Income and wealth inequality are different: income is contingent on conformity

High income is great if the fruits of that income can compensate for the required repression of the parts of a personality that don’t match the brand. On this blog, I also make theories to explain declining workforce participation. With the above discussion of how automation and technology is pushing celebrity status down to ever lower positions, a justification for avoiding work may be to avoid becoming a celebrity. Becoming a celebrity means repressing most of a person’s real self to fit in the brand of the celebrity. It is one thing to demand a coffee-house chain to remain true to a brand image of nothing-but-good-coffee. It is another to expect that kind or restraint from a talented human being.

Income inequality and the inequality of patience

Collecting all of these annoyances as expressions of income inequality gives the impression that we have an opportunity to regulate the problem. We can tax incomes, We can demand minimum incomes. This is something we can do. However these actions may not make a difference if the real problem is that some people do things that annoy other people. People will continue to annoy other people.

Perceptions of income inequality is really about consumption inequality

We observe more obesity in lower income people and a higher prevalence of obesity in less affluent communities. They may not be actively concerned about the debate of income inequality (of the very rich having more than the rich), but they are sharing in the same culture that prizes experiences of wealth over other experiences. The very rich satisfy that need with their wealth. The merely rich satisfy that need through income-supported debts. Many of the rest find satisfaction of this need through their food in elaborate creations or in bountiful quantities (if not both).

Income Inequality: Attention Inequality

In an earlier post, I agreed with another author that the most motivated complainers about Inequality are the rich people complaining about the very rich: the 1% complaining about the 0.01%.   Going down the income ladder from those lofty heights, income inequality is lower in priority. The earlier suggestion was that there was a…

Income inequality among the rich

From a BloombergView article by Megan McArdle, the following quote was interesting: “But the proportion of this unhappiness due to income inequality is actually relatively small — and moreover, concentrated not among the poor, but among the upper middle class, which competes with the very rich for status goods and elite opportunities.” There is a…

Questioning Celebrity

In my previous post, I loosely defined celebrity to the point of suggesting that every employee is a kind of celebrity to a certain audience of peers and bosses.   There may be a better term but I like the impact of the term celebrity.  Celebrity is when established recognition is the major or sole…

Celebrity culture

The thought occurs to me that there was a golden era of the Internet about 10 years ago.  It is a surprising idea to look at the Internet that way.  But there was a time when it seemed the Internet was ushering in a more egalitarian period.  Egalitarian in terms of allowing more people to…