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I can't read the article so I'm just going by the headline... I was thinking about this over Christmas break. My wife and I live in Hammond, IN, a poor town ne

I can't read the article so I'm just going by the headline... I was thinking about this over Christmas break. My wife and I live in Hammond, IN, a poor town near Gary and we were visiting my in-laws in Boca Raton, FL. Until then, I had thought of income inequality in terms of billionaires and outliers. But as I walked the beautiful sidewalks along the pristine manicured landscapes between the gorgeous library I was working out of to the nearby Starbucks and Jamba Juice as BMWs, Teslas, and even a couple Ferraris passed, I realized there's definitely a lower level inequality as well. Where everyone in the town is just a bit richer than everyone in my town. We don't have spectacular libraries and great walking paths. It was just kind of weird where everyone is "rich", even if no one is a billionaire. (There very well could be billionaires, too, but I don't think they would change much of what I was thinking. Billionaire inequality issues are like having too much power, that sort of thing.)

ryandrake 3y ago
The billionaires really, really want you to perceive this distinction as a real inequality problem. When people making $30K are resenting/fighting people making $300K, the people making $300M are sitting back and laughing. There's really not much of a difference between the lifestyles of Hammond, IN vs. Boca Raton, FL. I mean, there's a difference, but the difference is tiny compared to the difference between them and the people whose next 5 generations can buy anything they want, have any lifestyle they want, and never have to work a day in their lives. The Hammond and Boca people both have to work for a living, they both haven't saved enough for retirement, they are both leveraged uncomfortably, they both are worried about the future for their kids. None of that is true for the billionaires. Just because one has Jamba Juice doesn't mean they're very different.
- nwiswell 3y ago
  > The billionaires really, really want you to perceive this distinction as a real inequality problem. When people making $30K are resenting/fighting people making $300K, the people making $300M are sitting back and laughing. But that is inequality, too. Just as a thought experiment, if you were to take the global GDP and spread it perfectly evenly over every person on the planet, you'd have less than $13k per capita. That's around half of the income per capita in Hammond. I think there's a perception that there's this massive hoard of wealth at the very top, and if only we could distribute it more fairly, we could solve a bevy of social ills. It's not that simple. It's absolutely true that there are some unbelievably wealthy people, but they are also small in number. If you were to magically disgorge, say, every American with $50M+ of 90% of their wealth, you'd be lucky to be able to use the proceeds to raise all the Hammonds to the living standards of all the Boca Ratons, which as far as you're concerned here, does not really change their lifestyles. Honestly I'm much more disgusted that billionaires exist while there are infants dying of malnutrition than I am disgusted that billionaires exist while there's people worried about their kids and their retirement. Those sorts of things are really unavoidable as long as we're grappling with scarcity.
  - bix6 3y ago
    I’m disgusted that there are 5-10,000 luxury yachts in the world while infants are dying of malnutrition and people have to worry about feeding their kids while attempting to save for retirement on salaries that have hardly moved for anyone except a few fortunate elites since the 80s.
    - nwiswell 3y ago
      > on salaries that have hardly moved for anyone except a few fortunate elites since the 80s. I assume you're talking about salaries in the USA, and this is largely because global salaries have risen to take more of their fair share of the pie. At the same time, this has put a lot of pressure on US labor. The postwar period from 1945 to around 1980 in the USA was historically aberrant. In 1970, the USA's share of global GDP was 38%. In 2023 it was around 15.5%. Globally, living standards have skyrocketed since the 80s. https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
- alexawarrior23 3y ago
  What's interesting is in my neighborhood I've seen growing inequality at the ground level over the past 20 years. We are an old neighborhood of decaying middle class housing still occupied by the elderly remnants of long-term owners. As the elderly move out they are replaced by one of three possibilities: 1. A large immigrant family moving in with one family to a room, sometimes sublet to several families, with no maintenance being done and the house falling apart. 2. An upper middle class family typically with Teslas moving in and doing a full remodel of the house. 3. An upper class family tearing down the old house and building a 6,000-10,000 sqft+ mansion for the husband, wife, and zero to two children. In the first case above, the poorer section, city services, roads, shopping continues to decay, with ever more liquor stores, massage parlors, pawn shops, tire repair, and used auto lots. This is by and large the largest area and population of the neighborhood. In the second case above, roads are repaired, a few new restaurants, but largely a decaying infrastructure. A large area but not as big in area or population as #1. In the third case above, all new roads. New full rebuilt shopping. A new school. A new public library. The smallest area by far, but once you enter it, it's a different world. Literally one side of the street is nightly robbery dilapidated midrise, and the other side behind the walls with their own police force are new mansions that start at $3m. Note what's missing from the above: the middle class. They don't exist here. They die off and are replaced, largely by the lower class. I've seen this happen on the ground, over the years. Inequality at the ground level. And it's still going on: absolutely no new building or improvements for the poorest, a little renovation for those with salaried jobs, and continuous rebuilding of luxury mansions for the upper crust. Doesn't seem sustainable from the Piketty perspective. I only hope it can be resolved peacefully. I'd even be fine with we all get new things but some get nicer ones than others. But this, you get the same thing, worse even, every year, and we get more and more and more, doesn't fit well with human sense of decency.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    The natural end state of our trajectory is an Elysium-like class system where a tiny few have everything, physically separated/secured from the remaining billions who have nothing. And rest assured: The billionaire class is actively working to bring about this end state. I'm sure as far as they are concerned, that end state is fully sustainable if they have effective-enough physical security and control/coercion of the population.

