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Is Inequality Inevitable? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

Is Inequality Inevitable? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine... >Wealth inequality is escalating in many countries at an alarming rate, with the U.S. arguably having the highest inequality in the developed world. >A remarkably simple model of wealth distribution developed by physicists and mathematicians can reproduce inequality in a range of countries with unprecedented accuracy. >Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets, including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality. An interesting article that argues that wealth inequality is inevitable in a free market system which does not have non-market measures that counteract the tendency to oligarchy.

seibelj 7y ago
There is no moral issue with inequality. The moral issue is with equality. There will always be people who are willing to work twice as hard as someone else, and there are always people who if given the choice will not work at all, even if able bodied. Therefore forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard. It doesn’t take a computer simulation to show how free people wind up with different degrees of success. I want us to have more equality of opportunity but enforcing equality of outcomes with violence (government enforced equality, where violators are imprisoned) is a terrible evil.
- javajosh 7y ago
  I never did like this kind of binary thinking. What if people could work twice as hard, but after acquiring more money than you can spend in a beautiful life, decide to either retire or work for free? I believe this would reduce inequality too, and it would only require that earners set an upper-bound on their earnings. You could still compete on, for example, velocity. (I call this my Enough number, by the way).
  - alpha_squared 7y ago
    In my limited experience, it takes a very special someone to adhere to an "enough number." I've met many who claimed to have one, only to work long past it. For most, reaching that number only becomes a motivating factor to reach a higher number ad infinitum.
- FpUser 7y ago
  "There is no moral issue with inequality" Well, there is. Thanks to legalized corruption ( lobbying ) the rich are able to twist laws and regulations more and more to their advantage. This is self feeding process and the final outcome does not look nice at all. "Therefore forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard." Nice try at twisting the line, who is talking about absolute equality here? You know there are all kinds of shades between black and white.
  - kova12 7y ago
    Inequality and corruption are different things. It's like there used to be a catchphrase "sex and violence", piling together things that clearly don't go together
    - FpUser 7y ago
      "Inequality and corruption are different things" - happily working together, one working hard to increase the other
      - kova12 7y ago
        Why did you write this comment? It does nothing to disprove my point
  - notdonspaulding 7y ago
    > Thanks to legalized corruption ( lobbying ) the rich are able to twist laws and regulations more and more to their advantage. What you are describing is regulatory capture, and you don't have to be against wealth inequality in order to be against this. This is common ground between traditional conservatism and traditional liberalism. > ...who is talking about absolute equality here? The principled/moral argument goes something like this: - Wealth inequality is a symptom of an unjust system. - We see wealth inequality. - Therefore, we *must* have an unjust system which created it. - Therefore, we should *correct for injustice in the system* by creating laws X, Y, Z to bring about greater equality. ) Instead, you seem to be arguing that: - Wealth inequality is undesirable for some unstated reason. - We see wealth inequality. - We would like to reduce wealth inequality for some unstated reason. - Therefore, we should implement some laws Q, R, and S to reduce wealth inequality (presumably to one of your "shades between black and white"). The first argument is a moral argument. It says "wealth inequality is bad." When confronted with the fact that no two people start out in the same place in this life, it can fall back to "So? that doesn't mean they should be stuck with where they started, because wealth inequality is bad!" When confronted with the fact that freedom means people with different values being allowed to make choices with different outcomes, it can argue against that freedom, because it considers Wealth Equality to be a virtue. The second argument is an argument of degrees. To what degree is wealth inequality acceptable, and at what degree does it become unacceptable? That's not a moral argument. It's lost its fallback position of morality. The person making the argument has already agreed with the principle that in some cases, under some circumstances, wealth inequality is acceptable. Now we're just arguing about where the line should be. Reasonable people can disagree about where the line should be in an argument of degrees, but neither person can claim a moral high ground in such an argument, because they aren't disagreeing in principle. You should either strengthen your position by making the moral argument, or agree with the GP who said that forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard. Where you seem to be at the moment isn't a very defensible stance to take.
- marliechiller 7y ago
  unfortunately in current western society, equality of opportunity (or somewhere closer to that) will never be achievable compared with equality of outcome due to an enshrinement of identity politics in our political structure.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  Would it be a terrible evil to put measures in place to prevent people from ending up in grinding poverty though? Reasonable financial/social welfare regulations do not amount to violence by any reasonable definition. If inequality is inevitable, then some people are going to end up on the bottom. If the bottom is not enough to live on, then that could be argued to be structural violence.
- Drakim 7y ago
  If you are born as a serf in a feudal system then being willing to work twice or thrice as hard doesn't guarantee success or even safety from near-starvation. Hard work alone can only guarantee success in a perfectly fair and even system, and obviously not even the west is anything close to that.
gbrown 7y ago
>Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets, including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality. I'm always super skeptical of claims like this (disclaimer: haven't actually read the paper), because they seem to make clearly overextended analogies between dissimilar fields. If you're used to studying "phase transitions, symmetry breaking, and duality" in ferromagnetics, then when you look at economics you're likely to see similar patterns - but at face value, we're comparing replicable features of (relatively) simple physical systems to non-replicable macroeconomic behavior. If we could rewind time and run a bunch of population level counterfactual scenarios, then it might be worth taking seriously, but I have yet to see a convincing case for making conclusions about population level systems based on unrelated physical models. CAVEAT: this isn't to say that models aren't useful. Neither am I claiming that we can't take some insights from other fields. I just think we tend to sometimes forget that the map is not the territory. For example, I could certainly imagine populations undergoing changes between states which we could roughly analogize to be "phase transitions", but I wouldn't therefore conclude that those states were, in fact, fundamental - I'd expect similar dynamics to play out differently depending on context. Mandatory SMBC Comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
- specialist 7y ago
  Preferential attachment is just math.
  - gbrown 7y ago
    So, a mathematical/statistical tool which usefully describe a variety of phenomena. I have no issue with that kind of framing.

