This sounds rather like the competing political economic theories of classical liberalism and Marxism to me. Both of these intellectual traditions carry a lot of complicated baggage that can be hard to disentangle from the underlying principles, but you seem to have a done a pretty good job of distilling the relevant ideas in a relatively apolitical manner.
That being said, I don’t think it’s necessary for these two explanations for wealth inequality to be mutually exclusive. Some wealth could be accumulated through “the means of production” as you call it, or (as I’d rather describe it to avoid confusing it with the classical economic and Marxist meaning) “making useful things for others and getting fair value in exchange”.
Other wealth could also, at the same time, be accumulated through exploitation, such as taking advantage of differing degrees of bargaining power to extract value from the worker for less than it should be worth if we were being fair and maybe paying people with something like labour vouchers or a similar time-based accounting. Or stealing through fraudulent financial transactions, or charging rents for things that you just happen to own because your ancestors conquered the land centuries ago with swords.
Both of these things can be true at the same time within an economy. For that matter, the same individual could be doing both in various ways, like they could be ostensibly investing and building companies that make valuable things for people, while at the same time exploiting their workers and taking advantage of their historical position as the descendent of landed aristocracy. They could, at the same time, also be scamming their venture capitalists by wildly exaggerating what their company can do. All while still providing goods and services that meet many people’s needs and ways that are more efficient than most possible alternatives, and perhaps the best way possible given the incentives that currently exist.
Things like this tend to be multifaceted and complex. People in general can have competing motivations within themselves, so it would not be strange to expect that in something as convoluted as a society’s economy, there could be many reasons for many things. Trying to decide between two possible theories of why, misses the possibility that both theories contain their own grain of truth, and are each, by themselves, incomplete understandings and world models. The world is not just black or white. It’s many shades of grey, and also, to push the metaphor further, a myriad of colours that can’t accurately be described in greyscale.
I agree these mechanisms can coexist. But to test and improve our models and ultimately make better decisions, we need specific hypotheses about how they interact.
The OP was limited in scope because it’s trying to explain why more detailed analyses like the ones I offer in The Debtors’ Revolt or Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency are decision-relevant. Overall my impression is that while the situation is complex, it’s frequently explicable as an interaction between a relatively small and enumerable number of “types of guy” (e.g. debtor vs creditor, depraved vs self-interested).
This sounds rather like the competing political economic theories of classical liberalism and Marxism to me. Both of these intellectual traditions carry a lot of complicated baggage that can be hard to disentangle from the underlying principles, but you seem to have a done a pretty good job of distilling the relevant ideas in a relatively apolitical manner.
That being said, I don’t think it’s necessary for these two explanations for wealth inequality to be mutually exclusive. Some wealth could be accumulated through “the means of production” as you call it, or (as I’d rather describe it to avoid confusing it with the classical economic and Marxist meaning) “making useful things for others and getting fair value in exchange”.
Other wealth could also, at the same time, be accumulated through exploitation, such as taking advantage of differing degrees of bargaining power to extract value from the worker for less than it should be worth if we were being fair and maybe paying people with something like labour vouchers or a similar time-based accounting. Or stealing through fraudulent financial transactions, or charging rents for things that you just happen to own because your ancestors conquered the land centuries ago with swords.
Both of these things can be true at the same time within an economy. For that matter, the same individual could be doing both in various ways, like they could be ostensibly investing and building companies that make valuable things for people, while at the same time exploiting their workers and taking advantage of their historical position as the descendent of landed aristocracy. They could, at the same time, also be scamming their venture capitalists by wildly exaggerating what their company can do. All while still providing goods and services that meet many people’s needs and ways that are more efficient than most possible alternatives, and perhaps the best way possible given the incentives that currently exist.
Things like this tend to be multifaceted and complex. People in general can have competing motivations within themselves, so it would not be strange to expect that in something as convoluted as a society’s economy, there could be many reasons for many things. Trying to decide between two possible theories of why, misses the possibility that both theories contain their own grain of truth, and are each, by themselves, incomplete understandings and world models. The world is not just black or white. It’s many shades of grey, and also, to push the metaphor further, a myriad of colours that can’t accurately be described in greyscale.
I agree these mechanisms can coexist. But to test and improve our models and ultimately make better decisions, we need specific hypotheses about how they interact.
The OP was limited in scope because it’s trying to explain why more detailed analyses like the ones I offer in The Debtors’ Revolt or Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency are decision-relevant. Overall my impression is that while the situation is complex, it’s frequently explicable as an interaction between a relatively small and enumerable number of “types of guy” (e.g. debtor vs creditor, depraved vs self-interested).