We continue to hear a lot of complaints about rising income inequality. However, in considering alternatives, we should understand that people now have to be able to get rich in order to justify any exceptional effort; and when I say rich, I mean “set for life with high living standards”, not $1 million 2016 USD and 25 years to go before nominal retirement age, when you wouldn’t even have a pension since you weren’t working for those 25 years.
To demonstrate this, I’m going to remind you:
– What the economic tiers are in the modern industrialized world
– What you get at each tier
– That more work, in contrast to even the relatively recent past, rapidly hits diminishing and negative returns to individuals’ actual happiness
– That only massive rewards can even hope to “buy back” what people give up by working long hours; namely, a good wife, family time, and enough freedom from work to be able to pursue your goals while you still have your health
Apologies for the traditionalism and lesbian-centrism, but I beg your forgiveness in the name of brevity.
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In the world in general, not just the American Empire, these following economic classes exist:
Those who cannot act for themselves:
– The weak and powerless, who have the freedom and the misery of nothing. Hence we cannot consider them to have achieved the good life.
– Those who remain in subsistence labor at a level approaching slavery. Their present and future is similarly bleak.
Those who have a degree of freedom:
– Those dependent on the state and charity who still manage to get by. They have very little ability to procure goods, but anything that comes for free or with low upfront cost, they can enjoy without limit.
– What we variously call the middle class or the bourgeoisie. They have some money and some time, but their ability to obtain the ends of their desire is limited until they retire at a fairly old age.
– The upper-middle-class or local gentry. At some point in their healthy years, they can retire, but because of the inherent uncertainties of inflation and the costs of living at a certain standard, they work for decades as well.
Those who have riches, but have even greater ambitions. They will continue to work until either they achieve their goals, or they die.
Finally, we consider the truly rich and satisfied, with no true ambition beyond their personal welfare. Even having a few million dollars does not make you truly rich; with the cost of living escalating in the developed nations, you could burn through that in 30 or 40 years. We will simply declare these people in possession of the means to obtain their end goals.
The ideal would be that the altruistic, hard-working and clever/motivated individuals would reap benefits in proportion to their contributions; this punishes freeloading and rewards optimal economic management.
However, the social structures of most nations, including the United States, actually fail to implement this approach. Instead, they practice a weak meritocracy, in which the burden is still borne by the hard-working, able, and righteous, while the rewards become increasingly useless.
Now, we show that the promise of enjoying the surplus is mostly a mirage.
If you could not retire, what would you do with more money?
– You could not appreciably improve the content of your diet; that is dictated by calorie counts and nutritional benefits. Unless you are truly a hedonist that lives only for today and will die in 10 years, this is not an option. Spices are now commodities, so you can’t much improve the taste, either.
– You cannot buy really good drugs, because you would not be able to work due to addiction and social stigma, as well as occupational impairment.
– You could buy a big house, but that only helps if having a lot of material goods, and then having to trade off your freedom/time at work, actually makes sense. As we learn more and more about the benefits of experiences vs. material wealth, this becomes far more suspect.
– You cannot buy a large amount of increased personal security (e.g. bodyguards) in a free society with the kind of money that these economic classes have – and it might be pointless for most people, if crime is low.
– You cannot buy more physical fitness, because with the advent of weight training and high-intensity interval training, you can get in great shape without a whole lot of money. Furthermore, you cannot yet forgo exercise with more money, because medicine is not advanced enough to really compensate for treating your body poorly.
– You can’t buy less sleep yet, as we do not fully understand all the benefits of sleep, and only a few people seem to have a genetic makeup that may allow for more useful waking hours.
– You could buy more expensive travel and experience type things. This is actually a useful step, but naturally limited because by the above resource limitations, you only have so much free time.
So before we even consider any talk of charity or social obligation, we already find ourselves looking at 8 hours/work, 8 hours/sleep, 15-30 minutes transportation, 1 hour shower and exercise, ~1 hour of food prep, eating and other hygiene, that can’t go anywhere. Now if you stack on things like staying on top of current events, raising children, taking care of your parents and elders, and so on, you have almost exhausted the time envelope of possible life improvements before you even considered whether wealth could increase your personal happiness.
