Every time I see a reference to the meme that the top M% of the population has N% of the total wealth for some N > M, I always want to point out "Inequality in Equalland" (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-equ...), a thought experiment which shows that even in a society equal to the point of parody, 20% of the population would hold at least 64% of the wealth just by saving for retirement over the course of their careers.
It makes slightly more sense to talk about income inequality, and much of the article looks at what a top-tier income looks like, but it makes little to no sense to gripe about wealth inequality.
Even beyond income, I think that what we really ought to concentrate on is inequality of consumption. If some person is immensely rich but lives modestly and either gives most of their income to charity or reinvests it I don't really see how they're meaningfully contributing to inequality. And if they just pile the money under their mattress we might as well just print money instead of taxing theirs, the net effect on everyone else is the same but the miser gets whatever emotional gratification they're seeking.
I agree with the first half of what you said; getting bothered about income seems like sour grapes, but I don't see anything wrong with finding wastefulness tacky. (With the caveat that "wastefulness" remains subjective.)
However, I disagree with your claim of "just print money"; doing so devalues currency for everyone, including people genuinely saving money for the future.
If we wanted to maximize the value of our money, we could straightforwardly start reducing the number of dollars and introduce widespread deflation. What we do instead is try keep inflation predictable, so that interest rates on savings and debts can easily factor in inflation and neither savers nor borrowers are treated unfairly.
Getting back to the case in question, the link between printing money and inflation isn't magical, the mechanism that turns more money into inflation is people using that money to bid up the prices of goods and services. But the money that was in the mattress wasn't being spent on anything. So both taxing that money away and printing new money result in exactly the same amount of new money chasing goods and services.
You don't have to take my word for it. During '09 the supply of dollars increased by a pretty sizable amount, but we actually managed to have negative inflation because the Fed's interest on reserves policies managed to keep all that new money in the vaults of large banks rather than in circulation.
Charlie asks a variant of one of my favorite thought experiments: what is society like when everyone lives like the 1% of today, affordable housing, universal health care, robotic servants, cures for nearly all of today's diseases, cheap customize mass production, a society where only the 5% make a meaningful contribution to society (designers, artists, entertainers, writers, scientists, etc).
One theme he doesnt mention is what is the road there like. What happens when all the fry cooks are unemployed because of fast food robots, maybe 30% of the middle class is suddenly unemployed?
That's because writing stories around the question of how to get there from here is how I earn my living.
(Also: it's hard. Because if it was obvious how to get there from here, we'd already be following the roadmap! :)
NB: It's worth looking, not at unemployment figures, but at employment stats -- what proportion of the population are (a) working and (b) not underemployed in some way. Globally employment is somewhere under 60% on average; in the USA right now it may well be as low as 40% in some parts (recession-hit, with folks working part-time jobs or unemployed).
I deserved that.:-) It also explains why I'm a devoted reader of your novels.
So the non-stupid view of the way forward is that society (and by implication those who generate excess value) must provide for those unable to do so. I just cant see letting some sizable fraction living in sub-civilazed conditions. This sounds sort of Marxist, but it isnt. It is an essential part of capitalism. You get rich because you make everyone else richer in turn.
Since employment is such an important component of psychological well being (near future anyway) I expect to see the full-employment work week to slid down to 20 hours or so, so everyone has a job.
I think of Henry Ford, fascist that he was, because he paid his employees a high wage so that they could afford to buy his cars.
Let us not forget that the social security system, with unemployment insurance and a state pension, was invented in the late 19th century by that well-known radical leftist, Prince Otto von Bismarck.
(He did it specifically to undermine the socialists, who he viewed as an internal security threat: it was the usual game of giving 90% of the supporters enough to buy them off and then rounding up the 10% radical fringe.)
The greatest hazard for our collective future is that the wealthiest section of our societies seem to have forgotten that there's an implicit social contract in consumer capitalism: mainly because many of them are engaged in financial manipulation with the goal of concentrating wealth, rather than actual primary production with the goal of creating wealth (like Henry Ford -- or, for that matter, Steve Jobs).
Once a capitalist society switches from producing and distributing wealth (so that everyone has an incentive to pitch in and work for it) to allowing the strong to grab as much as they can, the outlook for any kind of cooperation to produce long-term growth becomes bleak.
And why, you ask is the traditional retirement age 65? Bismark decided that too. Very few workers lived more than a year or two beyond 65, if they lived that long. It was a great sop, few collected, but everyone felt protected.
