7 ms·

>The majority are a lot poorer Source with data? This doesn't match any place I've seen such as BLS data or Census data or FRED data.

andy_ppp 8y ago
I've added some references - look at the diagrams in the first article - most of the increases in wealth since the 70s have gone to rich people.
- IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  > most of the increases in wealth since the 70s have gone to rich people. That itself isn't enough to state poor people became poorer, only in comparison to an ever increasing moving goalpost of what poor means is that statement enough to say poor get poorer. Median personal real income has grown by about 35% or so in the past few decades. The average is quite a bit higher, I'm just talking about the median. Household income usually isn't as good an indicator because household size has shrunk.
  - quakenul 8y ago
    That is not what has been stated though. They said the majority have become poorer, not the poor. Whether that's true or not, to me, seems to depend on your definition of individual wealth, it either being relative to total wealth or rather quality of life -- but it's certainly not the same thing.
    - ChrisLomont 8y ago
      Bezos becoming richer through stock gains costs me nothing, because his wealth increase is purely speculative. He didn't take that billions out of the economy, or from the poor, or from anyone. So I think this is not a good measurement of whether or not the majority have become richer or poorer. A much better measurement is do they have more stuff, or better stuff, or a higher quality of life than before. This is the level I think most people care about. Not whether some rich people got richer (mostly from stock growth) faster than I did.
      - andy_ppp 8y ago
        Apart from most of the small book shops in the world going out of business?
        tryptophan 8y ago
        Why did they go out of business? Probably because they offered worse prices and worse service. By taking less money from his customers, Bezos makes his customers richer than if they shopped somewhere else. The few business owners who are affected and are made worse off are rounding error and do not change the fact that the median person is better off.
- ChrisLomont 8y ago
  Someone else becoming richer does not require me to become poorer. Everyone's quality of life can increase and the best may still outpace the lowest.
  - dnomad 8y ago
    > Someone else becoming richer does not require me to become poorer. Oh but it does. Systemic inequality engenders winner-take-all dynamics. We see this very clearly in the data: as capital becomes more concentrated the rich grab more and more of the surplus. Eventually all growth will be captured by a few large enterprises. Now, even if you don't go all in on Piketty and you give fuck-all about the poor, it should be clear there's an issue here. We don't live in a static world. Someone else becoming richer doesn't make you poorer... until new players join the game. The rich capture all the economic surplus but it's the poor keep having all the babies. So now you've got no choice but to commence with the somewhat unpleasant business of liquidating the poor. Get them hooked on opiods, send them off to wars, drive up the cost of housing and schooling -- do whatever it takes to drive down birth rates and increase mortality. There's no money for these new mouths to feed because it's literally all going to the rich. And long term this becomes problematic. Again, even if you give fuck all about economic justice, history has proven such systems to be woefully unstable. Humans aren't like rabbits -- they just don't and lie down in a hole and starve to death quietly. Unlike natural systems that tend to course correct smoothly human systems tend to just collapse.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      Additionally we are learning more that psychological effects of poverty translate to material outcomes, like higher mortality rates, even after controlling for baseline access to material benefits like health care or nutrition or education. For example, Last Place Aversion is a real psychological effect that motivates people in their voting habits, e.g. minimum wage laws. Status signalling effects in medical outcomes are also an area of active research (e.g. the richest person in a poor neighborhood can end up having significantly better longevity outcomes than a wealthier person who happens to be the poorest person in a rich neighborhood). Relative wealth has material effects on health, mortality, etc., which look to be driven by psychological effects and persist even when controlling for material benefits. In other words, if you're in the middle class and your perspective is that you have to work harder to be less relatively well off, this psychological factor can be a cause for genuine material harm. I think we are only just beginning to understand these types of inequality effects.
Dirlewanger 8y ago
That's because it's nonsense. In the past 20 years, more people have been lifted out of poverty than at any other point in human history. Look up the UN's millenium development goals. Some people just want you to believe that the world is always getting worse.
- onion2k 8y ago
  You're talking about poverty in terms of absolute wealth. Yes, fewer people live in extreme poverty now. Most people on Earth have access to phones, washing machines, healthcare and transport. This is undoubtedly great. In terms of relative wealth though, comparing the average to people at the top, the 1%'s wealth has grown much faster than everyone else. It's true to say that we are all relatively less well off than we were in 2000. This is bad because wealth begets more wealth, so the inequality grows. That could lead to all sorts of problems (societal breakdown, revolution, civil war at the extremes...).
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Why do you care how much somebody else has? People often refer to things like the French revolution as a warning of what can happen when wealth inequality gets out of control, but that comparison is completely absurd. People were not upset that the aristocracy had great feasts, liquor, and lavish lifestyles. They were upset that they could not afford even bread. In modern times this is not even remotely comparable where ever more people have ever more access to ever more things. But the richest of the rich have even more things. For comparison if we break this down into an anecdotes of toddler the French revolution would have been Joe having 0 toys while Jane had 10. In modern times Joe has 500 toys while Jane has 5000. By most of any metric, except in comparison to Jane, Joe has a ton of toys. And so his complaint seems more petulant than justified. Let's put this another way. Imagine I told you that in 100 years somebody of the lowest social class would have what would be equivalent to 10 million dollars today in terms of spending power. That sounds unbelievably amazing. Would that somehow suddenly change if somebody at the top had a quadrillion dollars of spending power? Taken to extremes wealth at the top can decrease the value of wealth at the bottom (largely due to inflation), but that's not really the case to a significant degree today - people just seem upset that other people have more than them.

andy_ppp 8y ago

I've added some references - look at the diagrams in the first article - most of the increases in wealth since the 70s have gone to rich people.

