Taylor: Argument of unequal distribution of wealth

economies that encouraged hard work and risktaking.

Countries that squash markets and enforce a state-driven equality — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe come to mind — tend to have horrific poverty.

Still, I worry about inequality.

In households with children under age 18, a recent New York Times piece explained, the bottom 50 percent of households actually have negative net worth. They have more debt than savings or assets.

That New York Times piece also describes a straight-line 3-step mechanism of inter-generational poverty:

1. Wealth correlates strongly with the likelihood of attending and graduating from college.

2. A college degree correlates strongly with higher lifetime earnings.

3. No higher degree means a much harder path to attaining or maintaining a middle class life.

Those steps alone suggest that at the bottom rung of society, poverty begets poverty and inequality tends to beget more inequality.

Meanwhile, at the up- per end of the economic ladder, the power of compound investment returns, reduced taxes on intergeneration wealth transfers and favorable tax rates on dividends and capital gains, tend to maintain the status quo among wealthy households.

Wealth begets wealth. I don’t like the idea of stagnation at the top and bottom.

Conard’s book challenges some deeply held beliefs.

Traditional measurements of the lack of wealth for the bottom 50 percent of American households miss a key factor. Measuring consumption at the bottom half — due to social safety net programs including government transfers Medicare and Social Security — shows a strong reduction in poverty over the last 20 years. If we measure consumption instead of wealth, our society looks far less unequal.

Conard also makes some disturbing counterarguments about the usefulness of investing in education to overcome economic immobility. His skeptical arguments will make people on both the left and right of the political spectrum uncomfortable

My fondest wish on this topic is not to bash capitalism, or socialism for that matter, but to ask:

Can we talk about a middle ground?

Conard worries about killing, through redistribution and taxation, the golden goose that has raised billions out of poverty. I worry about that negative median net worth of the bottom 50 percent of households in America. A hollowed-out middle class affects the economy and broader society.

I’m worried that the concentration of wealth in the U.S. at the very top is too high and getting higher. In developing that view, I look to Thomas Piketty’s 2014 masterpiece Capital, in which he shows we’re on trend to return to 19th Century Gilded Age levels of wealth-concentration in the U.S. I don’t love the idea of an entrenched aristocracy in America.

While Conard celebrates the positive economic effects of that inequality — more pools of wealth encourage more innovation, which leads to economic growth — I’m worried about the moral problem of an entrenched aristocracy permanently separated from the other 99 percent of society.

My view: I’m OK with some inequality. I’m a capitalist. To the extent that more hard work and more talent leads to more money for some people over others, I’m fine with that. That’s great.

I’m not OK with permanent inequality, or intergenerational inequality or inequality that suggests a fixed, rigged game. If being born into poverty is a life-sentence to an underclass, then inequality is something I’m less OK with.

I want people on my side of the debate, people who think inequality is a major problem, to read more smart people on the other side of the debate, like Edward Conard. Because if you don’t know where your own assumptions are weak or wrong, it’s hard to enact change.

Of course I also want folks worried about “creeping Socialism” in America to consider the moral consequences of a system in which children don’t get enough to eat, and the next generation’s children might not either.

You can talk all you want about “bootstraps,” but are kids still in elementary school responsible for yanking up their own straps?

Before you write to tell me that I’m either a greedy capitalist or a lefty socialist (I admit, I’m giving evidence of both here), can you instead just read Conard’s book? And then Piketty’s?

Sometimes I think the only solution to these arguments, at the individual level, is to consciously set out to read the things we’ll probably disagree with.