Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Furthermore, wealth isn't a static I win/you lose proposition - much of that wealth has been created in recent history. People spend less as a percentage of income on food and housing, have better access to healthcare, and more leisure time than ever before. It's a remarkable story.
Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years thanks to globalization. I think that's much more important than how much money Warren Buffett or Bill Gates have.
Income/wealth inequality has been the state of humanity for all of recorded history, and it seems unlikely to go away any time soon - it's trivially easy to show how wealth accumulation occurs using game theory even if trade is relatively fair. The only events that seem to reliably reset the balance are global wars, huge famines, or natural disasters.
I think it's a natural human inclination to fixate on the rich and to demonize them, and perhaps some are deserving of such demonization, but it doesn't seem to be a terribly useful way to think about improving the human condition. It just spurs on class resentment which is, if history is any guide, just about the worst way to go about things possible.
If you have $10m, and you invest that really really really well, you might be making 10 to 30% on that capital. Maybe more if you're an entrepreneur investing strategically. That's fine.
But let's say you're worth $1bn, and you compound at 10% per year.. you're making money hand over fist. Add smart use of debt to that, and that's probably too much rent seeking to be healthy.
Basically, once you pass a few 100 million, I think it gets really unfair. Below.. it doesn't really matter. No one will live in poverty because someone owns $100m -- it's meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But wealth is a snowball that doesn't grow fast enough on the low end, and too fast on the high end.
The only way to fix that would probably be a global wealth tax, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
It's surprising that people already seem to be forgetting how incredibly horrible communism was when implemented.
If you can find an example of a government's commitment to free markets directly resulting in the starvation of tens of millions of people your argument would be much more credible.
EDIT: This is re: the comment below. We've reached HN's maximum allowable comment depth.
The follow-on question is: what do we do about it? Attempts to artificially "correct" inequality for the sake of correction are universally disastrous. Progressive taxation and redistribution are, I think, reasonable, as is universal basic income, and sound government has a huge role to play. But the goal should be to provide basic services and create opportunity for the bottom 50%, not wrest control of wealth from the top 1%.
The goal of actually stamping out inequality is a fool's errand.
At least they tend to lock horns. To the extent that the two collaborate, we should be suspicious.
In my experience, government incentives are generally misguided and force mis-allocation of resources. That is to say the government is distorting the market to favor activity that wouldn't otherwise be attractive to a business.
More on the issue: https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
To take your example regarding pharmaceuticals, instead of mandating a particular regime of testing and efficacy, why couldn't the government require products that have not passed that particular hurdle be labeled as such?
If you picture eliminating the state altogether, including its enforcement of property rights and contracts, then I concede that the powers attendant to wealth would no longer involve a de jure state. I think that the powers of concentrated wealth would remain nonetheless. Wealth would hire private guards to exclude others from their mines instead of using the law enforcement apparatus of a state, for example.
So, "competition"? Cartels in general are unstable because of these internal competitive forces.
I get that corporations with large market share can set prices in the short term. But every resource has a substitute. Even oil. So even price-setters have to operate within limits or risk their power being marginalized.
I am picturing the elimination of the state. And I agree that one can enforce his own property rights.
OPEC is frequently divided against itself in terms of production targets; ExxonMobil is not. In a world without states there's no antitrust regulation preventing ExxonMobil from acquiring a market share equivalent to present OPEC, then exercising that pricing power with more effective discipline.
I am picturing the elimination of the state. And I agree that one can enforce his own property rights.
An entity that answers to no higher authority and enforces its own territorial claims with force is a de facto state. I understand and sympathize with many arguments for personal liberty over the power of the state. I don't understand the implication that unbounded private power is more trustworthy. It's an affront to liberty for the State of Delaware to exist and enforce its laws at the point of a gun, but it's ok if a corporation or family can acquire a Delaware-sized, Delaware-shaped parcel of land and enforce its decrees at gunpoint within those borders? That may not fairly represent your point of view. I have previously had arguments where self-proclaimed anarchocapitalists affirmed that it's fine for a small group of people to wield power equivalent to a state government as long as it's not called a state.
Since "acquire" implies voluntary vacation of the premises by those who previously owned and occupied it, yes, exactly. I don't see a particularly problem with that scenario.
For smaller, more common examples, look at the history of company towns and union busting.
Companies these days exert control by manipulating the power of the state because the state usually won’t allow them to exert control more directly. Nothing says it must stay this way.
Henry Ford's Sociological Department did unannounced visits to employees' homes to ensure they were "model Americans" and probe for union ties.[1][2]
Walmart "locking in" janitors.[3]
There are a lot more examples of negative environmental and financial impact, I picked these two as they are examples of controlling human freedoms.
[1] Negative source: https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli... [2] Positive source: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/us/workers-assail-night-l...
Fortunately, working for any particular corporation is voluntary. And thankfully, it seems that sunlight has disinfected these specific extreme practices. Hadn't heard of either.
Off-topic: This is the first I've encountered explicit citation of negative/positive sources. I like it.
Now of course wealth tries to subvert that, and particularly in the anglo-saxon countries, the US first among them, it has been particularly successful.
A market economy is more efficient than a command economy. A market with only one capitalist is a de facto command economy.
To avoid corruption you need the state and the collection of the most powerful corporate/private actors be of similar size, and they must be as isolated and independent as possible. This way you get a balance of power, rather than one corrupting the other.
The problem in the US is the isolation/independence part. Money in politics and revolving doors has corrupted the balance.
“Limited government” is an idea sold by people who want government to be weaker so it’s more easily corrupted.
What we should strive for is the middle way. Just the right amount of government.
Why? Also, is that borne by history? Was the US federal government more corrupt when it was more limited?
Your assertion isn't self evident. A government could have great power within its defined scope of power and little power outside that scope.
There is also a reasonable argument that as the scope and strength of government power increases so does the desire to corrupt and control that power.
Which is more dangerous a corrupt but weak and limited government or a corrupt strong and expansive government?
If the government has power. If is an authority in the eyes of the people. In those cases we should care about the integrity of the government.
For another simple example, look at the Fortune 500 of today vs 20 years ago. Very few companies remain, it’s still very much fluid.
You could have a contrived round robin system where 100% of people eventually end up with 100% of the wealth.
To my eyes, your statement seems to be completely false.
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arch...
