The end of poverty began in the US around 1800, when the specter of famine was finally eliminated. Throughout the 19th century, Americans grew in height and life expectancy, resulting in America's poor being the richest poor people in the world.
Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
> Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
This can’t be true. Just look at the homelessness situation across the US. No shelter, no income, no sanitation. That is certainly worse quality of life than a king.
You must starting your definition of poor quite a ways up the income scale. Maybe you could make make an argument for solidly middle class and above?
Even then, there are even a lot of benefits to being a king which probably outweigh having basic modern amenities like running water and a nice bed. Who needs plumbing when you have a servant to bring you whatever you want?
Beyond that, quality of life is also significantly emotional. There’s a lot of stress to life unless you’re rich, and you also don’t have very much control over things around you. A king has a significant amount of control by definition, and that probably contributes a lot to their quality of life.
The homeless issue in the US is much more of a drug addiction and alcoholism problem than a down on one's luck problem. Something like 90% of the homeless are in that category.
> Who needs plumbing when you have a servant to bring you whatever you want?
I like hot showers. I bet you do, too. Besides, what do you think happens to kings when they get a toothache? No anesthetic, nothing to be done except an idiot with a pair of pliers and filthy hands. I doubt many kings had teeth after 35 or so.
> There’s a lot of stress to life unless you’re rich,
I'm afraid that's pretty presumptuous. The rich just have different problems.
> and you also don’t have very much control over things around you. A king has a significant amount of control by definition, and that probably contributes a lot to their quality of life.
When you're the king, everyone wants to kill you. Including your own brothers and sisters and kids. You have no friends. The losers in the game of thrones are always killed.
> The homeless issue in the US is much more of a drug addiction and alcoholism problem than a down on one's luck problem. Something like 90% of the homeless are in that category.
Where'd you hear that? I've been watching a lot of Soft White Underbelly, interviews with people on Skid Row, and that doesn't really seem to be the case in general although there are a few [1]. Invisible People also does interviews with homeless people more widely and it's even rarer there [2]. Most of the time it just comes down to them not being able to afford to not be homeless and not having anyone to turn to. Without a home, they have no way to keep clean, receive mail or do anything else they need to do in order to keep a job. So it's a catch-22 for most. Without security, they are assaulted, get robbed (of even their basics), arrested and never get to rest, so there's a lot of positive feedback loops that can quickly make things even worse.
And 30% have severe mental health issues (same source).
Treating those issues solves only ~half the problem though (though that's probably 90% of the visible problem). The rest (to your point) is that it's really hard to afford to get a home when you don't have one.
I'd blame zoning as the biggest issue here. Boarding homes and micro-apartments are effectively banned in most cities. Meaning that the hurdle to go from homeless to not homeless is way higher than it should be. Instead of having to scrounge up a couple hundred bucks for a month's worth of housing, you're looking at a thousand or more.
I blame private property as the biggest issue here. Empty dwellings outnumber homeless people at least 10-to-1 in the Global North (France, UK, USA..). The fact that media and corporations pretend that's not a problem and the only solution to homelessness is to build more housing tells a lot about what's wrong with "our" approach to problem.
If we lived in a democracy where people can decide for themselves locally, homelessness would be a non-issue. As a former squatter myself, i know for sure if we voted in my neighborhood for/against cracking empty housing to provide housing for all, over 90% of people would support it. If the people in power had the will to do anything about homelessness, by simply ordering police not to evict squats (unless someone squatted a person's residence while they were on vacation, which under french law is a "house theft" crime, not "squatting") in less than 72h we could rehouse all the homeless people and give them proper sanitation.
The problem is the political class and their watchdogs (media, police) are only interested in protecting banks, corporations and wealthy individuals. They couldn't care less about homelessness or people who can't afford to eat.
This is a survey of drug use, not cause of homelessness. Many people use drugs after they've become homeless because of how terrible and pointless it is. Check out the interviews.
This reminds me of a survey that was done in Seattle about of homeless were from out of the county or not, and the data collected found most of them squad they were housed in pioneer square before becoming homeless. Anyone who knows Seattle would find that very fishy (it would be like most homeless in LA saying they were housed in skid row).
Surveys in the homeless community are extremely unreliable, but I guess that makes sense (better to claim you started drugs after being homeless than admit you did them before, more sympathy that way). Even outside of the homeless context, self reported surveys aren’t considered reliable (see https://www.verywellmind.com/definition-of-self-report-42526...).
I sympathize with the OP, the source is unreliable.
In a similar vain, a lot of US residents do not believe the numbers China is pumping out in regards to COVID-19, just another example of how the source can be unreliable.
Being homeless changes your attitude and perspective on life. It's unlikely these people can be truly honest with outsiders, especially strangers because then they don't receive any aid or help.
Personally, I can't take those interviews as a gospel of truth because I don't believe the authors.
The percent of chronic homeless in the drug/substance abuse bucket is pretty high, but it’s like comparing the people visible on the streets (chronic) vs someone who ran out of money is and is crashing on a couch or living in their car.
The problem is treating both kinds of homeless equally: they have completely different problems with completely different solutions. Give the chronic homeless just housing and they’ll more than likely just trash it or figure out how to support their habit with it, the latter will use the housing in the way it was intended as help.
We should throw as much help as possible to those who aren’t in the drug and substance abuse bucket simply because it is very difficult to help them effectively once they move into that bucket.
> The percent of chronic homeless in the drug/substance abuse bucket is pretty high
That's true, but correlation does not equal causation. Many rich people have drugs/mental issues, too. Some drugs are basically a social status symbol in some circles (cocaine, champagne and some other fancy alcohols, for example).
Many people become homeless due to reasons unrelated to drugs. Once you're homeless, basic survival becomes an every day struggle and it's not hard to see how mind-altering substances can be very appealing in this situation.
> Many people become homeless due to reasons unrelated to drugs. Once you're homeless, basic survival becomes an every day struggle and it's not hard to see how mind-altering substances can be very appealing in this situation.
For some definition of “many” sure, but many become homeless because of drugs, driving their families to give up on them as they are not able to deal with their problems. Still some are independent but lose their apartments as their $2k/month drug habit eats into rent money. Alcoholism is another problem.
The fact that you claim substance abuse is so pervasive among those who aren’t homeless should provide some evidence that ya, people do fall into homelessness because they aren’t lucky enough to remain high functioning or have the support network that would allow them to abuse while remaining housed.
Good, then we agree chronic homelessness is not entirely due to drugs, as i often read on HN :)
> Alcoholism is another problem.
I think it's the same problem. Alcoholism is a drug addiction problem and can be just as bad as any other addiction. That some cultures believe alcohol to be tolerable/encourageable is irrelevant. Alcohol was historically weaponized against indigenous people (not only in the US) and to this day some revolutionary indigenous movements such as the zapatistas in Chiapas consider it this way. Much like crack cocaine was weaponized by CIA against black/brown communities in the US (to finance their counter-revolutionary covert wars in South America).
> people do fall into homelessness because they aren’t lucky enough to remain high functioning
Exactly, but drugs is far from the only reason to become non-functioning according to capitalist standards. Depression/burnout, physical health, workspace/job closure, and *many* other factors can lead to homelessness.
"60 Minutes" did a segment on that, too, and went interviewing Seattle homeless. Everyone they interviewed turned out to be a drug addict or an alcoholic, even though they initially fooled the 60 Minutes crew.
Lots of them will say they were homeless because they lost their job, which is technically correct, but digging deeper reveals they lost their job because they were drug addicts and alcoholics.
While you’re partially right that chronic homelessness is related to drug abuse, most of them are mentally ill. Unfortunately due to legal changes in the 1980’s, you can no longer help the mentally ill unless they provide consent. The end result is they stay homeless, while the other 80% of the homeless end up recovering in less than a year.
As Pinker points out in Enlightenment Now, progress is devilishly hard to measure. I enjoy more air conditioning than the Rothschilds. But I feel like they perhaps enjoyed other things that I can never aspire to…
>The homeless issue in the US is much more of a drug addiction and alcoholism problem than a down on one's luck problem.
This is more like a convenient truth. How many of those people become homeless, then turn drugs? It's not like the US's social safety net is particularly robust, and even just being on the street for a week can expose you to the violent way the homeless are treated.
Drug addiction leads to homelessness, as the addict's priority is always getting the drugs. Things like jobs, friends, family, sense, are all sacrificed for the drugs. Everything is sacrificed, and so they wind up on the street.
Treating a homeless drug addict as a victim of poverty is like giving cough medicine to a person with lung cancer. It does not work.
That is a very simplistic view of addiction; High functioning addiction is the norm - Purdue made billions creating them. I'm sure - at your workplace in a major city like SF or NY you have worked with people addicted to Benzos, Cocaine, or Alcohol. Most of them will tell you they can "quit any time" (they can't), but are still capable of taking a shower and showing up to work.
>Treating a homeless drug addict as a victim of poverty is like giving cough medicine to a person with lung cancer. It does not work.
How do you rehab someone who does not have stable shelter? Are they supposed to battle withdrawal on the street? Housing first policies have demonstrably worked in Finland and Austria.
Sure why not, but what after that? If you think helping them overcome addiction then throwing them back out on the streets is gonna have any positive effects, i can say with 99% confidence you haven't spent more than a day being homeless.
So give them housing? Please analyze what you are saying. What is a drug rehab facility if not housing with nurses on staff?
What I'm asking you to consider is that housing first policies are cheaper to scale and have shown to work. If people's basic needs are met with safety and dignity they are less likely to run away to drugs and alcohol.
So the 40 million Americans living below the poverty line with zero access to health care or dental services are living like kings? Really? May I suggest that you talk to some of them and ask if they feel like Kings/Queens?
They still have better health and dental care than medieval kings, who had zero of both. They didn't even have toothbrushes or any notion of dental or medical hygiene.
BTW, those miniseries on the lives of medieval royalty that are popular today are romantic fantasies. For example, the only warm place in a castle in winter is right next to the fireplace. They had no concept of central heating, not even an iron stove. Do you want to live through a winter in England with no heating?
How about being around people who never, ever bathed? What do you think happened to all the poop in the castle? Did the cooks ever wash their hands? Most of your kids are going to die before they're adults.
There's a fallacy at play here. Some kings died due to lack of knowledge how to treat them. In the US, poor people die from diseases we know how to treat but society refuses to treat them because they don't have money.
Measuring the increase in possible outcomes is irrelevant if you don't take into considerable how accessible/affordable those outcomes are. It's just like if you said "but medieval kings didn't have space travel" because you see Jeff Bezos going into space as a sign of social progress for the rest of us.
There is no way that modern poor have worse health care than medieval kings, because those kings HAD NO HEALTH CARE, and in fact, what doctors they did have did harm to their luckless patients. For example, they would bleed a person to try to drain out what was making them sick. For another, they did not wash their hands or their instruments.
I'm not arguing otherwise. All i'm saying is you can't compare apple to oranges: it's fine if you can't walk on the moon. Except when every one else is doing it because it's become trivial and you're denied it because of your caste/class or social status.
That many Americans die due to illnesses we know how to treat for cheap for decades is unbelievable. And don't even get me started on long-term conditions, like insulin or HIV-medication prices skyrocketing for zero reason (well, there's one: profit) decades after their first commercialization.
In much of the world, the USA is (rightfully) derided for being so backwards when it comes to health care. I would even go so far as to argue that some traditional medicines (plants, kine/ostheo, acupuncture...) are/were far more advanced than the medical treatments available to poorer US citizens (i.e. none), but i'm not versed in medical sciences so don't take my word for it.
You are absolutely right. When I lived in Europe, the US was often used as an example of how bad things can get when you prioritise profits more than people. The US culture is brutal to the less capable/unlucky citizens.
