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The Only Thing, Historically, That's Curbed Inequality: Catastrophe (theatlantic.com)
ColdWetDog writes: The Atlantic has an interesting article on how societies have decreased economic equality. From the report: "Calls to make America great again hark back to a time when income inequality receded even as the economy boomed and the middle class expanded. Yet it is all too easy to forget just how deeply this newfound equality was rooted in the cataclysm of the world wars. The pressures of total war became a uniquely powerful catalyst of equalizing reform, spurring unionization, extensions of voting rights, and the creation of the welfare state. During and after wartime, aggressive government intervention in the private sector and disruptions to capital holdings wiped out upper-class wealth and funneled resources to workers; even in countries that escaped physical devastation and crippling inflation, marginal tax rates surged upward. Concentrated for the most part between 1914 and 1945, this 'Great Compression' (as economists call it) of inequality took several more decades to fully run its course across the developed world until the 1970s and 1980s, when it stalled and began to go into reverse. This equalizing was a rare outcome in modern times but by no means unique over the long run of history. Inequality has been written into the DNA of civilization ever since humans first settled down to farm the land. Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk."
Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"
Slashdot reader ColdWetDog notes: "Yep, the intro is a bit of a swipe at Trump. But this should get the preppers and paranoids in the group all wound up. Grab your foil! Run for the hills!"
I imagine you might think that if you didn't read the article.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You know what else we had coming out of the world wars? Incredible advancements in technology. Yes, technology levels the playing field. That's the /. nerd slant.
Income inequality is an indirect, at best, and irrelevant at worst, measurement.
One cares about the average health, wealth, and longevity of a population. That continues to skyrocket as much of the third world becomes modernized due to economic freedom, the one measurement directly proportional to such measurements.
This continues to improve in the west, too. Their health is stalling, but due to too much cheap food and a lack of needing to physically labor.
Both of these are historically novel "problems", where most places and all other time periods, dollars per calorie and dollars per nutrition were the limiting factor to average health and longevity.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I think most people argue that income inequality is bad on two accounts.
At the upper end, they argue based on a kind of labor theory of income. They ask, if a certain CEO makes 1000x the income of the average worker, is their work really 1000x as difficult, or 1000x as laborious? The answer is obviously no, but that's not the way our economy works. You could ask the same of movie stars or professional athletes. I don't think this is a useful argument. People at this income level get paid what they can negotiate.
At the other end, they argue that it isn't right for some to be so desperately poor. That's why raising the floor of income (perhaps by a Universal Basic Income) is the other part of the argument. To this I'm much more sympathetic. I live in Los Angeles and don't have to go very far in any direction to find a tent city. People are hurting and they need help.
In my opinion, it's not income inequality that is the real problem, but wealth concentration. The concentration of wealth into fewer hands is bad for the economy. If there is less wealth for most people, then there are less purchasers for an economy's output. It's a deflationary scenario where less available money means businesses have to lower prices to sell, making profits smaller and debts harder to pay off. Bill Gates is only going to buy so many TVs, cars, and houses. Doubling his wealth is not going to change his spending habits. If that amount of wealth was placed in the hands of a thousand people, then there would be a thousand new customers for TVs, cars, and houses. This more distributed kind of customer base can sustain an economy.
From this perspective, extreme income inequality is bad because it leads to catastrophic wealth concentration. The small number of very rich can only be customers to a small number of luxury businesses. Every other business relies on the existence of a much larger customer base that can actually afford their wares. If wealth is too concentrated, there's not enough money in enough hands for most businesses to operate. Businesses suffer and lay off their employees, leading to greater unemployment, leading to even fewer customers, leading to worse business, and on down the vicious cycle.
The Declaration may not be "Law", but it is _the_ single most important document in American History. The Declaration of Independence is what founded the country. The document provides both the reason for discarding rule from England
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
And the principles that the Country should, and would, have.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
I'd recommend reading the whole Document. The Constitution is the Law used to protect the rights declared.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
So I'm very familiar with two countries, Vietnam and Thailand.
