This post, "Incentives to produce” are incentives to rig the game, on inequality by the economist Steve Randy Waldman makes many excellent points, one of which maintains that the character of the dispersion of outcomes (the economic incentives that influence the choices individuals make) will, in a society with great inequality, result in behavior that reproduces and even promotes greater inequality...

Suppose, reasonably I think, that ceteris paribus humans prefer to “be good”. That is, we prefer to do work that is productive and engage in behavior that is ethical. Suppose, also reasonably, that a well ordered society depends upon people sometimes making choices opposed to their material interests on ethical or other grounds. Then it is obvious how inequality might be costly. Instead of talking about “incentives to” (produce, extract rents, whatever), we might describe outcome dispersion as a tax on refraining from mercenary behavior. If the difference between economic winners and losers is modest, people of ordinary virtue might refrain from participating in activities they consider corrupt, might even be willing to “blow the whistle”, because the cost of doing so is outweighed by their preference for behaving well. But as outcome dispersion grows, absenting oneself from or even opposing activities that would be personally remunerative but socially undesirable becomes too costly.

What this passage answers is two things. One, that inequality is not a given or natural but cultural, and therefore not outside of the political. So if a society wants to reduce its levels of inequality, then what it needs to do is change its values. Two, what comes naturally to a human, being a highly social animal, is precisely what is corrupted by an economic system that encourages and rewards asocial behavior. And so the many behave in all areas of public life like their opposite, the few (the economic winners).