I don't think that's a fair reaction. It's possible to care about the rest of the world and recognise context. Workers looking for greater bargaining power in the US shouldn't accept "but things are much better in Eastern Europe these days" as a reason for them to not organise - the two are entirely separate issues, and can happen independent of each other.
Now at its disposal, a government can implement tariffs and protectionism to level the playing field, but those can have disastrous long term effects (see the history of India's protectionism).
So, an excellent way for wages to rise is to make employees extremely efficient, and to increase the demand in labor. Make no mistake though, the gains in other countries have effected US and European workers.
It's easier to get away with worker hostile policies for an employer when the employer's option if workers object is not "no workers" but "I guess I have ti shift production to China".
You're right that it's not directly related to the decimation of unions. That has other things going on, and different things in different sectors.
The absolute improvement is great.
The accelerated concentration of Wealth is not.
The term economists have now settled on and are considering is the very mundane “lack of social mobility”
It’s a problem.
Yes, exactly. The reason actually is very simple: wealth inequality results in inequality in political (not to mention legal) representation, as the wealthy always carry more influence in society and use that influence to stack the odds in their own favor.
It’s pretty much the same line parents use on their children - I don’t think it works for them, much less adults.
The conclusion that I draw is that while people broadly in this position might accurately perceive that they are now in a more comfortable short-term position than they were, they are at high risk in the medium-term and long-term.
Secondly, it's not clear whether wealth has improved for poor people (something I should take a look at...).
https://avc.com/2016/08/elephant-chart/
The chart, as I understand it (in limited reading), tracks three phenomenon:
1. Increasing wealth formation by more disadvantaged groups in non-first world countries (the "body" of the elephant).
2. Wealth stagnation for middle classes in first-world countries (the "dip" in the elephant's trunk).
3. Increasing returns to capital held by upper classes in first-world countries (the "trunk" of the elephant).
I found this version [1] showing that, in absolute terms, the gaps are actually increasing.
[1] https://patternsofmeaning.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/elepha...
In any case, you are not necessarily addressing my rebuttal of the elephant graph. What I'm saying is that the elephant graph is an interesting conversation starter, but, by itself, it does not convey enough information to make a conclusion about fairness. To make an extreme example, if I have literally $0 last year and I have $1 now, my growth rate in the elephant graph is infinitely higher than the richer 1%. I'm still going to starve to death, though. Absolutes matter.
My point is that knowing only the fact that "absolute inequality has increased" doesn't tell you anything about whether that's good or bad for the world.
I agree that absolutes matter to the individual - but I personally think percentages are a better way of understanding and interpreting growth over time for most populations, because growth has historically been very consistently exponential.
A growing absolute wealth gap can still lead to reduced quality of life for lower-wealth groups - e.g. because prices rise faster than their incomes and so they effectively lose access to certain goods. It will also increase inequality and makes other economic measures (that rely on the mean) less reliable.
Just because an effect is always present, doesn't mean you can ignore it, especially if doing so would flip the conclusion. Posting the elephant graph as an argument that all is going well would do exactly that.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality
specifically from eyeballing
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Global...
Fixating on silly numbers that ultimately mean nothing doesn't seem like a good way to make the world better. We should look at concrete things - and how often you can eat an orange is the kind of concrete thing that really matters.
1) The percentage of people living in cities as compared to living in rural areas has increased dramatically (https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/acs-...)
2) Large cities (NYC, San Francisco, etc), have lots of regulations to building more housing
3) Demand for housing in large cities has exceeded supply for decades
4) Student loan debt has destroyed purchasing power for folks in their 20s and 30s, the average student loan is almost 40k (https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/)
Leaving NYC, even after taking a pay cut, was one of the best decisions I ever made. I don't have data, but I suspect that for young folks outside of the largest 20 American cities, if they didn't have on average 40k in student loan debt, they would have more purchasing power then previous generations even including real estate.
Those days are over. Germany has a huge real estate problem right now.
There are factories in villages too.
Many things are much more inexpensive jeans, shoes (functional not trendiest), entry-level tools, computers, media, etc.
Whats not more inexpensive and what imho really actually matters are things like education, housing, and the barrier to entry to careers (require licensing, certfications etc.)
Yes. The delta between the richest and poorest indicates a lot of things about a society.
You can go to a place like Mauritius where the delta is enormous, but everyone is pretty happy and the rich and poor mingle freely. Or you can have a place like France where the delta is far smaller, but the rich and poor detest each other and very rarely mingle.
The top 1% in France has about 20% of the total income as of 2014.
For Mauritas no suitable data was found for wealth inequality or dispersion of earnings.