ryandrake 3y ago

The billionaires really, really want you to perceive this distinction as a real inequality problem. When people making $30K are resenting/fighting people making $300K, the people making $300M are sitting back and laughing. There's really not much of a difference between the lifestyles of Hammond, IN vs. Boca Raton, FL. I mean, there's a difference, but the difference is tiny compared to the difference between them and the people whose next 5 generations can buy anything they want, have any lifestyle they want, and never have to work a day in their lives. The Hammond and Boca people both have to work for a living, they both haven't saved enough for retirement, they are both leveraged uncomfortably, they both are worried about the future for their kids. None of that is true for the billionaires. Just because one has Jamba Juice doesn't mean they're very different.

nwiswell 3y ago
> The billionaires really, really want you to perceive this distinction as a real inequality problem. When people making $30K are resenting/fighting people making $300K, the people making $300M are sitting back and laughing. But that is inequality, too. Just as a thought experiment, if you were to take the global GDP and spread it perfectly evenly over every person on the planet, you'd have less than $13k per capita. That's around half of the income per capita in Hammond. I think there's a perception that there's this massive hoard of wealth at the very top, and if only we could distribute it more fairly, we could solve a bevy of social ills. It's not that simple. It's absolutely true that there are some unbelievably wealthy people, but they are also small in number. If you were to magically disgorge, say, every American with $50M+ of 90% of their wealth, you'd be lucky to be able to use the proceeds to raise all the Hammonds to the living standards of all the Boca Ratons, which as far as you're concerned here, does not really change their lifestyles. Honestly I'm much more disgusted that billionaires exist while there are infants dying of malnutrition than I am disgusted that billionaires exist while there's people worried about their kids and their retirement. Those sorts of things are really unavoidable as long as we're grappling with scarcity.
- bix6 3y ago
  I’m disgusted that there are 5-10,000 luxury yachts in the world while infants are dying of malnutrition and people have to worry about feeding their kids while attempting to save for retirement on salaries that have hardly moved for anyone except a few fortunate elites since the 80s.
  - nwiswell 3y ago
    > on salaries that have hardly moved for anyone except a few fortunate elites since the 80s. I assume you're talking about salaries in the USA, and this is largely because global salaries have risen to take more of their fair share of the pie. At the same time, this has put a lot of pressure on US labor. The postwar period from 1945 to around 1980 in the USA was historically aberrant. In 1970, the USA's share of global GDP was 38%. In 2023 it was around 15.5%. Globally, living standards have skyrocketed since the 80s. https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
alexawarrior23 3y ago
What's interesting is in my neighborhood I've seen growing inequality at the ground level over the past 20 years. We are an old neighborhood of decaying middle class housing still occupied by the elderly remnants of long-term owners. As the elderly move out they are replaced by one of three possibilities: 1. A large immigrant family moving in with one family to a room, sometimes sublet to several families, with no maintenance being done and the house falling apart. 2. An upper middle class family typically with Teslas moving in and doing a full remodel of the house. 3. An upper class family tearing down the old house and building a 6,000-10,000 sqft+ mansion for the husband, wife, and zero to two children. In the first case above, the poorer section, city services, roads, shopping continues to decay, with ever more liquor stores, massage parlors, pawn shops, tire repair, and used auto lots. This is by and large the largest area and population of the neighborhood. In the second case above, roads are repaired, a few new restaurants, but largely a decaying infrastructure. A large area but not as big in area or population as #1. In the third case above, all new roads. New full rebuilt shopping. A new school. A new public library. The smallest area by far, but once you enter it, it's a different world. Literally one side of the street is nightly robbery dilapidated midrise, and the other side behind the walls with their own police force are new mansions that start at $3m. Note what's missing from the above: the middle class. They don't exist here. They die off and are replaced, largely by the lower class. I've seen this happen on the ground, over the years. Inequality at the ground level. And it's still going on: absolutely no new building or improvements for the poorest, a little renovation for those with salaried jobs, and continuous rebuilding of luxury mansions for the upper crust. Doesn't seem sustainable from the Piketty perspective. I only hope it can be resolved peacefully. I'd even be fine with we all get new things but some get nicer ones than others. But this, you get the same thing, worse even, every year, and we get more and more and more, doesn't fit well with human sense of decency.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  The natural end state of our trajectory is an Elysium-like class system where a tiny few have everything, physically separated/secured from the remaining billions who have nothing. And rest assured: The billionaire class is actively working to bring about this end state. I'm sure as far as they are concerned, that end state is fully sustainable if they have effective-enough physical security and control/coercion of the population.