How do you know if it's making "everyone" better off or not? What does 'better off' mean, and how do you measure it?
If you could demonstrate it made 'everyone' better off, I think it'd be an interesting question to consider. But I suspect many of those at the bottom ends of our actually existing inequality are not so "better off".
Measuring simply by how well those who have it worst is a much better metric. A world where all people have it terrible is a bad world. A world where everyone has it at least okay is a much better world.
There are downsides to inequality, but a metric that counts "everyone is miserable" as a success is an awful metric.
"distributed 100 times more unequally" doesn't mean anything, certainly not anything that implies anything about "the worst off". You need to characterize what happens to that specific part of the distribution if you want to estimate the impact.
In particular it is possible to reduce the shares of the top N%, and the bottom N%, increasing the share of the middle, and have many measures of inequality go down.
Well yes decreased inequality globally does make life better, it's just that those who've gained the most (the ones that used to be poorer than the American poor) arent part of your in group
> Inequality is not a good metric for whether or not things are getting better.
That depends on your definition of "better". Given the fact that relative deprivation has a demonstrably very strong negative subjective disutility, demonstrated in many studies, its pretty darned important if you want to understand increases or decreases in actual suffering.
This doesn't fit the simplistic way lots of people would like to think economic indicators should map to human experience, but that's a problem with the simplistic models.
>I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequality start to mean just "a few people are doing really good" and I think there are far fewer people that are bothered by that.
I'd say the problem with inequality is something else entirely than "some people doing really good" vs "lots of people doing really bad".
It's that there are resources in the world, and some people have way more access to them.
This can hold even when all people are out of poverty: of the potential and resources of the world, still some people could take the lion's share to the exclusion of others, regardless of whether everybody has a house and food on their table.
And this inequality (with the true sense of the word, not mere poverty vs richness) is also related to opportunities and squandered potential (as in: yeah, we all have UBI, but this dumb mega-rich person could pay his way to Harvard, whereas some other with much larger potential -- e.g. smarts, inventiveness, etc-- had to settle for some lesser school, and didn't get as far in their career).
Alright, narrower spreads in economic inequality appears to connote greater overall happiness in the measured society. Perhaps attributable to the averaging and not representative of the outliers, or demonstrable of modality, but that might be a separate argument. Northern European countries are famed for ranking near the top. The degree to which a society is advanced can be measured in part by how it treats its most disadvantaged members. And in the long run, we help ourselves by helping each other.
But (playing the devil's advocate here) I'm interested in equalizing opportunity, not in equal outcome and artificial fairness.
If this notion is ridiculous, would somebody care to enlighten / disillusion?
Note: Income inequality [0] and poverty rate [1] are in-distribution relative measures, not absolute measures. You could “improve” these measures by making everyone worse off (i.e. a Pareto worsening).
Makes what worse? Nobody is arguing here that gross inequality is good. The question here is whether "70% of current income" is a reasonable metric for individual retirement.
Thanks for linking to the post with the methodology, it was interesting. It does show the difficulty of trying to get accurate numbers, although the author has clearly made an effort to.
Re: the effect of inequality: sure, that's the effect on income. But that is obviously not all that matters.
Yes, the things I am referring to are subjective. Yes, they are hard to measure. But this doesn't mean we should just ignore them, and focus on what we can easily measure. Sounds like a recipe for optimising the wrong thing.
Exactly. We talk about income inequality being bad, but obviously if you're on the higher side of the average, it has a direct financial benefit (though other aspects, like a higher crime rate, are still bad for you).
It's always nagged me how we can say the economy has improved without taking the distribution into account. It's like saying one person gained five bucks and three people lost a dollar. Sure there is two more dollars but the community/society isn't necessarily better for it.
So what? Inequality should only matter to you personally if it means the lower bound on income, the poorest of the poor, is going down. If the richest is getting richer, maybe that means the poorest are becoming poorer as a consequence, but not necessarily, in fact, most likely not.
Because if you define "bad" as "produces human misery", inequality, in and of itself, has been shown to be bad. Relative deprivation has been demostrated to be a major source of disutility.
I still fail to see how "economic inequality" is a bad thing.
If you accept that we will never be equal (aka aren't a communist) then the question becomes, what is a "good" level of inequality? How do you determine that? Does inequality increasing actually mean anything?
I'd argue inequality is quite meaningless. Especially on a national basis. Everyone can be equally poor, what good did lower inequality do then? Why focus on inequality instead of something like poverty? As Louis CK tells his daughter in an episode of Louis "The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them."
Some believe that equality means that the gap between the rich and poor is lessened, and if that was your frame of mind, then it does seem like global inequality has risen.
However, absolute poverty is decreasing just as you said, and i think that ought to be the real measure. Who cares if the richest of the rich is 100million times better off than the poorest, if the poorest is better off already?
If you could demonstrate it made 'everyone' better off, I think it'd be an interesting question to consider. But I suspect many of those at the bottom ends of our actually existing inequality are not so "better off".
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