Obviously aiming for absolute equality would probably be more harmful. But there are plenty of arguments on why excessively high inequality is bad for the society as a whole. If you never bothered to read them and resort to silly conjectures like: "well, it's wrong because people kept saying so since I was young, duh!". Well...
It's not self-evident, as there are plenty of counter-arguments, including the Chinese Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the British Empire, the Caste System in India (going strong for over 3 millennia), and so on. Most of human history has been a period of extreme inequality. All you've got is a handful of revolutions in the last 500 years?
You actually need to make a moral argument. For example, slavery is bad not because it caused the the Civil War, but because it's morally wrong (and there's plenty of arguments here). I've also yet to see a very crystalized train of thought as to why inequality (maybe even extreme inequality) is morally wrong.
Assume civilization has the perfect capacity and amount of resources to meet the basic needs (however that's defined) of all people.
Inequality here might be worse than a different civilization where we are in extreme abundance.
If one person has 99% of wealth and everyone else shares 1% - but that is still enough for everyone to have a good life - then it probably matters much less than the same amount of inequality when there's just enough resources.
So I think the amount of resources and the level of inequality matter - not just inequality in general.
Additionally, it matters what the people with most of the wealth are doing. If they're spending it mostly on orgies - that's probably not great. If they're spending it on making advances that we wouldn't otherwise invest in if things were equal - then I'd argue that's good.
All of this is going to be highly subjective based on what you think is basic needs and a good life and how much envy you have.
Yep, I think I agree with this, although I've often seen stuff like "Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos/Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't have that much money. No one should."
So I think the typical anti-inequality argument has a much stronger conclusion.
Or perhaps I'm incorrectly inferring from your use of the word "crystalized" that you're looking for near undefeatable resiliency.
Yes. All of those were indeed miserable places to be if you were poor or did not have right skin color etc. I agree.
> You actually need to make a moral argument. For example, slavery is bad not because it caused the the Civil War, but because it's morally wrong (and there's plenty of arguments here)
No necessarily. I'd prefer to make an utilitarian argument. Over long periods of time high inequality leads to inefficiency due to wealth accumulation across different generations.
I could try and make more arguments, but I'll let you have a go this time..
This model is communicated at large in various forms, "meritocracy", "you can do anything if you put your mind to it", "inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", "every life is sacred" and so on. It's such a common model, it seems unsurprising that many people balk at a need for explanation. It's like asking 'explain from first principles why 2+2=4'.
And yes when the available resources are below the saturation point, more analysis will be necessary to determine what's optimal. A more advanced model would account for a variety of qualities, each with different importance and different Ks, suggest distributions for those and relate them to total available resources. My intuition, based on 'lots of distributions end up being gaussian' is that equality is maximal except when significantly resource constrained (ie some state like war or famine), or k for some particularly important quality is extremely high (which interestingly is another common narrative: Noah's Ark, the Manhattan Project, Armageddon, The Martian.)
Extreme inequality is dangerous because the few wealthiest people concentrate enough power to overpower the mechanisms that keep the society stable and working. If you can bribe your way out of problems with law, or force the hand of the government by lobbying or menacing, you can break the society, while also acquiring even more wealth. If not stopped, the process leads to a dictatorship at the mildest, or a downfall at the most extreme.
Rare to find sound argument does not equal absence of argument.
I’m not sure what a first principles case would be here, but I guess it would need to start with an agreement about what a person is and what a society is, and the interaction between those two. Difficult as these are not agreed upon, even in the west.
On a relatively orthodox view on these points, your argument might be that beyond a given level of inequality, there are diminishing marginal returns to even the beneficiaries of the inequality. Tinbergen, a relatively well-known economist, thought this was around 5x disparity in income (ignore assets). You might argue about the precise figure, but having lived in places where there is high inequality, the crime rate put a serious cap on my perceived quality of life.