Explore Wealth and Income Inequality in the World Wealth and Income Database

This is incorrect assumption.

The idea behind too much inequality being bad assumes feedback loop. If you want to grow the pie, every non zero-sum investment into production and innovation must be matched by equivalent increase in consumption that creates the ROI.

Post industrial economies are 60-70% private consumption, rest is government spending. All busines-to-business earnings flow from these two if you follow the money. Every product and industry has their money flowing trough private consumption or government spending, including WhatsApp.

If too much of the money flows into the richest people, they only consume fraction of what they earn. Rest of their money is spend buying property or investments (increasing property prices or recusing P/E values). Economy turns into rent seeking, ROI decreases and the pie stops growing.

All innovations that grow economy must pay themselves by producing money flow goes into the private consumers or to the governments pay collecting taxes. If private consumption is reduced, then either governments must step up and pay welfare benefits and invest into stuff like military or else the real economy slows down.

Growth economy is not a pipeline that has the beginning and the end. It's a loop where money flows to other direction and products flow to the opposite direction. Income equality is not categorically bad. __too_much__ income inequality creates a stunt that directs too much money into capital goods and reduces the overall flow.

The example you gave here suggests you don't know what a difficult life is like.

PS: Social Security pays money for blind people who have never worked, it's in no way a just a 'retirement' fund and is simply general welfare under a new name.

Yet the solution to income inequality is to increase government control of the means of production via confiscatory taxes and redistribution?

So some advocate increasing government's ability to take money from you a gunpoint through taxes in order to prevent the government from being able to control people?

> Overall, if things were constantly getting better, I doubt people would care.

Poverty rates in the United States have been between 11 and 15% consistently since 1965. However, worldwide absolute poverty has dramatically dropped over the past 100 years. There are 3 times fewer extremely poor people in the world today than in 1970. So things are absolutely getting better -- dramatically better in fact.[1]

If people were unaware of how much "rich" people have and just looked at their own ability to buy food, housing and small luxuries, wealth inequality wouldn't even be a thing worth mentioning. Why should it matter what my neighbor has -- as long as I have what I need.

This whole "income inequality" cause is little more than Marxist class warfare rhetoric [2] rebranded for a modern audience: people are jealous that some people make more than them. So what. No matter what policies are enacted, poverty in the United States is practically unchanged since 1965 and vastly lower than it was in the 1950s when it was first measured. [3] The same crowd that cares about inequality also happen to be the same people who demand governments address climate change by essentially changing the balance of the means of production. Nobody cared about climate change in 1986. The first mainstream book on the subject wasn't even published until 1989. However, the industrial revolution started a low time before that. Apparently the climate change wasn't a catastrophic threat until someone wrote a book about it being a catastrophic threat? Were scientists simply sleeping for the past 100 years until some far-left journalist wrote a book about it? [4] But 1991, it started becoming a big thing. What happened between 1986-1991? Hint: something to do with the Soviets. Interesting more still is that the Palestinian cause is also supported by those who care about climate change and wealth inequality -- and the Palestinian cause was supported in a very big way by the Soviet KGB.[5]

Interesting how climate change, income inequality, poverty and even the Palestinian situation all feature the same "cure" -- the end of US-dominated, global capitalism. Convenient how that all fits together so nicely.

Fascinating how everything that was important to the Soviets has become the lightning rod of the left wing of American politics -- but those causes weren't even on the radar before 1998. Actual environmentalists were trying to save whales and the rain forests in the 1980s and not trying to restructure the entire world economic system. Anti-Capitalism didn't become a semi-mainstream idea until mid 1990s. I honestly miss the Greenpeace of the 1980s.

Should the goal actually be 0% poverty? Is that even possible? If you took 100% of the wealth of the worlds 1000 richest people and distributed it equally among the poor -- it wouldn't make a dent. let's say that the world's richest combined assets were worth $2 trillion. And there are 2 billion people living in extreme poverty, that gives each of them about $500. But that's it. Because there'd be no more wealth to redistribute from those rich people because it would be all used up. So you go to the next 1000 rich people and so on until eventually everyone has just enough enough money to buy a pregnant chicken and five carrots -- with no pot to cook it in since nobody's going to bother making anything since it's just going to get taken away.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/ [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2562423?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con... [3] https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un... [4] http://environment.harvard.edu/news/huce-headlines/social-mo... [5] http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/103576/the...