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Comment by bumholio | Hacker News Reader

A great article, but maybe too much emphasis on "the impending catastrophe". Short of epidemics, fire and the like, the city is in permanent stasis: the conditions devolve to the point where there is an equilibrium with the arrivals from the country side.

It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded country that experienced famine as recently as last year.

There is no catastrophe looming, just the slow grip of poverty following people around and slowly suffocating their lives, absent coordinated social organization and coherent politics to end it.

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> It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded country that experienced famine as recently as last year.

Lagos and all of Nigeria suffers from the same plague that is consuming the West: extreme inequality. There's economic growth but when the rich capture the overwhelming majority of the new wealth then, combined with population growth, you can get a population where many people are actually worse off as time goes on. This is why even as the economy grows the number of people living in poverty is actually increasing [1][2].

It's highly unlikely the government will/can/wants to address the inequality [3]. At some point the only "fix" to this problem will be, as it has been in the past, war. The growing regional and ethnic divisions just need another decade or so (by that time we'll probably see as many as 120m living in poverty) and then, suddenly, the water reaches a boil.

Ironically, if you speak to many Nigerians they'll tell you that inequality isn't a problem at all. If you work hard and smart enough you can make it. Sound familiar?

[1] https://www.stearsng.com/article/inequality-in-nigeria-is-wo...

[2] https://qz.com/963465/some-of-the-worlds-biggest-countries-h...

[3] https://www.oxfam.org/en/even-it-nigeria/nigeria-extreme-ine...

I won't downvote you but I think people are because it's a pretty perfunctory claim, not to mention inflammatory, that 'extreme inequality' A) applies to the West or B) is plaguing the West (for whatever we mean by 'West' which itself is pretty broad strokes). But you seem to be mainly making a point about Nigeria, and to be fair, the trend in Nigeria is really bad. But also, to be fair, it's also an aberration as far as global poverty is concerned. The % of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 44% in 1980 to < 10% today.[1]. Nigeria seems to be a rare exception where absolute poverty is increasing rather than decreasing.

But there seems to be an assumption baked into your point that inequality is the problem to optimize for, rather than actual poverty alleviation. And of course wealth inequality doesn't correlate very well with absolute outcomes in economic wellbeing. Cambodia has very low income equality (Gini index of 30.8%) and very high percentage of people living in extreme poverty (6.15%). Brazil, on the other hand has very high Gini index (51.3%) and very low percentage of people living in extreme poverty (0.5%). Those numbers are just from Wikipedia but there are plenty of studies done on how useless 'inequality' is as a measure of real world outcomes.

[1]https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...

IIRC, if you remove India and China from poverty trends, the picture is a lot less positive.

That definitely isn't true. I don't have the data on hand but I believe poverty in almost every country has dropped dramatically in the last few decades.

I don't see that inequality is the primary problem when 45% of the population survive on less than $1.90 a day. If you doubled everyones income the equality/inequality metrics wouldn't change but the level of human misery and suffering would decrease massively.

Nigeria's GINI is hardly exceptional. Adjusting the shape of the income distribution can achieve limited improvement to the quality of human existance compared to raising the distribution's mean.

I am a little confused - why is this downvoted?

Because a simple thought experiment disproves his point and criticisms of the West.

If the “troubles” of a society are really the disparity between the richest and poorest, then a country like Somalia would be a glorious example of liberty and prosperity. Yet everyone there is poor and with extremely limited options in anything you might want to measure.

Clearly this isn’t it. Maybe in order to get a healthy thing going you must have some extreme outliers as a result of the freedom/ability to let people do their thing.

What makes you think Somalia doesn't suffer from rampant inequality?

If that is a reason, I think the downvote wrong. I think this is a place for exhange of views and debate, not an exam in which "wrongly" argued points are downvoted.

Because those points he’s trying to make are extremist and violent it seems. “The only fix is war” seems like the typical extremist sound bite by someone with those views.

Proposing violence to fix an issue with which appears your friend is not well versed on seems just like the mass mob lynching of a “suspected” person doing X. The mob feels righteous at the time, only to learn the person killed didn’t do anything at all.

That seems somewhat disingenuous, unless I've somehow completely misinterpreted OP's point. OP was not proposing violence as the fix, but merely stating the fact that historically only wars or other kinds of catastrophic events have reversed trends of increased wealth inequality [1].

Stating that as the basis for a debate is not the same as endorsing violence as the fix. It seems to be a tragic fact that different societies have not found a political way of solving this issue and that alone is worth discussing.

[1] https://voxeu.org/article/europe-s-rich-1300

If you look closely, you'll see that "fix" is in scare quotes, indicating that dnomad doesn't believe war to be an actual fix, but nonetheless an inevitable consequence of extreme inequality.

I think that's wrong, though. Poor people do not have the resources to wage war. Wars are led by people with resources against other people with resources, with poor people only serving as cannon fodder. That also holds for revolutionary wars, e.g. pretty much any Communist revolution was led by middle-class intellectuals. So I think that inequality might increase criminality and strengthen violent gangs, but it's unlikely to lead to actual war.

Somalia is a beacon of equality? Really? I must have skipped class.

Boiling frog is the better analogy. Rome wasn’t built in a day and didn’t decline in a day either. It’s the slow death-march, “water drops to the forehead” of civilization that so weakens it such that criminal mobs and/or religious lunatics can takeover. The pattern throughout history has been roughly the same story every time, except now there is an abundance of technology, population cresting/declining and absurd inequality.

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