According to both the political elites, academic consensus and the never ceasing babble of the chattering classes, the defining challenge of the moment in Western culture is economic inequality. President Obama has spoken time and again about the challenges posed by gaps between the rich and everyone else and his arguments have been supported by ceaseless references to the growing divide between the top one percent and everyone else. Though hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of dire poverty over the last 25 years by the dynamic forces of capitalism and its spread to developing nations, when focusing narrowly on intra-national or personal differences in wealth then income inequality becomes apparent.
The first modern economist, Adam Smith, noted the importance of human virtues and vices and their contribution to modern man’s concern about income inequality and wealth disparity. Workers, noted Smith, seek riches and wealth for reasons that often confound observers, and understanding humans’ motives is key to understanding both what drives wealth accumulation and disparities in income. “In other words, it is the fact that people sympathize more easily with the rich that leads them to want to become rich themselves, and to (wrongly) assume that the rich must be supremely happy” . Once we note the immutability of human motives for seeking wealth and vices such as envy, the focus on income inequality during times of unprecedented wealth and leisure for the typical worker is easier to understand.
There seems to be little qualitative difference, at least according to Smith’s assessment of workers’ motives, between the motives of those seeking wealth from 18th century Scotland and the modern American. Smith observed about workers of his time that they sought wealth not for basic provision, but for the sake of chasing an illusion of perfect happiness people tend to associate with those who achieve great wealth. Today’s workers certainly attain the basic provisions of life noted by Smith in a much easier, safer and less certain environment than those he observed over 200 years ago. And yet the modern worker still subject herself to a life of pursuing ever higher rungs of the corporate ladder and the riches that accompany each step closer to the executive suite and farther from the life of leisure and ease that people falsely imagine as the end state of their pursuit.
Work Cited
Rasmusen, Dennis. "The Problem With Inequality, According to Adam Smith." The Atlantic 9 June 2016. Web. <http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-problem-with-inequality-according-to-adam-smith/486071/>.
