This article reads like "see how good you have it", when for most folks the upsetting part these days is around inequality, globally as well as nationally. You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there. Blame the rise of mass communication if you want, but it's depressingly easy to see what both ends of inequality looks like and dismiss articles like this as "so what".
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There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend.
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The problem is that those who would like to maintain the status quo are bound to pick only the optimistic stats and suggest nothing should be done because the trend is naturally towards a better society. The truth is that progress is made in spite of these people, and in spite of some of the policies they promote. So such articles are more like a reality check of sorts, showing that we can make progress but we need to work hard for it, it does not just happen by the magic waving of an invisible hand.
It's interesting to me that people care about equality. I can't say that I, personally, do. I care only about absolute life standards. If my life is improving I don't care that someone else's is too. But absolute life standards do matter.
If Bezos gets another rocketship every minute that's fine if I get another million dollars every minute. I can't really care about his life like that.
For those always looking in others' bowl to see if they got more, I can see how this makes them unhappy. It sounds corrosive to the soul.
It's not about jealousy or unhappiness; it's about the fact that wealth buys power, and significant power differentials are dangerous for the people on the short end. If Bezos can afford to buy a rocketship every minute, he can afford to rearrange the society you live in such that he will get to siphon off most of the million dollars a minute you've been enjoying, and there will be nothing you can do about it. This is what rich people do: this is what it means to be that rich.
Actually, it does so a lot less in our current world than it did in the past.
> If Bezos can afford to buy a rocketship every minute, he can afford to rearrange the society you live in
No, he can't, because in a society that can supply him with a rocketship a minute, the wealth that allows him to buy them will be a very small fraction of the total wealth that exists, just as it is now.
Whereas in, say, the Middle Ages, the wealth of feudal lords and rulers was a significant fraction of the total wealth that existed, and that is why that wealth bought them so much power.
The siphoning off of the money is what the government does. Just have a look at our government, and how much of the GDP it consumes (and that consumption is accelerating every day).
Sure, but the government is made up of our neighbours that we choose to represent us. Like Lincoln said, our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people.
You absolutely do care about equality. There are some places where absolute standards are fine, but when we discuss social contracts - equality is fundamental.
You are not operating as a solitary individual, you are operating within a society that both takes and gives to you, and ensuring that social contracts remain fair is fundamental to keeping that society as a whole alive and functional.
ex - how would you feel if the government issues everyone rebates on taxes. you receive 1 dollar. Everyone else receives 100k.
Or the government funds schools - your kids receive 1 free book, every other child receives a free college education.
Or the government increases park allocations - you are given a 5ftx5ft greenspace, the neighborhood over receives a 10 acre maintained park.
Absolute standards are bogus when we are discussing the allocation of group resources. You paid in, you should be monitoring how that resource is paid out.
To be oblivious is to essentially be abused. We should care deeply about wealth inequality in society at large. We should not compare ourselves to our neighbors in individual circumstances. They are different things.
I see. You oppose redistribution through the government. That's a view I can be sympathetic to. If taxes were near zero then this would be less of a problem. Fair enough.
Redistribution is fine - being aware of how that distribution occurs is important, though.
Otherwise you end up with situations where "redistribution" essentially becomes handouts to those most influential with the ones making the distribution decisions, instead of meaningful improvements to society as a whole.
Is it a good thing if Besos gets a rocket every minute if that means climate change destroys my local community?
Is it a good thing if we excessively bail out companies that make poor decisions at tax payer expense?
Is it a good thing to promote school systems that ignore and underfund certain neighborhoods along racial lines?
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My argument is not that redistribution is bad in itself, my argument is that social groups depend on "fairness" to operate.
And those definitions are certainly challenging (one person's fair might be another person's horror story). But they are critical to how a society decides to exist and cooperate.
Like - this isn't a new idea... it's what a social contract is. I also don't sign contracts without reading them, and an educated populace should care about what's in the fine print.
It's not about making sure I get personal wealth or advantages from that contract, it's about making sure I find that contract morally acceptable. Because if enough people reach that stage where they don't... you have a civil war or a rebellion. They will try to write a new contract.
