Plague of Inequality CONCLUSION The Lessons of Canonical Wisdom on Inequality

Williams points to Steven Pinker ( and indirectly, Deirdre McCloskey): “Given his celebration of inequality, it is perhaps unsurprising that Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men in the world, championed Pinker’s book as his ‘new favorite book of all time.’ As the most prominent work in recent decades to confirm to the rich that inequality is more a social blessing than a burden, Pinker’s arguments surely soothe billionaires much better than James’s disconcerting warning, ‘You rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you (James 5:1).’ That aside, over the course of a long book dedicated to lionizing the wisdom of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, Pinker fails to acknowledge even in passing that several of the most celebrated intellectuals of that period, including Hobbes, Rousseau, and Smith, registered serious objections to inequality (p. 313).”  Yes.  Extreme inequality was to be tamped down, tempered hopefully the people who were at the upper end the wealth ladder by paying, compensating more down the ladder.

Williams reminds the reader:  “The arguments against (extreme) inequality found in historical texts are hardly peripheral; they emphatically deserve to be as prominent a feature of these thinkers’ thought as any other part of their work (p. 313).” And, Williams also does not like the sufficientarianism idea either… as in the ethic that works to ensure poor having enough to survive, keep them alive, in effect like slaves of old.

And, in a quote of Economist Deirdre McCloskey (self-proclaimed as a reformed Libertarian Economist who now sees the key role of the Ethic in tempering the Incentive, see Lynne 2025):  ‘It doesn’t matter ethically whether the poor have the same number of diamond watches and Porsche automobiles as do the owners of hedge funds. It does, however, matter ethically whether they have the same opportunities to vote or to learn to read or to have a roof over their heads’ (p. 313).”  So, it seems for McCloskey, too, some form of optimal inequality, one that at least addresses the problems of extreme material inequality if not the myth of bourgeois equality also being applied to the poor (i.e., the myth that only hard work will bring one up the income and wealth ladder, so, "don't be lazy"), is essential. Yet, to Williams the kind of  sufficientarianism based framing as used by McCloskey itself is not sufficient to dismiss extreme inequality as ‘ethically irrelevant’ … (said) considerations are not overlooked by Rousseau or Mill who, for example, understand the myriad ways in which inequality subverts democratic institutions (p. 314).” 

Williams continues:  “For McCloskey, one reason that earlier generations mistakenly cautioned against inequality is because they embraced a zero-sum economic framework in which one person’s financial gain is another’s loss. To be sure, this assumption was dominant before Adam Smith all the way up through Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who once asked someone with aspirations to become rich, ‘How is it possible to become wealthy without contributing to impoverishing someone else?’ Mandeville began challenging this orthodoxy in the early eighteenth century (pp. 314-315).” Yes. Economic growth does help in reducing absolute poverty, but, as DIT makes clear, working toward optimal inequality also enhances that growth: The possibility frontiers of Figure 2 move out at an increasing rate as more optimal inequality is realized.  Optimal inequality is essential to economic efficiency and more rapid as well as sustainable economic growth.

Williams (quoting from the McCloskey 2016 book, one of the 7-books on the topic of what drove the Great Enrichment 1780 to present): “McCloskey thus follows established precedent in emphasizing that by virtue of the market economy, to be sure, ‘the rich got richer’ while ‘the poor [got] richer, much richer.’ This ‘Great Enrichment’ …  has buried zero-sum conceptions of economics in favor of one that is ‘distinctly positive-sum’ or ‘win-win’ (p. 315).  Again, as DIT makes clear, the positive-sum and the win-win is greater on some path 0Z, the path of optimal inequality.  Avoiding extreme inequality (as well as avoiding extreme equality) matters, as DIT makes clear.

