I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
I don't think that would do much in the current environment of media consolidation. Instead of direct campaigns we'd just see the issues of some candidates be more present in the media. Trumps stump says that illegal immigrants are the cause of all our issues and the media will be full of crimes by illegal immigrants, etc.
Thomas Piketty has collected that data. He showed that the rate of return for capital is larger than the rate of growth, meaning capital owners are getting an ever increasing share of the economic output. Income inequality doesn't really account for this, look into wealth inequality. The wealthy are also good at hiding their wealth to avoid taxation and publicity, I'm not sure how much the studies consider that.
I wouldn't call people working for a salary rich, which most of the people in those groups are. They pay plenty of taxes and many of them probably support funding public services as well. I meant the actually wealthy, who use their political power to reduce those services and the taxes they need to pay. They don't help fund them unless they are forced to, and currently they are not because the political power of their wealth has become larger than the political power of regular people.
> Wealth inequality isn't great but the existence of wealthy people in successful countries helps fund service for the entire population.
I think it does the opposite. Those services were mostly built during the last century after the war when conditions were just right for people to get those policies implemented. Since then the wealthy have mostly been lobbying against those services, dodging taxes, spreading propaganda justifying the inequality, etc. Now we're seeing the results of this work by the wealthy.
I also think it's wrong to assume the wealthy are the creators of that wealth just because they have it. It can also be the result of using positions of power to get a larger share of a pie baked by a lot of people.
> It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power.
Those are the same thing.
> The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale.
That was true a few decades ago. Now with everyone having a smartphone in their pockets at all times and the amount of computing power we have it should be doable. Still not easy for sure, but not impossible.
> Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation
Think about how much non-productive work has to be done just to enable competition. Instead of one organization per industry we need multiple, all with their own overhead costs. Every company has to do their branding, HR, marketing, etc. The whole advertising industry pretty much exists only because companies try to get an edge with propaganda instead of improving their product. Wasted work.
Competition also forces companies to do unethical things. Say one company starts cutting down rainforests to get an edge over the competition. Now they're cheaper than other businesses, and every business that wants to survive has to start cutting down rainforest. One country gets rid of worker rights -> businesses move there and other countries must follow suit. Same with taxes.
There are probably very few things people wouldn't do if the price is high enough. How many people would refuse to lick a boot for ten million dollars? The bigger the wealth differences become, the harder it is to resist the people with wealth. Wealth is the same thing as power, denying that is silly.
The same thing would happen by focusing on technologies that improve more lives right from the start. Instead of cars we'd be developing better public transit, instead of food delivery we'd be developing ways to deliver food to the people who actually need it, etc. Developing luxury goods and hoping it'll at some point benefit the public is an inefficient way to improve lives.
Sure, but making people pay for those treatments themselves does not change anything. For many the quick satisfaction of good food is simply a stronger incentive than a healthy body or a fatter wallet 10 years later.
Inequality can be a cause of suffering, as it can price average individuals out of essential, limited resources like power, land, and skilled labor. For instance, some combination of skill and knowledge held by a few scientists could be applied to develop technology that improves the lives of millions or to create luxury entertainment for a handful. In an environment of extreme inequality, the concentrated wealth of a few elites can more than the wealth of a million average individuals. Because of that the rare talent is more likely to be used for entertainment purposes.
I think the incentive of not getting a life altering or threatening disease is much stronger than having to pay for the treatment yourself. If the cost has any effect on choices, it must be very small because it does not show in statistics.
> I'm also curious if there's a selection pressure in play where the more cruel wealthy people in the Nordic countries move to the US
That's an interesting thought! It would make sense that the people who care less about others and more about themselves would find it easier and more beneficial to leave. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the wealth, personality traits and political views of the people who leave.
Isn't it more dystopian that people doing jobs as essential as cleaning have to live in poverty? Just because everyone can clean doesn't mean the people doing it don't deserve a good life. Without people doing those "easy" jobs those talented people wouldn't have time to build and use their talents. The cleaners enable the talented people and so deserve a fair share of what they produce.
That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way.
Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or median income is the most useful definition. Someone earning less than half of average, for example. That tells you how well they can afford the limited resources of any society, as those track the average purchasing power.
That's not the definition of wealthy. Wealthy is a relative term. It's meaningless to say that a lower middle class person today is wealthy just because people 500 years ago could only dream of the things they have. If other people in the society they currently live in have a million times more, they are not wealthy.
I'm sure you understand how capitalism works. If you do, you should understand that not everyone can be an owner, someone has to do the actual work.
Isn't the point still valid if you consider just the return on capital? If the market cap of the S&P500 was about 18 trillion in 2015 and returns 10%, the income going to to the owners of that capital is 1.8 trillion. In 2025 the market cap is 53 trillion, and a 10% return is then 5.3 trillion. That's an increase of almost 300%.
Now if the average salary was 48,000 in 2015 and there were 150 million people employed in the us, that's 7.2 trillion. The 2025 average is about 66,000 with 160 million employed. That's about 10 trillion. Around 40% increase in income going to labor. Am I missing something?
Where does this return on investment come from? From people working. It's not possible for everyone to live on investments, someone has to do the actual work. Imagine if everyone started investing most of their money now, and after a generation or two everyone had enough capital to live on the interest alone. Who would do the work? I think we would benefit more from letting a larger part of the returns that work creates go to the people who do the work, not to the people that happen to have a lot of capital.
Coming from a country with no tipping at all, it was somewhat creepy how the people expecting tips acted when I visited the US for the first time. You can tell when friendliness is fake/forced, and living in a country without tipping you don't see it nearly as much. I felt a bit uncomfortable.
Might regulations be the result of these "rational markets"? After all, if I invest a lot of money to build apartments, I might want to protect that investment by lobbying for regulations to make it harder for competitors, increasing the value of my investment. Or if I buy an apartment, I might want to prevent others from ruining my view, prevent noise, etc. All completely rational.
Well sure, there's entertainment value. But there's plenty of harmful things that people enjoy that we ban because the entertainment value is not worth the downsides. I enjoy driving very fast, but I'm not allowed to do it (except in very limited areas) because the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
Knives are useful. What's the the benefit of porn? Before I discovered porn, I just used my imagination and got the same level of "entertainment" as you now must get from porn.
Porn does harm some people, as it's easy to get addicted to it, and there's a lot of bad things happening on the supply side of it. I'm sure porn has also changed how people behave and what people expect in relationships, but it's hard to study such things. The amount of sex we have has decreased recently. I don't know if it's due to porn, but it'd be worth studying. If sexual satisfaction is easily available, there's less reason to seek the real thing.
It's beyond parents to fix these things, at best they can delay the discovery of porn for a few years, but that doesn't fix anything.
You would say the same about any group that did the same things to you as the Israeli have done to Palestinians. Answer this: will these actions by Israel decrease or increase the number of people who think that way? Even if they kill all the Palestinians and get rid of the threat in Gaza, they'll just create more, deeper and stronger hate against themselves in the region and the world. If at any point in time they lose the support of the most powerful country on earth, they'll be in huge danger and they can only blame themselves for creating that danger.
Maybe, but it's not possible to critically evaluate everything you see and read. For sure most people don't, and probably no one does all the time. So if before 10% of information was lies and manipulation, most of the information was still good, or at least something that a real person thought was good. Now, or soon, anything you read or watch has a 99% chance of being generated by someone who wants to manipulate you, because those who want to manipulate have something to gain from it, and are willing to spend more money to do it than those who want to share the truth.
We are approaching a time when most of that free flowing information is LLM generated propaganda and advertising. The average person can no longer go on the internet and trust any of the things they see or read, so what's the value of such information? I would prefer the free internet of the 90s and 00s, but we're losing it even without these laws.
I believe there's enough capable people to whom money is not all that matters for this to not be as big of an issue as you think. Sure, people who only care about their personal wealth and power will leave everything behind for a chance to get it, but the vast majority of people would pursue their dreams close to their family and friends for just a good salary if given the capital to do so. It might even be a positive for society to lose those self-centered power hungry people, as they have negative effects in addition to the positive economic ones, especially when you give them a lot of power.