> Why don't they have medicaid? It covers everyone under the 140% the poverty line.
No, it doesn't; in states that have expanded, it covers up to 138% of the FPL, but in some states for adults without dependent children who are neither aged, blind, disabled, nor pregnant, it covers nothing, and for parents of dependent children the limit is still not 138%.
The homeless issue is in the name. It's people without a home. The solution is to provide people with a place they can call home, like a house or an apartment.
Why focus on drugs? Do you believe that some people deserve to have no home if they have a drug problem?
With the security and comfort of having a home, becoming a productive member of society becomes much easier if that's what you care about.
>Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
Only in some very limited aspects. "Oh, they can eat wild strawberries in winter" or "have access to modern technology whereas a medieval king didn't" and such.
The don't have the power of medieval kings, the don't have the wealth of medieval kings, they don't have the estates of medieval kings, the servants and free time of medieval kings, they certainly don't command the respect medieval kings had, they don't have many luxuries of medieval kings, and lots of other things besides. They also have to work shitty jobs (even two jobs), they can end up homeless and live in the streets (including out in the cold), a random cop can abuse them, etc.
There's more to "better quality if life than medieval kings" than modern medicine and gadgets...
Let's see, they're taller (better nutrition), live in heated / air conditioned dwellings, indoor plumbing, flush toilets, clean water, fresh food year round, no smallpox, far fewer diseases, far better educated, infinitely better medical and dental care, better clothing, TV, phones, ...
That sounds like a bunch of rich people stuff to me. If you're poor, you're lucky if you have a place (many don't) let alone heating and air conditioning (are you kidding?), what you can afford to eat is terrible nutritionally and obviously you can't afford medical or dental going into without life-ending debt. And this is when we're talking about the US, not even a poor country.
Yeah, I just defined it in my comment. Poor people don't have those things I complained about and many (0.1% of all people apparently) don't have houses.
Even whole cities had running water, all the way back to the Roman era. Heck, Rome I said? Ancient Knossos, over 3000 years back:
"Water technologies included running water within the palaces and other settlements, drainage systems, piping systems, rainwater harvesting, and other technologies."
However Kings did have shelter, plenty of food, easy access to sex, lots of fun and games, the respect of everybody, the best protection in the land, the power to behead or torture anything they didn't like etc. So lets be fair when we compare the two.
They died young and were shorter. Shorter is indicative of poor nutrition. If you're in Europe, look at the royal armor in museums. Those would be kid size today.
The same goes for colonial America. Take a look at the clothing in the Fort William museum (from the 1700s). It's so small.
Kings had access to the best doctors of their era. Medical knowledge was just less. Not due to lack of access though. And Kings didn't need to do 99% of the back-breaking back modern poor have...
They have access to all the world's information. They can travel across continents in a number of hours for less than two weeks wages. They can push a button on their phone to have gourmet food delivered to their house in under an hour. They can press another button on their phone to fetch a personal driver that will deliver them to any destination. They can choose to drive themselves, of course, and can travel hundreds of miles in an affordable, smooth ride that beats even a gold adorned horse drawn carriage, while streaming music from any decade or century. They can learn almost any skill. They can converse instantly with anyone in the world in a way that beats even magic mirrors of medieval fantasy.
If you had to choose between being Louis XVI or Henry VIII and a middle class American in Cleveland, Ohio, what would you choose?
So? The Kings had access to much more information than they cared about already.
>They can travel across continents in a number of hours for less than two weeks wages.
A big chunk can't even afford to take a couple of sick days off, lest they be fired, or can't afford to retire and work in their late 60s and 70s in shitty jobs like a Walmart greeter - much less travel across continents to have vacations.
>They can push a button on their phone to have gourmet food delivered to their house in under an hour.
The King could do the same, all day, every day, with personal chefs familiar with their preferences, and without fear for the expenses...
>They can press another button on their phone to fetch a personal driver that will deliver them to any destination.
Oh, how Kings would be jealous of the magic of Uber...
Still, are we talking about the poor - for which Uber is an expense they have to consider very well, and days off a luxury, or people above that? Because I don't see many trailer park types visiting Paris or Barcelona...
>If you had to choose between being Louis XVI or Henry VIII and a middle class American in Cleveland, Ohio, what would you choose?
Depends, if the middle class American is also cherry picked to die (e.g. from some stray bullet or robbery gone wrong), I'd pick one of the Kings. As for Kings who didn't die in guillotine, that would be a no brainer. Who wants to be a middle class schmuck in Ohio, as opposed to a King? (I guess the kind of people who overestimate the magic of Uber and food delivery).
I don't think you've really thought about how awful the middle ages are.
> The Kings had access to much more information than they cared about already.
Royals used to have portraits painted and transported just so they could get an idea who the person their arranged marriage with actually looked like. Bet they'd like Facebook.
Louis XIV commissioned a more accurate map of france. It took 4 generations to make.
The first semaphore was so valuable it was initially reserved just for government use.
Oops, no wait, these are all post-medieval by a few centuries! Things were even worse before.
> The King could do the same, all day, every day, with personal chefs familiar with their preferences, and without fear for the expenses...
The king would be stuck with local food, in season only. At least he'd probably be able to afford some foreign spices. And they probably couldn't get food in an hour, due to the less efficient kitchens of the time, and not having thousands of restaurants already on standby to serve every kind of meal.
> Oh, how Kings would be jealous of the magic of Uber...
That device that travels twice as fast as a horse for hours without break, and at more comfort? I think so.
> As for Kings who didn't die in guillotine
England has never had a king live past 81. It's even worse if you look at medieval kings. US Life Expectancy is ~79. Even ignoring life expectancy, pretty much all illness was vastly more unpleasant. As a king, you'd likely have gout (called the "disease of kings") or an StD.
> Who wants to be a middle class schmuck
The purpose of the exercise is to determine who is poorer in terms of what is available to them. Kings are no doubt more important and powerful, but can we agree that's besides the point? I for one, would take the quality of life of said schmuck.
People really underestimate just how hard life was in prior ages, especially due to disease.
An old person my wife once talked to said that "penicillin changed everything". It certainly did, along with vaccines and other very effective treatments (including hand-washing!) for once-deadly diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, even leprosy.
Death was a major part of life for folks living prior to the late 1800s. Everyone experienced frequent life-threatening sickness and death of close friends, infants & children, family members, and acquaintances.
If I had a choice, and avoiding a very hard life & early death were my only criteria, I'd choose to live now rather than then, regardless of social status.
I recently received a copy of a letter with some information about my ancestors from the 1700s. Apparently they owned an inn in a small village in France (it is still there and looks like a relatively nice place to me, so…I guess they were doing ok?). They had 10 children, of whom 6 died before the age of 3. The mother died at age 39, in the last 8 months of her life 3 of her children died.
Henry VIII didn't die from violence. He died from (probably) complications of obesity at 55. I'd rather be some random middle-class female from Ohio than one of Henry's wives, though.
In fact, I'd rather be some random middle-class female from Ohio than any female in the Middle Ages, because of the dangers of childbirth back then.
Henry VIII lived in constant agony from a jousting injury. The witch doctors of the day could do nothing for him. Complications of obesity likely meant diabetes.
At first, I was confused reading your assertions of what poor people of the US can do, things that obviously demand money - cash or credit - that a person in poverty don't have.
With your final sentence I realized you're not talking about poverty at all, but the wealthy, which in a sense clarified things, but also made me confused: what does your comment have to do with this discussion?
>>>At first, I was confused reading your assertions of what poor people of the US can do, things that obviously demand money - cash or credit - that a person in poverty don't have.
A homeless, flat-broke prostitute can turn 4 tricks in a day. Let's call them $50 each, for $200 cash-in-hand. Then they can take that $200 to Wal-Mart, buy an Android phone for $50, a SIM card for $50, and one of those loadable debit cards for $50. That leaves them with $50 cash and a $50 debit card balance. They can use their smartphone and debit card to access many of the modern amenities that the parent post mentioned, such as a delivery meal from Uber Eats, or a Greyhound bus ticket, or music on iTunes. The point is, this stuff is within the realm of the possible for the modern poor. It is NOT for a medieval king. Not at all. No matter how large his army, no matter how much gold in his coffers, Richard the Lionheart can't instantly access music from the other side of the planet while traveling across England in a climate-controlled vehicle at twice the speed of a horse.
I don't imagine many people would trade sitting on a throne in a grand hall enjoying a feast whilst watching the era's leading performers personally dedicate performances to them for the possibility of selling their body to download a superhero movie and buy a burrito and packet of cigarettes.
There are some tradeoffs where the average person doing a boring middle class job really does have better opportunity and greater security than pretty much anyone in pre 20th century history (and some forms of ancient kingship that really weren't pleasant lifestyles), but let's not take it to reductio ad absurdum levels
>>>I don't imagine many people would trade sitting on a throne in a grand hall enjoying a feast whilst watching the era's leading performers personally dedicate performances to them for the possibility of selling their body to download a superhero movie and buy a burrito and packet of cigarettes.
That "grand hall" had worse climate control than a Motel-6, and the food was dirty. We can debate the subjective utility of skilled medieval musicians vs a low-end local rock/metal concert with supporting audiovisual systems (a ticket to that can fit within the budget of a few tricks), I would charitably call that a break-even. And a $50 trick buys a LOT more than a burrito and a pack of cigs. You can get a steak dinner at Texas Roadhouse to with your pack of Newport 100s.
The "ick factor" of selling their body was just to demonstrate that even the most down-on-their-luck, homeless, destitute American has a path to access the commodity goods of our age. I don't think it's an absurd reduction to point that out.
America's poor can't travel (it costs! even if you bus it, you need time off work, a place to stay, etc), they can't have gourmet food delivered (it costs!), they can't fetch a driver (it costs!), they often can't drive themselves (cars cost!).
They also generally can't afford medical care, child care, a wide variety of leisure activities (plays, shows, even movies cost!)
They do have access to information and music, but if I had to be a medieval king or a poor person in Cleveland, it is such a no-brainer I can't even understand how the question is being asked.
They still get free treatment, regardless of their debt. The hospitals just write off those debts, it's covered by the high prices they charge the patients who can pay.
If you're a rich person with stuff in your company's name, or some kind of structured impersonal assets (and ultimately, relatives to take care of you, and friends to do you favors every time you bankrupt and default Trump-style) yes.
Otherwise, there are repercusions from one that aren't there on the other - up to incoming a debt slave to your default's arrangement, not getting any credit anymore, and even ending up homeless.
>The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food.
So? Many people die from even baser diceases today too. Including homeless and poor people in the US. And they toil their whole lives before that, and are made to feel insignificant, and have no power or servants, unlike the kings.
Did you read the healthcare link I provided? Death from those sorts of diseases are a tiny fraction of fatalities in the US. They're so small that it is disingenuous to extrapolate them as indicative of the plight of "the poor in Cleveland" writ large.
But just for English kings who died of natural causes, dysentery killed 2 and food poisoning 1, out of 60 total (dead from natural causes, not 60 total monarchs....a 5% fatality rate for the most powerful people in the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_Britis...
"made to feel insignificant" "have no power"....I'd really like to see how you are quantifying these, and why you would weight them so heavily in a quality-of-life assessment to even mention them in the same breadth as dying of preventable food sanitation diseases.
“Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.”
That may be true from a purely materialistic point of view but a lot of the unpleasantness of being poor is stress. Not knowing if you can feed your children tomorrow, you may become homeless, if you work minimum wage you often get treated like crap. Medieval kings didn’t have to worry about that.
In short, this is a pretty condescending line mainly uttered by people who aren’t poor and don’t know how it is to be poor.
