5 ms·

I’d argue focusing on wealth inequality is precisely the wrong approach. A better approach would be to look at the quality of life of the poorest.

by Sprotch 11mo ago

roflyear 11mo ago
I don't think many look at wealth inequality in isolation, it's usually accompanied by how people are starving. E.g. "over 20 people die from malnutrition in the US but we have over 900 billionaire's" - e.g. each billionaire would probably only have to give $300k each (equiv to what the average tax payer gives to the defense budget each year) to prevent most deaths in the US due to lack of food - etc.
- gishh 11mo ago
  883 billion divided by 200 million is like 4 grand. How do you figure each taxpayer pays 300k/yr in taxes to the defense budget?
  - Spooky23 11mo ago
    You make your currency the reserve currency, tax the world by inflating it while restricting circulation, print money, then borrow. When people or countries potentially disrupt the equilibrium, kill them.
    - gishh 11mo ago
      Sorry, I meant the math part
- solveit 11mo ago
  I get the feeling that you're winging the specific numbers because they're spectacularly incoherent. But anyway, the United States is extremely rich and has essentially no big problems that can be solved by a small amount (say, a few billion) of money. The problems are either so big that it would take trillions to solve (supporting aging population etc), or blocked by something other than money (politics, regulations, etc). The big problems that can be solved just by throwing a few billion at them are solved quite easily by either the government or by private entities like the Gates Foundation.
  - rizzom5000 11mo ago
    In practice, it seems that politics generally takes precedence over problem solving. If you look into the psychology of it, neither politicians nor voters are really incentivized to solve big problems. This is especially true for big problems that will take more than an election cycle to solve. It seems to me that it would be easy to support an argument that suggests more big problems could be solved if incentives were better aligned toward problem solving and if competent people, not professional politicians, were chosen to solve them.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  In the US, the poorest people suffer from an obesity epidemic. Virtually no one is starving in the US anymore, besides mental health problems or other edge cases creating it.
  - HumblyTossed 11mo ago
    The poor are food insecure. This leads to obesity not because they have access to an abundance of food but because their access to food is not stead, leading to over eating to compensate, and the food they can afford is not healthy.
    - akoboldfrying 11mo ago
      > the food they can afford is not healthy Are you really claiming that it's cheaper to buy an appetite-satisfying amount of unhealthy food (chips/sweets/snacks/fast food) than fresh vegetables and staples like rice or potatoes? Serious question.
      - miltonlost 11mo ago
        Yes, both cheaper and more accessible and easier to eat without having to spend the time (which the working poor don't have) to then cook the raw foods. They're called food deserts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
        akoboldfrying 11mo ago
        Thanks for the link. I agree that preparation time is an important consideration. I do think that the food desert criterion (> 1.6km to the nearest supermarket in urban centres) seems very restrictive -- this would make half of most suburbs "food deserts" in the affluent western country where I live. I find the more recent concept of "food swamps", also explained on that page, to be a (perhaps unwitting) direct challenge to the theory that absence of nearby healthy food is the root cause: > A related concept is the phenomenon of a food swamp, a recently coined term by researchers who defined it as an area with a disproportionate number of fast food restaurants (and fast food advertising) in comparison to the number of supermarkets in that area.[13] The single supermarket in a low-income area does not, according to researchers Rose and colleagues, necessitate availability nor does it decrease obesity rates and health risks If this claim is true -- that is, if areas with 1 nearby supermarket have obesity rates no better than areas with 0 -- then it's essentially impossible to blame health outcomes on the availability of healthy food nearby. If an area has nearby supermarkets, it is much harder to make the case that obesity is purely the result of external factors outside a person's control.
- SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
  One of the things you learn quickly when you look at these kind of problems is that they’re not so easy to solve with money. The budget for SNAP, the US’s primary food benefits program, is about $100 billion; the additional $270 million you propose would be a tiny drop in the bucket.
SilverElfin 11mo ago
Agree. Focusing on the inequality bit feels closer to envy. But if the quality of life or something like inflation adjusted wealth is going up for everyone, or if it is above some acceptable minimum, then is it really a problem? Or just a reflection of how concentrated things can be in a technologically advanced world?
- computerthings 11mo ago
  [dead]
- kuerbel 11mo ago
  I’m from Europe, and that’s what I focus on when talking about inequality: even if everyone’s living standards are rising, extreme wealth concentration can erode social cohesion, limit access to essential services, and distort political influence. You seem to view this through an American lens, very focused on individual opportunity, while to me it's about fairness, shared responsibility, and the health of society.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
