Recently I watched a documentary which is based on a similarly named book - as on the headline - by an economist Thomas Piketty. I was highly intrigued by it and I would highly recommend anyone to watch it as I feel it is an extremely important piece to understand our current economic situation and its broader consequences. The following is some of my personal ponderings that have been inspired by the aforementioned documentary.
I have paid attention to the large economic forces and the trend is that younger generations are earning less, meanwhile the abundantly rich are getting richer and the middle class is shrinking, more in the US, less in the Europe, but the trend is apparent here in Finland, too, and has been a topic of concern. If the situation gets polarized enough, social distress will raise head and take form in an extremist political movements, which are fuelled even further by the algorithms of social media platforms that give each user their personal truth - whatever it is they want. All the platform cares is to capitilize on the attention of the user.
When people are distressed they look for someone to blame, often it is whatever superficial difference that strikes up first - like skin color. People don't realize that those on top of the tower with massive wealth are happy to have people fighting against each other because it takes the attention away from them.
There's an argument that markets should take care of themselves and it's not a problem if there are some mega rich people, because the up tide of increased productivity will lift all boats, not only those with capital. This is sort of true, however, there is a danger for slippery slope, because human greed often takes over of those who get money, and with money comes power which is used to extract even more wealth from the bottom.
Greed isn't the only problem. You see, the mind twists one's large wealth to be only because of personal ability even when they had a clear advantage attributed to them by the game (as was demonstrated by the Monopoly game experiment on the documentary: two players with the other having double the starting money than the underdog, and two dices to the one that the underdog has).
The more wealth one has, the less likely one is willing to share it with others. The billions of dollars - all of them are just because of personal ability, they deserve them. What deserves and what, I don't know, but the heightened sense of self-attribution creates segregation between those with massive wealth and those without much. It is unfortunate this happens, because the social distresses that results because of the economical polarization, is in the end just a personal illusion of "this is all because of my personal ability". It is an extremely egocentric way to look at it, since it completely disregards that they are existing in a world where the rules have allowed this massive accumulation of wealth in the first place. Yet, it is typical human way to think - and going into psychology, maybe a defense by the psyche to create a consistent narrative on the events, to avoid cognitive dissonance; it is easier to justify your bigger wealth by attributing it to yourself only. It becomes uncomfortable when you realize that some of your own well-being and wealth might be a result of some good cards you were dealt with by random. Thus, it becomes harder to justify why you are better off than someone else - unless they are just less valuable as people. In India they have solved this cognitive dissonance using karma: "that guy has no legs, he must've been a shitty person in his previous life".
The lengths we go at attempting to project our consistent narratives out to the world is outstanding.