Vietnam, as you all know, went through a difficult occupation by the French, then the Americans, before having their country divided in two and then suffering a devastating civil war which killed millions of people (4 million?) before unification. The result? Everyone, more or less, started out very poor (during the late 70s and early 80s starvation was a real fear). So everyone was equal. Now though, inequality is climbing (fast) as the winners have "capitalized" (ironic comment intended on the supposedly communist country) on their ability to extract a greater and greater portion of the country's rising wealth. Still, for a time, society was remarkably fluid and anyone could be anyone (for example the ex-prime minister came from humble beginnings).
Thailand has not been conquered by a foreign power (ever?), certainly not by the westerners who did so to every other country in S.E. Asia. (That was due to the astuteness of their past king(s) who played the foreigners off against each other). So the power structures in Thailand have remained static for hundreds of years. In the last century, because of the great increase in wealth coming from modernization and technology, much of it was captured by the ruling class. Thus you have an urban elite that was (until recently) running the show from Bangkok (the "Hi So" or High Society) and getting richer and richer in the process. A populist (yet corrupt) billionaire politician used this great divide to sweep himself into power (sound familiar) only to be ultimately blocked by the military (acting on behest of the existing power structures).
I care about me and my family and we're not doing so hot. Income inequality is a hot button issue with me because the gains since 2008 have all gone to the upper class, of which I am not. My kid just hit college and she'll not only spend her life making somebody else rich but the first 10 years paying them for the privilege. I'm struggling and she's going to struggle. Putting it in historical context doesn't make my objective reality any better.
Maybe if you're in Europe things are getting better. Here in the States millennials make 20% less than boomers adjusted for inflation. We're losing ground while our ruling class is gaining. Those aren't feelings. Those are cold, hard facts. 20 minutes in google will prove that.
I want Americans to stop settling for less. I want us to stop fighting among ourselves while the ruling class take everything. Everything you just wrote and every sentiment you just expressed makes it that much less likely that they will.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands.
These countries (nor the ones GP listed) aren't socialist. Socialism is when the government owns the means of production. This means that the workers work directly for the government, and the government sells goods and services directly to consumers. Cuba is almost completely socialist, so is North Korea. Venezuela is mostly socialist, but not quite as much as those two. USSR was completely socialist, along with the warsaw pact nations.
These countries do have a few economic sectors that are socialist, such as their health care systems (i.e. the doctors work for and are paid by the government,) and in the US very few socialist systems exist but they can include things like municipal water, trash, emergency, and fire services. However when the government buys from the private sector and gives to the public, that isn't socialism, that's welfare. For example, food stamps are welfare (essentially, the government buys food and gives it to the poor, but doesn't make the food.)
And then there's communism, which in all cases has never lasted more than a few years. Although USSR identified itself as communist, it was in fact socialist.
He uses the extra income to bribe the government. Regardless of how many regulations or how few, if the local judge is bought off, I'm screwed. Also my rich neighbor will pay far market rates for hitmen or lawyers to make me disappear if I oppose them, either physically or financially.
Have you ever wondered why? It's because they were trying to reduce the influence of slaveholders. A default position of counting slaves as a full person for representation purposes would have led to the slaveholders (who actually voted for representation, not the slaves) controlling the federal government based on the number of slaves they held.
So the 3/5ths compromise as well as granting the power to restrict or prohibit the importation of slaves (also in the Constitution) were the Nation's first two anti-slavery measures, passed over opposition from the slave-holding States. They'd have done more, but then the slave-holding States wouldn't have ratified the Constitution in the first place, making any restrictions in it pointless.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I have internet in the stix. It's the only utility that goes as far as my house (not a trailer).
No electricity (solar works well for me), water (well) or sewer (septic tank). I live in a custom semi luxury house with every amenity of someone living in San Francisco would have. I have AC (thee of them actually, two window and a heat pump), a double refigerator and a Bosch dishwasher (hot water provided by popane). I have 30A/120v AC full sinewave power. If I didn't tell you that I was not connected to the grid, you would not know it. And it was done for less than $30,000 and 7 years of work. I have no debt and if need be, I could survive very well on minimum wage, as could many around me (I live near a hippie commune).
