Yes, inequality increasing because the richest aggregate in the US says absolutely nothing about how the quality of life has changed for regular people. It's a red herring.

If a rich person moves into my tiny town, I don't suddenly become worse off, despite inequality increasing drastically.

That doesn't necessarily follow, for reasons you allude to. Massive wealth inequality is a lot more tolerable, if the _poor_ people are (by historical standards) incredibly wealthy.

"it's not what you earn it's what you keep" - someone on the internet

Honest question: is that true?

I mean practical weather (in)equality, not just comparing how many billion of dollars some few billionaires have vs the poorest people on Earth.

In the past there were Kings and peasants, Masters and slaves, people who had everything by birth right and other people who had nothing and never could have it, not even the right to education. I'm not saying nowadays there are not instances of that in still too many contexts (not only in far away countries), but claiming that wealth inequality was never so big as today sounds quite odd to me.

But that isn't what's happening. The bottom quartile's incomes have shrunk when adjusted for inflation and they have stagnated since the 80s.

That IS a problem.

This is obviously wrong. Take India and Switzerland as an example. Also, in the post-war era, the Western European countries saw a diminution of wealth disparity at the same time as a great wealth increase.

Actually the history of the western world in the 20th century looks more like “the less wealth disparity, the more wealth growth” (I'm not implying causality, but at least the correlation goes this way).

Yes, actually it is. There are other problems that are negative consequences of inequality, such as the US having turned into a plutocracy etc., but inequality just by itself is a problem.

To quote: "The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world. But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much."[1]

Let me repeat this: in our fairly rich developed world, inequality is the problem, it is more important than overall wealth of the society. So the "rising tide raises all boats" meme is a nice metaphor but empirically just pure nonsense.

Furthermore, even the very rich in the more unequal societies are, in many aspects that matter, worse off than average people in more equal societies, even though they are much weather individually. This surprised me. A lot.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en

I really think wealth inequality is a terrible metric for overall social wellbeing because it does not consider that the baseline has risen. It just comes off as a greedy attitude to be salivating over your neighbor's plate simply because it is larger, even though yours is quite full.

That’s it right there. If wealth is relative then you can’t possibly create a system that will result in equality of outcome since we’re all born unique.

If this is true then how come despite people being richer today than in the past they are still less wealthy from a relative perspective? Your statement is obviously incompatible with our current world and fails to explain why we had less inequality in the past where people had less talent and worse personal conduct.

>None of it is society [1], unless you consider refraining from forcibly conscripting everybody into communist slavery to be a structural factor.

I don't know where you get these crazy ideas but the conventional solution to high unemployment is to just increase consumer inflation which makes it lucrative for everyone to work and whatever inflation we have right now is clearly benefiting existing wealth holders at the expensive of workers.

Decreasing wealth inequality is quite simple. Just increase wealth at the bottom. If poor people at the bottom have $100 to their name and Bill Gates has $100 billion then he is a billion times richer but if you made sure everyone at the bottom had $200 then Bill Gate's relative wealth would basically be cut in half and he would only be half a billion times richer.

It's pretty obvious that there are fundamental problems in modern economies and a lot of them relate to government policy.

I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...

This is a problematic statement. Wealth inequality is not a huge problem. If we removed all the billionaires, people who are currently starving or unable to get clean water would still be in the same situation. Getting the base level of human condition up is the important thing, and it generally occurs much more in systems that are not trying to crush people who create vast amounts of value.

> as far as I can see any kind of arguments against tackling it such as 'we'll miss out on innovation' are capitalist propaganda. This is why it would be good to have accurate historical data to respond to these kind of arguments.

I don't see why this is the case. If you let people take more risks and try more things, with commensurate value exchange to the value they provide, then more things will appear. That's just normal.

You can see it in the small even - if teams are allowed to fail and succeed by taking risks, then they will take some risks. If they are never rewarded for succeeding, or even punished for succeeding, then they will never try.

No, it's not.

Income inequality would be, in an idealized state where you both had a perfect market (with all the ideal rational choice theory attributes like perfect information and perfect utility maximization) andp erfectly equal initial distribution of wealth. Or, at least, the instantaneous income differential at the first moment would be, as well as the resulting wealth inequality; once you are past that you have wealth inequality which means that differences in market clearing price even in a perfect market no longer perfectly reflect differences in utility produced, because the interests of the wealthier participants are favored, so neither income inequality nor it's resulting wealth inequality reflect productivity, and with mortality and inheritances wealth inequality is even farther from a reflection of income inequality after the first generation.

Being born a Trump—or even a member of the first world middle class—puts you pretty high on the world distribution of wealth from day one, and your personal productivity has no contribution to that.

So I keep being told, but it's pretty hard to see any evidence of this.

I still don’t see a peaceful alternative. The wealth gap is growing inexorably year after year, decade after decade, and the richest of the rich certainly aren’t voluntarily tripping over themselves to redistribute the gains.

Would you be willing to articulate why wealth inequality is bad for society? I am fairly certain that wealth inequality globally is higher than it was in 2000. At the same time, well the poorest globally are doing much much better on average.

In my mindset as long as the median is improving and the poorest are improving, the ratio of rich to poor isn't important and isn't clearing a bad thing if the inequality is increasing. You seem to think otherwise, why?

It was caused by economic parasites, not choices.

I know a fair number of people who inherited property and do almost no productive work.

They live lavish lifestyles and live almost entirely off the hard work of others while their wealth - the result of the hard work of others - both grows and sustains them.

I know a fair few others who are worth to society far in excess of what they are paid and have very little left of that once bills from monopolies, rent and taxes are accounted for.

At some point this system breaks down completely.

You mention disparity as if it is a problem but ignore that most of the population is much better off. Your source clearly shows that in 1800 the world population was mostly poor, while in 2015 it was mostly _not_ poor. This despite the population being 7x larger.

Which is exactly my point - the system that generates billionaires has done so as a side effect of generating enough wealth to lift a several times larger world population above the poverty line.

Is disparity itself so offensive that we should let everyone be poor just to avoid billionaires? I can't get behind that, but I do want better laws to prevent corruption.

Rationally, I'd say that you were correct, but that does nothing to address the feelings of the folks missing the "American Dream".