Having read literature on it, I still struggle to understand how most of the problems attributed to income inequality aren't really problems of poverty.
An example is that inequality usually materializes in higher asset prices: people with proportionately more money tends to buy assets, driving up the price.
Now, the less well of people cannot afford housing anymore and are priced out.
Ingerently this not because housing is expensive, but solely because of income inequality.
You can insist it is because of poverty. But making both groups 10 times as well off would make no difference. The less we'll off people would still struggle to access housing.
You can also say that poverty is a total consequence of income inequality.
Now come and tell me again how inequality makes the world a better place.
Edit: I take, as you have read the literature, that you perfectly know that the same is the case of capital and produce from that capital in general. And so you are perfectly enlightened now to understand that poverty is inequality.
People with substantial multiples of wealth largely do not buy the same class of assets that those with a fraction of theirs do.
Someone who earns $1000/month and someone who earns $10 million/month are not competing for the same housing. Their effect on each other is minimal compared to those with very similar incomes who are competing for the same housing.
The only exception to this would be if there isn't enough housing for everyone, but the outcome would be identical (someone not getting housing) regardless of the level of inequality.
The idea that poverty is inequality makes little sense. Poverty is lacking a basic standard of living. If everyone has everyone they could want and their neighbor discovers an antimatter reserve under them catapulting them to unheard of levels of wealth, nothing materially changes for everyone else.
Similarly if everyone has perfectly equal income and wealth and still doesn't have enough to eat, they're all in poverty, regardless of the lack of inequality.
Seems like you didn't read that literature after all.
You definitely would Understand that ownership also comes in the form of owning rentals, mortgages, and not just owner occupied housing. That ownership is stock and shares with increasing valuations where you require increasing yields - requirements that makes the produce of the companies more expensive to support these valuations - inflation without a basis for salary inflation (as that would make the incomes more equal, which you explicitly forbade).
If half the population (your naighbor in you analogy) amassed significant wealth, it most certainly would materially change your wealth and make you poor - their money would gravitate to equity, yours and your kids equity. Literally making your poor.
> it most certainly would materially change your wealth and make you poor - their money would gravitate to equity, yours and your kids equity. Literally making your poor.
That sounds like the "wealth is a fixed pie" theory, where for one person to have more, another must have less.
The proof that is false comes from the history of the US. In the 19th century, it was populated by poor immigrants with nothing more than a suitcase. The US turned into a global superpower. How do you explain that with the fixed pie theory?
> I say that equality is a way to make the pie bigger.
Your idea has been tried, literally tens of thousands of times. The pie got smaller.
Just in the US alone, 20,000 communes have been formed (they're not illegal). They all failed. Even the diehard communists can't stand living in a commune and sharing equally.
It sounds like what I missed it isn't worth reading.
Arguing poverty is essentially a relative measure of wealth or somehow other's wealth, even unexploited or unused wealth, somehow makes everyone poor with the sudden knowledge that it exists?
I am interested in economics here, not philosophy.
