Did you read my comment? I said they are in the second quartile, and they foot the bill for a lot of the ways that wealth improvement reaches people in the first quartile.
Although, across the part of the country where I am from, Appalachia, there actually are people in the bottom quartile, especially after you take addiction-related QALY metrics into account. I'd argue your knee-jerk "just cause they are inside America's borders means they don't have it comparably bad" attitude, which sounds like you're just regurgitating some Giving What We Can blog post or something, is more of the small view.
> You also see this as a zero-sum game: a process of extracting wealth from someone and handing it to someone else. Trade increases the overall amount of wealth.
You really did not read my comment. I said that we translate the whole distribution to the right (that is the part about making everyone materially better off) but by doing so we shuffle some people from the second quartile into the first quartile, or at least shuffle them to lowered status within the second quartile.
In terms of ordinal status, it is, by definition, a zero-sum game. If, no matter how much total wealth there is, the thing people care about is where they rank in wealth, then it is zero sum. You can't manufacture more ranks. And, the evidence (which you don't seem interested in) really does suggest that it is the rank that people care about (especially when you are ranked second-to-last), even if preserving your rank means denying yourself better overall conditions from a material point of view.
People might be willing to accept a lessened station in life if the offsetting overall increases in wealth that they get to see are significant in their lives. The fact that at least 50% of the population is more concerned with rank than with overall well-being is, for me, a shameful indictment of how little we actually use societal wealth to improve impoverished lives to any degree, let alone a degree that would justify setting aside primal Last Place Aversion.
Disclaimer: I am very, very far from the top 25%!
"The top 5% paid 57% ..." makes it sound like they are doing more than their fair share, but that's a gross mistake. It doesn't matter what the raw percentage is without also looking at how much of the income the op 5% took. If they take 99% of the total income, but only pay 57% of the tax revenue, it still amounts to a deep unfairness. (I'm not saying that tax revenue paid has to be 1:1 with income, only that taking 99% income while paying for 57% of the tax revenue is deeply unfair in favor of that wealthy 5%).
If you imagine everyone in the world has a "quality of life" score and this is distributed normally, then outsourcing jobs tends to help people in the bottom quartile, at the expense of people in the second quartile.
It is like pinching up a little bit of the probability mass living way out in the left tail, and folding it over into the second quartile region. Some of the people in the second quartile have to be displaced (in an ordinal sense) to the left, thus losing status.
We'd like to pretend like material well-being of, say, impoverished third-worlders, matters more than social pecking order status of poor-but-mostly-OK first worlders. Would you like to go first? Would you like to ensure your children have no access to decent education or a college with a social network that could raise their social status? Yeah, sure, you'll have acceptable food and someone will throw you some afterthough scraps in terms of feigned medical care. You'll have a middling life, mostly unpleasant, lots of mental health issues and lots of risk to you and your family of getting caught up in substance abuse or drugs, but you'll live into your 60s or 70s before you die.
Status really impacts health. Status affects your attitude about your own health, your willingness and access to seek help. It's not solely about material resource.
So I certainly sympathize. Why aren't we extracting wealth from the top quartile as a means for delivering aid to third world workers? Why instead are we extracting wealth from the second quartile to pay for the first quartile?
In this sense, your comment comes off as a little bit naive and insensitive. I'm sure down to brass tacks that people living in the second quartile understand what you are saying and feel compassion for people who have it even worse.
But how can you ask them to lay down and agree to be the lowest status group willingly? Yes, please outsource my already-degrading-and-menial job, reducing me into the bottom quartile of a slightly right-translated distribution. We're all slightly better off in absolute material terms, but now I'm worse off in relative status terms (which really, physically, affects my health and opportunity).
It's ... complicated.
[0] < http://www.nber.org/papers/w17234 >