Dear Armin,
Thanks for reading and for commenting and questioning. If you're asking whether I think the model could be pushed further, my answer would be a provisional yes. As I noted in the abstract in the paper I made pretty extreme simplifications to be able to define things clearly and derive clean results. Generally the world is not that clearly defined and the results not that cleanly derived. But then approximate equations take us a pretty long way in physics don't they?
I expected more negative feedback than I have received since any political topic pushes hot buttons and I have seen a few rabidly political comments on others essays. You ask whether the concept of equality as presented is not a little bit of a strawman. I don't think so. When you say most people understand equality as meaning equality of opportunity, that is the classical interpretation since the founding of this country (with the obvious failures in practice that all countries have in their history.) I try to listen closely and read closely and the understanding I have is that much current thought is aimed at equality of outcomes, which I show to be unrealistic and that's putting it mildly.
Equality of opportunity does not, cannot, and will not produce equality of outcomes. It produces a dynamic society in which one can rise or fall based on one's efforts and accomplishments. This economic mobility is two-way, with citizens rising and citizens falling, and sometimes an individual may rise and fall several times in his life. As long as they do not fall below subsistance level, that seems to be the best system. Without going into details, I started near the bottom in many ways, and have achieved my goals through hard work (and of course with luck.) I have always felt that much of the attraction to immigrants in some more traditional societies was that one could come to America and, through hard work, succeed, whereas some societies were much more based on what social or economic class one was born into.
Obviously a country with 300 million citizens and a 250 year old government cannot be characterized in such simple terms, but, on the whole, we've had equality of opportunity, at least for 2nd generation immigrants who willingly entered the "melting pot" to become Americans. Unfortunately, there are votes to be had from "divide and conquer" and it appears that the psychopaths are determined to divide us by race, religion, gender, politics, and every other avenue thay can find. I somewhat doubt that today's corruption is inherently worse than other times in history, but communications control tools and the 'crony capitalism' certainly make it seem that way. And structural issues exacerbate the problems. For example two California senators may have represented 5 million people a centruy ago. Today they represent almost 40 million of us. Who can believe any but the most powerful have any influence with such representatives?
If one accomplishes big things, it almost invariably generates wealth, and this allows one to accomplish even bigger goals, using one's own money, as opposed to taking other's money and then trying to accomplish things that they may be opposed to. So I am not automatically opposed to productively generated wealth disparities, only to those generated by corrupt collusion between government and corporations, as tends to be the case in the systems you write about in your essay.
So to repeat, I don't think 'equality of outcome' is a strawman. I think it is a misleading slogan, meant to play off of ignorance and envy, to establish a two-class system where the beta class can be equal in misery, and the alpha class is above the law. We don't have that, but we've seen numerous examples this last century.
Thanks again for writing your essay and reading and commenting on mine,
Best regards,
Edwin Eugene Klingman