This is Not News

Over to Balloon Juice this story is touted as a must read. All I can say is that if this is the most exciting economic story you've read in a while, you need to get out more. You could, for example, go read this. The core of the argument is that the current rampaging inequality in the US and the world more generally

underscores a bigger dilemma facing the business community. The big rise in economic inequality over the past four decades is partly the result of impersonal economic forces — technological change, mostly — but political decisions have played a crucial role as well. Financial market deregulation, tax-code changes, and all manner of other policy choices in the have promoted inequality in the U.S., as Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrated pretty convincingly in their 2010 book Winner-Take-All Politics. And similar moves were made in much of the rest of the world.

Really?  This is news?  Rich people rig the game so that rich people get to get richer? Also how is "technological change" evidence of "impersonal economic forces"?  Are we to believe that the robots built and installed themselves and then decided to move the company to China while the politicians and managers were napping? A series of decisions based on the belief that created the greatest profits for the fewest numbers which includes deciding what kind of technological developments you are going to fund and implement isn't an impersonal economic forces; it's a series of bad decisions, where bad means hurts more people than it helps.

In the same article, there is this argument from Mark Thoma

There is an equivalent of a Laffer curve for inequality, but the variable of interest is economic growth rather than tax revenue. We know that a society with perfect equality does not grow at the fastest possible rate. When everyone gets an equal share of income, people lose the incentive to try and get ahead of others. We also know that a society where one person has almost everything while everyone else struggles to survive — the most unequal distribution of income imaginable — will not grow at the fastest possible rate either. Thus, the growth-maximizing level of inequality must lie somewhere between these two extremes.

I wonder if the greatest innovations arose from a desire to increase one's wealth relative to others.  Did Harvey, for example, try and monetize his discovery of the circulation of blood.Was Darwin seeking riches when he came up with descent with modification based on fitness for a specific biological niche? Not, of course, that the might have made some money, book sales, professorships, etc, off the discovers but was the desire for more money the motivation?  Clearly, for people who discover new ways to get money are motivated by the desire for money but the world as it is right now would seem to be a pretty solid argument in favor of doing what ever we can to stop that kind of activity and, by golly, if that means we all have to share and share alike, I, for one, freely offer equal shares of my infinity of nothing.