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> it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average

> it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average for quite a while, It's not clear at all and I certainly don't think that's the case, personally. Dollar numbers went up, population went up (barely - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...). Wealth was extracted and concentrated, not necessarily grown. The wealth was extracted from more primitive foreign economies as the poor of the US became less attractive for labor. The number of fabs/factories that moved out the US is a telling factor.

abecedarius 3y ago
How do you extract, like, 10x wealth from the poor of a world that had less than x wealth in total a few centuries ago? Without ever increasing the total amount of actual wealth?
- Supermancho 3y ago
  > 10x wealth from the poor of a world The middle class of Asia happily became the workhorse of the US. The median quality of life for the planet improved, but that was about technology and efficiency of the systems moving about goods...to the richer countries profiting. The movie Outsourced was an on-the-nose look at the effect the US had on poorer nations from the 2000s to today.
  - abecedarius 3y ago
    Exploitation does exist. It sounds like you're not disagreeing however about real growth, or even that it's been reaching more of the world.
gjm11 3y ago
Could you be a bit more explicit here? I mean, pick a specific reasonably long period of time over which you consider real economic growth not to have been as much as say 2% per year, and explain a bit about what you think actually happened? It seems to me that ... ... in general poor people, and especially poor people in poor countries, don't have all that much wealth to extract, so if rich people in rich countries have become substantially richer in real terms (which seems hard to deny) it's not clear that it can have come from poor people in poor countries; ... poor people in poor countries have in fact been getting richer, not poorer, for the last several decades; ... surely if poor people in the US become less attractive as employees the effect is to make people in "more primitive foreign economies" richer rather than poorer (because those people start taking jobs that would previously have been done by poor people in the US, and miserable though those jobs may be compared with the ones we[1] are lucky enough to have, presumably they're better than the ones they had before because otherwise they wouldn't have taken them); ... the question was about the world economy, not the US economy, and I don't see any particular reason to assume that when a fab or factory moves from the US to somewhere else it makes the world poorer (or for that matter that it makes the world richer). [1] Meaning "folks on HN in general"; of course there will be exceptions. There's definitely a case to be made that since somewhere around 1980 most gains have gone disproportionately to richer people. Or for that matter that all the time most gains go disproportionately to richer people. (Which shouldn't be a surprise. Being rich means having more resources to use to make things go the way you want, and most people want to be richer. If at any place and time economic gains aren't going disproportionately to richer people, it's probably because a vigorous effort is being made to make that not happen despite its "natural" tendency to do so.) But, again, it doesn't look to me as if poorer people are generally getting poorer in real terms, and even if they were they don't have enough for the rich to get much richer just by taking from them.

abecedarius 3y ago

How do you extract, like, 10x wealth from the poor of a world that had less than x wealth in total a few centuries ago? Without ever increasing the total amount of actual wealth?

Supermancho 3y ago
> 10x wealth from the poor of a world The middle class of Asia happily became the workhorse of the US. The median quality of life for the planet improved, but that was about technology and efficiency of the systems moving about goods...to the richer countries profiting. The movie Outsourced was an on-the-nose look at the effect the US had on poorer nations from the 2000s to today.
- abecedarius 3y ago
  Exploitation does exist. It sounds like you're not disagreeing however about real growth, or even that it's been reaching more of the world.

gjm11 3y ago

Could you be a bit more explicit here? I mean, pick a specific reasonably long period of time over which you consider real economic growth not to have been as much as say 2% per year, and explain a bit about what you think actually happened? It seems to me that ... ... in general poor people, and especially poor people in poor countries, don't have all that much wealth to extract, so if rich people in rich countries have become substantially richer in real terms (which seems hard to deny) it's not clear that it can have come from poor people in poor countries; ... poor people in poor countries have in fact been getting richer, not poorer, for the last several decades; ... surely if poor people in the US become less attractive as employees the effect is to make people in "more primitive foreign economies" richer rather than poorer (because those people start taking jobs that would previously have been done by poor people in the US, and miserable though those jobs may be compared with the ones we[1] are lucky enough to have, presumably they're better than the ones they had before because otherwise they wouldn't have taken them); ... the question was about the world economy, not the US economy, and I don't see any particular reason to assume that when a fab or factory moves from the US to somewhere else it makes the world poorer (or for that matter that it makes the world richer). [1] Meaning "folks on HN in general"; of course there will be exceptions. There's definitely a case to be made that since somewhere around 1980 most gains have gone disproportionately to richer people. Or for that matter that all the time most gains go disproportionately to richer people. (Which shouldn't be a surprise. Being rich means having more resources to use to make things go the way you want, and most people want to be richer. If at any place and time economic gains aren't going disproportionately to richer people, it's probably because a vigorous effort is being made to make that not happen despite its "natural" tendency to do so.) But, again, it doesn't look to me as if poorer people are generally getting poorer in real terms, and even if they were they don't have enough for the rich to get much richer just by taking from them.