    I think it's not even the billionaires that are the biggest problem. It's more like the top 10-20% that are driving up housing prices and many other things. They are a large enough group that it makes sense to mostly cater to them which is something we already see in most new apartments being higher end, less and less cheap cars on the market, no small houses to buy, restaurant prices shooting up, concert tickers becoming crazy expensive and so on. Las Vegas used to be the place for the average guy to fun. In the last few years they have publicly stated that they don't want that population anymore but want more of the upper end. All this leads to a system that favors the top 10-20% who can afford things, own assets like stocks and real estate, get better education for their kids and leaves the rest of the polulation out in the cold.
    - Spooky23 11mo ago
      It’s not that they don’t want — you can gamble on the toilet now. The guys who were gonna fly in and drop $10k already blew their kids college fund on Draft Kings.
CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
Agreed. Unfortunately humans are hardwired to compare themselves to others.
- aprilthird2021 11mo ago
  So much so that even if the quality of life of the lowest improves greatly, if the quality of life of everyone around them improves even more rapidly, they will feel worse off, not better off
  - CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
    "You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you." Because on one level, we are all just competing for finite resources - especially quality females - economics is in that context an ordinal competition, not cardinal.[1] But on another level, it's the mutual cooperation, wealth creation from nothing (making the "finite" a little less finite and a little more infinite), etc that allows us to advance both as a society and as individuals. [1]There is an interesting tie into Mises here if I wanted to rabbit hole it (value is subjective, not measurable in cardinal units, and exists only in the mind as a ranked preference of options)
    - czl 11mo ago
      One of the big advantages humans have is that we are really good at working around constraints rather than just fighting over them. Health care, education, and even things like prenatal screening to reduce serious genetic disease all expand people’s potential and quality of life. Over time, that means more people who are emotionally stable, educated, and healthy, which is exactly what makes “higher quality” partners possible in the first place. When we treat everything as a zero sum status game, especially when it comes to other human beings, we tend to slide into ugly, destructive dynamics (up to and including wars) where everyone burns resources just to keep their relative place. Cooperation and innovation, on the other hand, are how we turn a fixed pie into a growing one. So yes, relative position matters in some contexts, but the whole reason our species has gotten this far is that we are not limited to fighting over scraps. We can change the size and shape of the pie together.
bijection 11mo ago
Though I agree that inequality is less important than the quality of life of the poorest people, this article explicitly tries to characterize the latter, so even though this is done in the name of discussing wealth inequality, I'm not sure your comment applies here.
- loeg 11mo ago
  The whole article is about creating a log-ish scale comparison system.
hearsathought 11mo ago
[flagged]
Nifty3929 11mo ago
Yes, and also numerical "wealth" is not the same as stuff. Rich people often have very high numerical wealth, but actually don't have so much more "stuff" - houses, medicine, food, etc. They will certainly have more of these things, but maybe 100x not 1Mx. For example, let's say that Musk is 250k times wealthier than I am. Does he have 250k shoes? Houses? Not really. And it's the consumption of stuff that is really the share that one takes from society, not "wealth." Having $1 might be wealth, but it is not until I spend that Dollar on an apple that I have taken something from society.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- lazide 11mo ago
  Eh, even the ‘taking’ in this example isn’t so simple. By spending that $1, you’ve also given a farmer (plus middle men, plus a retailer) $1 they otherwise wouldn’t have had - and relieved them of an apple they already have too many of. The big ‘taking’ events are when things are destroyed without an exchange of value (aka if those farmers can’t sell the apples because a new law passes, or there is a disease event, or the like), or where a market is cornered/controlled/manipulated to the extent someone is forced to sell for an artificially induced (lower) price, or sell at an artificially induced (higher) price. Smaller ‘taking’ events are when something is actually consumed, but that has to happen eventually, and someone paid for it to happen. Which means they also traded something else for that money (time, work, whatever). Otherwise, it’s numbers moving from one side of the book to the other. Things aren’t lost/destroyed, but are moving around.
  - Epa095 11mo ago
    Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have. So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
dasil003 11mo ago
