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Counterpoint: "Low wage underclass" has described most of humans for all of existence. It is only in very recent history that we have had a large middle class.

Counterpoint: "Low wage underclass" has described most of humans for all of existence. It is only in very recent history that we have had a large middle class. And while the middle class is slipping, I don't think the message is that we need to "redesign society". Society has been working well recently (on the grand scale) - we just need to tweak some of the settings so that we don't backslide into aristocracy and feudalism.

ilaksh 9mo ago
[flagged]
- FloorEgg 9mo ago
  That's not what legitster said at all. You just completely misrepresented their point.
- legitster 9mo ago
  I am unclear how you got that out of my statement at all. I am arguing that we have made huge leaps of progress that we should not be willing to give up. A good illustration of this is in Hans Rosling's books. We're making unprecedented bounds on metrics that matter - like childhood poverty, disease, illiteracy, hunger, child labor, violent crime, lead usage, etc. Some of these things we are at risk of backsliding on, but for even the poorest person in America the quality of life is so much better today than it was even 50 years ago.
  - ilaksh 9mo ago
    But that isn't nearly good enough, and it's much worse for people in many other countries. And that is largely despite many structural aspects of our society. There have been some improvements to social structures, but almost all quality of life improvements have been from technology gains. The social structures are fundamentally based on elitism and exploitation. The prevailing counterviews seem to be basically 1950s style centralized planning. I'm not saying we should throw the baby out, but we need a more fair, refined, and technologically sound foundational worldview. I don't think we should abandon money or centralize things. But we do need, for example, protocols and/or protocol registries enforced by government for sharing information effectively, such as about energy and resources. We also need the monetary systems to be integrated into truly democratic government in such a way that resources and power are distributed in a sane way.
OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
"All of existence" is pretty wildly wrong. "All of civilization" might be a bit more on track. I wouldn't describe hunter-gatherer societies as particularly hierarchical. There may have been individuals in charge, but the concept of a leisure nobility class didn't seem to form until we developed agriculture.
- legitster 9mo ago
  I was specifically talking about quality of life, I wasn't even thinking of hierarchy. