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> If no one is dirt poor, does it really matter if some are much wealthier than others?

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.

I agree that accumulation of power is bad, and since wealth eventually becomes power, accumulation of wealth beyond some point can be bad. However, complaints about inequality invariably seem to go beyond complaints about the lofty 0.001%.

But this hasn't happened. See the book Missing Billionaires by White and Hagani. Subsequent generations are much better at squandering wealth than hoarding it. So that issue sort of takes care of itself.

> the wealth distribution has a self-reinforcing inertia

85% of American millionaires are self-made.

The US has one of the highest child poverty rates of any "first world" nation, minimum wage is lower than it has ever been, we pay more for healthcare than any of these same nations and have worse healthcare outcomes than Cuba, housing is an impossible dream for most... Wealth inequality is just one indicator of a larger problem, not the problem in it's entirety, and poverty is still one of the biggest problems of the modern era. Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.

> Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.

We're not "slightly" better than in the 1800s. We are way way way better than in the 1800s. World-wide.

Sure, that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around. I laid out a small percent of that in my original comment. and that's not even considering the poverty "first world" countries rely upon from the heavy exploitation of the "3rd world" from slavery conditions, to coups and death squads funded by US corporations, to stealing their resources.

> that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around.

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.

The thing is, the US has clearly gotten way better in the past 50+ years, while the past 30 years is maybe debatable. But if we're looking at past 30 years globally, there's no sane way to argue it hasn't gotten way. It's been an absolutely amazing past few decades in terms of reducing global poverty. We've seen something like a billion people lifted out of poverty—child mortality, clean drinking water, education, basic nutrition. We've a long ways to go, but if you're argument rests on ignoring over a billion people having their lives transformed in this way, I'm not sure you're on the side of the poor.

That's nice, you should fly down to the global South and tell them how good they have it.

Dude, chill. They're not merely some abstract rhetoric device for arguing about American policy. They're real people, and you can ask them how they feel about infant mortality dropping, starvation rates dropping, clean water access shooting up, education access increasing. You don't even have to fly down--loads of them now have internet access (and electricity!)

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.

> The US has one of the highest child poverty rates of any "first world" nation

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.

Of the 74 million children in the US, 11 million live in poverty. The average American makes 40,000 a year and healthcare and housing are more expensive than ever. Yes, the things that are problems have changed, medical advanced have been made, but most of that is out of reach for the majority of people unless they are willing to take on millions in medical debt for things like cancer and diseases that have preventable measures. just the fact that we have to reel back that far to paint a good picture of the present, says a lot. Let's be real, this audience is generally wealthy and are not necessarily going to be in touch with how the average person lives.

We don't have to reel back 200 years. We can reel back 80, 50, 30 and look at:

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.

> Of the 74 million children in the US, 11 million live in poverty.

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.

> housing is an impossible dream for most

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.

What's renting, right? lol. The next generation has absolutely zero hope that they will ever own a home, and a large percent, simply won't.

Renting is still housing. Besides, you never actually own a home. You rent it from the city, and the zoning/code rules greatly restrict what you can do with it.

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.

Is that relative or absolute poverty?

The descendants of Mark Zuckerberg will continue to build dynastic wealth through no skill of their own without doing any real work. Other people in the same country are single parents working multiple jobs just to keep their family sheltered and fed. You don't think that's a situation that we can improve?

> 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.

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?

Show me how Elon Musk is causing poverty.

Elon Musk created his wealth, he did not confiscate it.

> the ultra-wealthy accumulating more wealth?

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.

> People like Elon Musk aren't "accumulating" wealth. They're creating it.

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.

> Tesla annotators make $20 / hour.

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...

The poverty level varies by region.

I would consider $40k / year poverty level in Buffalo, NY. It's a rather upscale area.

Ever driven through rural America? Lots of people raise their own chickens, keep hens for eggs, grow their own veggies and fruit. Their property taxes are low, their income is low, but they're not hungry, and often want for nothing.

The causality is a hard question to answer honestly but I can answer the ending poverty portion. So ignore it for now and engage in a bit of rough math. Take the 5.2 trillion of every US billionaire combined and divide it by a third of the US population. It comes out to a one-time payment of about $45k. An amount which would certainly be appreciated by the bottom third of the population, certainly but not a panacea. The poverty line is defined via income and not assets. So lets do a conversion, if paying out the interest only at long-term treasury bond rates that would give the bottom third a "trust fund" which gives an extra $2K per year.

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 like your thinking.

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?

That's marginal income, which is not necessarily related to book value, and is almost certainly just a small fraction, which brings you back to less than $2,000 per person per year. I.e., it's not much, and you really can't extract it.

Eating the rich doesn't work. It's never worked when it has been tried. It cannot work. It will never work.