" There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. "
The problem is that those who would like to maintain the status quo are bound to pick only the optimistic stats and suggest nothing should be done because the trend is naturally towards a better society. The truth is that progress is made in spite of these people, and in spite of some of the policies they promote. So such articles are more like a reality check of sorts, showing that we can make progress but we need to work hard for it, it does not just happen by the magic waving of an invisible hand.
If Bezos gets another rocketship every minute that's fine if I get another million dollars every minute. I can't really care about his life like that.
For those always looking in others' bowl to see if they got more, I can see how this makes them unhappy. It sounds corrosive to the soul.
It's reasonable to be fat enough and happy enough that you don't want to rock the boat and don't mind that others have "more in their bowl", which is why this pattern persists through geography and time, but you might want to keep an eye out on how the worst off are doing, whether they're growing or shrinking, and whether things are getting worse or better for them because the other part of the pattern is not unprecedented or unreasonable either.
You are not operating as a solitary individual, you are operating within a society that both takes and gives to you, and ensuring that social contracts remain fair is fundamental to keeping that society as a whole alive and functional.
ex - how would you feel if the government issues everyone rebates on taxes. you receive 1 dollar. Everyone else receives 100k.
Or the government funds schools - your kids receive 1 free book, every other child receives a free college education.
Or the government increases park allocations - you are given a 5ftx5ft greenspace, the neighborhood over receives a 10 acre maintained park.
Absolute standards are bogus when we are discussing the allocation of group resources. You paid in, you should be monitoring how that resource is paid out.
To be oblivious is to essentially be abused. We should care deeply about wealth inequality in society at large. We should not compare ourselves to our neighbors in individual circumstances. They are different things.
Otherwise you end up with situations where "redistribution" essentially becomes handouts to those most influential with the ones making the distribution decisions, instead of meaningful improvements to society as a whole.
Is it a good thing if Besos gets a rocket every minute if that means climate change destroys my local community?
Is it a good thing if we excessively bail out companies that make poor decisions at tax payer expense?
Is it a good thing to promote school systems that ignore and underfund certain neighborhoods along racial lines?
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My argument is not that redistribution is bad in itself, my argument is that social groups depend on "fairness" to operate.
And those definitions are certainly challenging (one person's fair might be another person's horror story). But they are critical to how a society decides to exist and cooperate.
Like - this isn't a new idea... it's what a social contract is. I also don't sign contracts without reading them, and an educated populace should care about what's in the fine print.
It's not about making sure I get personal wealth or advantages from that contract, it's about making sure I find that contract morally acceptable. Because if enough people reach that stage where they don't... you have a civil war or a rebellion. They will try to write a new contract.
In some countries, there are no laws against how much credit card fees can be. In those countries, a small fraction of the wealth of poor people is transferred to rich people [1]. In other countries, the fees are limited to small values, so this wealth transfer happens at a much smaller scale or doesn't happen at all.
Or a government can license a coal plant in some area [1], destroying the air quality and health outcomes of people in the area, while most of the wealth generated by the plant goes to the investors.
[1] Because credit card companies charge fees inversely proportional to expenses. And give rewards to those who can spend more.
[2] Or worse, in an adjoining area far enough away to commute for jobs, but still in the same air shed.
Bezos only represents himself.
Actually, it does so a lot less in our current world than it did in the past.
> If Bezos can afford to buy a rocketship every minute, he can afford to rearrange the society you live in
No, he can't, because in a society that can supply him with a rocketship a minute, the wealth that allows him to buy them will be a very small fraction of the total wealth that exists, just as it is now.
Whereas in, say, the Middle Ages, the wealth of feudal lords and rulers was a significant fraction of the total wealth that existed, and that is why that wealth bought them so much power.
For example, Elon Musk has many many many times more wealth than I, and I don't care. Ditto Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on. I don't care about inequality -- I care about poverty and ending it.
Formulations like "the problem is no longer poverty but inequality" are a lot like the post-USSR formulations like "now that we have solved the production problem we need to solve the distribution problem". It's Marxism moving the goal posts as economic freedom delivers all the things that Marxists say they want. To argue that one should be given power to solve the problems that are already being solved one has to keep making yet other problems into bigger problems than they really are.
Yes, because the wealth distribution has a self-reinforcing inertia, especially over generations. Absent mechanisms for redistribution of personal wealth (e.g. confiscatory inheritance/estate tax over a certain amount) it will only concentrate into a kleptocracy.
Too much inequality is bad, even if the lowest 5% lives very well, because it is not a sustainable equilibrium. On the other hand, too little inequality is also not sustainable or desirable.
85% of American millionaires are self-made.
What I wonder is, how much poverty (in developed countries) results from the ultra-wealthy accumulating more wealth? At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
People like Elon Musk aren't "accumulating" wealth. They're creating it.
> At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
Wealth that is created doesn't come at the expense of anyone.
It is true that many rich people (for example much of the financial industry) don't get rich by creating wealth but by siphoning it from other people's pockets into their own. But the other people in such cases are the middle class, not the poor.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-workers-treatm...
Tesla annotators make $20 / hour. That's hardly a well-paying job.
I think we can easily make a case that any Tesla employee or contractor who earns at the poverty level supports an argument that extreme wealth comes at the expense of the poor.
