How much do the rich owe the poor?

First, read the following excerpt:

It is impossible to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth without Bill Gates’s ingenuity and effort. But it is far easier to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth being produced by someone other than Bill Gates within the institutions of modern American economic society than it is to imagine Bill Gates generating Bill Gates’s wealth in a different time and place – in France in the 1700s, or in the Central African Republic today – in which society was or is less tolerant of entrepreneurial capitalism and the accumulation of personal billions, and where the community of engineers that gave rise to and became America’s tech sector is absent. Indeed, at some point in Microsoft’s history it was Microsoft the information-processing organism that was more critical to Bill Gates’s wealth accumulation than Bill Gates himself. People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

That paragraph can easily be used as some kind of an ideological  Rorschach test.  Upon reading that, one can get pissed off and defend Gates's gazillions, or one might applaud in agreement that Gates has been unfairly hogging it all.

In the essay, by Ryan Avent, from which I had excerpted that paragraph, he makes an argument that will certainly make one sit up:

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

His follow-up sentence?  "That is not a radical statement."

I want to get back to the example that Avent uses. Bill Gates has made gazillions.

Could Gates have amassed that wealth if he were in the Central African Republic? The answer is easy--he could not have.

Could Gates have made it that big back 200 years ago in France. He could not have.

Which means, there is something special about the very specific time period over which Gates was able to make his gazillions. The question then is how much Gates owes society for the special circumstances in which all these were possible.

Bill Gates, his wife, and Warren Buffett, have all made it abundantly clear--through their interviews and speeches over the years--that they fully recognize how lucky they were to have been in this special circumstances that made possible their gazillionaire status. Buffett refers to even being born in the USA as having won the "ovarian lottery." In addition to their humanitarian views, this is also a reason for them to turn almost all of their wealth over to the foundation that then spends it on various domestic and international projects.

After quoting Adam Smith and the wonderful advantages of trade and specialization, Avent writes:

Secure in the knowledge that societal growth would not reduce redistribution (and could indeed increase the value available for redistribution by increasing global output) the incentive to draw the borders of society tightly would be curtailed. The challenge, of course, is to create the broad social interest in an encompassing redistribution. How to do that?

Isn't that the challenge that I have been struggling with all my adult life!  How do we create the broad social interest in redistribution that is needed along with the open borders, trade, and specialization?  How do we develop a social contract that will include redistribution, which the ideologues from the right hate, while also allowing for free trade that the ideologues from the left hate?

Avent writes that Adam Smith the philosopher wrote about that too.  "The force of human empathy can be made to serve either openness or societal mercantilism."

Here again the problem is that we are far more empathetic to people like us, but not towards others who are completely unlike us.  We conveniently forget that deep down we are all humans, but only view each other through nationalistic or religious or ethnic, or whatever divisive lens we want to use.

There is a better answer available: that to be ‘like us’ is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia. ...
Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.

If only we had more empathy.  If only even a couple of million among the 63 million had even a little bit of a respect for the value of empathy!