The lack of good data for Mauritas makes a comparison between the two questionable.
Plus even after looking at the numbers for these countries I would want to check out money laundering - if I recall, based on the Panama papers, a nontrivial amount of the 1% (probably more like the 0.1%s) wealth is laundered/hidden/dark. I don’t know if the studies here attempt to account for that or not. I would imagine money laundering is prevalent in France (or any major economy for that matter), possibly in Mauritas
https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...
https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...
Information on data sources here - https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/about/
As of 2018 the population of Mauritas is 1.26 million (via google search). The 2018 population of France is 65.23 million (via google search). The 2014 population probably was not radically different.
I wonder if the size of the society in question matters here - is comparing a country to one 65 times larger than it useful?
I did not look for data to validate the hypothesis that everyone is pretty happy in Mauritas as opposed to France.
Doesn't do a single thing to address the point made.
Why are people trotting out chicken as an example of healthy food? It is anything but:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/poultry-farms-anti...
Obviously, no one food is healthy, note that I named a couple different "healthy" foods. Having a balanced diet is important. Nothing about your article seems to point to chicken being unhealthy to eat. I don't even know if you read the article.
> Why are people trotting out chicken as an example of healthy food?
Are you kidding me? If you're vegan, just come out and say it, or make an actual point. Part of my response was related to affordability, which is hard to beat when it comes to chicken as a source of protein. What healthy alternatives do you have?
I started watching the second link. Interesting stuff. Maybe chicken isn't the most healthy option, but I don't think it's evil.
How can getting antibiotic resistant E. coli from eating chicken be healthy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/opinion/sunday/meat-antib...
> What healthy alternatives do you have?
Beans are pretty great.
> but I don't think it's evil.
People in Medieval Europe did not think that torturing animals to death for entertainment was evil. It is obviously evil to people in Europe today, just like breeding and enslaving animals in horrific conditions only to slaughter them for food is obviously evil if you take a moment to think about it.
https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/news/...
If you're thinking the unhealthy food in the grocery store is cheap, that's also not true. Chips are $3-$5/bag while 3 pounds of onions is $2. I could go on.
Poor people are likely to be both cash-poor and time-poor: it's not a question of "being bothered". If you have the available time to fully consider, process, and follow this advice, then you may not realistically be poor at all.
And, if you did manage to follow this advice, you would likely still be poor - saving pennies on food is not any way out of poverty.
And lets get off of this no time argument. Why do all these people with no time still have TVs? The average American watches ~5 hours of TV per day. Watch 4 hours instead and cook a healthier and cheaper meal.
That's a complete non-sequitor. You're going to have to provide evidence that those who are poor are the ones watching tv so much, and don't have the time because they're working multiple jobs.
She kept the house stocked with canned soup and lunch meat because a 6 year old (me) and a 12 year old (my brother) could manage to make a meal out of it while she was working.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(17)...
The research done concluded that differences in Gut Microbiome meant that "The glycemic response to the two types of bread varies greatly across people".
More food for thought (Pun intended :p )
I do think in the general case though, that people usually have 1/2 hour to cook if they wanted to. Are there going to be exceptions like yours? Absolutely.
Which, if you're working 2 jobs, you very well might not have.
"If you're thinking the unhealthy food in the grocery store is cheap, that's also not true."
Time is also a cost. So is the ability to store food.
Not everywhere.
"Maybe you don’t care that much about the world outside the US or Western Europe, but literally billions of people have seen their living standards rise from the subsistence level to a decent level."
That's very uncivil of you. There is lots of poverty in the US, and despite popular opinion, there is lots of hunger here too.
The "locally grown food" in many cases was little more besides white flour and mincemeat. (A situation that still exists in parts of rural Russia.) The only tea that could be drunk was usually a single variety of black tea. I think "poverty" is a reasonable adjective for that state of affairs. The fact that people in urban Russia today do have access to a vastly wider choice of food is a significant advance.
It is amusing that use the term "richer" to dispute my claim above that Russians are less poor.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932–33
The millions of deaths (irrespective of the famines ultimate cause) in the USSR and especially in the Ukraine in 1932 / 1933 are well documented (2-4 million deaths estimated):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%...
There was also a Russian famine in 1922 where an estimated 5 million people died:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80...
There is a Wikipedia article on “hunger in the United States”, but a google search for “United States Great Depression famine” did not return any Wikipedia articles documenting a famine in the US at that time, only the above Stack Exchange discussion (which appears to reject the hypothesis).
FYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
Without data to back up the claim of a famine killing millions in the US during the Great Depression the comparison used here is nonsense, although there may be other evidence for the point the author was attempting to support.