If India follows the west then it won't be possible for 2 people with education to lift a family out of poverty to middle class. In my country you basically require 2 full-time wages to be able to have a kid, house, car etc. I think that is the point they were making.

That's because of idiotic zoning laws that make it nearly impossible to build multi family properties, high density residential, limit the height of skyscrapers and basically forced the entire nation to be a damn suburban hell hole, not because of a land shortage. India hopefully won't make the same idiotic mistakes the NIMBY soccer mom boomers did.

I don't know what western country you live in, but I'm guessing you have a very different definition of poverty than the UN. The UN has a list of criteria such as:

- 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.

During my childhood I fulfilled the first three for about four years or so and knew many others in similar situations. This was in the US, any country with significant undeveloped land is going to have areas that have people who fulfill the first three pretty easily.

Just out of curiosity, how far did you have to walk to get potable water, how long did it take, what was the source, and how much did you carry back at a time? Sorry for so many questions, but this is very interesting to me.

Every year I lived in a different location but the shortest was a bit more than half an hour trip by bike and I could only safely manage a single gallon. Usually though we'd get water when we hitchhiked into town as we could get more at once. Both of these sources came from water resupply points for trucks but no on cared if you filled a few gallon containers. Rain water was also usable in many cases but we avoided drinking it. We went out maybe once a week or so?

I’m not calling you a liar, but I am heavily skeptical. Where and when did this occur within the continental United States?

I never said continental, this was on the Big Island in Hawaii. Though I would be shocked if there weren't similar places in the large patches of undeveloped land in the west side of the US.

There are two types of poverty being talked about here.

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.

Right now India is in a transition period and wages for these kinds of jobs are keeping pace with gains in productivity and that's how you're seeing so many lifting themselves are their families out of poverty.

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.

I'm not sure what the "free market" has to do with it. Capitalism, communism, feudalism, socialism, etc.. always end with the majority of money and power concentrated with the few.

It's just human behavior to be selfish.

I agree with the first part of your point, but this in particular is an emergent phenomena that only happens with large-scale civilizations.

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

I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure, and modern civilization passed that a long time ago, and human beings in general just aren't capable of empathy on the scale of modern civilization. And I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. On some abstract level you have to know that even meagre standards of living in western society requires someone, somewhere to be suffering to provide it. $1 for a pound of bananas shipped from across the world before they even have a hint of yellow on them? That shit don't come without a cost, and our $1 sure as hell aint paying it. But we all just kind of don't think those people just to get through the day, because dwelling on the extent of suffering and horror we've wrought upon our fellow man in pursuit of whatever fresh hell the guys over at Oreo have managed to shape into the general form of a cookie would leave us a broken shell of a person and unable to show up for our next shift at the Big Mac factory.

> I've read that there is a certain number of people that we're basically optimized to coexist within a societal structure

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.

> this in particular is an emergent phenomena that only happens with large-scale civilizations

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.

Oh absolutely agree, everything up until now has eventually descended into the age old pattern of power and money finding it's way concentrated into the hands of the few elite, however capitalism with it's private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit, and rewarding accumulation of capital, seems like it's designed from the ground up to funnel money and power into the hands of the few, where at at least in theory communism/socialism/other -isms are designed to try to share the wealth.

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.

Yeah, but capitalism has more mechanisms that allow the big to be disrupted by the growing small. And a way for all to rise together through trade.

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

A large majority of the US owns their homes and has been greatly enriched by the distorted housing market. It's a moral hazard resulting from democracy if anything, as people vote themselves into housing monopolies and other advantage over newcomers.

America is not a "free market" capitalist country. I would say it's of the lack of a free market that enabled the wealthiest to capture that wealth that would otherwise have been more evenly distributed. There is an enormous amount of regulation in the US (and other countries) designed to make it nearly impossible to compete with the established actors in the market.

The free aka perfect market does not exist.

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.

Nobody thinks a perfect market, or perfect anything is possible. It's just a theoretical concept. None of the imperfections you mentioned can be solved by a state or any other form of coercion.

> None of the imperfections you mentioned can be solved by a state or any other form of coercion.

Says you, basically.

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