1998, 2017: 1) GM, Walmart 2) Ford, Berkshire Hathaway 3) Exxon, Apple 4) Walmart, Exxon 5) GE, McKesson 6) IBM, United health 7) Chrysler, CVS 8) Mobil, GM 9) Altria, ATT 10) ATT, Ford
Wow, outstanding ! As you can see there are a number of companies that are new, dropped lower ranking, moved up in ranking, and completely disappeared.
We could keep going even further back a decade and the changes will be more visible. There’s a few companies who are entirely gone from the top 10, and I can guarantee that none of them wanted that outcome.
So to you, I say, got any more nitpickings?
> The basic position - and I think the data supports this - is that it really doesn't matter what the top 1% are doing so long as the bottom half are seeing improved living conditions.
This is whataboutism and justifying means to ends and it makes no sense to me. How could this be? Many of the top 1% in our world are murderers and killers and so greedy they are set out to hurt the poor as much as possible. This matters. It does matter who they are. Their character matters. Their actions matter. Their words matter. Due in part to their wealth, the world listens to them for better or worse, and they hold a responsibility that the current 1% batch (and perhaps none in history, I don't know) are not holding up.
Yes, overall the poor are seeing vastly improved living conditions. This does not mean that it should not be better. It is offensive to a population to tell them that they have it better than before and to basically not worry about it or complain that the inequality is so intense, because their parents or even ancestors had it worse.
No, the attitude should be that it is still really bad for a lot of people, and that state of affairs should be unacceptable. That much human suffering is unnecessary. It should not be happening in a world of surplus like today's.
The top 1% matter immensely - who they are, what they do, how they act.
_How Much is Enough_ is a very conservative British book about this, and the idea that modern Capitalism has forgotten what the point of life might be.
I should also mention that I live in Canada which, though flawed in many ways, seems to have struck a better balance.
You may be wondering who would want to attack Canada. Well, you have an awful lot of wheat and oil, and China has an awful lot of hungry people and factories.
Would China invade Canada if the world's defence budgets dropped precipitously? Probably not - it has far more to gain through trade than by attempted colonization.
In fact, last time I checked nobody in Canada or Western Europe was asked to vote on the US defense budget. I'd gladly vote to cut it in half and devote more to shoring up your healthcare system, but it's a sovereign issue and it's up to Americans to solve it for themselves.
We're not talking about what China spends. We're talking about what Canada spends. Which wouldn't be enough to defend against Mexico in a fair fight, much less China.
> Probably not - it has far more to gain through trade than by attempted colonization.
Yeah, well, you might want to talk to Tibet, Vietnam, and India about that. Or, for that matter, any of the people who are being displaced by Chinese colonization in Africa as we speak.
Edit: lots of food for thought here. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+colonization+africa&ia=web
Do you know what would happen if the US suddenly dropped its defense budget and pledged not to defend its NATO allies? We'd spend more on defense. Although to be frank, the idea of Canada facing China solo in a military conflict is ridiculous.
In 2017 we spent around $19B on a federal budget of about $311B. If you accounted for provincial budgets, it's probably close to $500B in annual expenditures. We could easily triple our military spending without adversely affecting the economy.
The more important question: why does the US spend so damn much?
Which they are not: real wages for the bottom four quintiles have been stagnant since the seventies and the 1% have captured essentially all income gains from productivity growth since then. That is the source of the discontent.
> Over a billion people have been lifted out of poverty over the last 30 years thanks to globalization
You're trying to pull a fast one here. The statistic about "a billion people have been lifted out of poverty" has been greatly overblown: it's technically true, but it turns out most of those people are in China— if you exclude China, the number looks much less impressive. And yes, China's development is impressive, but it's a non sequitur to go from "Dirt-poor Communist country becomes richer when switching to free-market capitalism" to saying that contemporary ultra-laissez-faire economics are a good thing for developed nations.
> It just spurs on class resentment which is, if history is any guide, just about the worst way to go about things possible.
"It's only class warfare when we fight back". If, as the evidence strongly hints, the rich are leveraging their capital into political power to get more and more opportunities to stack the deck and create an unfair playing field (in a positive feedback loop), then not noticing this and subsequently demonizing them is deliberately blinding oneself to the problem and the most plausible avenues of solution.
I'm talking globally. The American middle class has done uniquely poorly during this period. (I'm not American)
Still - if you can tell me with a straight face that you'd rather be poor in the 70s vs today, I would label you crazy. It's almost impossible to account for the changing quality and abundance of goods - huge advances in medicine, computation, a plethora of high quality goods and services. Life today is qualitatively different than it was 40-50 years ago.
>You're trying to pull a fast one here. The statistic about "a billion people have been lifted out of poverty" has been greatly overblown: it's technically true, but it turns out most of those people are in China
How is that a fast one? A billion people is a billion people. If the fact that they're primarily Chinese bothers you we'll need to have a different discussion.
> "It's only class warfare when we fight back".
Who are we fighting? This is an entirely unhelpful rhetoric.
I've been under the impression that disparity, inequality in and of itself is a problem due to human nature. Does Pinker's research show otherwise?
as just jealous
I did not write this or imply this. People who struggle with food or housing are not merely jealous. They have real concerns and need. The discussion I referred was not about such people or conditions.
I was responding to the notion that inequality does not matter as much now because conditions for the those at the bottom have improved. Clearly the implication is that we are not talking about people struggling with food and housing. The idea is that if everyone has their basics needs met does inequality still matter?
I suggested it would still matter due to the tendency toward jealousy and comparing oneself to those who are better off.
Now you are mis-quoting.
It was fairly obvious what you were implying.
It is bad for you to ignore the rest of what I wrote in my previous comment. I think I did make it clear what I was talking about. Specifically, what reasoning does Pinker give for believing that inequality doesn’t matter as much? He claims that it doesn’t matter. I would like to know why this is so given the tendency of humans toward jealousy and similar emotions.
Despite my clarification you appear to still be under the impression that your original interpretation is correct. Since we don’t know each other common courtesy mandates that you accept my clarification.
I think inequality does matter. But Pinker does not and he is much more knowledgeable about the issue than I am. Hence my inquiry into why this is so. Addressing the inquiry would be the proper way to respond to my original comment. Or, ask if indeed I think people with real struggles are merely jealous instead of making that assumption.
