i dont know why everyone keeps getting away with statement like this.

the proposition of equality as a meaningful metric is absurd at every level of examination. no one is equal to anyone else except on the most trivial and simplistic terms about anything.

do you feel inferior to rich people? do you feel superior to poor people? what hogwash. i reject this axiom that inequality is bad.

people don't hate inequality - they hate unfairness. they hate having their house repossesed because they took a loan they couldnt afford while the banks get a taxpayer bailout for making financial decisions THEY couldn't afford. people don't hate gates, jobs, buffet, or bezos; they love and idolize them. but if the system that purports to give commoners a path to wealth like those people instead shackles them with 200k in debt you have to fucking die to get rid of... things start feeling a little rebellious.

the problem doesnt have anything to do with equality. there is a loss of control, of autonomy. no chance of growth or the ability to change your circumstances.

In a world with limited resources, huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else. It also tends to concentrate political power in the same small group. Many people would say there is something inherently unfair about this.

I think these things aren't as separate from your concerns as you make them out to be.

Poverty comes from lack of opportunity (usually due to centralization of control), perverse incentives (often due to lack of centralization of control), ignorance, delusion, and other kinds of mental problems, not from limited natural resources or from "a small group of people consuming vastly more."

If all the people of india and china were to maintain a similar way of life as mine, the eco system would collapse right away.

I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.

To be sure, sugar from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii, pineapples from Hawaii, and bananas from Honduras were obtained by exploitation of the residents of those unfortunate lands, enriching the US colonists, and gold was mined by the colonists in Alaska; but these resources were peripheral to the projects of US industrialization and energy supplies. 50 years earlier the US had none of them, just huge tracts of land taken by force from Native Americans.

In Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, the story was of course quite different. But it is perhaps not coincidental that the industrial power least addicted to plundering resources from colonies abroad became the land most prosperous in the epoch when industry and invention reshaped the world.

The people of India and China can absolutely maintain a lifestyle with your energy consumption and use of manufactured luxury goods without causing ecological damage.

80% of electricity produced in Denmark is renewables, mostly wind. Historically, renewable energy other than hydroelectric and low-efficiency wind had a poor EROEI, so it wasn't really a viable alternative to fossil fuels, more like an extremely compact battery that had to be "charged" with fossil fuels and then required sunlight or wind to "discharge". That hasn't been true for 20 years, though, and EROEI keeps getting better as PERC gets adopted, PV cells get thinner, tracking gets cheaper, windmill rotors get bigger, etc.

But only a small minority of the energy used in Denmark is electric, about 15%, which is lower than in many other countries. About 10% of the rest is waste heat, and the other three quarters is currently fossil fuels. Replacing those fossil fuels will require not only increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 but also converting a substantial fraction of that energy into easily transportable fuels such as ammonia, biodiesel, propane, or aluminum, in order to power things which cannot practically run off the power grid like ships, airplanes, and long-distance trucks. That fuel does not need to be produced locally in Denmark; it can be produced, for example, in China, Australia, or Tunisia, and exported to Denmark.

Increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 may sound daunting, but worldwide solar and wind energy production doubles about every 3 years, so that transition will probably take about 5-10 years. The cost of PV and wind energy is now far below the cost of fossil-fuel energy in most of the world, although in Denmark in particular PV is not economically competitive with fossil fuels yet. The available solar resource is about four orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, and I think the wind resource is about one or two orders of magnitude larger.

Cheap labor is not critical to manufacturing goods; if it were you'd be importing your fridges, phones, and TVs from Bangladesh and Malaysia, not China and South Korea. (Open up a recent cellphone or TV sometime and look at the country names printed on the chips.) Modern manufacturing is highly automated, and the non-automated part is highly skilled. As you're surely aware, Nokia made their phones in Finland until only a couple of decades ago. Moreover, cheap labor does not create ecological damage, only human failure to thrive.

