Hacker News Reader

Comment by SideQuark | Hacker News Reader

>For most people the economy is not working for them.

For most people in the world, they are quite a bit richer than their ancestors, even by 50 years ago.

In fact, the number pulled from poverty over the past 50 years is astounding.

Even in rich places like the US, the poor today are vastly richer than 50 years ago. Median wages are at all time highs as well.

So how do you conclude "for most people" (which I take to mean at the very minimum more than 50%) "the economy is not working for them." Which people are these? How do they compare for income or assets or access to things to their ancestors?

View on HN

Wtf? Who cares what the median wage is? People can’t afford health care or housing.

Have you been outside in any major city recently? There is a homeless crisis that is truly shocking going on around all of us.

The median wage gives you a picture that is closer to the real value than just anecdotes. For most people on Earth, there has been a great increase in living standards. It just so happens that much of it took place outside of the West.

It sounded like the gp was referring to median wages in the US.

My bad. In any case, the principle still stands. Looking up some stats I get a figure of 0.17% of the population being homeless. A tragedy to be sure, but a tiny fraction of the whole. In other words, it makes more sense to look at the median wage than what you see in a given city as a single individual going on about their day, if your goal is to get a feel for the situation.

The recent spike in homelessness, the health insurance coverage gap, rising economic inequality, we are facing many major urgent crises. But there is a severe lack of imagination to suggest that our problems as a society or species can't or haven't been far, far worse.

A homeless woman today in any major American city (which generally require hospitals to provide emergency care even to people without health insurance) is safer giving birth than a queen a few centuries ago. A homeless person today in any major American city is safer from cholera, tuberculosis, any antibiotic-treatable disease than a king a few centuries ago.

Society and technology have made us much better off overall, it's not close. The fact that we still have major problems today does not contradict the fact that we have also solved some major problems, too, thanks to science and technology.

Those are not economic problems. They are structural problems. People have decided to build their cities all at once and expect them to never change. They have convinced themselves that incremental progress will not or should not happen and that any problems can be solved by running away from them.

A homeless crisis is easy to explain by counting numbers. Count the number of people, count the number of houses and count the number of jobs. The mismatch between those numbers is your housing crisis.

Why is there a mismatch? Because one of those numbers refuses to change despite an upwards trend in the other numbers.

US homeless population has been steadily dropping for decades, likely even longer if you dig for data. Here's recent numbers [1]. It's also an outlier on the condition of how a person in the US is faring. Taking that as evidence for how people live overall is as reasonable as pointing to the top 0.1% and claiming all is well. Neither gives as accurate a picture as a median.

The median is simply much more indicative of how Americans fare.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555795/estimated-number-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com