An expert claims inequality is less of a concern than it used to be. I wonder why due to attitudes like “keeping up with the joneses”, jealousy and similar emotions. Have those gone by the wayside since those in the bottom economically are better off now? It’s a legitimate question. You apparently don’t know the answer or don’t care to answer it. Why then comment at all?
What do you hope to gain by your posts? In what way do they contribute in a positive manner? I’m clearly not denigratingmthise with real struggles, I’ve said as much directly yet you persist. It’s quite fascinating.
I've lived in several places in the last few years and this couldn't be further away from truth. I spend the same or more % of my income in housing than my parents did, and I get much less for it. They were able to buy a 4 bedroom flat in town working blue collar jobs, and me, with an engineering degree, probably could aspire to a 2 bedroom out of town at best.
That's not to say that many people aren't still struggling - we can always do better, but I think there's reason to be optimistic.
Indeed they are. Here are some numbers from NPR (hardly a right-wing thinktank):
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...
In 1960, Americans spent about 18% of their income just for food. Now it's less than 10%.
And, of course, the quality of food available to a typical American is vastly better than it was in 1960.
I doubt any of the stores my parents shopped at in the 1960s Midwest particularly had things like avocados.
Quality has many facets - for example, I doubt they could tell you how often people in their youth died from salmonella, e. coli, or the like. Food was also significantly more expensive, and in colder regions fruit was nearly impossible to come by in winter months.
Was an apple from 1918 more nutritious than one bought in store today? It's possible, but then again nobody (in the developed world) in the 2008 recession was in danger of starving - a very different proposition than during the Great Depression.
The quality of food is immensely better.
For one, you can get actual fresh veggies and fruits year 'round, even in the northern regions.
They didn't have Whole Foods in 1960, dude.
In fact, 1960 was the era of Cheez-Wiz, TV dinners, Tang, Velveeta, and Wonder Bread.
The US economy is crazy diverse. There really is no such thing as a unified working class struggling against "the man".
Owns means of production: bourgeousie
Works without owning means of production: proletariat
Do those workers have say in their economic situation? Can they change the direction of their company without losing their jobs? Do they have economic and political power?
Stop equating stock ownership in a fund as if it is "owning the means of production." You know that it is a mere extension of the word "own" and it probably doesn't refer to what Marx talked about, so stop trying to twist definitions and thinking it counts as sincere argument.
I was responding to "because all taxes will be paid by workers.", which is complete nonsense.
I'm interested to see your source for the US tax receipts by quintile, though. I could definitely believe I was wrong about the richest portion paying "the vast majority". I probably should have said the top half.
For US taxes, see: https://itep.org/wp-content/uploads/taxday2017.pdf
The rate is definitely lower for poorer people, but nearly as much as the standard punditry, focusing only in federal income tax, would have you believe.
I feel like I should make it clear that my personal opinion is that top marginal tax rates should be much higher than they are, especially on capital gains, but I don't think it's fair to say that the working class is paying all the taxes, given the breakdown.
What if all the billionaires in the world decided 'let me just hit delete on all of the zeroes in my bank account' what affect would that have on the rest of the world?
Most wealth already isn't hoarded. It's things like amazon.com and jets and buildings and so on.
If the wealthiest 1% had their assets wiped out tomorrow, most of us wouldn’t have a job the next day.
Not that I am an advocate of that.
In the long term, nothing.
Do you have a reference for this? Interested to read more (game theoretic basis specifically).
However...income inequality by itself is a problem. Hmm...I thought it was one of Hans Rosling's (amazing) TED talks, but now I just see Richard Wilkinson's talk:
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson
Anyway, the fascinating thing is that everything gets worse in a country when there is "too much" inequality. Even the rich in unequal countries are worse off by many/most measures than the rich in more equal countries, despite having more money. (And even than the not quite so rich in the more equal countries, IIRC).
And that's without the whole pitchforks action that starts to happen when things get too out of hand.
So yes, there is some level of inequality that we need to tolerate in order to run a basic capitalist economy, and interestingly enough most people are OK with that. But you also need to work hard to not let that inequality get out of hand, and not because of a bleeding heart, but because of pure self interest.
Income and wealth inequality have reached pretty ridiculous levels, and noting that as a problem is not "bemoaning" people their (well-earned) wealth. A lot of that is not money earned by advancing society, a lot of is extractive/rent-seeking that is actually harmful (cough 2008 cough).
For example:
"The median American estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. The reality? 354-to-1. "
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequali...
Sorry, 354:1 is absolutely ludicrous, and I know a little bit of what I am talking about. My father was a high-ranking auto-executive, had actually been planned to succeed Carl Hahn as CEO of Volkswagen, but some funky politics got in the way of that. He never made that kind of money, and didn't want to. He thought it was obscene. And it is.
He also thought unions were a Good Thing™, and they are. If nothing else, they are selective pressure on companies to become better. And that's despite having that belief tested to the limit, because at VW the unions pretty much run the place.
So yes, envy is not a good thing, but noting that CEO pay is ridiculous, that banker's bonuses need to be reined in lest we all suffer the consequences, again, and that inheritance tax is not the devil is not "bemoaning".
It's an entirely symbolic ratio. If you halved it tomorrow it would not make one whit of difference. It just sounds outrageous and makes for compelling headlines.
Hmmm...I actually mentioned finance and inheritance. Both are at current scales arguably worse. Finance has devolved into rent-seeking that leeches off the real economy and caused the 2008 crisis, with virtually no consequences. Unlimited inheritance creates oligarchies with wealth and power that hasn't actually contributed to society.
> entirely symbolic ratio.
Er, no. Please read up on behavioral economics. If rewards are too lopsided, the game too obviously unfair, people stop playing. That's a really, really, really bad outcome. One we want to avoid at nearly any cost.
My suspicion (hypothesis, really) is that CEO compensation is too abstract a concept to actually impact behaviour all that much. It might spark outrage when people think about it intensively, but most people would be more focused on specific, tangible barriers to their economic wellbeing. Examples might include applying for jobs, networking, performance reviews, salary compared to industry average for their role (higher or lower?).
I would imagine that behavioural economics in academia is probably very specific and attempts to be predictive, whereas behavioural economics in popular journalism is more philosophical and hand-wavy.
How sure are we of the causality here? Does inequality make these things happen?
