No, because the richer one is the more one can endure. In a market crash, the rich can just survive with their own stash of liquid money and when the time is ripe they can sweep in and buy for cheap the stocks of middle class investors trying to liquidate to make ends meet

Liquid money is only good if the bank stays solvent. Which SVB was not, and neither were many banks in 2008 until the federal govt stepped in and backstopped all deposits beyond the $250K limit.

In the past several US financial crises, most notably 2007-8 and 1929, it wasn't loss of faith in currency which was instrumental, it was a lack of availability and flow of currency, largely due to debt structuring.

In both cases, what eventually resolved the matter was not banks spontaneously restoring solvency, but the central bank, that is, the financial entity capable of creating new money out of thin air, which reliquidated the banks, greatly assisted in the earlier instance by vast increases in government spending as a consequence of WWII.

There's a group who likes to preach loss of faith in the US dollar; their predictive record has proved quite poor. Despite this it remains an inexplicably popular trope.

Rich people use different banks than the general population

This!

I keep "my money" in a few different places. I keep a spreadsheet and every 1st of the month I 'do the rounds' and add the numbers of deposits, investments, '401k', etc. so I keep an eye on my 'net worth' on a monthly basis. When COVID happened and I saw that SP500 tanked, I bought more than my typical 'monthly purchase'.

Now, I am a nobody and worth a little. Someone who had $50m in the bank, well connected, and with access to info, 'went in' for x1000 what I did, at a better timed entry and left at a better timed exit made big bucks.

I am definitely part of the top 1% (8b people --> 80m)(considering that majority of the planet lives 'poor')(my definition of 'poor' was redefined when I visited the Philippines and saw a family of 4 live in a carton box from a fridge).

"We" here in HN (most of us) are in that 10% of the global population, whether we like it or not. And it's not because "everyone living in the EU is rich", it's more like in so many countries for majority of the people their income is well below $upper-tripple-digits.

How are you defining rich here? All these discussions people throw out relative terms and we all have different numbers in our heads. However when Democrats propose bills they start at ~$400k for W2 workers. This is not rich in NYC/SF, and these people use regular banks.

The median household income in San Francisco is $141K

Those banks are very far from being more trustworthy.

That’s why they use more than one.

The 2008 stock market crash famously reduced inequality. Definitely didn't increase inequality by leaving the average person (via government bailouts) holding the bag.

I'm assuming sarcasm here. The 2008 crash was immediately offset by huge rounds of QE that most of them went to bail out financial institutions and inadvertently further inflated the prices of most assets. It may have been necessary, I don't know, but the bottom line is the stock market (and all assets generally) was inflated with huge sums of new money.

so how does this align with your opinion/idea that a stock market crash today would reduce inequality? more likely the same thing would just happen again.

As I'd just noted in another comment: in 1929 the US (and eventually global) stock markets collapsed.

This set off the greatest period of wealth equality in the US, through a combination of factors:

- Strengthening the power of the Federal Reserve to re-liquidate banks.

- Direct government employment of individuals, whether through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civil Conservation Corps (CCC), and eventually of course the armed forces as the US entered WWII.

- Enormous strengthening of labour rights and unions within the US.

- The US stepping in as the world's leading manufacturer in the post-war era, having its industrial plant intact, raw materials available, and demobilisation providing for a vast increase in the labour force itself without wage reductions.

- Generally progressive policies in government regulation, civil rights, educational access, housing access, transportation improvements, and healthcare over the period 1945 -- 1975.

- A highly progressive tax policy.

Not all of that is obviously replicable today. The US faces strong disadvantages relative to other countries in raw manufacturing (though can produce very-high-value goods which make up in trade value what they lack in sheer tonnage) and demographic challenges (along with much of Europe and advanced Asian countries, notably Japan, Korea, and China). But other options remain available and to my mind useful. Changes in tax policy to re-distribute aggregated wealth and make tax havens (both onshore and off) far less viable would likely be good starts. These are of course politically challenging, particularly under present circumstances, but might remain within possibility.

