Economic historian Gregory Clarke has been studying social mobility over the long term. He believes that it is very stable over time and across nations: "if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility were just as high as they are now."
One of the things he talked about in his interview with Tyler Cowen was assortative mating, that is, the tendency of people to marry those of their own social and educational status. He notes that in the US and Europe, husbands and wives resemble each other as much as siblings do.
But it does produce more inequality, so if you’re worried about inequality in society, you don’t want assortative mating. The one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching.
One of the remarkable things about Denmark is, education is essentially free until you’re age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses, for childcare provision — it’s all available. They’ve compressed the income distribution quite sharply.
There is this periodic survey of how well students do, the PISA measures. Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. Again, it’s just interesting that a high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. It turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. That is the thing that you would worry more about, that there is going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society.
The major disagreement between Clarke and Cowen is about how much this matters. Cowen thinks relative inequality is less important than everybody's rising income, but Clarke thinks people mainly care about relative differences:
People are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. So, I really want to stick with this idea that in a society like England, we have not in any way improved rates of social mobility in the last 300 years.
Which is an interesting question: could it be that Americans think the economy is terrible because they are comparing themselves to the rich, so we would be happier if we were all poorer but more equal? Does social media increase our dissatisfaction by constantly showing people happier and more beautiful than we are?
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Which is an interesting question: could it be that Americans think the economy is terrible because they are comparing themselves to the rich, so we would be happier if we were all poorer but more equal?
I'm not sure why the supposition insists that everyone would be POORER (it seems to imply that's the only way that more equality could be reached, which is ridiculous), but...
To answer the question as posed? Yes. Absolutely, 100%, people would be less mad about us all being poorer but more equal, because it would be fairer. We humans tend to actually pull together as communities when everyone is suffering. That's been shown time and time again in history, all around the world.
But what we cannot STAND is when large groups of people are suffering terrible deprivations, while a select elite few are living in grotesque opulence, indifferent to the poverty of others. It's the cruelty and the selfishness of the rich in the face of the suffering of the poor that spurs such hatred for them.
See Oliver Twist, and the deeply hateable character of Mr. Bumble - a fat, greedy, cruel, hypocritical weasel of a man who has power over the lives and fates of orphans whom he allows to starve on mere scraps while he stuffs his gullet, and to whom he preaches Christian morals while himself behaving abominably.
Poor Americans hate having their jobs and lives being subject to rich corporate idiots who live in absurd luxury despite performing no productive labor to speak of...
...arrogant hypocrites who work cushy desk jobs with flexible hours and generous vacation time who then tell the poor that they're lazy and worthless despite performing manual labor on rigid timetables with barely any time off, and most that unpaid...
...lying conmen who insist that if the poor only worked harder, they too could be filthy rich - and who then proceed to slash wages, benefits, pensions, retirement funds, and all the rest, the better to "reduce costs" and "increase profits" which then all go to shareholders and executives who perform no actual productive labor themselves.
Americans are sick of having their lives dictated by rich idiots and misanthropes who actively despise them at worst, or who forget they exist entirely at best. People deeply resent having important decisions made by men who don't have a clue what life is like for actual people on the ground, or how the decisions they make in a vacuum will ultimately affect the lives of others.
And this isn't somehow new! Nor is it uniquely American. It is, actually, fairly universal to the human condition, throughout all of history.
People are willing to put up with a lot - more than they ought to, to be honest. It's how men allowed themselves to be sent to die in World War I, despite every man, woman, and child with any sense understanding that the rich and powerful idiots responsible for the war itself had no idea what they were doing, and it was the poor who paid for those mistakes by being sent into the meat grinder, or staving at home under rationing.
But eventually, every now and again, we get fed up. The pressure builds too high, the powers that be do too little to bleed off that pent up resentment, and eventually things boil over. It's in the process of happening again as we speak.
Sadly, it's a slow process.
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