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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

On a global level, the rich have gotten richer, but the poor have gotten a LOT richer. Three decades ago, as a kid in Eastern Europe, I could taste oranges once a year, at Christmas time, with some skipped years here and there. Now everybody can eat as much as they can, and obesity is a growing problem. Maybe you don’t care that much about the world outside the US or Western Europe, but literally billions of people have seen their living standards rise from the subsistence level to a decent level.

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> Maybe you don’t care that much about the world outside the US or Western Europe

I don't think that's a fair reaction. It's possible to care about the rest of the world and recognise context. Workers looking for greater bargaining power in the US shouldn't accept "but things are much better in Eastern Europe these days" as a reason for them to not organise - the two are entirely separate issues, and can happen independent of each other.

They're not entirely separate issues. One of the big reasons for rising living standards in the rest of the world has been the offshoring of work from the US and Western Europe, which is also one of the things reducing worker bargaining power.

But it's got nothing to do with the decimation of unions and the rise of more and more worker hostile policies in general.

I think they are related. If a factory is in the US, and unions drive cost of employment higher, then the factory owners look to move the factory overseas to be more competitive. Now it's important that we also recognize that the factory owners also have to be competitive in a global landscape and against new entrants into the market, new entrants that can spring up from countries where the cost of employment is much less, so they have a strong incentive to move factories when costs rise.

Now at its disposal, a government can implement tariffs and protectionism to level the playing field, but those can have disastrous long term effects (see the history of India's protectionism).

So, an excellent way for wages to rise is to make employees extremely efficient, and to increase the demand in labor. Make no mistake though, the gains in other countries have effected US and European workers.

It's not entirely unrelated.

It's easier to get away with worker hostile policies for an employer when the employer's option if workers object is not "no workers" but "I guess I have ti shift production to China".

You're right that it's not directly related to the decimation of unions. That has other things going on, and different things in different sectors.

Yes. Clearly my comment relates to the article which I believe is talking about pay and conditions in the West.

I think this is a red herring. I’m from one of those places where things have gotten much MUCH better - not an American.

The absolute improvement is great.

The accelerated concentration of Wealth is not.

The term economists have now settled on and are considering is the very mundane “lack of social mobility”

It’s a problem.

>>The absolute improvement is great. The accelerated concentration of Wealth is not.

Yes, exactly. The reason actually is very simple: wealth inequality results in inequality in political (not to mention legal) representation, as the wealthy always carry more influence in society and use that influence to stack the odds in their own favor.

I definitely agree that it’s a red herring - the majority of people are going to judge their position relative to the world around them, not to some time 30-40 years ago.

It’s pretty much the same line parents use on their children - I don’t think it works for them, much less adults.

By my understanding, global income inequality is improving but global wealth inequality is worsening:

The conclusion that I draw is that while people broadly in this position might accurately perceive that they are now in a more comfortable short-term position than they were, they are at high risk in the medium-term and long-term.

Sounds like a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

I think this had more to do with the Iron Curtain than poverty.

Can this be attributed to advances in genetically modified plants yielding more fruit in less favorable conditions along with advances in logistics to get the fruit shipped from all over the world. I'm eating mangoes grown in Peru that I got off the shelf at my local grocery store.

I think there are a couple of intertwined ideas in your comment. I wonder if your observations could be explained by decreases in the cost of food / increased food distribution.

Secondly, it's not clear whether wealth has improved for poor people (something I should take a look at...).

It's well known that folks in the lower 70% of global income have seen significant growth. There's even a name for the plot - "the elephant chart."

https://avc.com/2016/08/elephant-chart/

The chart, as I understand it (in limited reading), tracks three phenomenon:

1. Increasing wealth formation by more disadvantaged groups in non-first world countries (the "body" of the elephant).

2. Wealth stagnation for middle classes in first-world countries (the "dip" in the elephant's trunk).

3. Increasing returns to capital held by upper classes in first-world countries (the "trunk" of the elephant).

I think that the elephant chart can be misleading. A 100% growth of very little is still very little.