Agreed, this is such a privileged point of view. This person wouldn't last one minute in the situations those homeless people are in, yet sees fit to pretend they are living better than kings.
You don't think there are any stressors related to being king? People constantly wanted to take your power, it isn't like the subjects are bound to serve, there are no contracts or laws or anything ensuring people do what you want, your only way to control things is to convince others do what you want. If you aren't careful you'd get poisoned, or hanged or ran out of the country from a coup or rebellion. Not to mention that everyone's children died in droves back then, even kings, having your kids die on you is stressful.
> Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
Humans are social animals, and kings are at the absolute top of the social hierarchy. They had immense power. Poor people have very little power in comparison. This has an immense effect on their experience in the world.
Most poor people in the US face a variety of real hardships. Your comment seems quite tone deaf to this reality.
Yes, because the government is generally bad at using capital and the ROI on higher tax rates reaches negative at some point, nevermind that it can print as much as it wants.
This is hardly true, and is only "common" wisdom due to an incredibly effective PR campaign by Ronald Reagan. In the 60s, when we were sending people to the moon, people didn't generally hold such contempt for government. Any large government is no more dysfunctional than a large private corporation - the inside of Google isn't all sunshine and roses.
>that it can print as much as it wants
Just because you don't see it come out of your paycheck doesn't mean it's not a tax. It's an undemocratic, flat tax that is paid with inflation.
>Also in your opinion he represent a bad government and none the less you want more government?
Reagan was bad, to me, because he massively cut social programs. So yes, Reagan was bad because he made "less government". If Reagan did "more government", then I would be happy. Do you not see the obvious contradiction in your comment?
If you need me to spell it out for you:
1. I am for more social spending, even if it has a "bad" ROI, because the ROI for social spending is hard to measure.
2. Regan was incredibly effective as painting government programs as woefully inefficient.
3. If Regan did more social spending, I would want more of that, but that is not who Regan was, so I do not like that.
Most crashes are caused by misallocated capital in the markets, and state intervention on a massive scale is usually the answer.
The state isn't an amazing tool, but it is the best one we have. It can bring about universal healthcare and education, mass housebuilding programmes, regulation and optimisation of dysfunctional markets.. and even put human beings on the moon.
And why are they doing this? The trail leads right back to... government.
"Side effects include investors to dumping money into sketchy stuff because nothing else returns worth a crap" is one of the big gripes people have with 2008+ fed policy.
How about they all distribute their wealth directly? Or even better, don’t amass that much wealth but pay their workers better. They can still keep more than enough to live better than medieval kings.
Piketty covers this extensively in Capital and Ideology and comes to the opposite conclusion with charts of data of wealth taxation versus income inequality in every country for which there is reliable data. There has only been progressive wealth taxation for a short time period in the USA and the UK off the top of my head.
An example: the communist revolution in Russia in 1917. (The “negative effect” included millions of people getting murdered, killed by the famine, or imprisoned.)
Bulgaria has free healthcare and university education. People in Bulgaria are also very unlikely to be killed by police or die in a mass shooting. Bulgaria also has less people incarcerated per capita than the US. Bulgarian workers get mandatory 20 day of PTO a year.
I could imagine lot of people who would think they are better off there than in the US.
E: There's of course a lot of things that aren't great about Bulgaria - it is probably the least developed and most corrupt EU country - but since US is very unequal, it depends whether your baseline is millionaire FAANG software engineer or minority person working in Walmart.
Correction, higher education is dirt cheap, not free. My English degree cost me about $600 in tuition, CS is about double that. Of course international students pay more, but it's still cheap by Western standards. Healthcare is free, at least in theory. In practice you may need to grease some palms to get decent treatment. There is a thriving private system, not too expensive either. American-style health insurance is a standard perk for tech companies. Hopefully it won't end up driving prices to the roof.
> I could imagine lot of people who would think they are better off there than in the US.
I love Bulgaria (beautiful country, great people) but it's just your imagination: there are still more Bulgarians emigrating to the USA than Americans to Bulgaria. Lots more. Like almost one-way street, really.
Poor minority Walmart employees having no idea how good they would have it in Bulgaria instead...
At the same time, I assume Americans would love to have 20 days of PTO, and not be afraid they end up in debt over disease or die because they can't afford insulin.
This is a hard pill for society to swallow. On the poor end people legitimately feel like they are not well off because they have so much less than many others. On the high end, rich people don't like the idea that 200 years from now they will be seen as relatively poor.
I think on the contrary, contemporary culture doesn't care as much about legacy or image as other cultures in the past. I think it glorifies "hustle" and "profit" much more than legacy.
> Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
That's definitely not true. That's a bias with some social researcher focusing on certain metrics such as income and education level. But in many societies (especially prior to that period), quality of life was rather unrelated to anything measurable: mutualizing resources on a local scale provides quality of life improvements which cannot be measured by looking at commercial activity (money).
> resulting in America's poor being the richest poor people in the world.
That's a pretty big assertion without evidence especially with America's awful healthcare system and it's smaller safety net than some other countries.
I just pushed back on a unsupported statement, not sure where you got "hell-hole" from. God forbid we admit America isn't the greatest country on earth in everything.
Everywhere in the world had an awful healthcare system during the time period they're talking about.
Germany had made a few baby steps towards socialized healthcare at the very end of the 19th century, but other than that socialized healthcare systems didn't start until the 20th century and universal coverage not until after World War II.
GDP per capita includes public spending, but (I'm guessing here) may not include a weighting for what people value. So America's epic military budget counts towards that figure, but the comparison with (eg) universal healthcare elsewhere is dollar for dollar. Which is to say, GDP per capita does not reflect public values, only public spending.
Homeless. In medieval times, everyone was poor, and one person's life had no value to another. In modern times, I can be relatively safe from violence and predation, recieve shelter from compassionate strangers almost anywhere, get medical care for free with government benefits or through the emergency room, and if I'm really doing bad, go to jail and get three hots and a cot. Sounds vastly preferable to dying by 40 from being a violent thug and living in a dirty tiny cold hall.
I flat out don't believe you. However you are welcome to enlighten us with some of the details. How long were you homeless? Where? How did you get homeless and how did you escape? Why did you go to jail? For how long? Where? And how amazing was your life doing all of that compared with being a King? A King that has shelter, easy access to food, sex with the most beautiful woman in the country, the power to torture and kill anybody he didn't like, the power to change the laws of the country at will, an army of people doing everything to please them? Please enlighten us all on how being homeless or in jail is better than that?
Kings have people trying to murder them, they also have to murder others. They do not have peace. Power doesn't attract me, neither does rape. I'm sorry you're so broken.
I would prefer to be a medival king. Easy access to having sex with the most beautiful woman in the world, beheading people I don't like, fixing laws I don't agree with, having people willing to do anything to please me etc. Lots of perks!
> Easy access to having sex with the most beautiful woman in the world
Which can give you any number of incurable dick-rotting diseases (because no antibiotics) or give birth to an unwanted heir (because no birth control).
> beheading people I don't like
Thus making enemies that will hunt you in your sleep (because no rule-of-law).
> fixing laws I don't agree with
Then having to keep fixing them to repair unwanted side effects (because no law-making experts).
> having people willing to do anything to please me
And having no way to know if those people are really on your side or are just biding their time until their turn to do you in and take your place (because no quiet suburban lifestyle).
If you thinks these are perks, you are watching too much Fantasy.
And if you think that being homeless in the US, being beaten up by people eager to steal your few belongings, raped by strangers and ignored by the police, freezing to death during the winter etc. is better than being a king then you are watching too many feel-good rags-to-riches Disney movies.
Nailed it. I don't understand why smart people on this site can believe in such nonsense. The fallacy of being blinded by ideology is such a strong weakness in human beings regardless of intelligence level.
There's quite a broad range of "poor" in America. At least medieval kings never ran out of food, which people in food deserts do regularly. And medieval kings would have been quite secure, compared to the extreme violence that makes up daily life in many of America's urban poor communities, which are some of the most dangerous in the world.
I'm thankful that I've gotten to live in Northwest DC, South Chicago, West Baltimore, Oakland. Our country's extremes are often as bad as a war-torn country.
> Our country's extremes are often as bad as a war-torn country.
I infer you've never spent time in a war-torn country.
My father told me that in Germany after the war, if you were smoking a cigarette, people would follow you until you threw the butt away. They'd fight over the butt, and the winner would combine the bits of tobacco left with other bits and sell the result.
Accurate figures are not known, but likely millions starved to death in Germany after the war.
That would be an interesting study, actually, to see what percentage of medieval kings died of old age (and not in their successor's dungeon). As a first order approximation, I've looked at the Wikipedia article "List of monarchs of the British Isles by cause of death"[0] (which covers more than just the medieval period), and counted this summary:
The "other" category seems to be cases where the monarch was effectively imprisoned and/or murdered, and I'll exclude the euthanised king as being controversial from the point of view of "violence". That leaves 107 deaths, of which 34 were violent (battle, murdered, assassinated, executed, imprisoned), giving a percentage of about 32%. I guess if you live like a king you have to be willing to die like one too.
This is exactly what I had in mind, thanks for asking.
Are those tribes who are still living a secluded life in the forests of Amazon or say even those who are completely isolated like in Indian ocean islands considered poor? They've had everything they need and unless there's no external interference(Humans, Weather events e.g. Tsunami) they're living a successful life.
Also I have serious issues with the term 'Civilization', I don't know how tribes who have been co-existing with nature successfully for thousands of years could be called uncivilized where as we who have set in motion the likely destruction of vast majority of the species on the planet considered civilized?
I feel that mentality is a relic of colonial mindset, There are vast amount of written accounts of colonists calling the indigenous people 'Uncivilized'.
That seems like a simple question - yes, they are poor. It would be miserable and horrific, and they'd be happy every day they were healthy because it would be a pleasant surprise.
And there is nothing romantic about being poor and ignorant at the same time. Even if hot running water is now considered a colonial luxury.
The book “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging” examines this in detail. By looking at places where people were thrown back from civilization (wars, famine) and historical examples where pre-industrial civs lived alongside colonial powers. Quite fascinating really.
For example the book explores the fact that much more europeans went into the indian tribal societies in colonial America than the other way around. As well as people longing for the times they were under siege (Saraevo) as they remember the closeness and belonging those situation caused. Fascinating really.
And it also has the virtue of being short - recommended.
Why do you assume tribes living off-grid are miserable? That doesn't seem to be the case unless they are stricken by a particular disease / natural events, usually they appear to be very content with a simple life. That you would be miserable in their condition does not tell us anything about happiness.
This relativism isn't good for anything. They are poor and also underdeveloped in every sense. That's a fact.
If you romanticize them you are not doing them any good. You simply cannot understand what being in their position is like. Any slight inconvenient to a modern society is a very serious event for them, eg. disease, drought, famine, etc. while you have most conveniences in life and most problems solved.
As I said in a previous comment, if you consider yourself a Marxist or a leftist you really aren't. Societies do advance, humanity goes forward. Going back 200-1000 years is not progress and it surely isn't any good. Stagnating isn't either.
That is no argument. Not only you're again dismissing it based on opinion alone, now I'm being personally judged for it... I'm not going down that line.
Practically every research study on happiness associates it with health, family, culture, friends, purpose, religion. Comfort, physical goods, wealth are always at the bottom.
Living in simple conditions doesn't mean forfeiting health or basic sanitation. The question is still valid: you have a home, clean water, a surplus of food, friends, family, sanitary conditions, access to healthcare; but no TV, Netflix, car, laptop. You'll never afford even a mobile phone. Are you poor?