Maybe countries with strong feelings of unity tend to look after their poorest members better, and tax or restrain their wealthiest members more strongly. In countries with no such feelings it's every man for himself, and those who can screw those who can't, economically and politically. These are less nice places to live, but inequality is one of the results of this, not the cause.
Does it matter?
In fact, I am almost certain that these are results of other things, but that they are so closely linked that if you get income inequality as an outcome of those other things, you also get the other negative results. And vice versa.
I'm not sure that there is no causality, BTW. I'm just objecting that too much discussion assumes it's obviously all causality: The money just falls from heaven onto certain Brazilians, not others, and that's why Rio has the murder rate they do, and you could fix it with income tax. This seems crazy.
But what if there are alternative models where the bottom half are improving faster than they are now? I think it's helpful to think about different economic models in terms of optimizing a figure of merit. Free-trade globalization is probably good for optimizing aggregate global GDP. In a democratic society, that's not necessarily the most relevant figure of merit. Are there a different set of economic rules that, for example, maximizes the wealth of the middle 50% (such that they have more wealth under that system than they do under the current one)?
Indeed, the worst thing slaves could do is to resent against their masters. I am sure there must have been a better way.
It is about as compelling as stomping your feet and yelling at the top of your lungs.
Even if many of them are benevolent for now, it may not always be that way. It's simply not a safe system. We need a level of opportunity for all to advance. And that means some level of economic equality for all.
This is a matter of intrinsic justice but also more importantly a matter of practicality to avoid the hazards of slavery, corruption, dynasty and stagnation.
Inequality has always been, and likely always will be. And this natural and its fine (like most things) within certain parameters. Inequality doesn't doesn't need to exist at these extremes. Its dangerous.
A critical phrase uttered without any evidence. I urge you to look at the slice of people for whom housing and healthcare are increasingly out of reach, not just the globalization fairy tale you would like to focus on in your post.
Games that allow both skilled/rich and less-skilled/poor players are common even in balanced games, and they are fun.
The problem becomes when a few players are cheating or the game is imbalanced to the point that noone can win but the already winners and noone can have any fun.
Right now we have inequality that is more like cheats in a game than a balanced, fun, fair game.
Ultimately money wasn't designed to be hoarded, it was designed to be an exchange of value and services. Hoarded money that isn't put into action is taking from the game and the fun which cheats everyone.
No. When inequality increases more people are necessarily below the average while a tiny minority gets way above average. The total wealth on the planet is divided among people. This is a basic economic fact.
As inequality increases people are rewarded more for "climbing the ladder". Competition and selfishness increase and cooperation and solidarity decreases.
> I think it's a natural human inclination to fixate
This is the "human nature fallacy".
Second, wealth inequality is a direct threat to the democratic system. In a country that has extreme levels of wealth concentration as we see here in the US and elsewhere, it is very easy to enact policies that harm society in general in benefit of the minority that holds economic power. This in fact was the downfall of capitalist society in the 1920s. In such a society, there is big turmoil among the general population, which frequently leads to revolutions and economic disasters. We are just starting to see this pattern happening the the US, with increasingly big economic calamities such as in 2008 and political turmoil such as the election of Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if the US and similar countries are heading towards a popular revolution as we saw in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Now automate. We no longer need the labor of millions to run the machine (country's industry). We need only a million. Then only a hundred thousand. Then none. What happens to the 'laborers'? They are dropped out of the bottom of the machine as scrap.
Its this 'means of production' that gets us into trouble - when a few folks squat on it and call it 'theirs', the rest of us are reduce to marginal participants in the machine, expendable.
Automation is happening in the US at an explosive rate. Heard about a factory coming back from China? Only because now even Chinese labor is too expensive, if you can automate. There are insignificant jobs 'coming back'. And there never will be any more, again.
No, the age of labor is nearly over. And what will the millions of us do then?
Actually the USA in 1910 was the richest society the planet had ever seen. This was why half of Europe was busy trying to move there, to start at the bottom. (It was poor by today's standards, of course.) It's a lie to claim they got rich "because of socialist policies".
The depression was a brief dip in the growth of the income of the average guy, over let's say 1870-1970. Things went backwards by the equivalent of about 15 years or progress (on average! it was rough for some). The effect of the new deal on ending this, or perhaps prolonging it, is a confusing issue. Certainly it paid some people's wages, and hit some rich people hard (and had non-economic implications too), but my understanding is that there's a serious argument that, without such action, the depression might have been sharper & shorter, like the 19th C ones.
Besides differences in government response, the other big difference was that employment had become more secure, more long-term, more Henry Ford and less Charles Dickens. You could indeed argue that this made it more serious. Compare a 20% drop in employment which meant 4 days a week for everyone (because they were all casual, factory or farm) vs 1/5 of workers (who thought they had jobs for life) being unemployed for years.
I am not claiming nothing of this. But everyone knows the huge toil of the great depression on poor workers. The only reason why the new deal was enacted is that people were on the verge of revolt. If the recession had been any worse, there would be blood on the streets and even more people would starve to death, and possibly the US government would be overthrow by communists who were very active at the time. That's the fundamental reason why these silly ideas pushed by conservatives never come to fruition: a completely free market is guaranteed to lead to revolution sooner or later.
I'm just dubious of claims that it was economically a great idea, especially in the long run. This seems to be unclear from the data, looking back from a safe distance.
There is now consensus among leading economists like Stiglitz [2] and even bastions of neoliberalism like the University of Chicago and IMF that something has gone seriously wrong in the last 40 years.
Piketty's data shows a dramatic increase in inequality since the 1980s with labour share of income shrinking with wages stagnant and essentially at the same levels as they were 40 years ago with disproportionate gains going to the top 1 percent.
Grandiose claims about lifting 1 billion people out of poverty are meaningless without any data to back them up. Where, how was it achieved, how long it did take, which specific policies? Why haven't we been able achieve these results in the poorest parts of Asia, Africa and even the USA inspite of trying for the last 70 years?
Contrary to the 'envians' no one cares about the rich in any serious economic discussion, but many do care about the majority in a society getting poorer, unequal outcomes, bad economic policies, lobbying and capture, exploitation, unemployment, underemployment as this can only lead to highly unstable societies.[3]
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/pikettys-inequal...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/stiglit...
[3] http://evonomics.com/joseph-stiglitz-inequality-unearned-inc...
