Jerry Bower looks at increasing inequality in Census and Sensibility:
I’m giving you a red pill and a blue pill. If you take the red pill, your income will roughly double in the next ten years, but your neighbor’s income will triple. If you take the blue pill you and your neighbor will stay the same, equal to each other now and ten years from now. Which pill are you going to take?I really like that question, because it’s such a timesaver. When levelers (people obsessed with income inequality) used to call my radio program, I would typically debate statistics with them. But that took too long. It’s better just to get to the point and expose the different moral universes in which we live.
In my universe, also known as reality, social progress inevitably leads to inequality. It’s a statistical necessity. As the world gets bigger the bell curve gets wider. Distributions work that way. In a world of 7 billion people the top IQ will be higher above the mean than in a world with one billion people. The fastest miler will almost certainly be faster than the fastest miler in a smaller world.