If not having internet, a phone or computer has a detrimental impact on your quality of life - which it most likely does for the vast majority of people who live in the city, have a normal job and bills to pay - then the answer is yes. If you go homeless, hungry or sick because of not having one of these things, yes. But what if it doesn't? It's not as black and white as you imply. This is much more of a philosophical question than socioeconomics (or marxism).
First of all, I'm not judging you, where did I? I'm arguing against your ideas, which are harmful. Second, how am I basing anything on opinion alone?
I never mentioned modern day commodities or technologies, you are arguing against things I've never said, and are completely omitting my main points.
According to your own arguments and words, do "tribes living off-grid" have "a home, clean water, a surplus of food, friends, family, sanitary conditions, access to healthcare"? It seems like you're completely changing what you're saying on the go.
I'll just say this: that's precisely your error, it is not a philosophical question, it is a material one. It is not ideas we're talking about, it's people and their living conditions.
The (vast?) majority of pre-industrial tribes I remember studying in anthropology live in very fertile areas like the Amazon, Pacific islands, and the mountainous jungles of central Africa or Papua New Guinea. These areas can support small scale agriculture but for various reasons are impractical to exploit economically.
Anthropologists have gone to great lengths to study tribes that have had little to no interaction with the outside world so our understanding of their quality of life isn't as biased as you'd think.
Because I have thought carefully about my lifestyle and, like pretty much everyone, decided that if I have the option of being grid-connected I will take it.
It is an open-and-shut case. If people are given a choice, it would be a good day when 1 in 100 would choose to live a life in absolute poverty. If these hypothetical secluded tribes had a choice, they would say the equivalent of "wow, antibiotics! Reliable food! Houses! Sign me up for this please, I want to be a part of it! This will make my life better!" in their local language.
Lots, obviously. It isn't utopia. But not being connected would make you impoverished. Like how monks might disconnect by taking a so-called vow of poverty.
And people who voluntarily do that? Vanishingly rare.
It is interesting that it is obvious to you. Did you grow up in an unconnected region and then become connected later in life? How would your perspective change if that was true. Is this speculation or have you spoken to someone who had that story? I find it fascinating what facts are assumed by societies. That the current way of life is the best is a reoccurring theme amongst societies with very different conditions. To me it is more of a defense mechanism that rationalizes it more than anything else, but that's just my opinion.
I was born on perifery of comunist country during at the time when regime started to colapse. All the people worked either at local state farm or one of few factories that were around.
We all were equaly poor and even if you had money there were few things you can buy anyway. You had a house (build by yourself) and food. If you were in good standing with government, you might get a chance to go to international holiday (in other eastern bloc country). Going anywhere in west would be totaly cost prohibitive even if they allowed to do it. Buying coffee in Vienna (closest big city) would easily cost 3 months of your paycheck.
So you were poor and you know you are poor, but it doesn't matter that much. 30 years later you can easily spot the difference in what does it means to be poor in developed economy: easily available loans and brain drain destroyed the periphery communities as whole. Now people are poor, they know it and they can compare to more well off everyday.
It is very different being poor in functioning community of similarly poor people, where people barther among themselves and being poor in developed country, where you are isolated from wide society or living in society with widespread drug/alcohol/mental illness problems in debt and no way out.
All the fantasy of cotagecore, simple life, #vanlife, home steading is basically trying to get into former type of being poor: not being stressed by work that much, having little societal asspiration, living with other similary minded people (even if that means watching each other posts on social media) and such.
There are many things I would like to reply to this comment but I'll be brief and direct.
If you consider yourself in any way a Marxist or a leftist, you _aren't_, you are pretty far from it. You are not making a rational analysis of society, humanity or reality based on historical materialism. Going back 200-1000 years is not progress. Period.
Clearly, underdeveloped tribes living primitive lives are poor in almost every sense of the word. They may not be poor spiritually, which is debatable, but that's it. There is no colonialism boo-hoo here. Their means, technologies and knowledge are primitive compared to most current day humans. You are romanticizing them based on tedious with current day lives, but if you analyze their situation they _are not_ in a good position compared to humans in more advanced places in the world.
If you think you would like being one of them just think what their average lifespan is, or what their access to drugs, medical treatment, etc is, or what happens to them when there is a drought.
There is nothing to romanticize about it. They have it very rough and they are poor. You shouldn't based your world view on the "noble savage" myth.
I would very much like to be free of spectacle without having to live in the woods. What is it that makes society and spectacle inseparable in your mind? I like these questions because they directly address social assumptions.
One must be careful not to fall into Rousseauian “noble savage” myths. Primitive societies were also stratified, as evidenced by differentiated burials. Violence was also very much a part of their lives. Graeber talks about this.
That doesn’t mean that modern society has nothing to learn from its antecedents, though.
>Could we classify the lives in tribes and villages prior to civilisation as "poverty"? Or did "poverty" begin with civilisation?
It's far more complicated than that. How do you measure inflation across the world of disparate currencies and circumstances across a century? How do you measure it in hostile zones? Some warlord/dictator isn't going to report how much of their population is in poverty.
The error margins would be massive even if you could.
Then there's the complication of poverty vs extreme poverty.
Ultimately what we want to measure isn't 'do you have enough money' but rather 'do you satisfy your maslows heirachy of needs' or rather really how much?
If you look at a tribe, their physiological needs are met, their security needs are met, they most likely have friends and good social order, they very likely have a sense of accomplishment. So what's the problem?
Flipside, we in the rich world have created multiple planet wide problems and what if those tribe people are who have the solution? We want to get them connect to the internet as soon as possible.
A fairly well (but far from universally) accepted thesis is that war and violence was widespread in pre-civilized times, keeping the population density low more "efficiently" than cycles of over-expansion and famine..
I don't fully get it either. Certainly the agricultural revolution led to more babies and more calories (if not better nutrition in the early days), so it is possible to the calories / babies ratio stayed the same.
For the hunt gather nice times stuff to work out, I think theoretically there must also be some claims about the work being divided more evenly. Among other things, that could be some restrictions on how much pregnancy the nomadic band can deal with.
It is always nice to see such narratives based on robust data. For similar stories backed by data I can also recommend the book "Factfulnes" by Hans Rosling [1].
When we talk about basic needs, our global community is making tremendous progress. At the same time, we should not forget that the same system that abolishes poverty also creates enormous inequality, which not only makes people unhappier, but also leads to enormous social tensions within whole societies. So while we should be celebrating the decline in poverty, we are somewhat also left with a sour taste about the side effects that occur.
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.
Inequality has nothing to do with feeling superior or inferior to others (though, our culture absolutely does encourage those beliefs).
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.
The world has limited natural resources, but it doesn't have limited human welfare or enjoyment or wealth. Moreover, natural resources are not consumed, except for helium, energy, and the contents of spacecraft. The natural resources in a big plate glass window are a double handful of sand. The natural resources in a Rembrandt are the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a sheaf of flax and a handful of powdered colorful rocks. The natural resources in a bottle of the finest wine are half a handful of sand, and the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a bunch of grapes. The natural resources in an anti-malaria bed net are what is needed to grow a single cotton plant. A Rolls-Royce contained the same natural resources as a large Yugo.
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."
The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system built up around it to maintain it. From shipping and transport to cheap labor in a 3rd world country.
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 bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".
100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.
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.
Nowhere was dominance of fossil fuels or the very powerful industrial upswing stronger in 01922 than in the United States. But the US did not then have the huge international network of overseas military deployment and occupied territories it developed later that century. It did have some overseas territories: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Alaska, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Wake Island, the Panama Canal, and arguably Honduras; but these were primarily naval bases and tourist resorts, not pools of cheap labor or troves of resources to exploit.
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.
This is a common set of misconceptions, so I'll try to explain why they're wrong.
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.
Thank you for a very thorough reply. Interesting read. We very obviously read different things. Basically what I hear you saying is: we have the technology, we can do it. Please correct me if im reading you wrong. And sure, that is the hope, and I'm not saying that we wont be able to find solutions - simply that our current solutions wouldnt work if scaled to the world. My argument is simply that we're on a massive ecological clock, and I dont see our current political systems or power structures being able to support the necessary change.
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...
Oh, well, I do agree that if we just tried to scale up the current fossil-fuel-based economy to the world, that would be ecologically catastrophic. But the infrastructure to do that doesn't exist either! And we're already on the path to switching over to renewable energy, not because of political will but because it's cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world now. It's definitely possible to implement at scale—as demonstrated by the fact that even in your own country 80% of electrical generation is already solar and wind. That won't solve overfishing or feedlot-induced aquifer eutrophication, but I think we can eliminate those with relatively minor lifestyle changes, changes that will require political will.
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.
> 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."
“Mental problems”—did people fail to Think and Grow Rich or something?
Listen, I don't know if you have anyone in your family with mental problems, but it's very common for them to result in poverty, despite having what would appear to be opportunity, well-aligned incentives, knowledge, and correct beliefs. And I really don't think this is a thing you should be making fun of.
I was making fun of the apparent idea that some people are poor because they have the wrong attitude. So that was not what you meant. You are still wrong however, and your opinion is harmful in my opnion.
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.
This comment is not up to the standards of this site, or indeed of decent human discourse, and I suggest that you delete it immediately. Specifically, you are lying about what I have said in order to smear me, while contributing no insight of your own, and all of this on a sensitive emotional issue.
> huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else.
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.
huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else.
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.
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.
> 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.
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”…
> the proposition of equality as a meaningful metric is absurd at every level of examination
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…
What are you talking about? Equality is a well-established concept. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that people don’t believe in it.
>we should not forget that the same system that abolishes poverty also creates enormous inequality
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].
You could argue that the wealth of Swedes comes from the (indirect) exploitation of the poor. IKEA and H&M are household names that give Swedes and the world cheap clothing and furniture, virtually all of which is made by comparatively much poorer people in China, Bangladesh, etc.
I think that's definitely true but we have some heavier examples than the ones you listed and at the same time massive natural resources which include iron (and many other metals), hydro and timber as well as significant local value generation in high-tech and services. The lack of inequality comes definitely from the very strong labor movement though.
> 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
Volvo - exploits poorly paid non-union workers in countries like Mexico to make cars and/or car parts
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.
It’s a shame I don’t know Max’s handle in HN but if you follow him on Twitter you’ll see he’s a very big fan of that book. I think it’s mentioned in the about page of OWID.
Wealth is a zero sum game, And when 1% holds more than 50% of entire wealth then inequality becomes the root cause of every social issue as the 1% has enough incentives to preserve the status-quo.
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.
I think this is simply a false goal. $30 a day is an arbitrary number and is certainly in the realm of "relative poverty" already: a person who lives on $30 a day is relatively poor - that is, in relation to the middle class in rich countries. That life might seem to be a misery, but with the economic development worldwide, today's life of middle class in rich countries will also seem like a misery in 50 years, and the threshold will rise again. So a goal to "eliminate $30 a day poverty" is little but a goal to "establish artificial, Soviet style forced redistributional equality of outcomes" which is hardly beneficial for development, social cohesion, or democracy, and can hardly be morally justified.
The goal of poverty reduction must be that the people don't starve or destroy their health due to poverty, and their children aren't poverty-trapped (but it has limits too - make higher education free for everyone and in the next generation education will simply be irrelevant as elites will find different ways to preserve their hereditary status, and this is a dangerous thing cos non-educated people will get in control of things, so it's better to keep higher education unattainable to the poor so to at least the rich kids educated).
One problem, other comments hint on the same thing, is that poverty is not an absolute, it's relative.
We would consider ourselves poor if we lived as a family of five in a tiny early 20th New York immigrant's appartment, even though we'd be much better off than a feudal peasant living in a straw hut with no electricity and a distant water well (the "working class" of its day), which in turn would be must better off than some early aggrarian iron age person (even an upper class one). So, in some sense, poverty must be estimated with regard to access to the standards and niceties of the era (and is therefore connected to inequality).
