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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

One difference is the old inequality meant the poor people lived short miserable lives, starving to death or dying from disease.

Today's inequality means poor people have a climate controlled place to live, regular food, decent healthcare, the ability to travel across the nation if not the world, see and communicate around the world in a moments notice, easy access to knowledge at their fingertips that spans all human civilization, endless amounts of entertainment, and freedom to live as they please.

It's unclear to me why this kind of inequality is a bad thing, or how it is comparable to inequality in the past.

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TBH, this feels like a "why aren't they happy eating cake" kind of response. Just look at the statistics of rising "deaths of despair" in the US. To say "I don't see why this kind of inequality is a bad thing" - well, huge amounts of inequality is also what ends up destroying democracies.

You seem to jump from 'deaths of despair' to 'inequality is a problem'. Can you explain how you establish the connection?

My point is the two are not necessarily connected. Very well off socialist countries, such as the Norse, also have quite high suicide rates.

My hypothesis is 'deaths of despair' is due to the emptiness of materialism, not due to inequality.

I feel that in most discourse today we all seem to suffer from lack of perspective. Lack of perspective of the past and of other places in the word. This lack of perspective results in words that meant something in the past (or mean something today in other places) to mean things that, IMO, do not carry the same weight and shouldn't be used as such.

Take the word "evil". We used evil to mean people or organizations that would purse goals such as terrorizing, torturing, killing, imprisoning. We ended up up using "evil" to mean "corporation that is going to use more private information that I want them to, for displaying ads to me".

You may argue that language constantly changes and it's organic, and you'd be right. But I'd prefer if we introduce new words than keep reducing the gravity/meaning of existing words. Because the problem then is that while we are all stuck talking about the "evils" of modern life in our stable safe country with cheap food and constant Internet access, somewhere someone reads this and thinks we are just a bunch of wussies, disconnected from reality and real struggle and problems (and they'd be right).

Excellent point. It's one thing to be in favour of a rising standard of living for everyone - as a right-leaning guy, I can honestly say that I really do want everyone to be able to do more and to live better on this metric.

The problem is viewing things through a lens of equality-as-goal, because it's basically just pushing for a race to the bottom. No place more equal than everyone in the mud.

Though my metaphor is hyperbole, I can't stop thinking that this is the same as raising the standard of living of two homeless individuals by paying a small amount (perhaps charged per distance) and asking them to carry you around town in a sedan chair.

It's an improvement (they have no other source of income) and it's all voluntary; they might do enough miles/hours to leave the streets, or they might never earn enough to do so and just keep doing it until somebody devises a cheaper process to carry those who eat the extreme opposite of gruel.

If you lost your current status and became poor in a way matching your description, would you consider that bad? If so, in what ways would it be bad?

Would you be content, or seek to regain your current status? If you found that impossible would you be happy with your life?

These are rhetorical questions, as the standard win-the-forum-argument response is anticipated and will not be helpful.

Empathy and introspection, however, will.

I would actually be pretty much content if stuck in that position. I grew up without running water, electricity for an hour on Friday, confined to an island that was less than a square mile, and I had to entertain myself without the luxuries of modern technology. So, it is actually very easy for me to be content with pretty much any Western standard of living.

Yuck, you clearly don't live next to projects.

My list seems pretty descriptive of projects I'm aware of. The housing and conditions seem alright. Problem is people don't maintain what they have.

Now, people who are farthest from my description in our country are those who live out in the countryside away from modern luxuries. When I lived in Texas I saw a number of these little houses that seemed to barely hang together out in the middle of nowhere. But, they all seemed to at least have power, water and transportation, which is more than I had growing up in an undeveloped country.

In broad strokes, purely considering survivalism or hedonism, sure. From the perspective of what's moral and what's not, you start seeing less differences between old inequality and "new" inequality.

And from the perspective or liberties, power and control, today's inequality seems perhaps even worse, as all these luxuries raise the question of wether change is actually inevitable, or we're reaching a point at which people won't care.

What if the inequality we see today is a symptom of rising wealth across the board? If there is more wealth to go around, there is more chance a large portion of it gets into the hands of a few, due to the unequal distribution of talents.

Talent isn't inherited, money is. Inheritance usually starts from birth, as children are raised on their parents' money, so they get superb schooling, opportunities to fail and learn, and entry to reserved clubs/credentials/connections, which can be mistaken for talent.

(And for a nontrivial number of fields, talent is knowing the language of its business, more than creative output)

That is not contrary to what I'm saying.

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