trippy wrote:Inequality creates poverty you numpty. Poverty creates suffering. 42 people hold same wealth as 3.7bn poorest If you can't see, just from the headline, why inequality might cause problems, then you're a lost cause.
The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially. That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too. Even experts repeat the lump fallacy, presumably out of rhetorical zeal rather than conceptual confusion. Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.” But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”
JRPC wrote:No, it doesn't. Why would it?trippy wrote:Inequality creates poverty you numpty. Poverty creates suffering. 42 people hold same wealth as 3.7bn poorest If you can't see, just from the headline, why inequality might cause problems, then you're a lost cause.
JRPC wrote:
Muzzy, no I'm not ignoring anything. I've addressed Stoph's post. I don't think any of those examples speak to any intrinsic harm of inequality. Not nearly.
I don't understand how anyone could think they do.
We're talking about economic inequality here right?
]
JRPC wrote:The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially. That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too. Even experts repeat the lump fallacy, presumably out of rhetorical zeal rather than conceptual confusion. Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.” But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”
JRPC wrote:Can you explain why inequality is an evil in itself?
JRPC wrote:I'm trying to get to a more foundational starting point. Is inequality intrinsically harmful? If so, how? I don't think any of what Stoph has posted really speaks to that, and not to disparage, but most there strike me as pure tautology. Actually reading through those, the only one that actually does seem to follow directly is the one about access to certain medical treatments.
Stopharage wrote:Inequality leads to improved life chances for those at the top. As a result networking and nepotism exist at the expense of a working meritocracy and fairness. Those at the top can manipulate market conditions to further grow the gap between themselves and the rest.
JRPC wrote:That's something to go on at least.
JRPC wrote:Muzzy, no I'm not ignoring anything. I've addressed Stoph's post. I don't think any of those examples speak to any intrinsic harm of inequality. Not nearly.
JRPC wrote:I don't understand how anyone could think they do.
We're talking about economic inequality here right?.
JRPC wrote:acemuzzy wrote:* is inequality inherently bad? * Lots of examples of it being inherently bad * I want a more foundational look at whether it's inherently bad; why are people not engaging with the debate? Ignoring the content of others post while expecting complete asymmetry in his they handle yours, is oddly narcissistic
Muzzy, no I'm not ignoring anything. I've addressed Stoph's post. I don't think any of those examples speak to any intrinsic harm of inequality. Not nearly.
I don't understand how anyone could think they do.
We're talking about economic inequality here right?
OK this should be helpful. It's an excerpt from the the chapter on inequality from EN. So there we go.
http://bigthink.com/big-think-books/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-inequality-happiness
But actually he’s not saying anything too silly once he balances it all out.The starting point for understanding inequality in the context of human progress is to recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being. It is not like health, prosperity, knowledge, safety, peace, and the other areas of progress I examine in these chapters. The reason is captured in an old joke from the Soviet Union. Igor and Boris are dirt-poor peasants, barely scratching enough crops from their small plots of land to feed their families. The only difference between them is that Boris owns a scrawny goat. One day a fairy appears to Igor and grants him a wish. Igor says, “I wish that Boris’s goat should die.”
The point of the joke, of course, is that the two peasants have become more equal but that neither is better off, aside from Igor’s indulging his spiteful envy.
But in their recent article “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” the psychologists Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom took another look at the studies and found that people prefer unequal distributions, both among fellow participants in the lab and among citizens in their country, as long as they sense that the allocation is fair: that the bonuses go to harder workers, more generous helpers, or even the lucky winners of an impartial lottery.
Either way, I suspect that it’s less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on. The influence of money on politics is particularly pernicious because it can distort every government policy, but it’s not the same issue as income inequality. After all, in the absence of electoral reform the richest donors can get the ear of politicians whether they earn 2 percent of national income or 8 percent of it.
Great. That's the end of the discussion then.JRPC wrote:Muzzy, no I'm not ignoring anything. I've addressed Stoph's post. I don't think any of those examples speak to any intrinsic harm of inequality. Not nearly.acemuzzy wrote:* is inequality inherently bad? * Lots of examples of it being inherently bad * I want a more foundational look at whether it's inherently bad; why are people not engaging with the debate? Ignoring the content of others post while expecting complete asymmetry in his they handle yours, is oddly narcissistic
dynamiteReady wrote:So we've dropped the 'scientific' part of this discussion now?
What a fucking surprise...
Back to the inequality / Griff thread, perhaps?
Most damagingly, the sociologists Jonathan Kelley and Mariah Evans have snipped the causal link joining inequality to happiness in a study of two hundred thousand people in sixty-eight societies over three decades. Kelley and Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness, including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious attendance, and found that the theory that inequality causes unhappiness “comes to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.” In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier. The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope. Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.
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