In some countries, there are no laws against how much credit card fees can be. In those countries, a small fraction of the wealth of poor people is transferred to rich people [1]. In other countries, the fees are limited to small values, so this wealth transfer happens at a much smaller scale or doesn't happen at all.
Or a government can license a coal plant in some area [1], destroying the air quality and health outcomes of people in the area, while most of the wealth generated by the plant goes to the investors.
[1] Because credit card companies charge fees inversely proportional to expenses. And give rewards to those who can spend more.
[2] Or worse, in an adjoining area far enough away to commute for jobs, but still in the same air shed.
Historically, the best off maintain their largess by making sure there are enough in the fat and happy middle to not support a revolt by those left to deprivation and exploitation.
It's reasonable to be fat enough and happy enough that you don't want to rock the boat and don't mind that others have "more in their bowl", which is why this pattern persists through geography and time, but you might want to keep an eye out on how the worst off are doing, whether they're growing or shrinking, and whether things are getting worse or better for them because the other part of the pattern is not unprecedented or unreasonable either.
For those who are dirt poor inequality might look like a problem, but as TFA shows the trend line is -and long has been- that everyone gets wealthy enough to have a decent life. If no one is dirt poor, does it really matter if some are much wealthier than others?
For example, Elon Musk has many many many times more wealth than I, and I don't care. Ditto Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on. I don't care about inequality -- I care about poverty and ending it.
Formulations like "the problem is no longer poverty but inequality" are a lot like the post-USSR formulations like "now that we have solved the production problem we need to solve the distribution problem". It's Marxism moving the goal posts as economic freedom delivers all the things that Marxists say they want. To argue that one should be given power to solve the problems that are already being solved one has to keep making yet other problems into bigger problems than they really are.
> If no one is dirt poor, does it really matter if some are much wealthier than others?
Yes, because the wealth distribution has a self-reinforcing inertia, especially over generations. Absent mechanisms for redistribution of personal wealth (e.g. confiscatory inheritance/estate tax over a certain amount) it will only concentrate into a kleptocracy.
Too much inequality is bad, even if the lowest 5% lives very well, because it is not a sustainable equilibrium. On the other hand, too little inequality is also not sustainable or desirable.
I agree that accumulation of power is bad, and since wealth eventually becomes power, accumulation of wealth beyond some point can be bad. However, complaints about inequality invariably seem to go beyond complaints about the lofty 0.001%.
But this hasn't happened. See the book Missing Billionaires by White and Hagani. Subsequent generations are much better at squandering wealth than hoarding it. So that issue sort of takes care of itself.
The US has one of the highest child poverty rates of any "first world" nation, minimum wage is lower than it has ever been, we pay more for healthcare than any of these same nations and have worse healthcare outcomes than Cuba, housing is an impossible dream for most... Wealth inequality is just one indicator of a larger problem, not the problem in it's entirety, and poverty is still one of the biggest problems of the modern era. Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.
There's a homeless population in Seattle, but as a percentage it is pretty low. They also mostly consist of drug addicts and alcoholics who reject attempts to put them in housing.
Renting is still housing. Besides, you never actually own a home. You rent it from the city, and the zoning/code rules greatly restrict what you can do with it.
Besides, the statement was "housing", not "owning a home".
The government does a lot to restrict the supply of housing, too.
Don't forget all the expenses one has owning a home. My rent to the city went up 10% this year.
Sure, that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around. I laid out a small percent of that in my original comment. and that's not even considering the poverty "first world" countries rely upon from the heavy exploitation of the "3rd world" from slavery conditions, to coups and death squads funded by US corporations, to stealing their resources.
The thing is, the US has clearly gotten way better in the past 50+ years, while the past 30 years is maybe debatable. But if we're looking at past 30 years globally, there's no sane way to argue it hasn't gotten way. It's been an absolutely amazing past few decades in terms of reducing global poverty. We've seen something like a billion people lifted out of poverty—child mortality, clean drinking water, education, basic nutrition. We've a long ways to go, but if you're argument rests on ignoring over a billion people having their lives transformed in this way, I'm not sure you're on the side of the poor.
Dude, chill. They're not merely some abstract rhetoric device for arguing about American policy. They're real people, and you can ask them how they feel about infant mortality dropping, starvation rates dropping, clean water access shooting up, education access increasing. You don't even have to fly down--loads of them now have internet access (and electricity!)