I found this version [1] showing that, in absolute terms, the gaps are actually increasing.

[1] https://patternsofmeaning.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/elepha...

Is a that very useful way of understanding growth? Without any change in the income distribution, everyone getting 1% richer would increase the absolute gap by 1%.

I'm not sure I understand this rebuttal, do you want to expand a bit? Everyone getting 1% richer would not affect the Gini nor the absolute gap, or at least not as much as you imply. So I must be missing something.

In any case, you are not necessarily addressing my rebuttal of the elephant graph. What I'm saying is that the elephant graph is an interesting conversation starter, but, by itself, it does not convey enough information to make a conclusion about fairness. To make an extreme example, if I have literally $0 last year and I have $1 now, my growth rate in the elephant graph is infinitely higher than the richer 1%. I'm still going to starve to death, though. Absolutes matter.

But it would affect the absolute gap - everyone is proportionally richer, so the absolute gap is proportionally larger.

My point is that knowing only the fact that "absolute inequality has increased" doesn't tell you anything about whether that's good or bad for the world.

I agree that absolutes matter to the individual - but I personally think percentages are a better way of understanding and interpreting growth over time for most populations, because growth has historically been very consistently exponential.

That seems about right. "Getting 1% richer" would imply something completely different for a billionaire than for a worker, so I don't see why it would be a useful measure.

Because economies growing or shrinking generally affects people proportional to their wealth (including human capital). To me, Gini curves seem far more effective for understanding the dynamics of inequality than looking at absolute differences, which largely change due to economic growth.

Yes, that's true when talking about causes of a wealth gap, but this thread was about effects.

A growing absolute wealth gap can still lead to reduced quality of life for lower-wealth groups - e.g. because prices rise faster than their incomes and so they effectively lose access to certain goods. It will also increase inequality and makes other economic measures (that rely on the mean) less reliable.

Just because an effect is always present, doesn't mean you can ignore it, especially if doing so would flip the conclusion. Posting the elephant graph as an argument that all is going well would do exactly that.

If I understand the graph correctly, the gap in absolute terms reduces, when the derivative of the (original) Elephant graph is negative, that is the gap between the lower half of the income distribution and the P50-60 (6th decile, something like $2k - $4k [0]) increases. And the gap between P80-90 ($8k-$14k, that's the lower third of the US population) and the top increases, while the gap between P50-60 and P80-90 decreases.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality

specifically from eyeballing

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Global...

In terms of poverty, is there a difference between getting more wealth vs everything becoming cheaper? I don't think there is - your life has improved just the same either way.

Fixating on silly numbers that ultimately mean nothing doesn't seem like a good way to make the world better. We should look at concrete things - and how often you can eat an orange is the kind of concrete thing that really matters.

Oranges may have become cheaper in relative terms, but property sure hasn't. In many parts of the world property is more inaccessible than ever before for similar social economic groups.

That's just artificial scarcity, right? Rural property out in the woods is just as cheap as its ever been, in my experience. Cities just have a lot of laws preventing a lot of things, but I think most people who choose to live in cities prefer it like that.

I'm not sure the relevance of it being artificial or not is here. The reality is that many people in their 20s and 30s can't buy a house, while their parents could, even if their parents were less affluent by many measures, say in orange purchasing power.

There seems to be three issues related to real estate that effect prices and one issue related to purchasing power that I'd like to point out.

1) The percentage of people living in cities as compared to living in rural areas has increased dramatically (https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/acs-...)

2) Large cities (NYC, San Francisco, etc), have lots of regulations to building more housing

3) Demand for housing in large cities has exceeded supply for decades

4) Student loan debt has destroyed purchasing power for folks in their 20s and 30s, the average student loan is almost 40k (https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/)

Leaving NYC, even after taking a pay cut, was one of the best decisions I ever made. I don't have data, but I suspect that for young folks outside of the largest 20 American cities, if they didn't have on average 40k in student loan debt, they would have more purchasing power then previous generations even including real estate.

