Re:The Mayan calendar might represent a longer timescale tha...
by eru on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @12:54AM
(#35783512)
> This wealth inequality is also unavoidable, you cannot relocate elsewhere and forage, that land is already taken up by a corporation.
Taken up by a sovereign nation state, you mean? They are pervasive. Corporations are a drop in the bucket by comparison. And not all countries even have corporations.
> One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't.
Why do you bring up inequality? Who cares about that? Let's care about the absolute well-being of people, especially those in lower income percentiles.
For them it's scant consolation in their poverty, if other people are also in poverty. (Ie equality is no consolation.)
> [...] we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25".
I didn't mention any of that. You can measure poverty by that metric, and we made huge strides. But you can also look at other indicators. Like life expectancy, or child mortality or access to the Internet, or access to AC, or access to food and clean water, etc. Almost any metric you can think of has gotten better.
And you might quibble with 1.25 1990-dollars as an absolute threshold for poverty, sure. But you can't quibble with it as one marker of relative progress amongst many. Or in other words: 1.25 dollar a day is a low bar, but the number of people who clear that low bar used to be much, much lower in the past than today.
That's progress! Let's hope people's incomes will keep clearing higher and higher bars in the future!
Taken up by a sovereign nation state, you mean? They are pervasive. Corporations are a drop in the bucket by comparison. And not all countries even have corporations.
> One might believe all civilizations were just as unequal, but they really weren't.
Why do you bring up inequality? Who cares about that? Let's care about the absolute well-being of people, especially those in lower income percentiles.
For them it's scant consolation in their poverty, if other people are also in poverty. (Ie equality is no consolation.)
> [...] we are still judging "poverty" based on "$1.25".
I didn't mention any of that. You can measure poverty by that metric, and we made huge strides. But you can also look at other indicators. Like life expectancy, or child mortality or access to the Internet, or access to AC, or access to food and clean water, etc. Almost any metric you can think of has gotten better.
And you might quibble with 1.25 1990-dollars as an absolute threshold for poverty, sure. But you can't quibble with it as one marker of relative progress amongst many. Or in other words: 1.25 dollar a day is a low bar, but the number of people who clear that low bar used to be much, much lower in the past than today.
That's progress! Let's hope people's incomes will keep clearing higher and higher bars in the future!