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I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. I see this im

• edko 10y ago
  Rather than start a dialectic, let's consider concrete examples: is there any society with a large income inequality that also has a world-class standard of living for all of its members?
  • dsacco 10y ago
    Yes: the United States. EDIT: This answer probably comes across as cavalier and perhaps dismissive without some sort of effort to substantiate my claim, so I'll edit this in: The United States ranks sixth in the world for median cost-adjusted household income. It ranks highly, along with many European countries, for overall quality of life, according to the Quality of Life Index (2016) - countries like Switzerland and Germany are higher, while countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan are lower. Quality of life can be a vague and murky measurement, but pretty much every index attempting to measure it presents the same set of countries topping the list. The US is not perfect, and I'll accept arguments that it would be better off with less income inequality, but I'd like to see evidence that this is the case.
    • edko 10y ago
      Every year, 3.5 million people in the US experience homelessness.
      • dsacco 10y ago
        I assume you're getting your data from here[1]. I'd counter by asking which modern society does not have homeless citizens. Particularly, which countries that rank more highly than the US in the Quality of Life or Human Development Indices? The other challenge I have is that homeless in America enjoy a quality of life patently superior to that present in nearly every class virtually everywhere else in the world. Sure, homeless in the US are not as well off as the middle class in Switzerland, but they're certainly better off than the median individual in India, Peru, Pakistan, Syria or Zambia (to name a few from what would be a long and saddening list). The resources consumed by, and available to, homeless citizens of the US make them look like citizens of Elysium in comparison to those nations. To flesh out one example - the bottom 5% of Americans are about as wealthy as the top 5% of Indians.[2] [1]: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/How_Many.html http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/How_Many.html [2]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have-nots/?_r=0 http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...
        • edko 10y ago
          Well, if being homeless in the US is such a privilege, then I must concede that income inequality must not be such a bad thing after all.
  • xhdjdjjxjs 10y ago
    Yes, all of them.
• acidburnNSA 10y ago
  Good point; "a rising tide lifts all boats". If that were true, then yeah, it'd just be a psychological question of how OK people will be with seeing a rising class of professionals get accelerated wealth while they just rise in quality of life at a 'normal' rate. And how big is the professional class compared to the others? At what point is there social instability? Where's the breaking point, if anywhere? I don't think anyone really has any idea of the answer, so considering a few historical data points, it's just judicious to be concerned about it. Also, does the rising tide lift all boats? Working class wages remain pretty stagnant, and dissatisfaction in the USA is growing, at least when viewed through the election cycle. Any sociologists out there? What does the literature say on societal effects of income inequality?
  • Ericson2314 10y ago
    In high school I was taught that it correlated with mental illness.
• HillRat 10y ago
  >I'd like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself. One main issue is that income inequality decreases socioeconomic mobility by inflating the cost of scarce goods that improve earnings capabilities. So 4K TVs are cheaper but college tuition becomes unaffordable, because good universities and grad programs are valuable, scarce goods that the wealthy can outbid everyone else on. Policies that aggressively expand capacity and defray costs, such as post-WW2 expansions of universities and the GI bill, can ameliorate this by shifting monies down the socioeconomic ladder via taxation, but high levels of inequality also lead to a powerful political interest group that generally seeks to reduce tax rates that affect them. There's also the more general economic argument that high levels of inequality are economically inefficient since they result in a lower average marginal propensity to consume, but that's not so much "bad" as "could be better and provide greater macro stability."
  • morgante 10y ago
    > So 4K TVs are cheaper but college tuition becomes unaffordable, because good universities and grad programs are valuable, scarce goods that the wealthy can outbid everyone else on. Except that such goods are increasingly not priced via the market. If you're smart enough to get into an elite university, you don't have to worry about the cost. Full stop. That being said, I do think we have a societal responsibility to set things up so that this applies across the board. Personally, I think income inequality is fine and maybe even good if we can also have: 1) Basic income, so that even if your parents aren't wealthy you still have all the necessities. 2) Well-funded and high quality public education (from pre-K up through college) Personally, I actually think income inequality can make these things easier to achieve for 2 reasons: 1. Each individual dollar matters a lot less to billionaires, so they're a lot more willing to give away a huge percentage of their wealth. This trend is very evident with tech billionaires. If Warren Buffet had his wealth spread amongst millions of families, would each one be willing to give up 90% of that wealth? 2. The winnowing of the middle makes redistribution more palatable. A large part of current politics is moderately well-off people feeling morally superior to slightly less well-off people. If society becomes more bimodal, it's a lot more possible to pass aggressive redistribution policies.
