That was made clear to me when I was involved in a professional organization that put on such dog-and-pony shows. Their primary interest was not professional, but in making money.

Harry and I have been working on a comprehensive response to the Schmidtz piece and we hope to post it on CT some time tomorrow (Friday). It will be long by blog-post standards.

On philosophical level, I fail to see any difference between an attempt to enforce equality of means and an attempt to enforce genetic sameness. There are always going to be genetic traits that can be converted into increased means (beauty, speed, strength, etc). To punish these individuals or their children seems biologically wrong. Perhaps a better solution is to ensure that the power of the state is not used to transfer wealth to the wealthy. This seems to be where the current forms of capitalism break down. Democracies and Republics should have given the masses of less wealthy the political means to prevent this. Unfortunately the infighting over control of social interaction is superseding economic concerns.

BTW, these surveys are annoying to interpret because they give ‘share’. In order to interpret that you need to know that the number of people in the bottom quintile is just under 59 million and that the expenditures are in millions for the total group. To find the expenditures you have to convert the share into a percentage (11 becomes .11), multiply that by the expenditure and divide by 59. (The millions cancel out and you get a very rough dollar figure).

Interestingly the reported expenditures for Food, Alcohol, Housing, Apparel, Transportation, Health Care and Entertainment are about 170% of the reported post-tax income for the bottom quintile. I suspect this is some combination of mixing in retirees with workers and not adequately tracking public assistance.

This is because I believe the “envy” objection to egalitarianism is about as interesting as the “greed” objection to inegalitarianism. zdenek, I can only speak for myself here, but I believe that in a just (egalitarian) society I would be worse off financially. Can I, at least, be excused the envy objection?

Note A) on this summary report. It breaks out Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor as 4 separate categories for almost everything else. For the question you cite, it doesn’t. This always attracts my attention. Of “excellent”, “good”, “fair” and “poor” only “poor” has a clearly negative meaning. If you dig into the bowels of the questions you find that only 16% of people rate their personal finances as “poor”. Considering the number of rich people I know who would rate their personal financial situation as fair to poor, I don’t take a 16% poor rate as a failure of the economic system as a whole—especially when the values for March 1994 and February 1995 (the middle and tail end of a huge economic expansion in the US) were 14% and 13%. There are a subset of people (and frankly I would have put it at 20% or more) who are going to report unhappiness no matter what because they are unhappy people. The vast majority (always above 80%) are reporting their personal finances in positive to neutral terms. That with the measurable increase in access to all sorts of technology and time-saving devices paints a picture of economic success.

The Washinton Observor you cite is a Chinese press, I’m not sure where they are getting their numbers. But at such low household income (if correct though it would suggest very little work even at minimum wage), the people are clearly eligible for non-income aid and they are getting it. (See consumer spending for the bottom quintile).

(No, don’t answer, the question was merely rhetorical.)

But suppose you are right and the system is working superbly (I would disagree with you but I accept your point of view). Would you or would you not be troubled by inequalities due to their possible influence on the democratic system (to restate my position one last time, strikingly unequal people may cease to consider themselves as part of the same society, and this possibly could endanger the democratic system)?

Where have you shown this?

“Would you consider the system is functionning superbly were you a black kid born in a household in New York making 6,000$ a year (and lest you tell me this is absurdly low, you would then be above the average income of the lowest 20%, so well amongst the 90% for wich the system allegedly works superbly)?”

$6,000 per year is below minimum wage. It would be three dollars an hour. It wouldn’t even be minimum wage in New York if you only worked 20 hours a week. You are going to have to provide some cites before I can engage you on this one. That is the AVERAGE income of the lowest 3rd? I’m skeptical.

Second, though inequalities per say may not be too big a problem, do you concur that inequalities can endanger the democratic basis of a society because people may cease to envision themselves as part of a single social body? If yes, do you take the democratic system seriously enough so as to conclude that inequalities matter? If no, then we have a factual disagreement, and it would be clear to me where our opinions diverge.