7 ms·
Is there any scenario like this in any other developed country? (Im honestly looking for an answer)
by yairhaimo 9y ago
Is there any scenario like this in any other developed country? (Im honestly looking for an answer)
- sleavey 9y agoGiven that the wealth gap in the US seems so much bigger than any other country, I'd wager not.
- contingencies 9y agoParts of China have some cool stuff. The arts community in Yunnan is a good example. Many sculpture parks, weird spaces, reinvigorated industrial, etc. But gentrifying quickly now, so creativity is waning.
- NeonVice 9y agosource?
- microcolonel 9y agoThe United States is not a particularly wealth-unequal country by world measures.
- greglindahl 9y agoThe US is very wealth-unequal, especially if you compare it to developed countries: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm
- specialist 9y agoCompared to itself, 30 years ago.
- IncRnd 9y agoThat page doesn't compare wealth but disposable income.
- dahauns 9y agohttps://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/dp2008-03.pdf https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/dp2008-03.pdf Picture's still the same.
- IncRnd 9y agoActually, that isn't shown by your link. Your link's Table 1 shows Wealth Shares by percentiles in 10% intervals. This shows a gap of 39% for the US and 53% for Denmark, between the lowest 90% and the top 10% by wealth. Comparing the top 10% to the bottom 10% shows an 82% difference for Denmark and a 70% delta for the US. The OP wrote, "the wealth gap in the US seems so much bigger than any other country," which is not supported by your link.
- dahauns 9y agoThe US is the third worst in that list. If you're content to say "but X is worse", as long as there is at least one X, so be it... EDIT: And if you want more recent data: https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/research/research-institute/global-wealth-report.html https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/research/research...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sleavey 9y agoThe question was specifically about developed countries. If you look up the Wikipedia entry on wealth inequality [1] and sort the first column, looking down the list the USA appears to be the highest ranked country for inequality (ratio of earnings between richest and poorest 10%). Notably China is there, and Mexico and South Africa too, among myriad developing African and Central/South American countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
- astrodust 9y agoAmerica is a lot more like African and South American countries in terms of income inequality than compared to other G20 countries. It's also one of the few countries with a multitude of multi-billionaires and yet an astoundingly high rate of child poverty.
- microcolonel 9y agoThe problem here is a lack of prudence. When the town was flush with cash from the manufacturing sector, they expanded the budget and became inefficient. When that money left, they still had all of these long-standing inefficient agreements and processes. Detroit is a well known example of it because they are still trying to uphold these parasitic relationships despite being basically evacuated.
- maxerickson 9y agoI'm not sure you even need profligate spending to suffer after 50% of the population leaves.
- stickfigure 9y agoProbably not, but the combination is especially dire.
- microcolonel 9y agoI would generally consider spending to be profligate if you could not sustain it for a proportional reduction in population (even of an important demographic) with an equal proportional reduction in number of people served. Or I guess the important matter would be making it so that you only have maybe a few quarters of loss before you can legally adjust services to fit within the budget.
- vacri 9y agoIt's really unusual for cities to shrink, let alone drastically, so rapping people on the knuckles for not planning what happens when half your population leaves is a bit disingenuous.
- microcolonel 9y agoI don't think it's disingenuous to be thinking of how quickly you could terminate non-essential services and staff, and in what order they are cut. You can spend your size, you'd just better be able to downsize quick, whether the economic downturn is global or local, artificial or natural. City councils seem to think they're in the business of employing people permanently, but they really shouldn't need to be concerned about that, given that the citizens are left to foot the bill, and the majority of them do not work for the local government.
- matt4077 9y agoBerlin in the 90s, and to some degree today, may be similar.
- akgerber 9y agoThere are parallels in the decline of boomtowns of the Industrial Revolution between the Rust Belt and the Rhine-Ruhr and Northern England, although declining European cities generally saw a lot more investment from their central governments. More importantly, the European cities didn't experience the same degree of racialized shunning, as described by the Detroit-native urban planner Pete Saunders: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petesaunders1/2017/07/28/detroit-emerges-from-the-shunning/#4d33f4b07fd8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/petesaunders1/2017/07/28/detroi... Most Rust Belt metro areas have seen little population decline from their peak (metro Detroit has lost perhaps 200,000 people even as the city has lost over 1M), and could easily be intact-but-rough-edged cities with cheap housing if there weren't the same dynamic of white flight from the core.
- pjc50 9y agoA lot of UK cities suffered 70s/80s economic decline, to the extent that the government was discussing "managed decline" for Liverpool: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-16355281 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-16355281 . Even London suffered a decline in population from ~8m to ~6m. But somehow I don't think it ever got quite as bad as Detroit. It seems that somehow American politics can just abandon cities, and declare their failure not a problem for the nation or the state. (Last time I ran the numbers, 80s Detroit was more dangerous than troops-in-the-streets Troubles Belfast, but I don't have it to hand)
- jordanb 9y agoDifference between the UK and the USA is white flight and racial/ethnic tensions.