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Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

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Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#11

Post by opportune »

Not really sure why this is surprising to anyone. In many cases the wealthy become so through "unfair" or non-merit based means such as inheritance, luck, personal connections, etc. But in many cases, wealth is also earned. A doctor probably does "deserve" to have a $500k house more than a cashier. It wouldn't make sense for the cashier to receive more than the doctor just because they were poorer to begin with. Actually justifying such a transfer doesn't even compute for me.

The author interprets this as preserving the hierarchy, but I think that's a bit of a stretch. I think people don't want to live in a system that could result in their own wealth being used to enrich others to their own detriment. Sure, taxes and redistribution schemes do that, and you could argue that that's the whole point of capitalism (in the other direction), but it seems perverse and unfair for people to take so much from the wealthiest that the poor end up richer than the wealthy were to begin with.

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#12

Post by swayvil »

arcanus wrote: post #2

If the world actually equitably shared wealth, the western would have an absolutely astounding drop in our incomes and quality of life. Few would accept this. The average person in the first world has a massively higher quality of life than developing countries. This is why the only long term answer is technological development, without which we would all still be subsistence farming (and all poor). It would be nice…

How about a reduce-the-population plague, like zika? Wouldn't that achieve equity?

Actually, that might count as a tech solution.

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#13

Post by CalRobert »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #3

That is an interesting study, but it isn't too surprising to me. I think most people recognize that a certain level of inequality is natural, and is often driven by legitimate differences in personal character and discipline. I think the aspect of inequality in America that irritates most people is the degree of inequality combined with the fact that it's only the rich that is experiencing an improving quality of lif…

One thing that's forgotten, I think, is that some degree of income inequality is a natural result of giving people freedom to choose how to live their lives. Person A might say "I want to have lots of cool stuff so I'll work 12 months a year" and earn 100k. Person B might say "I want to stop and smell the roses so I'll work 6 months a year" and live off of 50k.

Sadly, this isn't really possible. By designing a system in which you more or less start life indebted, health care is tied to full time employment, and you will be forcefully removed from land that isn't "yours" (though really it was stolen a few centuries ago from a peasant or a native American for most of the world) the latter option is removed from a lot of people.

We've somehow built the worst of both worlds, I worry, with near-feudal degrees of inequality (though admittedly the baseline is higher), combined with reduced individual freedom and leisure to live the life one chooses with respect to balancing work and life.

Sometimes I wonder if more of the poor, given the choice, would prefer to live a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle like that of people thousands of years ago, if only we hadn't made it illegal via enclosure.

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#14

Post by cmahler7 »

arcanus wrote: post #2

If the world actually equitably shared wealth, the western would have an absolutely astounding drop in our incomes and quality of life. Few would accept this. The average person in the first world has a massively higher quality of life than developing countries. This is why the only long term answer is technological development, without which we would all still be subsistence farming (and all poor). It would be nice…

this, tech is lifting more and more people out of poverty. It's still not great but compared to feudal times where basically everyone were peasants except for a small nobility we are doing well and it will get better with time.

This is also why I don't really support universal health care. UHC doesn't fix the supply/demand problem, but I think that AI/ML and other tech will, making health care affordable for everyone in time. I would rather the government invest trillions in R&D to actually solve the problem as opposed to a stop gap like UHC.

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#15

Post by lostmsu »

vixen99 wrote: post #7

In other words, what humans want and what they actually do, are rather different. When made public the wanting is called virtue signalling and often provides benefits at no or minimal cost and thus it's popular. Example: https://life.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/corbynistas-believe-in-... ('corbynistas-believe-in-socialism-until-the-bill-arrives').

IMHO, better way to think about it is that humans claim they want not something they really want.

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#16

Post by freneticfox »

arcanus wrote: post #2

If the world actually equitably shared wealth, the western would have an absolutely astounding drop in our incomes and quality of life. Few would accept this. The average person in the first world has a massively higher quality of life than developing countries. This is why the only long term answer is technological development, without which we would all still be subsistence farming (and all poor). It would be nice…

While the average quality of life in the western world is still currently higher than the global average, there have been recent data points in the US that globalization has drug certain subsets of the US down to 3rd-world levels of life quality[1][2]. Globalization is desirable on many levels and happening, and it is already beginning to pull down on the bottom end of western society (and similarly, pull upwards on the bottom end of non-western societies).

What we're getting is globalization (which essentially causes equalization across geographic/national boundaries) without wealth redistribution (within national legal boundaries), which means that while the global average scales are slowly equalizing, there will continue to be a vast split between the rich and poor everywhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_County,_West_Virginia... [2] https://www.sanders.senate.gov/life-in-mcdowell-county - "Men in McDowell County have the same life expectancy as men in Namibia"

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#17

Post by anodari »

opportune wrote: post #11

Not really sure why this is surprising to anyone. In many cases the wealthy become so through "unfair" or non-merit based means such as inheritance, luck, personal connections, etc. But in many cases, wealth is also earned. A doctor probably does "deserve" to have a $500k house more than a cashier. It wouldn't make sense for the cashier to receive more than the doctor just because they were poorer to begin with. Actu…

Why did the cashier not have a medical degree, too? If we consider only the effort of each one, we could think that the cashier was lazy? But he may also have the misfortune of being born with less intelligence or in poor social conditions, and the effort he would have to do to equate himself with the doctor would be impossible to attain. This could be a problem of the meritocracy.

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#19

Post by LyndsySimon »

tw04 wrote: post #9
weberc2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that only 45% of people think this is unfair. That's a disappointingly low number.

Well, I think that's because the premise of how they first acquired the money is that it was "completely random". So ya, if Bill Gates randomly started pulling names out of a hat and handing out money, I think people would tend to feel less bad about that money being redistributed than something that was actually earned.

In that circumstance, the money was earned - by Bill Gates. Why should stealing it from him make someone feel less bad than stealing it from someone else?

Re: Humans want equality – as long as the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor

#20

Post by jakelazaroff »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #19
tw04 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think that's because the premise of how they first acquired the money is that it was "completely random". So ya, if Bill Gates randomly started pulling names out of a hat and handing out money, I think people would tend to feel less bad about that money being redistributed than something that was actually earned.

In that circumstance, the money was earned - by Bill Gates. Why should stealing it from him make someone feel less bad than stealing it from someone else?

GP is saying the reverse: that people shouldn't feel bad if the money that Bill Gates hands out randomly is redistributed again, since none of the people he gave it to initially had earned it.
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