The World Wars may have level the playing field somewhat, but the biggest leveler in Western civilization was the Black Death of the 14th century. Before the plague, labor was plentiful and cheap, and land was valuable and held by the wealthy. But with a third of the population gone, labor became much more scarce and expensive, while the value of land plummeted, and fields were left fallow for a lack of farmers to tend them. There was a huge shift of wealth from the landowning class, toward farmers and craftsmen.
Maybe, I grew up in a different USSR. What "luxury goods"? Name one private label, that existed in USSR in 1952...
They were called "collective farms" and weren't "private" at all. Though ostensibly the farm's chairman was elected, in reality the sole candidate was introduced by the Communist Party's representative for the members of the collective to rubber-stamp. Whatever they collectively farmed could only be sold to the government as well.
Neither Coca-Cola nor Pepsi owned anything — USSR-owned factories were producing the drinks under license.
Nope. Some Soviet models tried to emulate foreign cars, but Fiat didn't own any stake in the factories.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is slashdot. They have no understanding of money. They think 80k is little and minimum wage is plenty. They think life is easy for people in rural areas and think being more than ten minutes from a major city is the rural life. Slashdot is a silly place with people that live in bubbles, unaware of how others even in their own country live.
Doing better than when? Sure during the 80s the poor couldn't afford 55" projection systems for their homes, and now they can afford 55" LCDs! -- for other peoples' homes because poor people have trouble affording real estate anymore, especially in the larger cities, and are stuck renting for most or all of their lives whereas in the 80s it was still relatively expected that you'd own a home by your early-to-mid 30s and back in the 50s during the post-war boom it was just taken as a near guarantee that you'd get your white picket fences (at least if you were a white male or married to one, but discrimination is a whole other issue I'll leave alone for now.)
Income inequality in the US and other western countries is only really starting to get bad enough to be noticed and cautioned about. We're nowhere near the kind of stories you hear about the Middle East and Africa where warlords and kings are among the wealthiest people in the entire world while their country starves around them.
But just because we aren't there yet doesn't mean we shouldn't follow the trends and try to predict what the future will look like, and its not looking good for anyone who isn't in the 1%. Sure we may have a good century or more before it gets unsustainably bad, but its coming (presuming no new major wars or such to act as the reset switch again.)
Unfortunately like global warming, its not something you can immediately point to and say "look! Its a guarantee! We must do something right away!" And like global warming, the people best in position to curtail the issue are the same people who most benefit from keeping the status quo.
There is another factor from which America gained huge benefit: German and Japanese industry had been decimated. Without funding from the US they likely could not have recovered at all - but for many decades US manufacturing had effectively no competition. Toyota and BMW were slowly rebuilding from nothing - a process that took decades. It's easy for your factories to get rich, and pay people well, when the only competition is from other companies in your own country with the exact same legal and economic situation as you have.
Then in the 1970s... something very bad happened. With a lot of help from the CIA one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century came to power - his name was Pinochet. Pinochet was heavily influenced by the likes of Milton Friedman and Friederich Hayek who sold him on their (entirely devoid of evidence theory - that actually rejects the idea that theories need evidence) of how to create a successful economy.
And he followed their advice. It was a dark time - tens of thousands of people were brutally murdered, and twice that many starved to death as he implemented Milton's "shock therapy".
By 1978 though - the economy had gotten over the worst of the harm (if only because the poor people were mostly dead now) and suddenly the so-called Pinochet miracle happened. The economy grew at an astounding rate, for a while it had the highest GDP in the world ! Pinochet actually considered decoupling his currency from the dollar (something he had originally done to try and forceably destroy inflation) just because it was clearly worth so much more.
And while these figure were coming from Chile - that's when Friendman and Hayek started seeing western heads of state - at the height of the Chile boom in 1980 they sold their ideas very successfully to Thatcher and Reagan.
Neither implemented them fully - Thatcher told Hayek why: because it's not possible in a free country. The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time - took a dictator to do, because it's impossible to get it all done WITHOUT one. Libertarians don't like to talk about that - but they know it's true. That's the real reason Peter Thiel funded Trump: he wanted America to get a dictator who would do what Pinochet did.
