The participants identified a negative feedback loop, whereby the government’s failure to tax wealth effectively means it lacks sufficient revenue to uphold the social contract by which strong public services, an effective social safety net and a healthy economy provide people with decent living standards.
Trust in politics then declines further, politicians avoid honest discussions of the underlying problems and what to do about them, and the system’s legitimacy is increasingly questioned as the social contract collapses.
That’s a nice story, but there’s been plenty of even less egalitarian societies. Pretty much all of the ones in written history, actually.
More likely, in the short term a new, more coercive “social contract” will be rotated in (if the trend continues). Heck, we’re already seeing it a bit in the US. Now showing fealty to the president is more important than public relations for a lot of companies and billionaires.
From a quick skim, that’s not actually what this says. It’s about wealth tending to concentrate in historical societies until there’s a catastrophe. The graph of estimated wealth inequality included takes an absolute nosedive in the 20th century before starting to climb back up a bit, and it’s still shown way lower than in the bad old days.
Keep in mind that ancient societies, at their worst, were mostly slaves, with just enough free people to beat them into submission. (At their best, you get some merchant republics and loosely overseen peasant communities, but no actual democracies)
That’s a nice story, but there’s been plenty of even less egalitarian societies. Pretty much all of the ones in written history, actually.
More likely, in the short term a new, more coercive “social contract” will be rotated in (if the trend continues). Heck, we’re already seeing it a bit in the US. Now showing fealty to the president is more important than public relations for a lot of companies and billionaires.
It’s hard to imagine, but modern inequality is actually very extreme in historical context
From a quick skim, that’s not actually what this says. It’s about wealth tending to concentrate in historical societies until there’s a catastrophe. The graph of estimated wealth inequality included takes an absolute nosedive in the 20th century before starting to climb back up a bit, and it’s still shown way lower than in the bad old days.
Keep in mind that ancient societies, at their worst, were mostly slaves, with just enough free people to beat them into submission. (At their best, you get some merchant republics and loosely overseen peasant communities, but no actual democracies)