seibelj 7y ago

There is no moral issue with inequality. The moral issue is with equality. There will always be people who are willing to work twice as hard as someone else, and there are always people who if given the choice will not work at all, even if able bodied. Therefore forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard. It doesn’t take a computer simulation to show how free people wind up with different degrees of success. I want us to have more equality of opportunity but enforcing equality of outcomes with violence (government enforced equality, where violators are imprisoned) is a terrible evil.

javajosh 7y ago
I never did like this kind of binary thinking. What if people could work twice as hard, but after acquiring more money than you can spend in a beautiful life, decide to either retire or work for free? I believe this would reduce inequality too, and it would only require that earners set an upper-bound on their earnings. You could still compete on, for example, velocity. (I call this my Enough number, by the way).
- alpha_squared 7y ago
  In my limited experience, it takes a very special someone to adhere to an "enough number." I've met many who claimed to have one, only to work long past it. For most, reaching that number only becomes a motivating factor to reach a higher number ad infinitum.
FpUser 7y ago
"There is no moral issue with inequality" Well, there is. Thanks to legalized corruption ( lobbying ) the rich are able to twist laws and regulations more and more to their advantage. This is self feeding process and the final outcome does not look nice at all. "Therefore forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard." Nice try at twisting the line, who is talking about absolute equality here? You know there are all kinds of shades between black and white.
- kova12 7y ago
  Inequality and corruption are different things. It's like there used to be a catchphrase "sex and violence", piling together things that clearly don't go together
  - FpUser 7y ago
    "Inequality and corruption are different things" - happily working together, one working hard to increase the other
    - kova12 7y ago
      Why did you write this comment? It does nothing to disprove my point
- notdonspaulding 7y ago
  > Thanks to legalized corruption ( lobbying ) the rich are able to twist laws and regulations more and more to their advantage. What you are describing is regulatory capture, and you don't have to be against wealth inequality in order to be against this. This is common ground between traditional conservatism and traditional liberalism. > ...who is talking about absolute equality here? The principled/moral argument goes something like this: - Wealth inequality is a symptom of an unjust system. - We see wealth inequality. - Therefore, we *must* have an unjust system which created it. - Therefore, we should *correct for injustice in the system* by creating laws X, Y, Z to bring about greater equality. ) Instead, you seem to be arguing that: - Wealth inequality is undesirable for some unstated reason. - We see wealth inequality. - We would like to reduce wealth inequality for some unstated reason. - Therefore, we should implement some laws Q, R, and S to reduce wealth inequality (presumably to one of your "shades between black and white"). The first argument is a moral argument. It says "wealth inequality is bad." When confronted with the fact that no two people start out in the same place in this life, it can fall back to "So? that doesn't mean they should be stuck with where they started, because wealth inequality is bad!" When confronted with the fact that freedom means people with different values being allowed to make choices with different outcomes, it can argue against that freedom, because it considers Wealth Equality to be a virtue. The second argument is an argument of degrees. To what degree is wealth inequality acceptable, and at what degree does it become unacceptable? That's not a moral argument. It's lost its fallback position of morality. The person making the argument has already agreed with the principle that in some cases, under some circumstances, wealth inequality is acceptable. Now we're just arguing about where the line should be. Reasonable people can disagree about where the line should be in an argument of degrees, but neither person can claim a moral high ground in such an argument, because they aren't disagreeing in principle. You should either strengthen your position by making the moral argument, or agree with the GP who said that forcing absolute equality on everyone is a moral hazard. Where you seem to be at the moment isn't a very defensible stance to take.
marliechiller 7y ago
unfortunately in current western society, equality of opportunity (or somewhere closer to that) will never be achievable compared with equality of outcome due to an enshrinement of identity politics in our political structure.
gerbilly 7y ago
Would it be a terrible evil to put measures in place to prevent people from ending up in grinding poverty though? Reasonable financial/social welfare regulations do not amount to violence by any reasonable definition. If inequality is inevitable, then some people are going to end up on the bottom. If the bottom is not enough to live on, then that could be argued to be structural violence.
Drakim 7y ago
If you are born as a serf in a feudal system then being willing to work twice or thrice as hard doesn't guarantee success or even safety from near-starvation. Hard work alone can only guarantee success in a perfectly fair and even system, and obviously not even the west is anything close to that.

gbrown 7y ago

>Surprisingly, several mathematical models of free-market economies display features of complex macroscopic physical systems such as ferromagnets, including phase transitions, symmetry breaking and duality. I'm always super skeptical of claims like this (disclaimer: haven't actually read the paper), because they seem to make clearly overextended analogies between dissimilar fields. If you're used to studying "phase transitions, symmetry breaking, and duality" in ferromagnetics, then when you look at economics you're likely to see similar patterns - but at face value, we're comparing replicable features of (relatively) simple physical systems to non-replicable macroeconomic behavior. If we could rewind time and run a bunch of population level counterfactual scenarios, then it might be worth taking seriously, but I have yet to see a convincing case for making conclusions about population level systems based on unrelated physical models. CAVEAT: this isn't to say that models aren't useful. Neither am I claiming that we can't take some insights from other fields. I just think we tend to sometimes forget that the map is not the territory. For example, I could certainly imagine populations undergoing changes between states which we could roughly analogize to be "phase transitions", but I wouldn't therefore conclude that those states were, in fact, fundamental - I'd expect similar dynamics to play out differently depending on context. Mandatory SMBC Comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

specialist 7y ago
Preferential attachment is just math.
- gbrown 7y ago
  So, a mathematical/statistical tool which usefully describe a variety of phenomena. I have no issue with that kind of framing.