![]() ![]() Like the vast majority of Americans, I have access to some important new pharmaceuticals, such as statins to protect against heart disease. ![]() I have access to penicillin, air travel, good cheap food, the Internet and virtually all of the technical innovations that Gates does. Bill Gates is much, much richer than I am, yet it is not obvious that he is much happier if, indeed, he is happier at all. First, the inequality of personal well-being is sharply down over the past hundred years and perhaps over the past twenty years as well. Most analyses of income inequality neglect two major points. In terms of immediate political stability, there is less to the income inequality issue than meets the eye. Let’s start with the subset of worries about inequality that are significantly overblown. If our economic churn is bound to throw off political sparks, whether alarums about plutocracy or something else, we owe it to ourselves to seek out an accurate picture of what is really going on. The reality is that most of the worries about income inequality are bogus, but some are probably better grounded and even more serious than even many of their heralds realize. As a result, there’s more confusion about this issue than just about any other in contemporary American political discourse. There is plenty of speculation on these possibilities, but a lot of it has been aimed at elevating one political agenda over another rather than elevating our understanding. Does growing wealth and income inequality in the United States presage the downfall of the American republic? Will we evolve into a new Gilded Age plutocracy, irrevocably split between the competing interests of rich and poor? Or is growing inequality a mere bump in the road, a statistical blip along the path to greater wealth for virtually every American? Or is income inequality partially desirable, reflecting the greater productivity of society’s stars? ![]()
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