In another sense, poverty is also qualitative and cultural, and working as a factory cog in a sweatshop for $3 dollars might be worse than living as part of your traditional tribe (and their lifestyle) for $0 dollars. And yet, we herald people whose native lands have been plundered (or whose local e.g. farm income has been destroyed by cheaper imports) and are forced against their will and to the detriment of their lifestyle, to seek work in the cities as a triumph over poverty.
What can be measured well, is whether we have greatly reduced hunger and childbirth deaths and such metrics.
But poverty is too flexible and abstract a term to say we have "ended" it. Else we'd have already "ended poverty" when we moved from the caves to early cities and huts too - as everybody had raised their income levels and owned goods and such. And yet, poverty just reappeared in a different relative level.
> One problem, other comments hint on the same thing, is that poverty is not an absolute, it's relative.
Seems like you're just trying to redefine "poverty" to mean "income inequality". Income inequality is an issue that's worth tackling, but it's also important to recognize absolute standards of living conditions. We already have a term for income inequality, it's called income inequality. It's unclear why you want to redefine "poverty" to also mean "income inequality".
>poverty must be estimated with regard to access to the standards and niceties of the era
That's fine. Other commenters have mentioned tackling about starting to address "basic poverty" after we address "extreme poverty".
>Seems like you're just trying to redefine "poverty" to mean "income inequality".
No, I'm trying to properly define property, instead of leaving it as a hazy term.
And this includes income inequality, because what's considered poor is not static (see my example regarding the feudal peasant in their hut, the early 20th century immigrant family, or a modern trailer poor).
>It's unclear why you want to redefine "poverty" to also mean "income inequality".
It would have been "unclear" if I haven't already given several arguments for it on the comment you've replied to.
>No, I'm trying to properly define property, instead of leaving it as a hazy term.
Alright, after looking at the wikipedia article, you're technically correct in the sense that the word only means "poor", therefore people are free to define it in whatever they want (either in relative or absolute sense). However, in the context of international development, it almost always refers to absolute poverty. Even in governmental terms, the use of relative poverty is limited to rich countries.
>Since richer nations would have lower levels of absolute poverty,[34][35] relative poverty is considered the "most useful measure for ascertaining poverty rates in wealthy developed nations"[36][37][38][39][40] and is the "most prominent and most-quoted of the EU social inclusion indicators".[41]
Taking this into account, I'm still opposed to your initial claim that "poverty is not an absolute, it's relative". There's certainly an absolute component to it, even if countries shift to using relative measure once they get rich enough. Furthermore, since it already means absolute poverty in most contexts, arguing for it to be redefined just causes confusion.
>There's certainly an absolute component to it, even if countries shift to using relative measure once they get rich enough.
Then perhaps to clarify things we should separate the absolute components from the relative ones? For example, I've mentioned hunger (lack of access to food), or similarly for access to healthcare, etc. Those can be quantified absolutely.
Relative poverty is a pretty old and standard way of defining poverty. Adam Smith, for example:
> “A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”
"Poverty" (the word) is relative and has a cultural meaning. But it's not clear that we should care about those components of the word/concept.
If the poorest person in the world has a car, a home, food, and water, are they poor just because other people have much more? Even if they are, does it really matter? We find poverty viscerally disturbing because it comes with privation. If we get to a point where that is no longer the case, poverty may still exist but perhaps it shouldn't bother us as much.
>If the poorest person in the world has a car, a home, food, and water, are they poor just because other people have much more?
Yes. And we could ask the same for things the poorest medieval peasant had, that a caveman didn't. Would you say the medieval peasant wasn't poor?
>Even if they are, does it really matter?
Yes. We're social animals.
Here's another way to look at it.
Would it be ok if the poorest black person in the world had a car, a home, food, and water, but the poorest white people had much more? If not, why? It would be better than today, no?
Because it's racism? But if the same situation is good if we omit the racial qualifiers (which makes it your example, which you claim we should consider ok), why does it turn bad when the subsets are selected racially?
I'd argue it was already bad even in your original example (when the rich vs poor dichotomy didn't have the race qualifiers). It's just than in one case it's bad as class+race, and the other it's bad just because of class.
No it doesn’t matter. As a society we can determine what poverty is. Yes it can change over time, but there is a set standard of living that “isnt poverty”.
Now if everyone in society has that standard of living it doesn’t make a different whether someone has 100x more, everyone has a set standard of living that is above poverty.
Peasants and cro-magnons both faced privation so I would call them poor without reservation. My argument is that the concept of poverty would need to be revised if we succeed at ending privation.
> If the poorest person in the world has a car, a home, food, and water, are they poor just because other people have much more? Even if they are, does it really matter? We find poverty viscerally disturbing because it comes with privation. If we get to a point where that is no longer the case, poverty may still exist but perhaps it shouldn't bother us as much.
It might matter. I think the relative levels would be less important that the perceived ability to change one's level, and perceptions of if the different levels are earned. If everyone has basic needs met to a higher level than today, but hopelessness persists, and you still have violence and crime as a result... that's an outcome I'd want to change.
But maybe that's less a result of what the baseline is, and more a result of being stuck, regardless of the baseline.
In many of the places I have heard of the people who are moving to the sweatshops themselves are rejoicing in the change because the alternatives are subsistence farming or sex work, and staying around with their "tribe".
OTOH, I have heard of the people who are moving to the sweatshops, that they fought the destruction of their traditional lands and sources of income and ways of life with tooth and nail. That has been historically true from the forced industrialization of British peasants all the way to today, where many of such forced migrations plays are still on (from China and India to Chile and all around Africa) and there are plenty of books on those lamenting their forced entry into sweatshop labor, slums, etc.
If a burn down your house and farm, and you end up working on a McDonalds or a sweatshop to make ends up, you'd do it too because it's "a better option than any other" for you.
Same if your parents took you there, because the state is rigged in favor of the rich guys, which have fucked over their prospects, pocket money that would go for development and infrastructure, sold national resources for cheap to foreign companies that bribed them, and so on.
What's the "better option" is not some neutral natural given state.
But people who haven't experienced those things, think all is well in the best of all possible worlds, and these sweatshop guys should be thankful for the greay opportunity.
(To add insult to injury, more often than not, those people live in the countries benefitting from both exploiting the sweatshop countries to underdevelopment, and from the resulting cheap sweatshop products).
These imagined scenarios have very little to do with real life in the poor world.
Living in the modern rich world it's hard to imagine, but the natural state for humanity is being a dirt poor subsistence farmer. Only since the start of Industrialism 250 years ago have regular people been systematically getting wealthier.
In the early industrialized world this path to wealth also started with sweatshops. They were awful, but less awful than the earlier life, life expectancy and wealth grew steadily decade by decade, science and industry prospered, and now we can talk about this on this technological miracle.
No society has gotten industrialized without going through a sweatshop phase. It is now happening across Asia and Africa, and I think it's wonderful.
In almost every country in the world there are people that:
Are almost dying because of a lack of food
Are almost dying because of being outside at the wrong time
I would call that poor.
I am speaking from second hand experience. And I am from The Netherlands, a country with a fairly good welfare system if you know how to deal with a bureaucratic system. There are a few people that can’t deal with that because of whatever undiagnosed issues they have.
People with a low and livable income are IMO not poor, depending on if there is a good healthcare system.
There are actually qualifiers, absolute poverty and relative poverty. Where relative poverty is more about a semi fuzzy baseline whether someone has enough money that they can function in a society without extreme disadvantage, often talked about as inequality. Absolute poverty has a defined amount of $1.90 a day.
While there's clearly a lot in the whole $1/day thing, it's not as clear cut.
If you live in Sweden on $30 a day and pay $900 a month in rent, that leaves you with just 31 cents a day. Meanwhile if you live in India on $5 a day and pay $50 a month in rent you'd have $3.35 a day left over, and $3 in rural india goes a lot further than $3 in Sweden.
Those are of course extreme examples, and the levels of poverty in places like India (families sleeping rough on the streets etc) makes even California look glorious levels of civility.
You know, it's funny, I see in the price adjusted the US is near the top, with most of the population seeming well off. On the other hand, there is _a lot_ of complaint about poverty in the US, and, well, a lot of unsatisfaction about the income. I honestly don't know what to think anymore. Is the US popoulation really poor or just... unhappy with what they have because they compare with others?
I had a short stint in the US with a work & travel program and, my personal experience kind of painted the picture that people in the US are simply horrible with their finances. I was young, and I was smart and coming from, what I now realise, was poverty. It seemed to me I could have _easily_ had a good life over there, without even trying. Basically the ethos of FI community would have worked beautifully there. Spend less than you earn, try to have a clean life. Easy.
I think people need to have at least a little while living in poverty to understand what it really looks like. I remember my childhood in one of the ex communist countries, it was... wild. Uncertainty everywhere, we could not afford basic shit. I saw catalogues from some nice EU country and I was _flabberghasted_ that people could afford such nice things. And I was young, I couldn't even process things properly. But there was obvious disconnect between my life and some of the media, promotional material, films, cartoons I was seeing. It certainly gave me a interesting perspective.
The USDA defines[1] food insecurity to include the following:
>Food Insecurity
>Low food security (old label=Food insecurity without hunger): reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.
People in other countries would scratch their heads at the very concept of "food insecurity without hunger".
There are two levels of food insecurity described in your source. Why did you only quote the one?
Very low food security—In these food-insecure households, normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.
3.9 percent (5.1 million) of U.S. households had very low food security at some time during 2020.
And according to the graph at the bottom it's still true that people who are Low Food Security are hungry -- just at a lower yet non-zero rate compared to Very Low Food Security.
He used international dollars, which might be precisely what you’re looking for, in his last article (https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief) it is unclear if he used the same metric or not this time but I’d be very surprised if he didn’t, specially considering he references his old article several times.
And I wonder if that metric that accounted for parity in the power in purchasing (let's call it PPP for convenience), if it existed, would be much more than a crude bureaucratic misrepresenation of the situation on the field and bad government statistics taken at face value...
> I calculated that at a minimum the world economy needs to increase five-fold for global poverty to substantially decline. This is in a scenario in which the world would also achieve a massive reduction in inequality: inequality between all the world’s countries would disappear entirely in this scenario. It should therefore be seen as a calculation of the minimum necessary growth for an end of poverty.
> A five-fold increase of the global economy is certainly not easy to achieve, but it is also not impossible – it is what the world has achieved in the last 5 decades, and the climate researchers of the IPCC expect even more growth for this century in their ‘Sustainability Scenario’, the scenario in which the world is most successful in avoiding climate change.
Surprising that such an increase would be what is needed in order to avoid climate change. I would have thought that those two things were in conflict.
I read that as saying that even if we adopt climate change measures necessary for their 'Sustainability Scenario', that will invariably hamper economic growth, the IPCC still believes we will achieve more than a five-fold increase of the global economy this century.
Until we have a more robust conception of what human wellbeing is and what contributes to it other than ("well not being dirt poor and on the verge of death helps, and at some point there are diminishing returns") data like this just strikes me as barking up the wrong tree.
Humans, so far, have been pretty good at improving shit within the current boundaries of their awareness of improvement, and often at the expense of "other people that don't deserve it". Capitalism has been particularly effective at unleashing energy, productive and destructive - though there's also fossil fuels in there. But it could perhaps be a product of that energy release, not it's cause.
By and far, they've been shit at understanding the meta effects of what they are doing or the long term effects of that. Which is hard. Our brain is not built for long time horizons or non-linear causation or even very much meta.
It's a good thing less humans are super poor. Still some questions about whether this world is the only world in which that would happen.
