The history of the end of poverty has just begun

Reagan was bad, to me, because he massively cut social programs. So yes, Reagan was bad because he made "less government". If Reagan did "more government", then I would be happy. Do you not see the obvious contradiction in your comment?

If you need me to spell it out for you:

1. I am for more social spending, even if it has a "bad" ROI, because the ROI for social spending is hard to measure.

2. Regan was incredibly effective as painting government programs as woefully inefficient.

3. If Regan did more social spending, I would want more of that, but that is not who Regan was, so I do not like that.

How can you not see the obvious problem with that logic?!

(Aside from the anecdata issue.)

There are some tradeoffs where the average person doing a boring middle class job really does have better opportunity and greater security than pretty much anyone in pre 20th century history (and some forms of ancient kingship that really weren't pleasant lifestyles), but let's not take it to reductio ad absurdum levels

An old person my wife once talked to said that "penicillin changed everything". It certainly did, along with vaccines and other very effective treatments (including hand-washing!) for once-deadly diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, even leprosy.

Death was a major part of life for folks living prior to the late 1800s. Everyone experienced frequent life-threatening sickness and death of close friends, infants & children, family members, and acquaintances.

If I had a choice, and avoiding a very hard life & early death were my only criteria, I'd choose to live now rather than then, regardless of social status.

Um, no, that is not free in the US. You can go into serious debt that way.

So? Many people die from even baser diceases today too. Including homeless and poor people in the US. And they toil their whole lives before that, and are made to feel insignificant, and have no power or servants, unlike the kings.

Sure, but that proves nothing.

I blame private property as the biggest issue here. Empty dwellings outnumber homeless people at least 10-to-1 in the Global North (France, UK, USA..). The fact that media and corporations pretend that's not a problem and the only solution to homelessness is to build more housing tells a lot about what's wrong with "our" approach to problem.

If we lived in a democracy where people can decide for themselves locally, homelessness would be a non-issue. As a former squatter myself, i know for sure if we voted in my neighborhood for/against cracking empty housing to provide housing for all, over 90% of people would support it. If the people in power had the will to do anything about homelessness, by simply ordering police not to evict squats (unless someone squatted a person's residence while they were on vacation, which under french law is a "house theft" crime, not "squatting") in less than 72h we could rehouse all the homeless people and give them proper sanitation.

The problem is the political class and their watchdogs (media, police) are only interested in protecting banks, corporations and wealthy individuals. They couldn't care less about homelessness or people who can't afford to eat.

That's true, but correlation does not equal causation. Many rich people have drugs/mental issues, too. Some drugs are basically a social status symbol in some circles (cocaine, champagne and some other fancy alcohols, for example).

Many people become homeless due to reasons unrelated to drugs. Once you're homeless, basic survival becomes an every day struggle and it's not hard to see how mind-altering substances can be very appealing in this situation.

No, it doesn't; in states that have expanded, it covers up to 138% of the FPL, but in some states for adults without dependent children who are neither aged, blind, disabled, nor pregnant, it covers nothing, and for parents of dependent children the limit is still not 138%.

If they survived and if your wife surviived, a large number of women would have likely died giving birth, possibly at an age of 15 or 16 or so.

Measuring the increase in possible outcomes is irrelevant if you don't take into considerable how accessible/affordable those outcomes are. It's just like if you said "but medieval kings didn't have space travel" because you see Jeff Bezos going into space as a sign of social progress for the rest of us.

>Treating a homeless drug addict as a victim of poverty is like giving cough medicine to a person with lung cancer. It does not work.

How do you rehab someone who does not have stable shelter? Are they supposed to battle withdrawal on the street? Housing first policies have demonstrably worked in Finland and Austria.

I mean maybe we could have spent more time hunting, gathering, and birthing, but I don't begrudge the ancestors for just kicking back instead!

Practically every research study on happiness associates it with health, family, culture, friends, purpose, religion. Comfort, physical goods, wealth are always at the bottom.

