#Equality #Ambition #Success #Economy
Hey everyone! 🌟 Let’s dive into a thought-provoking question that has been swirling around in my mind. If everyone possessed the same physical and attractiveness attributes, along with high ambition, intelligence, and marketable skills, would we all be rich? 🤔 Here’s what I’ve been pondering:
– Education and marketable skills are often touted as the keys to financial success. But in reality, not everyone has equal access to these opportunities, leading to an uneven distribution of wealth.
– If everyone were equally driven and skilled, would our society need to adopt a more communal approach to wealth distribution, such as communism or government planning?
– Would luck or nepotism play a larger role in determining who achieves the highest incomes in a scenario of universal equality in abilities?
– Is genetics or evolution a factor in why some individuals may not prioritize wealth accumulation?
– What would the economic implications be if everyone possessed the same money-making attributes?
Now, here’s my suggestion for a potential solution or way forward:
– Encouraging a shift in mindset towards valuing personal growth, fulfillment, and contribution to society over solely chasing financial success.
– Promoting access to education, skills training, and opportunities for all individuals, regardless of their background.
– Advocating for policies that aim to reduce income inequality and create a more equitable society for everyone.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Let’s start a conversation and share our perspectives! 💬 #Discuss #EqualityInWealth #FinancialSuccess
Being rich or making more than a lot of others implies a comparative advantage. It’s important to remember that wealth isn’t zero sum, so when two parties are trading even with the comparative advantage, both parties end up wealthier after the trade.
Not really sure what you mean by “if everyone’s rich” because it’s so relative.
100 years ago just being able to feed 8 billion people would seem rich, no ?
10,000 years from now and if you can’t vacation to mars often you’re not rich ?
This is not a a direct answer, but you may want to ponder what Gary Becker, Victor Posner and the commenters that followed said about luck at birth and if tax policy should try to equalize it.
https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/10/luck-and-taxation-becker.html
It is useful to think of jobs one at a time. Suppose that by magic everyone on earth is blessed with great knowledge and skill in carpentry. Such that the skill is as common as the ability to perform “unskilled” work. This would drastically reduce the income made by carpenters. However, it would also increase real incomes elsewhere. That is because the price of products produced by carpenters would fall drastically. Now, think about those who do unskilled jobs. Their income would rise because of the fall in the price of products produced by carpentry. Also though, since they can perform carpentry those jobs are open to them too. So, the wage of unskilled work would increase a little too.
Now, let’s say that this magical increase in skills progresses across the economy. Tomorrow everyone can program computers. The day after everyone can do accounting. The day after that everyone knows how to be a nurse. Now wages for software engineers, accountants and nurse will all fall. However, the price of the output of all of those things will fall too. So, real incomes will rise, there will be large GDP growth. Unskilled workers will benefit from that too, but they will also benefit because they can do so many other jobs. At the start they could only do unskilled work, now they can do that or carpentry, or programming, or accounting or nursing.
As this process progresses incomes will level out across all jobs. A person who washes the dishes in a restaurant will be paid the same as someone who is a surgeon. That’s because the person who washes the dishes in a restaurant has the skills to be a surgeon. If the wages were low then people would move jobs. Of course, average wages would be much higher than they are today. The progress of science and technology would also be much faster which would make growth faster.
As WallyMetropolis says, there is no reason to think that society would collapse. It’s more the opposite, it would be much more successful.
This does not mean that everyone would be equally rich. There would still be capital ownership and all the risks associated with it. Some businesses would still perform better than other businesses – even if simply by random chance. Some future events would be anticipated by some people but not by others. Some people would suffer from accidents and illnesses that reduce their income earning potential.
Certainly, the world would be a lot more equal than it is today, but not perfectly equal. The variation would happen around an average income that is much higher than today.