You are missing the mass destruction of assets of the wealthy in WWII and the increase in bargaining power of labour in the post-war years (perhaps driven by loss of life/injury for those of a working age). The post-war public sentiment, at least in the UK, was that the lower orders of society had fought the most and suffered the most, and there was an appetite for a new social contract that saw Churchill voted out from office and gave rise to the National Health Service, etc.

That's my fourth point above, viz: The US stepping in as the world's leading manufacturer in the post-war era, having its industrial plant intact, raw materials available, and demobilisation providing for a vast increase in the labour force itself without wage reductions.

The irony is that the countries which did substantially see their industry wrecked and received Marshall Plan or equivalent funds afterward turned into the most competitive post-war economies, most notably Germany and Japan.

The US managed to build out new infrastructure, where it couldn't convert its war plant directly (which in automobiles, lorries, locomotives, ships, and aircraft it largely did).

We saw spectacular greenfields development most especially in high-speed rail, first in Japan, then France and Germany, all of which saw both infrastructure and real estate valuations (the key obstruction to railroad rights-of-way) collapse after the War. (China's HSR build-out follows a similar dynamic, though with different reasons, as that country industrialised for the first time.)

(Edit: The US hasn't established HSR, largely I feel because its previously-transport-enabled real-estate became too valuable. It's not tractably feasible to buy rights of way in the US, alternatives such as subway construction are themselves phenomenally expensive.)

I'm not sure of all the reasons for the UK's relative economic stagnation, though I suspect it was a mix of WWI and WWII debt, not having its industry blown to splinters, being out-competed by the US, and losing its cheap inputs as the Empire collapsed and colonies were spun out as independent states.

(Edit: The UK didn't see an economic turn-around until the 1980s, largely as North Sea oil came online, a boom it managed to extend with financialisation of the City of London, though that was largely restricted to the London metro region itself at a cost to the rest of the country which is immensely backwards.)

It's interesting to note that the US's post-war boom began slowing in the 1970s (for reasons which are widely, and I strongly suspect mostly wrongly speculated upon, particular the goldbugs' hypothesis), whilst Japan and later South Korea's were just hotting up (the latter imploded with the asset bubble collapse in 1990), and later of course China starting to grow significantly during the 1990s.

But at the end of WWII, the US had huge productive capacity, largely non-obsolete factories, worldwide markets for goods, raw materials, and a largely intact workforce (vanishingly few overall war casualties), a situation few other countries could claim, and none at similar scale. This provided about two-to-three decades runtime before factors caught up with it.

And in light of the 1929 crash, helped both prolong the expansion out of that crisis and see that the rewards were widely distributed among socioeconomic classes rather than concentrated amongst the very wealthy. That formula's not been tried since.

(Edits: Note two late adds above, they clarify/expand my argument slightly, pre-empt some possible counterarguments, and shouldn't change the meaning significantly.)

Its probably not easy but I think a policy that protects the workers instead of a policy that protects the corporations / shareholders. You can let corporations go bankrupt - thus causing shareholders to get wiped out, and compensate by protecting the workers and poorer people with government checks until they can find new employment. Banks are probably the only exception , I don't think you can let the banks fail without risking an economic collapse.

if the government had a sovereign wealth fund it could have bought all the failing companies and "divested" when the market recovered. instead of being massively in debt it could have probably come out on top. granted that incentivizes the government to cause market crashes but there no perfect system.

That would massively slow the economy and the people at the top will never do that.

True , but inflating an endless assets and debt bubble in the hopes A.I will come to save us is also probably not sustainable.

Well no, it's not sustainable. They just need to offload it to the next bigger fool.

Indeed, the bailout if banks in multiple countries is the biggest transfer from the rest of us, to the rich there has ever been.

Absolutely enormous amounts of money.

All major banks paid back all those loans with interest. That was actually net income for governments that lended those money. Who really lost money directly were all those speculators who had 10 mortgages on them and just kept taking more and more.

