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Well, there are two things happening, and if you want sources, I can hunt them down later. 1) Wealth inequality is bad for social stability. People in general
by conception 8y ago
Well, there are two things happening, and if you want sources, I can hunt them down later.
1) Wealth inequality is bad for social stability. People in general care less about how much they have as compared to how much they have compared to everyone else. When you are dirt poor but so is your neighbor, you care less. The Internet has magnified this effect as now it's very easy to see when you are dirt poor that lots and lots of other people are not. And they are not great people a lot of the time. So, populations are generally happier when things are more equal.
2) Money can generally translate to power in our world and so it creates absurdly uneven power distributions. The US for instance suffers from politicians generally listening to money over the people that they serve, and those people generally are listening to whatever the people with money are putting in front of them, etc etc. Laws are meaningless if you can afford the fine. This is also bad for society.
3) Generally, accumulating tremendous wealth is done on the backs of people and not on bringing them up as well. There are exceptions of course, but usually tremendous wealth creation at the individual level is not done through a series of actions with an equal social benefit.
As to your other question, what should it look like? This of course is up to debate, but historically, when it starts to look as it does, people begin to get angry and violent. Which is bad for a stable society.
- stcredzero 8y ago3) Generally, accumulating tremendous wealth is done on the backs of people and not on bringing them up as well. There are exceptions of course, but usually tremendous wealth creation at the individual level is not done through a series of actions with an equal social benefit. Yes, wealth uplift of the general public must be a rare exception. This is why everyone are still peasants who have dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing, and no Internet. You are technically correct that there isn't exactly equal social benefit. However, many poor people in industrialized nations in 2019 are better off in many ways than some rich people from centuries ago. Go back just a little in time, and even rich people had high infant mortality and no access to antibiotics.
- restalis 8y ago1) "Wealth inequality is bad for social stability." That may be true only on a raw/natural level. People also have a lot of other traits that may naturally threaten the social stability. The solution was education, and enforcing social conventions and mechanisms that lead to improved social stability and society's operation capacity. Just as unacceptable is now discriminating against sex or race, can become prohibited also the discrimination (as merely having a different attitude) towards being rich or poor. 2) "Money can generally translate to power in our world and so it creates absurdly uneven power distributions." "Can" being he operative word here. We're talking about a possibility not a certainty. Each of us can be a potential criminal but we're not treating each others as such. We're innocent until proven otherwise. Money translating to power is just a phenomenon. Inherently it is neither good nor bad, it just is. Just as it may have bad results it can also have good ones. 3) "Generally, accumulating tremendous wealth is done on the backs of people and not on bringing them up as well." This is the basic assumption of Communist Doctrine and it was proven wrong. Wealth accumulation does not necessarily imply exploitation of others.
- sundaeofshock 8y agoIt may not be implied in all cases, but there are plenty of examples out there where great wealth is a direct result of exploiting labor: Nike, Apple (most hardware in fact), Amazon, Uber, etc…