That's also partly because you can't hardly buy a newly constructed house unless it's 3000+ sq feet, whereas houses from decades ago were substantially smaller, leading to more affordability. The lack of these houses does not imply that people currently in their 20s and 30s are less affluent, just that there is less affordable housing.

Maybe.But Germany has cities but they created a political system(after ww2) optimized for cheap real-estate , and they do have fine cities, while their real-estate prices has Rose neglibly over the last few decades.

"while their real-estate prices has Rose neglibly over the last few decades."

Those days are over. Germany has a huge real estate problem right now.

German manufacturers are not limited to few cities.

There are factories in villages too.

Cities also have jobs. I don't see many postings for positions out in the middle of the woods. Certainly not enough to sustain all the people who would be needing to go there in order to have property.

This is really the question that throw’s people for loops in my experience. Not contextually what you were addressing but in comparison to my parents in the US.

Many things are much more inexpensive jeans, shoes (functional not trendiest), entry-level tools, computers, media, etc.

Whats not more inexpensive and what imho really actually matters are things like education, housing, and the barrier to entry to careers (require licensing, certfications etc.)

> In terms of poverty, is there a difference between getting more wealth vs everything becoming cheaper?

Yes. The delta between the richest and poorest indicates a lot of things about a society.

What does it indicate?

You can go to a place like Mauritius where the delta is enormous, but everyone is pretty happy and the rich and poor mingle freely. Or you can have a place like France where the delta is far smaller, but the rich and poor detest each other and very rarely mingle.

In 2014 The Gini coefficient for Mauritas was 30 and for France it was 40.

The top 1% in France has about 20% of the total income as of 2014.

For Mauritas no suitable data was found for wealth inequality or dispersion of earnings.

The lack of good data for Mauritas makes a comparison between the two questionable.

Plus even after looking at the numbers for these countries I would want to check out money laundering - if I recall, based on the Panama papers, a nontrivial amount of the 1% (probably more like the 0.1%s) wealth is laundered/hidden/dark. I don’t know if the studies here attempt to account for that or not. I would imagine money laundering is prevalent in France (or any major economy for that matter), possibly in Mauritas

https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...

Information on data sources here - https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/about/

As of 2018 the population of Mauritas is 1.26 million (via google search). The 2018 population of France is 65.23 million (via google search). The 2014 population probably was not radically different.

I wonder if the size of the society in question matters here - is comparing a country to one 65 times larger than it useful?

I did not look for data to validate the hypothesis that everyone is pretty happy in Mauritas as opposed to France.

Back in the 90's I saw the same thing when living in Brazil. A friend in his 70's who owned real estate in Rio owned a Rolls recently returned from NYC. He said he was shocked at seeing the hatred in the eyes of people in NYC. He countered how he could stop for a coffee or beer or anything else and just talk to anyone who was there regardless of the socio-economic status. I had to agree. I always wondered why there was not more discontent.

That's nice for them.

Doesn't do a single thing to address the point made.

Obesity is growing because the cheap food is loaded with sugar while the healthier stuff is more expensive...

I can't agree that healthy food is necessarily expensive from the perspective of someone in the US. Chicken breast is regularly 1.99 a pound and thighs even cheaper. Canned food is ridiculously cheap, and frozen vegetables don't go bad and are no worse than fresh ones.

> Chicken breast is regularly 1.99 a pound and thighs even cheaper.

Why are people trotting out chicken as an example of healthy food? It is anything but:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/poultry-farms-anti...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ

I don't mean to say you are wrong or I am right. But what do you suppose is a better healthier solution? Everyone growing their own food? Or everyone starving?

Obviously, no one food is healthy, note that I named a couple different "healthy" foods. Having a balanced diet is important. Nothing about your article seems to point to chicken being unhealthy to eat. I don't even know if you read the article.