What about western countries where people under 35 are dealing with high student debt, unaffordable housing, stagnate wages and "gig" economy jobs? Things look pretty glum unless you've got some form of inheritance on the horizon.
Interventions often don’t do what you wanted them to do.
In some areas that's true, but in others it isn't. There's only so much land, and if rich people own all the best places to live (i.e. the ones within reasonable driving range of jobs), then the poor people are stuck paying rent.
Other examples are that the rich have a disproportionate influence on the political process, have greater control of the media, and increasingly (thanks to Facebook, Google, etc.. and advances in machine learning) they have fine-grained knowledge of the opinions and preferences of whole populations, knowledge which is used specifically to influence the behavior of those people -- mostly through ad placement, but also to influence elections (e.g. the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal).
I dont think much has changed for bottom half living conditions. Especially since QE.
>People spend less as a percentage of income on food and housing
Is that true though? If you take any housing prices and rent and compared to salary in the last 10 years.
They feared expropriation. Britain nationalized many industries. Most telcos were run by governments. Monopolies were routinely targeted by democratic governments.
Capitalism now has a monopoly position and acts like it.
...is extremely ambiguous, context dependent, variable. Especially for words ending in '-ism'.
> The remedy for ambiguity is clarity.
Then don't use words from the extreme end of the range of vapor words. Instead, talk about something concrete.
As an aside, I strongly recommend Iannucci's The Death of Stalin [1], which is in US theaters right now. The material would be horrific in a serious film, but treating it as a black comedy makes it endurable. I enjoyed it much more than I expected, and the cast is first rate.
The fact that some people once wished the word "communist" to mean something else doesn't matter much. Post-1945 it has had a clear meaning: the empire of Stalin, and its vassals, imitators, and admirers.
"as envisioned" just means some people once told a fairy tale about how nice things would be. The Heaven's Gate cult also "envisioned" riding to paradise on Comet Hale-Bopp.
Planned economy and lack of personal liberties cannot coexist in what we would call a democracy unless your definition of democracy is a slightly less violent conflict resolution method.
Overall democracy works because it respects the wishes of the individual essentially it gives everyone the right to express their wants communism has no room for any form of individualism.
They didn't all call themselves communists. The germans also don't call themselves german. We do.
It was invented long before, as a label for some imaginary perfect system which did not need to run gulags to keep the lights on. This perfect place played an important theological and rhetorical role in these kingdoms. If discussing such issues we use the word for this too. Words can have several meanings.
Regardless, it's just a word. My point is people commenting don't know the difference anyway, it's best to just read their comment as referring to "those authoritarian states that called themselves communist."
This imaginary utopia which some 19th writer dreamed up, to which said evil empire payed lip service, is a topic for those with special interests in 19th century utopian dreaming.
This historical revision of "The US and capitalism did nothing wrong" needs to die.
On propaganda, you may notice that one side's propaganda needed to be backed up at home with a gulag system, while vocal dissent on the other side was not a bar to ivy league tenure.
Trotsky would've been just as bad as Stalin in the end not because he was evil but because an authoritative regime has no other means of asserting power other than force and violence.
Which is why under any autocracy even the most "benevolent" ones any challenge to the authority, ideology and core philosophy of the rule must be squashed.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is essentially the phase that all communist governments get stuck on because there is no way for it to evolve into anything but another dictatorship, free market democracy or pure anarchy.
The idealistic state which is supposed to come after the dictatorship in which 7 billion people somehow live in harmony and prosperity with no laws to enforce how to live or to protect them isn't possible.
And a dictatorship by definition does not have the mechanism to yield power or to evolve in a non-violent manner and a natural instinct to preserve it at all cost even if that state was achievable it could never get there.
They simply aren't relevant for talking about the brutal 20th century system of organising human affairs called communism. (Or rather, perhaps, no more relevant than the details of the Imam are to understanding the Iranian regime. If you want to go deep and read between the lines in speeches etc, then of course you have to know the relevant theology.)
But sure show me how you transition from the "dictatorship of the proletariat" phase to this stateless paradise and I'll concede my argument.
By Marks himself the dictatorship is a critical phase in the process.
But it is not the same as the common defition of a dicatorship, with oppression and selfish tyranny, which seems to be the association you want to make.
I loathe linking to Wikipedia, but the page in question does sum it up quite well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletar...
The stateless version of your so called communism is essentially pure libertarianism the problem is that both are just as impossible and unlike the latter the former cannot coexist with the free market of ideas which is the natural state of a nationless/stateless society.
Only defeatist quitters speak in such absolutes.
Again, it is not a dictatorship in the commonly understood terminology, but rather a term that is used for a political system where one part has political power over the other under the existence of a state, because we don't really have a proper and precise term for it.
>"Only defeatist quitters speak in such absolutes."
Can you have a system that does not conserve energy? No, there such things as absolutes.
Communism besides being the mother of all bad ideas and the most vile ideology humanity has created is also deeply internally flawed and essentially ensures that it's final outcome can never be reached.
And even if we take that final outcome as our starting point it has no mechanism to sustain itself once there is no government and now laws that dictate social behaviour anyone can do whatever they want and no one can stop them.
So if at T+0 we have the withering of the state and perfect communism at T+1 nothing would stop me from taking control over whatever resource I want and saying well fuck you now you gotta pay.
And yes you hit the point I was trying to make, no one forces you to live under capitalism even in a capitalist country it's perfectly legal for you to go and live in a commune it is not however true the other way around.
I had a grandparent die to Stalin's purges in the Gulag and I grew up in a Kibbutz I can say that my family experienced at least 4 different flavors of authoritarianism in the past 80 years and I've learned to be very weary of the very early signs of any authoritarianism.
Polish/German (mainly due to the fact that they lived in a region that went back and forth between Poland and Germany since the unification of the Prussian states) Jewish family my parents were born in 1942 after their parents have already escaped eastwards because of some guy that couldn't get into art school.
(When tired of mass starvation, the strategy is to export oil & buy wheat from the prairies, if you have enough oil.)
What labels marxist theology applied to its imaginary systems is besides the point. This was all just words which the guys with guns made a certain class of intellectuals spout for their bread, to make sure everyone knew who was the boss.
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison, Federalist #51.
