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Michael Magoon's avatar

Could it be that this is really more about Status rather than Inequality? We could reduce inequality to near zero, but people would still have differences based on social status within the group. People can also have high status and low income (in for example art, academia, etc).

I believe that people inherently desire status, that some people do more than others, that it is zero-sum, and it completely separate from income and wealth inequality. Fortunately, people can have high status in one domain and derive pleasure from it while being low status in all other domains. For example, a person who is a really good welder can derive status among his peers, while still being relatively low status in the rest of his life.

But since people are not comfortable being seen talking about their low status, they express it as a concern for inequality.

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Julius's avatar

Yeah, this definitely could be more about status than economic inequality, and I agree with what you say about status. I think this post blurs different types of inequality (e.g. economic, social) into one, and that might have been a mistake.

It could be the case that people are less upset about economic inequality. It's tied to status and I don't think even if we achieved perfect social equality, people would be satisfied. It's not so much that people want equality in status, it's that they want more for themselves and their groups/allies, no matter what the current situation is.

So all people can never be satisfied with their status. A simple example: if multiple people want to be considered the greatest in their field, by definition, only one of them can succeed.

This creates an interesting dynamic where there are easy-to-measure inequalities (e.g. economic) and hard-to-measure inequalities (e.g. social).

Since people generally want more status for themselves and their groups, they can point to economic inequality and say, "You can see here that I'm not paid as much, therefore [because I'm high status] I should be paid more". (https://x.com/Catherineoscopy/status/1704878327918465468) They can't, of course, ask for more status directly. They hope to reach high status and middle income, which would make them even higher status overall.

I'll admit that some of the reasons that people dislike economic inequality are:

* They can't separate it from injustice in real-world contexts, although this can be done in a lab

* It's tied to social status, which people are never satisfied with

But I don't think this proves that people aren't also opposed to large economic inequality in a deeply innate way. So I still believe my overall thesis that people innately dislike inequality. But at a more granular level, it gets messy and it's probably more (though not completely) about social inequality and fairness. In addition, in the real world, these things cannot be distinguished from economic inequality.

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Josh G's avatar

As a smell test, I wanted to look at immigration rates by country, and how that relates to gini coefficients and poverty rates, that might be a post for another day.

What I will say is that the gini and poverty rates are similar in that you basically have a global south that is both absolutely poor and unequal. So an analysis of those factors will not inform you of much, given that they are largely the same and it would be hard to tell the difference between them.

What I would say is that however you slice it, if you are an immigrant to a completely different culture and country, it stands to reason that you are lower on the social hierarchy. So why do they move to a new place even though they are stamped as an immigrant? I think it’s due to the absolute level of opportunity. Many middle class Americans could move to another country and live like a king, but the overwhelmingly majority choose to live boring middle-class lives that are just like everyone else.

So to me this indicates that for most of humanity, the billions that live in squalor - absolute wellbeing is more important to them. At a certain point of wealth it becomes less important and fitting into a wider social context becomes more important. I don’t know that this exactly means that inequality becomes more important, as Michael points out, it could be that a bunch of non-fungible social status related things become more important - given that social status is more scarce than income in developed countries, I think that’s particularly likely.

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