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While the sentence is likely true, the sister statement to it would cover historical relativism.
Society is generally expected to evolve and improve - this being the whole point of it.
So being absolutely better than the past is not as relevant to the conversation as how poor people are with comparison to their peers in their own country.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a world where everyone has everything they need and one person has a net worth of a gazillion dollars.
People like to point at a gap (in attainment or wealth or whatever) and pretend that this is all they really need to do, because the gap itself is evil. But that is nonsense, as demonstrated by my hypothetical. The gap itself is nothing and the context is everything.
So you can't just point out gaps. You need to articulate 1. what the people at the bottom are lacking 2. how closing the gap will ensure that the people at the bottom are better off afterwards (rather than just cutting down the people at the top).
it's not exactly comparing apples to apples. working class americans have access to material goods but they don't have generational wealth like the aristocrats did. they don't have political power. they have to work everyday. they don't benefit from the class privilege. pretty significant list of all the differences.
What we do have is food, clean water, climate controlled housing, and sanitation - all better than the richest royalty of the time.
In revolutionary France one particular cold snap without enough logs on the fire could kill your children.
Our actual quality of life in the day to day far surpasses the aristocracy of revolutionary France.
You don't rebel because someone has a nicer car than you, you rebel because you're starving and miserable. We're just not. We're comfortable and mildly annoyed someone else is more comfortable.
> You don't rebel because someone has a nicer car than you, you rebel because you're starving and miserable. We're just not. We're comfortable and mildly annoyed someone else is more comfortable.
very easy to say from our tech worker point of view!
A tiny group of people have an enormous amount of power over the rest of us. I still call that a big problem even if we have food and material goods.
>and the majority that do suffer addiction or mental illness.
This is also a problem, and a great example of something we could easily fix if power was not concentrated in the hands of a tiny few.