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Comment by aaronblohowiak | Hacker News Reader

>I can make hundreds of thousands more while still hoping and contributing to raising the floor in quality of life.

I used to believe this too. Sadly the statistics suggest this is no longer happening and millennials as a generation are the first to be worse off than their parents, with rising income inequality being a driving factor. Robert reichs class is available for free on YouTube, interesting stats to follow to help entertain other perspectives.

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Robert Reich is a far-left hack who claimed that "a libertarian vision of an uncontrolled internet [is] the dream of every dictator, strongman and demagogue".

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20220412104542/https://www.thegua...

Global inequality is actually decreasing (potentially at the expense of Americans).

Sadly this is looking more and more like the rich countries becoming more like poor countries in terms of income distribution within country than the poor countries looking more like the rich countries, though likely some kind of meeting in the middle ( still a bad outcome if you are interested in rising standards of living for poor globally)

This is not really true. China has seen a dramatic rise in wealth spread over much of the population with the rest of SE Asia seeing a smaller but dramatic per capital growth over the last 3 decades. India is also seeing huge improvements. Here is a good study to look at[1].

[1]https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-insights-into-the-dis...

Do you have a source for this? Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st century goes into wealth inequality in great depth, and would suggest that intra-country wealth inequality is dramatically increasing in the west, but he doesn't have sources on inter-country wealth distributions. I would be interested to know more.

check out your world in data. For better or worse the income equality thing is outweighed by the gains in China and India but most of the world seems to be improving on that front.

There are still countries getting worse though sadly

> check out your world in data. For better or worse the income equality thing is outweighed by the gains in China and India but most of the world seems to be improving on that front.

>There are still countries getting worse though sadly

Do you mean https://ourworldindata.org/?

It would be far more constructive to give an actual link to proof than some massive site.

No offense, but that's like me saying, "You want proof that climate change is real? Check the internet," that's not proof, just some nebulous hand-waving. No one would or should believe that.

Their source data for the slight decline [1] in global inequality (which is only hypothetical) is the Worldbank [2], a source that has been heavily criticized for data-rigging [3-5].

The Worldbank also tries to present itself as helping to reduce inequality [6], so they have a bias for showing results.

I am not saying you are wrong or right, but let us keep the conversation quality on this website strong.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-and-between-countr...

[2]: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/9592514681766870...

[3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-bank-imf-face-long-te...

[4]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-15/the-ge...

[5]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/20/theres-de...

[6]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/20/theres-de...

You are right, apologies.

This was the article I was referring to:

https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-...

The argument you appear to being attempting to support is:

> Global inequality is actually decreasing (potentially at the expense of Americans).

The link you have [1] states that "While the steep rise of inequality in the United States is well-known, long-run data on the incomes of the richest shows countries have followed a variety of trajectories."

Also, "high and rising inequality is not an inevitability; it’s something that individual countries can influence".

This does not say anything about a global trend. This support nothing except that counties can influence inequality levels.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/how-has-income-inequality-within-...

https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-2/

In figure 2.3, it shows that global inequality hasn't been lower since the 1870s, back when virtually all but the rich would be living in poverty by the standards of today.

Any data before 1900 is an estimation [1].

> but the rich would be living in poverty by the standards of today

Such a comparison is completely useless. A person today in the US in poverty is better off than a caveman. What of it?

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00144...

Ok. So global inequality is lower than it's ever been since it could reliably be recorded.

Not necessary.

You could make an argument for 2019, but COVID-19 significantly increased global inequality; in wealth and health [1-3].

[1]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/01/1055681 [2]: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/08/02/g... [3]: https://inequality.org/facts/global-inequality/

> the statistics suggest this is no longer happening and millennials as a generation are the first to be worse off than their parents

Why? What are we doing differently now than we used to?

To bring it back to the article posted:

CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/

I would think that's a symptom, but do you think that is the underlying cause?

There are many, check out the lecture series (not just the intro lecture) that starts here: https://youtu.be/1f2blKai7HA

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