A carefully-researched comic about wealth inequality

August 18, 2022 8:40 AM

A comic about wealth inequality in New Zealand, but applicable almost everywhere else as well. "Imagine you're invited to a dinner. There are 10 guests, 10 seats at the table, and 10 plates of food. But then you all sit down to eat and one person gets served nearly 6 meals. 5.8 meals to be precise..."
posted by carriage pulled by cassowaries (25 comments total)

Man, that was good! And it's part of a series? I have to read the others. (The animations were new to me, and a great touch.)

This combination of a terrified, precarious middle class with a top tier that's happy not to rock the boat, means the have-nots are kind of doomed to either waiting for everyone else to work against their perceived interests or violent revolution.

I like that this comic is an effort to break that fearful silence! I would love a version with numbers for my own country to share around...but I suspect they are just are tilted. :7(
posted by wenestvedt at 9:02 AM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

wenestvedt, You can read the rest of the series here. ^_^
posted by carriage pulled by cassowaries at 9:04 AM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh, this is good.

I get a little impatient with the soothing and attention directed at the folks in the middle, when it's the folks with the tiniest amount who are hurting the most - but I think it's good to remind myself that - as they say in the comic - everyone is hurting, everyone could benefit from a better society, and everyone should be involved in, welcomed into, discussing this and improving the situation.

And I really like the ending.

(Also, I don't look at a lot of web comics, so I was struck by the little bits of movement in each panel. I thought that was quite cool. It's probably commonplace by now, but I enjoyed it.)

I really liked this. Thank you so much for sharing it with us, carriage pulled by cassowaries!
posted by kristi at 9:06 AM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Are they invited to dinner but with food they paid for themselves?
posted by Ideefixe at 9:06 AM on August 18, 2022

In the real world, 20% of people would try to take the plates away from the rich person for more equitable distribution, 20% would defend the rich person's share with violence, and everyone else, 60% of people, would sit there and shrug and say "maybe they just really need a lot of food?"

[ disgusted noise ]
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:45 AM on August 18, 2022

I liked the comic, and especially appreciate suggestions on working towards equality. There are many options for information about income inequality, and few that include ideas about where to enact change. When I feel most frustrated and afraid, having direction is a comfort and place to put my energy.
posted by winesong at 10:03 AM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's so much complexity around this issue.

As a healthy, financially stable American, I wish I felt as rich and secure as I am, relative to the rest of the world. Instead, as an underemployed, mid-career wage-earner, I feel like a single mistake will drop me off the ladder.

I keep trying to find ways to take advantage of my wealth and privaledge to help others. But for the past 5 years or so, I've felt like all my efforts have been in vain. I'm getting close to the conclusion that nobody wants to help me become less precarious... And nobody wants my help in becoming less precarious.

I wish I could find a way to use the master's tools myself.
posted by rebent at 10:03 AM on August 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

And I really like the ending.

The polite request to Mr Rich?

I would have much prefered a policeman forcibly taking and redistributing his hoard. It should not be up to Mr. Rich to decide if he is full yet.
posted by Meatbomb at 10:04 AM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was thinking more of the fact that a person with a full meal chose to break through everyone's discomfort enough to suggest paying attention to, and providing more to, people with less than she had.
posted by kristi at 10:30 AM on August 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

Toby Morris is a NZ national treasure. This post needs a TobyMorris tag to go with the other posts based on his work.(edit: though sadly many of the links in those posts go to dead sites now)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:48 AM on August 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

And I really like the ending.

Reading it with my NZ accent on...I recall several times where "Ahhh...you reckon we could..." was pretty much a polite but fairly mandatory ask or else we were about to have a problem that may involve stepping outside for a few minutes to resolve. But that may just be me.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:54 AM on August 18, 2022 [10 favorites]

I would have much prefered a policeman forcibly taking and redistributing his hoard. It should not be up to Mr. Rich to decide if he is full yet.

