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Comment by TheMblabla | Hacker News Reader

You conveniently leave out the part where the wealth of the rich become many magnitudes larger compared to the poor.

"the poor get richer and the rich get richer, faster" is very different from "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer"

No. Unsurprisingly, essential goods like food and housing follow the market.

If the poor get richer and housing gets more expensive slightly faster, the poor will be homeless in 30 years.

You're completely missing the point. 200 years ago the majority of people were illiterate and uneducated, had no electricity or indoor plumbing, no telecommunications, food insecurity tied to local conditions, and on and on. Housing was a hovel or a few square meters in a shared dorm or family house. In much of the world, freezing to death and having enough food to survive the winter was an annual concern.

Today, the majority are literate and at least somewhat educated, have electricity and usually indoor plumbing, have telecommunications that communicate with at least half the world instantly, and today food insecurity mostly depends on market manipulation and international shenanigans rather than acts of god. Except for remote tribes that aren't integrated into modern society, across the world the poor are much better off than they were 200 years ago.

All data discussed here is inflation adjusted. Even after price increases, the poor are getting richer.

Yeah, there's a reason we've been talking about inequality and not just pure wealth for a century.

Because you'd be happy for the poor to get poorer if it meant the rich going from stupendously to merely ridiculously wealthy?

No, because the _actual reality_ is that reducing inequality makes the rich, slightly less so, and the poor significantly safer and healthier.

If you tell people you want to reduce inequality we tend to correctly assume the intent is to make the poor better off, we're not AI searching for the most absolutely effective solution to reduce inequality to 0 by killing everyone or something.

I think there is something to be said for the danger of losing or stagnating the progress of the poor and middle class if the wealthy become so rich and powerful that we effectively revert to a fuedal system.

The worsening social mobility measurements are one reason to be concerned.

Well that's the baseline assertion that he was replying to.

I don’t see this as a problem, so long as the poor get richer too. The obsession with “wealth inequality” is jealousy when refusing to acknowledge how much better the poor have it than ever. As the article notes, much of what we take for granted as baseline today (vaccines, HVAC, lights, rapid transport, etc) were simply not available to even the extremely rich until recently.

I contend many rich are rich precisely because they improved life for so many poor. Earn $1 for improving life for each person on the planet and you reap billion$ - that’s fair & laudable.

There's a couple of problems with it:

- In many of the most important areas, e.g. home ownership and choice of career, the poor in America have gotten poorer.

- Due to America's lack of campaign finance reform, extreme wealth allows the rich to buy off the government.

- Even if the poor get somewhat richer, that doesn't mean they got as much richer as they would in a more equitable system.

- Inequality becomes a problem if the rich control so much of a resource (e.g. housing) that there is not enough available for the poor.

- Inequality creates a power imbalance which can allow the rich to abuse the poor and/or make them unaccountable to society.

You confirm my point.

If trust-fund babies can coast through life without working, and those are taking over everything, when the poor still have to put in 12 hour days to live, even if they have it better than the past--that's not jealousy, that's simply asking why does person X have to work so hard when person Y doesn't under a system that supposedly claims all men are created equal.

all men are created equal under the law.

Except we know having money gives you enormous advantage under the law. So we either have to fix the law or fix some of the inequality.

It's a big problem for one simple reason: inequality of power and freedom increases. At some point you lose democracy entirely.

The rich do not achieve anything on their own. They do so by employing a lot of labour and natural resources. And we know for a fact that the rich have disproportionate influence on regulation of labour practices and resources, skewing it drastically in their favour.

If we all worked together to make the world better, why should only a few benefit so much?

If you improve the lives of others (including by creating employment and reasonably leveraging resources), fair reward to reap a fraction of that improvement. Improve lives of billions, reap billion$.

That would be true if income was proportional to your added value to blowback wellbeing. I would welcome a citation on that but to me it does not seem like that would hold at all. The greatest minds of the past centuries and the ones who contributed to the progress you are talking about were not billionaires, and for some of them were even quite poor. Your wealth depends on what you can extract from the market and what you can extract from the past wealth of your family.

If I inherit 1 billion dollar and place it in the SP 500 I will increase my wealth progressively compared to basically everybody, but my productivity is 0. The state could have taxed my inheritance 100% and done a similar investment with the same effect to the economy except inequality would be lower instead of higher.

However we are not covering the basic needs of the poor. People are still dying of hunger, exposure and disease.

We have more than enough collective wealth and resources to solve those issues, by securing housing, food and healthcare for everyone. Yet we choose not to, because it isn't profitable enough for those who already have plenty.

The "not even medieval lords had access to HVAC" argument ignores that the baseline changes as society evolves. And a lot of people in first world countries still don't have access to the things you mentioned. That is an absolute travesty.

Pedantic. That not literally everyone lives at a given baseline doesn’t disqualify fact that we’ve raised 90% of everyone from under to over that baseline in a few decades.

People in the richest nations in the history of humanity are starving, homeless and without access to healthcare.

What does that say about those who have more wealth than they could spend in several lifetimes?

It’s not left out, it’s just a different topic. We’ve gotta be able to discuss economic history without pulling in everyone’s political hobbyhorses.

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