Frankfurt suggests that if people take the time to reflect, they’ll realize that inequality isn’t really what’s bothering them.
People might be troubled by what they see as unjust causes of economic inequality, a perfectly reasonable concern given how much your income and wealth are determined by accidents of birth, including how much money your parents had, your sex, and the color of your skin. We are troubled as well by potential consequences of economic inequality. We may think it corrodes democracy, or increases crime, or diminishes overall happiness. Most of all, people worry about poverty—not that some have less, but rather “that those with less have too little.”
.. A world in which everyone suffered from horrible poverty would be a perfectly equal one, he says, but few would prefer that to the world in which we now live. Therefore, “equality” can’t be what we really value.
.. My favorite example here is from the comedian Louis C.K., where he describes how his five-year-old’s toy broke and she demanded that he break her sister’s toy, which would make things equal. “And I did. I was like crying. And I look at her. She’s got this creepy smile on her face.”
.. The psychologists Alex Shaw and Kristina Olson told children between the ages of six and eight about two boys, Dan and Mark, who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with erasers—but there were five of them, so an even split was impossible. Children overwhelmingly reported that the experimenter should throw away the fifth eraser rather than establish an unequal division.
.. In other words, they were fine with inequality, so long as it was fair.
.. He argues that these egalitarian structures emerge because nobody wants to get screwed. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or her.
.. Boehm writes, “Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition. … Because the united subordinates are constantly putting down the more assertive alpha types in their midst, egalitarianism is in effect a bizarre type of political hierarchy: The weak combine forces to actively dominate the strong.”
This analysis helps us explain why such huge power differentials exist in the world right now, where it’s far harder for the weak to team up to dominate the strong.
.. They found that Americans are very wrong about just how unequal their country is—they think that the bottom 40 percent has 9 percent of the wealth and the top 20 percent has 59 percent, while the actual proportions are 0.3 percent and 84 percent.
.. the vast majority of Americans prefer a distribution of wealth more equal than what exists in Sweden
Are You Sure You Want the Job?
the Internet and global supply chains drove profitability up and the cost of labor and goods down. Interest rates were low, and although the income of men without college degrees declined, it was masked by rising home prices, subprime mortgages, easy credit, falling taxes and women joining the work force, so many household incomes continued to rise.
“Up until the year 2000, over 95 percent of the next generation were better off than the previous generation,” said Richard Dobbs, a director of the McKinsey Global Institute. Therefore, even though the rich were getting even richer than those down the income ladder “it did not lead to political unrest because the middle was moving ahead, too” and were sure to be richer than their parents.
.. When you are advancing, you buy the system; you don’t care who’s a billionaire, because your life is improving. But when you stop advancing, added Dobbs, you can “lose faith in the system — whether that be globalization, free trade, offshoring, immigration, traditional Republicans or traditional Democrats. Because in one way or another they can be perceived as not working for you.”
Walmart Chief Defends Investments in Labor, Stores and the Web
In the last year, Walmart has stopped selling Confederate-flag merchandise as well as assault rifles, has publicly supported gay rights and, after years of criticism, has raised its minimum starting wage to $9 an hour.
Now, progressives may be cheering, but Wall Street is not. Investors fear that Walmart’s heavy investments in labor, in the Internet and in discounts will weigh on the retailer’s short-term earnings — and many are running the other way.
“Walmart expects a return from these wagers,” Michael Lasser, a retail analyst at UBS, wrote in a note. Still, “it’s unclear if its investment of $1.5 billion in labor and ‘several billion dollars’ in pricing will push it ahead of others, or just keep pace.”
.. Walmart.com is set to offer 10 million products by the end of the year. That is impressive, until you consider that a shopper will find an estimated 300 million items for sale on Amazon.com.
.. Last year, Amazon sold almost $90 billion worth of products online, compared with just $12.2 billion Walmart sold through its website. E-commerce still makes up only about 2.5 percent of Walmart’s annual sales, and its growth online is slowing.
Bernie Sanders Has a Secret
It allowed him to focus on what fueled him without being forced to discuss publicly significant details about his personal life — like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement, and the fact that the mother of his one biological child is not his ex-wife. That’s a surprise to some who have known him for decades. It’s also very much a product of an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters and local reporters who have steered clear rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.
.. Sanders, who long had fashioned himself as something of a media critic, poked fun at the facile storyline.
“Yeah, OK, I’m a socialist,” he told the Globe. “We’ll charge $10 a head to come see the freak mayor of Burlington.”