9 ms·

Incorrect use of the term "tipping point". Reaching this point may be noteworthy, but there is absolutely no evidence or reason to believe that the remaining p

• 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  The authors' argument for why this is important is made here: Why does it matter that a middle-class tipping point has been reached and that the middle class is the most rapidly growing segment of the global income distribution? Because the middle class drive demand in the global economy and because the middle class are far more demanding of their governments. FWIW, I agree that reaching 50% globally is of little importance, but it's certainly very meaningful locally. China's meteoric rise in the last two decades was born from the rise of the middle class, and the same is now starting to happen in India and Indonesia. Also, And while the rise is not without it's downsides (pollution, obesity, whatnot), as the authors note that it's quite well established that escaping poverty/vulnerability makes people a lot happier. Risking a heart attack from a bad diet 30 years down the road is preferable to starving now due to a lack of food.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • riffraff 7y ago
    grandparent's point, as I understand it, is that there is no substantial difference between 49% and 51%. The middle class would be driving choices at 49% too.
  • elfexec 7y ago
    > China's meteoric rise in the last two decades was born from the rise of the middle class I think you have it backwards. The rise of china's middle class was born from china's meteoric economic growth in the last two decades.
• barry-cotter 7y ago
  > but education and public health have not improved significantly, and possibly even declined for the lower middle-class. There’s an upper limit to the proportion of the population that can do doctoral/professional/executive level work because people’s capacities are limited. If you bump up against that limit further attempts to increase qualifications or learning will fail or the qualifications will be debased. If there is a single first world country where life expectancy has declined from 20 years ago to now I haven’t heard of it. > And while people used to be poor here, nobody was malnourished in the bad old days, but now, with their new industrialized middle-class diets, they are getting "starving fat" like American inner city kids. Starving fat doesn’t exist. If people choose to eat bad food that’s their choice. We can lament it; we can take action to encourage healthier diets but that doesn’t mean “starving fat” isn’t an oxymoron.
  • dpau 7y ago
    > Starving fat doesn’t exist. If people choose to eat bad food that’s their choice. We can't place blame fully on consumers. "Food deserts" are spreading while quality, variety and abundance of fresh food is decreasing. Meanwhile fast food is cheap, heavily marketed, and engineered for its addictiveness. In many areas poor people don't actually have much choice.
    • barry-cotter 7y ago
      Food deserts are a problem of lack of demand, not lack of supply. Where there are people who want fresh produce people will sell it to them. See any US neighborhood mainly populated by recent immigrants from countries where people cook. > The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States > We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts. https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDeserts.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...
• seibelj 7y ago
  It sounds like you would have preferred your community to stay poor? I think you need you need a dab of humility - let people make their own decisions. If they choose to eat crap and get fat, that’s not a reason to delay economic progress and take away individual freedom.
  • bob33212 7y ago
    Right. How would you like it if someone 1000x richer than you decided that it was unfortunate that you were (Playing video games / watching netflix / eating unhealthy food ) too often and said that it is not that great that you got a large income boost because you are spending your time doing those things
  • Consultant32452 7y ago
    I don't want to be involved in the health decisions of the poor. But I'm required to fund dealing with the consequences. My money my vote. If you don't like it, don't take the money.
    • justforyou 7y ago
      I doubt you have an accurate picture of how much of your money you are 'required' to give to the poor.
      • Consultant32452 7y ago
        I know exactly how much goes into Medicare and Medicaid. The idea that I shouldn't have a say in how my money is spent or what strings are attached is morally bankrupt. If I owe you insulin just because you're morbidly obese in my country then you owe me to never drink soda. It's not that complicated.
        • etripe 7y ago
          How is that so many American libertarians fail to get the concept that you pay taxes because you benefit directly in terms of infrastructure and public services? And why do you often focus much more on social welfare "mooching", which is a miniscule amount compared to the amounts paid into corporate and military-industrial welfare? I'm left wondering: if it ends at insulin, where does solidarity begin for you?
• JauntTrooper 7y ago
  In 1950, 27% of people died before age 15. In 2017 it was 4.6%. Still horrifically high, but a staggering achievement in the history of our species. [0] Think of all the people spared from having to deal with a child, sibling, or friend dying young. I think it's sometimes hard to fathom just how bad the human condition has been for most of our history. [0] Source: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/Mortality-rates-of-children-over-last-two-millennia.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/06/Mortality-rates-o...
  • dahart 7y ago
    Reducing the infant mortality rate depends on getting out of poverty, and the line above with infant mortality rates stabilize is way higher than the $1.90/day definition of “poor” that is used in this article, in fact in a lot of the world, the income needed to escape high infant mortality is as high as what the authors of the posted article have decided to call “middle class”. See for example https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/RBPLTechPub.pdf https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/RBPLTechPub.pdf
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  • rofo1 7y ago
    > I think it's sometimes hard to fathom just how bad the human condition has been for most of our history. It really is not. All it takes is non-zero curiosity and picking up a book or two. Every single person of sound mind that has some history knowledge or evolutionary biology will confirm that life in 2020 is remarkably easy. The things that we have at our disposal are remarkable! Too many people take everything we have now for granted. I blame two institutions: school and parents. Sure, there are market forces that thrive on greed, but that's not an acceptable excuse!
• pif 7y ago
  > And all those new middle-class consumers are doing a real number on the environment, They are enjoying life, good for them!
• randomcarbloke 7y ago
  "tipping point" implies nothing of the sort. Schelling described no acceleration associated with it.
  • discreteevent 7y ago
    Then he has a very bad choice of language. Tipping point means physically that once it is reached then the scales (or whatever is in balance) tip 100% to the other side.
  • wutbrodo 7y ago
    I don't think this is true. Per Wikipedia[1]: > The phrase was first used in sociology by Morton Grodzins when he adopted the phrase from physics where it referred to the adding a small amount of weight to a balanced object until the additional weight caused the object to suddenly and completely topple, or tip. Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families remained in the neighborhood as long as the comparative number of black families remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black families arrived, the remaining white families would move out en masse in a process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point". The idea was expanded and built upon by Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Schelling in 1972. As one would guess from the common usage of the phrase, as well as the physical analogy itself, a tipping point is indeed a threshold that causes an acceleration (sometimes described as the specific case of a binary flip). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_(sociology)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_(sociology)#Hist...
• ElFitz 7y ago
  For those interested, there's a great course on models on Coursera[1] where they (amongst other models) talk about tipping points [1]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking https://www.coursera.org/learn/model-thinking