The quote below is a slight modification of a post I made to a local political group's mailing list in response to another posting about class warfare. It also reflects a conversation I had yesterday with Gerald Huff, a senior technologist at Tesla Motors who is building a lot of smart cloud infrastructure.
We can get so bogged down in the importance of relative comparisons (which of course do matter) we can forget that there are some absolutes. For example, the best predictor of a country's government collapsing is infant mortality (free PDF, see page 650). (Incidentally, pre the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, the USA had the highest infant mortality of the industrialised word. I don't know if that's changed now that healthcare provision is wider?)
One of the best reasons I've heard put forward to care about income inequality even in the case that there is enough wealth distribution that everyone feels adequately cared for and able to engage in fulfilling activities, is just disproportionate power. If large numbers of people have no meaningful representation of their interests, then bad things are likely to happen to them, and this is likely to make things worse not only for them but for everyone.
I don't think concern about inequality is necessarily class warfare. Very rich people in technology companies for example can be very left (as are Buffet and Soros). There's a simple economic reason for that. If you are rich because you own resources like land or minerals, you want to keep hold of those things and you want stuff not to change, so you are conservative. But if you are rich because smart people build creative things for you, then you want good education, social mobility and open immigration, and you are liberal.
But even if you have reason to be conservative, you also have reason to want to make sure that there isn't too much income disparity. Don't forget that the 1% of the 1% (the .01%) have way more power than the other .99% of the 1%, and so on for the .001% and the .0001%. Hardly anyone benefits from a very few people having so much power they can alter the outcomes of elections. Also, few rich people would want to go back to medieval Europe (or many current countries in the world) where they couldn't go into cities without armed guards to fend off kidnappings.
Most Americans want most other Americans to at least have a fair chance. So while the situation we are in appears to benefit everyone rich, reining in the runaway economics of the situation could benefit everyone.I should say that I'm just starting to try to get my head around the economics of inequality, and technological "unemployment". In fact, currently I suspect that what we are really talking about is perceived underemployment, as people can't believe they shouldn't have better jobs given the educations and skills they hold. Which is to be expected, if only because we are getting better and better at finding ways to provide education for people, even if we weren't also finding technological ways to fill what used to be skilled jobs. But if everyone has nice things, good health care and a safe place to live, should they care about the prestige of their employment? Should we? Would anyone want to cause social disruption?
We can get so bogged down in the importance of relative comparisons (which of course do matter) we can forget that there are some absolutes. For example, the best predictor of a country's government collapsing is infant mortality (free PDF, see page 650). (Incidentally, pre the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, the USA had the highest infant mortality of the industrialised word. I don't know if that's changed now that healthcare provision is wider?)
One of the best reasons I've heard put forward to care about income inequality even in the case that there is enough wealth distribution that everyone feels adequately cared for and able to engage in fulfilling activities, is just disproportionate power. If large numbers of people have no meaningful representation of their interests, then bad things are likely to happen to them, and this is likely to make things worse not only for them but for everyone.
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