And, why would economic growth be even higher on path 0Z?  Well, the rich also do better, that is why:  As Williams points out, drawing on research of a psychologist Dacher Keltner, “… who has found that the wealthy tend to act in ‘self-gratifying and often greedy ways,’ becoming increasingly ‘rude and offensive’ and delighting in stories that ‘divide and demean’ (p. 316).” Not living that life also helps makes for a more viable system, even for the rich.

Williams continues to refer to the work of Keltner, that the rich “… are also more likely to avoid paying their taxes and to invent elaborate justifications for doing so … justifying bad behavior is among the favorite pastimes among the ill-behaved rich—they show ‘no shortage of imagination when it comes to explaining away [their own] injustices.’ When shown graphs depicting widening inequality gaps in the American economy, ‘those from upper-class backgrounds were more likely to attribute the income gap to talent, genius, effort, and hard work.’ The rich, that is, have persuaded themselves that they have deserved their fortunes. This sense of entitlement, on Keltner’s account, emboldens further presumptuous behavior (p. 316).”  Reducing that tendency works to make the economy work better for everyone.

Williams also refers to another problem with the sufficientarians, “… the assumption that the problems of poverty and inequality can be reduced to the dollar amount required to satisfy the basic needs of the poor. Elizabeth Popp Berman refers to this approach as ‘thinking like an economist,’—where social problems are reduced to simplistic mathematical elements without consideration of their intricate moral complexities (p. 317).  Yes, the Ethic is ignored, the Ethic left out, the shared other-interest with the poor is ignored. Only the Ego of self-interest is fed in sufficientarianism.  And, it is made even worse by framing like:  ‘If we are to reduce poverty in this country and to raise our standard of living, we need more inequality than we have now’ (p. 317).”  Such framing is all about ego-based self-interest only, as it is what drives ever more inequality.

Williams reminds the reader, in referring back to Mill:  “But we (like Mill so did, need to distance the thinking from) ... Bentham, not only from ... (the) ... myopic insistence that every person has always been and will forever be egoistic but also from his mathematical reductionism ... (it was not only Mill's) explicit rejections of Bentham’s trenchant egoism, Mill rebukes Bentham ... by refusing to reduce his moral philosophy to mathematical formulas. Yes, Mill wants the greatest happiness. But there is no suggestion on his part that we can actually quantify that (pp. 317-318).”  Fortunately, as DIT in Metaeconomics makes clear, one can bring the Ethic into play through the vehicle of the shared other-interest, another kind of utility if one prefers to use utilitarianism in the framework. Happiness can be measured in the state of homeostasis on path 0Z.

Williams continues on:  “.... immediate point is ... simple numbers like GDP and economic growth rate do not effectively replace considerations of unity and solidarity. We cannot achieve these ends simply by deriving some fixed number of how much money to throw at the poor (p. 318).”  Well, yes, there is an Ethic at play, a shared other-interest, like the Poetry being played agains the Pushpins: Non-money valued goods (and bads) are also at play, as in the Ethic about an empathy-based reasonable level of income and wealth up and down the ladder.

DIT does not necessarily support the Williams claim of “… no simple formulas delineating the right degree of inequality (p. 318).” Perhaps not, but reframing the problem as searching for the  optimal inequality given definition by what reasoned people can go along with seems workable in an empirical sense, using Mathematical Metaeconomics to help (see Profane & Sacred, and the Law , as well as the Mathematical Appendices in Lynne 2020). Said optimal inequality is evolved behind the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance and at the Adam Smith Station of the Impartial Spectator --- fevolving the Ethic  --- at play. And, as noted earlier, the US got very close to it during The New Deal Order 1930-1980, but it was stopped by The Neoliberal Order and is made ever worse with the Unethical Project 2025 (short on empathy and fact-based science) is now being put into play.

