Is increasing economic inequality inevitable without catastrophe?

Parent Cafe
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“I think that if we are concerned about the likely causes of a catastrophe, rising inequality might be one thing to think about but it is not in the top 5 concerns.”

There are a lot of causes of catastrophe’s, for example the apparent change in climate is likely to cause more and more natural catastrophe’s, and also could impact things like food production that may in the end lead to issues with starvation.

That said I wouldn’t say income inequality is not a major issue. If the income inequality we are saying, where the income and wealth are being concentrated in a top .5 means that there is less and less for the bulk of people in this country, then there is reason to be scared. One of the things that has been a hallmark of the US is people truly believed that as a country that the future would be better, if not for ourselves, for our children, and that is wavering. The anger that underlies current politics is a sign of this, polling of people’s attitudes is showing a steep decline in people who believe their kids will have it better than they did, and that perception (if not reality) is dangerous, that hope goes and you could see a lot more than anger at the polling places.

The reality of the Great Depression (not the myth many people now spread about it, how it wasn’t so bad really, how people hung together, they were frugal but happy, yada yada) is that people lost hope and despite the mythmaking it was a desperate, ugly time. It led to the rise of people like Charles Coughlan, it led to Huey Long, it led to violent confrontations, it led to a rise in the KKK, it also led to a rise in membership in the Communist party. In rural areas farmers were in open revolt, sheriffs and marshalls delivering eviction notices were often found dead, it was that ugly…and this was when expectations to be honest were a lot less, this was before organized labor and then the stimulous of WWII had moved working class people into the realm of the middle class…in the post WWII world,that many now look back to as the ‘golden age’ they want to try and recreate, people truly felt that no matter who you were, you could expect a comfortable future (whether true or not doesn’t matter, perceptions are often more powerful then fact). If people really start believing that the future is stacked against them, that we are heading into a future where more and more is given to less and less people, it won’t be pretty, I can almost guarantee that.

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The problem is that extreme levels of economic inequality and lack of economic opportunity can lead to the catastrophic events. Specifically, if the majority of the population sees only downward mobility and no upward mobility within the existing political and economic system, revolutionary demogogues with charisma can influence them, even if what they are selling will result in the slaughter of millions or other catastrophic events. Think of how far left or communist economic ideologies become popular in places where nominally-capitalist economies have large numbers of people without hope, or how racist extremists gain popularity by labeling minorities as the reason for the majority’s economic woes.

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@ucbalumnus:
You don’t even have to go that far, look at the current situation in the US, and it doesn’t take a brilliant analyst to see the roots of many of the things we are seeing in the US, politically and otherwise. Among other things, downward mobility has been shown time and again to create a culture of failure, with all the ills attendant upon that, drug use, breakdown of families and so forth. Take a look at the problems with Opiod addiction, it isn’t a coincidence that while it is affecting the whole country, the epicenter are areas that are economically struggling. They had an interview with a farmer the other day wondering what will happen to his farm, at least one of his kids od’ed and the others have had serious problems with drug addiction.