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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Inequality in Canada is substantially lower than in America (and is on par with Australia, and between Fr and Se). This is evidenced in their Gini coefficients. [1]

- Gini for SE is 0.25

- Gini for FR is 0.31

- Gini for CA is 0.33

- Gini for US is 0.48

- Gini for ZA is 0.65

I've also included South Africa for comparison, one of the least equal societies on earth. A photo of what a 0.65 Gini country looks like is here (https://blog.prif.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/SA_Drone_Pi...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

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From your link, GINI of Canada and Tajikistan is the same or Finland and Azerbaijan. Totalitarian states like Belarus or Kazakhstan have one of the lowest GINIs in the world, now I question gini usefulness even more.

I assumed you realized we were constraining ourselves to places with a High or Very High HDI.

If nobody has any money at all, would you not say inequality is low? If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president, Emomali Rahmon, is inequality not low?

I suspect you are looking for a pairing of HDI and Gini, which factors in both the development (and hence the standard of living) and the inequality.

Sweden: (Gini: 0.25, HDI: 0.933), France: (Gini: 0.31, HDI: 0.901), Canada: (Gini: 0.33, HDI: 0.926), USA: (Gini: 0.48, HDI: 0.924), South Africa: (Gini: 0.65, HDI: 0.709).

Now, Tajikistan has an HDI of 0.66 ("medium"), and Azerbaijan 0.756 ("high").

Kazakhstan might surprise you, the HDI is 0.817 ("very high"). The standard of living there is actually good, in spite of what you may have seen on Borat - incidentally filmed in Romania. Almaty's been on my list of places to visit for a long time :) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaty

> If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president

That distribution will yield a very high gini coefficient of very close to 1.

No, it yields a Gini coefficient very close to zero.

The Gini coefficient is defined as 1/2 the mean absolute difference considering all pairs of households:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

A group of people where everyone has the same income as a Gini coefficient of exactly zero. Adding a single outlier will increase it a little. A group of 1001 with 1000 people earning $1 and one person earning $100 has a Gini coefficient of 0.09.

>> If everyone in Tajikistan has $5 except the president

> That distribution will yield a very high gini coefficient of very close to 1.

It yields (n-1)|5-p|/(2n(5(n-1)+p)) which is about p/(5n+p).

So it depends on whether the president (p) has $10 or $n^2.

indeed. If everyone in tajikistan has $5 except the president, who has $1, the gini coefficient will be different.

> Borat - incidentally filmed in Romania

Romania: Gini: 0.36, HDI: 0.828

HDI is close to Kazakhstan, actually

Trives of neanderthals were very equal too.

Obviously you have to compare apples to apples

Read "Sapiens" 35 hour working week as a hunter gather is far preferable to the 60 + home chores of the homo softwaricus.

I would way rather program 60 hours a week than live as the hunter-gatherers did.

I am not sure, in there own world some tribes might have been far happier than 95% of society is today

That is until they die from a simple infection.

Seems better than perennial back pain from sitting long hours and getting brain fried from implementing same logic of micro-service 1000th time for a 'challenging' project.

Go try it and let us know how it works out

This virtue signalling about hunter gatherers is funny. It's not the first time I've seen these kinds of discussions :-)

Or starvation, or being eaten by a grue. People who think being a hunter-gatherer sounds great should go try it, there's nothing stopping them from doing so. They don't because actually, living in civilization with abundant cheap food, clean running hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and entertainment is great.

> People who think being a hunter-gatherer sounds great should go try it, there's nothing stopping them from doing so.

Well, I mean, except property rights and the people that will defend them in most of the places in the planet suitable for human habitation.

Plenty of hunter gatherer tribes still around for the people crazy enough to want to join them

It is not likely any of them will gladly accept new members.

Gaining acceptance by a tribe and finding ways to not die if you ever become disfavored seems like part of the whole hunter-gatherer package, don't you think?

They tend not to be very wealthy by modern standards. Maybe you could ingratiate yourself to them with them gifts of things that require modern manufacturing infrastructure.

Your argument literally defeats itself.

You were born into the tribe, and stayed there your entire life. Also there were no laws on hunting, setting traps, etc.

The Missus and I tried to plan going back to nature as a quarantine thought experiment. The conclusion was that it's simply not possible in most of Europe unless one manages to find a Sami spouse, and even then, most Sami seem to live fairly modern lives. As a Nordic citizen the Greenland option is there as well, but the situation is similar to the Sami one.

And the above presumes the existing population would accept you, and it's quite likely they won't.

Deciding to live off the land without special privileges enjoyed by native populations is simply not possible; regular financial transactions between you and society is a requirement, and it's pretty much impossible to raise children without access to modernities and without having the authorities go after you for child abuse.

you can make a simpler experiment: try going a week with only food you can forage in nearby forests and fields, plus some meat you'd buy (you're not expected to be able to hunt).

I love eating wild weeds and berries, but it takes _a lot_ of time to get enough to fill yourself, and it's not a case that people have only eaten stuff like acorns only in times of famine.

This fact by itself made me question a lot of what's in "Sapiens".

a tropical island wull give results very different to like a siberean forest.