More likely the policeman would have been there to stop the five people at the hungry end of the table simply helping themselves to Mr Rich's surplus food.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:33 AM on August 18, 2022 [8 favorites]

Now imagine the near future when neural networks are doing much of the work that human workers are doing now, including knowledge workers.
posted by The Half Language Plant at 11:49 AM on August 18, 2022

The dinner table metaphor owes something to Huey P Long, pbuh.
posted by eustatic at 12:17 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Love it and we are a small enough country to actually tackle this issue first off the block must be taxing capital gains made on property. I'd love to see more discussion about income tax too.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 12:49 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I can see why someone might not like the "polite request" ending. I think a Mr Creosote ending would work here. (CW: yucko)
posted by scratch at 1:55 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Wait, who serves the meals?

This comic uses a pretty loopy example to make its point.

I would have much prefered a policeman forcibly taking and redistributing his hoard. It should not be up to Mr. Rich to decide if he is full yet.

Yes, what we need is police forcibly taking and redistributing stuff. Is there anything the police can't make better?
posted by 2N2222 at 6:09 PM on August 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Max Rashbrooke's site. David Latele's BBM program.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 7:31 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm enjoying that dinner is sausages, frozen peas, broccoli, mashed potatoes. Not flash by any means. Plain, old school. I'm not sure whether this is deliberately signalling something or not.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:44 PM on August 18, 2022

I think that's traditional NZ spuds, meat and 2 veg - sort of a food-of-the-people from a previous century
posted by mbo at 8:22 PM on August 18, 2022

Fully expected the last panel to be 9 of the diners clambering over the table towards the guy with 6 meals, with their steak knives drawn.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 11:18 PM on August 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Would it have been all 9 of them though? Part of the point of the strip was to explain the ambition/fear of loss motivation which encourages the 4 diners in the middle to side with Mr Rich.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:13 AM on August 19, 2022

Part of the point of the strip was to explain the ambition/fear of loss motivation which encourages the 4 diners in the middle to side with Mr Rich.

My opinion is that due to income inequality, 4 middle full meal people may be economically far closer to the bottom than the top, but they are also close enough to the top where they aren't actually particularly all that worried about falling into the lower rungs. If you specifically ask, they may express some consternation about falling to a lower class, but so will a billionaire!

Judging by their purchases, their savings, and their attitudes about income, savings, and class, falling classes is not a major concern. So in that aspect, those at the top of the middle are actually closer to the top than their income belies, mostly because most people actually have a cap on the amount of active work they will do to earn income, and it trails off dramatically as they get 'comfortable', and becoming ultra-high net worth is really a case of timing and luck.

They are not actually being squeezed by inflation or high housing prices, at least not in the US, not based on their purchasing decisions. They could legislate for lower housing prices, they could legislate for social safety, they could fund construction. Judging by actions, they actually like high housing prices! Maybe New Zealand is different, but I seriously doubt it is that different.

So maybe 1 of the 4, the one closest to the bottom due to circumstance or whatever, would be willing to share with the lower, but that relies on their compassion, not some over-arching fear that they are going to join the underfed diners. The other 3 are not.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:32 AM on August 19, 2022

One of the great things The Spinoff has been doing for years is using comics and GIFs to explain things. They did it with COVID really effectively. Glad to see this.
posted by rednikki at 7:18 PM on August 19, 2022

This webcomic fails to hit the target for a couple of reasons – assuming that the target is an honest discussion of the moral implications of wealth inequality.