Yes, the US has done a bunch of really bad stuff, but a higher percentage of people having food and water and medicine is actually good. And yes, those real human beings tend to agree.
> that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around.
What? This is nonsense.
> and that's not even considering [...]
This is changing the subject, which one should probably take as conceding the previous point. Even granting all of this I'm pretty sure that life today almost everywhere on this planet is much less brutish for humans than it was 200 years ago, let alone 400, 2,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago.
> The US has one of the highest child poverty rates of any "first world" nation
Yeah, we should do way better, but this article isn't about the US today vs. western Europe today. It's about the world today vs. the world in the past. Child poverty in the US is way better right now than it was pretty much anywhere a hundred years ago, and poverty across the globe is way better than in the past.
> minimum wage is lower than it has ever been,
Good news: ~98.7% of workers earn more than the minimum wage. Wage growth for the lowest quartile has been especially good these past few years, handily outpacing inflation for the poorest among us.
> Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.
Slightly better? Child mortality in rich countries in the 1800s was 20%. What's it today, 0.5%? "Oh, but in some countries it's less than that, so this isn't actually better than before"?
Calling these changes "slightly better" is just an incredibly dishonest take. It's a massive improvement, and that shows just how much we're able to improve if we honestly look at what works and implement it.
This isn't a pro-complacency article. It's an argument against doomerism.
Of the 74 million children in the US, 11 million live in poverty. The average American makes 40,000 a year and healthcare and housing are more expensive than ever. Yes, the things that are problems have changed, medical advanced have been made, but most of that is out of reach for the majority of people unless they are willing to take on millions in medical debt for things like cancer and diseases that have preventable measures. just the fact that we have to reel back that far to paint a good picture of the present, says a lot. Let's be real, this audience is generally wealthy and are not necessarily going to be in touch with how the average person lives.
The things that today would be considered poverty were considered the norm when my neighbor was a kid.
I've worked with many and been close friends with many poor people. I'm under no illusions that their lives are all hunky dory. I just don't feel the need to pretend things weren't significantly worse in many important ways in the recent past.
> Of the 74 million children in the US, 11 million live in poverty.
That's an absolute number, and let's grant that it's accurate. What is the evolution of child poverty in the U.S. since its founding? Let's use caloric intake -say- as a yardstick of poverty.
The descendants of Mark Zuckerberg will continue to build dynastic wealth through no skill of their own without doing any real work. Other people in the same country are single parents working multiple jobs just to keep their family sheltered and fed. You don't think that's a situation that we can improve?
> For example, Elon Musk has many many many times more wealth than I, and I don't care. Ditto Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on. I don't care about inequality -- I care about poverty and ending it.
What I wonder is, how much poverty (in developed countries) results from the ultra-wealthy accumulating more wealth? At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
The causality is a hard question to answer honestly but I can answer the ending poverty portion. So ignore it for now and engage in a bit of rough math. Take the 5.2 trillion of every US billionaire combined and divide it by a third of the US population. It comes out to a one-time payment of about $45k. An amount which would certainly be appreciated by the bottom third of the population, certainly but not a panacea. The poverty line is defined via income and not assets. So lets do a conversion, if paying out the interest only at long-term treasury bond rates that would give the bottom third a "trust fund" which gives an extra $2K per year.
Of course that is ignoring many of the messy practicalities. The inflation that would ensue from this hypothetical influx of cash to the bottom third, or if one could even extract the nominal market cap via selling assets vs the value crashing after the first third is put on the market. Combine that with the fact that the fortunes are invested in productive assets and the hypothetical mother of all liquidations would do majorly bad things to productivity and the economy.
That's marginal income, which is not necessarily related to book value, and is almost certainly just a small fraction, which brings you back to less than $2,000 per person per year. I.e., it's not much, and you really can't extract it.
Eating the rich doesn't work. It's never worked when it has been tried. It cannot work. It will never work.
People like Elon Musk aren't "accumulating" wealth. They're creating it.
> At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
Wealth that is created doesn't come at the expense of anyone.
