And here we are at the highest levels of inequality since the 1920s. For the last 100 years, efficiency has meant squeezing every spare penny of disposable income from the working class. These people don’t benefit from market gains.

I would have agreed with you. But I live in Berlin, which is "poor but sexy", and I'm watching a culture of artists and creativity get destroyed by increasing wealth. I don't have anything else other than this observation, though. I'd love to know why or how, and what we could do to preserve the culture in the face of rising wealth.

> It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to enrich the poor’s souls then you need to enrich their pockets first.

Can't disagree with that. But we haven't been enriching the poor. We've been practicing trickle down economics instead.

Enriching the rich has marvelous side effects like a proliferation of low paying contract work (jobs!), ratcheting housing prices (wealth!) and increased production of luxury goods (utopia!).

But then you look at minimum wage, inflation and the consumer price index; and see that the poor have been hemorrhaging purchasing power since the 1970s.

So, yeah. Increasing wealth is great for humanity. But there's a wide gap between anticapitalism and the neoliberal/libertarian economic theories which brought today's plutocracy. The middle ground is classical capitalism.

> But we haven't been enriching the poor.

Of course not. We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"? Maybe you need to look beyond the literal "first world problems" in your privileged corner of the West.

> We've just been lifting many hundred millions of people out of poverty in China, India, South-East Asia and elsewhere, but what does this have to do with "enriching the poor"?

I love this line of thinking because it always shows someone has put forth no effort into what the "poverty reduction" means. The International Poverty line has been $1.90/day. So, if you make the equivalent of $1.90 in your country or higher, then you are not in poverty. Now how about you go and do some work and see how nutritionally complete your diet will be on $1.90.

> I love this line of thinking because it always shows someone has just guzzled from the gutter of ideology.

I somewhat disagree with zozbot and I agree with your material analysis (I'd add something about the rising Gini indices in the mentioned developing nations), but this sentence adds nothing to the conversation.

In Europe? well, that's most of a donor kebab in Berlin, so not terrible ;)

In Cambodia... I could easily feed myself on $1.90 a day, if I wasn't white and getting barang (foreigner) prices.

No, you get local prices adjusted to 1.90$

As much as I love Döner, half of one isn't nutritionally complete.

As I understand it, the poverty line is $1.90 in USD. Not in local currency, and not adjusted for local prices. Which is why it sounds like anyone living in poverty should starve to death within a week, but they actually don't (because $.190 isn't comfortable in Cambodia, for sure, but if you get local prices you won't starve to death in a week).

OK, half a kebab and a few beers. Many's the time I've woken up to empty beeer bottles and a half-eaten kebab and I haven't starved to death ;)

Im not sure suffering works that way. Someone in East Asia who is poor but has a loving family, community, autonomy, and meaning may be better of then a relatively rich Westerner who lacks those things.

That's part of my point, of course - that material resources are clearly important when you're talking about someone who's truly in extreme poverty, but it's not clear whether going beyond this point matters that much more than, say, better social inclusion etc.

Wealth for whom? If the money is going into poor people's pockets, things will improve, but inevitably capitalism, and specially neo-liberalism, will only be lining rich people's pockets. We're seeing that happen right now across the globe, and we're seeing popular uprisings in response to that.