Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?

Fairness implies that the wealth you generate as an individual is equivalent to the wealth you earn and own.

Right now 1% of the population owns 50% of the worlds wealth.

For 1% of the world to own 50% of the worlds wealth implies that 1% of the world generated 50% of the worlds' wealth.

It is not physically possible for a fraction of the human population to generate half the worlds' wealth. There is no reality where this makes sense. Thus for 1% of the population to own 50% of the worlds wealth, the 1% must obtain wealth generated by other people.

A common example of how this happens is through the ownership of a corporation. As an owner you own all the wealth generated by people who work for you. As owner you can do zero work, yet extract the wealth generated by hundreds of employees.

Owners essentially pay people less wealth than the wealth they generate. There is no circumstance where people will explicitly agree to such a transaction when given other choices.

It is fundamentally immoral and unfair to own wealth you did not produce or generate. This is not a question of empathy, it is a question of fundamental human rights.

The belief is that even if you have bad luck, eventually your good work and talent will get you in the position you deserve. Even in the cases where that works out, we sort of overlook decades of toil in obscurity in poverty.

The reality is that the relative success of people in the first world is almost completely dependent upon the fact that they were born into the first world.

For example, some significant percent graduate from college and enter into office jobs, which then enables them to have a home, washing machine, car, wife/husband, etc. Owning these things and marrying does determine success in a real way. The percentage is significantly greater in some countries than others. Does that mean that some countries have significantly more talented, hard workers? Or is it because overall the other country is much less wealthy, there are fewer good-paying jobs, and fewer student aid options?

This is where you run into another related issue: racism. If you pick certain browner countries and compare them to whiter countries, a large percentage of people will just say "Yup, those brown people aren't as talented and don't work as hard".

Generally in economic theory companies in perfectly competitive industries have zero "economic profit" which means they earn enough profit to compensate the owners for capital invested. Effectively the owners are getting fairly compensated for the risk of investing their capital.

In a monopoly the owner is getting compensated not based on risk of investment but rather how much can be extracted from the customers. This is clearly good for the owner and not so good for everyone else.

Creating a monopoly based on a superior product is a good thing for everyone since you are innovating and creating something that was not there before. You should be able to hold this monopoly if no one can effectively reproduce it. However, any kind of regulation to maintain your monopoly is likely bad for everyone except yourself. In theory, without regulation you would expect most monopolies to fall or have reduced power as other players come into the market.

I think Peter Thiel has a very good way of thinking about the motivation for innovation in a capitalistic market. However, outside of brand new innovations, monopolies are likely bad for a society as a whole.

Internet Explorer. .doc format. Viruses.

> evil

They abused their monopoly to sell crap software and destroy competitors. At least, that's what the courts say.