Tom writes:
I am finding the spate of recent articles about the huge and growing inequality of wealth in the US pretty tedious. I suspect they are making some basic mistakes. They usually take the form of saying the wealthiest X percent of the US population owns Y percent of the wealth, where Y is a much bigger number than X. What I don't get is, why should I care about the relationship of X and Y?
He then explores and rejects various reasons he ought to care.
A couple of interesting points:
- Tom notes that "as much as I find it annoying that some other people are so much richer than I am, it is not as if I would pay very much to see them brought down a notch or two. If they suffer some bad fortune, I might enjoy that, but I certainly would not pay one thousand dollars of my own hard earned money so some fund manager in La Jolla would lose a million." But would you pay $10 to see Paris Hilton made penniless? In other words, how much do you value economic schadenfreude?
- "Finally, why should anyone think that say twenty percent of the population owning twenty percent of the wealth has anything to recommend it morally at all?" Tom and I are both Catholics, so I would be interested to see him engage Pope Benedict's encyclical Caritas in veritate, with its admittedly ambiguous teaching on inequality. Serious scholars steeped in economics like Tom would do yeoman work by engaging constructively with Catholic social thought.