Why is it "precisely the wrong approach"? And why does it have to be just one? I agree looking at the quality of life of the poorest is a valuable barometer for the quality and success of a society to serve all its people. Similarly I think looking at the richest and what checks exist on their power also says a lot about the health of a civilization. It also makes perfect sense to me that we would look at wealth distributions as well. After all comparison and competition is core to the human experience, is entirely relative, and more visible than ever in the age of the internet and social media. These dynamics massively impact individual perceptions of success and political priorities, fairness being a deeply baked value in the human wetware (just ask any 5-year-old), so not sure why we wouldn't want to address them directly. Certainly there's more value than in the superficial tribalism and dog whistle culture that passes for political discourse today?
jimkleiber 11mo ago
I'm reflecting more these days on what I call "trust inequality." I'm curious how much trust in each other relates to wealth. Any thoughts?
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  What does trust inequality mean to you?
  - jimkleiber 11mo ago
    Not sure yet, curious to reflect on it more. But initial take is that some environments people trust each other more. Trusting intentions, actions, words, ability. For example, a low-trust environment would probably be most prisons. High-trust might be a neighborhood where people don't lock their doors. I remember reading a World Bank economist saying that we might be able to explain the difference in GDP per capita between the US and a place like Somalia based on how much people trust each other. How mistrust can add so much friction to interactions.
    - CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
      There's a lot of research in this area. You might not like the conclusions. Fukuyama (Trust) or Putnam (Bowling Alone) might be a good place to start, or here is a public paper by Putnam: https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477.2007.00176%20Putnam%20Diversity.pdf https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477.... Here's another prominent paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272701000846 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Uslaner (2002) makes a distinction between moralistic trust ("Can people be trusted?") and strategic trust ("Can THIS person be trusted?") that you may find interesting. There is also Yamagashi's Paradox: Japanese cooperate more, but trust less. Americans trust more, but defect more in specific situations.
      - jimkleiber 11mo ago
        I am very very fascinated by these leads. Thank you so much for sharing them, and excited to hear about any more that you may have.
wyre 11mo ago
>I’d argue focusing on wealth inequality is precisely the wrong approach. Okay, so whats the argument? Wealth inequality and the QoL of the lowest wealth individuals are intrinsically linked, because we live under systems of government with powers of taxation and goals to increase the QoL of their citizens. At what point does the poorest become wealthy enough that immense levels of wealth-hoarding, especially by individuals, is okay? I cannot believe with a good conscience that at any point it becomes okay, unless we are all living in a utopia. If you don't agree with socialism, that is what it is, but to care about the QoL of the poorest without wanting actual support networks for those people isn't rational and seems more like moral posturing.
rectang 11mo ago
Eventually huge wealth inequality impacts quality of life because quality of life is not measured exclusively in cheap toasters. For starters, look at the proportion of income that goes to rent: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordability-how-did-we-get-here https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi... > The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. As inequality has increased, life has become more uncertain for those towards the bottom, because the cost of recovering from adverse life events (health crises, unemployment, etc) has become increasingly unmanageable.
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  The switch to the current monetary system, followed by the elimination of taxation for rich people created this. You can only prosper with compounding. People on the bottom are just as helpless as they were before. They carry on with benefits and modest income. They get (shitty) healthcare fit free. The next two tiers of working poor are the ones that have gotten screwed.
globular-toast 11mo ago
That's exactly what someone who isn't poor would say.
odiroot 11mo ago
This is how you end up with aggressive taxation on middle class, all the while the wealthy are laughing their way to the bank.
Atomic_Torrfisk 11mo ago
I disagree, high degrees of wealth inequality result in manipulation of our society to act against the best interest of the common man. Unfortunately, this article seems to be more inline with quantization for the sake of navel gazing.
max_ 11mo ago
Unfortunately no one cares about the poor. Inequality is a problem parroted by middle classes mostly due to envy. It has nothing to do with improving lives of the destitute.
immibis 11mo ago
Both are important. A lot of poverty is directly caused by having a class of rich people who seek to siphon away as many resources as they can. A society with only poor people would probably be a more cooperative one, which would help in raising the average standard of living. For instance, shelter being expensive implies either that it's fundamentally difficult to construct shelter (which is not the case, as seen in every slum and homeless camp everywhere) or the existence of rich landlords.