Communism has a problem with coordination: once the economy grows complex enough that someone must decide who produces what, the central planner becomes a power structure in its own right (what is power other than the ability to control what other people do, after all?). That happened with disastrous results under both Stalinism and Maoism. If you disperse that power democratically (i.e. by majority vote, perhaps using technology to instantly tally votes for a proposal), most people only have a limited amount of time and context to evaluate each proposal, and so a charismatic strongman can easily sway the vote. (This frequently happens with California ballot propositions, for example.)
Anarcho-communism has worked on a small scale with many hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies - for example, the idea of private ownership of land was nonsensical to most Native American tribes. However, these societies tend to be conquered by ones that have attained industrialization, because the higher complexity of those economies lets them build much more effective weapons of war.
That's a classic observation. It may no longer still be true. Scaling works better now that we have enough computer power. Amazon doesn't have a problem with coordination. Nor does WalMart. Alibaba and Tencent don't seem to. All those companies are above the quarter-trillion dollar level. They approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy.
There's no longer a limit on the size of a monopoly. It used to be that big companies had trouble getting out of their own way. The successful giant companies now seem to be past that problem. In a capitalist world, this leads to one big monopoly in each category.
An economy with a gigantic computer-controlled execution apparatus controlled by a single individual or small group of individuals starts looking a lot like the totalitarian strongman model of Mao or Stalin. Would you want to live in a world where Jeff Bezos controls the whole economy? Mark Zuckerburg? Regardless of how efficiently they run their companies, it's a problem when they're the only arbiter of what should be available to society.
Put more succinctly, the genius of capitalism is that we can have Amazon and Walmart and Alibaba and Tencent and Google and Apple and dozens of other companies that approach the scale of the USSR's entire consumer goods economy. In Soviet Russia they just had Soviet Russia.
* You can have a caste system, where everyone does what his father did. Which is more fun if your dad was a priest than if he had to shovel shit.
* You can have someone with a gun tell you what to do. This was Stalin's preferred system. It doesn't mix well with democracy, because threatening to shoot yourself doesn't get coal dug out of the mine.
* You can use money, and let people trade their time for the fruits of their labour. This can exist with or without democracy. It can exist with varying levels of redistribution, too, but people still call it capitalism.
What is this alternative system?
Unsurprisingly there's so much disagreement and ignorance around the topic.
It's imperative that the government or some superior structure (preferably decentralised) that doesn't exist yet enforces this improvement of economical performance tracking.
It's not that we shouldn't try to improve these things, but in my opinion your position is a forlorn hope that is destined to be disappointed.
The times when nations have worked better and more efficiently are times when there have been other sources of unity and a combined sense of national value which the modern world, and perhaps historical distance from the reckonings of the past (in particular world war 2) have been inexorably weakening.
Success stories include food production, household goods, and many kinds of media.
Failures include addictive drugs, gambling, global warming, and healthcare.
As a civilization we’re crushing it on problems solvable by capitalism. The solution to other problems is not new ways of measuring things to make them fungible (sounds like Wuffie). The solution is other forms of collective action and decision making, like functional governments and NGOs.
I am pro balanced socialism, just making the point that it inherently requires force.
Capitalism is also freedom limiting. Just ask low wage earners struggling to pay rent and afford healthcare.
And on the other hand, the nordiis seem to do quite well.
What are 'the laws of nature'?!!?
For the record I am pro balanced socialism, just making the point that it inherently requires force and reduces freedom.
All forms of social organisation require force. Capitalism is based on a particular configuration of property and contract relations established and upheld through coercion. It is not 'neutral' or 'natural'.
Wait are you arguing for or against social cooperation? I would definitely disagree that social organization cause more harm than good. I would say that it is humanity single most important strength. Imagine a place with complete anarchy and disorganization.
> property
Do you think that there was never any property? I am not sure which era you are referring to but when things are infinitely abundant relative to the population there is no need or concern for making them property. No one cares who owns which land when there is endless land. If you decided to take your fellow caveman's spear tho, you would probably get a knock on the head. Have you seen children's natural reactions and jealousy when another child takes their toys? Material is fundamental to survival, and gets more pronounced when things is scarce.
The concept of owning land/estate other than your dwelling is very modern.
No, it isn't.
You don't see people leaving Miami for Havana on rafts they've made of trash bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts.
You didn't see people getting shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall into East Germany.
You don't see vast numbers of South Koreans trying to sneak into North Korea (or preferring life as an illegal alien in China to living in their own country).
You are really stretching the world "forced" here.
Still, a poor person that wants to survive has to choose between paying for food and rent or being arrested and imprisoned for theft. Which then implies being forced to work and therefore not having time and money to get better education and so on...
Edit: spelling
Sorry, but I'll take the freedom to buy endless crap, have an virtually unlimited food supply, and have the freedom to criticize the government without ending up in the Gulag.
'Full communism dictates almost every part of your life'.
No it doesn't.
Repetition doesn't fit with intellectual curiosity, and the purpose of the site is the latter.
Not really. Plenty of people now pushing for the equality of outcome. Which is a cornerstone of communism.
Marx/Engels thought that equality in general, was a concept used by the "bourgeoisie" to manage scarcity. They thought that equality of outcome was impossible, and that communism would be so much more efficient than capitalism at providing goods (because communism would be based on pure cooperation rather than 'energy intensive' class antagonisms of capitalism) that nobody cared any more about equality, because everybody had more than enough. In other words, with communism, the desire for equality would whither away.
See e.g.
- F. Engels, Brief an Bebel (1875), MEW 34, 129
- F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, MEW 20, 9599
See Chomsky: Soviet Union vs Socialism
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
I remember checking my moderately above average European income on a site that showed this. I think I was in or close to the top 1% of earners. But not being on the property ladder I think I was closer to top 6% by wealth. (It was a while ago so my numbers may be a bit out, but I hope you get the idea).
When it comes to hanging the rich nobody cares about such details.
Jordan Peterson seems correct for a certain percentage of people when he says 'Middle Class Socialists don't like the poor but they hate the rich'. Your comment comes across as backing that up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
These meetings notes were secret, but after drop of Iron Curtain, American scientists were able to read them for few years, so they scanned them on microfilm, then digitized back to text and released to public, so I read them. I forgot name of University where they are, but I will try to find them again, if somebody is interested.
