A good location means more opportunities. Someone located in the center of a large expensive city will have a lot more opportunities to make money and meet people who have influence than someone in Elmo. A business set up in Elmo will not make as much money as a business set up in Monaco. This means that the best opportunities are reserved for people who need them the least.
This is very close to saying you wouldn't be against slavery. A slave could be given a decent quality of life. Does that mean slavery is acceptable? A person with 50 bazillion will be able to make you a slave if he wants to.
Slaves are free to think that slavery isn't acceptable. Always have been.
Oh, sure, you aren't a slave. You can't be bought and sold like property. But try going a few months without a paycheck and tell me how that goes. And if you happened to get lucky at some point and escaped wage slavery - you have to be cognizant of the fact that most didn't, and never will, by design.
Modern wage slavery vs whatever they had in Mesopotamia is just details of the perks that the owners decide to hand out.
A cancer doesn't kill you as soon as the first cancerous cell division happens. It takes time for the processes of markets to develop into something that threatens our existence.
While that's true, there's still enough "fixed pies" that inceasing inequality does make people worse off. Land, attention, positions of power, etc. will all be taken by the wealthy, because only they can afford those things in an environment of high wealth inequality.
Partly this is a huge problem. But partly it's intentional.
It's a huge problem for the obvious reasons. Nobody wants a country where only the rich people have a say, or have influence, or wield political power, or own all the land. Because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the rich then bend the rules to favor themselves. For example, I personally think it's ridiculous that we need a lower capital gains income tax rate to "spur investment." Investment was just fine back when capital gains rates were the same as normal income tax rates, and I see this as a way for the rich to just benefit themselves.
That said, a system where the wealthy benefit is partly intentional. The whole idea of incentivizing people to earn wealth is that the wealth should be useful. It only works if it's useful. If extra wealth doesn't allow one to buy more land, or exert more power, or gain more attention, or live more comfortably, then it's pointless and does not serve its purposes as an incentive. This is literally the entire point of it. The issue is not that it happened, it's the degree to which it happens.
My fear with #1 is that the degree of difference will be too much. This is absolutely something to keep in check. It's a tough problem to solve. But on the flip side, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Any political or financial system that we have is going to have some inefficiencies and some disadvantages.
My fear with #2 is that people have lost the plot, and believe so firmly in "equality of outcomes" that they can't stomach any amount of inequality. Some inequality is okay! We're never going to have a completely equal world, and that's okay. I had a happy, safe, abundant middle-class upbringing, and it didn't bother me one bit that Bill Gates is a billionaire.
I think the problem with allowing even a moderate amount of inequality is that over time it'll always lead to large inequality, because after a certain level of comfort the only interesting thing you can do with with wealth is to attempt gain more power and influence, and are even forced to do it because if you don't someone else will. It's like the markets' tendency to consolidate. For example at the beginning we had "low inequlity" media where we had a lot of regional newspapers, but in a competitive system eventually the winners take it all, and now we have only a few large players left. Moderate inequality will be used to increase the inequality, because the people who don't do it will lose to the people who do.
I believe the only way forward that won't always lead to large scale war and destruction is to come up with a system that does not allow any amount of concentrated power. That means as close to zero wealth inequality as we can get while keeping a functioning economy. But for that we'd first need better ways to make decisions collectively, as political power can't have any centralization either.
I don't know if I buy this. The most wealth equality humanity has ever had was probably in the pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer era. It was also undoubtedly one of the more violent times in human history, with homicide rates that dwarfed those of today, and many deaths in war as well.
Also, most industries aren't winner-take-all. There is constant disruption, new entrants, etc. Very few huge companies last 100 or even 50 yers. And the vast majority of all companies are small. We have more artists than ever, more entrepreneurs than ever. Media has fragmented more today than ever before.
But my biggest concern with thought experiments like this is with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Poverty is decreasing at a rapid rate, quality of life is improving, widespread famine has been largely eliminated, major warfare has maintained historic lows for 70+ years, technology is rapidly bringing education + communication + entertainment + transportation + medicine to more people than ever at cheaper prices than ever. We've essentially solved most of humanity's biggest problems with our current systems. Why press "reset" on all of that, just to eliminate a much smaller problem (some rich people having more than the rest of us)?
The capital class chooses and presents the people you can vote for. They decide what issues are talked about in the media, they decide who gets the most funding, and they probably have ways of getting rid of or corrupt the people who somehow get popular without first being accepted by at least some people from the capital class.
Is criticizing dictatorships just envy? Because wealth inequality is the same thing as power inequality. Wealth doesn't just mean more goods to consume, it means power, and that power is mostly used to gain even more wealth and power. Eventually we'll have power concentration similar to a real dictatorship. Opposing such a future is not envy.
Despite what the free market religion has been telling for decades, we actually don't live in little parallel universes that don't affect each other. Even putting yoghurt on pizza has on effect on the world, not just the individual doing it. Not understanding this is what'll be the end of humanity. AI girl/boyfriends will have a huge effect on society, we should think hard before doing things like that. Slightly slower technological progress is not as disastrous as fast progress gone wrong.
Natural selection will fix this in no time, as the genes and cultures that lead to people not making kids die off. Widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion is recent enough that we just haven't had the time to adapt yet. The desire to have sex has been enough to keep birth rate high for most of human history. Now evolution is strongly selecting for cultures and genes that lead to more kids even in the presence of birth control. In a few of generations we'll start seeing birth rates recover.
I am not sure will all culture remain immune to the "curse" of modern comfortable lives that lead to low birthrates. This remains unproven.
And based on current trend it seems that it's the most religious group ( Islamists, Orthodox Jews) who props up the birthrates. But they are also economically most unproductive and most anti-science ones, so I really unsure where this will lead us.
The trend is universal because birth control is becoming universal. The only places that still have high birth rates are places where birth control isn't easily available (and religious cultures). It could be driven by other factors as well, but I'm betting it's mostly just birth control. We don't have a very strong innate desire to have kids, it is the desire for sex that human reproduction has mostly relied on. We're only a couple of generations into birth control, so we're only now starting to feel the effect.
I think you’d lose that bet. Women die in childbirth regularly. And it’s not birth control but our stratospheric advances against infant mortality that most strongly influence population dynamics.
No they don't. The common man voted for Trump in 2016 when all the billionaires and big money were behind HRC. The "billionaire owned" media has had a terminal case of Trump derangement syndrome for the last 10 years. If anybody listened to their hysterics anymore Trump would have lost in a landslide. We aren't secretly run by billionaires. That's a brain dead conspiracy theory.
Average standard of living can rise even if it decreases for 99.9% of people. Median standard of living is what you want to increase, and increasing wealth inequality does not help with that.
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