Is financial inequality good for society? Surely, if cleaners,

>>1788878
Compared to what?

Inequality will exist no matter what. You realistically cannot remove everything that makes us different and unequal.

You need to ask some questions.
Are people motivated by self interest?
Why should people be equal?
How much is equal enough?
Do humans fall victim to the vices of power, honor, pleasure and greed?
What are you willing to do to make things equal?

>it's another total and complete equality is impossible therefore we should accept one man having a higher networth than a billion poor people combined as just another fact of life thread

>>1788878

>Surely, if cleaners, nurses, taxi drivers, etc... were all millionaires no one would want to do those jobs and so society would fall apart.

1. Nurses get paid a shit ton in the US and most Western countries, don't know where you live.

2. Not everyone has the aptitude to be an electrical engineer or a surgeon or a CPA or a lawyer or a CEO.

3. Too much inequality creates resentment, which can lead to political and social instability in the long run.

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>>1788878
The most productive, stable, and politically well adjusted and fastest growing societies in histories were the ones with the strongest middle class. The most productive economic period in human history took place in the largely middle class culture that emerged after World War 2, where the free world was under constant pressure from the Communists to maintain a fair society. Under these conditions, lots of people had capital to borrow against to launch their own ventures, often failing, sometimes succeeding in a free enterprise system.

Some inequality is to be expected, obviously a doctor should be better compensated than a janitor. But beyond a certain amount it stops being just a benign feature of society and becomes something that actively harms it. Capital concentrates into the hands of money-lenders who are far more cautious and risk-adverse and raising capital becomes slanted in favor of people who already have lots of it to borrow against. This suppresses the natural entrepreneurial spirit of the people and force them into the ranks of working poor, where they are stuck doing menial work for a meager wage and previously staple features of life like home ownership and healthcare fall out of reach, creating a negative feedback loop where demand becomes anemic driving down business and forcing companies to make painful cuts to payroll, further aggravating the problem.

>>1788878
This isn't exactly a counter to your point, but there is no such thing as necessary "bad jobs". The worst paying occupations are the ones that could be eliminated without consequence.

>>1789257
Are you saying that the downward spiral is a natural occurrence and not the result of government intervention?

>>1789274
Define "natural"

Because you have about 800 billion dollars worth of tax evasion a year in the US.

That's mostly rich fucks who can afford tax lawyers.

>>1789278
What if the government just printed more money instead of taxing? It collects value from everybody equally and there is no way to evade it.

>>1789281
One word: hyperinflation.

>>1789281
This creates inflation and makes rich poor, which is big no no.

>>1789281
You get hyperinflation. It's basically what we are doing now just more slowly

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>>1789274
I'm the guy you were responding too, btw
>a natural occurrence and not the result of government intervention?
It's hard to say, really. The government has always played a more active role in the economy than historic regimes so the two seem intertwined. The government makes the laws that guarantee the capital and tell us that the little green slips of paper are worth something. The free market uses these tools to create and disperse things and services of value, with a built in creative destruction mechanism that prunes out inefficient or obsolete institutions rather than allowing them to become entrenched, as what happens under conditions of high income inequality, where society becomes notoriously more risk-adverse and less adaptable.

>>1789295
Hyperinflation only happens if a country tries to pay off a huge debt all at once with printed money. It won't happen like this.

The real issue is that this can't be done with physical money.

>>1789305
MV=PQ
M being money supply, V being the velocity of money, P being price level, and Q being total output. Now, V and Q are going to be mostly static in the short term, so in order to compensate for that, P is going to have to rise in proportion with M. And that means hyperinflation.

>>1789305
Paper currency is only worth what people think it is. Inflation is a accumulative thing so it get worse and more dramatic over time. Venezuela tried to use money printing to finance public needs. Printing money does not work.

>>1789296
Well it actually hurts the poor more then the rich. Most rich people have assets that raise in value even with high inflation (real estate, gold)

>>1789328
Venezuela is a textbook case of not putting all your economic eggs in one basket and has little to do with their fiscal policy. When so much of your economy is dependent on the price of oil remaining at a certain level, when global prices fall below those numbers things get really bad.

>>1789338
I think he meant that it is a bigger problem to upset the rich than the poor.

>>1788878
Some inequality is health and to be expected in a functioning economy. After all skilled labor and professionals merit better compensation, else we wouldn't get anybody to put up with the hard work of being a doctor, etc.

Wealth inequality becomes a problem when it is a side effect of structural biases that favor the few at the expense of the many.

>It is important to distinguish between “good” and “bad” inequality, with good inequality arising from fair and open competition, and bad inequality arising from market failure in the form of corruption and sweetheart deals that benefit those at the top, and various labor market bottlenecks at the bottom that prevent poor children from fairly pursuing opportunities; e.g., low-quality schooling, labor market discrimination, unequal risks of incarceration. There is all manner of smoking-gun evidence to suggest that wages and compensation are increasingly distorted by various types of market failure – and that “bad” inequality is on the rise.

http://news.stanford.edu/2015/12/26/inequality-grusky-qna-121915/

>>1788878
why do these jobs have to exist though?
surely technology will at some point deprecate all of these. cleaning and doctor-aiding robots, self-driving cars (and more pertinently trucks), etc.
at that point the only "shitty" jobs become overseeing and maintaining these fleets

>>1789620
We could already be at that point, but those systems require high initial investment, which most people don't have enough capital for.

>>1789342
There are more rich than poor, and the causes of their disquiet tend to be closer to survival than those of that of the rich.

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>>1789564
>unequal risks of incarceration

>>1789656
>those systems require high initial investment, which most people don't have enough capital for.
kinda confused by what you're trying to say
first, the tech is going to decrease in cost/difficulty of setup and management as time goes on almost by definition, not infinitely, but the limit will definitely be within reach of almost all businesses
second, the jobs will disappear, people won't buy things to do their jobs then subcontract them out. it doesn't matter if most people don't have the capital, businesses and entrepreneurs do, and are happy to put down the cash if the recurring cost decreases * appraised duration of plausible use -cost of maintenance is greater than the up front cost
hell, even if they don't, at the point that they become profitable according to that, an entrepreneur outside the field will create/buy them and rent their services

apologies if this isn't very coherent

>>1788878
> if cleaners, nurses, taxi drivers, etc... were all millionaires
See, this is where the problem begins. Imagine you were to give millions of dollars to the underdogs.
to compensate, prices of everything else would be raised dramatically, and those underdog jobs would be impossible to get, thus it's oxymoronic to say "Millionaire nurse", because that's impossible. Financial inequality isn't necessarily "good for society"; it's a byproduct of things that do actually end up being good for society. "Wealth disparity" is a bullshit idea, because only the middle class live content; the rich actually have a lot of money, but when you look at it realistically, they're not spending thousands of dollars more than you on the same things that you buy. They buy as much as you buy on a day to day basis. The reason they have money, is because they don't spend it. They've learned to be financially responsible, as the poor have learned to be work-responsible. The upset over income inequality is relatively a new idea.

But the people in the bottom of society today have access to a much better standard of living and luxury goods than ever before. Even though the rich are getting richer, with the money you have today you can buy cheap cell phones, cheap computers, cheap refrigerators, cheap food, cheap HD tv's, and other products. And everyone has access to information a lot easier due to the internet and mass media than ever before so it is not as concentrated as it once was.

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>>1788878

>cleaners
Robots will do this in 50 years

>nurses
Understaffed and underpaid means that there is room for improvement. Being well paid does not make you a millionaire.

>taxi drivers
Robots will do this in 10 years.