Before I get into that, though, I will say something about the venerable tradition of using a hypothetical example to appeal to moral intuitions. It’s a hard thing to do well, but it pays off when it works. Here’s an example of how well it can work: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s great article, “In Defense of Abortion.” In that article, she says (I’m paraphrasing) “Imagine that you wake up in a hospital, only to discover that your blood and other bodily fluids are now part of a two-person transfusion – a bunch of biomass is now running back and forth in a bunch of tubes between you and a famous violinist in a coma. When you attempt to leave, you’re told that you can’t, because it’s necessary that you stay hospital-bound for the next several months in order to save the life of the violinist – because violinists have a right to life, and you’re needed in order to preserve the right to life of the violinist.” Thomson makes a strong case that, in effect, the drafting of someone else into involuntary confinement/harvesting service cannpt be justified – the right to life argument doesn’t justify the harvesting and confinement, etc. of someone else. (In my opinion, her essay’s argument has never been successfully countered.) She goes to anticipate arguments against the relevance of the example to abortion and provides counterarguments to those arguments, etc. The general method is: here is a fantastical example; note your intuitive response to it; and then if we talk about something in the real world that is sufficiently like the fantastical example, your intuitive response to the real-world example should be the same.
But the problem with the webcomic is that the fantastical example has a poor fit to reality: the two situations aren’t analogous. The fantastical situation is the bad distribution of a meal at a dinner party; the real-world situation is (expressly) wealth inequality. So there are problems here.

First, the distribution of wealth is very different from the distribution of income. The comic would make more sense if it focused on the distribution of income, and my guess is that the ratios of the meals produced by this alternative (income-based) dinner party would be a bit different.

Second, even inequality of income as such isn’t an especially powerful argument for some (including me). If I’m shown that some number of people don’t have enough income to meet basic needs, that’s a powerful argument about justice. But just showing that some people have more income than others doesn’t demonstrate that there’s an issue of justice involved. (Again, all this is just my opinion, but I’m sure that my opinions are shared by plenty of others.) Furthermore, if all we’re doing is exploring the implications of the fact that some people have more stuff than others, this is not a morally powerful fact that demands collective action – what it is, in fact, is an appeal to envy. In my opinion (again, I appreciate that this is controversial), a guaranteed minimum income could on net solve some social problems, but a guarantee of wealth equality is likely to create lots more social problems than it solves.

Third (and relatedly), it is a part of life that we all accept that some people are better off than others in their possession of certain desirable things. Some people have better sex lives than others; some people have more nutritious diets than others. If we had a hypothetical ten-person dinner party recounted by the cartoonist in which the situation of unequal sex frequency was bemoaned and repaired, or the situation of variance in healthy or unhealthy diets was bemoaned and repaired (so as to imply that we really ought to have mandatory intervention in and reparative measures for sex lives and healthy diets) , I suspect that the intuitive response of the reader in such a case would be “That’s not a dinner party solution that solves a problem that I want solved” even if such a solution might be seen as helping (for example) incels, or people whose diet includes too much alcohol or fatty foods. Such solutions imply large and disastrous social intrusions – few people think that the direct regulation of people’s sex lives or diets is morally permissible, even if a drop in inequality is the result. (I appreciate that comparing one’s sex life to one’s financial assets seems bizarre, but I think it is not much more bizarre than comparing one’s bank account to a meal at a dinner party. After all, what is at issue is things people want or need.)

Fourth, it’s notable that the webcomic pays a great deal of attention to what is seen as a problem, but (like many other instances of great propaganda) pays very little attention to the solution. Admittedly, there’s a bit of discussion about the solution: The problem is (per the comic) wealth inequality, which (per the comic) is always going to be at a level of imbalance, which (per the comic) always leads to more maldistribution. This has multiple implications, because we don’t see any elaboration on the details of what is presumably the webcomic’s preferred solution: an eleventh person at the dinner party. The eleventh person will (presumably) take some of the dinner for him- or herself and perform the task of distributing food for everyone else, and it’s unclear to what extent this will affect everyone else’s distribution. Map this onto national wealth maldistribution, and what you get is (as noted by another commenter above) a bunch of cops charged with redistribution. The impact that this will have on wealth creation and production is unclear, but there is some reason to think that it will create a downward trajectory.

So these are all generalities – I’ve sketched out a bunch of arguments and haven’t made any of them in a complete or formal way (kind of like the webcomic!) – but the bottom line is that the webcomic is great propaganda but contains very little substance. If you think it contains anything like a solid argument for equalitarian wealth redistribution, I’m guessing that you were quite sympathetic to that cause before you ever saw the webcomic.
posted by PaulVario at 10:14 AM on August 20, 2022 [1 favorite]