> Why are people trotting out chicken as an example of healthy food?

Are you kidding me? If you're vegan, just come out and say it, or make an actual point. Part of my response was related to affordability, which is hard to beat when it comes to chicken as a source of protein. What healthy alternatives do you have?

I started watching the second link. Interesting stuff. Maybe chicken isn't the most healthy option, but I don't think it's evil.

> Nothing about your article seems to point to chicken being unhealthy to eat. I don't even know if you read the article.

How can getting antibiotic resistant E. coli from eating chicken be healthy?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/opinion/sunday/meat-antib...

> What healthy alternatives do you have?

Beans are pretty great.

> but I don't think it's evil.

People in Medieval Europe did not think that torturing animals to death for entertainment was evil. It is obviously evil to people in Europe today, just like breeding and enslaving animals in horrific conditions only to slaughter them for food is obviously evil if you take a moment to think about it.

It is healthy in comparison to the average thing people eat. It's hard to get obese eating just chicken breast (you will get full pretty quick). We aren't going to get everyone drinking kale smoothies.

Canned food is usually higher in sodium.

Sodium is only unhealthy if you happen to have hypertsenion.

Too much sodium can cause hypertension.

https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/news/...

Unhealthy food is only cheaper if you can't be bothered to take 30 minutes to cook. It has been a long time, but the last time I went to McD's it was ~$5 for a meal. The expensive grocery store up the street sells chicken breast on a permanent sale for $1.99/pound.

If you're thinking the unhealthy food in the grocery store is cheap, that's also not true. Chips are $3-$5/bag while 3 pounds of onions is $2. I could go on.

I will be sure to immediately replace my bag of chips with a bag of onions?

Poor people are likely to be both cash-poor and time-poor: it's not a question of "being bothered". If you have the available time to fully consider, process, and follow this advice, then you may not realistically be poor at all.

And, if you did manage to follow this advice, you would likely still be poor - saving pennies on food is not any way out of poverty.

I was poor growing up. Both parents worked, a lot. My mom had tons of ways to quickly prepare ground beef or chicken into something that tasted good. When she had time she bought whole chickens and broken them down because it was cheaper. Maybe once/month she would buy a 2 liter of soda as a treat for my sister and me. So I've been there and done that.

And lets get off of this no time argument. Why do all these people with no time still have TVs? The average American watches ~5 hours of TV per day. Watch 4 hours instead and cook a healthier and cheaper meal.

"And lets get off of this no time argument. Why do all these people with no time still have TVs? The average American watches ~5 hours of TV per day. Watch 4 hours instead and cook a healthier and cheaper meal."

That's a complete non-sequitor. You're going to have to provide evidence that those who are poor are the ones watching tv so much, and don't have the time because they're working multiple jobs.

Yes, I recall my mother (single mother, high school education, in the rust belt of the Ohio Valley) saying to me, in between shifts of her 2nd and 3rd part time jobs, that she would love to spend 30 minutes cooking a delightful meal from scratch and then another 30 minutes eating followed by another 30 minutes cleaning up, but she just can't be bothered.

She kept the house stocked with canned soup and lunch meat because a 6 year old (me) and a 12 year old (my brother) could manage to make a meal out of it while she was working.

Sandwiches are dirt cheap, filling, nutritious, and quick to make and clean up. Sure, they aren't delightful, which is sad, but that's not the barrier to nutrition.

Wow, standards of delight have come up a lot in this country. I've probably had more delightful sandwiches than not

They can easily be bad for you if you use any kind of appealing (white) bread.

So this is what I had always assumed as well, but the science is less clear:

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(17)...

The research done concluded that differences in Gut Microbiome meant that "The glycemic response to the two types of bread varies greatly across people".

More food for thought (Pun intended :p )

Switching from rye to white bread is a whole lot less bad for you than switching from water to soda. At some level we have to make a decision about what an acceptable level of "bad for you" is and I think white vs wheat is way below that line.

