Advanced medical treatments, robotics unavailable to the average person, space flight, the ability to avoid pervasive surveillance, a greatly disproportionate ability influence politics, etc.
There are lots of things you have access to by having a great deal of wealth that are simply unavailable in even a reduced form to the average person.
A homeless person in the US today does not have access to better health care than the president did in 1960. Is a homeless person likely to have up-to-date health insurance information (I'd imagine its pretty tricky to get your health insurance card when you don't have an address). Are they likely to have enough cash on hand for a copay? What about for prescriptions? Are they going to have reliable transportation to a medical office? Are they going to have a reliable phone number where they can get messages from the doctor?
For all of these practical reasons, I would imagine that many homeless people would probably forgo all but the most essential medical care, which they would receive at an ER. They're probably going to be waiting hours to see someone at the ER and when they do it will be an overworked resident. The president in 1960 would be able to see any doctor he wanted at the time of his choice.
Also, a lot of homeless people probably wouldn't be homeless in the first place if they were able to access mental health care.
What does it matter if they have insurance, or cash for a copay? Public hospitals are required to treat them, with an extremely high standard of care, regardless of their ability to pay. Not only do they not need to pay to get care, but they don't even wait longer in the ER; ER triage (at least, where I've asked, but I assume this is true everywhere) is need-blind.
Those same hospitals are also incentivized to rush an uninsured patient out the door as soon as possible. Serious, painful, but not immediately life-threatening problem: give a random diagnosis and tell them to follow up with their nonexistent primary care doctor as soon as possible, and escort them out.
In many states in the US, Medicaid or other insurance is not available to the homeless or indigent, not unless you have a disability diagnosis from the doctor you can't pay to see, and can get the necessary help to have that diagnosis recognized legally by the government. Otherwise cursory, rushed visits to the free clinic and ER are all that's available.
Hospitals may be as minimally need-blind as required by law (if that, its not like the homeless can sue), but they only offer just that. The number of options and quality of medical treatment is vastly greater for those who can pay than for those who can't.
I doubt very much that the president would receive the same level of attention and prioritization at an ER as a homeless person, but even if you substitute a wealthy person in 1960 for the president you're still wrong.
Let's say that the homeless person develops a form of cancer that was incurable in 1960 but can now be treated with a very low rate of recurrence with chemotherapy. Your point, I assume, is that because this new treatment exists, this homeless person will receive better healthcare than anyone in 1960. But that presupposes that this homeless person has access to that treatment, which means that they need reliable transportation to a medical office on a regular basis for an extended period of time, they need someone to take care of them when they're really sick, they need some ability to get their medication and to take it regularly.
I can't give a precise date, but you might compare what a homeless person would get for a heart attack in 2014 with what Eisenhower got for his heart attack in 1955.
I think that a lot of the advances in treating heart disease have to do with preventing a heart attack in the first place by recognizing what risk factors a person has and having them change their lifestyle and take medications such as statins. Improvements in the area of prevention are going to be difficult for a homeless person to access since they require the ability to visit a primary care doctor, get medication and make lifestyle changes. It's pretty hard to eat healthy if you're on a very tight budget for food and don't have access to a kitchen.
The treatment that a homeless person gets when they actually have a heart attack may be better since they would presumably have access to a defibrillator in an ER.
Disregard the homeless for a second. The life expectancy for white Americans without high-school educations has dropped since 1990. -5 years for women, and -3 for men. The life expectancy for white women without high school educations in 2008 was the same as all women in 1960.
Uninsured ER treatment is great when you want to get your gangrened limbs amputated. Not so much when you want insulin to control your diabetes. But yes, I'm sure that a homeless gunshot victim taken to a trauma center today is given better treatment then Reagan in 1981.
How about having all of the following, only because you were lucky enough to be born to rich parents and no other reason:
- better parenting
- better education
- better nutrition
- better accommodation
- better connections
and countless other advantages over 99% of other people? Kids of billionaires having all that, and kids of poor people having nothing of that, seems to me the biggest injustice and the strongest argument against capitalism.
Why must an income gap mean that only the rich have good parenting, education, nutrition, and housing? Which of those benefits can you allocate exclusively to the wealthy in an argument backed by evidence? Poor school districts spend enormous amounts of money on students. In the span of half a century, we've moved from a society where the poor lacked electricity to one in which families below the poverty line have air conditioning, a car, and Internet access. His argument is that this is a result of price pressure caused by increasing competition driven by a need to keep capital invested in order to achieve the 'r' that Piketty talks about.
I admire accomplishments of capitalism - like material progress enhancing lifestyles of everyone, or lifting millions out of poverty.
But that was not the main thrust of my comment, which talked mainly about "injustices" caused by unchecked inheritance. If you want an example of the benefits allocated to wealthy, here is one - opportunities. I believe billionaire kids have a lot more opportunities in life compared to middle class kids, let alone poor ones.
Edit: tptacek, since I cannot reply to you, I will reply here - one example of what poor people won't have access to "tomorrow" compared to rich people : ability to be rich. And I already explained the advantages of being rich over being poor are already (food/health/shelter/education/...). And yes, your questions certainly helped clarify my thoughts, so thanks :)
First, you just moved the goalposts. Education, parenting, nutrition, housing: you said the rich have all of that, and the poor none. Did I misread you? Did I effectively rebut you and change your mind, simply by asking questions? That seems unlikely.
Second, in this new argument, you refer to "opportunity". Opportunity for what? Wealth? If capitalism is generating competition which in turn generates innovation which in turn drives down prices which in turn raises everyone's quality of life, how much does the opportunity for wealth matter? What is the thing rich people have "today" that poor people won't eventually have comparable access to "tomorrow" as a side effect of capitalism? I'm sure there's something; what is it?
Incidentally: I sound like I'm an advocate for wealth inequality, but I'm not, nor am I a concern troll. I believe the argument were having here is positive, not normative; we don't even agree on the facts. We should get the "is" down before the "ought".
> Poor school districts spend enormous amounts of money on students.
By what measure? Throughout most of the US public schools are funded through local taxes. The poorer the district, the less resources are available to educate children, which means understaffing, buildings which are falling apart, lack of classroom materials.
And is your comparison on funding per student meant to be against upper class families, who most likely send their children to pricey private schools? I just don't see how your statement is justified.
Sure, but that's a syllogistic non-sequitur. Norway drives innovation, the US drives innovation; either way, poor people get sharply increasing access to medical technology and services, not worse access (as an intuition of income inequality might suggest).
Yes, even in non-equal societies people benefit greatly from innovation.But if innovation is not dependent on extreme capitalism , why attribute it to capitalism in this discussion ?
It's because the engine of all wealth in capitalism is investment. Currency gets less valuable over time. Like sharks, concentrators of wealth need to keep moving. One of the most effective ways to do that is to invest in enterprise, which is competitive, and thus generates innovation.
It's a decent argument, and the arguments about lower taxes and increased innovation sound sensible. But as I said, some high taxes countries are quite innovative.
And in the end, the role of innovation should be to help people and equality, safety net and the like have great value for many. On the whole it's hard to argue social Democratic countries offer a worst deal for people than capitalism.
There are lots of things you have access to by having a great deal of wealth that are simply unavailable in even a reduced form to the average person.