There are many, many third-world countries where the gap between the 1 and the 99% is much larger than it is in the Western world. Without wishing to be depressing, I see no obvious reason why our society couldn't slip into the same trap; it's been like that before!
maybe 30% of the middle class is suddenly unemployed?
30% of the middle class not participating in the formal labor market would take us to the strange alien society of Japan in the present day or the US in the 1960s.
Who knows, full employment might just have been a weird fluke. For that matter, employment might have been a weird fluke.
I don't know what it would be like for others, but if the society was 100% equal and egalitarian, I would be bored to death.
It's the same old question as: what do people do when they get to Heaven? Right now I have something to strive for and somewhere to get to. If I got the same share of food/amenities/service as everyone else regardless of how hard I work and how smart I am, I would kill myself. Either that or I would be transformed into a pathetic measly creature which has near zero impact on the entropy of the Universe.
Are you sure that's not the result of social conditioning? Surely, humans, esp. males have an innate aggressive/competitive behavior but it hasn't always been the case that people want to be compensated for their work with material goods to be satisfied. Michelangelo was rich yet he barely ate, Einstein wasn't rich but i doubt he was unhappy. Someone from a former communist country could chime in about the differences of an egalitarian society.
> Someone from a former communist country could chime in
I am from a former communist country. If you ask my opinion, communism was the most repulsive and despicable experiment in the history of mankind. Nazism was communism under a different name. The way people bonded with each other was through vile and resentful hate of the westernized upper class (communism) or the Jews and the British (nazism). Schoolteachers brainwashed children from the early age to become haters as well. Both were populist movements enabled by "liminal" conditions of post-WWI period and spearheaded by ruthless Machiavellian manipulators of public opinion who harnessed the newly emergent mass-media to appeal to the disgruntled poorly educated populace lacking a better leader. See any Dostoyevsky's novel where he portrays the character known as the "Underground Man" for a better background, as well as the following links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leaders...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/.
You introduce a dichotomy between wealth (aka Bill Gates) and fame (aka Michelangelo, Einstein). It's a false dichotomy. As PG wrote, money is not wealth. The way money works is that it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people. The way fame works is it makes you important in the eyes of a number of people as well, perhaps a different kind of people, but the underlying logic is the same. It's not one against the other, and whoever ardently defends that idea carries an agenda. Ultimately both money and fame are tokens for power. If you were infinitely powerful, you would need neither.
What makes you think that a society in a position of universal material wealth would be egalitarian? It's just as likely that the basis of social hierarchy would shift even more towards connections, beauty, style and knowledge. And there would still be striving for limited resources; there are only so many people that this season's hottest media stars will sleep with, so many housebuilding plots available with a view of the Taj Mahal, a limited number of penthouses overlooking Central Park. Yes, you could live a physically comfortable life anywhere you choose, but admiration, acclaim, worship and respect would still have to be earned.
A society where almost everyone was living at the level where self-actualization was their primary concern would not be boring, even if it contained boring people.
And how are you, sophacles, not doing the same right now by appealing to high-brow marxist morality?
Oh, I know, marxist morality is convenient because it allows people to feel superior to others without experiencing remorse for having such feelings. How nice, isn't it?
I'm not sure how you are getting that I am looking down on you, let alone deriving pleasure and self-identity from it.
I simply was observing that your statements fit the pattern I mentioned. I think it is unfortunate that people try so hard to find ways to be superior at the expense of others, but I don't really take pleasure in the fact that I see others doing it, and I certainly don't derive my self-identity from who is my "better" or my "inferior". Nor do I think everyone is "equal" in the mathematical sense, but that is not really what egalitarian means; such accusations, and the equating of egalitarianism to Marxism, are merely strawmen.
It is an unfortunate consequence of the Internet that people get to argue with each other without knowing who they really are.
I don't need to see others worse off than myself in order to be happy. I just need to remember who I myself was two or five years ago. I am rapidly becoming someone else, a larva turning into a butterfly if you forgive the hackneyed expression.
To you, the opinions I express signify contempt towards others. In reality, the only true contempt I experience is towards paths I almost took when I was growing up. Without that contempt there would be hardly any growth. By the way, there is a good movie by French director Godard called "Contempt". One of my favorite quotes is from that movie: "Oh, the gods... I know exactly how they feel."
For the wealthy this might seem acceptable, but the thing everyone forgets is that the fry cooks and the middle class are not going to go without a fight.