IkmoIkmo 8y ago
> most of the increases in wealth since the 70s have gone to rich people. That itself isn't enough to state poor people became poorer, only in comparison to an ever increasing moving goalpost of what poor means is that statement enough to say poor get poorer. Median personal real income has grown by about 35% or so in the past few decades. The average is quite a bit higher, I'm just talking about the median. Household income usually isn't as good an indicator because household size has shrunk.
- quakenul 8y ago
  That is not what has been stated though. They said the majority have become poorer, not the poor. Whether that's true or not, to me, seems to depend on your definition of individual wealth, it either being relative to total wealth or rather quality of life -- but it's certainly not the same thing.
  - ChrisLomont 8y ago
    Bezos becoming richer through stock gains costs me nothing, because his wealth increase is purely speculative. He didn't take that billions out of the economy, or from the poor, or from anyone. So I think this is not a good measurement of whether or not the majority have become richer or poorer. A much better measurement is do they have more stuff, or better stuff, or a higher quality of life than before. This is the level I think most people care about. Not whether some rich people got richer (mostly from stock growth) faster than I did.
    - andy_ppp 8y ago
      Apart from most of the small book shops in the world going out of business?
      - tryptophan 8y ago
        Why did they go out of business? Probably because they offered worse prices and worse service. By taking less money from his customers, Bezos makes his customers richer than if they shopped somewhere else. The few business owners who are affected and are made worse off are rounding error and do not change the fact that the median person is better off.
ChrisLomont 8y ago
Someone else becoming richer does not require me to become poorer. Everyone's quality of life can increase and the best may still outpace the lowest.
- dnomad 8y ago
  > Someone else becoming richer does not require me to become poorer. Oh but it does. Systemic inequality engenders winner-take-all dynamics. We see this very clearly in the data: as capital becomes more concentrated the rich grab more and more of the surplus. Eventually all growth will be captured by a few large enterprises. Now, even if you don't go all in on Piketty and you give fuck-all about the poor, it should be clear there's an issue here. We don't live in a static world. Someone else becoming richer doesn't make you poorer... until new players join the game. The rich capture all the economic surplus but it's the poor keep having all the babies. So now you've got no choice but to commence with the somewhat unpleasant business of liquidating the poor. Get them hooked on opiods, send them off to wars, drive up the cost of housing and schooling -- do whatever it takes to drive down birth rates and increase mortality. There's no money for these new mouths to feed because it's literally all going to the rich. And long term this becomes problematic. Again, even if you give fuck all about economic justice, history has proven such systems to be woefully unstable. Humans aren't like rabbits -- they just don't and lie down in a hole and starve to death quietly. Unlike natural systems that tend to course correct smoothly human systems tend to just collapse.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Additionally we are learning more that psychological effects of poverty translate to material outcomes, like higher mortality rates, even after controlling for baseline access to material benefits like health care or nutrition or education. For example, Last Place Aversion is a real psychological effect that motivates people in their voting habits, e.g. minimum wage laws. Status signalling effects in medical outcomes are also an area of active research (e.g. the richest person in a poor neighborhood can end up having significantly better longevity outcomes than a wealthier person who happens to be the poorest person in a rich neighborhood). Relative wealth has material effects on health, mortality, etc., which look to be driven by psychological effects and persist even when controlling for material benefits. In other words, if you're in the middle class and your perspective is that you have to work harder to be less relatively well off, this psychological factor can be a cause for genuine material harm. I think we are only just beginning to understand these types of inequality effects.

Dirlewanger 8y ago

That's because it's nonsense. In the past 20 years, more people have been lifted out of poverty than at any other point in human history. Look up the UN's millenium development goals. Some people just want you to believe that the world is always getting worse.

onion2k 8y ago
You're talking about poverty in terms of absolute wealth. Yes, fewer people live in extreme poverty now. Most people on Earth have access to phones, washing machines, healthcare and transport. This is undoubtedly great. In terms of relative wealth though, comparing the average to people at the top, the 1%'s wealth has grown much faster than everyone else. It's true to say that we are all relatively less well off than we were in 2000. This is bad because wealth begets more wealth, so the inequality grows. That could lead to all sorts of problems (societal breakdown, revolution, civil war at the extremes...).
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Why do you care how much somebody else has? People often refer to things like the French revolution as a warning of what can happen when wealth inequality gets out of control, but that comparison is completely absurd. People were not upset that the aristocracy had great feasts, liquor, and lavish lifestyles. They were upset that they could not afford even bread. In modern times this is not even remotely comparable where ever more people have ever more access to ever more things. But the richest of the rich have even more things. For comparison if we break this down into an anecdotes of toddler the French revolution would have been Joe having 0 toys while Jane had 10. In modern times Joe has 500 toys while Jane has 5000. By most of any metric, except in comparison to Jane, Joe has a ton of toys. And so his complaint seems more petulant than justified. Let's put this another way. Imagine I told you that in 100 years somebody of the lowest social class would have what would be equivalent to 10 million dollars today in terms of spending power. That sounds unbelievably amazing. Would that somehow suddenly change if somebody at the top had a quadrillion dollars of spending power? Taken to extremes wealth at the top can decrease the value of wealth at the bottom (largely due to inflation), but that's not really the case to a significant degree today - people just seem upset that other people have more than them.