I agree with the overall arguments and conclusion, but I wonder if we need a better way of measuring poverty than some overly-adjusted "dollar per day in income" value. Like, how many calories per day in food is your family getting? Do you have consistent shelter? Do you have access to basic medical care? Are you safe from physical threats? Can you pay an unexpected bill? Do you have a social structure in place around you? Are you free from symptoms of depression? I imagine there would be significant variance in the answer to these questions over just "how much money do you make".
Ultimately all this is what matters to people when talking about having a decent life. Charts like the one in the article will convince people that capitalist systems are working around the world, but that's because they are tracking metrics of capitalism in the first place rather than quality of life.
Yeah I agree. The people who criticize such metrics backed statements that "it's getting better" say that those same metrics are often subject to Goodhart’s Law dynamics[0], fudging and outright lying with numbers. If you subtract China out of many of these numbers, it's the same or worse in many cases.
They then cite things how calories per person in India has actually dropped compared to a few decades ago for example, and it's not because they are a developed country that learned to let off the ice cream, but more Indians are suffering malnutrition in the past. Or how the things that are cheaper are nice optionals and the necessities of life are becoming more unattainable, like the food issue in India. India might have less 'poverty', but is it just a measurement error, on purpose or not?
[0] When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
They back into those factors by adjusting for both time and place, at the relevant thresholds. The "Human Development Index" correlates pretty strongly with income, such that you can say: at this (adjusted) income thresholds, people can afford X,Y,Z and the next threshold, they can also afford a,b,c. A more complex measure is the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which tracks Health+Eduction+StandardOfLiving, but even then the standard of living pretty closely aligns with income measures.
>I calculated that at a minimum the world economy needs to increase five-fold for global poverty to substantially decline. This is in a scenario in which the world would also achieve a massive reduction in inequality: inequality between all the world’s countries would disappear entirely in this scenario. It should therefore be seen as a calculation of the minimum necessary growth for an end of poverty.
A five-fold increase of the global economy is certainly not easy to achieve, but it is also not impossible – it is what the world has achieved in the last 5 decades, and the climate researchers of the IPCC expect even more growth for this century in their ‘Sustainability Scenario’, the scenario in which the world is most successful in avoiding climate change.
I'm interpreting this to mean that my generation has a chance to see the end of poverty in 50 years. This is incredible!
Is anyone aware of any studies which looked into the impact/correlation of global poverty as a result of moving to fiat currency away from a gold standard?
I know even bringing this up is unpopular but I can't think of a bigger elephant in the room, if there is one I'd like to know.
every discussion of poverty needs a discussion of absolute vs relative poverty. I'd say this report tips it's hand
> The share in poverty in any country depends on two factors: the average level of income and the level of inequality.
reducing inequality itself, while correlated, is not necessary for poverty reduction.
I'd love to see one of these official boards to decide that poverty is over when some absolute measure happens (even the currency one is a mess due to inflation numbers and currency manipulation) .
Eg to illustrate the point: maybe we could say poverty is over when less than .01% of the population dies from malnutrition. (plus other measures).
It seems like the more meaningful advance in society has been to increase the quality of life of poor people, not to move more of them above some arbitrary cutoff. I'm talking about life expectancy, access to shelter, food, medical care, entertainment, educational and career opportunities. If the definition of poverty is that you live off less than the (adjusted) $30/day cutoff, who here would choose to live that way in 1820 Sweden, compared to 2020 Sweden? Anybody? If so, how is that a useful way to compare poverty over time?
I encourage you to read his old article https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief in which he talks about the cutout and what he did to minimize the effect. (He adjusts per purchasing power through time and location)
If we enable everyone to have at least $30 per day, would this not result in asset inflation and purchasing power of said $30 lower - these these people would still end relatively poor ?
It depends on how it's done. If it's just printing the $30 out of thin air and giving it away then probably yeah, but if it's from a better wealth distribution it should have better effects.
This is per capita right? So a family of 5 making $4500/mo in Bolivia would be considered rich, the same family with that income in London is barely surviving.
Not sure how these percentages will move if adjusted for purchasing power. Maybe half the world isn't poor anymore? Or maybe 90% still is?
I'd be much happier if UBI proposals were higher.
Living on ~900$/month nowadays would be difficult.
20 years ago I was able to split rent for a tiny concrete windowless-basement-bedroom for 450$/mo, trimmed my grocery/cleaning bill down to 100$/mo by eating nothing but rice, beans, and frozen vegetables, 120$/mo for a phone and internet (which I consider essential), and another ~80$/mo in bus tickets. That's ~750$/mo.
Nowadays, when two bedroom appartments in small remote cities are going for 1600$+, I'm guessing splitting rent is much closer to 800$. That doesn't leave enough money for food, transportation, and communication methods. Heaven forbid you get injured or sick.
The solution to your housing costs isn't increased payments, but cheaper housing. Housing prices are spiraling out of control almost everywhere because we refuse to build more of it through asinine zoning restrictions.
High housing costs have such ripple effects on the cost of everything else that it's incredibly frustrating to see everything else but cheaper and more available housing be proposed as a means to help the less well off (This isn't a jab at you in particular).
The effective purpose of a UBI (why the ruling class likes the idea) is to constrain risky tendencies of a highly financialized economy that depends on a large supply of dirt cheap labor without too much inflation.
With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Everyone else will be a reserve army of cheap labor that serves to bare the weight of the financial ebbs and flows of the mighty dollar in the global market, similar to the function of America’s current lower class, but intensified. Rent prices in rural, small city, and slum neighborhoods will be saran wrapped to the UBI amount, and escaping those areas will be practically impossible because rents in the cities will be affordable only to the elite.
> With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth.
Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is worth (much) more than you are willing to sell your labor for. If you’re not rich and you want to become rich working for Google at $200K a year is clearly superior to a UBI of $40K a year. Even with an arithmetically impossible UBI[1] like that there are still many people who would like to be rich, but just middle class.
[1]US average household income per capita is under $60K.
Those people won’t have access to jobs at Google, partially because Google would be a much smaller company if we had UBI because the number of people with disposable income would be minuscule and the internet would be scummier than ever before it gets shut down, which would absolutely happen if we implemented UBI in the U.S. because you simply can’t have a 2-tier society with free discourse.
Realize the economic problems that UBI would address are caused by transitioning our economy from creating value to collecting rents over the past 40 years. Tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night, but the fact that advertising does not create value for our society (or any society) is not a moral claim. It’s one of the cold realities that put us into this situation. Financialization has allowed us to deny the facts for a few decades and UBI will be the neoliberal New Deal, but without any of the good parts of the New Deal. It will effectively serve as a method of control. The contradictions of capitalism laid bare.
I kind of agree with your idea that we should work to decrease housing prices, but the problems with housing are not as simple as remove zoning and building restrictions and watch prices fall. One example. Energy prices are the base input to everything including housing, so if you want to make housing cheaper then better energy policy might be a good start.
Energy is a large portion of the cost of aluminum ingots or tanker cars full of ammonia. It is not a large portion of the cost of constructing new housing. I wouldn't start with energy prices if I were trying to figure out how to make housing affordable. I'd try to contrast e.g. Tokyo, where housing is reasonably affordable, against the city of New York, where it is much less affordable. Japan doesn't have cheaper energy than the US.
It’s not just zoning. It’s things like urban growth boundaries, which arbitrarily contain available land and encourage more dense housing, both of which drive up prices. All so that we can “conserve” an extremely plentiful commodity: open land.
There are plenty of places in the USA with loose zoning rules, the problem is not many want to live in those places for some reasons. Why are strong job markets correlated with stricter zoning rules?
That's a good question about the enforcement. You'd really only care about the most trafficked dense areas to live in, so gated communities should be less of an issue unless the whole city is made of urban sprawl neighborhoods. If it turns out to be hard to catch, the penalty should take into account the likelihood of getting caught, such that the expected reward from cheating is still negative.
If you're out of the country for an entire year and you want to keep your house empty during an housing crisis, you seem like exactly the kind of person this tax should be levied on. Either rent your home to someone else for the year, or pay the penalty for contributing to the housing crisis.
> If it turns out to be hard to catch, the penalty should take into account the likelihood of getting caught, such that the expected reward from cheating is still negative.
That already puts a red flag. How do parties prove/disprove vacancy?
Far better to
discourage (not forbid, mind you) multi-ownership in the first place.
> If you're out of the country for an entire year and you want to keep your house empty during an housing crisis, you seem like exactly the kind of person this tax should be levied on. Either rent your home to someone else for the year, or pay the penalty for contributing to the housing crisis.
As long as it’s a penalty and not a forced eviction. If I’m taking a one-year sabbatical and then coming back it’s a bit much.
There’s a perverse set of incentives for a city/town to try and mark someone as “not residing”, which makes me
question this vacancy approach even further.
Upfront investment by building-out to provide supply is the policy that we need.
Yet current policies favor rent-seeking and parking-funds in desirable areas, leading to properties that owned but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island).
A larger secondary market leads to more capital being available in the primary market that directly funds new construction that adds housing stock and renovation that prevents its depreciation.
>>but actually vacant (e.g., most of London or Vancouver Island).
Most of London and Vancouver Island are not vacant.
> A larger secondary market leads to more capital being available in the primary market that directly funds new construction that adds housing stock and renovation that prevents its depreciation.
I don’t buy this. The speculators who make-up the secondary market are not the ones who make money by tearing down and building new properties.
There’s no value added to these speculators and is akin to domain squatting.
The higher the price, the more potential projects are cost-effective to move ahead on. The secondary market generating demand in the primary market is a universal property of all markets.
>>The speculators who make-up the secondary market are not the ones who make money by tearing down and building new properties.
The investors who tear down and build new properties are motivated entirely by the market price that a unit can fetch on the market, which is largely determined by the speculators in the secondary market.
>>Vacancy is a problem in most areas of Vancouver.
The article says the vacancy rate is 8.2% in Vancouver, which is a far cry from most houses.
> The investors who tear down and build new properties are motivated entirely by the market price that a unit can fetch on the market, which is largely determined by the speculators in the secondary market.
But how is this at all related to the secondary market speculators?
People who make a living by holding on to properties and flipping them on a price increase.
>>But how is this at all related to the secondary market speculators?
Speculators inject capital into the real estate market. They often bring outside capital into it, and then keep it in the real estate market instead of taking it out. Housing prices are simply a matter of the interplay between the supply of capital interested in housing, and the supply of housing, i.e. supply and demand in housing, and more speculators pushes up the demand side of the equation, leading to higher prices.
In fact, that's what the critics of real estate speculation always point to as to why it should be discouraged: they push up prices (which is a bit simplistic: the increase in prices in multi-dwelling units is temporary as long as zoning doesn't prevent developers from building more dense developments. Only the price increase in single family homes is permanent).
What the critics miss is that rising prices is what funds supply expansion. Ceteris paribus, a market with more speculators will have higher SFH prices, more units, and lower rental rates, and rent is the true cost of housing (the purchase price is the cost of investing in housing).
Injecting capital doesn’t magically increase the supply of real estate.
If my goal is to hold on to a single family house and sell it for a profit later as is or with just some touch-ups, it’s still a single family residence. The speculation just increased the cost of the land.
If my goal is to tear down the single family home and replace it with a two-family home or a small apartment; that increases the supply.
Both involve speculators, but only the latter increases the supply. Why shouldn’t policy discourage the former—a market inefficiency, but a very sane local maxima—and encourage the latter?
>>Injecting capital doesn’t magically increase the supply of real estate.
It's not magic. It reliably increases supply by raising the return on investment from building new units, and thus increasing the number of potential projects which find investors.
>>Both involve speculators, but only the latter increases the supply. Why shouldn’t policy discourage the former—a market inefficiency, but a very sane local maxima—and encourage the latter?