• orblivion 10y ago
  I generally agree with you, and often ask the same question. But I do have one possible answer, which is that inequality of economic power leads to inequality of political power. Perhaps it's not so relevant between lower and middle classes, but sufficiently rich people can buy political favors.
• pcl 10y ago
  "Overall quality of life" can mean a lot of different things, depending on how you measure. Do you mean the arithmetic mean, the median, the quality of life of all members of the population, or something else? And while we're at it, it's worth considering how the population is defined -- all Americans? All westerners? All humans? I've found that the appropriate answers tend to differ considerably depending on these definitions, and there is nowhere near a consensus for which is the right one to strive for.
• raquo 10y ago
  With rising income inequality the difference between the average Joe and the 1% Joe is growing larger and larger. This seems increasingly unfair to more and more people. Eventually all those disillusioned poor people will act on this by bringing to power some radicals who will bulldoze the current system much like the Bolsheviks bulldozed the Russian empire. If you need evidence that income inequality is itself a bad thing, ask anyone who happens to be on the poverty side of the inequality. There's much, much more of such people than rich people. All these poor people hold a lot of latent power.
  • maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Haven't we heard this same spiel for the last 150 years? The revolution is always one week away and this is a time-invariant statement.
    • raquo 10y ago
      Haven't we had revolutions in the last 150 years? Not in the US, but other countries had a few. But that's not the point. You don't need an armed uprising when you have elections. You need populism. Trump / Brexit / far right parties are not "revolution".
      • maverick_iceman 10y ago
        > Haven't we had revolutions in the last 150 years? Not in the US, but other countries had a few. Yes, and it worked out so wonderfully for them. :)
        • sanderjd 10y ago
          And that's the point! Armed revolution is really bad, and massive inequality is one piece in a puzzle that can lead to it. It seems really odd to me to shrug this off as at least part of the answer to the original question of why inequality is bad. We have been more or less immune to this in the US for a long time because of our large and strong middle class that has had way too much to lose. But that's the same middle class that the elites are eroding by short-sightedly capturing an ever larger portion of the modern economy's output.
• tomdell 10y ago
  There are quite a few places where you can look into whether or not you think an increase in income inequality is a bad thing or not. Feel free to start here - https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/impacts https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/impacts - or here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects
• Trundle 10y ago
  I'll bite although this isn't the most researched of my opinions that's for sure. Humans happiness isn't concerned with absolute standard of living but more comparative standard of living. I don't mean just conscious comparison in a competitive manner, I mean in setting what counts as normal to our brains. Consider the standard of living we've obtained compared to what humans had for the vast majority of our 200 000 years. Regular hot meals, basic medicine, and being able to fall asleep without fear of waking up to tigers ripping you and your family apart should have resulted in us all walking around in pure bliss 24/7 if advancement in standard of living was all that was important in absolute terms. But we're not. Some of us are happy. Some not. Some so unhappy that we straight up kill ourselves. Neither do I think past generations of humans, or any other animal that hasn't achieved our current standard of living yet, are all walking around in misery. Instead we care about comparative measures. How am I doing compared to how I was doing before. How am I doing compared to my peers. How am I compared to the guy down the street. How am I doing compared to all of those people I see on the internet/tv. Again, although phrased as if it's a conscious mental decision here, it's about subconsciously setting a 'normal' that's greater than we have. Think of the whole facebook making people feel inferior thing because they only see their friends highlights reel making life seem like it should be one long maldives vacation, except with inequality it's not an illusion and you actually are being exposed to better lifestyles. So inequality isn't fundamentally detrimental, however exposure to it is. At its most extreme it shows you fantastical lifestyles you could never realistically imagine to live. More realistically it's your neighbour buying a nicer car than you have. Either way it takes the great thing you have going and puts it in to a context within which it can't compete.
  • stale2002 10y ago
    No matter how much money you have, you can't buy a better coke. Income inequality is a misleading metric. I would argue that equality has vastly increased over the years. The rich don't really live much better lives than the middle class. Rich or poor we all have roofs over our heads, we all have access to relatively affordable methods of travel to get anywhere in the world in a day, we all use the same IPhones, watch the same movies and drink the same Cokes. The things that the rich have access to aren't really that much better when you compare it to the old days when you contrast Kings living in Castles to the 90 percent who are just worrying about their next meal. The world has never been more equal.