That $20/hour is coming from wealth that Tesla is creating. It's not taken from someone else. Indeed, it's helping those people since without Tesla those jobs would not exist and they might have to work at other jobs that paid even less.
> at the poverty level
$20/hour times 2000 hours is $40K per year. The US Federal poverty level even for a household of 4 people is $31K per year [1], and is significantly lower for smaller households (for a household of 1 person it's $15K per year). So no, Tesla annotators are not earning "at the poverty level".
[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...
I would consider $40k / year poverty level in Buffalo, NY. It's a rather upscale area.
Of course that is ignoring many of the messy practicalities. The inflation that would ensue from this hypothetical influx of cash to the bottom third, or if one could even extract the nominal market cap via selling assets vs the value crashing after the first third is put on the market. Combine that with the fact that the fortunes are invested in productive assets and the hypothetical mother of all liquidations would do majorly bad things to productivity and the economy.
I tend to look at extreme wealth accumulation as a symptom of not paying people enough.
IE, instead of requiring a liquidation, what about increasing pay at the lowest levels?
Eating the rich doesn't work. It's never worked when it has been tried. It cannot work. It will never work.
We're not "slightly" better than in the 1800s. We are way way way better than in the 1800s. World-wide.
What? This is nonsense.
> and that's not even considering [...]
This is changing the subject, which one should probably take as conceding the previous point. Even granting all of this I'm pretty sure that life today almost everywhere on this planet is much less brutish for humans than it was 200 years ago, let alone 400, 2,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago.
Yes, the US has done a bunch of really bad stuff, but a higher percentage of people having food and water and medicine is actually good. And yes, those real human beings tend to agree.
Yeah, we should do way better, but this article isn't about the US today vs. western Europe today. It's about the world today vs. the world in the past. Child poverty in the US is way better right now than it was pretty much anywhere a hundred years ago, and poverty across the globe is way better than in the past.
> minimum wage is lower than it has ever been,
Good news: ~98.7% of workers earn more than the minimum wage. Wage growth for the lowest quartile has been especially good these past few years, handily outpacing inflation for the poorest among us.
> Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.
Slightly better? Child mortality in rich countries in the 1800s was 20%. What's it today, 0.5%? "Oh, but in some countries it's less than that, so this isn't actually better than before"?
Calling these changes "slightly better" is just an incredibly dishonest take. It's a massive improvement, and that shows just how much we're able to improve if we honestly look at what works and implement it.
This isn't a pro-complacency article. It's an argument against doomerism.
Who has electricity?
Who has indoor plumbing?
Who has air conditioning?
Who has internet access at home?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/technology-adoption-by-ho...
The things that today would be considered poverty were considered the norm when my neighbor was a kid.
I've worked with many and been close friends with many poor people. I'm under no illusions that their lives are all hunky dory. I just don't feel the need to pretend things weren't significantly worse in many important ways in the recent past.
That's an absolute number, and let's grant that it's accurate. What is the evolution of child poverty in the U.S. since its founding? Let's use caloric intake -say- as a yardstick of poverty.
Most of the population lives on the street?
There's a homeless population in Seattle, but as a percentage it is pretty low. They also mostly consist of drug addicts and alcoholics who reject attempts to put them in housing.
Besides, the statement was "housing", not "owning a home".
The government does a lot to restrict the supply of housing, too.
Don't forget all the expenses one has owning a home. My rent to the city went up 10% this year.
Inequality isn’t about your personal circumstances, though. It’s about what you read in the news. You need statistics to judge it.
These statistics are relevant when people talk about where the country is going or where the world is going.
So people can never be happy if inequality exists? Sounds like an unsolvable problem. No matter how good everything gets, people will still be unhappy because someone else seemingly has it better. 1000 years from now:
"Poor person: Sure, I own a 7000 sq ft mansion with an electric drone that can fly me around everywhere and my life expectancy is 105 and my standard of living is an order of magnitude better than the richest people living in 20XX, but Elon Musk VII's life expectancy is 120 and he owns an entire planet with a space fleet, my life sucks, the universe is so unfair."
> You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there
Somehow i read that as equal opportunities.... To me a fair deal generally means, something close to equal opportunities(of course, ceteris paribus, and rarely do we have all other things equal, but adjusting for it..)
As a meta question we should ask whether happiness is the right metric to optimize in social policy? Unhappiness motivates some people to work harder and accomplish more. Whether that's a good or bad thing is entirely subjective.
My takeaway was that my personal happiness is moderately diminished by the fact that I had such a privileged upbringing compared to others born into almost inescapable poverty, and that my charitable contributions towards famine relief / malaria / etc. don't make a huge impact on addressing the root causes of inequity.
When I was young, the discussion was always about the quality of life for the poor. The inequality problem is a fairly recent thing.
When people are free, inequality is the result. To remove inequality requires a totalitarian government.
Be careful what you wish for.
Are a lot of people actively and actually suggesting the full removal of inequality? Finding ways to reduce it is a very different thing.
Instead, examine government policies that hold people back from being free. For example, making it difficult for a business to employ people.
The communists had equal opportunity. It didn't work out so well.
The magic ingredients are:
1. equality under the law
2. freedom
Also progressive taxation (a moderate position) which avoids the authoritarian measures of both left and right while counteracting the cancerous effects of exponential growth.