500 years ago, only 1-2% could afford "whatever" and the rest had to scrap by and pinch pennies. I'm not sure we're moving to a world of less evenly distributed wealth.
Only we're not beasts. Wealth is social and relative based on the era.
E.g. nobody feels like a champion as a unemployed homeless in LA, or a single mom making ends meet hand-to-mouth, just because 8000 years ago other people lived in caves, died at 30, and where often hunted by wild animals...
The change compared to not-so-distant decades, when a single-income middle class family had a job for life, could afford a house, and college education for their kids -- compared to living paycheck to paycheck is more relevant to whether we enter a world of more inequality, than what they did in the caves or the wild west.
Statins, anti-retrovirals, common availability of antibiotics, treatment for TB, vaccines for many population-decimating (in the traditional sense of the word) viruses.
Everyone has a super computer in their pocket, the vast majority of human knowledge is available in your hand for free all the time, you can video chat anyone you want anywhere in the world in HD for free, world-leading educators post hundreds of hours of video lectures online for free. You can get O(every song ever recorded) instantly anywhere you are for $10-$15/month.
In my opinion, what we're seeing is that things split into two categories: generally free or almost free, and expensive enough to be out of reach of most people. The thing that is really exciting is that things are moving from the latter to the former very quickly. The problem specifically with education is that expectations (everyone must have a degree!) Hasn't kept up with reality (degrees are no longer the only/best marker of skill!).
The real costs for most people in the US is artificial. Housing, internet, and healthcare in the US is 2-5 times what it is in most countries because of systemic corruption.
Consider, 15 minutes of a doctor’s time making 300k total compensation directly costs ~40$. Meaning your copay is often the actual cost of the services rendered and you need insurance to cover overhead.
> 15 minutes of a doctor’s time making 300k total compensation directly costs ~40$.
So the nurses, administrators, technicians, lawyers, accountants, janitors etc that are needed to allow that doctor to see you don't factor into that cost? I'm not saying the pricing of healthcare in the States makes sense, but neither does the argument you present.
I simply put an actual price tag on a doctors time. Dentists and Doctors both need receptionists, janitors, deal with insurance, and have an office etc. However, compare a few bills and a few different situations and some clear differences show up.
If you want an actual examples a famous one is the Medicare Prescription Drug Price Negotiation issue. Each individual little bit is not a big deal, but they compound with inefficiency growing at each step.
After a trillion dollar bailout on the real estate bubble (where banks propped house prices for more than a decade), and widespread studies of healthcare inflated prices you need "citations"?
It's like some bizarro world where to speak of something well established you also need to prove the universe exists all the way to modern history...
Things are also moving the other way at unprecedented speed - the expensive ones: housing, medical care, education. None of which is discussing the comparative inequality of the two periods.
Are you saying inequality is required for that list of innovations? If so, on what grounds?
We came up with contraceptive pills, eradication of polio, visited the moon, transformation of aviation and personal transportation, domestic appliances - including TVs, washing machines, dish washers went from unaffordable luxury to in every home. Doesn't seem like the pace of innovation has increased, just moved to a different field compared with the period of lowest US inequality. If anything it's slowed markedly.
So why didn't these innovations need inequality?
Nit: antibiotics were commonly available 60 years ago, they just weren't yet abused by stupid uses in agriculture.
>Additionally, yes, the US society in the 50s-80s was pretty egalitarian and full of opportunities — as long as you were white, male and heterosexual.
It was full of opportunities for all kinds of people, not just "white, male, and heterosexual". That's when the civil rights movement and the feminist movement flourished too and ensured the rights for women and blacks.
People born after some age seem to remember some bizarro version of history, when it was all oppression with no redeeming qualities, and if you were a woman or black etc you were as good as dead. People think we made some huge strides in the 00s, probably because they have no experience of the 60s to 90s. That main strides have been done for gay/lesbian rights (and even those were increasingly more permissible after the 70s and the sexual revolution).
