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Why is it unsustainable? Why must inequality be forever?

• AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  No physical system is uniformly distributed, and dynamical systems ensure that it will stay that way, therefore enough differences are baked into the system that it's effectively impossible have equally functional systems everywhere. Some people can just lift more stuff than others, or think about numbers faster or whatever happens to need to be done and their labor is more valuable because it's more efficient. Therefore inequality.
  • sqeaky 10y ago
    Clearly their ability to lift is not why there are millions without clean drinking water, for example. You are right that there are difference built-in to humanity, but we have already overcome those with fairly common technology already. Now inequality is more about who your parents were instead of where you are born or other purely physical problems. We can ship drinking water to anyplace on the planet. We just aren't incentivized to do so. The person leading a team building the roads that will support that effort could be a wheelchair bound parapalegic. Our systems don't need to be perfect they just need to be better than they are now.
    • grzm 10y ago
      Our systems don't need to be perfect they just need to be better than they are now. You make a great point here, and one I hope you continue to push for. Statements like Why must inequality be forever? will obscure this point as it doesn't include the nuance of "not perfect, just better". You will always find people who will argue that "Why must inequality be forever" is naïve at best, needlessly preventing you from finding solutions you might agree on.
  • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    That doesn't really account for the degree of inequality. Innate differences between human beings are the same in Sweden as they are in the USA, and yet Sweden has the lowest degree of inequality in the world (approximately), while the USA's numbers get listed alongside African dictatorships. The Swedes have just chosen to regularize away factors like family wealth or differences between school districts which create inequality but don't contribute to society positively in exchange. Americans are treating that statistical noise as meaningful information about "who deserves what" and conditioning on it. The result is that Americans are just broadly doing worse, because our social system is irrational.
• module0000 10y ago
  Because of war. Basic income will be first on the chopping block.
• maolt 10y ago
  Suppose you give everybody the same universal revenue (let us postulate everybody has the same rights). The issue at stake, is that unless you also engineer them to be similar in every aspect (looks, intelligence, physical capability), there will be differences, and those differences will enable a new hierarchy, with people who have more, and others who have less, thus recreating a unequal base situation. You don't get to solve the problem by making every human's base situation identical, you solve it by making the inequality device and the means to use it available to everybody.