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The average person is nevertheless still better off than they were in all of history.

Once basic needs are met (and tbh far exceeded in most first world countries), it seems that awareness about inequality only makes people less happy.



If the average person has a good life then hooray that's great. Also irrelevant.

Let's move on to the bottom of the heap. The people starving to death for numerous reasons. The 62 people at the top are probably not responsible for the hundreds of millions of humans in poverty but they sit on top of a system that has been tuned over many centuries to make rich people richer.

I have no objections to billionaires but I want the rules changed so that earning a 100 million dollars is as hard for a billionaire as it is for a millionaire or just a person starting from scratch. I'm not quite sure what the rules would be but it'd be interesting to engineer that level playing field.


The economic power imbalance is still problematic.

Free trade and supply/demand were supposed to be a way to decentralize economic decisions, but they lead in practice to inequality and a situation where we have an economy that's planned by the wealthy for their own benefit (see planned obsolescence, predatory marketing practices, dark UI patterns, the privatization of justice through arbitration, lobbying, ...).


This point of view has always baffled me. It invites a kind of “shut up and be happy” mentality - like we should have all been happy subsisting on gruel in Victorian workhouses merely because we were “better off than in all of history”.

It’s silly to say that “basic needs are far exceeded” when we can clearly observe plenty of people in “most first world countries” struggle to meet basic needs.


When talking about inequality, median is more appropriate than average.

And even if the median is higher, there's some psychology in whether that actually feels better in a chimp brain hierarchy.

And, the implicit argument that inequality is required or helps the progress in the average or median is usually implied but not supported.




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