Inequality in Equalland

This is not to say it is not interesting, but I would put it in the same camp as discussion around religion: it is possible to discuss about it, but almost impossible to do it in a reasonable manner with random people in the internet. That's why I refuse to discuss it as a matter of principle in most cases with people I don't know personally.

>The fact is the majority of people aren't successful or really very useful to society.

That's an insanely arrogant thing to say, not to mention complete garbage. The only reason we even have a society at all is because of that majority you dismiss. They are the ones who spend the money, do the mundane jobs that the top 1% can't be bothered to and so on.

>The top 1% of society do most of the work, so they get most of the reward. That's pretty fair IMHO.

Wtf? Citations? Actually I'm not sure what kind of citation could possibly be provided to demonstrate such a statement was anything but full retard. How do you define "work"? Obviously not manual labor. I will venture a guess that you must be talking about CEO's, but there is no metric you could name that you can't find people lower on the food chain who outwork any CEO on.

>Human motivation requires that success be rewarded.

More Rush Limbaugh-esque nonsense. Rewards take many different forms. A college professor might take reward in the results of his research, even though he'll never be compensated like e.g. Larry Ellison who some would qualify as a blot on the IT industry.

The shapes of individual "wealth curves" will not necessarily be identical. Here are a few examples to consider:

- A person who is raised in a middle-class home, and has basically the life story in the blog post will have a curve similar to that one.

- A person who is raised in a poor home, is unable to afford college even with loans, and makes a few bad economic decisions early on, though not so bad that he cannot pay for them, will have a similar-looking debt event, followed by little change for the rest of his life.

- A person who is raised in a wealthy home, goes to college without needing loans, and is taught from an early age the value of savings and investment will have a much steeper exponential curve, and a much flatter "retirement decline".

- A person who is raised in a poor home, is unable to afford college even with loans, and makes catastrophic economic decisions will likely either declare bankruptcy or end up in prison. Either event resets wealth accumulation to an unspecified negative value (to account for the stigma and reduced access to various opportunities), yielding a significantly different curve.

- A person who is raised in a rich home, with a trust fund, but whose trust fund was invested in real estate and Bernie Madoff.

- A person living the Equalland scenario encounters a catastrophic financial event at some point (illness, crime, failure of an over-leveraged investment such as a home) and is driven considerably into debt. Servicing that debt will require either a significant portion of income thereafter or bankruptcy.

- A person living the Equalland scenario, except that his chosen field of education is overproduced in his generation, will have a similar curve to the fourth scenario above. The education debt does not necessarily produce benefits thereafter.

I do think the Equalland scenario is likely to be most common, but I recognize that my suspicions are likely influenced by the fact that it is the most common scenario amongst my peers. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that it is the overwhelmingly most common scenario in general, especially with so many different scenarios resulting in a net wealth loss over the course of a person's life.