Is what you could claim if inequality wasn’t a detrimental to quality of life in and of it self, a fact which psychologists and sociologists have pretty well established at this point.
Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
Sure, you can downplay the effects all you want, but this has been thoroughly studied, and there is a consensus within the scientific community that the negative effects of inequality are real. Disputing it at this point is kind of like disputing climate change.
If all of Bezos, Musk, Buffett, Ellison, and Gates’ wealth were instantly destroyed, inequality would fall quite a bit and yet my life would not be improved in any discernible way.
That is not how this works. Collectively (all else being equal) a lot of lives would indeed improve, or at the very least, the collective perception of the quality of life would improve significantly (in a statistical sense).
What you are saying is the equivalent of stating that today is cold, so climate change must be false.
Their possession of vast wealth is not a negative for me, nor would its destruction benefit me. There’s very few cases where we are competing against each other for goods and services.
If you’re asking whether I’d be better off if you instead seized it and gave me some, of course I would, but it’s important to understand that that improvement comes from being given money, not by the reduction of inequality.
Its been a while since I read the literature, but if I remember correctly, this effect you are describing is usually controlled for. If I remember correctly, it is the inequality it self, that decreases quality of life, and is independent of the increase in wealth among the poorer public.
That is, over a certain baseline, an increase in wealth does not yield significant improvement in quality of life (i.e. diminishing returns). Redistributing the wealth to increase inequality will improve the collective quality of life, not because the general public has more money, but because there is more equality.
Again it is up to you if you don’t believe this, just be aware that your believes are contrary to the scientific consensus.
I’m not sure if you’re inadvertently or intentionally trying to move the goalposts in our conversation.
There’s no doubt that money has a declining marginal utility. That’s as established an economic fact as they come.
There is still a leap from that fact to concluding that reducing inequality by vaporizing the wealth of five well-known billionaires would improve the economic lives of hundreds of millions of people. I believe it would not.
I do agree that if that were true, it would be strong evidence that inequality standing alone is causally negative (rather than merely a lack of redistribution being the actual negative and inequality being merely a correlated outcome, which is what I think is the case).
I’m sure this is not this simple, and I’m sorry if hinted that it was. Just how rich the richest 5 people in the USA are, is really emblematic of the wealth is distributed, you can’t just take away their wealth and leave it at that, you’ll have to shave off the wealth of the right-hand side of the wealth distribution curve such that the 5 richest people aren’t so filthy and unbelievably wealthy as they currently are. This is how things work in the real world, and what social scientists create their models after, and that is what I’ve been assuming you meant. Not a magic scenario in which the five richest people, and only the five richest people have their wealth erased.
Throughout this thread my goalpost has always been that inequality is in and off it self a detriment to the quality of life for most people. This effect has been measured, thoroughly studied, and is real, we shouldn’t be debating about that, because, if you don’t believe it is real, you’re believe runs counter to the scientific consensus and there is nothing I can say to convince you. However you seem to be in disbelief about how it works, so I’m gonna provide a plausible scenario. Note, I am not a social scientist, and surely there are more informed guesses out there, if you have the time, and are so inclined, you can probably find better sources on the web that explains this better.
In an unequal but wealthy society access to basic needs might be available to all. However access to other things which affects your quality of life is distributed. You might have access to education, but of lesser quality than the richest 10%, this gives you lesser access to better jobs, etc. Healthcare has a similar story, and so does recreation. You might have to settle for a badly moved lawn shared by dozens of people, while in another part of town the rich have a giant polo-field which is hardly ever used. In a more equal society, that polo-field may be repurposed to serve more people, access to health care and education is more equal, and the overall quality of life is improved. This is regardless of how much money is in the hands of the lower classes.
Note that this is just me—not a social scientist—guessing how this works, so take it with a pinch of salt. Other people have done quality research into this, and know it better than me. However, it may very well be that the mere fact that you have people that are this rich, really incentivizes the society around them to accommodate them, and their interest, at the cost of accommodating the rest of society.
In all those stories, it is the redistribution of something better to people originally without it that is the agent of change/improvement.
The analog where inequality alone is a problem is if you take the polo field from the wealthy and make it unusable by everyone. That doesn’t make anyone any better off.
People who talk about inequality are almost always actually seeking redistribution but have the sense to realize that arguing “I want what these other people have without working for it” garners much less sympathy than if they frame it as a global inequality.
Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.