Rettoper, it’s called marginal utility. Giving a million dollars to Bill Gates doesn’t improve his situation nearly as much as giving a million dollars to the average American. The lower classes always gain more out of increases in wealth than the upper classes do.–azure
one man’s marginal utility is another man’s moral hazard.
you cant redistribute wealth for other than economic reasons and insure a society’s economic health and well being at the same time.
moreover, the lower classes DO NOT gain by redistributive policies since overall societal health and well being is seriously eroded by the moral hazard and economic inefficiency associated with punishing productive individuals and enterprises — and rewarding unproductive, corrupt, and/or wasteful individuals and enterprises.
we tried that in 1917 in the soviet union, and later in cuba, north korea, east germany, mozambique, et al – it doesnt work.
““The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.””-- Churchill
Income inequality AND the living standards of everyone (from the wealthiest to the poorest of the poor) would increase simultaneously. The two are not mutually exclusive.
You’re buying into socialist propaganda. It is quite frankly impossible to measure the utility that Gates would gain from an additional million dollars vs. the utility that Joe Schmoe would gain. Each individual has their own value scale. You cannot cross-compare value scales between two or more different individuals. Marginal utility, properly understood, means that the more of something an individual has, the less s/he values it. So, in your example, Bill Gates values the additional million dollars less than he did the previous million dollars. That does not mean that Joe Schmoe will value the million dollars any more or less than Bill Gates. You cannot compare the value scales of Gates vs. Schmoe.
Both. I’m starting to think that diversity of land is a more important factor than diversity of labor. Or rather, that land simply is more diverse than labor. As dude6935 pointed out, as the population increases, the diversity of land will increase because less and less desirable land will become owned. I don’t see why human productivity would do the same. Human beings seem to be more equal or uniform in terms of “productive potential” than land is.
What makes human productivity widely diverse is capital and technology. Capital makes American workers more productive than African workers, for example. But in a free society (a free world), capital and technology would go to where labor is cheapest, so there will be more uniformity in terms of capital distribution.
Those are my current thoughts on the issue of inequality.
Your second question has got me thinking about a similar hypothetical. In a free society, would we expect businesses to become smaller-scale, or larger-scale? Due to the cartelizing effects of State regulations, many industries today are dominated by a few big firms, and it seems clear that without the regulations we would probably have smaller, more localised firms. But are there any industries where the opposite is probably true? Are there any industries that are currently dominated by small local firms, but this is only because small firms are currently State-privileged at the expense of larger firms?
Many people, then. Do you agree? Income inequality is important to many people (especially uneducated people), and the root of this desire (envy) comes from our evolutionary psychology?
Some but not all right? And you claim that for the some, it comes from evolutionary psychology. So for the others, can we assume they are a different species then? Sounds like you’re headed for polylogism.
Saying something comes from evolutionary psychology does not mean it must be a universal human attribute. Are you familiar with Dawkins and/or Pinker? I am reading “The God Delusion” right now and Dawkins attributes widespread belief in false ideas (religion being his example, Statism would be the example I would use) to natural selection in our evolutionary past. This does not imply that all humans are doomed to believing in God or the State; some of us can overcome these evolutionary instincts using reason. I think of envy and desire for income inequality in a similar way; using reason, we can see that envy is destructive and therefore reject income equality as a worthwhile goal.