Wealth inequality is bad for everybody

Michael Lewis (Sam Slaughter)
October 2023

This discussion was built around Michael Lewis’s 2014 piece in the New Republic called Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy.

Discussion questions:

"The distinction between haves and have-nots, winners and losers, wasn’t entirely gone, of course. But it became less important than this other distinction, between the givers and the takers."

How might this lesson be applied to our society as a whole?

"It’s an obvious point: people’s behavior can be changed. But it’s largely absent from the growing and increasingly heated discussion about the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else. The grotesque inequality between the haves and the have-nots is seldom framed as a problem that the haves might privately help to resolve. Instead, it is a problem the have-nots must persuade their elected officials to do something about, presumably against the wishes of the haves."

What do we think of this idea that inequality might be an idea that "the haves might privately help to resolve"?

What do we think of the relative power of the top 10%, 1% and billionaire classes to influence the future of our society?

If money seems to make the rich (a) less empathetic / less good citizens and (b) not incrementally more happy, why does money continue to dominate the narrative of what "success" means amongst the rich?

Additional content: a little video visualizing the evolution of wealth distribution in the US over the past few decades.