Yes, poor people are better off in absolute terms than 200 years ago. No one is denying this.
The question is more that, given how prosperous we are, and how much capital we have at our disposal, why do we still have so many poor people? Why is income inequality so bad?
Extreme poverty vs plain vanilla poverty? That's funny.
You're falling for the ruse. Funny how the First World all but abandobed the rest of the (impoverish) world until it needs that head count to pat itself on the back and sell the ruse
Thank you for proving my point.
Regardless, the question remains: why so much poverty in so many places? *Especially* in the First World?
"Smile and be happy you pathetically poor, you're slightly less pathetic than before"
Do you not sense how insensitive and in-a-bubble that sounds?? Certainly, we can do better. Certainly, we shouldn't be bragging about that is still a massive loss to so many.
Yes, it's a reasonable metric of "we're doing better than anyone anytime".
It's very easy to ruin this and very hard to improve upon. Why should I believe whatever anyone suggesting is going to make things better? Every single attempt of destroying capitalism "for the benefit of the proletariat" made it worse for said proletariat, big time, every time.
Reasonable to whom? (Hint: Not the impoverished, and there are a lot of those)
Or simply a twisted rationalization so some can sleep better at night?
I would recommend you read "Broken Money" by Lyn Alden. There's are some serious systemic thumbs on the "globalization" scale, and those thumbs are the same outfits spewing the narrative you're parrotting.
Get the book. We can resume this in a couple weeks.
The main issue is the ones having a problem with the improved state of affairs reliably call on the use of other systems that have always worsened the affairs of countries that adopt them.
Multiply 30000 a year (a lower end US wage) by the number of people living in what the UN defines as poverty. That’s about two billion. You get 60 trillion dollars a year. That’s close to world GDP.
If you gave that out and those two billion people tried to spend it, you’d just get hyperinflation because there isn’t enough supply to match that demand.
We have a lot of abundance but not that much. Still fewer people as a percentage live in poverty by far than at any time in human history. It’s mostly going in the right direction. We’ve lifted a billion out of poverty in the last 20 years.
Living on 30kUSD/yr is a lot different in London than it is in Buenos Aires. To set a universal safety net ensuring everyone had adequate food, shelter, education, medical care, transportation etc would be a lot cheaper than 60tUSD/yr.
First, this means, as compared to today, that the results of some people's labor, and a lot of that, are sent to these undeveloped countries, rather than letting them sell it at a price of their choice. Why would they agree to that? Or buying that with tax money, which nobody would agree to either.
Second, as the last few decades have shown, just sending food, medicine and other supplies to these regions just makes more miserable people.
>Yes, poor people are better off in absolute terms than 200 years ago
Not than poor people 200 years ago, than kings 200 years ago. No king of early 1800s could have tropical fruits, antibiotics or an entire library of human knowledge at his fingertips.
>Why is income inequality so bad?
Does a burger taste any worse if you know someone's having caviar?
Also, how would you compare today's wealth inequality with that of 200 years ago, when peasants, being some 90% of the population, didn't own nearly anything at all?
> Does a burger taste any worse if you know someone's having caviar?
Human beings have a fine-tuned sense of inequality and injustice; it's one of the things that makes us self-legislating agents, rather than beasts scrabbling for the top. The burger absolutely does taste worse if you know that it isn't a fair representation of the value of your labor.
To make this more salient: your argument would apply to people living under repressive regimes as much as it does to content Westerners sitting at home. Or do you think that North Koreans in China have no right to object, given that their equivalent domestic forced labor would be even worse?
Well we (and they) know a society can do better than North Korea and it's reasonable to strive for that, but it's not obvious you can do better than the West.
Sure some countries do better others, and one can say higher taxes and social services are the way, but that's still good old capitalism.
Poverty is the default state. We shouldn’t ask why we have poor people but rather how can more wealth be generated to have fewer poor people. Our system has redefined what it means to be poor. So much that we’ve forgotten that abject poverty is the default state.
We dont need less capitalism but rather more and faster.
> We dont need less capitalism but rather more and faster.
There is no clean spectrum. We need more good capitalism (free trade, free movement of labor, entrepreneurship) and less bad capitalism (negative externalities, money in politics). Just like we need more good regulations and less bad regulations.
We shouldn't force heterogeneous things into a single conceptual basket (called "capitalism") and then conclude more is better, or less is better. Components of the system should be separated out and analyzed on their own merits.
Sure can debate the minor points I guess but the overarching theme needs to be more capitalism (private ownership of things, production, etc), more productivity (automate more, more and better jobs, outsource), and more energy (extract more, better green solutions that are actually competitive and not forced on people). We should continue to do more of what has proven to pull more and more people out of poverty and to even redefine what it means to be poor compared to many years ago.
The goal should be to make today's relatively poor comparatively rich to the poor of generations past.
Maybe. Some of what you're advocating for sounds more in the category of bad capitalism. The typical libertarian denial of the existence of second order effects and negative externalities. It's hard to tell whether "more private property" is really a euphemism for more inequality or if "better green solutions" is really a euphemism for cancelling renewable and accelerating climate change. Which would be a recipe for social unrest and millions of climate refugees fleeing the equator leading to authoritarianism and lower prosperity. That's bad. There are some interpretations of your words that I'd agree with, though.
There's plenty of wealth. The issue is the concentration of wealth at the top.
Since the current system is deeply unfair, I'm not sure why adding additional wealth to the system would make it any more fair. The majority of every extra dollar goes to the ultra rich.
> There's plenty of wealth. The issue is the concentration of wealth at the top.
That's just an opinion. What we do know is that as more wealth has been generated via Capitalism more and more people globally (and nationally) have been brought out of poverty to the point where poverty has had to be redefined in certain areas. Capitalism has made starvation a thing of the past and diabetes the new, but better, problem of the poor for example. Poor people can afford to eat meat daily. Not even wealthy could do this in the not so distant past.
So instead of fighting over probably wrong opinions we should look at the data and then continue to do more of the thing that has been generating better outcomes for more people. That means more capitalism because that leads to better outcomes.
It doesn't need to be one or the other. People should be able to give a good start to their kids, but not to make them as rich as countries when their children didn't do anything to deserve those resources.
Even then wealth mostly lasts 3 generations or so, either by dilution or squandering by the descendants. Trickle down economy of sorts. Exceptions like Rockefellers are rare and far between, and some might argue even they are net positive through their philanthropic efforts.
The question is more that, given how prosperous we are, and how much capital we have at our disposal, why do we still have so many poor people? Why is income inequality so bad?