There's also a way of seeing it as just a thing.
It sounds like you believe that if the ownership share of the top 10% went up, then the average wealth of the bottom 90% went down. The latter does not follow from the former. Both can have seen increases in wealth.
It's a simple question: Has the wealth of the lowest 90% gone up or down?
(And 90% is too coarse. Would be good to see it for every decile.)
> but that is nearly meaningless when the cost of living has increased much greater than any of those wealth increases.
Can we show that for each decile?
Here's the equivalent of your statement: If I throw a penny into a fountain at the mall, has the wealth of the fountain gone up or down?
Here's more realistic and relevant discussions on the relative gross of the lower classes:
* https://www.cbpp.org/research/a-guide-to-statistics-on-histo...
* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
* https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/income-inequa...
This trend will continue until resources are no longer exploitable, or people trying to enrich themselves created artificial scarcity or restrict their trade.
This is false. The concentration of wealth directly correlates with increases of death, starvation, suffering, etc. Inequality is by far the most important measure. "Growth" of income is effectively meaningless on its own without relative comparisons to the other classes in your own country and the significantly higher increases in the cost of living. If you look for the narrative you'd like, you can certainly find a number in isolation supporting it. But that narrative falls down when you look at the whole picture.
Also consider that A) things are more expensive here and B) our economy is debt based and many people with homes and cars in the US have negative income after expenses, just because aesthetically our poverty looks different, it doesn't mean that it's good. It's not comparable.
I’ve had people who make less than me tell me I live like a poor person. That’s ok. I know I’m doing fine and they have since told me about some of their money struggles, and have a lot of debt to deal with each month.
Maybe if people stopped using debt to pretend they had more than they do, we’d see more reasonable housing and car prices, as well as goods that are made with some quality and repairablity instead of things like fast fashion that simplely gets thrown away.
Companies doing business in the US go to where the demand is. People need to stop using debt to demand junk that makes things worse.
Step one could be ratching down the average home size. It has more than doubled since the 1950s, while the number of people in the house has gone down. A bigger home is naturally going to be more expensive to buy/build, but then it also takes more land, has higher property taxes, costs more to heat/cool, costs more to repair and maintain, has more rooms to furnish, and has more place to put stuff before a person needs to stop and question if this need all of it. Simply living in a more modest home or apartment can have a massive effect on a person’s finances.
Also consider: where do the billionaires in the US get the resources to fuel their empires? Do they get their cobalt from slave labor mines in the Congo? Do you think maybe there is some kind of connection between corporate greed in America and people on the other side of the world making $1/day or less?
This is absolutely besides the point. I also wish as many people as possible could make enough money to live comfortable lives but it has nothing to do with the problem of people passively earning millions of dollars without contributing anything positive to society.
Fighting corporate greed in the US is in effect fighting for the rights of laborers internationally that are negatively affected by American business interests. No one who fights for this kind of change does so for selfish reasons, it's for all of us.
"Better" is entirely relative and using a western-centric framework to assert a "hierarchy of goodness". However, it is not an objective frame, and there are plenty of detractors both endogenous and exogenous.
What is really of interest here is one, the consolidation of wealth into a pinhead of the population, and two the egregious and worsening condition of wealth distribution in the US. Which I would argue exacerbates the global condition through manifold conductors, in essence it's imperialism-via-market but in equal measure an unabashed use of threats in other capacities to keep other countries in line.
Most people, given the time (which they necessarily trade away) would, I expect, prefer a definitively ethical, sustainable, robust product - however this comes at a cost (which is what they purchase with their increasingly devalued time) and so what we end up with is a consumer-driven market where people don't have enough time to peer down the rabbit hole of ethics and sustainability, instead opting to take the wheel for what best appears to suit their demands. This is then papered over simply by hand waving that introducing the Western market regime is improving conditions globally, which I'll again point out that this is relative. And I think this then suffers further amplification because, it seems for a great many decades, that the US itself has been suffering a slow decline. This itself has many impacts, for instance it has been increasingly salient that something like home ownership is becoming less prominent and so the social fabric must be altered. These dynamics may take a lifetime to shift to meet equilibrium, so you'll have to forgive the many hundreds of millions of people for their disinterest in global affairs when the social contract their forebears penned them is burning to ash.