Look, I am all for hatin' the big man when he deserves it and he often does, but lets be a bit smart and not just throw random angry spits without checking the facts, shall we?

Do you even realize that during covid globally money lost some 20-30% of their purchasing power? That's real burning cash of regular folks right in front of you and everybody else.

No they didn't, some of them went bankrupt anyway, while others used that money in corruption schemes, which is why in Portugal many people nowadays avoid any kind of offers their bank advisors propose.

The 2008 crash was also famously centred around mortgages, rather than pure stocks

Mortgages that were packaged into mutual funds that traded on the stock exchanges.

Meanwhile, the insiders who knew what was going on (that the packaged mortgages were super high risk) insured their risk through new financial products - specifically 'credit default swaps' marked by AIG. The gimmick there was that AIG designed the swaps in a way that avoided insurance reserve regulations - and thus AIG had no money set aside in the event of default.

So when the shit hit the fan taxpayers coughed up close to 200 billion dollars to cover the 'swaps' sold by AIG that were backed by ... nothing.

A fair number of billionaires rose out of the ashes of those shenanigans. None were ever charged. That's how 'capitalism' works in the gold old USA. Always has. Always will.

Similarly, the great depression was not a great time to be poor. [Edit:to be clear income inequality did go down, but poor people got a lot poorer, which seems like a pretty bad outcome]

The great depression in itself wasn't, but the combined effect of WWI, GD and WW2 was. We razed Europe rather than redistribute.

Also ended up with all of Europe's gold by the end of WW2, making the dollar the global reserve currency

Both facts may be true without the causal link being present.

Establishing the US as the global reserve currency had little if anything to do with where gold was stored, and far more to do with US economic and military power generally in the post-war era.

That’s incorrect. It had a lot to do with it because it represented the fact that Europe’s governments had little to no wealth after WW2 while the US had it all (thus economic and military dominance).

And wealth, as Mr. Smith says, is "the produce and labour of the nation", which is to say, economic activity, as noted in my GP comment.

True, but gold is (and especially was) a store of wealth, into which "produce and labor of the nation" had been converted over time by European nations

No, it is not.

Gold is, and has been, an exchange medium, in which national finances have been transacted, and a durable representation of wealth. It's useful in addressing balance-of-trade relations between state.

But the overwhelming wealth of states is in their internal and external production and international trade of goods and services.

Colonial-era Spain imported gold in vast quantities from the Americas, which did it little good as that didn't represent wealth but rather exchange capacity, and did little but bid up prices whilst reducing (in similar mechanisms to Dutch Disease and the Resource Curse) the real economic potential of the country (why raise grapes, cattle or other goods when you could get in on the gold exim trade instead)? Gold bankrupted Spain, ironically enough.

Britain's colonial trade focused far more on goods: spice, cotton, sugar, tea, grain, wool, lumber, saltpetre, slaves, and the like. Those are both directly useful and contribute to infrastructure. Two things Spains gold utterly failed to do.

In fairness; there is an ongoing strategy of printing money and distributing it to asset owners. That may also be contributing to asset owners accounting for most spending.

This is basically what happened during the covid low interest mania.

Not realizing what had happened, in three years I went from "almost enough to buy a house in the city in cash" to "have to buy vacant rural wasteland then develop it myself from scratch."

The latter worked out, but cost me two years of my life of hard labor. Those two years of manual labor more or less represent what home owners took from non owners via the central bank.

Do you mean you developed vacant rural land from scratch?

Ignoring the meta economy lessons etc, how was it? Do you love what you've done?

How did you do it? Where is it? What was surprisingly hard and what was surprisingly easy? Etc etc etc, please tell all!

Love this kind of stuff :D (An HNer just embarking on a house self-building project)

Only in the US and some other countries

I’m still “waiting” for the GFC to correct the Australian housing market…

The bailouts were paid back with interest.

QE was not, but, you know, everyone who owns assets or had a job turned out to be a beneficiary of it.

> Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.

