EDIT:
How about Population C, where 9 people have $10 each and one person has $10,000?
Assuming wealth is the same, population B is better.
( If you don't like averages maybe we should also compute standard mean salaries )
Here's a hypothetical: If a person is moved from a situation where they have no money, but the food, services and mobility they need for a somewhat comfortable and stable life to a system of employment that is less stable and creates dependency on this employmenet is that progress? That person or family might have moved out of extreme poverty but is their situation improved?
I suppose my underlying point is a critique of how wealth and quality of life are connected. People in Cuba get $20 a month but they have have free healthcare and housing. I spend $20 a day and can't afford healthcare and worry every month about how I'm going to pay rent.
How much of the world is moving towards a situation where we're unable to see a doctor and hold down two or three jobs to make rent in a house we could never afford? Is this an upward trend?
It’s not really a fair point that Cuba has a better standard of living than the USA, for example.
When in doubt, look at the simplest metric - which way do the rafts flow. The desperate people flow from Cuba to Florida, and not the other way around.
A long term reduction in poverty and a more balanced relative income ratios has to come through self-sustainable economic development in the middle, and upward mobility from the bottom. Wealth transfer is just a temporary fix, an initial boost - but it is not an adequate endgame... as many pure socialist countries quickly learned after the glow of the early days wore off. Redistribution as a primary policy is also increasingly difficult to pull off via central policy, given global marketplace, technology's impact on finance, and the growth of countries which act as tax havens.
There is plenty of indifference in practice towards legitimately taxing the wealthy but it's been a hot topic globally for a while now and I fear this obsession has been a large distraction from figuring out how to help the middle/bottom develop their own jobs and businesses. To push up their wages and salaries as the primary goal, not just increasing the tax base for better government services and reduced tax burden on the middle.
When wealth generation is coming from rent collection on existing assets, redistributing wealth and redistributing wealth generation are equivalent.
> Georgism, also called geoism and single tax, is an economic philosophy holding that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society.
> Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of 'land monopoly' involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair, and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value. Georgists argue that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (for example, on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue back to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend.
For measuring the success of what, exactly? Economic success? Average incomes? Doesn't seem to be a very good metric for either.
Lowered inequality seems to me to be a good metric for measuring the success of attempts to lower inequality, and not much else.
But in this kid's day-to-day life after graduating, unless he becomes famous on his own, nobody will know who he is. They'll just see a dude that dresses well, lives in a well-off neighborhood, and got an education like everybody else. He won't have been raised in a violent neighborhood with poor access to education. And no employer will think twice about his application on account of his looks or the way he speaks.
Isn't that exactly the VC model?
The only loser here is the middle class of rich countries, not middle or poor class of poor countries.
100 years ago, they didn't have phase-change refrigeration, instead relying on ice. (That's why your grandmother might still call it an "ice box".)
50 years ago, they didn't have air conditioning.
25 years ago, they didn't have cars that would reliably run for 250K miles with airbags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, and which required very regular servicing to keep running.
10 years ago they probably didn't have a smart phone with the world's information in their back pocket.
All of those things are now readily affordable and very commonplace in the middle class.
And we have people complaining about housing and healthcare.... I know the solution to theses issues
If their only value prop was cheap labour then manufacturing could easily have flourished in plenty of other countries with cheap labour (eastern europe, latin america, africa?). And plenty are geographically closer and have more similar language/culture to the western markets than Asia. But there is more to it, Asian countries have a talent for it and have mastered manufacturing and related industries like steel production.
I doubt any American factories could legitimately compete with Asia, even if the wages were the same, without some heavy-duty automation. And Asia has many other advantages around vertical integration of factories, such as access to raw materials, from there and other countries they've developed relationships with.
Now it's possible these advantages are just a side-effect of the fact the industry residing in Asia in recent decades but I believe there's far more to it, even regardless of the wage advantages, they are very much deserving of that industry.
If you look holistically at what happened, you're more likely to find why so much moved to Asia. Geographically speaking there may have been closer low-wage countries, but distance alone does not determine where you can build appropriate facilities.
Geologically, China has access to large ports, allowing large amounts of tonnage to flow in and out. You have a generally easy path from China to California. Eastern Europe is out because you can't easily ship to and from. Similarly, jungles and mountains in Latin/South America and Africa keep large manufacturing bases from being built. Africa lacks sufficient ports - its largest ships 1/10 the tonnage that Shanghai does.
At a local political level, you have governments willing to subsidize manufacturing and tolerate certain working conditions that other governments wouldn't. From an international perspective, you have incentives to bring capitalism to the borders of previous socialist countries as a destabilization measure (large increases in US-China trade in the 80s).
Yes, people in other countries are people too, etc., but they also have their own governance, their own resources, their own economics systems to manage and oversee.
I can take no active part in any of that--only my own country's.
Until we have one world government, I'm always going to prioritize the places where I have at least some capacity to pull the levers in ways I think are better for people.
