yovargas wrote:If someone could provide some logical reasons why, say, Steve Jobs' enormous wealth contributes to a dysfunctional society, I'd be interested to hear it.
It engenders an unhealthy obsession with iPhones?
No, I got nothing either.
As for societies with small income disparities - btdt. You have a different set of problems to deal with. When money is not sufficient to buy power, something else buys it. In many ways, money is cleaner.
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.
As I previously stated, I appear to be guilty of diverting the topic subject, which was not my intent. Rather than continue with this diversion, I would recommend those who are interested read Pickett and Wilkinson for evidence of why great inequality produces dysfunctional societies.
It is the American idea that anyone can "succeed" if they work hard enough, etc. And that idea has been shown to be a good idea many times.
But the world has changed drastically. The US likes to think of itself as a new nation, but it's not. The USA has quite a long history of freedom and liberalism and democracy - much longer than many other nations on earth.
Now the major economy is China - and China has little notion of freedom or liberalism or democracy. The leaders of China seem to think that in allowing some men to accumulate great wealth they are securing their hold on the nation - but it is already straining at the seams. Many millions of Chinese cannot find work and when they do they often have to leave their children behind and go to one of these factory cities. This system is bound to break down, and probably pretty soon.
But in the meantime, the opportunities for Americans to "succeed" by starting widget factories are few and far between. It is soon found that widgets can be made cheaper in China and no Americans are going to get jobs in them. Americans are working at Walmart, selling cheap Chinese widgets to poor Americans.
And some Americans (and others in other nations) were given to moving fake wealth around and taking a commission on every move. That is not "honest wealth" and it has led to an economic disaster that we have not seen the end of.
When there is a real chance that anyone can rise above poverty into wealth, or relative wealth, then the disparity of wealth between top and bottom doesn't really matter. Everyone can strive to move up. That upward mobility was often just a well-paid job at General Motors - and those jobs, those sorts of jobs, are vanishing.
That's the issue, I think. Not that some people are fabulously wealthy, but that the middle class - which in America was often really working class - is shrinking and losing ground.
