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It's also a poor analogy in that the average Dutch person is around 15% taller than the average person in Timor-Leste, which Google informs me has the smallest
by MrJohz 3y ago
It's also a poor analogy in that the average Dutch person is around 15% taller than the average person in Timor-Leste, which Google informs me has the smallest height difference. If the disparity in wealth were on the order of 15%, I don't think there'd be nearly as much complaint.
Instead, in many countries, it's not uncommon for some people to be sitting on a hundred, a thousand, even a million times as much money as others. The disparity is so great that it's difficult to fully visualise - hence why you get videos of people like Tom Scott driving around trying to demonstrate just how different these sorts of numbers are.
More importantly, wealth scales in a strange way. Becoming a billionaire didn't just entitle you to more exotic holidays or vehicles or mansions than your millionaire peers, it brings incredible ability to influence politics and the world, with next to no accountability from the people whose lives you are affecting. You can buy media companies on a whim. You can demand meetings with politicians. You can make economic threats in order to get your own way. And, unlike politicians, there is no democratic process to elect you or remove you.
The analogy is, therefore, absurd. The premise is that, if you have an issue with wealth inequality, you have an issue with inequality universally, at all scales. But it misses the point that the issue with wealth inequality isn't that the numbers aren't an identical, it's that extreme wealth actively causes problems.
- brvsft 3y ago[dead]
- shreyansh_k 3y agoI hear your comments and agree with your data about the 15% difference (personally, this number doesn't even matter, what matters is just the fact that there is some form of observable difference) even though I haven't verified it. I'd like to give you a thought exercise, if you be so kind to me. I'd like for you to take that Dutch argument and replace Dutch with "human adult" and Asian with "human baby" (assume it's a booming population where babies outnumber adults) and see if your reasoning serve you well.
- cycomanic 3y agoSeriously what sort of weird equivalence are you trying to create. Apart from the fact that it doesn't even make sense, it doesn't match in terms of scales (sure a baby is 10 times smaller, whatever that means), we are talking about the richest having 5 million times as much as the average (in the US). So your next thought experiment is "ah let's compare an adult with an individual cell"?
- shreyansh_k 3y agoYou talk about wealth (and inequality) so much yet you fail to see that food and oxygen is also a form of wealth. We, the humans, in fact, had barter system, food and oxygen before we invented money. It's difficult to take you seriously.
- MrJohz 3y agoI don't think that analogy works well either, given that humans often put a lot of effort into caring for human babies in order that they are able to make it to adulthood (thus achieving "equality" as per your analogy). I think it might be easier for you to explain your point if you didn't describe it in analogy, and instead described it directly. The criticism is that large (i.e. several orders of magnitude) wealth gaps are bad for society, and that they cause tremendous power imbalances in what would otherwise be a democratic society. Purely in terms of wealth inequality, and not through analogy, why do you disagree with this criticism?