problems. And that is only for minor changes to the system. The fact that we have interconnected most of the world in the way that we have means that any disruptions to the system are global and everyone suffers.
Two responses to this:
1) Please don’t communicate in absolutes (always, never, etc); you’re speaking for yourself only and I don’t share your limited imagination. Attempts to set arbitrary axioms like this is a dialog-shutdown tactic and I don’t share your perspective.
2) Perhaps you’ve intuited this, but you didn’t respond to my actual argument (that the GP is arguing in favor of the status quo); so instead you have to invent a straw man where I’m an idealist with his head in the clouds, so that you can have something you’re qualified to respond to. Congratulations!
> On the other hand, optimizing for a better balance than we have currently is possible.
Why say this if you’re going to spend the rest of your post talking about how any change to adjust the status quo will be undermined by “global elites” (your phrase, not mine)? I’m not sure you’re actually interested in this beyond a rhetorical feint.
You’re making the same argument as GP, know you have nothing new to share, yet still insist on browbeating anyone who points out the system isn’t producing good outcomes.
> The fact that we have interconnected most of the world in the way that we have means that any disruptions to the system are global and everyone suffers.
How convenient! Spoken like an ant, excited to watch the grasshopper starve.
I guess the tens of thousands of years from when humans were painting on caves to the first manifestation of a class society 10000 years ago was a horrific disaster.
But I'm not sure you can really compare cavemen to the past 6000 or so years of attempting society at scale.
For one there's fairly limited understanding of what those societies were really like. Discussions about how they were attempting to architect their economy are likely to run into walls pretty quickly. Do we have anything to suggest they were perfectly equal?
Secondly, I think the constraints are much different when you're talking a few family groups mostly eating and hunting, where everyone knew and personally cared for each other, rather than 8 billion people in a highly developed and interconnected global economy.
I suspect a lot of societal features and economy in general is just due to the need to scale out trust. Many things are easier when you have almost perfect knowledge of everything that's going on in your tiny group, but the larger that group gets the more you need to invent abstractions like money.
The closest things that exist to those societies now is probably families or partnerships, which can operate on a broadly equal basis - though even they often don't.
I was always under the understanding that inequality was horrific 'tens of thousands of years from when humans were painting on caves'. If I was not producing enough for the tribe or group I would be left behind or worse. The strong ones had the most food, women, and best spot in the 'cave' i.e. inequality.
There were no known tribes over ten thousand years ago, there were bands. In your perception, children abandoned their parents to death when they aged, which is not behavior anthropologists observed in modern hunter gatherer bands. Also, anthropologists observer modern hunter gatherer bands eating gathered berries and the hunt in communal meals. You do not have one man with multiple wives/concubines/mistresses in the manner of the class societies following this - although often all the fertile men and women who are not close relations are sleeping with one another. Your picture of pre-class society does not jibe with archeological finds of old societies or anthropological observations of modern ones.
I would also point out that the dichotomy you talk about: neoliberalism vs equal economy is false . Modern Social democracies don't optimize for perfect equality, they try to strike a balance between market forces and humane values. They reject the neoliberal idea that perfect markets are morally correct.
You'll note that I never even actually argued for neoliberalism. I think social democracies are far better than unfettered neoliberal capitalism.
However, I think the way that people answered those questions is completely compatible with social democracy too. They never asked do you want inequality and perfect markets above all else. Modern social democracy is much closer to neoliberalism than it is to communism or even 70s style socialism.
One way or interpreting these poll results is that living under a neoliberal world order has increased support for inequality because people are, on the whole, happy with how it changed their lives. Sure, some rich people are absurdly, unfairly rich, but in many ways the average person's life drastically improved from the 70s to now at far quicker rate than ever before in history.
Perhaps many people accept that increased inequality is a fair price to pay for the way they feel life has improved?
Certainly speaking for myself, I don't particularly care that Elon Musk is so rich that he could buy every superyacht in the world, provided that I have all my basic needs met and the economic resources to try and achieve what makes me happy. I'm not jealous of the wealth of others. Looking at what happened to my family under the economic policies of the 70s in the UK, I am pretty glad to have grown up in the 90s.
I'm aware that not everyone is as lucky as me to have all their basic needs met. I think that's a great shame and as far as inequality goes, I think it's fine if someone is 100000x as wealthy as someone else PROVIDED THAT person on the bottom has a house, food, heating, healthcare etc. which certainly is not the case right now.
Ultimately, I'd prefer to be the poorest well fed person in Britain rather than starving in the same boat with everyone else.
I suspect few people want inequality directly, but it's a means to an end.
Looking throughout history, extreme inequality, while unfair for most people, still achieves some useful progress. All attempts for a perfectly equal economy, that I'm aware of, have ended in disaster. Sometimes horrifically.
For that reason, I think it's fair to see some level of income inequality as a necessary evil until someone can convincingly demonstrate otherwise.