I fully support encouraging the latter and discouraging the former. I would support utilizing a land tax to discourage, and eminent domain to outright prevent, the former.
I definitely couldnt do it in a weekend. But I have been wondering how new cities are born, like not a suburb beside an existing city, but the ones that are in the middle of "no where". And what would stop a few thousand people from having a mutual interest to start something in the middle of no where?
Most of the jobs could be remote save for the ones that support the citizens themselves.
maybe this would fail for the same reason those preplanned cities in china failed? IDK. I'm definitely not implying it's dead easy, just that maybe it's easier than fitting 1M more people in a city that is already dense and full of NIMBYs?
What if those 10k people put up capital kinda like buying a new build home?
Like what if we somehow sold 10 thousand condos at $100k each. If I didnt make a mistake thats about $1B of capital to prepare the place for them to live. If China can build a prefab hotel in 36 hours, I would think we could pull it off too...
I think Madison Avenue style advertising is far more effective than commonly given credit for. Even if you personally avoid the brain washing, it’s not just you, it’s your family, friends, partners etc. All encouraged to live a more expensive lifestyle.
> To be clear, this debate is not about whether new housing can reduce housing prices overall. At this point, that idea isn’t really in doubt. There’s good reason to believe that in regions with high housing demand, building more housing can help keep the prices of existing housing down. In their Supply Skepticism paper from 2018, Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, and Katherine O’Regan offer an excellent introduction to the broader question of how market-rate development affects affordability. Citing numerous individual studies and reviews of dozens more, they conclude that “the preponderance of the evidence shows that restricting supply increases housing prices and that adding supply would help to make housing more affordable.”
Because of course it does. Demand doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's a number judged against supply.
If you want to see the real world impact, look at rents where the rules make it easy to build housing. For a city of its size and national importance, Tokyo has dirt cheap rent compared to the states: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Where I live they have not been able to build new housing fast enough to keep up with rising population over the last thirty years. The prices increase directly proportional to the current velocity of new housing availability at any given moment. If they continue to build new housing at this rate my city will become one of the 10 largest US cities within the next 15 years and the value of my house will boom to more than 3x what I paid for it.
Why? Fixed assets exist outside the supply/demand cycle of high school economics. You can’t make more land but you can always build more houses irrespective of demand. Aside from conjecture and speculation there is no evidence (data) linking house price reduction (not rent) to new housing availability.
> Where I live they have not been able to build new housing fast enough to keep up with rising population over the last thirty years.
Yes, because rules in the US handicap new housing growth.
> The prices increase directly proportional to the current velocity of new housing availability at any given moment.
Yes, because they have the same cause: demand increasing.
Imagine that every car maker was heavily constrained in how many cars they could make. As demands for cars rise, they find every angle to try and produce more cars, but the price keeps going up. Did the new supply cause the price to rise? No, they just have the same cause.
There have been myriad studies on this, almost every economist finds that new housing in booming areas makes housing prices less bad than they would be otherwise.
> You can’t make more land but you can always build more houses irrespective of demand.
This isn't true. Zoning severely handicaps more housing in the places people want to live.
Well, except for Houston (sorta), and indeed, rent there seems substantially lower than other major cities in Texas like Dallas and Austin.
> Tokyo has dirt cheap rent compared to the states
You can rent small two and a half tatami sized apartments in Tokyo that wouldn’t even be legal to let in most of the west. Is that what they mean by reducing zoning rules?
Also, by basically mandating that all housing be rebuilt every 20-30 years, Tokyo effectively prevents speculation on residential real estate (housing depreciates as it gets older, negating land appreciation to some extent).
Japan tearing down building after 20-30 years is, as far as I’ve seen, greatly exaggerated. You see apartment complexes all over the place obviously older than that.
> “half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S. There is virtually no market for pre-owned homes in Japan, and 60 percent of all homes were built after 1980. In Yoshida’s estimation, while land continues to hold value, physical homes become worthless within 30 years. Other studies have shown this to happen in as little as 15 years.”
I’m all for a similar culture in the USA, it would cut down on rampant and pointless residential real estate speculation.
I agree. To me it seems as though a small handful of corporations owns a large percentage of multi-tenant housing and an increasing percentage of single tenant houses and is able to set prices algorithmically and that other landlords price similarly.
A handful of corporation own most of the grocery stores, but grocery prices remain reasonable, nowhere close to as insanely priced as rent.
The difference is real competition: there's only so much land that exists, and localities only allow so much housing on that land. Demand goes way up, supply goes up only feebly, the result is predictable.
$900/mo. is near the high-end of the feasible UBI range. If you want to live on your UBI, it's pretty much expected that you'd move to the lowest-cost feasible area, and content yourself with a somewhat dignified subsistence. UBI has by far the most potential as a supplemental income to low-skilled, entry-level or low-intensity work. The key aim is to make it seamless for people to enter or leave the job market as they choose, which removes the threat of exploitive "wage slavery".
If you doubled federal individual income taxes for everyone in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen around $750/mo in UBI with that increase.
If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI.
And of course, the higher you set UBI, the less point there is to work like a chump and pay 2x current tax rates so other people don’t have to, so fewer people would work (which is one of the promises of promoters of UBI), meaning taxes would have more than double to make the payments.
The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.
"Doubling income taxes" sounds scary, but a large portion of the working population would roughy break even as the increase in taxes would simply be offset by the UBI they receive.
A negative income tax is probably the best way to implement a UBI as it would require only distributing money to those that are below the income threshold, and it would prevent political opponents from trotting out big scary numbers on how much it would cost, while ignoring the necessary accounting required to truly estimate the financial impacts.
Given that businesses are taxed on profit rather than gross, probably nearly all of them. But most would move their headquarters to other countries where they can simply dodge those taxes (like many have already).
Look, UBI isn't for living comfortably. UBI is just a knob for producing more negotiating power for laborers. It's the means to quit a job and look for a new one. It's not about living a happy work free life. That doesn't make any sense.
I agree that we largely have capitalism + globalization to thank for across the board wealth increase (or where wealth hasn't increased, the price of commodities has decreased) over the last century. However, state-run welfare programs, social safety nets, automation, etc. also play some role.
Well, China has eradicated extreme poverty by means of communism. So that appears to be an option too.
I'd be interested to see a relatively detached, objective analysis on the speed and extent to which poverty is alleviated by different social policies. There's some clear variation there that deserves analysis.
Edit: misread the post I replied to, "could" as "should".
Before we even attempt to answer this question: look at the article's URL, its title and its subtitle. The title posted here on HN is badly mangled and implies things not said in the actual article, or at least, not said with the implied emphasis.
Definitely not. It's the regulation of capitalism that is driving this. This is why the countries where capitalism is most heavily regulated (nordic countries, some european countries) are cited throughout the article. Capitalism on its own with no regulation just devolves into corporate dystopia and corruption because the short term path of least resistance is always taken. When we experience progress it's because of thousands of well thought out regulations that steer capitalism, perhaps kicking and screaming, towards actual technological and societal progress. Conversely, when public policy is dictated by lobbyists and corporate interests, wealth disparity increases and progress ceases. Those that say "but capitalism is all about disrupting and innovating" are wrong -- capital will only innovate if it has no other choice. It would much prefer to simply buy out, price-fix, monopolize, crush via economies of scale, bribe, silence naysayers, acquire, etc., because these tactics and any tactics that maintain the status quo in which the corporation has been able to become successful are superior if left unregulated. If the only options you leave on the table for capital to take are options that are good for society, then you will see society improve.
Imagine how much we could progress technologically, culturally, and societally if we were able to 100% remove corporate influence over politics and create regulations and guardrails that reward innovation and punish monopolization and exploitation.
You joke, but there's no denying that the last millennium's trend of increasing government centralization, stability, control over the use of violence, and enforcement of property rights (in whatever systematic form they take) has been a factor in this reduction in poverty levels.
Nothing is quite as good at causing desperate poverty cycles as most of your local infrastructure getting regularly forcibly undeveloped in a civil war, or the chaos of local resources getting stolen by whatever brigands show up.
> why the countries where capitalism is most heavily regulated
This really isn't the case. There is a very heavily regulation of industry in many developing countries and it impedes their growth. Often it even provides the basis for corruption. You could argue the that the nordic countries have smarter, or better regulation, but in many ways they operate freer markets than much of the world.
I agree. If capitalism is the fuel that makes the car run, as some say it is (maybe it is? I don't know.), it needs to be regulated and applied in the right place and amount to make the car go forward.
Some people seem to think more is always better, and that we should just dowse the car in gasoline and light it on fire to make it go faster. Why they think that would work is beyond me.
I'd say it's modern technology that's eradicating poverty. You could make the argument that without capitalism we wouldn't have modern technology. But capitalism was around for centuries before we even got to the point where extreme poverty was on the retreat worldwide. And the most efficient engine for the eradication of poverty the world has ever seen, China, is arguably not capitalist. Joseph C. Sternberg, columnist for the WSJ, asserts that, "What makes a system capitalism rather than mere pursuit of capital is the ownership that brings with it both the motive to improve corporate performance (desire for profit) and the means to do so (control of the company’s management)," and argues that since investors in PRC firms have no control over management, it's not true capitalism. [0]
Some might also suggest there's nothing intrinsic to capitalism that ensures that workers will get paid enough to escape poverty, and without parallel advances in the philosophy of human rights, there would no push to eradicate poverty.
Capitalism is one tool in the economic toolkit. Capitalism isn't the only economic system, or even the only free-market economic system, just a very popular one. I wouldn't say a hammer builds a house, even if it is very useful. If poverty will be eliminated, my first guess is that humans will ultimately be the ones to do it.
I think your question assumes that poverty is somehow unnatural, as though the human animal is born with plenty and must be driven to poverty by some external force. But the masses have lived in poverty since the beginning of time,[0] because poverty is the state of nature. Anyone who says different is trying to sell you something.
Poverty will never cease to exist.
Some people in the USA consider themselves poor, while having cars, houses, access to food and potable water.
I myself had the opportunity to visit a indigenous tribe in Brazil. They would be considered poor by many people in the US, but they don't feel poor. I was offered shelter and food. They were happy to be able to offer me something, and that made them feel rich.
We should do what we can to bring basic and humane conditions to all. What comes after that is harder to manage. A mutable definition of poverty will always make it a moving target that is impossible to fulfill.
Jason Hickel (the degrowth advocate; a term that infuriates me) is a genius and writes very well. His critique of the end of poverty is very eye opening. I still feel the cognitive dissonance.
IMO poverty will be the normal state of 2/3 of humanity due to technological unemployment. UBI will be successful exactly nowhere except maybe the USA if they manage to keep the status of the dollar as wolrds reserve currency.
This article was a vague gesture towards a projected future. A numbers magic trick.
Capitalism leads to unequal development at all scales. Be it between nations or inside their borders.
That can be justified with vague meritocracy or hard racism/classism. Whatever floats your boat. But it has nothing to do with individuals, the reality lies within the capitalist mode of production in itself which is fundamentally based on the inequality between social classes. Those who have no means of subsistence sell their work. Those who have the means buy their work. Profit is the product of the exploitation of this social relationship.
Poverty is not only an income measure, it is also relative to your society. You cannot solve this gap without addressing how this mode of production functions.
No such thing as a post-scarcity economy, even in the fictional universe of Star Trek. When you have replicators that can produce any food or clothing or small pieces of equipment you need, you end up bartering over planets, star systems, or wormholes [1].
But would it? In most of the developed world health care is free, and it's more expensive than food, clothing & internet, and almost as expensive as shelter.
Yes, if you have them or can recycle. It would be great to find ways to build everything with materials that are plentiful but sometimes it's not possible. Perfect automation is like biology, it can work and replicate on its own but sill needs to compete for limited resources in the ecosystem.
