Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the problem: Giridharadas

Re:Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the probl... by rayiner on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @03:58PM (#24125243)

Wages are a bad metric because they exclude various non-wage compensation, tax transfers, etc. Consumption is a more direct measurement of whether things are getting better. It’s also better because it naturally excludes the super wealthy that making a bunch of paper income from the growth of equity value, but it actually consuming proportionally to that increased wealth. The idea being that I don’t really care about how much Bezos’s stock is worth except insofar as it impairs my own ability to buy stuff.

Inflation adjustments are tricky because it’s not really obvious how to measure inflation. But even adjusted for CPI inflation personal consumption expenditures have been steadily increasing in the 20th century: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA

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Re:Elite do-gooders 'fixing' the world are part of the probl... by jjoonathan on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:22PM (#24125521)

Yeah, if you average the rich and poor together, they're getting richer! But the poor are still getting poorer. Averages hide disparities. We've been over this!

Tangent 1: Placeholder: I don't agree that consumption metrics are better.

Tangent 2: Rich people do consume (colloquially speaking) proportionally to their increased wealth, but after sating their material desires they turn to financial assets: dibs on passive income and future growth. More for them does mean less for everyone else. Both in the first-order sense of owning more shares and in the second-order sense of being on the winning side of prevailing trends in globalization, automation, tax law, and corruption.

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