I have complete respect for single parents and how hard their job(s) are. It sounds like for your situation growing up that even 30 minutes would have been too much time to spend to make a meal.

I do think in the general case though, that people usually have 1/2 hour to cook if they wanted to. Are there going to be exceptions like yours? Absolutely.

Poor people often have less time as well, due to working multiple jobs, taking the bus, etc.

"Unhealthy food is only cheaper if you can't be bothered to take 30 minutes to cook"

Which, if you're working 2 jobs, you very well might not have.

"If you're thinking the unhealthy food in the grocery store is cheap, that's also not true."

Time is also a cost. So is the ability to store food.

I cook my own food from fresh vegetables, meat, etc. for about $10/day. It's not organic-branded, but I can't see how it's any less healthy, and it seems pretty inexpensive to me.

"Now everybody can eat as much as they can"

Not everywhere.

"Maybe you don’t care that much about the world outside the US or Western Europe, but literally billions of people have seen their living standards rise from the subsistence level to a decent level."

That's very uncivil of you. There is lots of poverty in the US, and despite popular opinion, there is lots of hunger here too.

That's more to do with a better food distribution network. The fact that you ate mostly locally grown food and not imported from far away places didn't make you poor. You had to really try to be poor and hungry in USSR. The collapse of communism and diminished threat of proletariat revolution in western countries is what driving the inequality in the past 30 years ("the rich are getting bolder").

> The fact that you ate mostly locally grown food and not imported from far away places didn't make you poor.

The "locally grown food" in many cases was little more besides white flour and mincemeat. (A situation that still exists in parts of rural Russia.) The only tea that could be drunk was usually a single variety of black tea. I think "poverty" is a reasonable adjective for that state of affairs. The fact that people in urban Russia today do have access to a vastly wider choice of food is a significant advance.

Nope, that's called a richer diet. Also having an option to buy 50 different varieties of black tea doesn't make someone better off. In the end you are going to drink a tea. I'm not whitewashing history which is quite bleak in that region but too many things are distorted by propaganda. It's all subjective but Russians today are not better than they were 50 years ago despite having the ability to buy iPhones, drive BMWs and eat sushi...

> Nope, that's called a richer diet.

It is amusing that use the term "richer" to dispute my claim above that Russians are less poor.

What in God's name are you talking about ? USSR saw a massive famine in 1932-1933 [1] believed to be caused directly by communist policies

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–33

That's controversial who caused what, the wikipedia link actually discusses it. It's like saying the Wall Street bankers caused the famine in USA in 30's. Too much propaganda and subversion on this topic.

There does not appear to be much data supporting the hypothesis that a significant number of people died of malnutrition (ie a famine) in the US during the Great Depression: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...

The millions of deaths (irrespective of the famines ultimate cause) in the USSR and especially in the Ukraine in 1932 / 1933 are well documented (2-4 million deaths estimated):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%...

There was also a Russian famine in 1922 where an estimated 5 million people died:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80...

There is a Wikipedia article on “hunger in the United States”, but a google search for “United States Great Depression famine” did not return any Wikipedia articles documenting a famine in the US at that time, only the above Stack Exchange discussion (which appears to reject the hypothesis).

FYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

Without data to back up the claim of a famine killing millions in the US during the Great Depression the comparison used here is nonsense, although there may be other evidence for the point the author was attempting to support.

We are discussing economic systems. What is the point of listing selective list of famines at certain times of Russian history to the discussion about communism vs capitalism. Much worse famines occurred when the Russia was capitalistic. Famines occurred in any type of economic system. Are you implying that communist Russia was more susceptible to food shocks?

The discussion points to Soviet policy. You are invoking fallacy of the gray [1] with your comparison to the dust bowl

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Fallacy_of_gray

He talks about later stages of communism. There was no famine in 1970 or 1980.

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