THE 4 BIGGEST REASONS WHY INEQUALITY IS BAD FOR SOCIETY

1. Economic inequality can give wealthier people an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others.

If wealth is very unevenly distributed in a society, wealthy people often end up in control of many aspects of the lives of poorer citizens: over where and how they can work, what they can buy, and in general what their lives will be like. As an example, ownership of a public media outlet, such as a newspaper or a television channel, can give control over how others in the society view themselves and their lives, and how they understand their society.

2. Economic inequality can undermine the fairness of political institutions.

If those who hold political offices must depend on large contributions for their campaigns, they will be more responsive to the interests and demands of wealthy contributors, and those who are not rich will not be fairly represented.

3. Economic inequality undermines the fairness of the economic system itself.

Economic inequality makes it difficult, if not impossible, to create equality of opportunity. Income inequality means that some children will enter the workforce much better prepared than others. And people with few assets find it harder to access the first small steps to larger opportunities, such as a loan to start a business or pay for an advanced degree.

None of these objections is an expression of mere envy. They are objections to inequality based on the effects of some being much better off than others. In principle, these effects could avoided, without reducing economic inequality, through such means as the public financing of political campaigns and making high-quality public education available to all children (however difficult this would be in practice).

A fourth kind of objection to inequality is more direct. In Paul Krugman’s review of Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty, he mentions these stats from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: “Real wages for most U.S. workers have increased little if at all since the early 1970s, but wages for the top 1 percent of earners have risen 165 percent, and wages for the top 0.1 percent have risen 362 percent.” (Krugman calls those “supersalaries.”) Again, the idea that this is objectionable is not mere envy. It rests, I believe, on this idea, my fourth point:

4. Workers, as participants in a scheme of cooperation that produces national income, have a claim to a fair share of what they have helped to produce.

What constitutes a fair share is of course controversial. One answer is provided by John Rawls’ Difference Principle, according to which inequalities in wealth and income are permissible if and only if these inequalities could not be reduced without worsening the position of those who are worst-off. You don’t have to accept this exact principle, though, in order to believe that if an economy is producing an increasing level of goods and services, then all those who participate in producing these benefits — workers as well as others – should share in the result.