You could imagine an economy in which the labor productivity of goods like fridges, phones, and TVs was so low that the people who made them would be unable to afford them. This is the case, for example, with skyscrapers: it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort to build a skyscraper, so it would be impossible to pay each of the construction workers enough money to buy a skyscraper of their own. (An attempt to do so would raise the cost of skyscrapers by a factor of 100 or more, back out of their reach.) As should be obvious, this is very much not the case with fridges, phones, and TVs, whose labor cost is measured in person-days per instance, not person-centuries. Paying the workers Denmark wages instead of China wages would not render the production of fridges, phones, and TVs uneconomic; it would just make them more expensive. Even in Bangladesh, where many people live on US$3 per day, it is common already for people to own fridges, phones, and TVs, a situation that will only improve further when Bangladeshis are not denied the opportunities they are today. Whatever you have been told, your standard of living does not rest on exploiting the poor in faraway countries.

Shipping and transport are not a significant part of the resource usage of supplying you with fridges, phones, and TVs; shipping a TEU halfway around the world costs up to about US$7500 (though "return" rates, like from Los Angeles to Shanghai, can be as low as US$700, because the objective is just to get the container back to China, and the more usual cost is US$1000-US$2000 over the last ten years; see https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2021ch3...). A TEU weighs 24 tonnes, of which normally 21.6 tonnes is payload, giving a cost of US$0.35 per kg (and more realistically half that because of the return-cost thing). Part of that cost is the cost of fuel, which is the only resource cost of shipping. At the moment crude oil costs US$86/bbl, which means that if all of that US$0.35 went to fuel, and the fuel were unrefined crude rather than diesel and kerosene, it would buy 650 g of crude oil. That's 27 MJ/kg or 7.5 kilowatt hours per kg.

So if your fridge weighs 200 kg and uses 1000 kWh per year, running it for a year and a half is guaranteed to use more energy than it took to ship it to you from China. Because most of the cost of shipping is not actually fuel, a more realistic number is probably three months. But you will probably use that fridge for 10 years, and it is very likely that manufacturing it took more energy as well.

You can strongly bound the energy use of the whole manufacturing process in the same way. A new fridge costs about US$250 retail, which means it can't possibly require more than 2.9 barrels of oil to make it, and that only if the costs for things like labor, steel, and taxes were literally zero. 2.9 barrels of oil burned for energy is 18 MJ, 4900 kilowatt hours, though typically only 40% of that can be used for useful manufacturing things like turning motors and electrolyzing aluminum. In California with its 29% PV capacity factor, 2000 watts (peak) of solar panels produces 18 MJ every year, all high-quality electric energy, not low-grade heat. That's 10 square meters of solar panels costing under US$400. So, you can see why renewables are taking over.

This is also how you can know that your US$250 fridge doesn't require person-years of effort from a labor force in Bangladesh, even without going there. Bangladesh's per-capita GDP is US$2500 per person per year, nominal, and its Gini coefficient is a reasonable 0.39, so at most that fridge could be a couple of person-months of work, including all the components. (But in fact it was probably made in China, US$14000 per person per year, or South Korea, US$35000 per person per year, and with lower inequality.)

They might have to eat less beef, pork, tuna, herring, and mackerel, and burn less biofuels than you do, though. Those may be renewable but environmentally they are catastrophic.

What I think your calculations miss is two things: 1) producing a fridge is harmful to the climate not just because it takes ressources to produce and ship and maintain, but because it uses limited ressources and pollutes after it is thrown away [1] and prices doesnt currently reflect the real cost on the environment. And 2) Technology is worth very little if politics and infrastructure doesnt support it. We could avoid a large part of the pollution of fridges if we recycle, but we need recycling plants, a government that mandates it, a culture of recycling, not to mention we need to share technology across borders.

My argument is not that its physically impossible, but that it isnt realistic in any way to imagine we could scale our way of living to the entire world with our current political, tehcnological and cultural infrastructure. Right beside everything you describe, there is an on-going climate-crisis of extreme proportions going on. The way we live in the west is built historically on fossil-fuels and direct exploitation of other parts of the world, and it has led us to the brink of ecological ruin. Even if technology might be able to ensure that the rest of the world wont need to rely on fossil fuels in the same way we've done historically and still do, there is not the political will or the infrastructrure to do so. There will be, maybe, in 10 years - we'll see.

