Okay, I just posted elsewhere that an asteroid should fall on the World Economic Forum but you're right that demonizing the mega rich isn't going to solve our problems.

One big issue is one of perception. If people feel the system is rigged against them moving up the economic ladder then they will get discouraged and won't fully participate. So we do need to emphasize the chances that people have.

But we also need to acknowledge that Horatio Alger's chance is not chance enough.

I propose to you that the problem of income inequality can be restated as the problem of access. For example, Bill Gates did not rise out of nothing. His parents were rich and sent him to the Lakeside School, a prep school so well endowed that a young Gates had access to early computer networks while most university students were still playing with punch cards. Gates famously dropped out of Harvard and built a business out of his garage into an empire. But he only dropped out of Harvard because his rich parents gave him a high school education that, at least in Gates' field, rivaled what the Ivy League could offer at the time. Gates' unequal access to education, because his parents had money, was a real leg up!

Caroline Kennedy almost got appointed to a senate seat when anyone else with her qualifications but not her family connections, would never have been considered. Seriously, if Paterson had asked to see resumes without names on them, from which he'd pick his pool of potential senate appointees, he would not have picked her.

Or look at News Corp. -- a public company run as a family empire. There are always high paying executive jobs available to those related to Murdoch. Since when was nepotism part of guarding the wealth of shareholders?

It isn't that there's no economic mobility in the US. There is, even in bad times like the last 10 years here has been mobility of people within certain professions (and downward mobility for people in others) but there is still a sense that the game is rigged and that has to be addressed.

It's funny -- people used to be all up in arms about affirmative action and the notion that a qualified candidate for a job or course of study might not get in because the gatekeepers would be seeking diversity when it's always been the case that qualified people don't get jobs because of nepotism or wealth and nobody ever really complained about that.

But it probably is worth complaining about. The game is still rigged, Scott. It's access inequality. A lobbyist can get a repeated meetings with my senator but I probably couldn't get one unless I persisted at it for a couple of years. The difference between me and the lobbyist is money that equals access.

So not to demonize the mega wealthy but how are we to have a functioninig democracy when they have all the access to power, industry and education and the rest of us have very little?

Many progressives, however, go further and suggest that for opportunities to be equal, there must be limited economic inequality. But this need not be the case. Imagine a society - and you really do have to imagine it - where every child has an equal opportunity to fill any slot in an occupational structure where positions are unequally compensated.

I have been struggling against the Rawlsian milquetoast idiocy since I first encountered it as an undergraduate. It is depressing that it has continued to take in generations of impressionable young fools.

Yes, in principle, in the fictional dreamworlds of Rawlisan constructivist cogitation, we could have a society in which inequality of outcome did not lead to growing inequalities in opportunity. But in practice, in the world of flesh and blood human beings, it hasn't and can't work that way. Wealth is power. It is power because wealth, by definition, consists in the possession of things people desire. Thus, whoever possesses wealth also possesses the ability to control the desires and behavior of other human beings, and has power over them, and to turn their wealth and power into yet more wealth and power.

My wealth may come in a variety of forms: money, durable material goods, intellectual goods, etc. Now obviously, if I possess more power than you, I possess more opportunity than you. But more importantly, my children almost certainly possess more opportunity than you. No human society has ever devised a system in which the inequalities of the parent, and of the social milieu of the parent, are not passed on to offspring. We could perhaps imagine such a system. We could have a system in which children were ripped from their parents at birth, and raised in state schools and special communities in which each child receives equal nurturing and an equal educational foundation, with equal access to the resources on which character, curiosity and psychological health are built. But obviously we have nothing resembling such a society, and Americans would never dream of creating one.

The only practical, humanly realistic means of getting equality of opportunity requires aiming for equality of outcome. With proper vigilance and maintenance, equal outcomes can be perpetuated and sustained across generations. Inequality, however, breeds deeper inequality from one generation to the next, with an accelerating, chaotic dynamism.

Note however, that even in such a world, some amount of economic inequality would be necessary to ensure that essential goods and services were provided where occupations involve large training costs (e.g., surgeons) or unpleasant conditions (e.g., trash collecting).

False on the first: training costs for essential professions can and should be socialized, and distributed across the entire society. If these functions really are essential, then we should pay to equip the best people for the positions, with the best education we can provide them. On the second point, only partially true. We have reasonably good trash collection in this country, for example, and yet trash collectors aren't millionaires. When you suggest we would have to pay them more, you seem to be thinking of the fact that we have to pay them more than the other low-pay, low-skill, socially marginal groups from which they are drawn. I doubt you could advance any evidence that they must be paid more than the mean or median income.

Even more, inequality would be necessary to ensure that entrepreneurial risk paid off--risk that stands to benefit everyone by promoting economic growth.

Risk can also be socialized to a much greater extent than it is now.

taxing them is not the same as demonizing them

Thank you!

I'll tell you who demonizes the mega talented/mega rich. It's Fat Freddy Hayek and his crowd who claim that unless "incentivized" (what an horrendous neologism!) by the right to keep a full two-thirds of his second billion dollars, and each billion thereafter, Bill Gates would have just stayed home with his first Billion and made babies, and we'd still be using Big Iron.

When compared to other developed countries the US has higher wealth inequality, poorer health care (even though it spends more), shorter lifespans and a variety of other indicators that show that life is less pleasant for vast swaths of the populace.

These societies don't permit, in general, the kind of wealth accumulation that has happened in the US. Either they have high taxes during one's earning period or they have high inheritance taxes.

Notice that since Thatcher the UK has dropped much of the structure that it had put in place to eliminate the landed gentry and the result has been the rise of just the sort of social problems that we see here.

There is no plausible reason that anyone can give as to why the Walton family should be worth in excess of $100 billion while their employees are told how to apply for food stamps and Medicaid.

Wealth inequality has gone too far in this country and the policies which they have promoted though buying politicians and public opinion have been a disaster for the vast majority.

Defenders of the status quo like to paint things in black and white terms, but there is a need for nuance. Japan gets along fine with CEO's earning 20 times the average employee's pay, why do we need them to earn 400 times?

Let's bring a bit of reality to this subject.

Look folks, you need rich people. People are rich because people like you decided to trade your cash for something the rich person could provide. Something you are too poor, stupid, or just incapable of providing for yourself.

In Gate's case it was Windows, in the Walton's case it was a Dept. store with inexpensive goods, in Murdoch's case it was a news outlet. They provided something you people couldn't, and you (general) traded money for it in great quantities. That makes them special. More importantly they provided the country with something that made us all better off than we were before.

And more importantly to you they pay millions in taxes. Here's a truism you can't escape... no profits, no taxes. Here's another.... who is greedier? The man that wants to keep more of what he earns or the man that covets those earnings for himself?

Any questions? Bring it on.

So just how is that income inequality among siblings distributed by gender or by age? And how does the equation change when you talk about wealth inequality?

One can also imagine, of course, a society (say, almost anywhere in Europe) where income inequality isn't as much of a problem because adequate education, health care, housing and so forth don't depend critically on level and continuity of income. But the same people who handwave away the widening inequality in the US (c'mon, are the current generation of managers really 3-10x smarter and more skilled in relation to the rest of us than the previous one?) also seem to push strongly against providing the public goods that would make inequality less of a burden.