4 ms·
Only if you assume mobility is a zero-sum game. It doesn't have to be, if we allow people to obtain wealth from their labor instead of sucking all the alpha int
by philipov 8y ago
Only if you assume mobility is a zero-sum game. It doesn't have to be, if we allow people to obtain wealth from their labor instead of sucking all the alpha into a black hole of wealth consolidation by the already-wealthy.
Positive-sum social mobility was supposed to be the point of economic growth, but instead that growth was captured by rent-seekers, institutional investors, and others.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoQuality of life has been rising and poverty has been falling at very consistent rates worldwide over the past few decades. By just about any metric you could find, it's currently the best time to be a human being in the history of humanity.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoI cannot square that with a generation jobless, unable to buy their own place or even a car in many cases. If you cherry pick what 'poverty' is, I guess so, and surely even the least of us live better than 13th century peasants. But better than in 1980? No.
- barrkel 8y agoAh, but what about China, and Nigeria? They're doing much better! It's going to get worse, you know, the pushback from hollowed out rich world economies. Trump isn't the last populist, and he's not going to have been the worst. A more competent leader will learn from the fears Trump harnessed and be far more effective.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago13th century peasants didn’t live a much better life than many people did 100 years ago. But even if you’re only talking about the US between the 80s and now, you’re still wrong. Unemployment is half of what is was in 1980, and at the lowest rate since the 60s. Household wealth has grown an enormous amount since the 80s, the poor are less poor and the poverty rate has dropped since the 80s too. The only somewhat legitimate issue you can point too is that housing in some areas is unaffordable for most people. But if your biggest complaint is that you can’t afford to buy your own house in the most expensive cities in the world, even though there’s lots of places where you could, and even though poverty and unemployment is down, and household income is up, then maybe you’re just proving my point?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoEmployment as a flat stat is useless. Folks with college educations are flipping burgers. A better measure might be 'employment expected value' where you take the sum of the product of job X earnings or some such. Its been popular lately to claim that, because folks who used to have good-paying factory jobs have slid down the economic ladder to labor or service, its still good because its 'full employment'.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoAll of the statistics prove you wrong, so you demand that I produce a statistic that literally doesn’t exist?