There is, however, one major asset that we have not accounted for: the quality of personal relationships and the benefits thereof. Without massive wealth, you cannot increase the time that you devote to these, given the above constraints. You can, however, choose individuals that are compatible with you and make you happier. Here, wealth and social status can be a massive force multiplier. However, it is not the only requirement: you must also have time to spend with these people. This is where the nominal meritocracy of the developed nations falls flat on its face.
Who makes the most babies and has the most time to spend with their loved ones? Clearly, those on less-onerous forms of social assistance, and the part-timers who can’t get enough hours. For sure, they have to suffer through various trials and indignities, such as kids dying because they can’t get teeth pulled, roach-infested apartments, and so on.
Next, we consider the middle class. If they continue to work to provide for themselves in old age, at typical income levels, they will be occupied well into old age, losing time with their young children (with the older children, things are OK) and not being able to fully enjoy hobbies until they reach retirement age. With that said, they are still better off in certain ways than the dependents and the gentry.
The upper-middle-class typically works long hours and makes major sacrifices to achieve their economic means and status. Often this involves compromising personal relationships and being absentee parents.
Finally, we must also mention the nouveau riche for some additional perspective. The typical story here is 20 years of busting your butt, and then you either get the choice to retire, accepting a significant decrease in wealth and therefore living standards, or to go on, deferring rewards even longer. Some benefit possibly, but a lot depends on where you are with your family at that point, if you still have one.
So the economically well-off are in many ways the poorer, and more foolish.
But we have not fully considered the other possibility for maximizing personal happiness: that of having access and attention of better people. Promising “stability” to a prospective spouse, and then being able to give your children and elders the experiences, training, and freedom from want – these are all highly meaningful.
Even so, if you are the one working the 60-80 hour weeks while all this is going on, you aren’t enjoying these things enough that people would want to trade places with you.
However, even that is devalued from what it was decades ago. With the sexual revolution, both men and women become interchangeable parts, with no special bond to one particular person. The governments of the world make marriage a perilous enterprise with busted and irregular family laws. The old problem of women bearing children through rape and the lack of male accountability is now (in the developed world) giving way to the phenomenon of the man being unable to have a choice in whether and how many children to have, once he chooses to engage in sexual relations with a woman. (I ignore condoms here, as sex with plastic objects is not the purpose of romantic relationships.) Due to no-fault divorce law, now either the man or a woman can walk away from a marriage and the other has no effective recourse, regardless of their good behavior. All these things devalue the average romantic relationship (though great ones are as good as ever), weakening the case for the pursuit of wealth even further. In particular, it levels the benefit between the poor, who would attract relatively poor-quality mates, and the upper-middle-class, who, because of promiscuity/STDs, infidelity, monetary value-at-risk, and in general the coarseness and cheapness of relations, wind up with women who aren’t much better than people who don’t make the effort.
As for the nouveau-riche in their 40s and 50s who are chasing younger women…well, in some countries, prostitution is legal. We shouldn’t confuse it for an ideal relationship, though.
The situation doesn’t change that much when you are filthy rich and busting your butt: what does change is that you can have these whores divorce you, or you divorce them, and life goes on. You don’t have the same fundamental impact to your living standards when your marriage and family fall apart. You just truck on and get a new one, if you want. Or, if you’ve had enough, you can pay the alimony and child support without materially impacting your living standards. Obviously attracting women of this caliber is easier than it is for your hard-working counterparts in the upper-middle-class.
The real benefit is being able to quit working and do whatever you want – be it with family, friends, political pursuits, self-improvement, research and experimentation – whatever. This is something that none of the lower classes can get. You can get your family, keep your family and friends, and enjoy your family and friends, or whatever it is that you want to do. Everybody else just puts their nose to the grindstone for 30+ years and gets about the same results.
Since there’s only one economic class above slavery that can justify any serious additional effort, you have to keep entry into that class a real possibility. Without that opportunity, you may as well go straight to the old-skool communism, as all of us are now roughly equal in happiness, regardless of our economic contribution or the things we gave up to ensure we could contribute.