That was the beginning of the world we live in now - of the gradual destruction of wages and the working class, the ever growing gap - not just in wealth but in POWER between a small elite and the rest of society - and a world where nobody gets to raise their family with a modicum of financial security anymore.
And the worst part: the Chilean miracle was a lie. It never happened. Chile's amazing GDP ? It consisted ENTIRELY of currency trading, there was no actual productivity on the ground driving it. It was mathematical fiction which made a few Chilean elites very rich but had nothing real to back it up... by 1982 the lie was exposed, the Chilean economy collapsed entirely. Friedman and Hayek's disastrous grand experiment - having already killed tens of thousands of people, came to it's final, crashing failure.
But it was too - late the conservative politicians of the west had picked up the ball and started running with it, and they were not going to change course. They still haven't changed course - even after these same policies caused the biggest global recession since the great depression itself. Among the very first things they started doing when they got back into power last november was to dismantle the (meager) protections that was put in place after the crash in order to prevent another one. Because preventing such crashes doesn't suit them - not when the means to prevent them means bankers TODAY make ever so slightly less obscene profits.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I agree and I'd like to add another historical perspective that explains why only disaster ever fixed anything.
What made early Roman society great was its strong plebs and the farmer / craftsman who fought for his country. But as the Roman state expanded and turned into an empire, the labour market was flooded by slave labour, the foundation of the societal pyramid lost its value and eventually all land and wealth passed into the hands of the by now proverbial one percent. Populist politicians, i.e. people who were trying to fix the situation, got murdered because wealth is power and the section of society that could afford to pay for murder and get away with it unsurprisingly didn't consider society as something needing to be fixed. Eventually this set the stage for a seemingly endless series of civil wars, which the rich won. A lot has been written about this, but in my opinion they won in large part because they were rich, which is depressing because that doesn't bide well for our future. A lot of the later civil wars, which severely weakened the Roman state, were essentially about the rich versus the poor, albeit not always about wealth redistribution per se. For example one of the bigger ones was about issues like the poor wanting safety from viking-like raids versus the rich wanting imperial control.
There are plenty of examples in history, where only independence wars or complete collapse of society (eventually) fixes the problem.
So in my view, the reason that only disaster ever fixes anything, is because so far every time people tried to fix it in another way, they were thwarted by the very powerful rich elite.
It might be a bit hyperbolic, but its far from delusional -- especially the part about bribes. Bribes are and have always been a tactic of the wealthy to get their way regardless of the cost to anyone else.
Murder is certainly more rare, at least in the Western world (Russia might have a different take on that.) Financial fuckery isn't as much. You occasionally hear of companies selling their product under cost in order to drive the competition out of business.
And depending on how loose you want to read the term "fuckery," you could consider the 2008 market crash as a high-end version of such -- rich people doing rich people things that screw the rest of us over and we've got basically no say in it because dollars speak louder than words in many cases.
That fantasy land is Europe.
I'd invite you, but we already have far more than enough people who followed the invitation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is another factor from which America gained huge benefit: German and Japanese industry had been decimated. Without funding from the US they likely could not have recovered at all - but for many decades US manufacturing had effectively no competition. Toyota and BMW were slowly rebuilding from nothing - a process that took decades. It's easy for your factories to get rich, and pay people well, when the only competition is from other companies in your own country with the exact same legal and economic situation as you have.
No. WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments, and it didn't take decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong.
Coming out of WW2, we gave veterans the GI Bill. Hundreds of thousands of people could now go to college who would never have been able to without that assistance. In 1956 the US would start the interstate highway system, which would be critical to moving goods around. And in 1961, Kennedy would give the country a direction with a decree to go to the moon.
We had the newly educated masses, the means for transportation, and a path forward. The innovation to come from that in electronics, material science, and miniaturization is what propelled the advances that most people today take for granted, everything from telecommunications to food preservation.
Now, unfortunately, we have people who revel in their stupidity, and no longer understand that we are better as a nation, instead of a mass of stupid idiots with no rhyme or reason.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You should look in to that education thing yourself as you seemed to have skipped quite a bit. On a side-note, if liberalism needs a police state, why does your ideology of choice need lying?