I’d argue focusing on wealth inequality is precisely the wrong approach. A better approach would be to look at the quality of life of the poorest.

by Sprotch 11mo ago

I’d argue focusing on wealth inequality is precisely the wrong approach. A better approach would be to look at the quality of life of the poorest.

roflyear 11mo ago

I don't think many look at wealth inequality in isolation, it's usually accompanied by how people are starving. E.g. "over 20 people die from malnutrition in the US but we have over 900 billionaire's" - e.g. each billionaire would probably only have to give $300k each (equiv to what the average tax payer gives to the defense budget each year) to prevent most deaths in the US due to lack of food - etc.

gishh 11mo ago
883 billion divided by 200 million is like 4 grand. How do you figure each taxpayer pays 300k/yr in taxes to the defense budget?
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  You make your currency the reserve currency, tax the world by inflating it while restricting circulation, print money, then borrow. When people or countries potentially disrupt the equilibrium, kill them.
  - gishh 11mo ago
    Sorry, I meant the math part
solveit 11mo ago
I get the feeling that you're winging the specific numbers because they're spectacularly incoherent. But anyway, the United States is extremely rich and has essentially no big problems that can be solved by a small amount (say, a few billion) of money. The problems are either so big that it would take trillions to solve (supporting aging population etc), or blocked by something other than money (politics, regulations, etc). The big problems that can be solved just by throwing a few billion at them are solved quite easily by either the government or by private entities like the Gates Foundation.
- rizzom5000 11mo ago
  In practice, it seems that politics generally takes precedence over problem solving. If you look into the psychology of it, neither politicians nor voters are really incentivized to solve big problems. This is especially true for big problems that will take more than an election cycle to solve. It seems to me that it would be easy to support an argument that suggests more big problems could be solved if incentives were better aligned toward problem solving and if competent people, not professional politicians, were chosen to solve them.
Workaccount2 11mo ago
In the US, the poorest people suffer from an obesity epidemic. Virtually no one is starving in the US anymore, besides mental health problems or other edge cases creating it.
- HumblyTossed 11mo ago
  The poor are food insecure. This leads to obesity not because they have access to an abundance of food but because their access to food is not stead, leading to over eating to compensate, and the food they can afford is not healthy.
  - akoboldfrying 11mo ago
    > the food they can afford is not healthy Are you really claiming that it's cheaper to buy an appetite-satisfying amount of unhealthy food (chips/sweets/snacks/fast food) than fresh vegetables and staples like rice or potatoes? Serious question.
    - miltonlost 11mo ago
      Yes, both cheaper and more accessible and easier to eat without having to spend the time (which the working poor don't have) to then cook the raw foods. They're called food deserts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
      - akoboldfrying 11mo ago
        Thanks for the link. I agree that preparation time is an important consideration. I do think that the food desert criterion (> 1.6km to the nearest supermarket in urban centres) seems very restrictive -- this would make half of most suburbs "food deserts" in the affluent western country where I live. I find the more recent concept of "food swamps", also explained on that page, to be a (perhaps unwitting) direct challenge to the theory that absence of nearby healthy food is the root cause: > A related concept is the phenomenon of a food swamp, a recently coined term by researchers who defined it as an area with a disproportionate number of fast food restaurants (and fast food advertising) in comparison to the number of supermarkets in that area.[13] The single supermarket in a low-income area does not, according to researchers Rose and colleagues, necessitate availability nor does it decrease obesity rates and health risks If this claim is true -- that is, if areas with 1 nearby supermarket have obesity rates no better than areas with 0 -- then it's essentially impossible to blame health outcomes on the availability of healthy food nearby. If an area has nearby supermarkets, it is much harder to make the case that obesity is purely the result of external factors outside a person's control.
SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
One of the things you learn quickly when you look at these kind of problems is that they’re not so easy to solve with money. The budget for SNAP, the US’s primary food benefits program, is about $100 billion; the additional $270 million you propose would be a tiny drop in the bucket.