(This is why I dislike, in general, the specious globalist argument, "but the poors overseas deserve wealth too," sure they do, but they also live in sovereign nations and it's up to them to guide and shape their own.)
And that I find to be a shame -- that we find it so difficult to see the logic in a position we may disagree with.
The other thing is, I don't just apply this to international politics, I'm a firm believer in working to change your local politics as much as possible above all else.
How your city runs is both more accessible to the layperson and has a far bigger impact on your day-to-day experience than federal stuff, for example.
That's not to say I'd eschew federal level politics--I'm a huge proponent for socialized medicine, stringent environmental regulations, and a host of other stuff.
But when I go out and campaign, I do it for local folks.
The world economy isn't homogeneous, and what we may be looking at is that the current system is pretty good at taking people in economic/industrialized state A -> B, but bad at going from B -> C. If that's the case, sooner or later more and more people will arrive at state B and we will have a problem. It's even more of a problem if we get to B and it has people slipping back to state A in life qualitative measures (irrespective of imperfect quantitative measures like GDP...).
Switch to middle 40% and it will be still an increase but definitely does not look exponential - which most likely is the main point of the site creators
In any case, it wasn't clear if he meant the average person or an average about wealth or income. Average could have meant a colloquial reference to the average person, or it could have been a misuse of the statistical term.
when it comes to wealth (in)equality, you basically want to balance greed on one side and anger on the other. sure, allow the greedy to amass a little weath to promote their playing by the rules, but only just enough for those ends. and the other side, make sure wealth is distributed enough that people feel collectively prosperous, so we don't have riots and the like (fairer wealth distribution should come from better ways to more equally value the work of all people, not just that of gatekeepers and rent-seekers; and it should especially not come from simplistic wealth redistribution schemes like universal basic income).
wealth inequality has risen sharply over the past 50 years. whether you're a lefty or a righty, most people agree that it's time to level that playing field. there's absolutely no need to worry about stifling progress as we do that.
the concept of stealing is entirely beside the point.
we create value
we create value and that is what we accumulate in the form of wealth
Still, its a problem that we don't understand yet, and we have no economic model to solve. Milton Friedman's economic paradigm does not help. We need something new.
It paints a picture of the rich milking the rest of the world for wealth. It does not paint a picture of global improvement for the commoner. (Though, tbf, there isn't data on quite a lot of countries, so we really don't know.)
I think ratio of top to bottom does matter, or can matter. I don't really care how rich the rich are, but I do care that upward pressure on size and amenities for housing in the US means that there is a long standing (going back decades) shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US. There are people who are homeless in the US in part because they can't find anything for $400 or less a month in rent. We have largely done away with very basic housing, such as SROs and boarding houses. We tore a lot of those down (up to 80% of them in some cities) when the Baby Booomers were coming of age and didn't need something that cheap. We never rebuilt.
So, the US suffers from this idea that all housing needs to be appropriate for a family of four or five while our demographic has moved away from the nuclear family. We have a lot more single people putting off marriage, couples putting off having children or not having them at all or only having one child, seniors whose kids have all moved out, etc. But we don't really have housing designed for the needs of 1 to 3 people.
If we had strong policies to create enough very basic housing to house around 2 percent* of the population, then I likely would agree that I don't really care how rich the rich are compared to me. The problem is that the rich are the only ones being served here. There are huge challenges for the average person in the US.
I think the rich folks at the top are fools for doing this. This is the kind of thing that leads to bloody revolutions.
I won't be leading some bloody revolution. I am doing all in my power to reverse such trends. But I am an incredibly poor divorced single mom with health problems and adult special needs kids that still live with me. There are substantial limits on what I am likely to accomplish.
Doing a little blogging and making comments on forums is the majority of what I can do about this at the moment. Currently, I am also trying to put out flyers locally to promote some of my blogs to try to help put a dent in the high rates of poverty in the town I moved to. Unemployment and homelessness are rampant here.
But I am new to town and I lack connections and have credibility challenges. People think my "how to make money writing online" site is probably a scam. People don't want to approve the flyers for it. When they do get approved, people who see the flyers remain skeptical.
So, the reality is that the fools at the top who are milking the majority for money are the ones with the most power for trying to reverse such trends in some way (and, no, basic income is not the answer -- that is a lazy concept and won't work). I won't be leading the bloody revolution, but if it does happen, I will kind of sit back and laugh at the "victims" of it who brought it on themselves. Cuz, duh, you could see that coming from miles away and did nothing about it, you greedy dumbasses.
I am not talking about morality. I am talking about enlightened self interest here. (A la Henry Ford wanting all of his employees to be able to afford to buy a car.)
* http://projectsro.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-two-percent-solut...
The world as a whole is moving away from poverty and quality of life is improving which IMO is the most important metric here. Far more important to the average person than the relative wealth ratios at the top vs the bottom, which yes I know will skew the bottom end upwards in these averages, but regardless is still on an upward trajectory overall.
This should be the primary metric which success is measured by. And I hope in the effort to balance the wealth ratios this progress isn't crippled in the name of some abstract concept of equality.