http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-t...
THESE NUMBERS ARE ADJUSTED FOR COST OF LIVING.
(Since this keeps coming up, I added a link to that article to the post.)
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVRES/Resources/47722...
Yearly statistics on India are not very good. Realistically if you have accurate info on what happened in the past 5 years (form what I've seen, they've been great!), you should keep quiet about it and just rake in crores in the shares markets.
"Now, consider mean income of the people belonging to the top decile or ventile, in countries ranging from rural India to Cameroon. Their income puts them between the 51th and 69th percentile of world distribution. Therefore, these two distributions, e.g. Japan’s and rural India’s, practically do not overlap. Or to give another example: a Frenchman on welfare or unemployment benefits (who would presumably belong to the bottom decile of income distribution in France) would still be better off than a top decile person in Madagascar."
Note that it only talks about rural India. In fact all the charts in the paper, including the chart on top decile/ventile of poor vs bottom decile/ventile of rich on page 47 do not even include Urban India. I would be curious to see this study repeated with current numbers and without splitting India into urban and rural. Especially because of the amount of urbanization and economic growth that India has seen since 1998.
I spent a few minutes googling hoping to find something academic by the same author, but didn't look as carefully as I should have.
But since you've called me out, I dug up my copy of the book. Apparently this paper is the original source and it uses 2005 data: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/P...
No idea where to get the most current data.
Your link is interesting from a pure economic wealth perspective. But it is certainly not correct to claim that the poorest 5% of the US is better off than the richest 5% of India, which is easy to misread from these statistics.
In a sense, we are all kings compared to the Middle Age. This is truly wonderful and well worth remembering. But not everyone is living the life of kings.
http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
If you want to claim that poor Americans have diseases and mental illness (which might be the cause of their poverty - i.e., I'm not letting a crazy person be my maid), I'd love to see evidence of that. Do you have any?
There are also a lot of status effects you don't explore. Being poor in America means that even if you have the purchasing power of the richest 5% in India, you're a total scumbag nobody for privileged people to shit on, hate, call lazy, etc. The effects of being embedded in that sort of social situation are significant. I'm even thinking of Robin Hanson's article "Cut Medicine in Half" and also "Showing That You Care" -- which indicate that status effects for health are very real. Being the richest person in a poor neighborhood can be better than being the poorest person in a rich neighborhood, even if your overall consumption ability is higher in the second case.
I suspect this is likely true in this 5% American vs. 95% Indian example. Merely by having the status of being in the lowest 5% of the relevant social group you frequently interact with, that alone engenders negative life outcomes that can't be overcome just by raising the absolute consumption available to that 5% person.
So I would definitely not characterize the overall quality of life of a 5% American as similar to that of a 95% Indian. It would be way more complicated than that. There are probably many 5% Americans with roughly better lives than 95% Indians. There are also probably many 5% Americans with absolutely worse lives than 95% Indians. And some with lives that are as bad as 5% Indians (in fact, I know some of those people in my home region of Appalachia).
Regarding your last comment, I think drug use might be a relevant topic, because it is related to poverty (though, as always, it's complicated, good new data is hard to get [0]), and like mental illness, often creates a stigma against employment. There are many people in America who on paper may appear to have an amount of income that, in a worldwide sense, is very privileged, yet who nonetheless live lives that in some mental health or addiction adjusted QALY sense are some of the worst lives on the planet.
A friend of mine suggests ethnic segregation might be a good way to handle this. If you are a Jain, you get to be at the very top of the Jain status hierarchy (and Muslims are at the bottom). And if you are Parsi, well, Parsis are awesome (just have more babies please!?!?!), so much better than the Jains. Aren't you lucky to be one?
Being the richest person in a poor neighborhood can be better than being the poorest person in a rich neighborhood, even if your overall consumption ability is higher in the second case.
If this were true, wouldn't the rich try and avoid each other and move to poor neighborhoods? In contrast, the poor would form gated communities with no rich folks allowed?
Isn't that the exact opposite of what is observed?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/gayatrijayaraman/broke-hungry-and-o...
>Their influences are not difficult to spot. Their startup economy’s success stories are of entrepreneurs who spent VC money to create their own wealth, who spent every paisa immediately to multiply each into a rupee. The stories they hear are of Mukesh Ambani, who inherited an empire and built a very expensive home, instead of Dhirubhai, who lived in a very small home and built a very big empire. They read about Katrina Kaif’s hair costing ₹50 lakh to dye correctly. They internalise the lesson that to earn any money, you’ve got to spend a lot of it.