At least in Finland today it's much easier for young people to buy their 1st home now compared to 15 years ago. Interest rates are roughly where they were 15 years ago, but house prices in real terms have gone way down. There's also huge market asymmetry with large amount of vacant properties that nobody wants to buy, and relatively few buyers.

How did you manage that!?! It was my impression that increasing housing prices is a problem all over, and that it partially stems from the mega trend of people moving to cities. Most countries have a lot of room to build houses, just not where people want to live!

So why is it different in Finland? Is there a lot of free space around then cities? Or doesn't everyone want to live in Helsinki?

I've been trying to sell my apartment in Helsinki for 4 years now. I've dropped the asking price multiple times and I'm now trying to sell at a huge loss. And yet, nobody will buy it.

The mega trend of people concentrating to largest cities also occurs in Finland. The housing market in Helsinki (where I'm unable to sell my place!) is much better than the housing market in more rural areas.

Well, it's a bit more complex. Some areas have gone vastly up in price. But there's also been a lot of building and new mass transit projects, making it possible to now commute from an area that was a bit more complicated before. For example metro expansion and associated building.

The home crisis can be solved if we insist that people can buy property only for living and not as an investment. Chinese are buying homes in Canada which is the reason for housing crisis there.

Why not just construct more homes?

Problematic. Nearby city centre homes will be snatched up by those who have capital while others will have earn for 4-5 years to be in a position to buy

Exactly. If the problem is "Rich people and private equity are snatching up every home that gets built, as investments" then the solution cannot be "just build more homes." Those homes will just get snatched up by the same people.

That's great to hear for young Fins - other countries, unfortunately, are not as lucky when it comes to the price developments of real estate over the last 15 years.

So, are young people buying their 1st home now? If not, is it actually easier for them to buy?

I'm not an expert on Finland but looking and economy and geopolitics young Finns might have a massive problem with the second secret ingredient to buying their 1st home - a job. Then looking at fertility ratio only people who can afford buying housing to their children decide to have children.

> So, are young people buying their 1st home now? If not, is it actually easier for them to buy?

No, young people are not buying their first home. Despite that, yes, it is actually easier for them to buy. What is stopping them? I would say mainly the expectation that housing prices will drop further as the economy is going further down the drain, leading to better buying opportunities at a later time.

That sounds like buying a home not to live in and start a family in. Pretty sad if so.

Things are not black and white. People who are starting a family and buying a house will typically contemplate a long time on when it's the right time to buy. It's natural that financial aspects play a part in that equation (expectation of having a job, expectation of housing market going up or down, etc.)

This is astronomically incorrect it’s basically an info hazard.

A market crash like that would result in extremely broad layoffs, major global supply chain instabilities, and a cataclysmic knock on effect of capital losses into nearly every walk of life on earth.

Not to mention, as many already have, the federal govt would undoubtedly bail out the worst actors and leave the poor to fend for themselves.

Just yesterday the Treasury Department announced they aren’t going to enforce a money laundering law. You think they’re going to New Deal a major crash’s now? No way.

Also the rich have cash flow and can continuously invest during crashes.

The top 10% aren’t losing their jobs in a crash, but the bottom 50% might.

So while the top 10% keeps investing and will maximize the recovery, the bottom 50% will cash out at the bottom and won’t return to invest for years after their emergency fund has recovered.

> the rich have cash flow and can continuously invest during crashes

There are a lot of levered rich people. Musk would be screwed if he got margin called on Tesla.

I remember reading during covid about how Zuck lost billions in a single day. But he never lost his job. Meta kept paying him and he continued to invest throughout covid.

So you are telling me there is hope after all?

(I mean, unless there's a federal ruling that it's unconstitutional to let a Musk and his money part ways.)

Hope for what? Who would benefit?

Why would that change for the better if Elon lost a lot of money? People become more aggressive when they lose a lot, not less.

And that is often their downfall, overextending themselves.

I think its less than you think, but certainly not zero.

