Still, couldn’t you say the same for a feudal structure? That nature has power imbalances, and the role of king only conveys that inequality?
Instead, we’ve intentionally built a more egalitarian system (and we’ve all prospered because of it), seemingly against nature.
Maybe there's a distinction to be drawn between "inherent part of the human condition" and the "default state", as you have described it. Attempting to change something "inherent" seems worthless, but default is merely waiting to be overwritten with something better.
For ex: death is inherent in the human condition, we cannot avoid it and must deal with it. Nakedness is only the default state, and is pretty easily solved.
Back to economics: maybe scarcity is inherent, but "social tragedy" may be merely a very solvable default.
But keeping appropriate timescales in mind, I agree with the conclusion - for given constraints, there are things that are inherent and not worth attacking, and then defaults that are merely attractors for the system state.
Should? You're assuming that mortality is a problem. Extreme longevity or immortality would certainly change the human condition, but it's purely speculative to think it would be better in some objective, widely-accepted sense. Not every "default" is something waiting to be fixed.
There's a good argument to be made that the assumption of mortality is baked into so many things in our economy that it would break down if people suddenly started to live much longer on average. But that, again, is a default - some state attractor. Something we can try to work around.
As a speculative anecdote, imagine spending ten thousand years missing a child who died in an irreversible accident. (Would childbirth even be permitted in such a future? How would overpopulation be addressed?) Or the dampening economic and sociological effects caused by a millegenerian population's entrenched resistance to change. Or the possibility that longevity is only available to the wealthy, or the drudgery of being stuck in a boring job for millenia...
Longevity doesn't necessarily solve sadness, suffering, and social ills -- it just shifts the goalposts.
More egalitarian in the sense of opportunities, yes. But that doesn't mean it will be more egalitarian in the sense of outcomes. The disparity in wealth between the poverty line and Bill Gates, for example, is probably larger than the disparity in wealth between a serf and a king in feudal times.
I'm not sure that's true. While, as I said, the disparity in wealth between Bill Gates and the poverty line is much greater than that between a king and a serf in feudal times, the power disparity between Bill Gates and a person at the poverty line is a lot less. A feudal king could command all sorts of things of serfs and exert all kinds of power over their lives that Bill Gates can't command or exert over anyone. So Bill Gates' money does not represent power the way a feudal king had power.
No, markets pay for things that are worth more than it costs to make them. Only a very small fraction of those things are useless toys that delight rich people.
That being said, profit is a notoriously crude way of measuring utility, given that a lot of tragedy-of-the-commons type problems don't have "profitable" solutions without some type of government intervention. (See: pollution, public education and health, childcare, working week limits, etc.)
There are no non-crude ways of measuring utility among different people with different, often incompatible, preferences.
> a lot of tragedy-of-the-commons type problems don't have "profitable" solutions without some type of government intervention.
They also don't have good solutions with government intervention, because the downsides of government intervention (regulatory capture, increasing power of the state, micromanagement of all aspects of people's lives, political power being used to benefit some instead of all) more than outweigh any increased benefit in a particular area.
Yes, but everyone's desires and needs count in a market. Only the politically powerful's desires and needs count when the government intervenes.
Markets pay for things that people, period, will pay for more than it takes to create them. There's no restriction to "people of means". But yes, the word "worth" can be misleading if it's not understood to imply having something to trade (almost always money in today's economy) that the seller will accept in exchange.
What markets provide is an information-carrying mechanism to determine how you should allocate your efforts to get some of that wealth. If you're poor and want to be rich in a market economy, make a useless toy that delights a rich person. If you're poor and want to be rich in a communist economy, suck up to the party bosses. If you're poor and want to be rich in a feudal economy, you're fucked, because that useless toy that delights a rich person is his by divine right.
While all of these systems still have rich people and poor people, I would argue that the former leads to much more socially desirable outcomes than either of the latter, because at least the rules of the game for how to become rich are stable and well-known and the side-effects of the wealth-acquisition process are beneficial to humanity (or at least to that one rich person, but that's better than them being outright negative-sum, like when the way to get rich was by conquest).
I would argue that the former is self-evidently equal across systems. By definition, if you're speaking in relative terms, for you to rise up the social strata someone else must fall.
I would not argue that this is true in absolute terms - measured in your country's currency, it seems empirically true that certain systems (in particular free-market corporate capitalism) lead to much wider disparities in wealth than others (say, communism). However, I'd argue that if you actually care about absolute wealth rather than relative wealth, this shouldn't matter to you, because the median person in corporate capitalism does far better than even the wealthy in communist countries (we discovered this in the early 90s).
There may be hybridized systems that can still generate adequate absolute wealth while capping relative disparities. I'm skeptical of many of the examples that are often cited, though. IMHO unionized capitalism actively failed during the 70s; people like to blame Reagan or Wall Street for the dismantling of unions & pension plans, but the competitive reality is that the companies that made up this system all went bankrupt because of foreign competition, not because of any particular policies. That's a failure to generate adequate absolute wealth; you can't ignore the existence of outsiders who follow a different system when judging the sustainability of your own system. European-style socialism is intriguing to me, but may suffer from a similar problem: it's unclear to me whether the EU can a.) hold together and b.) avoid getting conquered militarily by outside powers in the absence of the NATO security umbrella.
Poverty is a social tragedy. Inequality is an inevitable consequence of choice.
So you can't easily choose to have less inequality, unless you also choose to eliminate almost all (other?) choice.
I do find it darkly funny that so many folks seem to throw up their hands - it is obvious that inequality will always exist, so just live with however much we currently happen to have and shut up about it. (Inflation, however - we can totally micromanage that!) Humans have an innate sense of fairness that becomes offended at some point, and they start punishing even when doing so harms themselves. The peasants get restless at some point, the tumbrels come out, and there's your natural law in action.
My partner is a nurse, she gets payed peanuts while daily ensuring that people don't die. Literally.
What judgment exactly is exercised to have life saving jobs be payed order of magnitude less than "plumbing" jobs? The argument of "higher positive impact on their well-being" is laughably naive.
It resulted in an explosion of theoretical and empirical literature in microeconomics, and in many ways creates the field we know today.
Consider this - it takes years of formal training to produce a qualified medical professional and pretty much nothing to produce a software developer.
If the software engineer is able to provide more utility, this roughly translates to more demand which means higher salary which means higher supply
Today, Some actors(not necessarily the good ones), get lucky and become filthy rich.
So is their luck an inherent part of the human condition ? or is it the result of technology, TV/Cinema ?
And do we have a right, as a society, to choose how technology will shape us, or not ?