6 ms·

> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.

criley2 4y ago
Historically it was much, much worse. The only way you can make an argument for saying inequality is greater now (when global poverty/subsistence farming is at the lowest % since human settlement 12000 years ago) is to point to the sheer amount of wealth we generate compared to any other period and nit pick about it's allocation. That's fine, but if you want to go back to farming for your life, like most humans for most of history, you'll probably find it a worse life than being in a developed country middle class, even if "your wealth is technically more equal to a king than a middle class to a ceo"
- RyanHamilton 4y ago
  What source are you basing that on? You can find countless sources that show the 0.1% owning an ever greater share: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-01-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i... "Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%."
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - criley2 4y ago
    I'm basing that on global numbers, not national numbers. Sure, I don't doubt that in developed economies inequality is getting worse. But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.
    - owisd 4y ago
      There's a good video on how that $1.90 is arbitrary and too low, and if you try to come up with a poverty line from first principles, you end up more in the $5-$12 range, where it doesn't paint such a great picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s
    - RyanHamilton 4y ago
      Inequality is about the ratio of high earners to low earners. What you have linked to is a different concept, i.e. absolute income. Income inequality in china also increased, see figure 5: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-ine... Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.
- pojzon 4y ago
  Thats completely true, tho a peasent was working for his master a lot less than we currently do for our masters. When we get 3days work week and 4 days of „time for my stuff” we can go back to discussing that.
  - vkou 4y ago
    The peasant was working for their master a lot less because if the master asked for more, the peasant would literally starve to death, because he wouldn't have enough hours in the day to work for himself. The ruling class will happily soak up all spare productive capacity - and as the amount of work necessary to keep someone clothed, sheltered, and fed went down, that spare productive capacity grows, and more of it flows upwards.
    - pojzon 4y ago
      Ok now how really it did look in history: Landlord was lending land to peasents - rich peasents, because bottom cast did not even have a chance to talk to landlord. For the land peasents got, they had to work for the landlord specific number of days in a week. For some time it was 1-2-3-4-5 days per week. Most common was 3 days. Thing is - the peasent was not obligated to do that work himself. He could have sent a son, family member or even hire someone. That way it was super easy to keep his agreement with the landlord while mostly focus on his own farm. Who had it terrible were bottom, poor peasents that worked for other peasents. They did not have their own land and were at mercy of their “master peasents”. They most likely had to work whole week or 5-6 days. They were more of a slave than a peasent tbh, but its a hard disregarded truth. Current middle class in our times could be translated to “master peasents” back in time. Slave peasents would be the slave-wage ppl. When I discuss or compare medival peasents to current corporation workers I always compare master peasents to corposlaves. And master peasents had it super better than corposlaves do now.
  - criley2 4y ago
    The subsistence farm does not wait for your days off. You will live your life according to its schedule, and it does not care about sick days or vacation. To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week" is nonsense. They worked hard af for all sunlight hours for some seasons, and had plenty of leisure in times like the winter. On average, maybe that's 4 days off, but let's not pretend that working the land is not back breaking work. It's not leisure. If you really think some 40 hour wfh coding job is harder work than farming for your life, then there's no law saying you can't buy some land and go off grid. You're welcome to subsist. Hell you could land a few million subs on youtube airing the experience, that category is all the rage these days
dylan604 4y ago
with minor blips where the peasants revolt and take out those above them only to settle back under the rule of someone new. it is a minor annoyance to those amassing wealth to keep in mind.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Never really happened in my country. The second tier complained at one point, and peacefully reached an agreement with the top tier (Magna Carta.) Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Uh, what about the time that Parliament decapitated the king and established a Puritan dictatorship for a minute
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > for a minute Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >Never really happened in my country. >Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years. So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      > So we've shifted the goalposts No... why do you think that? > The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there. Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question. > "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years" I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.
FabHK 4y ago
I am fairly sure inequality is more extreme than that (top 10% hold 70%) at the moment, and it was less bad in the second half of the 20th century. The top US marginal income tax rate was 90% in the 1960s, and 70% in the 1970s, and it did not seem to discourage GDP growth or innovation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...
- kansface 4y ago
  No one actually paid those rates, so it goes. The narrative is that part of lowering the rates was closing the loop holes...
- Aarostotle 4y ago
  We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago. Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials? Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money. Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly. Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.
  - 4y ago
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
Might want to check your history books, because mine are full of failed empires and revolutions.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  When they failed... did wealth redistribute, or was the bulk immediately claimed by someone else? What examples of civilisations without unequal wealth distribution are you thinking of?
Grustaf 4y ago
That particular ratio, if true, is not the issue. Someone being one order of magnitude richer than someone else does not necessarily damage society, the problem is how much the richest 0.1% control.
ggpsv 4y ago
Quite the opposite actually. "all of human history" spans at least 160,000 years and the inequality that you and the parent comment to are alluding to is a rather modern artifact. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
sam0x17 4y ago
very untrue. It is well documented that income equality is more extreme now (by an order of magnitude) than it was at any point in recorded human history. The inequality is something like 100x that of french revolution times where terms like bourgeois came from. The fact that we haven't broken out in revolution yet is just a testament to how powerful the media state, corporations, and lobbying have become.

