to be designed to screw it up worse. He doesn't see high levels of income i nequality as a problem.
blem is there are a high level of people that do not earn very much. The p roblem is not that some people earn a lot. It is that some people earn so little.
begs to differ, and presents quite a bit of statistical evidence that sugge sts that income inequality is a problem of itself. Wilkinson and Pickett ap proach the problem as medical epidemiologists.
Michael Marmot approaches it from a purely medical point of view, which rap idly acquires political content.
Picketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" looks at it from an economic point of view.
olution is to fertilize all the flowers.
That's not my solution, nor does it capture most of what has been written o n the subject. Everybody is agreed that what is required is to fertilise al l the flowers, but there's only a finite amount of fertiliser available, an d where some of the flowers have been hogging fertiliser to the point where it isn't providing them with any perceptible incremental advantage, while short-changing the rest of the garden, a certain amount of adjustment is re quired.
Japan manages to achieve an adequately egalitarian income distribution with out much government intervention, but it's not a system that's easily copie d. The Scandinavian and German approach - with higher taxes that the US has favoured - does seem to work, and could more easily be copied.
Note that an adequately egalitarian income distribution isn't everybody get ting the same income - which would give a Gini coefficient of zero. Scandin avia works fine with a Gini coefficient around 0.25, and most advanced indu strial countries sit around 0.3. The US, at 0.45 is a fairly spectacular ou tlier, and within the US individual states with more equal income distribut ions do better than those with worse - Wilkinson and Pickett had clearly ru n into American peculiarism, and took care to deal with it in advance.
The superior smartness isn't all that obvious - you do look like a fairly o rdinary right-wing nitwit, with the usual right-wing enthusiasm for self-de lusion. I doubt if you could trump Trump, but somebody who claims to have g one to a better university without specifying which one it was, or why this might have lead to better education (which it clearly hasn't) is quite a w ay down that particular road.