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The wealth gap in 2012 US is larger than it was in pre-revolution France. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-to
by agilob 2y ago
The wealth gap in 2012 US is larger than it was in pre-revolution France. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-inco...
- sladoledar 2y agoI am not sure this is a fair comparison. Wouldn't this be true if we compare any pre-industrial society with any post-industrial society?
- lukan 2y ago"Wouldn't this be true if we compare any pre-industrial society with any post-industrial society?" Technically not in socialist soviet union for example. (But de facto the top party members did control way more wealth than common people.)
- lores 2y agoWouldn't the opposite be expected, an aristocratic caste system less equal than an ostensibly democratic society ostensibly based on fairness and human rights?
- guerrilla 2y agoNo, I would expect exactly what we have because both debt and capital accumulation are positive feedback loops.
- lores 2y agoYou're talking about expectations from economic theory, while I'm talking about expectations from societal values; or, in other words, the economy defining society, vs society defining the economy. Obviously the first is factually correct in the US at the moment, but I think the second is what most people believe/wish for. Worth noting that other capitalist countries put better brakes on those feedback loops, they're not inherent to the system.
- fransje26 2y ago> Worth noting that other capitalist countries put better brakes on those feedback loops Seeing how the wealth gap is increasing between them and the US, most politicians and wealthy individuals are doing all they can to remove those brakes, pushing evermore to follow the US. Defund, privatize, deregulate.
- guerrilla 2y agoI understand. You mean why would a liberal democracy choose the system with the positive feedback loops, right?
- NoGravitas 2y agoWhat you're describing is "idealism" - the idea that people's ideas are not conditioned by the material conditions of their lives. That doesn't seem to be true. Instead, "The ideas of the ruling class are, in any age, the ruling ideas". Most people believe the things that are necessary in order for the conditions they live under to perpetuate themselves. People's ideas change mostly as a result of change in their material conditions. After the Great Depresson and the second world war, most capitalist countries put brakes on those feedback loops in order to keep the whole system functional, especially in view of the apparent success of a socialist alternative. But those brakes have been in the process of being gradually stripped away since the 1970s, and even faster since the failure of the Soviet Union.
- pwillia7 2y agothe real unfairness is they didn't have Netflix and dairy queen -- just brioche
- fransje26 2y agoLet them binge-watch Netflix.
- wongarsu 2y ago[1] has some actual numbers to answer that question, with e.g. [2] for modern US numbers (since [1] has only Europe). The wealth gap peaked in 1910, took a nose dive until the late 1960s (though much more pronounced in Europe than in the US) and is on the rise since then. The post-industrial US dipped as low as ~1300 or ~1650 Europe, but is now back to levels Europe only reached in 1750, well on track to repeating the rising inequality during industrialization. Sweden is still at 1280/1600 Europe numbers, better than 1960s USA. Actually it probably has risen a bit more since then since those are 2010 numbers, hence the comparison of US numbers to the French Revolution 1: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/top-rich-europe-long-run-history-1300-present-day https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/top-rich-europe-long-run-hist... 2: https://www.blogscapitalbolsa.com/media/images/69b536a604624e06a809504835aacbd4.gif https://www.blogscapitalbolsa.com/media/images/69b536a604624...
- fransje26 2y agoFrom [2], why is there a huge drop globally following 1910?
- froidpink 2y agoWorld Wars
- wongarsu 2y agoFrom what I gather a number of factors. As one article puts it: "Social solidarity engendered by the wars, wartime experience of governing the economy, unemployment in the 1930s and the rise of socialist ideas." Both pension systems and labor unions were first created in the late 1880s/1890s and got a lot of steam in the early 1900s. Similarly with the modern iteration of minimum wages. Both the Nordic Model and Rhein Capitalism were created in the 1930s. On the more extreme spectrum, the Russian Revolution brought communism to Russia in 1917. In a way you can see this as the fruits of the critique of capitalism by Marx in the 1840s. They grew and took root in light of rising unsustainable inequality and lead to mostly positive reforms that brought down inequality even in societies that retained capitalism at the core. Then the trend reverses as the US starts their war on Socialism and Communism, and Reganomics and Thatcherism become dominant.
- spl757 2y agoIf you think the system is designed to do anything but transfer wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest, then you should seriously do some critical thinking on the subject.
- donatj 2y ago[flagged]
- greenie_beans 2y agoi'm curious about the metrics you use for this comparison? such a different world with a lot of history that happened between now and then. it's not exactly comparing apples to apples. working class americans have access to material goods but they don't have generational wealth like the aristocrats did. they don't have political power. they have to work everyday. they don't benefit from the class privilege. pretty significant list of all the differences.
- donatj 2y agoI don't think much of that matters in the day to day. What we do have is food, clean water, climate controlled housing, and sanitation - all better than the richest royalty of the time. In revolutionary France one particular cold snap without enough logs on the fire could kill your children. Our actual quality of life in the day to day far surpasses the aristocracy of revolutionary France. You don't rebel because someone has a nicer car than you, you rebel because you're starving and miserable. We're just not. We're comfortable and mildly annoyed someone else is more comfortable.
- greenie_beans 2y agothis doesn't contend with any of the very real advantages i listed that aristocrats had versus today's working class. overall i disagree with your position. some people in my state died just the other day because of this system: https://vtdigger.org/2024/12/04/its-heartbreaking-death-at-berlin-encampment-comes-days-after-wolcott-deaths/ https://vtdigger.org/2024/12/04/its-heartbreaking-death-at-b... > You don't rebel because someone has a nicer car than you, you rebel because you're starving and miserable. We're just not. We're comfortable and mildly annoyed someone else is more comfortable. very easy to say from our tech worker point of view!
- intended 2y agoThe average person is the average which includes some of the richest people on the planet, so I’m guessing you were thinking median? While the sentence is likely true, the sister statement to it would cover historical relativism. Society is generally expected to evolve and improve - this being the whole point of it. So being absolutely better than the past is not as relevant to the conversation as how poor people are with comparison to their peers in their own country.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- IncreasePosts 2y agoHow does a rich person existing affect me? Is it just because I'm jealous that I don't have a yacht and so I should try to overthrow the system that doesn't let me have a yacht? Even though I'll never get a yacht in any system? Can we look at the graph of wealth disparity of America versus other nations?
- unknownsky 2y agoExtremely rich people control every aspect of your life, how your city is planned, the state of the job market, the state of the economy, the laws, the state of the planet itself. One way that got a lot of attention lately is that extremely rich people prevent access to health care for everyone else.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThis seems like a pretty conspiratorial view on how society operates.
- archagon 2y agoHow so? The richest man in the US just bought himself a president. And now he intends to dismantle half the federal government.
- gruez 2y agoThere's plenty of countries that are higher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_in... Most of those countries aren't exactly paragons of political stability, but they're probably not going to undergo a french revolution any time soon.
- spl757 2y agoViva la revolution.