Inequality is passed down the generations through social means (much more than genetics). The very poor never earn enough to save and invest. They are brought up with inferior access to education, health and capital or good examples of success

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So lets see.

They never earn enough. Well those that do are no longer poor. Hardly a logical argument.

They never earn enough. Or is it that the expenditures are too high? After all saving comes after essential spending has been made. Food, housing, clothing. And the biggy, paying the government. The government takes a huge cut out of poor people earnings. The major reason they can't save.

They are brought up with inferior access to education. Who provides it? The government.

They are brought up with inferior access to health. Who provides it? The government.

Not surprising that the don't have access to capital. They wouldn't be poor then would they. Another Doh!

Examples of success. Agreed. What's needed is a return to more selective education. For small schools, that's grammars and specialist schools. For large schools, its streaming. It needs cuts in spending so that taxes on the poor can be cut. It needs compulsorary savings even for the poor, so they can accumulate capital.

Equality sounds so very boring but is it so bad if the alternative is WW3?

But then again...... would equality be so 'effing boring we'd want WW3?

I still believe that a just and civilised society would have a very small percentage of very 'poor' people and a very small percentage of very 'rich' people - aka a mathematical 'normal' distribution.

A 'normal' distribution is natural - why fight nature?

Robert if we lived in a state of nature we would be hunter gatherers naked, living in caves or trees and relying on our inferior teeth and claws for success against better armed rivals such as bears, wolves, lions and tigers. We did the unnatural thing and used out brains to alter our environment. We changed nature by clearing forests and jungles for agriculture.

We have brains and we have hearts and consciences in a degree not shared by other animals. We exercise restraint in consuming less now to consume more later - saving the seed corn for next year's harvest. We exercise restraint and forward planning in living with each other in a civilised manner. Civilised comes from civitas, the Latin for city. We are born fighting our own nature.

A normal distribution is common but not universal even in nature. Assuming that everything is a normal distribution can have disastrous consequences. Naseem Nicholas Taleb made a lot of money writing a book, The Black Swan, about "fat tail risk". The financial crisis was partly caused by people assuming that the chance of a very high proportion of loans going south all at once was so small as to be negligible. The same assumption has been made about the Stock Market, that the number of days on which very big falls or very big rises happen MUST be so small as to be negligible. Then someone actually checked the statistics and found that sudden large moves are much more common than could be explained by the previous assumption of a normal distribution. Traders, including investment banks, working on the old and wrong assumptions have cost us all a lot of money.

A fact you all have to face ,if you shared out everything equally you can bet your life by tomorrow morning some would have nothing and others would have accumulated 19 times as much. There is nothing you can do about the accumulation of wealth . It is related to business acumen ,skill energy and resolution of aims and purpose. Some have it and some do not. Why do you think the Government insists on Pensioners having to buy Annuities with their Pension Pot, and not be allowed to have it in cash? Simply because there are more than enough idiots who would put it all on a Horse in the 3.30. race at oodwood They have to be protected from their own folly. It is just Human Nature to be unequal. Homo Sapien survived the others didn't.

Jeremy

Good points but I'm just saying that a normal distribution of wealth (minus the zero and infinite wealth bits) would be a good distribution to aim for rather than one skewed towards either a large wealthy and large poor class and small middle class or a large poor class and small middle to rich class.

If you disagree with that then you are against the large inequality you feel so strongly about that you created a forum topic about!

I feel that a civilised society society should have a LARGE middle class (one standard deviation from the mean in a normal distribution measured by wealth or income) and that is the kind of socierty I'd like to live in - with a strong and vibrant and healthy majority in the middle and a small extreme of wealth and poverty either side.