SilverElfin 11mo ago

Agree. Focusing on the inequality bit feels closer to envy. But if the quality of life or something like inflation adjusted wealth is going up for everyone, or if it is above some acceptable minimum, then is it really a problem? Or just a reflection of how concentrated things can be in a technologically advanced world?

computerthings 11mo ago
[dead]
kuerbel 11mo ago
I’m from Europe, and that’s what I focus on when talking about inequality: even if everyone’s living standards are rising, extreme wealth concentration can erode social cohesion, limit access to essential services, and distort political influence. You seem to view this through an American lens, very focused on individual opportunity, while to me it's about fairness, shared responsibility, and the health of society.
- vjvjvjvjghv 11mo ago
  I think it's not even the billionaires that are the biggest problem. It's more like the top 10-20% that are driving up housing prices and many other things. They are a large enough group that it makes sense to mostly cater to them which is something we already see in most new apartments being higher end, less and less cheap cars on the market, no small houses to buy, restaurant prices shooting up, concert tickers becoming crazy expensive and so on. Las Vegas used to be the place for the average guy to fun. In the last few years they have publicly stated that they don't want that population anymore but want more of the upper end. All this leads to a system that favors the top 10-20% who can afford things, own assets like stocks and real estate, get better education for their kids and leaves the rest of the polulation out in the cold.
  - Spooky23 11mo ago
    It’s not that they don’t want — you can gamble on the toilet now. The guys who were gonna fly in and drop $10k already blew their kids college fund on Draft Kings.

CGMthrowaway 11mo ago

Agreed. Unfortunately humans are hardwired to compare themselves to others.

aprilthird2021 11mo ago
So much so that even if the quality of life of the lowest improves greatly, if the quality of life of everyone around them improves even more rapidly, they will feel worse off, not better off
- CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
  "You don't have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you." Because on one level, we are all just competing for finite resources - especially quality females - economics is in that context an ordinal competition, not cardinal.[1] But on another level, it's the mutual cooperation, wealth creation from nothing (making the "finite" a little less finite and a little more infinite), etc that allows us to advance both as a society and as individuals. [1]There is an interesting tie into Mises here if I wanted to rabbit hole it (value is subjective, not measurable in cardinal units, and exists only in the mind as a ranked preference of options)
  - czl 11mo ago
    One of the big advantages humans have is that we are really good at working around constraints rather than just fighting over them. Health care, education, and even things like prenatal screening to reduce serious genetic disease all expand people’s potential and quality of life. Over time, that means more people who are emotionally stable, educated, and healthy, which is exactly what makes “higher quality” partners possible in the first place. When we treat everything as a zero sum status game, especially when it comes to other human beings, we tend to slide into ugly, destructive dynamics (up to and including wars) where everyone burns resources just to keep their relative place. Cooperation and innovation, on the other hand, are how we turn a fixed pie into a growing one. So yes, relative position matters in some contexts, but the whole reason our species has gotten this far is that we are not limited to fighting over scraps. We can change the size and shape of the pie together.

bijection 11mo ago

Though I agree that inequality is less important than the quality of life of the poorest people, this article explicitly tries to characterize the latter, so even though this is done in the name of discussing wealth inequality, I'm not sure your comment applies here.

loeg 11mo ago
The whole article is about creating a log-ish scale comparison system.

hearsathought 11mo ago

[flagged]

Nifty3929 11mo ago

Yes, and also numerical "wealth" is not the same as stuff. Rich people often have very high numerical wealth, but actually don't have so much more "stuff" - houses, medicine, food, etc. They will certainly have more of these things, but maybe 100x not 1Mx. For example, let's say that Musk is 250k times wealthier than I am. Does he have 250k shoes? Houses? Not really. And it's the consumption of stuff that is really the share that one takes from society, not "wealth." Having $1 might be wealth, but it is not until I spend that Dollar on an apple that I have taken something from society.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
lazide 11mo ago
Eh, even the ‘taking’ in this example isn’t so simple. By spending that $1, you’ve also given a farmer (plus middle men, plus a retailer) $1 they otherwise wouldn’t have had - and relieved them of an apple they already have too many of. The big ‘taking’ events are when things are destroyed without an exchange of value (aka if those farmers can’t sell the apples because a new law passes, or there is a disease event, or the like), or where a market is cornered/controlled/manipulated to the extent someone is forced to sell for an artificially induced (lower) price, or sell at an artificially induced (higher) price. Smaller ‘taking’ events are when something is actually consumed, but that has to happen eventually, and someone paid for it to happen. Which means they also traded something else for that money (time, work, whatever). Otherwise, it’s numbers moving from one side of the book to the other. Things aren’t lost/destroyed, but are moving around.
- Epa095 11mo ago
  Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have. So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

dasil003 11mo ago

Why is it "precisely the wrong approach"? And why does it have to be just one? I agree looking at the quality of life of the poorest is a valuable barometer for the quality and success of a society to serve all its people. Similarly I think looking at the richest and what checks exist on their power also says a lot about the health of a civilization. It also makes perfect sense to me that we would look at wealth distributions as well. After all comparison and competition is core to the human experience, is entirely relative, and more visible than ever in the age of the internet and social media. These dynamics massively impact individual perceptions of success and political priorities, fairness being a deeply baked value in the human wetware (just ask any 5-year-old), so not sure why we wouldn't want to address them directly. Certainly there's more value than in the superficial tribalism and dog whistle culture that passes for political discourse today?

jimkleiber 11mo ago

I'm reflecting more these days on what I call "trust inequality." I'm curious how much trust in each other relates to wealth. Any thoughts?

CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
What does trust inequality mean to you?
- jimkleiber 11mo ago
  Not sure yet, curious to reflect on it more. But initial take is that some environments people trust each other more. Trusting intentions, actions, words, ability. For example, a low-trust environment would probably be most prisons. High-trust might be a neighborhood where people don't lock their doors. I remember reading a World Bank economist saying that we might be able to explain the difference in GDP per capita between the US and a place like Somalia based on how much people trust each other. How mistrust can add so much friction to interactions.
  - CGMthrowaway 11mo ago
    There's a lot of research in this area. You might not like the conclusions. Fukuyama (Trust) or Putnam (Bowling Alone) might be a good place to start, or here is a public paper by Putnam: https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477.2007.00176%20Putnam%20Diversity.pdf https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477.... Here's another prominent paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272701000846 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Uslaner (2002) makes a distinction between moralistic trust ("Can people be trusted?") and strategic trust ("Can THIS person be trusted?") that you may find interesting. There is also Yamagashi's Paradox: Japanese cooperate more, but trust less. Americans trust more, but defect more in specific situations.
    - jimkleiber 11mo ago
      I am very very fascinated by these leads. Thank you so much for sharing them, and excited to hear about any more that you may have.

wyre 11mo ago

>I’d argue focusing on wealth inequality is precisely the wrong approach. Okay, so whats the argument? Wealth inequality and the QoL of the lowest wealth individuals are intrinsically linked, because we live under systems of government with powers of taxation and goals to increase the QoL of their citizens. At what point does the poorest become wealthy enough that immense levels of wealth-hoarding, especially by individuals, is okay? I cannot believe with a good conscience that at any point it becomes okay, unless we are all living in a utopia. If you don't agree with socialism, that is what it is, but to care about the QoL of the poorest without wanting actual support networks for those people isn't rational and seems more like moral posturing.

rectang 11mo ago

Eventually huge wealth inequality impacts quality of life because quality of life is not measured exclusively in cheap toasters. For starters, look at the proportion of income that goes to rent: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordability-how-did-we-get-here https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rental-housing-unaffordabi... > The net effect of this longer history is that renters today spend much more of their incomes on rent than they did in previous generations. The median renter household in 1960 spent less than a fifth of their income on rent. By 2022, housing costs consumed 31 percent of the median renter’s income. As inequality has increased, life has become more uncertain for those towards the bottom, because the cost of recovering from adverse life events (health crises, unemployment, etc) has become increasingly unmanageable.

Spooky23 11mo ago
The switch to the current monetary system, followed by the elimination of taxation for rich people created this. You can only prosper with compounding. People on the bottom are just as helpless as they were before. They carry on with benefits and modest income. They get (shitty) healthcare fit free. The next two tiers of working poor are the ones that have gotten screwed.

globular-toast 11mo ago

That's exactly what someone who isn't poor would say.

odiroot 11mo ago

This is how you end up with aggressive taxation on middle class, all the while the wealthy are laughing their way to the bank.

Atomic_Torrfisk 11mo ago

I disagree, high degrees of wealth inequality result in manipulation of our society to act against the best interest of the common man. Unfortunately, this article seems to be more inline with quantization for the sake of navel gazing.

max_ 11mo ago

Unfortunately no one cares about the poor. Inequality is a problem parroted by middle classes mostly due to envy. It has nothing to do with improving lives of the destitute.

immibis 11mo ago

Both are important. A lot of poverty is directly caused by having a class of rich people who seek to siphon away as many resources as they can. A society with only poor people would probably be a more cooperative one, which would help in raising the average standard of living. For instance, shelter being expensive implies either that it's fundamentally difficult to construct shelter (which is not the case, as seen in every slum and homeless camp everywhere) or the existence of rich landlords.