I definitely found this thought provoking. Personally, it doesn't bother me that there are other people with more money or status than me, I'm unsure of how much of that is me being less inclined towards it (there's definitely individual variation even among people with the same income), and how much is just because I have more than enough to live on (it helps to be young, single, busy, and in a very cheap city). Since most of the examples (not all) are about being below average rather than the existence of the above average, I think a welfare state funded by progressive taxation would address a lot of them.
However, if the concern is just about the existence of a status hierarchy, that seems much harder to address, since there'd be differences in status even if we made income inequality illegal.
I definitely found this thought provoking. Personally, it doesn't bother me that there are other people with more money or status than me, I'm unsure of how much of that is me being less inclined towards it (there's definitely individual variation even among people with the same income), and how much is just because I have more than enough to live on (it helps to be young, single, busy, and in a very cheap city). Since most of the examples (not all) are about being below average rather than the existence of the above average, I think a welfare state funded by progressive taxation would address a lot of them.
However, if the concern is just about the existence of a status hierarchy, that seems much harder to address, since there'd be differences in status even if we made income inequality illegal.