And the first ones up against the wall are the wealthy. No amount of private security, guard towers, and barbed wire fences can stop millions of desperate, hungry people with nothing left to lose.
Unless the poor find a way to efficiently organize themselves, I think private security can easily stop them. In such a dystopian future, a well funded, well equipped, well trained private security force of a 100 can take out a million opponents. When you're in your fortified complex with a mass of people outside demanding justice, you call in an artillery attack or an airstrike.
Tell that to the copiously armed forces of Egypt. Or Libya.
One doesn't need smart bombs or even automatic weapons to revolt, and in a society where the private security patrolling your gates and walls are cousins and brothers to the desperate, repressed poor, you will also have trouble getting them to pull the trigger. This has been a major factor in the Arab Spring.
The rich simply do not live in the vacuum that many of them seem to think they live in.
The armed forces of Egypt declined to put down the revolt, which they very easily could have. The revolt in Libya would have failed if not for outside help from the West. And these are two countries with militaries that have pretty much never won a war against other countries. Libya even lost to Chadians with machine guns mounted to Toyota trucks not so long ago.
If you look at successful revolts in history, usually either the deposed leaders were soft-hearted and let things get out of control (French revolution, Russian revolution), there were powerful factions favoring the revolt (American revolution), or there was outside help (American revolution again, various resistance movements in WWII). I can't think of any revolts that succeeded against sufficiently ruthless rulers without foreign intervention.
Look into the history of the Boer War, the Jacquerie, the US Civil War, or the Roman treatment of excessively rebellious tribes (the Bar Kokhba revolt would be a good place to start).
Getting people to pull the trigger might be a problem in some homogenous country like Finland, but here in the US, the teabaggers hate the occupiers and vice versa, and it would not be hard to get them to pull the trigger on each other. Even if it was, it would be easy to bring in foreign mercenaries who don't particularly care about either group. And if that was too hard to manage, by hypothesis we're talking about a world in which robots are capable of doing so much work that most people can't find jobs. Presumably these robots would make passable soldiers/security guards.
None of this means that the rich and powerful would necessarily have the inclination to brutally put down a revolt. The certainly don't now. I hope they never do. But they could if they wanted to.
Until we invent strong AI, jobs will always exist that humans can do better than computers. And once we invent strong AI, work becomes optional for 100% of people. (Or we all die horribly because somebody screwed up making the strong AI.)
Socialism works if and only if society can continue to function with 0 people working.
Supposing everyone is 'rich' (ie, can sustain heavy-duty research into space colonization supply chains without beggaring nations), what incentive do people have to go on the highly risky business of space colonization? You've got to have that itch to hit the frontier and keep going.
Personally, I have no great desire (today) to go wandering around the stars and be involved in sifting data points regarding exoplanets for years while stuck in a small enclosed space. Leaving aside the pay and risk , I'd go flippin' nuts in such an environment. Other people can sustain that life - today's submariners and Antarctic researchers.
What I'd leap at would be the chance to homestead another Terra-like planet as a farmer/rancher/etc. That's its own form of high-risk grunt work, but the thought of exploring and walking about on an unexplored planet with clean air sounds like a great life. Better than cube work, at least. :D
Alas, even given a reasonable form of interstellar travel for human physiological constraints, the chances of finding a target planet with an oxygen atmosphere but no pre-existing biosphere is very low. And the question of human food chain compatibility with alien biospheres is ... well, there's a very good chance that they would find us crunchy to snack upon, rather than vice versa. (I'm thinking at a microbiological level. H. G. Wells hit the hammer on the nail with "War of the Worlds" in more ways than one.)
The idea of finding a ready-made habitable planet somewhere out there isn't science fiction, it's pure fantasy.
You don't colonize the new world by paddling across the Atlantic in a dugout canoe with a few of your friends, expecting to rent an apartment in midtown Manhattan. We have a lot of work left to do on this planet first.
I understand that this is just a thought experiment, but what's the point if we're going to start with the assumption that if we found $100 lying on the ground, our actions are merely determined by our current socio-economic status?
Not all homeless men would do the same thing... some of them would spend it trying to create a better tomorrow, but many would spend it (for a myriad of reasons) on "right now". I believe that this fact would continue to influence us even if we all "lived like the 1%".
It makes slightly more sense to talk about income inequality, and much of the article looks at what a top-tier income looks like, but it makes little to no sense to gripe about wealth inequality.