Bob Fogel helps us understand why the left is obsessed by income distribution

Here's Arnold Kling reviewing my old professor Bob Fogel's Summa Magnifcat:  The escape From Hunger and Premature Death: 1790 to 2100. In it he indirectly explains the left's obsession with income inequality.

In it Fogel demonstrates why the left can no longer milk solicitude for the poor to get power and wealth because in America at least, real poverty is virtually nonexistent. Indeed a decade ago the American poor already in physical terms lived lives equivalent to the middle class in 1970. Their physical circumstances with higher life expectancy, ever cheaper basic commodities, much greater access to information and entertainment and cleaner air and water are even better today. In these respects, the poor have never lived so much like the rich.. What they lack is morality and purpose. (This is my surmise via Murray, not Fogel's conclusion) Their lives are impoverished of meaning and autonomy not things. And meaning and autonomy are the things the omni(in)competent stupor state reserves to itself.

So with nothing real to campaign against the left howls it's not fair because fairness, unlike destitution, is an infinitely malleable post modern concept.  No matter what the society achieves it will never be "fair". It's the perfect issue for the professionally aggrieved that dominate our left. Indeed our nation is rapidly bifurcating into states with falling median standards of living dominated by the professionally aggrieved and elitists (CA, NY ) and those (now much richer in real terms such as TX and UT) still hewing to the American dream. Expect the standard of living picture to continue to widen even as the left attacks the remaining pockets of capitalist prosperity. Because the left, lacking legitimate accomplishments for nigh on half a century has no record to run on as it must destroy "the other" to retain power. Hence the IRS, FEC, and EPA electoral scandals and the Dems proposed gutting of the First Amendment. They cannot survive in an environment of prosperity and liberty so it must go.