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To clarify, are you suggesting that current “low wages” or “wage inequality” are not that important because they fail to account for quality of life (food, shelter, entertainment), which is still achievable, especially by global standards, on a “low” American wage?

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I'm trying to say something like: When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.

Just yesterday on HN, there was an article about someone spending 1 billion dollars to own every pop song ever recorded. Well, I can go to YouTube and listen to any pop song ever recorded (or very close to any), for free.

So: How rich am I? I'm sure not a billion dollars rich, and yet...

As you say, the metrics don't compute very well.

And, yet, you can't eat a YouTube song. So it gets very complicated.

There are many things that are more or less free, but a lot of basic essentials really aren't.

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