Inequality as poison
Inequality with a purpose
A small level of inequality is desirable. This is inequality of outcome where there is equality of opportunity and no bias or discrimination. Together these can create the perfect conditions tomotivate citizens to work hard, innovate, and create economic growth and prosperity to improve everyone's lives. Purposeful inequality is capitalism’s stick and carrot. Without it we are l eft with communism, which struggles to produce an effective incentive for people to work and improve. The extent to which this is effective is debatable; too much inequality and people feel hopeless. Switzerland’s solution is to limit salary inequality (the highest paid person in a company cannot earn more than twelve times that of the lowest paid person, including cleaners and support staff). But, regardless of the correct level of inequality to reward people fairly and create the best level of prosperity, it all relies on the premise of equality of opportunity: meritocracy. Even with a slightly imperfect meritocracy, the small gaps compound over generations and small inequalities such as going to a slightly better funded school leads to vastly different job outcomes. Meritocracy requires people to have equal opportunity at birth from which inequality is allowed to grow, but isn’t inequality fromequality inherently unsustainable? It may be that with the current status quo we find it hard to imagine a society with perfectly equal birth opportunity and unequal retirement (where those who worked hardest get the nicest gardens and those who worked less hard get less nice gardens) but then not being able to pass these gardens on through inheritance. It would certainly be a radically different world to the one we live in today, but not impossible. We’ve spent a lot of the past centuries implementing laws and taxes which cull inequality to create a more equal start; however, current policies do fail to totally eradicate inequality. Greater steps could be taken in the name of meritocracy. Lots of people label these policies ‘extreme’, but none is beyond the realm of reality: banning inheritance, private tutors, and enforcing equal state education upon all could lead to near equality of opportunity. But some parents will inevitably find a way to give their child an advantage in life. It would be fighting a losing battle with parents and any government that fought this battle would likely be voted out very soon. Such policies will only survive for a prolonged period in an authoritarian state. The issue of inequality of opportunity seems to lie with the parents. The only way I can think of achieving total equality of opportunity is children being brought up by th e state, such as in Plato’s Republic , where children are educated and raised equally by society. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World children are brought up equally, progressing to jobs by merit or handed predetermined jobs before birth, inequality does not manifest because people don’t have children. [ Ironically the book states the rulers of society realized inequality was necessary from birth and so society grows some babies in alcohol to give them unequal intelligence. ] Hence, if we raise all children equally by removing parenting, it would be a world with an equal start, we could then allow perfect competition for slightly better or worse jobs/role with unequal rewards in society. Again, I will appeal to the distant future and an infallibility definition of possibility. To say ‘never’ , the justification must prove logical contradiction between equal starts and unequal outcomes. I believe in a definition of ‘possibility’ where the only things that aren’t possible are those which are ‘logically impossible’. It is not logically contradictory, because I have provided an (albeit farfetched) example of
276
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software