(2) Most current politico-economic systems across the world have the feature that any given rich person has much more say in the political process than a poor person.
(3) It doesn't take much of a study of history to ascertain that, at least in the last century, rich people have used the additional power they have over the political process to make decisions that make them yet richer. Which then increases their political power even more. And the cycle repeats.
(4) There are at least two obvious solutions to (2) and (3), and which a lot of people subscribe to:
* Either, pass laws and pursue policies within the current system that make it very hard for anyone to become too rich or too poor relative to the average. This is what you will usually see a lot of regular people espousing.
* Or, redesign the politico-economic system so that rich people don't have a disproportionate influence on the political process. This is, perhaps, the motivation of some people working on crypto-currencies, even if they are misguided in their efforts.
The reason you find people who think "inequality is some intrinsic evil" is because many people believe that the second solution is not possible, i.e. it is human nature to exploit others and they will exploit in any unequal system and, hence, inequality is always an undesirable state.
If the system were working for most people and they felt they had good lives, I don't even think people would be particularly concerned about the concentration of power that comes with the concentration of wealth because they would see the system working for them.
Certainly we should talk in terms of ensuring there is an adequate floor, rather than in terms of bringing down the ceiling. What's the point of lowering that ceiling if the people at the bottom still can't see a doctor? And raising the floor is indeed what a lot of progressive proposals do aim for (Medicare for All, or Living Wage, or UBI, etc.). But providing that floor requires funding. Funding anything is always redistribution of some kind with the wealthier paying more because that's where the money is.
What I've always seen suggested is that extremes of inequality are bad for society. That idea seems to be an implicit assumption behind this article.
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.
Sorry if this is a naive question, but is that really true? What's the evidence for believing that, much less treating it as fact?
The economic collapse of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact counties, Venezuela, North Korea.
By allowing a free market invasion in their Communist utopia, the Chinese Communist Party long ago abandoned their core ideology in favor of “pragmatic authoritarianism.” They get to stay in power, while reaping economic benefits impossible in a truly communist economy.
It is still true that most anybody can get rich in a capitalist economy if they’re some combination of smart, hard-working, or lucky. This causes lots of people to try.
The Polya process is another thing that comes to mind. In that model, if you were picked in the past then you are more likely to be picked in the future. That's the classic competitive exclusion "rich get richer" at work.
But here's the equalizer: Every distribution of possible outcomes under the Polya process has an equal probability of happening.
That strikes me as very interesting. Basically, if you were to run history forwards from the same starting point again and again, in some of those iterations your life would turn out significanty better than others. So, there is equality for everyone in that sense, but on a case-by-case basis it's more of a better luck next time.
Economic stratification is effectively a stratification of people's degrees of influence over the natural world, so unchecked economic stratification necessarily means that there's a breaking point where a system which was previously democratic stops being so.