A first reaction could be: “ok, the people who voted for Donald Trump clearly feel it is broken, but I am not sure they are that smart”, or “I am doing ok, and I think the system is fair. Yes people like that Elon Musk character have ‘X’ times more than me but he is also ‘X’ times more clever than me so he deserves it!”.
But the system feels sufficiently broken to those who voted for Trump, that they were desperate enough to vote for him, and there appears to be some similarity with the ‘Brexit’ vote in the UK. Something has to change, even if it is just perception or we are going to keep having to live with these kinds of election results.
Also, either Elon Musk is really clever, in which case we should listen when he is proposing that we need to make changes to wealth distribution (soon, if not now), or, he is not clever, in which case he does not deserve his wealth. Either way, we need to consider changes. For most of us, our own encounters with homeless people, fleeting as these encounters may be, leave us feeling at least, uneasy. Also for most of us, people ten times wealthier (or more) than ourselves do make it seem as if the ratio is at least a little bit higher than what is fair. Very few of us have actually experienced terrorism, for example, but it does worry us and it is hard to believe wealth ratios play no role at all in terrorism.
The real challenge for most of us is “can we increase wealth equality without encroaching on our own wealth”? I will explore this concept further in other posts, and will add revisions and more information to this post.
