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Claiming society hasn't massively benefited from productivity increases over the last century is certainly a take.... typical western raised privileged person c
by richwater 4y ago
Claiming society hasn't massively benefited from productivity increases over the last century is certainly a take.... typical western raised privileged person claiming how terrible everything is.
- mort96 4y agoI don't mean to say that there has been no benefit to the masses. I'm saying there benefits are clearly massively unequally distributed as the 0.1% get an ever increasing share of the wealth.
- runarberg 4y agoIs what you could claim if inequality wasn’t a detrimental to quality of life in and of it self, a fact which psychologists and sociologists have pretty well established at this point. Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
- weatherlite 4y agoHow do we define quality of life? I doubt the average American is mentally healthier than in the 50s.
- runarberg 4y agoAnother excellent point. Many (most?) quality of life indexes have tons of obvious biases, and are quick to fail the sniff test.
- sokoloff 4y agoFretting about inequality and focusing mental energy on someone else having more money than you is surely detrimental.
- runarberg 4y agoSure, you can downplay the effects all you want, but this has been thoroughly studied, and there is a consensus within the scientific community that the negative effects of inequality are real. Disputing it at this point is kind of like disputing climate change.
- sokoloff 4y agoIf all of Bezos, Musk, Buffett, Ellison, and Gates’ wealth were instantly destroyed, inequality would fall quite a bit and yet my life would not be improved in any discernible way.
- runarberg 4y agoThat is not how this works. Collectively (all else being equal) a lot of lives would indeed improve, or at the very least, the collective perception of the quality of life would improve significantly (in a statistical sense). What you are saying is the equivalent of stating that today is cold, so climate change must be false.
- sokoloff 4y agoTheir possession of vast wealth is not a negative for me, nor would its destruction benefit me. There’s very few cases where we are competing against each other for goods and services. If you’re asking whether I’d be better off if you instead seized it and gave me some, of course I would, but it’s important to understand that that improvement comes from being given money, not by the reduction of inequality.
- runarberg 4y agoIts been a while since I read the literature, but if I remember correctly, this effect you are describing is usually controlled for. If I remember correctly, it is the inequality it self, that decreases quality of life, and is independent of the increase in wealth among the poorer public. That is, over a certain baseline, an increase in wealth does not yield significant improvement in quality of life (i.e. diminishing returns). Redistributing the wealth to increase inequality will improve the collective quality of life, not because the general public has more money, but because there is more equality. Again it is up to you if you don’t believe this, just be aware that your believes are contrary to the scientific consensus.
- weatherlite 4y agoIt's definitely slowing the last couple of decades and in some aspects - reversing. U.S life expectancy is one measurement confirming this. Depression / anxiety among teens is higher. And the last decade was pretty comfortable economically, it's going to get much much harder now.