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Comment by mriet | Hacker News Reader

Wow. The reviewer/writer manages to completely miss some of Graeber's key points.

The reviewer writes "That some questions about inequality are obscure or ill-framed does not indicate that inequality of wealth is not a fundamental social problem."

Graeber's point about inequality is that, as a rights concept, it's impossible to define, and also not a good representation of how good communities work.

The reviewer is bending Graeber's words to suit his own points (and publications!). "Inequality of wealth" is a redundant misconception for Graeber, since wealth == inequality.

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> wealth == inequality

Yeah, Switzerland or Liechtenstein are so much more socially unequal than a brutal dictatorship like North Korea. Oh wait, actually they aren't. So this "wealth == inequality" thing is just nonsense. It might just be trying to say that everyone starts out "equally" poor by default but that's a trivial observation.

True. But what ancient civilizations had individuals with say, >100,000x the wealth of average citizens?

Powerful rulers, sure. With their own palaces, pyramids or whatever. Probably with their stash of gold somewhere. But as extreme as today?

I'd argue no. A tiny, tiny % of the population controlling a ridiculous amount of wealth, is a recent phenomenon for which there is no need, no good reason, and basically everyone is worse off as a result.

That's the weird part, imho. What keeps the remaining 99.999+% of the population from correcting this situation?

> A tiny, tiny % of the population controlling a ridiculous amount of wealth, is a recent phenomenon for which there is no need, no good reason, and basically everyone is worse off as a result.

This is a misconception. A powerful ruler might make his subjects worse off by plundering their wealth. But many of the billionaires on modern lists of wealthy folks grew their wealth via entrepreneurship that made others vastly better off. This is one of the key differences between the ancient pre-industrial and the modern world. Prior to the industrial age it simply wasn't feasible to create such amounts of wealth on a sustained basis, though a skilled craftsman would've been relatively well off.

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