criley2 4y ago

Historically it was much, much worse. The only way you can make an argument for saying inequality is greater now (when global poverty/subsistence farming is at the lowest % since human settlement 12000 years ago) is to point to the sheer amount of wealth we generate compared to any other period and nit pick about it's allocation. That's fine, but if you want to go back to farming for your life, like most humans for most of history, you'll probably find it a worse life than being in a developed country middle class, even if "your wealth is technically more equal to a king than a middle class to a ceo"

RyanHamilton 4y ago
What source are you basing that on? You can find countless sources that show the 0.1% owning an ever greater share: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-01-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i... "Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1% has increased from 7% to 22%."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- criley2 4y ago
  I'm basing that on global numbers, not national numbers. Sure, I don't doubt that in developed economies inequality is getting worse. But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l... So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.
  - owisd 4y ago
    There's a good video on how that $1.90 is arbitrary and too low, and if you try to come up with a poverty line from first principles, you end up more in the $5-$12 range, where it doesn't paint such a great picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc#t=19m16s
  - RyanHamilton 4y ago
    Inequality is about the ratio of high earners to low earners. What you have linked to is a different concept, i.e. absolute income. Income inequality in china also increased, see figure 5: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/04/01/income-ine... Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.
pojzon 4y ago
Thats completely true, tho a peasent was working for his master a lot less than we currently do for our masters. When we get 3days work week and 4 days of „time for my stuff” we can go back to discussing that.
- vkou 4y ago
  The peasant was working for their master a lot less because if the master asked for more, the peasant would literally starve to death, because he wouldn't have enough hours in the day to work for himself. The ruling class will happily soak up all spare productive capacity - and as the amount of work necessary to keep someone clothed, sheltered, and fed went down, that spare productive capacity grows, and more of it flows upwards.
  - pojzon 4y ago
    Ok now how really it did look in history: Landlord was lending land to peasents - rich peasents, because bottom cast did not even have a chance to talk to landlord. For the land peasents got, they had to work for the landlord specific number of days in a week. For some time it was 1-2-3-4-5 days per week. Most common was 3 days. Thing is - the peasent was not obligated to do that work himself. He could have sent a son, family member or even hire someone. That way it was super easy to keep his agreement with the landlord while mostly focus on his own farm. Who had it terrible were bottom, poor peasents that worked for other peasents. They did not have their own land and were at mercy of their “master peasents”. They most likely had to work whole week or 5-6 days. They were more of a slave than a peasent tbh, but its a hard disregarded truth. Current middle class in our times could be translated to “master peasents” back in time. Slave peasents would be the slave-wage ppl. When I discuss or compare medival peasents to current corporation workers I always compare master peasents to corposlaves. And master peasents had it super better than corposlaves do now.
- criley2 4y ago
  The subsistence farm does not wait for your days off. You will live your life according to its schedule, and it does not care about sick days or vacation. To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week" is nonsense. They worked hard af for all sunlight hours for some seasons, and had plenty of leisure in times like the winter. On average, maybe that's 4 days off, but let's not pretend that working the land is not back breaking work. It's not leisure. If you really think some 40 hour wfh coding job is harder work than farming for your life, then there's no law saying you can't buy some land and go off grid. You're welcome to subsist. Hell you could land a few million subs on youtube airing the experience, that category is all the rage these days

dylan604 4y ago

with minor blips where the peasants revolt and take out those above them only to settle back under the rule of someone new. it is a minor annoyance to those amassing wealth to keep in mind.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Never really happened in my country. The second tier complained at one point, and peacefully reached an agreement with the top tier (Magna Carta.) Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Uh, what about the time that Parliament decapitated the king and established a Puritan dictatorship for a minute
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > for a minute Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)
- jjulius 4y ago
  >Never really happened in my country. >Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years. So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > So we've shifted the goalposts No... why do you think that? > The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there. Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question. > "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years" I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.

FabHK 4y ago

I am fairly sure inequality is more extreme than that (top 10% hold 70%) at the moment, and it was less bad in the second half of the 20th century. The top US marginal income tax rate was 90% in the 1960s, and 70% in the 1970s, and it did not seem to discourage GDP growth or innovation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...

kansface 4y ago
No one actually paid those rates, so it goes. The narrative is that part of lowering the rates was closing the loop holes...
Aarostotle 4y ago
We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago. Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials? Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money. Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly. Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.
- 4y ago

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

Might want to check your history books, because mine are full of failed empires and revolutions.

chrisseaton 4y ago
When they failed... did wealth redistribute, or was the bulk immediately claimed by someone else? What examples of civilisations without unequal wealth distribution are you thinking of?

Grustaf 4y ago

That particular ratio, if true, is not the issue. Someone being one order of magnitude richer than someone else does not necessarily damage society, the problem is how much the richest 0.1% control.

ggpsv 4y ago

Quite the opposite actually. "all of human history" spans at least 160,000 years and the inequality that you and the parent comment to are alluding to is a rather modern artifact. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

sam0x17 4y ago

very untrue. It is well documented that income equality is more extreme now (by an order of magnitude) than it was at any point in recorded human history. The inequality is something like 100x that of french revolution times where terms like bourgeois came from. The fact that we haven't broken out in revolution yet is just a testament to how powerful the media state, corporations, and lobbying have become.