Also from what i gather most meat was aquired from trapping, rather than hunting

This argument is a fallacy. There's plenty of stuff stopping me from being a successful hunter-gatherer:

1. HGs are very skilled, and they build their skills throughout their lives - crucially, starting with childhood and adolescence. I, an adult brought up in a Western civilization, would be totally clueless in a rain forest the same way that those HGs would be totally clueless in our world.

2. HGs live in groups. I would need to find a group of HGs that would accept me, which is highly unlikely because of the language and culture barrier, plus my lack of skills - why would they want to have anything to do with an useless guy in the first place? My CV full of accomplishments does not impress them at all.

Unfortunately, just like transplanting an adult HG into our society most likely ends in them becoming a homeless addict, most likely result for me heading for the jungle is fairly quick death.

I guess I should have said "there's nothing stopping them except lack of will to do the required work." Which I guess makes sense since the motivation generally seems to be a desire for a return to some noble-savage-in-Eden life of plenty and ease.

How do you integrate with a HG community that doesn't care about you or, even worse, kills you and eats you? It's not only about "required work" but also about serious life-threatening risks involved. Whereas if you were born as a HG, those risks aren't there.

And don’t forget murder. So, so much murder: https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

I don't think I am able to make this judgement but I can talk about what happened after hunter gatherer tribes disappeared.

If you are a hunter gatherer you just need a good hunt every now and then. There is no pressure to perform work all day if you get enough food.

This is different if you are a farmer. Farming is highly labor intensive. There is so much work to do that you are never done. You will have to repeat the same motions every single day. Swing the same tools the exact same way. People are tied to their land and it is possible to conquer the land violently. You are dependent on a military force which implies that a local ruler must collect taxes to pay the soldiers. That ruler also has power over you which can easily be abused.

Democracy is definitively fairer than having an authoritarian ruler but it can be subject to tyranny of the majority or the minority and still cause failure in leadership.

Sprain an ankle and you’re out of food that week.

Break a leg, if you’re lucky, you’ll a burden for s month.

On the other hand, your teeth may be healthier than that of people who gulp sugary drinks.

I'm always sceptical when I see people quoting 50-60+ hours a week as a "normal" workload. I don't doubt that many people spend that much time in the office but I can't believe they're actually productive for that many hours - I know for myself (as, I think, a reasonably effective developer) I can't sustain much more than 40 productive hours a week for long.

I would not refer to Harari in any context as an author worth reading. „Sapiens“ is a popular book, but scientifically it’s at least questionable.

I think you have to approach it with a certain mindset. I didn’t read it as a source of reliable history, but I definitely got a lot of value out of it. He has a way of presenting ideas from perspectives I haven’t considered before. In fact disagreeing with him and trying to find evidence against his often too simple narratives is a fun exercise on its own, and I learned a lot just from those tangents.

In totalitarian states, everyone is equally poor.

> In totalitarian states, everyone is equally poor.

Not quite. In totalitarian states, typically everyone's income is fairly equal.

Wealth, however, is often another matter.

In the soviet Union, party apparatchiks often had very nice dachas to live in, fancy cars, exclusive shopping venues with imported goods, vacations abroad, etc. But these things weren't necessarily purchased with disposable income, per-se. At least not officially.

I would quibble with the "fancy cars" part. Only the nomenklatura got government owned fancy cars and other perks --that reverted to the state if they lost the position. So it was a kind of state wealth that you temporarily had custody over.

To some extent, many of the "fancy cars" and other perks of capitalistic wealth are also things that one has only temporary access to by virtue of one's position. Without the position and the attached income, these can revert to the bank or other creditor.

After the wall came down and the GDR collapsed, East Germans were surprised how simple the life of the highest government functionaries was. They had a small gated community, with a level of luxury (except perhaps for extra labor) which is comparable to North American middle class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldsiedlung

Are those wealth or income coefficients?

My impression has been that wealth inequality in many places in Europe is much higher than income inequality, as a factor of it being an older society.

The places in Europe I'd want to move to are really no cheaper to buy a house than the places I'd want to live in the US.

I grabbed these from FRED and it looks like they use the income version, not the wealth version. [1]

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINICAN

Gotcha, thanks.

I pulled some city-level numbers and it seems like at least in some areas, European SWE are missing out compared to coastal US ones:

London 2018: 0.7 https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...

SF 2012: 0.523 https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Income-inequality-on-... (probably this has gone up!)

Paris 2015: ~0.492 https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/blog/data-inequalities-... (they just say "similar to brazil", which is 0.492

Its unfortunately harder to find a bunch of city-level data, I wasn't able to find any German cities on quick googling, so I'm definitely fulfilling stereotypes of "Americans who think of Europe as just a couple famous cities", but those capture at least a couple of major population centers that aren't so appealing if you're a dev compared to the US hotspots: they're still unequal, but suddenly you're not nearly as high on the totem pole.

However you look at wealth inequality Sweden is actually the most unequal country in that list:

SE is 0.867 FR is 0.687 CA is 0.726 US is 0.852 ZA is 0.806

That picture likely contrasts lower middle class and lower class - middle class and upper middle class houses in south africa would not be across the road from an informal settlement due to unbelievable levels of theft and violent crime in such areas.

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