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production
This is your big fallacy. Consumption is hardly a "trivial" consequence of production. You're right (sort of..) that production stimulates the economy.. at least in so much as we measure GDP by dollars worth of goods produced (you could argue that that's a poor measurement but I won't right now.)
But consumption stimulates production. Nobody produces anything that someone else doesn't want to consume (or at least they don't produce it for long..) A working economy has to be (close to) a balanced equation: Too much production and things get left out to rot (draining value from the economy) and too much consumption can't be sustained (everything will get used up.) There's of course a little leeway in there, especially when you allow for international trade such that you can use imports and exports to shore up whichever side you're lacking, but overall the two have to remain in balance or your economy collapses.
To put it another way, the economy works at the point where supply equals demand. If demand was irrelevant as you claim, we'd only ever need to look at the supply curve.
Economy is all production and exchange of produced goods/services
No, that's GDP. Which is a measure of economic health but its just a number -- its not an economy in itself.
USA cannot stimulate the economy by any extra level of spending because it lives on borrowed money
That's actually the most irrelevant thing in your entire post. The US (and every other country) attempts to control its borrowing to avoid going broke just like any normal person, but just like any normal person can potentially borrow a bit more if things go down the shitter, so can the US. Certainly there is an upper limit on how far you can take that but we're nowhere near the level where they can't stimulate the economy in various ways. Have you forgotten the gigantic corporate bailout from a few years ago? That's exactly the kind of thing you're saying they can't do and recent history proves you wrong.
A million people with 1 dollar each is wealth dissipation, it will do nothing to improve the economy
I suppose you've never heard of those things called "corporations?" They're pretty cool. The came into existence precisely because people wanted to do things that no one person could afford on their own, so they pooled their money (via share distribution) and voila.
the dollar came from the theft of taxation
What the hell does that have to do with anything? But to respond anyway.. taxation is your payment for services rendered by your government. Army, police force, road maintenance, infrastructure. Your taxes pay for all that shit. And if you really want to bitch about welfare, you can consider that the "service" of keeping beggars off the streets and out of your sight/way.
And before you start saying its not a true transaction because you didn't choose what to "buy" well sorry but you did -- via your elected representatives. You can argue that the price is too high or whatever, or that your representatives are choosing to "buy" the wrong services or whatever, but calling it theft is rather disingenuous at best.
A poor person gets stuck with a public defender, a rich person gets an amazing lawyer. That means an innocent person without money is more likely to go to prison than an innocent rich person. Or do you seriously think OJ would have gotten off if he was poor and Johnnie Cochran and his team were replaced with a court-appointed public defender? Because if you don't think that's the case, you agree with the person you condemned and owe them an apology.
The main difference is that there is a group of health insurers called Gesetzliche Krankenkassen (health insurers according to law), which are heavily regulated and whose service offerings are governmentally controlled. If you earn less than a specified amount of money as an employee, you are required to get coverage from such an institution. Which institution is up to you, it just has to offer you the contract according to law. There are about 100 different health insurers in Germany, which offer coverage according to law, and most of them operate through the whole of Germany. You are free to buy additional insurance if you want more or better services. If you are on social security, you are automatically insured by a Gesetzliche Krankenkasse. If you are self employed, operate your own business or earn more than the limit, you are completely free in your choice of health insurance.
Yes, we are calling you a liar, because, as your own source points out, John Casor was of African descent. He was not a white man. You are lying.
It's amazing how people who claim their philosophy is about freedom - seem so comfortable with giving the state, and the rich, near absolute power. They say they want government small - but they don't mean "staying out of people's personal lives" (hence their comfortable alliance with social conservatives), they just mean "not charging much tax". As if that's the only measure of of a government. As if how the tax is used doesn't count at all.
They say they care about freedom - but it doesn't involve freedom from losing everything you built up in a mortgage scam by a bank. It doesn't involve the freedom from bankruptcy just because your daughter got cancer - meaning you are now both childless and pennyless. Those are freedoms they don't care about- because it affects situations they never anticipate experiencing.