• wvenable 10y ago
  Overall quality of life is improving but if you look at the shrinking success of middle class, I believe the reason is income inequality. The economy is health when money is changing hands and more and more money is in fact locked up and not providing any economic activity. This is way the so-called economic recovery hasn't really been felt on the ground. We have a literal handful of people with more wealth the entire rest of the country. And the real sad part, is that wealth is just a number in a computer somewhere. It doesn't contribute much. Those who have that wealth can't spend enough of it to make a significant economic difference. That inequality could be taxed and provide, for example, infrastructure which is a benefit itself but also provide jobs and generate a cascade of economic activity, like consumer spending, that simply isn't happening now.
• ucarion 10y ago
  It seems doubtful that income inequality is inherently bad, but perhaps it's strongly correlated with things that are inherently bad (i.e. suffering, if you ask me). Consider a society A, and then society A+ which is identical except the most well-off person is twice as well-off. It's hard to see how A+ could be worse than A in any way. Maybe there's an even better A++ where A+ has some redistribution, but that's another argument. We don't mind inequality within lives (nobody says it's inherently bad to have most of your happiness distributed toward the later half of your life), so we'd need an argument why inequality across lives is bad.
• mbrock 10y ago
  Aside from the huge problems correlated with income inequality for which evidence and reasoning are readily available if you look, there's a basic problem with the idea that something like inequality could be a net good despite what people tend to think... it's that because the majority of people, who are on the losing side of inequality, despise inequality and that is already leading to huge political ruptures, populism, depression, demoralizing feelings of injustice, etc etc etc. (There are related basic problems with focusing only on "metrics".)
• Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Income inequality in itself isn't bad. I can argue that a certain amount of it is desirable even. The problem is more the difference in quality of life and opportunity. This is a problem even if the base quality of life is generally improving. If the folks at the bottom are continually stressed about money, if they have shelter, food, power, etc, it is bad. If the folks at the bottom cannot get access to the things that basic society thinks they should have - internet, cell phone, transportation and decent clothing, it is bad. If one simply cannot afford education, regardless of intelligence, because of simple money or knowing they'd not be able to ever pay off the loan with a teacher's salary, it is pretty bad. And those are the things that really matter - if one can have a comfortable (though sparse) life at the bottom, and if one can actually work or try to improve their situation. Unfortunately in the US, a lot of folks are bound by circumstance. Their circumstances - such as bad health, whether or not they have children, not making enough to afford transportation, or even their parents' circumstance - determines their opportunity. Yet if they don't have the opportunity, or circumstances tend to be unlucky for years, they might never climb out. They are stuck at a miserable bottom. And it seems that countries that have transcended this also tend to have less income inequality. And the bottom isn't nearly as horrible as it is in the US - and you still have some opportunity. It can likely be solved without reducing the inequality, but I'm not sure exactly How do do this.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > If the folks at the bottom are continually stressed about money I'd say this is the key. It doesn't matter whether your bare-minimum cheapest apartment is an old wooden shed or a pretty newly constructed flat with heated floors, two bedrooms and a lifetime free subscription of Netflix. It doesn't change a damn thing if you're two paychecks from getting evicted and going hungry, raising your children on the streets. More and more jobs are turning transient, transitional, on-demand. This may be more efficient, but this hit the poorer hard, because there is no way in hell you can do any financial planning for yourself if you don't know when and how much money you bring home, or if you'll have any job at all next week. This is one of the bigger things that keeps poor in poverty.
• eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. Rising inequality generally hasn't improved quality-of-life for everyone.
  • sokoloff 10y ago
    Of course it harms the person at the very bottom of the stack. But, would you rather live as a 10th percentile American today, a 50th percentile serf in feudal England, a 50th percentile American colonist, or even a 50th percentile American in the 1950s? It's only the very last that's even close, IMO.
    • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      I think that in order to answer that question, you have to know how steeply well-being falls with reduced income. The poorest and least egalitarian counties in the United States today, for instance, tend to have life-expectancies below those of many Third World countries. Overly severe inequality really seems to make it so there's no bottom to the barrel to hit!