The great tech leaps of the mid20th century resulted in huge material improvements for huge numbers of people. The worry is that the benefits will no longer spread. And the robots in particular have a century of being hollywood villains to overcome.
I think the risk that the wealthiest few will rule the world is largely misplaced and overblown. We’ve lifted millions out of poverty and made tremendous progress in last few decades. And continue to do so. Yes, inequality has grown and accelerated due to the pandemic (Russell 2000 vs S&P500, retail is screwed but there is nothing we can do about it besides giving relief). We need to fix tax laws and corporate loop holes, not instituting marxism in our society.
http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/Projects...
There's even a special call-out in the PDF about the US being such an outlier:
"US states and Canada stand out for their low levels of mask usage compared to many countries in Asia and South America. "
I said that mask use was practically identical to Europe, not Asia or South America.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/08/11/racial-justice-prot...
A good portion of my friends all lost their jobs because they work in event production. If that data is true, then they should go back to work tomorrow.
We are definitely making progress in absolute terms, but there is plenty of good reason to be concerned about the benefits spreading in general, and particularly when we're talking about technologies to replace labor.
This is not true from a global perspective. In addition, there has been significant immigration, where people are are entering the economy at the bottom (increasing inequality in a country, while they are making more than they would where they came from). This is not to say things couldn't be better, but the economy is global, and nationalistic perspectives presume a closed system.
In the last 30 years UK’s population for example is up 19% where India’s is up 58%.
I'd never heard of this before. This is the most interesting thing I learned today. Thank you.
Though, sub 50% growth from 1980-2016 for the 60th to 95th percentile is more interesting. With the top 1% capturing 26% of all growth and the top 0.01% having 200+% growth. It’s clear arbitrary starting and end points can shift these graphs around dramatically. Ending now is probably going to make a graph like this look really bad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness:_Ten_Reasons_We'...
Increasing taxes shouldn't be the one jerk reaction because there is scant evidence that governments are remotely effective at using the money we already give them hand over fist. I suppose they do keep droves of civil servants employed, but make of that what you will.
During covid we should have made it far more easy for small businesses to survive by cutting they're tax burden, the healthy would have had a chance to flourish and the already weak businesses would still fall to the wayside. Instead we'll handed money out to people who will many times buy the next Samsung, Apple Amazon whatever feeding the big corps that everyone here loves to hate.
It's so obvious that this is what happens that i can't understand how so many can be wilfully blind to it.
The government certainly has the power to fix this, but not by stealing more but fixing the blatantly broken system
> healthy would have had a chance to flourish
There can be no healthy hospitality businesses during the pandemic.
This has literally been reality in every sense for all of history, and the point here is it's getting worse which a quick google will find you mounds of backing proof.
Which "we"? Which millions? Do you mean in China?