I hope, this will help you to find them. As far as I remember, You should nail for meetings at beginning of 1918, so search area will be small.
However, don't forget to include any defined benefit pension (state provided or otherwise) to the list of assets.
A pension paying USD$30k/yr (20yr length, 4% growth) costs USD$425k[1]. Add on an employer provided defined benefit pension (e.g.police, fire, military, federal employee), that can be worth a lot of money.
[1] https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/investing/annuity-calcu...
What percentage of HN will be in the international 1% in assets by the time they die? I’d still guess more than half.
Celestial bodies also have exponential inequality. Get a little mass, get more gravity, get more mass. Inequality is within nature itself.
Actors in hollywood. They release one movie, now they get 50 offers for other movies. They quickly get more than 2/3 of the opportunities, relative to an unknown. Inequality will always exist because trust exists, and if you trust someone, you will want to work with them.
Capitalism is great, because even if you're an unknown, you can do a good job(at whatever field you want), and get more opportunities, and do more good jobs, and get exponentially more opportunities.
It's the level at which, within your local market, essentials of life are not attainable.
Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjzfGChGlE
Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been able to yet.
(It's worth remembering that a good percentage of people reading this will be in the top 1% despite not being "rich" by western standards).
Honestly, if you live in desperate poverty, why would you want to bring a child into the world knowing the amount of suffering that its is likely to live through? Yet the poorest people seem to be the most likely to have the most children.
Maybe another way of phrasing the headline would be:
"The poor are reproducing far faster than the rich"
It doesn't sound as shocking then.
What you see as suffering might be seen as normal daily life to them which is terrible. The way most children in richer countries live might seem foreign to them. That being said, infant mortality is also very high in those countries so a chunk of those children born will not make it past 20 years old.
I do believe that as countries get richer the people of the country start having more responsibilities and jobs and those overwhelm the time available to take care of kids.
Many people say this. But it's worth knowing that, historically, lots of societies firmly limited reproduction when they were as poor as (say) most of Africa is now. The methods varied.
What I had in mind was people limiting their own. In the west the main mechanism was delayed marriage (i.e. saving up a socially approved amount of money first) which kept us well away from starvation 500 years ago. In china/japan I believe the pattern was more infanticide (in the same period) but know less about this.
Having children is a fundamental human activity. It gives people purpose, connection, novelty and a million other things I can't think of since I'm not a parent or a mother.
As you say, many poor people have many children. Perhaps you should look into what giving birth means to them rather than just assuming they're selfish idiots.
This statement is all but calling them selfish idiots. Your question is nothing but a self serving rhetorical for conclusions you already made.
https://reddit.com/r/changemyview
Lots of interesting debate happens there.
Hacker News fosters higher quality discussion than most subreddits because it's smaller and has a much higher floor for the scope successful moderation. But look at this thread: people are throwing around uninformed opinions about basic economics left and right. Outside of technical disussion, Hacker News discussions often fracture into arguments where people talk past each other and reinvent entire fields from first principles.
I think HN is nearly as good as you can expect a general discussion forum to be, but the focused, well-moderated subreddits for specific topics are clearly better for useful discussion.
It must also be asked, is improving equality a goal worth pursuing? You could improve equality by making every single individual dirt-poor. Improving average living standards would be a better in my world-view - and by all metrics, that has been going up since the start of the industrial revolution.
Birth rates almost invariably go down as a society gets richer and more educated - therefore the goal of improving average welfare could be better served by improving the lives of third-worlders directly, which would naturally decrease their birth-rates in the long-term.
Another argument could be that many "poor" individuals have positive economic impact - they are consumers of goods increasing overall economic output, or provide useful labor at a low price, allowing many others to have goods and services they could not otherwise afford.
For the poor to stop breeding would be ceding their one and only competitive advantage. Humans, and for that matter, life on Earth in general, aren't "judged" (in the sense that extinction/flourishing is a judgment) based on how many failed organisms they produce. Rather, that determination is based on how many successful organisms are produced.
As residents of richer countries, we're conditioned to breed at or around the replacement level and to view each failure as a catastrophe. So when we see those 80 gum balls being added each year to his misery containers, we're viewing it through the lens of seeing the failure. But in poorer countries, people adapt to the increased chance of failure by having more kids. They breed well above the replacement level knowing that, in all likelihood, not all of those kids will succeed. From that perspective, you need to focus on that 1 or 2 gum balls being allowed into the richer countries. That's the success. And having fewer kids runs contrary to that goal.
The concept to read up on here is r/K selection. Life is certainly judged by how many offspring, but there are various strategies for producing them, and one of the trade-offs is number vs. investment in each. Among all animals humans are far at the r-strategy end (high parental investment).
But different societies choose slightly different points, probably related to their history of farming. And the richer countries today are those traditionally towards the r-strategy end.
As standards of living increase, birth rate drops, until it's at a sustainable 2-per-family, like it is in rich countries.
Force poor people to have less kids, and you keep them in poverty. Improve their living situations and they'll have less kids.
I didn't say anything about "forcing" people to have less kids. But I do think we should encourage them. It would cost very little to feed people in extreme poverty, could you offer them that as an incentive not to have children? Offer them enough food for a family of three. If they want to have 5 kids, its themselves who will suffer? (Thats just a suggestion that I haven't thought through in any depth, I am sure there will be plenty of flaws in it).
On a side note, China has been growing very rapidly in the last few decades, and they had a one child policy for much of that.
Why not continue the extrapolation past 2050 and 2100, it might provide sound bites with more teeth "One person to control 99% of wealth by date 20XX".
You are in the top 10% if you have at least $71,560; top 50% (median) if you have at least $2,220. And the mean wealth is $52,819 per adult.
source: https://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21710771...
Top 1% Global Wealth - $770,000 assets
via https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
Assuming these two sets of people are not the same -- there are a lot of people in the west earning > $32K a year and having less than $770K in assets.
So they are in the top set but not the bottom. Since the cardinality of the sets is the same, where are all the people that have more than $770K in assets but earn less than $32K a year.
Even a fairly modest 5% return would produce more income than that, or are the stats excluding investment income?
People with that much equity in their home wouldn't realize the income ... but how many people in the west even live in $700K+ homes and yet have less than $32K in income a year? Maybe some seniors, but surely not a very large group.
Then again if you take a teacher who made $40k/year for 30 years but has a decent pension and owns a normal home maybe it's possible?
