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The author seems to have the forgone conclusion that high concentration of wealth is bad but doesn't put any real effort into explaining why. It's going to make
by averagewall 9y ago
The author seems to have the forgone conclusion that high concentration of wealth is bad but doesn't put any real effort into explaining why. It's going to make people who agree it's bad feel supported and people who disagree feel frustrated at still not having an answer.
The best reason I've heard is that is leads to violence. People (specifically men) can't cope with knowing they can never succeed in the competitive race to be the richest so they turn to other ways to gain power - like intimidating and beating people. But that seems to be more the fault of those individuals not the people they're jealous of. Maybe we should educate kids to not feel jealous of rich people and that would solve the problem.
- polotics 9y agoWow, just wow. The biggest flaw is ignoring shared biology: the meanest virus/bacteria bred in the deepest helpless squalor of absolute 3rd+ world poverty can and will infect any 1st- world billionaire at the first opportunity. Add climate change and associated vector spread (west-nile, zika,...) and those opportunities multiply. Solidarity may be the optimal approach, even with a pure self-serving outlook.
- conanbatt 9y agoIf solidarity does give the best results, there isnt much to promote other than information. People will naturally act on their own behalf.
- Sacho 9y agoThe effect is the other way around; diseases like aids, malaria, polio were/are the scourges of the third world, because the poor do not have the means to treat them; the viruses/bacteria in the third world suffer low evolutionary pressure because the humans only fight back with their immune systems. In the first world, we grow super resistant bacteria due to evolutionary pressure from our modern medical treatment. It's the first world that we should fear from a "shared biology" standpoint.
- polotics 9y agoAre you sure? Once in Dehli asking for coLd medicines the pharmacy salesman made me a very cheap and very wrong mix of very few antibiotics tabs. Resistant TB is also 3rd-world originated, right? Hep-A in southern Cali is another poor man infects rich man story.
- rbanffy 9y agoOTOH, populations that develop imune systems that can deal with their diseases will host deadly stuff for those who rely on external defenses.
- averagewall 9y agoConcentration of wealth is bad because it can't protect the rich from disease? I don't understand your surprise or your point.
- polotics 9y agoConcentration to the point of extreme deprivation. It's not that it cannot protect, it's that it actually does harm.
- averagewall 9y agoI still don't understand. Who's being deprived? Poor people in slums breeding diseases? Super rich people not developing immunity? Worries about superbugs can't be the biggest reason people are opposed to high wealth concentration. What's special about the healthcare of billionaires compared to upper middle class Americans? They all use the same drugs, don't they?
- closeparen 9y agoHmm. Most people claiming to oppose inequality list globalization and immigration as top causes. This does not smell of concern for the well being of the 3rd world.
- mantas 9y agoWe did have that in feudalism. The world was much better off once that was over.
- gozur88 9y agoFeudalism was more about political power than concentration of wealth. The big problem was the peasants didn't get to vote, not that they didn't have money.
- mantas 9y agoMore like they didn't have political power, because they didn't have money and influence. I'd argue that peasants had more political power than wealth back then. Peasants uprisings were a thing. Rulers had to work with that by either crushing them or giving them a wee better treatment. Yet they didn't have any wealth. Once peasants got some wealth thanks to industrial revolution, they soon broke into wider political scene.
- rbanffy 9y agoPolitics is not separated from wealth. Just because the really wealthy don't get into office (why would they need that if politicians will gladly do their bidding?) doesn't mean they don't have power (that frequently exceeds legal bounds).
- dragonwriter 9y agoIn feudalism, there is no distinction between political power and wealth, as what we consider political position was a component of (mostly real) property rights.