Chris Dillow: How inequality persists

Chris Dillow discusses How inequality persists.

Klaus Abbink, David Masclet and Daniel Mirza demonstrate a different mechanism — resignation. As inequality becomes extreme, they show, people simply give up fighting it*.

US politics is, I fear, consistent with all this; high inequality has given us a kleptocratic billionaire.

It’s also consistent with world history as described by Walter Scheidel. He shows that significant falls in inequality have generally been brought about not by gentle redistributive policies but by wars, revolution, disease and state collapse.

Perhaps there is no stabilizing negative feedback loop from increased inequality towards demands for redistribution. If so, a sustained** increase in equality is far harder to achieve than social democrats would like to believe.

* Plus, of course, there's the fact that the richer the rich are, the more they can spend on entrenching their position by buying the media and lobbying.

** How much could a one-term Corbyn government do to permanently increase equality?

Emphasis Mine

Yet the reformers persist in their delusion that the rich can be persuaded to give up their wealth. You would get more sense out of Daffy Duck!