Though all of the above are beyond the point. As if to have those other things (affordable housing, college and healthcare) that the 50s-80s enjoyed, you need to also have racism and sexism... How does that compute?
Not that it's required, but it's the effect of progress. Individual progress requires focus. With these new options being available every single day, those that have scarce resources have more and more problems with optimising the for their best outcome.
On a poker table, one that has more chips, has advantage over one that has less. Doesn't make it unfair.
>Statins, anti-retrovirals, common availability of antibiotics, treatment for TB, vaccines for many population-decimating (in the traditional sense of the word) viruses.
Those are technological innovations, not really relevant.
We could have had smartphones and anti-retrovirals AND affordable education/housing/healthcare/job prospects.
Like how people in the 50s and 60s could enjoy all kinds of technological and social innovations compared to 100 years before (electricity, TV, improved medicine, vaccines, etc) AND have cheap college tuition, affordable housing, etc.
Spare some catastrophe technology is monotonically increase -- it advances with new inventions.
So not really relevant as to whether we are more or worse off than the 50s and 60s in economic aspects.
You don't think what you get for your money is important in a discussion of economic advancement? It sounds like you decided on an answer, then went looking for a question which fits it.
> We could have had smartphones and anti-retrovirals AND affordable education/housing/healthcare/job prospects.
How can you possibly know that's true? Where are these example economies that have US-level innovation but also has the wealth distribution you crave.
>You don't think what you get for your money is important in a discussion of economic advancement?
No, I think technical progress is not important in a discussion of economic advancement. The economy can go up and down, but technical progress only goes forward (spare some catastrophe).
Even in the Great Depression or WWII, technology advanced just fine.
>How can you possibly know that's true? Where are these example economies that have US-level innovation but also has the wealth distribution you crave.
US had US-level innovation AND that "wealth distribution I crave" in the 50s-70s.
USSR was run by a party elite, devastated with millions dead/imprisoned in their purges, devastated with millions of dead in WWII, and starting from an agrarian economic base much behind the US of the time (1917) to begin with.
Without those aspects (but keeping equality more or less same, e.g. like Swedish style democratic socialism) it could be a very different story.
It's not like inequality produced them. If anything, today with rampant inequality we have far fewer innovations (and the US has far worse infrastructure, roads, etc) than in the golden post-war era up to the 90s.
I think a better comparison is East and West Germany.
You might also want to revisit your assumption that the US in 1917 wasn't an agrarian economy, given that the majority of Americans worked on farms between the World Wars.
Also, Baku (joined the USSR into 1920) produced over half the world's oil at that time.
Sweden had a very good run during the USSR time period. Especially post war until the ~90s. Somewhat ironically partly because we wanted to be more [0], and less [1], like the US.
[0] “In the end, all such authoritarian measures were dismissed by the Commission, which instead went with Sundbärg's goal of bringing the best sides of America to Sweden (unsurprisingly, as Sundbärg himself wrote the conclusions). First on his list of urgent reforms were universal male suffrage, better housing, general economic development, and a broader popular education which could counteract ‘class and caste differences.’” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Emigration_Commissio...
[1] “Always a dedicated traveler, Mr. Palme after graduation hitch-hiked around the United States for four months, visiting 34 states on a $300 shoestring budget that took him into pockets of poverty in a land of plenty. It was a shocking experience for the young aristocrat. He recalled having seen 'how poor some people were in the world's richest land.' The advanture marked a turning point in his life, and the comment was virtually a theme for what was to become the socialist ideology of his political life.” https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/01/obituaries/olof-palme-ari...
You can surely search for 3+ decades of books, studies, and articles on the declining US middle class, stagnant wages, increased housing/college/healthcare costs, etc, right?
Isn't it funny how when you ask for citations, the other person flips out and says do it yourself? Like, I have to spend my time figuring out if you actually did research or pulled something out of your ass? Sorry bro, got better things to do with my time than your work for you.