Living in simple conditions doesn't mean forfeiting health or basic sanitation. The question is still valid: you have a home, clean water, a surplus of food, friends, family, sanitary conditions, access to healthcare; but no TV, Netflix, car, laptop. You'll never afford even a mobile phone. Are you poor?

If not having internet, a phone or computer has a detrimental impact on your quality of life - which it most likely does for the vast majority of people who live in the city, have a normal job and bills to pay - then the answer is yes. If you go homeless, hungry or sick because of not having one of these things, yes. But what if it doesn't? It's not as black and white as you imply. This is much more of a philosophical question than socioeconomics (or marxism).

Hermit in the woods is an erroneous analogy to primitive tribes.

Meanwhile there is no inheritance tax, relatively low capital gains tax (or none on ISK accounts), and low corporation tax.

It's designed to preserve wealth for those who inherit property.

I didn't say that they didn't, I said that they did but the GP listed weren't the biggest examples.

The people of India and China can absolutely maintain a lifestyle with your energy consumption and use of manufactured luxury goods without causing ecological damage.

80% of electricity produced in Denmark is renewables, mostly wind. Historically, renewable energy other than hydroelectric and low-efficiency wind had a poor EROEI, so it wasn't really a viable alternative to fossil fuels, more like an extremely compact battery that had to be "charged" with fossil fuels and then required sunlight or wind to "discharge". That hasn't been true for 20 years, though, and EROEI keeps getting better as PERC gets adopted, PV cells get thinner, tracking gets cheaper, windmill rotors get bigger, etc.

But only a small minority of the energy used in Denmark is electric, about 15%, which is lower than in many other countries. About 10% of the rest is waste heat, and the other three quarters is currently fossil fuels. Replacing those fossil fuels will require not only increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 but also converting a substantial fraction of that energy into easily transportable fuels such as ammonia, biodiesel, propane, or aluminum, in order to power things which cannot practically run off the power grid like ships, airplanes, and long-distance trucks. That fuel does not need to be produced locally in Denmark; it can be produced, for example, in China, Australia, or Tunisia, and exported to Denmark.

Increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 may sound daunting, but worldwide solar and wind energy production doubles about every 3 years, so that transition will probably take about 5-10 years. The cost of PV and wind energy is now far below the cost of fossil-fuel energy in most of the world, although in Denmark in particular PV is not economically competitive with fossil fuels yet. The available solar resource is about four orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, and I think the wind resource is about one or two orders of magnitude larger.

Cheap labor is not critical to manufacturing goods; if it were you'd be importing your fridges, phones, and TVs from Bangladesh and Malaysia, not China and South Korea. (Open up a recent cellphone or TV sometime and look at the country names printed on the chips.) Modern manufacturing is highly automated, and the non-automated part is highly skilled. As you're surely aware, Nokia made their phones in Finland until only a couple of decades ago. Moreover, cheap labor does not create ecological damage, only human failure to thrive.

You could imagine an economy in which the labor productivity of goods like fridges, phones, and TVs was so low that the people who made them would be unable to afford them. This is the case, for example, with skyscrapers: it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort to build a skyscraper, so it would be impossible to pay each of the construction workers enough money to buy a skyscraper of their own. (An attempt to do so would raise the cost of skyscrapers by a factor of 100 or more, back out of their reach.) As should be obvious, this is very much not the case with fridges, phones, and TVs, whose labor cost is measured in person-days per instance, not person-centuries. Paying the workers Denmark wages instead of China wages would not render the production of fridges, phones, and TVs uneconomic; it would just make them more expensive. Even in Bangladesh, where many people live on US$3 per day, it is common already for people to own fridges, phones, and TVs, a situation that will only improve further when Bangladeshis are not denied the opportunities they are today. Whatever you have been told, your standard of living does not rest on exploiting the poor in faraway countries.