As evidenced since the crash in The Neoliberal Order in 2008:  “Perhaps the single most common theme uniting thinkers in this book regarding the problem of inequality is the degree to which inequality divides political communities (p. 319). … For Plato’s Athenian Stranger, for example, economic inequality ‘breed[s] both civil war and faction’ (Laws, 744d). For Jesus, ‘every kingdom divided against itself is laid to waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand’ (Matthew 12:22). For Hobbes, inequality is a source of faction, and ‘factions are the source of sedition and civil war’ (Citizen, 10.12). For Rousseau, inequality inflames the ‘citizens’ hatred of one another’ (PE, 20). Smith describes how in unequal societies, the ‘disproportion betwixt them [rich and poor] … is so great that he [the wealthy man] will hardly look at him [the poor] as being of the same kind’ (LJ, 184). Mill observes that unequal societies commonly pit the classes against one another in ‘concealed enmity … [and] soured animosity’ (Labour, 379). And for Marx, the inequalities required by capitalism stimulate ‘antagonisms” between the classes culminating in class war. This reveals a persistent theme that colors inequality today: that radical inequality, everything else being equal, fosters hostility (p 319).”  Americans, as well as many other Travelers in other countries on the Spaceship Earth, are living in and experiencing said realities here in 2025.  It is about the favored "us" against the less favored, even to be deported "them." The main exceptions to said framing in modern economies seem to be in the Scandinavian countries, who have learned best how to strike a good balance in private &  public good, including the continual search for a more optimal inequality.

Back to the list from the great thinkers:   “What the history of political thought reveals, and what is lacking in influential segments of the inequality debate today, is the understanding that inequality is intrinsically connected to all of (the items in the list) matters. There is no magic GDP figure, no target economic growth rate, or even a Gini coefficient number that can replace the task of carefully thinking through how inequality affects human nature, moral psychology, moral philosophy, and political institutions. There are no shortcuts to a more perfect union (p. 320).”  Yes, it is about finding common ground, about a shared other-interest --- such as the Ethic of optimal inequality among many other Ethics --- that works for everyone. It is especially about constant and recurring attention in a constant re-consideration of just what is optimal inequality, one that enhances the performance of an economic & social system.

Economics needs a workover:  “The Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton (among many others has noted) ‘economics has been very narrow in its focus compared with its origins.… If you read Adam Smith, or Karl Marx, … or John Stuart Mill … there’s a very broad set of issues including philosophy, some psychology, serious contemplation of the human condition in all its strengths and weaknesses and in all its dimensions—whereas a lot of economics over the last 20 or 30 years has become obsessed with efficiency.’ (Note: And as a result ignored the reality that efficiency depends upon the ethic, many dimensions of it, including the ethic of reasoned compensation).  He laments that economics has simply ignored these larger questions that rightly concerned earlier generations of economists and philosophers—a disposition that compelled them to take inequality seriously (pp. 320-321).”  Yes. It is about building a Humanomics, which is about the Human, and not just the Econ of Economics.  DIT in Metaeconomics is such a Humanomics, which is “an economics with the human and their ethics left in (as McCloskey says it, again, see Lynne 2025).”

Last paragraph in the book:   “A degree of economic equality is admittedly far from sufficient to ensure thriving political communities. But if we can learn anything from giants on whose shoulders we stand, it is almost certainly a component of it. Political thought cannot be entirely extricated from questions of equality and inequality. These matters inevitably shape our social world. We ignore them only at our peril (p. 321).”  Yes.

DIT does not ignore the equality and inequality problem, nor any of the other Ethics related problems. Instead, DIT brings the Ethic --- especially the Ethic of optimal inequality --- to center stage, seeing the consideration of the Ethic is just as essential as the concern for the Incentive. It is essential to strike good balance in the joint Incentive & Ethic to not only achieve a humane economy, but also to find economic efficiency and social as well as political economic stability. 

Also, not only is DIT confirmed, given even more robust empirical credentials by the findings and claims in Williams (2024), DIT also helps make sense of said claims. The canonical thinkers and Williams are all in effect MetaEcon, seeing the key role of the Ethic is economic choice. The Ethic gives context to the Incentive, and the Ethic of Optimal Inequality is essential to make it all work.