I'm With Stupid
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 6 May 2013
- Messages
- 20,343
Well yeah, it sort of works for one generation, maybe two, but once you get your first generation of rich kids, it's suddenly no longer based on merit but who your daddy was, what school you went to, and how much was in your trust fund. Once you have a generation of people who can live on the proceeds of money they've invested rather than the work they've done, this idea of inequality incentivising work disappears. Not completely. There'll always be the odd person who breaks through. But the more unequal things get, the more you're having to spend your wages paying off the mortgage of someone significantly richer than you, rather than saving for your own mortgage, the less of an incentive you have to work hard. And this is where you get a whole generation of people saying 'fuck it,' from the anti-work movement to Trump voters.It's interesting that people take a significant degree of inequality as some sort of Darwinian natural order thing when for most of our history as homo sapiens we have prospered by avoiding that.
In the past, we recognised this, and properly redistributed wealth. That went out of fashion in the late 70s though and it's been a one-way road since then.