So yes, my standard of living rests explicitly on poorer countries not living like me. Because we dont have the technology or infrastructure in place to support such a massive increase in living standard without it impacting the climate. It doesnt matter if we have the technology in ten years if its impossible to implement at scale.

[1] The cooling industry play a huge part in glomal warming: "Part of the problem with refrigerants, however, is that much of the harm they cause is after we as consumers have finished using them. It occurs out of sight, and so largely out of mind." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201204-climate-change-h...

I think the case of refrigerators is particularly interesting. Other than energy, they don't consume limited resources; they just contain limited resources until they're thrown away. Some of those resources are scarce, like copper, aluminum, and the refrigerant itself, and because it's profitable, those tend to get recycled already, even without government mandates (though sometimes government mandates can prevent it, like the "steps to stop illegal trade in HFCs" mentioned in the article you link). Others are not scarce, like iron, fiberglass, and polyurethane, so it isn't a problem if they are locked up in a landfill. At some point mining landfills will be profitable when the mineral resources they contain are depleted in their original mine deposits.

The problem of leaks of fluorinated refrigerant is real, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Greenhouse_gase... says that total fluorinated gas (including refrigerants from air conditioners and refrigerators, propellants, sulfur hexafluoride, and others) is only about 3% of the total greenhouse forcing, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions#/medi... gives 2.1%. Plausibly this is the largest climatic effect of buying a refrigerator, even if it's manufactured with 100% coal energy, but in absolute terms it's not that significant. And I don't think the number of refrigerators is going to more than double; according to https://globaldatalab.org/areadata/fridge/?levels=1%2B2%2B3%... even in Bangladesh 40% of households have one, and 35% in India and 99.9% in China; and https://bigee.net/media/filer_public/2012/12/04/bigee_doc_2_... gives the number as 1.4 billion domestic refrigerators ten years ago. So we might see that 3% grow to 5% or something, but not a high enough level to make a real difference. I don't think it's accurate to describe 3%, or even the 10% in the article, as "a huge part in global warming".

I used to have a refrigerator that didn't use greenhouse-gas refrigerants. It was an ammonia-absorption refrigerator, using ammonia, water, and hydrogen. These are unfortunately not available in my country (illegal, I think), and it is not safe to have them inside a house, but it's perfectly reasonable to keep them out on the patio. One big plus is that they can run on stored fuel, whether natural or synthetic, which would be really nice with the frequent power outages where I live now.

Sort of by coincidence, I've been trying to figure out this month how far desiccant-enhanced evaporative cooling can replace conventional vapor-compression air conditioning. I think I've found ways to reduce the system cost low enough that multistage cascades are economical, which ought to make it possible to do not only air conditioning but even domestic food refrigeration with desiccants, though freezing will require a different approach. I found some really interesting research from NREL on this, mostly over the last decade. Desiccant-based systems have the potential to provide not only cooling but also humidity control, heating, food preservation, and household solid waste treatment, and they can run on stored energy for days, which is important both during power outages and to ameliorate the intermittency of solar and wind energy.

“Mental problems”—did people fail to Think and Grow Rich or something?

Mental issues may only cause poverty if there is a lack of safety net. Homeless people with Schizophrenia is ultimately caused by policy decisions. Schizophrenic people are more likely to be homeless in certain developed countries compared to others.

> Specifically, you are lying about what I have said in order to smear me

I did not.

Why would you think so? Inequality means wealth inequality, it does not measure consumption. There are still people starving in the world; that is because they cannot afford to buy food, not because Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are eating 1000000x more food than the average person.

Are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk consuming vastly more available resources?

I mean most of their wealth is invested, in companies, that provide a livelihood for tens of thousands of individuals.

Let’s say we stopped Elon and Jeff from accumulating such wealth (i.e. stopped their companies from growing and/or forced them to divest their investments and captured it via taxes).

I think we can all agree that both companies would likely be much smaller. So how many jobs not created? How many consumers paying higher prices? How much was technology advances delayed?

I don’t have answers but they are questions worth asking.

People create wealth by work and trade.

