You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: How Cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain Will Change the World (And How it Changed My Life)
"Unfortunately when the income gap gets too wide, people's education-levels start to diverge, increasing the likelihood of a populist revolt."
What evidence do you have that:
a) income gap causes education-level divergence?
b) education-level divergence increases likelihood of populist revolt?
c) populist revolt is an undesirable outcome?
Thanks.
This is a pattern that happens in history over and over -- you could take a look at the various peasant riots that happened in Europe and Asia if you want well-recorded historical documentation, but it's pretty much everywhere, really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts
There are a lot of factors that lead to rebellion but income inequality becomes a central theme when social cohesion starts to crumble as it is the case in many places in the world right now. It's possible to squelch dissent through the brutal application of force (like North Korea) but is that the world we really want to be living in?
Nations we call "civilized" smartened up and realized that you can avoid bloodshed by allowing people to express their dissent through their vote, rather than through violence. So we do have an opportunity to fix some of the underlying issues before the situations starts to devolve even more.
I don't think we can attribute peasant revolts to income disparity, per se. Even if we could, we have much more income mobility now than in the past, I would think.
All else being equal (assuming no inflation), if top earners were earning $1 Trillion, and bottom earners earning $1 Million, then would income disparity, in itself, still be a problem?
I presume not. So income disparity is not the problem. What is the problem? Low earners aren't earning "enough". But what is "enough" when bottom earners in US still live lavishly compared to other countries?
All that said, when is enough "enough"? In other words, how much should the bottom income be?
Fair points, but for the United States, at least, their whole identity is based around the idea of income mobility, so when those opportunities start to disappear, people will get very angry and restless. Most Americans accept the fact that there will be disparities in outcome, but at the same time, believe that equality in opportunity is essential for our society to thrive.
So in order to reduce unrest, we have 2 options:
Fix the economic system to preserve our ideals and way of life. or
Change our ideals and culture to match the "reality" that we now live in a class-based society with an immutable social hierarchy.
I'm sure there are some who don't mind #2, but that outcome is not acceptable to me nor many others, I think.
I agree that we need to preserve and promote income mobility. I think we can preserve it by repealing regulations and taxes, allowing a strong economy.
For promoting income mobility, I'm not opposed to some UBI. The question is, how much?
Hmm, health care and putting a cap on spiraling education costs would be a good start, but a lot of that is kind of out of the scope of what crypto can do, unfortunately. Either way I don't think it makes sense to set an arbitrary target since there are individual issues we can talk about with more specificity which could lead to actual improvements in people's lives. (But not here, since there are probably better threads for that already out there.)
One thing that crypto can do, however, is change the way we talk about the issues on a day to day basis, which imo is it's real power for change. I feel like a lot of people right now don't really have a good grasp on how economic and political systems work, and a lot of it is due to the fact that the technology we use everyday is based on a fantasy where everything is free and non-negotiated. With crypto, though, you can embed the act of trading and voting into our daily routines. And the hope is that given these experiences, people will just get better at being better citizens of the societies that they're a part of.
The only thing government can do to lower healthcare costs is to deregulate. Anything else is a wealth-redistributive scheme.