The automatic consequence of freedom of association and freedom of contract - which is unionization they deplore as a "distortion of the market". But apparently pooling your resources to negotiate better deals is ONLY a "distortion" if ordinary people do it, companies can do it all they want - up to and including colluding across entire industries and building monopoly cartells - since they argue companies should have "Freedom" from antitrust laws.
They always say that "fraud" should be illegal but I have no idea what the fuck they define as "fraud" except it isn't the definition everybody else uses - since the things they don't consider "fraud" (and actively defend) includes flagrantly lying to your customers about what your product can and cannot do, deceptive practices in contracts, deliberately hiding information from consumers. I've seen libertarian journalists writing articles denouncing the lies of homeopathy and calling homeopaths 'scam-artists' yet never making the logical leap that this implies they OUGHT to be liable for prosecution for fraud. Instead they defend these businesses from such scrutiny by law.
And undermining democratically elected governments to put a business friendly dictator in place is, somehow, never morally unacceptable to them. A long history in which Brazil right now is just the latest chapter (and indeed, they've done it to that country twice before. Each time - after decades of suffering and hardship the Brazilians win back their freedom in the end, and then choose liberal leaders because they are a liberal people - and each time within a few years... these champions of 'freedom' goes full out to destroy their choice).
It seems flagrantly obvious that the one thing libertarians have NEVER given a flying fuck about is liberty. But it does sound better than saying "I want other people to pay my taxes for me and when I rob them I don't want to be punished".
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That is technically correct, but not really the right way to look at it. The driving issue was that the US had huge amounts of surplus industrial capacity after the war. They simply produced more stuff than most economists thought the population could consume (this may not have been true, but I guess nobody imagined how crazy consumerism was going to get). The government's options were to let many of the factories shut down and hope that new businesses would sprout up to absorb the unemployed workers, or engage in a rather sneaky trick that would kill two birds with one stone. This trick involved selling the Germans and Japanese US products on credit. This kept the US factories busy, while also supplying war torn countries with the capital goods they needed to accelerate their recovery. By making it appear as altruism, they could sell this to the US public, when the reality was they just wanted to keep idle hands busy out of fear of another Great Depression.
In a more rational world, surplus industry capacity should just mean that everyone can work less and enjoy a more prosperous life. However, capitalism does not seem able to produce this as a stable outcome, so for now Neo-Mercantilism persists.
My very first post was specifically discussing quality of life, especially arguing that making everybody equally poor doesn't make for a better society. And that is in fact what GP was arguing against, though admittedly my second post did go on a tangent, but that was because of the few points the article makes about civil equality (i.e. mention of voting rights.)
I understand what your point was, but it was refuting a strawman argument no one made. The article does not state the world is better off because wars reduced income inequality. It merely states the wars reduced income inequality. It then goes on to say it will be much harder to reduce inequality in peaceful times than it was in the middle of the last century. It does not make any claims that we are worst off because of this, only that we will need to work harder to reduce inequality without outside factors which made it easier in the past.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Article *never* does a good vs evil judgement. Never advocates anything.
Article simply states: "Inequality was only curbed by catastrophe. Even in the title, it calls all of those events *Catastrophes*!
The point of the Article is to say that constant, mild and progressive policies have seldom had any impact vs catastrophes. The article calls the chinese and soviet revolutions "bloody affairs" and "murderous mechanisms"
Makes you wonder why you're
Why would you hand pick only one school out of inequality when there are many other economists in other countries producing more investigations that we could take into consideration? Many of them have also investigated inequality as a cause and an effect of market failures, that is, failure by the market to maximize the value creation (ie: an inefficient economy).
Switzerland benefited quite a lot from the influx of foreign wealth, not produced by the swiss economy itself. During some of the catastrophes talked about in the article, a lot of the spoils were transferred to Switzerland, and it has a place in the world economy as the most famous tax haven were the beneficiaries of inequality elsewhere stored their wealth. Also, its economy is *far* from unregulated, not quite a libertarian utopia. You will be able to find many more countries with less industrial, environmental, labor and even financial regulations, why didn't you choose one of those instead?