Oil was an annoying sticky substance until the liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine was invented in 1876. This invention turned it into the most valuable resource in the world for the next 150 years.

That invention turned useless goo into gazillions of wealth.

> people don't hate inequality - they hate unfairness.

You seem to contradict yourself in the span of two paragraphs.

Inequality is OK (according to you) if it is fair. So rich people are superior to poor people?

(It’s not about “feeling” inferior in any case. It’s about having enough money to live. And yes, the interests of the rich often work against the interests of the poor in such a way that the lives of the poor gets to be more and more difficult.)

Or maybe we’re just seeing unfair inequality right now? Well then the distinction doesn’t matter much in any case. When was the last time that inequality was fair?

Rich people are created off the backs of relatively poor people, i.e. the working class. To a large degree, rich people need other people to be relatively poor in order to maintain their wealth. Why do you think that businesses hate when workers organize for better pay and conditions? I guess they should be fine with it if the inequality was “fair”…

Bah. Maybe my reading comprehension is off.

Some people have higher earning potential than others. Does that make them superior?

That’s a common wrong presumption that these “poor people are actually rich” people have: that the world is fair.

It’s also a popular assumption on message boards populated by high-income folks for obvious reasons.

In industrial capitalist societies, measures of inequality are historically the best predictors of political crisis, including but not limited to the the election of Hitler and the Holocaust. I think people have plenty of good reason to consider them.

You are confusing the metric of inequality with the ideal of equality. These are very different things. Statistical measures of inequality have always been highly correlated with measures of societal health in some way or another, but different measures mean different things depending on the type of society it is. For example, you are focusing on the very poor vs. the very rich, but most Americans tend to associate inequality with the size of the middle class.

>the problem doesnt have anything to do with equality. there is a loss of control, of autonomy. no chance of growth or the ability to change your circumstances.

A lot of people think there is a chance for success and spend most of their lives learning there isn’t. They idolize Bezos and Musk because the media does, and guess who runs the media…

People are not the same, but they weigh the same.

Is this true? The post uses Sweden as the exemplar, which has the lowest poverty (on its chart) and also one of the lowest inequalities as measured by the Gini coeffcient (30).

This page [1] seems to offer a handful of data, but nothing that outlines a clear 'higher Gini -> less poverty.' If anything it seems pretty uncorrelated. It does posit the related: higher average income _allows_ for a higher Gini because there's a limited amount of poverty people can suffer before dying.

A bit more research into Sweden specifically reveals that its Gini has gone up a bit the last 30 years, but seems like it was trending toward more equality before then [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality

[2] https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...

> The main industries include motor vehicles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, industrial machines, precision equipment, chemical goods, home goods and appliances, forestry, iron, and steel

> The 20 largest Sweden-registered companies by turnover as of 2013 were Volvo, Ericsson, Vattenfall, Skanska, Hennes & Mauritz, Electrolux, Volvo Personvagnar, Preem, TeliaSonera, Sandvik, ICA, Atlas Copco, Nordea, Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, Scania, Securitas, Nordstjernan, SKF, ABB Norden Holding, and Sony Mobile Communications AB

Ericsson - charges telecom companies a fortune for crappy gear because there's only 2-3 leading edge 5G equipment providers, which in turn makes it more expensive for people to get telecom service

H&M - sweatshop labor for clothes manufacturing

I only went through the first half but there are a number of companies in there that exploit poor people. I'll also add this link [0] which shows Sweden has very low corporate income tax and most of Swedish government income comes from taxes on labor and goods (VAT), which is hardly the high corporate tax model that most left wing Democrats are pushing today.

[0]: https://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-swede...

Meanwhile there is no inheritance tax, relatively low capital gains tax (or none on ISK accounts), and low corporation tax.

It's designed to preserve wealth for those who inherit property.

I didn't say that they didn't, I said that they did but the GP listed weren't the biggest examples.

For a full review (in french): https://paulboosz.github.io/2020/analyse-nouveaux-optimistes...

If declining poverty means at the end forced to serve that 1% by shitting in bags because there's no toilet breaks, Then I'm not sure 'celebrating the decline in poverty' is on their minds.