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I disagree that distributing wealth would reduce division and strife. It would only increase it. History would seem to contradict you---periods of high wealth

I disagree that distributing wealth would reduce division and strife. It would only increase it. History would seem to contradict you---periods of high wealth inequality do in fact seem to be historically correlated with division and strife. See, eg, https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/24/stanford-historian-uncovers-grim-correlation-violence-inequality-millennia/ https://news.stanford.edu/2017/01/24/stanford-historian-unco.... Or for a more short term analysis, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228173822_Income_Inequality_and_Social_Dysfunction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228173822_Income_In.... What leads you to believe that equality creates more division? The single example of strife in the US in the 1960s seems unpersuasive, given that the divisions then revolved largely around the draft and civil rights, both issues heavily rooted in inequality.

rsj_hn 6y ago
> History would seem to contradict you---periods of high wealth inequality do in fact seem to be historically correlated with division and strife No, this study is dominated by wars between states as well as death rates due to crime, which is primarily a function of the efficiency of the healthcare system to provide emergency services. It is basically a rehash of the observations of Stephen Pinker that death rates have been falling over time, and thus is a measure of technological progress. One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing -- historically most people had a subsistence level of income and the middle class is a relatively modern innovation -- so it's easy to make a correlation between the two which is not particularly meaningful as a proxy for social stability or as a causative argument.
- vannevar 6y ago
  It seems overly convenient to gerrymander the definition of strife so that it excludes anything that might contradict your thesis. One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing... One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater---the poorest people in the world live much as their ancestors did centuries ago, while the richest have massively increased their wealth even in the last couple of decades. Technology indeed raises all boats, but it raises them proportionately to their wealth, and so is highly non-linear, and certainly not equalizing.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    > It seems overly convenient to gerrymander the definition of strife so that it excludes anything that might contradict your thesis. No, I would say it's convenient to set up a strawman. I wasn't talking about overall death rates changing, of course they change with time, I was talking about social cohesion. >One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater- One could argue this, but the facts don't support the proposition. We've gone from a situation in which most people had a subsistence lifestyle -- barely above starvation and at the minimum levels of income necessary to avoid dying -- to one in which there is a middle class. You'd have to have a very peculiar definition of inequality to say that it has gone up. It certainly hasn't been decreasing monotonically, but it has gone down over secular timeframes. Perhaps for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population are no longer classified as "poor", and large numbers contain surplus wealth and earn surplus income. More importantly, there is much more equality in terms of political power and ability to influence change, which is what leads to chronic political violence and the age of social revolution, which basically started with Rousseau and has led to a flood of political violence, even if overall deathrates are lower due to things like penicillin and emergency services. That political violence started when the power of the monarchy weakened and was challenged by a rising middle class. Those early revolutionaries, from Robespierre on, were members of the middle class, eager to topple the group ahead of them. In previous eras, there would be no middle class and so no revolution. Also the power of the gun and the printing press shifted more power downward, thus creating the chaos that allows revolutionary movements like the Khmer Rouge, or communists, or Latin American revolutionaries to launch revolts. None of that would have been possible if we had previous levels of inequality and there was no middle class. The more closer in power people are, the more viable it is for one group to overthrow another, and the more revolutions follow. Then history is rewritten by the victors that it was the oppressed rising up due to terrible conditions, rather than the no. 2 knocking off no. 1. But we don't need to be so naive about history. It is the people at the bottom who are first to be murdered by the revolutionaries, whether the genocide of peasants in the Vendee during the French revolution, or the genocide of Ukrainain farmers in the Soviet Revolution, or the murder of 40 million Chinese peasant farmers right after Mao's revolution, or the murder of farmers by the Khmer Rouge. We know it is no. 2 knocking off no. 1, with the poor suffering and not being any better off after no. 2 and no 1. switch places. Then, they switch again. Revolutions are enabled by too much equality between the middle and upper classes.

rsj_hn 6y ago

> History would seem to contradict you---periods of high wealth inequality do in fact seem to be historically correlated with division and strife No, this study is dominated by wars between states as well as death rates due to crime, which is primarily a function of the efficiency of the healthcare system to provide emergency services. It is basically a rehash of the observations of Stephen Pinker that death rates have been falling over time, and thus is a measure of technological progress. One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing -- historically most people had a subsistence level of income and the middle class is a relatively modern innovation -- so it's easy to make a correlation between the two which is not particularly meaningful as a proxy for social stability or as a causative argument.

vannevar 6y ago
It seems overly convenient to gerrymander the definition of strife so that it excludes anything that might contradict your thesis. One can argue that as the arrow of time moves forward, technological progress has been increasing overall and inequality has been decreasing... One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater---the poorest people in the world live much as their ancestors did centuries ago, while the richest have massively increased their wealth even in the last couple of decades. Technology indeed raises all boats, but it raises them proportionately to their wealth, and so is highly non-linear, and certainly not equalizing.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  > It seems overly convenient to gerrymander the definition of strife so that it excludes anything that might contradict your thesis. No, I would say it's convenient to set up a strawman. I wasn't talking about overall death rates changing, of course they change with time, I was talking about social cohesion. >One could argue this, but again, the facts don't support the proposition. While it may be true that average and even median wealth has increased, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has never been greater- One could argue this, but the facts don't support the proposition. We've gone from a situation in which most people had a subsistence lifestyle -- barely above starvation and at the minimum levels of income necessary to avoid dying -- to one in which there is a middle class. You'd have to have a very peculiar definition of inequality to say that it has gone up. It certainly hasn't been decreasing monotonically, but it has gone down over secular timeframes. Perhaps for the first time in history, the majority of the world's population are no longer classified as "poor", and large numbers contain surplus wealth and earn surplus income. More importantly, there is much more equality in terms of political power and ability to influence change, which is what leads to chronic political violence and the age of social revolution, which basically started with Rousseau and has led to a flood of political violence, even if overall deathrates are lower due to things like penicillin and emergency services. That political violence started when the power of the monarchy weakened and was challenged by a rising middle class. Those early revolutionaries, from Robespierre on, were members of the middle class, eager to topple the group ahead of them. In previous eras, there would be no middle class and so no revolution. Also the power of the gun and the printing press shifted more power downward, thus creating the chaos that allows revolutionary movements like the Khmer Rouge, or communists, or Latin American revolutionaries to launch revolts. None of that would have been possible if we had previous levels of inequality and there was no middle class. The more closer in power people are, the more viable it is for one group to overthrow another, and the more revolutions follow. Then history is rewritten by the victors that it was the oppressed rising up due to terrible conditions, rather than the no. 2 knocking off no. 1. But we don't need to be so naive about history. It is the people at the bottom who are first to be murdered by the revolutionaries, whether the genocide of peasants in the Vendee during the French revolution, or the genocide of Ukrainain farmers in the Soviet Revolution, or the murder of 40 million Chinese peasant farmers right after Mao's revolution, or the murder of farmers by the Khmer Rouge. We know it is no. 2 knocking off no. 1, with the poor suffering and not being any better off after no. 2 and no 1. switch places. Then, they switch again. Revolutions are enabled by too much equality between the middle and upper classes.