Here's a nice encapsulation of the business case justifying income inequality and the increasingly vast wealth divide:
The reason for the ever growing wealth divide is quite simple but we, in our Politically Correct Society, are too cowardly to actually mention the true reason for the wealth divide in polite company.
Here is the reason. Global population is increasing at an exponential rate. Advances in technology are also growing at an exponential rate. Therefore the world needs LESS people to do the same amount of work (advances in technology) but the world is home to MORE people than ever before in humanity. Very simply, technology means we need less people to accomplish the same tasks. But we have more people. There is the absolute basis for the growing wealth divide. Less people are needed to do the same amount of work, therefore more and more people are being left behind because of advances in technology....
In 1945...America had a population of 139.9 million people.... Currently our population is roughly 330 million people.... In 1960 our GDP was about $520.5 Billion; today our GDG is now $16.8 Trillion. So there is more than enough money to go around for everyone right? Wrong. Absolutely wrong. This is where TECHNOLOGY comes in to play.
Technology has killed much of the demand for “middle class workers.” ...
Why hire a human when you can use a robot? Humans are inefficient. They get tired, they make mistakes, they get sick, they take breaks, they go on strike, they demand things like health benefits, food, OSHA standard work conditions, etc. What do robots demand? A computer code and an electrical socket. Robots are an example of technology that has killed the American manufacturing job....
Guess how many companies now have a typing pool? None. The concept of having a secretary for almost all employees of importance is gone. Book keepers, record keepers, typists, letter writers, etc are all gone. Why? Microsoft Office. People can write their own documents, keep their own books, create their own presentations, and mail (sorry….its now E-mail) their own correspondence. Nope, don’t need those middle class jobs anymore either.....
So we now must move to the true heart of wealth inequality; the fact that the average person is now nothing more than an interchangeable commodity.... [T]he true fact is that a vast majority of people are simply average. They just exist without bringing much to the table in the form of economic worth or new and revolutionary ideas. Not many people truly “Add Value.” Yes, that is brutal. However, it is also true.
Simply, those that harness the power of technology via the NEXT GREAT IDEA are the ones that get rich. Then they hire the faceless masses to implement the idea. But there is minimal value in the average worker; they are either a) interchangeable or b) replaceable via a machine. Bottom line: there will always be a need for great ideas, world class skill, and those that value ADD. These are the people that will collect an ever growing amount of wealth because, again, they need less and less people to implement their ideas. And as the total population grows, this means that an even smaller percent of the population will be involved in a high paying job....
Guess how many people Facebook employs? 6,337. That’s it. A $160 Billion company employs six thousand people.... Of course these employees are incredibly well paid....
But what about a very low skilled job providing a commodity service.... McDonalds is worth $97 Billion; roughly two thirds of Facebook. Guess how many people they employ? 444,000 people.... And, because there is no talent in adding pickles to a patty, they are minimum wage workers.
Though I'm a nonbeliever, let me say one positive thing here about religion. It used to be once upon a time that we were all granted some modicum of dignity simply as human beings, as fellow Children of God, and thus due an inherent right to exist, all equals in the eyes of God.
Under this new religion of Finance, we are instead interchangeable units of consumption or production that need to justify ourselves at the bottom line as worthy of existence by Creating Value In the Supply Chain. If we do not Add Value, we have no right to exist.
That's quite a fall, from Children of God to Useless Eaters in the space of a single lifetime or so.
If you're an adherent of the religion of finance, that's where you leave the argument, because it's all about the bucks, full stop. Any social fallout that results is not your problem.
If you're a human being first and foremost, you look at the same situation and say: There's less work needed because of technology? Great! There's more wealth than ever being created? Great! What we need to do then is to figure out how to share it better. Raise wages. Cut working hours. Provide a basic guaranteed minimum income for everyone. Guarantee the basics of life like shelter, food, water, health care, and education to all.
There's no law of the universe that just because someone comes up with a good idea and manages to implement it that they must have everything and everyone else must have nothing. Did Zuckerberg build Facebook because he knew it would make him into a zillionaire? No, he built it because he was a programming prodigy who built programs for fun, including the first iterations of Facebook. The profit motive isn't the only or even the best incentive for people creating things and adding value to the culture around them.
Society is how we choose to order it. We have allowed those who profit from it to set things up the way they are, allotting value here, no-value there.
There's not even a good business case for abandoning the vast majority of the population to an ever-shrinking existence because a fluke conjunction of money and political power allows you to cement your good idea into a perpetual advantage for yourself versus everyone else. As late as the 1950s, well within the lifetime of many people now alive, top marginal tax rates of over 90 percent ensured that a good idea gave you a good life but didn't turn you into such a colossus that you could thereafter completely dominate the entire political system and outweigh the voices of everyone else with the power of your money.
At some point, when you've impoverished the rest of the population with your wage exploitation, they won't be able to buy whatever it is you're selling, a point that Henry Ford grasped well enough a century ago. He paid his workers $5 per day, reduced the work week to 40 hours, and offered profit-sharing, at least in part to ensure that Ford workers could afford to buy the cars they were making. Shared wealth was more wealth for all, including the Innovator with the Big Idea.
There's really no good reason at all for saying Job Creators should get everything and that everyone else is a Useless Eater who should get nothing. It hasn't always been that way, and there's no good reason that it has to be that way, other than because the currently rich and powerful have what they want, and they want to keep it that way.
Who knows what value all kinds of people currently viewed as useless might choose to create for whatever motives -- fun, love, profit, whatever -- if they were freed from having to scrabble for a bare existence at fewer and fewer poorly paid jobs, or at more desperate measures, and instead could study, work, play, create, and dream at whatever they wanted, instead of using their life energies to increase the profits of a handful of oligarchs.
After all, that bright dream of freedom and leisure was what we once hoped the future of robots and other advanced technology promised us, wasn't it?