Income inequality is low in agrarian, pre-industrial societies, because you need income to achieve income inequality:
The idea is, there is an absolute level of subsistence income for the mass of peasants who are creating value in the traditional society. Above that level is the surplus, or the amount of income which can be expropriated by elites; and below that amount… starvation for the producers in the economy.
Thus, in a very poor society whose average income is close to the absolute survival level, the surplus extracted is pretty small and therefore inequality cannot be very high. But as average income rises, there is potentially more to extract. So the interesting question becomes, did pre-industrial societies at different levels of income have different “extraction levels”? Put another way: did peasant incomes also rise when the average income rose or did the increase simply lead to more elite extraction?
Incomes may have been more equally distributed in China in 1880 than in England in 1688, but that’s only because the average income was quite low in China. But perhaps more importantly, China in 1880 was closer to its maximum potential inequality than England in 1688 was.
(Hat tip to T. Greer.)
That is evidence that those on the Left don’t care about poverty — it is just a tactic to use when convenient — and that their strategic core belief is inequality.
The Left doesn’t care about the utter poverty in interior China; they only care about the inequality in much richer coastal China. Obviously they talk about poverty, but it is a relative poverty disguised as absolute poverty.
Here in my country, the Left only started to talk about Chinese social problems and poverty when the Chinese started to get rich. I bet when Cuba starts to prosper we will start to hear about Cuba poverty and social problems…
I guess that’s what the left means be income equality…All equally poor that is except for the elite ruling oligarchy.