It is true that many rich people (for example much of the financial industry) don't get rich by creating wealth but by siphoning it from other people's pockets into their own. But the other people in such cases are the middle class, not the poor.
Tesla annotators make $20 / hour. That's hardly a well-paying job.
I think we can easily make a case that any Tesla employee or contractor who earns at the poverty level supports an argument that extreme wealth comes at the expense of the poor.
That $20/hour is coming from wealth that Tesla is creating. It's not taken from someone else. Indeed, it's helping those people since without Tesla those jobs would not exist and they might have to work at other jobs that paid even less.
> at the poverty level
$20/hour times 2000 hours is $40K per year. The US Federal poverty level even for a household of 4 people is $31K per year [1], and is significantly lower for smaller households (for a household of 1 person it's $15K per year). So no, Tesla annotators are not earning "at the poverty level".
Ever driven through rural America? Lots of people raise their own chickens, keep hens for eggs, grow their own veggies and fruit. Their property taxes are low, their income is low, but they're not hungry, and often want for nothing.
Yes, looking at global or even national statistics tells you nothing about your own circumstances, which you can judge for yourself without any statistics at all. And it’s true that averages can be misleading.
Inequality isn’t about your personal circumstances, though. It’s about what you read in the news. You need statistics to judge it.
These statistics are relevant when people talk about where the country is going or where the world is going.
> You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there
So people can never be happy if inequality exists? Sounds like an unsolvable problem. No matter how good everything gets, people will still be unhappy because someone else seemingly has it better. 1000 years from now:
"Poor person: Sure, I own a 7000 sq ft mansion with an electric drone that can fly me around everywhere and my life expectancy is 105 and my standard of living is an order of magnitude better than the richest people living in 20XX, but Elon Musk VII's life expectancy is 120 and he owns an entire planet with a space fleet, my life sucks, the universe is so unfair."
How is this funny? They have: free food, free medical care, electricity, clean running water and sewer, mobile phones, subsidized or free housing, and don't pay any taxes.
Just consider food: the quality and variety of food today is far greater than was available to medieval kings. Like coffee, fresh fruit year round, meat that's free of disease, etc.
Henry 8 suffered horribly from health problems that are easily treated today.
Research has shown that happiness is heavily based on social status, and wealth or income is one of the key factors in social status. People constantly compare themselves against everyone they see, including in the media.
As a meta question we should ask whether happiness is the right metric to optimize in social policy? Unhappiness motivates some people to work harder and accomplish more. Whether that's a good or bad thing is entirely subjective.
Happiness = Reality minus expectations. Also, people, like many animals, are innately driven to compare each other and themselves. This may be a trait that provides (or has provided) an evolutionary advantage, especially in in the process of mating.
Huh, it's interesting how I interpreted the parent poster's point in a completely different way.
My takeaway was that my personal happiness is moderately diminished by the fact that I had such a privileged upbringing compared to others born into almost inescapable poverty, and that my charitable contributions towards famine relief / malaria / etc. don't make a huge impact on addressing the root causes of inequity.
Interesting that you read that comment as inequality...
> You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there
Somehow i read that as equal opportunities.... To me a fair deal generally means, something close to equal opportunities(of course, ceteris paribus, and rarely do we have all other things equal, but adjusting for it..)
but opportunities are far from equal in many parts of the world, including the US. poverty alone limits your opportunities when you can't even afford a car to apply for a job, or are stuck in a bad school that limits your chances to go to college. in other parts of the world you can't even go to school if you can't afford it.
Yeah, a lot of people in the US are seeing their standard of living decline and their children having to struggle a lot more and in ways neither they or their parents had to. Even the most basic things like clean drinking water and reliable electric power are getting less common in the US. No amount of telling people how bad farmers had it in the 1800s will make people feel better about the new struggles they have to deal with or the things they have to give up having today.
This discussion needs to distinguish equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. People don't mind playing games, but if they perceive the games' rules to be tilted (or some players to be cheating), then they will want to flip the board.
Avoiding totalitarianism means recognizing the need for both public and private power structures counteracting each other, not going all-in on one of them alone.
Also progressive taxation (a moderate position) which avoids the authoritarian measures of both left and right while counteracting the cancerous effects of exponential growth.
