- Lacking access to electricity

- Lacking access to drinking water within a 30 minute round-trip walk

- Lacking access to sanitation facilities

- No household members have completed at least 6 years of schooling

- Any child in the household has stunted growth due to malnutrition

You need at least a third of the criteria to be true in order for a household to be considered in poverty.

In the United States (where it is not only possible, but common for two people with education to lift a family out of poverty into the middle class), most people below the poverty have a drastically superior standard of living to anyone below the poverty line in India. The type of "poor" where two people are working full time jobs in the US would not be considered poor in India.

However, if history is anything to go by that will stop pretty soon as the hyper upper class solidifies their hold on wealth, appreciating assets, and means of production, and will start to keep larger and larger shares of profit while workers' wages stagnate, and then inflation will start to decrease the purchasing power of those stagnating wages, and the middle class will start to shrink and disappear as it is in America and other "free market" capitalist countries.

It's just human behavior to be selfish.

So I think some kind of sociological argument makes more sense (I don't know what that would be though).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

> Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.

Is it? If you have N participants in a market and a bunch of investment opportunities that are on average net negative, the person with the most money will take the most opportunities resulting in their relative worth increasing the most. The endgame for this is one person with all the money. Works for N=2 and N≃infinity.

It doesn't happen in (some? most?) small communities because of specific things that aren't present in big communities.

Of course, said -isms require either an unbroken chain of morally righteous people with absolute power being in charge of said means of production fairly for the equal enrichment of everyone, or some kind of system of checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing it and preventing corruption from outside the political power structures, the exact formula of which we've yet to figure out.

Personally I'm of the opinion we should just throw the baby out with the bathwater and chalk this whole civilization experiment up as a mistake and go back to tribal societies of yestermillennia. Of course, the vast majority of the current human population disagrees with me in that regard and I will admit there are some good things about it, so until that changes I'll be here plugging along like the rest and hoping for better days.

And, of course, capitalism and socialism work best together.

It's impossible to achieve in reality:

- fungible goods (i.e. stuff like toilet paper where you have 100s of vendors most people can't really differentiate much in terms of end result): good luck with that for any kind of complex good

- perfect information symmetry (i.e. the vendor and the buyer and seller know exactly the same about the product): can't happen when most buyers are individuals and most sellers are companies with full time people employed to work on their products

- low barriers to entry for vendor: good luck, in the real world you need time, capital, experience, etc to enter a market, and even when you're there, there's stuff like brands, marketing, reputation, etc

Etc.

Plus, even if this absurdly perfect model would be achieved, you still have to put stuff like social welfare somewhere in there. Why? Because some people are just plain bad at basic economics (president Truman was close to dying in poverty during his old age), and you can't just let them starve to death.

Says you, basically.

All current markets have state intervention, and the best ones have good state intervention.

For example, in Mumbai average people barely find more than few sq ft to live in whereas families like Godrej control land worth approx 10 b $ in the city itself. Moreover the Godrej family do not want the entire land to be used for development per se and are unwilling to part with some of it for developmental infrastructure projects. The moral of the story is that it is the same (if not worse) as any other country.

The rental yield on houses in India can be as low as 2% (source: Personal) which should in theory lead to crash in housing prices, but that is not happening as population in city will constantly increase with rural to urban migration.

[1]: https://superr.in/economy/i-tried-starting-a-manufacturing-u...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24106545

In which country is a new house 200k Euros?

I feel like the insane housing prices here are not just related to nimbyism that restricts supply, but mostly to speculation driven by banks, governments, realtors, investors, basically any and all large piles of money that need to see housing constantly going up fast so that their piles of money get even bigger.

Which area of France is that?

Because nobody wants to live outside Helsinki these days. So there's a lot of supply and low demand everywhere else.