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Perhaps the explanation is much simpler. 1) The way new wealth is generated in America tends to produce income inequality - at least in the short term. 2) Wea

Perhaps the explanation is much simpler. 1) The way new wealth is generated in America tends to produce income inequality - at least in the short term. 2) Wealthy people have their lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs met and are more likely to focus on things like esteem and self-actualization than are people who need to worry about putting food on the table. So wealthily people will tend to be more liberal. Therefore wealthy cities tend to have both income inequality and skew liberal, but the causes are unrelated.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
"Wealthy" isn't a coherent adjective. People who move up the corporate food chain are not the smart people, it's the people who adapt to the expected mood affiliation of their industry, develop the expected after-hours activities and buy the right clothing. Entrepreneurs, bluntly, get lucky. No, income inequality has much more to do with financialization, and I've so far traced the roots of that back to the Potsdam Conference, at least for the US. And first the US, then the world. It's fairly unscientific, but because I have access to a person with a specialty in population dynamics, my theory about "why inequality" is that previous efforts to curb older, milder forms of inequality usually backfire. Current wealth inequality results from gamifying efforts to "fix" inequality. It "feels" to me like the Pareto distribution just is, and all attempts to improve on it are in vain.
- sharemywin 10y ago
  current inequality is about globalization and the internet. Most income at the top of the pyramid is a function of the resources you manage/own(assuming things like too big to fail are anomalies) You get to keep a portion of what you make and/or manage. As the organizations get larger the higher the number of layers. The internet has even exacerbated the problem because now "customer/users" can self service and need even few people in the pyramid.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

"Wealthy" isn't a coherent adjective. People who move up the corporate food chain are not the smart people, it's the people who adapt to the expected mood affiliation of their industry, develop the expected after-hours activities and buy the right clothing. Entrepreneurs, bluntly, get lucky. No, income inequality has much more to do with financialization, and I've so far traced the roots of that back to the Potsdam Conference, at least for the US. And first the US, then the world. It's fairly unscientific, but because I have access to a person with a specialty in population dynamics, my theory about "why inequality" is that previous efforts to curb older, milder forms of inequality usually backfire. Current wealth inequality results from gamifying efforts to "fix" inequality. It "feels" to me like the Pareto distribution just is, and all attempts to improve on it are in vain.

sharemywin 10y ago
current inequality is about globalization and the internet. Most income at the top of the pyramid is a function of the resources you manage/own(assuming things like too big to fail are anomalies) You get to keep a portion of what you make and/or manage. As the organizations get larger the higher the number of layers. The internet has even exacerbated the problem because now "customer/users" can self service and need even few people in the pyramid.