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>If humans could live on laissez-faire capitalism, the US wouldn't have 11% of its population living below the poverty line. I think it might be a little more

by xoa 3y ago

>If humans could live on laissez-faire capitalism, the US wouldn't have 11% of its population living below the poverty line. I think it might be a little more complex than that? "Living conditions in Europe - poverty and social exclusion" [0], "Poverty in Europe" [1]: >"In 2022, 95.3 million people in the EU (22 percent of the population) were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, i.e. living in households facing at least one of the three risks of poverty and exclusion: income poverty, severe material and social deprivation and/or living in a household with very low work intensity (where adults work at less than 20 percent of their potential over one year). According to Eurostat data, this figure has remained relatively stable compared to the previous year (95.4 million in 2021, 22 percent of the population)." I don't support total "laissez-faire capitalism" at all as I understand and think it's counter to the free market as well as bad for society, but I don't think you can just claim the opposite extreme has clearly better outcomes. It's not unreasonable to argue that both the US and EU go too far towards different ends of the spectrum. ---- 0: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Living_conditions_in_Europe_-_poverty_and_social_exclusion https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 1: https://www.statista.com/chart/30411/share-of-people-at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion/ https://www.statista.com/chart/30411/share-of-people-at-risk...

turquoisevar 3y ago
1 seems to be a rehash of 0 and being at risk of “poverty and social exclusion” seems to be a broader definition than living below the poverty line. This seems like comparing apples to oranges or am I missing something? On a similar note, is there parity between US definitions of poverty and European definitions of poverty and/or are the statistics normalized to account for any differences?
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
There is this weird relic of the cold war where people claim the US has unregulated markets because that's what the internal propaganda said when the enemy was Communism. The US government is the largest bureaucracy in the world with a government budget that exceeds the entire GDP of every country except for China and the US itself. The US Code is tens of thousands of pages long. And those are just the federal numbers. That isn't to say that the US and Europe are the same. The US government is more captured by industry. Occasionally this is actually an advantage, because the industry can push back against the more ridiculous of the naive incompetence of people who are good at identifying problems but not solutions. The industries also use it to put up regulatory barriers to entry and promote market consolidation, which is very bad, but that happens in Europe too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you could pretty easily have a UBI that essentially eliminates poverty without having an incompetent regulatory apparatus that tries to micromanage every part of the economy. On either continent.

by xoa 3y ago

turquoisevar 3y ago

1 seems to be a rehash of 0 and being at risk of “poverty and social exclusion” seems to be a broader definition than living below the poverty line. This seems like comparing apples to oranges or am I missing something? On a similar note, is there parity between US definitions of poverty and European definitions of poverty and/or are the statistics normalized to account for any differences?

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

There is this weird relic of the cold war where people claim the US has unregulated markets because that's what the internal propaganda said when the enemy was Communism. The US government is the largest bureaucracy in the world with a government budget that exceeds the entire GDP of every country except for China and the US itself. The US Code is tens of thousands of pages long. And those are just the federal numbers. That isn't to say that the US and Europe are the same. The US government is more captured by industry. Occasionally this is actually an advantage, because the industry can push back against the more ridiculous of the naive incompetence of people who are good at identifying problems but not solutions. The industries also use it to put up regulatory barriers to entry and promote market consolidation, which is very bad, but that happens in Europe too. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you could pretty easily have a UBI that essentially eliminates poverty without having an incompetent regulatory apparatus that tries to micromanage every part of the economy. On either continent.