Even if Musk filed bankruptcy yesterday, he would still end his life a multi-billionaire.

when Musk and you are both screwed, which of you can get the big money from the government

Arguably even doing it the first time around was a mistake.

How young is your 'young'? House is normally by far the biggest investment in couple's lives, and if starting from 0 (ignoring common US debt from studying) it should actually take a bit of time to progress in careers and amass some money aside required for such a move.

I've never felt that I am entitled to any sort of property even when being software engineer to the core, even more a house, as a young person right after university. That was always a hard-won luxury, and I don't even mean some extremely well located place.

Some folks here often mention similar stuff and refer to some period in 50s/60s in US specifically where 1 salary could have done it in some more rural areas. Nobody mentions how rest of the population looked like, hardly whole US population was buying new houses with wife being stay-at-home mum.

When women started going to work too, suddenly such couples quickly outcompeted single earners from housing market. In Europe, this stay-at-home was never the thing in most places so we never even had such period, thus 0 such expectations. Properties, especially houses, were always a hard-won luxury.

The rich stay rich no matter what.

Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly.

They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.

Not to mention none of them had to go to the Nuremberg trials...

It's their system, it's their game.

> Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly.

> They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.

Yes, these families exist. But there is an equal amount of them that went to the poorhouse that you don't know about. Many German Nazis that got wealthy through stealing/grafting of Jewish businesses _did_ lose their assets. Others still stayed somewhat wealthy but are now just barely millionaires.

It's very easy to get fooled by survivorship bias, since it's only the companies and people that are still wealthy that get heavily covered. I don't think a publisher would accept a book like Nazi Billionaires about all the people that are no longer relevant at all.

edit: I have to say, I also think it's terrible that so many people could just go on like nothing happened. Doubly so for the bureaucracy, diplomats and judges -- both in Germany and the Axis collaborators.

But this is how the world goes. The only people punished for the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward or the Gulags were those caught up in internal purges. The new Syrian government threw a few of the worst people in Jail, but cannot dismiss everyone involved in the old system for practical reasons. The Architects and executors of British and Dutch "counter-insurgency" strategies to keep their colonies have Barracks named after them. I could go on with American examples but I think we all know.

It’s also worth mentioning, that these people/organizations hide very well. For broad society they don’t exist and if you mention this, you get a label “crazy conspiracy theory lover”. Funny thing, even law for such constructs exist and they’re real. Look at “Familienstiftung” (English family foundation or similarly). It’s absolutely their system, they law and their game. But I also want to get there!

It has not been possible for decades in Southern Europe countries for decades, that is why most people live with their parents and only leave home when married, and then get credits that last all the way until they retire, assuming they live that long in first place.

Or eventually get the parents house from generation to generation.

And yet there's hundreds of entire villages in Mediterranean Europe that are empty apart from a few elderly people, lots of small rural towns with tracts of empty property. Usually because they're hours away from the nearest good jobs.

What's happened is a massive shift from a small-scale agricultural economy to a mix of urban and large-scale agriculture, and the building of homes/apartments hasn't kept pace.

Yes, even those are out of reach for many pockets.

The properties themselves are being effectively given away.

Refurbishing them to a modern standard, of course, is quite a different story. Perhaps €100K EUR in a lot of cases.

Now try that on a 1 000€ salary, or 2 000€ assuming married and both working at a good enough place (minimum wage in Portugal is 870€ brutto), while having a family, paying credit on the car (as public transport sucks), various kinds of insurances, supermarket, electricity, water,...

Even me with my seniority most likely won't pull more than 1 500€ netto at most places.

Yep, that's a big part of why people aren't doing it. I guess with 2000€ income you can get a loan for 100K€ (certainly the case here), but it doesn't solve the problem of there being almost no work within a ~1hr drive in any direction.

not always

in the great depression, the crash did reduce inequality

in the covid19, the crash increased inequality

my opinion is that nowadays, fortune is highly financialized.

during a crisis, for most(99.99%) ordinary people who are in the market, they suffer the real lose, and they have nothing to comeback, even have to sell their assets to pay their bills, all they can get from the goverment is something like food banks, or the best situation, get a job to sell their labor

but for certain people either hold enough cash or can obtain enough cash from government relief programs, putting them in a position of advantage, this enables them to quickly reap a large amount of wealth during an economic crisis.