Even Star Trek TNG didn't have a true post-scarcity economy.
At least 5 things were key parameters in their economy and were scarce:
- dilithium crystals, which were used to power ships, and thus also powered the replicators
- Enterprise class ships were definitely scarce/precious
- labour
- land, especially on Earth
- hand-made goods
STTNG didn't have a money economy. That doesn't mean they were post-scarcity.
The closest analogy on today's Earth would be the unmetered water connections that some towns have. Just because the water isn't metered doesn't mean that the water supply is unlimited.
It's just a little funny to say an essentially communist society has a scarcity of labor... It's like yes, that's kinda the point!
They often note on the show itself that it is in fact replicator tech itself that sealed the deal for their era of post-scarcity, so yeah, that would imply some kind of scarcity in handmade goods.
I think when people generally talk about "post-scarcity" it isn't that literally everything that could possibly exist is plentiful, at your fingertips, its more talking about the things we find scarce now (housing, food) being plentiful.
"sealed the deal" meaning that the replicator wasn't essential for their economy. Today we have industrial farming, robot factories and ships that can carry 100,000 tonnes, allowing us to produce an incredible amount of stuff with very little human labour. The difference between that and a replicator based economy is small. If the Star Trek reputation economy is feasible in the 24th century, it's feasible today.
I agree its logistically feasible and plus it would have broad support from regular people.
Main issue I can see is swift and devestating interventions from the USA.
Remember, star trek timeline had to go through a century of fascism and war before they could get to post-capitalism. We want post capitalism, not scarcity.
By that definition we already live in a post-scarcity economy. Food & housing are extremely plentiful in the US. We consume over 3600 calories per person, and waste a similar amount. Livestock eat over 10,000 calories per person. We have over 800 square feet of living space per capita.
Ok sure but all those things are still subject to whatever artificial scarcity the market needs in order to survive, which is not the case in Star Trek.
The fact that there is no money in that world is not a byproduct, it is the whole thing. Whatever is scarce or not follows from that, not the other way around.
Granted, especially as you get later on, star trek is not the best at realizing its original conceit. But I choose to believe!
...and therefore extremely cheap? Instead it's extremely expensive and therefore exclusionary. So it is healthcare.
Polls clearly show that younger generations feel very unsure about their work, their ability to save, buy a home end even retire and have a pension. The complete opposite of post-scarcity.
Yes, that's my point. In economics a scarce resource is a limited resource. Defining post-scarcity as an abundance of goods is a bad definition, unless the goods are truly unlimited. Neither us nor 24th century Star Trek has post-scarcity. Star Trek TNG has a post-capitalist, non-monetary economy, but it's not post-scarcity.
Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely
---
Post-scarcity does not require all goods/services to be infinitely abundant.
In the US today a bushel of wheat (60 pounds) is worth $7.50 and contains about a month's worth of calories, for about half an hour worth of the average American's labour. Chinese factories produce widgets for pennies.
Under that definiton either both the 24th and the 22nd centuries are post-scarcity or neither are.
Trekonomics writer Manu Saadia has a much better definition:
"Post-scarcity is not so much a matter of material wealth or natural bounty, but an organizational option for society".
> Not at all. People need much more that wheat and widgets.
OK, let's expand. People need food, water, clothes, shelter, health care, education, entertainment and widgets. I see 4 economic categories.
- food, water, clothes, widgets: these are cheap and abundant in both the developed part of the 22nd century world, and in the 24th. That anybody is short of any of these is completely a political choice. They are abundant, but still limited. In both the 22nd and 24th century their abundance is constrained by the cost of energy.
- health care, education: constrained by Baumol's cost "disease", these will be more expensive in the 24th than they are now.
- shelter: we have more shelter in the US than we need, but it's in the wrong places, so it's incredibly expensive. It could be abundant -- a widget factory could cheaply build prefab homes to place in the middle of nowhere, so the extreme scarcity is almost entirely social & political. I hope that the 24th has solved this problem, but the basic conditions for our problem will be unchanged in the 24th.
- entertainment: in so far as this is mostly TV, movies, books, video games and holodeck programs that can be copied at will, these are truly unlimited non-scarce goods.
Infinitely more, according to orthodox economics, which is why post-scarcity is not a coherent concept within the framework of orthodox economics. The idea that there is a point of finite abundance where the basic relations of economics break down is, at best, highly speculative and completely undemonstrated.
A significant portion of our economy is post-scarcity. Software, movies, tv, books, video games are all non-scarce goods forced to fit into a scarce framework through IP law. They are distributed horribly inefficiently as a result.
The replicator would transform most physical goods into IP so perhaps a better economy would be structured around efficient and equitable IP creation and distribution, with the few remaining scarce goods hacked into the economy similar to how copyright hacks non-scarce goods into ours.
But there's a flaw in that previous sentence. The replicator uses energy to operate, and that's still a scarce good, even in the 24th. In the 22nd, an iPhone is >95% IP, yet its price is primarily set by the value of the scarce components in an iPhone.
> A significant portion of our economy is post-scarcity.
No, it's not.
The economy is the system of distribution of scarce resources. Anything that is actually post-scarcity isn't part of it.
> Software, movies, tv, books, video games are all non-scarce goods forced to fit into a scarce framework through IP law.
No, they aren't. They are goods based around something with a high initial fixed cost and a low marginal cost. IP law exists to incentivize people paying the fixed costs. That's not post-scarcity.
> The replicator would transform most physical goods into IP
It might change most novel physical goods to having more of their costs as fixed costs, but high initial fixed costs are already a significant thing for novel physical goods and already addressed by IP law.
> In the 22nd, an iPhone is >95% IP
The 22nd is as much speculative future (or fiction) as the 24th.
> By your definition "post-scarcity economy" is an oxymoron, and this whole discussion is moot and pointless.
Both parts of that are true, but the second isn't because of the first (which is a terminological issue), but that “post-scarcity”, more than just being mutually exclusive with “economy”, appears to be fundamentally incompatible with human nature; there will always be something scarce, competition for it, and disutility driven by relative deprivation with respect to it.
We're able to foresee the end of some forms of scarcity, like basic food insecurity, but there's still no reasonable expectation that the economy becomes post scarcity in any way shape or form within the next 100 years.
Not to be a doomsday troll, but climate change seems to throw a big question mark in terms of basic food security especially non-industrialized.
See Afghanistan drought right now. I'm sure we can solve those problems with enough money and tech, but we could do that right now and feed millions but we choose not too.
I agree with you on climate change causing issues with scarcity, I just wanted to point out the basics around food scarcity is about the closest we could reasonably see a fix arriving within the next 100 years.
Durable fixes to food scarcity could come even in drought conditions through advanced genetic editing techniques, for example. It's not infeasible to imagine that being possible within the next century.
Now whether or not we'll do it is an entirely different question.
We are running out of everything, fresh water, energy, sand, soil, and our food production and distribution chains are unsustainable and quite fragile.
This century long bull run managed to offset extreme poverty, but it destroyed the biosphere as a result, and left us with nothing to work with.
The world soon will be a big spiral of blood as we fight each other for what's left.
TLDR: No, we are not headed for a post-scarcity economy.
Gain of Function only defines mutation, it does not define positive or negative effects to a system, “hold my beer and watch this” is gain of function.
Dr. Jason Hickel has—I think—a pretty fair criticism of these graphs [1], that I'll try to summarize here:
1. Treating "poverty" as a binary "yes/no" thing, where having > $1.90/day suddenly alleviates you from poverty seems like a bit of a stretch. $1.90/day is probably way too low a number to cover adequate nutrition, shelter, and basic human needs.
2. While the percentage of people in poverty by this measure has decreased, the total number of people is probably more important. And that number has actually increased in the past 40 years.
3. They didn't start collecting these numbers since 1981. All numbers prior to 1981 are highly dubious.
4. It ignores the effects of colonialism. Many people went from living lives with little need for money to one totally dependent on it. Enclosure of what once were public resources has eliminated many non-monetary forms of wealth these people once had.
5. Related to 4, it's not clear that going from a pre-monetary system to a much more capitalist system where money is necessary for virtually everything is an improvement. Especially when that transition was brought about by the threat of violence.
6. Virtually all of this reduction in extreme poverty occurred in China, which makes the notion that this was a triumph of capitalism / neoliberalism kind of silly.
> But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about what is happening relative to higher poverty lines. The evidence shows that there is a clear and continuous relationship between material deprivation and subjective well-being, so it would be wrong to celebrate shifting daily incomes from $1.89 to $1.91, even if this shift technically means abruptly reducing extreme poverty. People living on $3, $5, or $10 per day also face substantial hardships, and are still living in poverty.
Taking into account these other bands of poverty, you can see the absolute number of people in the lowest bands of poverty has increased from 3.3 billion in 1981 to 4.66 billion in 2017.
Re 5. Much of the global extreme poor are still primarily in a pre-monetary system. Subsistence farming is by its very definition, mostly outside of the monetary economy.
> Virtually all of this reduction in extreme poverty occurred in China, which makes the notion that this was a triumph of capitalism / neoliberalism kind of silly.
How so? Under communism, China ran itself deeply into the ground and tens of millions of people starved to death.
Economic reform changed that, in a straightforward triumph of capitalism.
When one of the major stimuli to the period of economic reform is the discovery that a little village notable for not starving to death is doing it by virtue of illegal enclosure of what was supposed to be public land, supported by a blood oath of secrecy because private landownership is so illegal... you think the takeaway is that China's modern success comes from their communist economic regime?
China's flavor of capitalism is, indeed, a vast improvement over their communist past. But it includes a lot more state-involvement than the more laissez-faire style of the U.S.
It’s incredible how wording can be confusing to different readers.
The HN title of this post is currently “the end of poverty has just begun” which made me think “just” = “recently”. So I thought the article would be about something that has indicated that the rate of poverty reduction has increased.
The URL says “history-of-poverty-has-just-begun” which made me think this is an article about historiography of poverty and how it’s not been cataloged well.
The article title says “The history of the end of poverty has just begun” which just completely confuses me.
The article subheading says “ The decline of global poverty is one of the most important achievements in history, but the end of poverty is still very far away.” which to me is a much more accurate summary of the article. Mainly that most of the world still lives on less than $30 a day. But some parts of the world have been uplifted from poverty recently.
My point I think is that, to me, a better post title would be something like “Poverty is only now starting to decline”
Folks 30 usd a day isn't basic poverty at all, it's what i used to earn as a software developer for some time. It's a pretty decent amount in a third world country
"extreme poverty" is a very arbitrary threshold and some charts are using a fixed threshold that is based on purchasing power and not updated based of *real* cost of life compared to what goods and services are enjoyed by less poor people.
Furthermore, inequality is actually rapidly increasing in many societies.
Yet, one can cherry-pick an arbitrary threshold making the whole analysis profoundly misleading.
PPP is designed precisely to allow fair comparisons. The article refers to it as "international dollars". It is important to note it did not refer to USD anywhere: it is talking about $30PPP per day, which in real currency is a wildly variable amount but which buys approximately the same things.
Without understanding the distinction between PPP and USD, it is not possible to fully comprehend the article.
It's odd to say that an end has a beginning instead of it happening. It's more accurate to say - without the hyperbole - that the incidence of poverty is being reduced.
My first thought that this would be a naturally occurring phenomena with inflation, but it appears all their analysis over time have adjusted for inflation.
I posit that this depends entirely on the social hierarchy of the country in question. The more egalitarian the society the more the eradication of poverty is possible. Unfortunately for the majority of countries this is highly unlikely, and while the end of poverty is possible, I highly doubt that will ever happen.
Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.