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Comment by nfw2 | Hacker News Reader

I generally agree with this essay, but I think the listed problems with society misses the mark.

"Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." Is this really changing? I don't buy that people today have less empathy for each other than they did historically. The bulk of human history was cruel in ways that stagger the imagination.

"The gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening." The gap between rich and poor is not the correct target to optimize. The only problem you can reasonably try to solve is improving the quality of life for the have-nots. World-changing innovation (steam engine, electricity, printing press) always makes a few individuals exorbitantly wealthy, and the world is better off because of it.

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presuming from the domain the author is Canadian and so likely this is more a proximal/recency comment on Canadian society, to which I actually do agree it is really changing.

That's fair, but I think focusing on one region over a limited time period can lead to incorrect conclusions. A single country is not a closed system.

The working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades, while the upper class gained tremendous amounts of wealth. One might assume the wealthy seized their gains from the middle class, and this may be true, to some extent.

However, once you widen your lens to a global view, you will see poverty world-wide drastically improved over the same period of time. So the regression of wealth away from the middle class in the US might more accurately be considered as transfer of wealth to the rapidly-industrializing world.

If you are referring to something different that's been happening in Canada, I apologize. I am not very familiar with Canadian history.

> the working class in the US has certainly suffered a regression over the past several decades,

Do you define regression as absolute position or relative position? For example does it matter if Jeff Bezos has 100 Ferraris if the middle class, on average, have .25 more cars per capital than 50 yrs ago?

I would love to put some data behind this discussion because it's long been mixed up as to which case is the ethical one (absolute vs relative growth).

What I mean is a regression of wealth and income relative to the cost of living for most young people (ie pretty much anyone who doesn't work in tech or other STEM field). I don't mean relative to the most wealthy.

Here is some data that compares the median income to the rising cost of living in the US. https://www.businessinsider.com/america-middle-class-living-...

I think the Bezos-Ferrari question is a good one. I feel it is personally unethical for Bezos to spend that amount of wealth on luxuries when the resources could alternatively be spent reducing the suffering of others.

However I also think it is impractical and misguided for a state to enact policies with the primary purpose of minimizing the number of Bezos Ferraris or to automatically attribute the lack of cars per capital to Bezos's excess of cars (although in some cases it might be)

this is where somethings get really tricky to measure, and i'm not trying to say i have the best answers.. But this article talks about housing being up and that's tricky because sq ft per person (and quality of each sq ft) is way up, I'm sure there is a similar story about health care costing more but also having better outcomes?

I admit it's a difficult thing to measure and to discuss, but I also do think that the tide is rising, but being creatures who's feel good brain chemicals are related to relative outcomes (see the primates w/ cucumber vs grapes studies), we're also feeling a bad feeling because we see others doing better to a greater extent than we are...

Yeah, I see the point. My only good argument against trying to optimize relative outcomes is that it isn't practical to try to do so.

To talk about the difficulties of implementing true socialism would be beating a dead horse, I think. But even if we could remove wealth inequality completely, people would still find ways to feel better or worse than others (sports, looks, social skills, intelligence, etc.). My high school in the suburbs was fairly homogenous from a socioeconomic standpoint, but that microcosm seemed more hierarchical than any other point in life.

I also would expect the good-or-bad feelings people get by making comparisons are more-or-less ordinal in nature, so I think people would manage to feel just as bad about small wealth differences (keeping up with the Jones's) if there were no more billionaires.

I would argue it does matter. Not to say that absolute position doesn't matter, it does, and probably even more so, but relative position has some very real effects.

The main one that jumps out for me is power, and influence. As an example, it doesn't really matter if I can donate $100 to the EFF instead of $50 when a billionaire can outspend me 1,000,000:1 without even flinching.

here we'd agree that money/power should not be used to influence elections. To which I'd say citizens united seems to have been a loss.

I found this interesting on the topic: https://www.forwardparty.com/democracy-dollars

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