Inequality is Absolutely Necessary for Progress

Here’s an idea that’s likely to be unpopular: Some level of inequality is an absolute necessity for progress.

There are actually several reasons for this (at least), but all of them are pretty on-the-face obvious. And any one of these is enough by itself to prove the point.

It's impossible for progress to be experienced everywhere all at once.

So, progress necessarily creates inequality as some experience the progress before others.

Insisting that no one should benefit from progress unless everyone does merely ensures that no one will. And insisting that some people should get it before others is blatant bias whose only real purpose is to give power to the people demanding to be able to make that choice.

Progress requires that some people have resources others don't.

Scientific research, for example, is expensive. So, the resources to do it are necessarily limited to a small number of people.

Giving only a small group these resources is necessarily unequal. And for scientific progress to continue, it's necessary to sustain this inequality indefinitely.

Insisting that we distribute all these resources equally would merely ensure that virtually no scientific endeavors had enough resources to succeed. So it would halt scientific progress in its tracks.

And again, anyone demanding that they get to choose who to distribute these resources to is merely trying to accumulate power for themselves and those loyal to them.

Inequality is also an absolute necessity for the motivation that drives progress.

People who have the same wealth and resources as everyone else, and know they will never have more, have zero motivation to do the work to improve their situation. Relying on the vast majority of people to do work out of the goodness of their hearts is doomed to fail (and has failed literally every single place it has been tried, without exception, from small communes to entire nations).

People who know that generating progress will improve their personal situation are much more motivated to make progress happen. So, the vast majority of innovation comes from people trying to improve their own, personal situation.

This means that if you don't allow people to improve their own situation relative to others (meaning, creating inequality between themselves and others), you eliminate the vast majority of motivation. And thus the vast majority of progress.

So, the idea of “equity” - where everyone gets the same outcomes, regardless of any other factors isn't progressive at all. In fact, it’s not just not progressive; it's actually regressive.

The unfortunate truth, of course, is that, other than the “useful idiots” who refuse to actually put their brain cells to use, many of the people demanding equity already know this. They promote the idea of equity not for the purpose of reducing inequality, but for the purpose of increasing it.

In other words, inequality is just fine, even to the most ardent warriors for equity. It just has to be the kind of inequality that takes from others to give them the lion’s share.