this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Income inequality is the difference between highest and lowest earners. This is meaningless statistic
What matters is where the floor is, and how surmountable that difference is. Actual policy positions matter a lot more than "but this one has more"
You've changed the definition of "income inequality" to match a very specific non-standard metric, which of course is a "meaningless statistic" since that's exactly what you redefined it to be - that's what's commonly known as a "straw man".
The problem is not how many "wealth tokens" people have, it's that in the system we live under at the moment there is a gatekeeping by amount of "wealth token" of access to important things such as food, the place somebody can live in, the opportunities their children have, their access to healthcare, how much free time they have, and even their freedom (having to work doing something you don't want to do to barelly survive isn't Freedom).
Nobody would give a shit about "wealth" if how many "wealth tokens" somebody has only affected luxuries, and in such an environment there wouldn't even be a life expectation difference between people with lots of "wealth tokens" and people with few "wealth tokens".
The problem is the combination of wealth inequality and a system were wealth dictates access to life essentials rather than merelly to luxuries. If all "wealth tokens" bought were bragging rights and a few luxuries, few would care.
If that's what you mean with "were the floor is" then we're probably more in agreement than it seemed at first sight.
I'm using the standard definition of income inequality.
https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/Inequality/introduction-to-inequality
I not sure what your overall point is here, but the total distribution of wealth is a meaningless statistic. If you had all your needs taken care of, UBI, didn't work etc and one person had a quadrillion dollars under that same system, you would not give a shit.
You definition: "Income inequality is the difference between highest and lowest earners." The IMF definition as per your source: "Income Inequality, which refers to the extent to which income is evenly distributed within a population"
They're not the same thing: you picked a very specific metric, not the general definition which is what I was using.
But yeah, if there was UBI that took care of life's essentials, "one person with a quadrillion dollars" would not matter.
Then again that wouldn't be possible in the Mercantilistic Economic System we have because in this system monetary tokens (such as dollars) are claims on a fraction of the goods, services and assets of a country, and I really can't see how it would be possible to both provide for the life's essentials for everybody AND have somebody with enough monetary tokens to lay claim to most of the wealth produced in the country (unless we're talking about worthless dollars, such as the ones in Zimbabwe at some point, in which case most people would be quadrillionaires anyway).
Now, if "dollars" were only claims to very specific kinds of things that excluded essentials and things necessary to provide them (which would also mean Land, since that's necessary for building places for people to live in), then how many such tokens somebody had would be irrelevant, but the closest to such a "money is not needed for essentials" environment we ever had was basically the USSR and we all know just how well that specific experiment worked.
In a centralized state control system "Income inequality" is is indeed not the problem: there the problems are in the production and distribution of goods and services, not affordability (i.e. the scenario where everybody can afford bread but there is no bread), plus centralized state control is by necessity authoritarian, so forget about Democracy in that one, which brings yet another big-box-of-problems.
It's only in trying to find an ideology to deal with the social side of policy whilst Capitalism deals with trading and resource provision, that you end up with the wealth concentration problem: if dollars are claims to goods, services and assets, then the fewer the hands holding those claims the more the State has to tax them to provide the essentials to everybody and as you might have noticed, those with lots of money use it to buy legislators and agents of the State to make sure they're taxed as little as possible.
This is the same thing written conversationally and professionally.
More to the point, it's clear we're discussing the same thing through context, so why choose this hill to repeatedly die on?
You're not serious here right? I don't need to address this? You're not being literal?
It's important to understand that "lots of paper dollars" does not mean wealth. For instance, here, you conflate having lots of paper dollars with being wealthy while also suggesting that the money is worthless (which is correct), but you're missing that people can still own a significant portion of wealth in a country even if that country is destitute.
Having lots of money doesn't mean you pay claim to lots of wealth. That's backwards. Having lots of wealth is represented by you having easy access to money. Billionaires aren't sitting on vaults full of cash. That would be insanely stupid. Their money is invested.
I'd highly recommend doing some reading on the various aspects you're not understanding here.
Clearly you so desperatelly need to feel you won an argument that you're critizing the very thing you brought to the discussion (I used "token" up to then because - No Shit Sherlock! - "wealth is not just money", and then you started talking about "dollars" so I went along with it only to be criticised for going along with it) and are figurativelly lying dead on the very hill you hinted I should not die on (way to display a huge lack self-awareness there!) after being disproven by the very link you provided which was meant to prove your statement.
You and your never-ending line of strawmen should probably get a room.
Anyways: I'll leave you with the statisfaction of knowing you won.
I really can't beat you in that shit, that's for sure.