The comments local to india are telling
>You completely misunderstood the point. You need that burger to socialise, FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR JOB. Your job as an actor would require you to dress well, your job as a journalist will require you to go to places for interviews that you probably cannot afford yourself, and neither will your company pay for it. It isn't that simple, choosing roti over burger.
So apparently, your example, job for job, starves in india, but may hopefully be caught by the safety net in the US and may luckily escape out as they get older.
This is silly. You could, in one extreme, just implement some kind of Harrison Bergeron system whereby everyone's consumption is literally manipulated to be equal with everyone else, including inhibiting natural talents or augmenting natural flaws as needed. More practically, you could pursue egalitarian political ideas instead of allowing resources to be allocated in response to market demands.
I'm not saying I support those ideas, just that it's silly to say that status is a zero sum game. You just eliminate the whole game.
> If this were true, wouldn't the rich try and avoid each other and move to poor neighborhoods? In contrast, the poor would form gated communities with no rich folks allowed?
I hardly think it's that simple. Many people are convinced that increasing their status is a desperately necessary pursuit, and will put themselves at a disadvantage to do so. They may willingly accept a lower life span (supposing that was one of the health effects of being the least wealthy person in a rich community) to gain access to an intangible feeling of status and belonging to that community. Deluded people move to New York and LA frequently, often to their own detriment, because of the status of residing in such glamorous places.
If we imputed values from these actions, it would tell us that the pursuit of status effects was more valued than the pursuit of demonstrable health benefits. And I fully believe many people feel this way, and by extension, living in a situation that affords certain top-5% health benefits (like being poor in America) but which does not confer the status they want, is a form of perpetual misery.
There's also research on Last Place Aversion that somewhat refutes what you're saying [0]. People who are in second-to-last place will oppose policies that make everyone unilaterally better off if those policies also move them from second-to-last into last place. They prefer a poorer world overall (even themselves poorer in absolute terms) so long as they are not the truly lowest status person. A world in which everyone (including them) is better off, but they rank last, is worse.
In fact, realistically, status already is based on things like this. A friend of mine (roughly top 1-2%) complained to me last night that no matter how much effort he puts in, he still won't be as tall or non-bald as I am. And realistically, a hot woman earning $25/year has much higher status than both of us 1-2%ers.
I hardly think it's that simple.
It was your theory that being the richest person in the neighborhood raises your status, not mine. I'm glad we've mutually rejected that theory.
Deluded people move to New York and LA frequently, often to their own detriment, because of the status of residing in such glamorous places.
Why do you believe that they do so for status rather than for other amenities (e.g. access to jobs, NY/LA lifestyle, a desire to be near people they identify with)?
If you are really concerned about such things, the right solution is a pigouvian signalling task - apply a tax to status goods to internalize the externality. E.g., we should tax things like education, suits, good looks, and loudly criticizing Trump on twitter/facebook.
I feel like you didn't really read my comment. Have you read Harrison Bergeron? The premise is that people receive body or mind alterations to suppress natural advantages or enhance natural flaws in order to make everyone equal.
I was already accounting for consumption being generalized to something like the advantages or good looks or a quick wit in my comment before.
> I'm glad we've mutually rejected that theory.
This is a bit glib, almost antagonistic, of you. The Last Place Aversion literature I linked provides direct evidence that at least a mild form of the effect I described exists, so I certainly don't reject it. All I'm saying is that, like all simple theories, it's not perfect. There are situations where being high status among poor is better than being low status among rich. I am not saying anything more specific.
Regarding the signaling tax -- I mostly do agree. I think we should use the same governmentally forced redistributive procedures that we apply to income or wealth and also apply them to sex, good looks, loneliness/social connection wealth, etc.
It's just too ingrained in our primitive morality to view these as acceptable. And I think that stems from another hypothesis from Hanson, in his blog post "Inequality talk is about grabbing" -- basically that we focus on monetary redistribution instead of say sex experience redistribution because we believe it's easier for us to use coalition politics to take what we want in terms of money, whereas we less believe it would work for sex, and for some other things, like, say, true love redistribution, we could not really even know if we were successfully grabbing what we wanted.
I agree that a mild form of status seeking exists (e.g. last place aversion), but I was taking issue with the strong form.
Personally, I don't bite the bullet of extreme redistribution myself. There are a few forms of harmful signalling I'd favor taxing (e.g. educational certification) and a few forms of negative signalling I'd favor subsidizing/regulating (e.g. mandatory paternity tests), but generally I think we just need to accept accidents of birth/luck/etc and should only apply minimal interference in extreme cases. I raise this more as a reducto-ad-absurdum than something I actually advocate.