As far as I know the stock market has winners and losers.

If you're not rich but invested whatever you could over the course of your life and now the market tanks to where you've lost half (or more) of what you had then someone else is going to win that from you.

A massively rich company can hold out a lot longer than a software developer who tucked away what they could over the years. If a real crash happens that software developer just got 30 years of their net worth mostly vaporized in a few months.

How much of the population is in that category? It's the whole middle class basically. It's a crushing blow to most folks when the market crashes for a long period of time. It's even worse for folks who are already in a position of barely scraping by while putting a little bit aside whenever they can. That person is destroyed if a majority of that disappears because they may have to sell it off on the spot just to survive because if the market really crashes, you can be sure a ton of people are going to be out of work.

In other words, if your retirement savings is $200K and you lose 50% of it, at best you're going to have to make major changes to your plans. At worst (depending on how much debt you have) you're in for some real pain.

A billionaire with $200B in wealth could lose 99% of that and still have $2B, generational wealth that will perpetually fund an entire family tree down to great great grandchildren.

Yep and losses are only losses when it's realized. A billionaire can just ride out the crash for 5, 10 or 15 years while investing more when the market is near the bottom. What they are investing in is buying the shares that the middle class has to sell off to pay their rent.

I don't know what you want to label it as but being able to ride out a crash and having your unrealized losses go back to normal while still having capital to buy a ton when the market was near the bottom of a crash sounds like a lot like transferring wealth to me (from the middle to the top).

The Fed has a few papers on this issue. Their conclusion is basically that the young will eventually inherit the wealth and market forces will force a redistribution. Thus it solves itself eventually.

I personally think that the Fed papers are just designed as an excuse to print money, but my point is the Fed is very far from seeing this as a problem and will never act to remedy it.

How will market forces force a redistribution when they can just invest their wealth and keep growing it even more?

Trickle down economy is totally going to work. Just wait another couple decades! /s

A collapsing stock market wouldn't make it any easier for young people to buy their own home though.

It would probably make it harder if it were anything like 2008.

The issue with housing is that throughout the Western world we've made it incredibly difficult to get new housing built.

It makes the rich poorer but keeps the poor in the same place.

It makes the rich less rich, the poor more poor.

Not really. Stock value is just paper. Stocks going down just means they are valued less now relative to other stuff.

Imagine if everyones socks were suddenly valued a million bucks, except yours. Would you "stay in the same place" or would you suddenly be too poor to afford to buy the labor of all the newly minted millionaires? I'd bet on the latter.

It’s hard to understand this scenario at all. If everyone’s socks suddenly became worth a million dollars but nothing else at all changed, the price would immediately crash back down when the first person tries to sell them and can’t because no one is going to pay a million dollars for socks.

If you want to make the example more intuitive you can imagine strain of fungi that has the potential to evolve to an incredibly potent medicine (prolonging life by 30 years) some day in the future. The fungi grows on everyones socks except your just by random chance.

Suddenly everyone in the world owns a vial of potentially the elixir of life, except you. Can you still buy tomatoes when your neighborhood has sold their socks to Bezos and they suddenly each have a million bucks of cash in hand?

A stock market crash mostly transfers wealth from the bottom rung of those who own stocks, who are forced to sell, to the top rung of stock owners, who have enough to be able to wait it out and then buy up the assets at low prices (and make a fortune when it goes back up).

It also causes a lot of companies to go out of business or reduce their workforce because of reduced consumer spending, hurting the working class more.

Theoretically sure it could help. Realistically we know governments, who are largely controlled by the wealthy, will immediately start dumping money around when stock markets dip and doing everything possible to insulate the investor class from losing everything. But if something only hurts the lower classes, they will usually ignore it as much as possible.

