Right, this is why the US GDP has grown by a factor of 20 in the past half century while adjusted average hourly wages haven't budged. What a frightfully naive point of view.
Life for the below-middle-class is way better than before. Maternal mortality, infant mortality, calories consumed, appliances in the home, life expectancy all trending in the right direction. Life now for the average American is stupendously better than half a century ago. Over the last twenty years (over which the ATUS was active), time spent sleeping, time spent on leisure, and percent of people engaged in sports and recreation each day are also trending well.
I don't care if I make a dollar and you make a billion if one dollar will provide for my entire life, and if that life is pleasant in an absolute sense.
Why is it a false god? "QoL Trending in the right direction" seems to be a very myopic way to view the world. When it's clear concentration of wealth has slowly eroded the dignity of many peoples lives, encouraging them to work longer and longer hours in jobs with less benefits "gigs/contracts" while being jerked around by increasingly powerful and untouchable classes of people.
I've experienced this phenomenon very prominently in the life sciences industry where short term precarious contracts are handed out to lower income lab workers. Recently it has become more obvious as all of management has moved to remotely monitoring and dictating the worker's day to day activities while becoming increasingly out of touch with the realities of the people doing the actual work. This is real and also representative.
When there is a culture of respect and dignity of all members of a society sharing similar goals, this sort of thing doesn't happen. Exploitation isn't expedited.
Wages and equality are a form of that respect.
It's not a false god when it performs a function of cultural cohesiveness, you could argue that is what a god does..
Final note: Keeping you're livestock healthy doesn't alleviate them from being livestock.
All societies that primarily aimed at equality have harmed their members. All societies that have aimed at top-quartile growth have their bottom-quartile more prosperous than those who've aimed at minimizing Gini.
Well doesn't that counteract pleasantness in an absolute sense? I would argue there has never truly been a society aimed at equality on a large scale. I don't consider the implementation of communism to have been truly aimed at equality and certainly didn't end that way.
In a POSIWID sense, systems that claim to be equality systems are actually aiming at Gini 1. Therefore, my priors on the outcomes likely if I am to go along with an equality-optimizer are high that I will end up a serf and near zero that I will end up equal participant in the commune.
My priors on the outcomes likely if I am to go along with a top-line optimizer are high that he will make out like a bandit, I will make out like a bandit's brother's mechanic, and low that he will eat me.
Merely empirically, optimizing for happiness of the bottom quartile, I should never choose the guy who claims to be an equality-optimizer. America is prosperous and peaceful and a veritable font of innovation. Her poorest are wealthy. Her hungriest are satiated. It's working. I'm going to double down. And double down again. It's going to keep working.
No, that's the point. Everyone claiming to minimize Gini gets Gini 1, so in a POSIWID sense, the system that claims to minimize Gini is aiming at maximizing Gini.
We should strive for the only equality possible, which is equality in face of the law. There is no other equality. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
If you give me a planet, I don't care that everyone else has a galaxy. Simply optimize for the leading edge and the rest will get dragged along.