Shipping and transport are not a significant part of the resource usage of supplying you with fridges, phones, and TVs; shipping a TEU halfway around the world costs up to about US$7500 (though "return" rates, like from Los Angeles to Shanghai, can be as low as US$700, because the objective is just to get the container back to China, and the more usual cost is US$1000-US$2000 over the last ten years; see https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2021ch3...). A TEU weighs 24 tonnes, of which normally 21.6 tonnes is payload, giving a cost of US$0.35 per kg (and more realistically half that because of the return-cost thing). Part of that cost is the cost of fuel, which is the only resource cost of shipping. At the moment crude oil costs US$86/bbl, which means that if all of that US$0.35 went to fuel, and the fuel were unrefined crude rather than diesel and kerosene, it would buy 650 g of crude oil. That's 27 MJ/kg or 7.5 kilowatt hours per kg.

So if your fridge weighs 200 kg and uses 1000 kWh per year, running it for a year and a half is guaranteed to use more energy than it took to ship it to you from China. Because most of the cost of shipping is not actually fuel, a more realistic number is probably three months. But you will probably use that fridge for 10 years, and it is very likely that manufacturing it took more energy as well.

You can strongly bound the energy use of the whole manufacturing process in the same way. A new fridge costs about US$250 retail, which means it can't possibly require more than 2.9 barrels of oil to make it, and that only if the costs for things like labor, steel, and taxes were literally zero. 2.9 barrels of oil burned for energy is 18 MJ, 4900 kilowatt hours, though typically only 40% of that can be used for useful manufacturing things like turning motors and electrolyzing aluminum. In California with its 29% PV capacity factor, 2000 watts (peak) of solar panels produces 18 MJ every year, all high-quality electric energy, not low-grade heat. That's 10 square meters of solar panels costing under US$400. So, you can see why renewables are taking over.

This is also how you can know that your US$250 fridge doesn't require person-years of effort from a labor force in Bangladesh, even without going there. Bangladesh's per-capita GDP is US$2500 per person per year, nominal, and its Gini coefficient is a reasonable 0.39, so at most that fridge could be a couple of person-months of work, including all the components. (But in fact it was probably made in China, US$14000 per person per year, or South Korea, US$35000 per person per year, and with lower inequality.)

They might have to eat less beef, pork, tuna, herring, and mackerel, and burn less biofuels than you do, though. Those may be renewable but environmentally they are catastrophic.

Oil was an annoying sticky substance until the liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine was invented in 1876. This invention turned it into the most valuable resource in the world for the next 150 years.

That invention turned useless goo into gazillions of wealth.

  Very low food security—In these food-insecure households, normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. 

  3.9 percent (5.1 million) of U.S. households had very low food security at some time during 2020.

Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is worth (much) more than you are willing to sell your labor for. If you’re not rich and you want to become rich working for Google at $200K a year is clearly superior to a UBI of $40K a year. Even with an arithmetically impossible UBI[1] like that there are still many people who would like to be rich, but just middle class.

[1]US average household income per capita is under $60K.

Yes, because rules in the US handicap new housing growth.

> The prices increase directly proportional to the current velocity of new housing availability at any given moment.

Yes, because they have the same cause: demand increasing.

Imagine that every car maker was heavily constrained in how many cars they could make. As demands for cars rise, they find every angle to try and produce more cars, but the price keeps going up. Did the new supply cause the price to rise? No, they just have the same cause.

There have been myriad studies on this, almost every economist finds that new housing in booming areas makes housing prices less bad than they would be otherwise.

> You can’t make more land but you can always build more houses irrespective of demand.

This isn't true. Zoning severely handicaps more housing in the places people want to live.

Well, except for Houston (sorta), and indeed, rent there seems substantially lower than other major cities in Texas like Dallas and Austin.

Japan tearing down building after 20-30 years is, as far as I’ve seen, greatly exaggerated. You see apartment complexes all over the place obviously older than that.

>>but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island).

Most of London and Vancouver Island are not vacant.

If you're out of the country for an entire year and you want to keep your house empty during an housing crisis, you seem like exactly the kind of person this tax should be levied on. Either rent your home to someone else for the year, or pay the penalty for contributing to the housing crisis.