Perhaps unrealized capital gains are counted as wealth but not income? I've heard that it's possible through some legal maneuvering to "spend" capital gains without technically realizing it.
There's no doubt that there is dramatic capital inequality in the world, but as long as that capital is being put to productive use (generating and distributing wealth) all is well. There's also vast wealth inequality (though, numbers wise, it's not nearly as bad as capital inequality), but as long as the minimum wealth is not desolation, wealth inequality is not a fundamental problem. As humans (or just as animals), we will always crave what we do not have, but if the cost of fixing wealth inequality is transferring capital to those incapable of applying it productively, thereby lowering the worlds total wealth, I do not believe we should bear that cost. Rather than focusing on wealth inequality, we should focus on building solid safety nets and proper incentives.
Politicians can hate on the wealth inequality, but it's a problem they themselves have created in part through QE.
2) I'd suggest examining double taxation. Corporations already pay taxes. It's unclear why an investor should pay additional taxes too on top of it, for the same profit.
simply just because they can, maybe this hoarding is fueled by the unease and insecurity they they too feel. especially when someones livelihood is totally tied to their job(healthcare, education, housing). in that kind of environment can you blame anyone in an advantageous position to want to hoard so that they feel secure against the winds of change. secure for their family more than anything. imagine someone with a big family who loses their job and has to feed all of them, has to be responsible for all their health-care, housing and education.
some societies have created an environment where if you lose your job your life is totally wrecked, seeing as most americans don't have a nest egg to fallback on since saving is not really part of consumerist culture.
knowing all this, can you blame the 1% for wanting to feel secure? just like everyone else. they have exaggerated the need to hoard and their bags of loot provide long term comforts not basic needs.
The top 1% should worry, but there's something euphoric about being that wealthy, almost like oxygen deprivation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheide...
On top of that, which "causes" would you decide to support? Would you choose to support a cause that disproportionately affects your family's net worth in a negative way as long as it made the rest of the world a better place to live? The fact is no one knows the precise ingredients to a healthy society or what the real solution to wealth inequality is, but only the wealthy and powerful get to steer the ship.
I've been changing numerous of my fundamental beliefs and can report that perssonally it's been difficult, painful, and disconcerting as hell. There's a quote on enlightenment by a recent Cupertino mystic I ran across a few years back:
"Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Slightly more: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/78lr8h/enlight...
As for human frames, world mental models, and ideologies, they seem profoundly tended to be highly self-serving, particularly of the powerful.
As to the relationship of wealth and power: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Sprinkle in a little radical islam fear mongering for kicks. This was funded by the Labour Party - not saying the message about inequality isn't true, but really strange to see that completely out of nowhere.
In terms of income, it is 30K EUR/yr or 37K USD/yr or 47K CAD/yr.
But more accurate is to look at wealth, you are the top 1% if you have more than 700K EUR or 885K USE or 1.4M CAD. That is a fair bit. Most in US will not quality.
According to: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
It's ~$30k after tax (net income). So the actual salary number is going to be higher.
It's also misleading because most rich people are rich because of wealth, not income. You need ~$770k in assets to be in the global 1%.
In the UK there are millions (probably) of people who bought their houses before the recent property boom, who theoretically have an asset worth at least that much on paper. But since all other property in the country is similarly inflated, the wealth is not real in any meaningful sense. It’s just a number.
It also matters in a real sense. Who do you think is better off in absolute terms? Someone who owns a paid-off 200m^2 apartment in London, or someone with the same size apartment in whatever dirt-poor country you could name?
The person with the apartment in London could sell it and move to a cheaper country (or even a small town in the UK) and be relatively wealthy, but the reverse isn't true.
You're not poor in any meaningful sense compared to the rest of humanity just because you're struggling to pay off your monthly rent on your penthouse in Times Square.
Of course it is, because ummm you live somewhere. That should be obvious but perhaps it isn't. A person with skill X, a teacher say, can be in "the 1%" (global) in the UK quite easily, but the same person with the same skill doing the same work, would be worse off in another country, so what other than the local economy is the variable?
And someone in the global 1% in the UK is not especially wealthy because they need to spend it all straight away...
But in your earlier comment you mentioned property ownership in some of the most expensive markets in the world, which is entirely different. That implies that you own hundreds of $K of an easily-sold asset, and you're only "poor" to the extent that you're unwilling to move.
As I noted the same could be said about someone with a penthouse in NYC. If they own a big part of a $10 million dollar house and struggle to make mortgage payments they're poor by this narrow definition, but of course that's an absurd way of looking at things. They can simply cash out and move somewhere else, unlike someone who's actually poor.
Being rich and having expensive tastes doesn't make you poor, it just makes you selective.
Still, to address this specific example of yours. Even someone who's struggling to get by in an area that's in the 1% of income worldwide is in a much better situation than someone who's struggling proportionally as much (when adjusted for purchasing power) in a much poorer country.
They're going to benefit from better public services, their kids will go to better schools and have better opportunities etc.
I think once you account for all of that the picture isn't going to look significantly different than if you'd just have looked at salary with no regard for local purchasing power.
It's just not necessarily money that's raining down on our heads.
Less snarkily: Piketty observes that reinvested capital accumulates at a faster rate than labour. Also, we have no global taxation system, so capital flows through the cracks into regimes with the lowest tax rate -- meanwhile, labour is pinned down by strict laws restricting immigration, and mostly can't go where wages are higher. (In the tech sector we're privileged exceptions, but consider the plight of an agricultural labourer.)
The system itself is broken, and the people who run it have forgotten the lesson of history that people with no stake in a system eventually turn to violence when threatened with starvation.
Labour is just less valuable now, and the system will need to change - not that it broke.
The people who run it are aware that they can, with impunity, make others starve when necessary (see multiple famines in the European history). Such potential power is extremely exciting for some.
Having a different way to record ownership doesn't change how ownership is distributed. Logically the blockchain would be a good way to record ownership in a more equal society in same fashion as forks and bricks would be useful tools in a new and more equal society.
So like slaves, we sweat away for them. Day in. Day out.
But if we agree on a new currency where you and I own 100000 coins each, we can happily start working for each other.
This doesn't appear any more revolutionary or likely. Why would any of the people who own real resources like deeds, stocks, stores, things agree to give them to you?