> that reduced the richest nation to one of the poorest.
Very good point, BTW. You're not going to find a rigid social stratification system in a rich society. Stratification takes over as an outcome of societal collapse, as people are reduced to fighting over scraps of their former wealth and will cling to any form of seeming stability, however damaging in the long term. This is exactly what occurred in the West of late antiquity and the dark ages, culminating in the early middle ages.
>So a society in which there's competition to be among a handful of feudal lords, but where everyone else suffers tenuous and desperation is unconcerning? How so?
To be fair, he did say it's concerning if the top income brackets are static, so as long as we shuffle out our feudal lords from time to time, we should be okay.
>it follows that social mobility is pretty much dead. It is a bleak vision.
I have always found the idea of social mobility depressing. It assumes that we will always have a hierarchy, with some people who are powerful and prestigious and others who are poor and always feel inadequate. It assumes that we will always have an underclass but at least people can leave it.
> The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on.
Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.
> Btw, poor people lacking influence is not consistent with how quite a lot of European nobles died
I believe people dying (noble or otherwise) is the recurring historical singularity we're trying to avoid; so we can both acknowledge that the poor can violently and quite temporarily gain political advantage while recognizing that during non-singular time periods (which is most of time) the converse is generally true.
> Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable?
Yes. However, too much equality also makes society too static, because no one is incentivized to innovate anymore. The problem, as always, is maintaining the right balance.
>Can you imagine a better way to destroy social mobility than by telling poor kids that the way to get rich is by exploiting people, while the rich kids know, from having watched the preceding generation do it, how it's really done?
I'm so glad someone finally said this, I wasn't sure if I was the only one with the same theory about inequality and it is articulated well here. It's "cultural inequality", inequality of cultural capital.
> Few are getting richer, nearly everyone is getting poorer. Your solution is elusive.
The material science necessary for pitchforks and guillotines has been well understood for centuries. Extreme inequality had the same outcome across human cultures and generations.
> As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.
This sounds like a bit of a stretch. Let's try and make people a bit more equal first.
>Currently we're on our way to the first option. But the second is the only viable long-term outcome - because in the limit the wealthy will continue to play status games with wealth, and the circles of distribution will become smaller and smaller until eventually literally everything is owned by a small handful of individuals and - perhaps - their immediate families.
That's been the case for most of human history. I don't see why this isn't a viable option again. High technology does not mean a humane society. For the majority of the last 10,000 it was pretty much the reverse. Egalitarianism meant primitive, starvation and deprivation meant wealth.
Of course one only need read what happened to monarchs for most of the period. Being king is good, less so when you become furniture for the next king.
> Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons).
I would completely reverse this... a society divided into classes is a precondition for agricultural society (for practical, not social reasons).
In the period of early civilization, convincing people to work 16 hours in the fields or in the mines is very difficult if they have any other viable option, including migrant hunter/gathering. Therefore, it is necessary to create a class of people that have no other viable options, either by slavery or other forms of inequality. The social structures surrounding inequality evolved as a method of maintaining this practical class stratification.
> It's also incredibly successful in destroying social mobility.
I find it difficult to agree with this sentiment. Social mobility might have decreased in the last four decades. But in the longer perspective there has never been a more egalitarian and meritocratic social structure than in our time. And that structure exists mainly in the democratic states of the world.
Came here to say this. The poverty and richness (this word doesn't sound right) of every country can be directly tied to the greed (or lack thereof) of 1 or more rulers, aristocrats, businessmen, dicatators, prime ministers, presidents = "ruling class".
That's all there is to it. No amount of analysis or economic theories, justifications or "studies" can hide that.
> But we know that our very own Anglo-Saxon society was very much a "thar-dominated" one until quite recently and although we've not reached ideal levels of equality, we have significantly cut inequality.
In other words, a "thar-dominated" society won't achieve equality, because the west typically isn't one anymore.
> According to this theory, as I understand it, you can't have the differences among people be too great because it will cause too much power imbalance and resentment and eventually the masses will rise up and destroy the system from within.
You shouldn't think of the destruction of the system from within as the problem. Some might fear that, but afterall, its unlikely that the people without power would beat those that have it.
The problem is the power zero sum game in itself. Wealth and power are both ways to gather even more wealth and power. In a simple society without a government you could simply use the power to buy weapons and soldiers to coerce the wealth of others. In our society you can use power to shape the rules more favorably for your own group.
As the wealth ratio of one group converges to 100%, the other groups have gradually less influence, unless allowed by those in power because of ideology or their good hearts.
Either you see this as fine and natural, or your ideology prefers everyone to have some amount of freedom over their own lives.
In the later case you may look at ways to reduce the wealth and power inequality, by weeding out rules particularly favorable to the powerful, or by trying to spread wealth more evenly.
> Society should be structured in such a way that charity is not needed.
We are a few more millenia away from that one.
It seems our very nature wires us for an us-vs-them mentality and until we can get past that, those patterns will appear in the social structures we set up; naturally creating a ladder of progression.
The idea is nice but the incentives we have to create new products and wealth unfortunately also incentivizes us to hoard the wealth
Very good point, BTW. You're not going to find a rigid social stratification system in a rich society. Stratification takes over as an outcome of societal collapse, as people are reduced to fighting over scraps of their former wealth and will cling to any form of seeming stability, however damaging in the long term. This is exactly what occurred in the West of late antiquity and the dark ages, culminating in the early middle ages.
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