No, they always win. A stock market crash could actually be a boon to them to grab free chips on the table.

They are only scared of one thing.

The hardest hit would be the middle class whose retirement depends on funds which predominantly invest in equities.

> So a stock market and/or real estate crash can actually be good to reduce inequality . In fact I think its about the only way to dramatically reduce inequality.

This would assume rich people have all their money in stocks, which is not correct.

I think its to recognize the role of Middle Men. With the tech (and globalization), Middle Men have been getting real fat.

Lina Khan types need solid support and fire power to make a dent.

They would get bailed out with something like Quantitative easing.

Congress will not let the stock market crash because they are #1 insider traders.

so short-sighted, they will either exit or short it before they let it crash. they make $ either way mate

But then they'd lose some amount of control.

Heck no. This would cause the rich to evacuate their wealth into real estate, pumping the market even further.

Nope. In a crash the poor get thrown out of their houses, have to sell their land, etc. The rich can endure more, buy that stuff and after the crisis it is even worse.

> I don't care about inequality at all

cheap products from 3rd world

cheap nature resources from 3rd world

cheap labor from 3rd world

that's why many of the free citizens of the Empire don't need to care about inequality at all

when these things change, you will care

So you're saying I should actually want to increase inequality?

Obviously sarcasm, but taking your argument at face value this is what rational (not necessarily moral) citizen of europe/usa should think. For that reason I don't think this is a good argument.

> The US has been an unequal place all its history and it's a tremendous country to live in.

Have you.. lived in other countries? I came here from southeast Asia and yes, my BigTech salary affords me a comfortable life, but I simply don't understand why the bottom 90% aren't up in arms over here.

Because they’re ignorant of what’s out there. Being poor in America probably sucks more than in third world countries where there is atleast fellowship and shared reality of the masses.

Haha, have you? I've been employed in 4 countries across 3 continents.

These comments typically come from people who are doing well in life, im guilty of that as well.

Instead we should be looking at the cups below us who can barely get by their salary

> only absolute living standards.

Well the idea is that (correctly or incorrectly) lower inequality would result in significantly higher absolute living standards.

Arguably they had been going up at the pace they have over the last several decades almost entirely due to technological progress (and more arguably globalization/free trade).

Average productivity has been in increasing at a much faster rate than median or below median absolute living standards. Growing inequality is possibly the main culprit.

> looking in the other guy's cup

Well hard not to do that when the other guy has turned off the tap after filling his cup..

> The US has been an unequal place all its history and it's a tremendous country to live in.

It could be way worse but it could also be better. There are people in the U.S without good health care or access to dignified jobs (or at least - a livable salary). These are issues that can be improved by a lot, it's not a law of nature.

Even the most basic of primates have a sense of fairness and get unhappy if someone is hoarding.

Which is why we should be encouraging the kind of wealth generated by mutually beneficial transactions, and thanking God if such strategy lead to people generating 'hoards' of value.

I exhort you to rise above the most basic of primates. I have transcended the flinging of my faeces and it has brought me great joy.

Pearls before swine.

Living standards are important, sure. So are democratic standards, and rich people often subvert them. There has been a long, long tradition of that in the US too, and everywhere else. Sponsoring their chosen politicians, being newspaper proprietors, often also being patrons of the arts and deciding what gets made and by whom.

That amounts to cultural and political hegemony. Telling people to accept that is a little like telling them to know their place.

The type of inequality being discussed is very different from 'keeping up with the Jones' that you are discussing.

Historically, one of the major turning points in the cycles of society/governments is when there is massive inequitable distribution of wealth such that the masses are left to divvy up a tiny piece of the pie while the top .05% hoard 80+% of the wealth. IMO we are currently seeing the wealthiest people on earth taking over the levers of the US government and it is unlikely we will ever return to the constitutional democracy we used to have. Moving forward Elon Musk and the other members of his Gothic MAGA will decide how much the government can spend each year and on what and for whose benefit.

A very, very different scenario than being envious of the sports car in your neighbor's driveway.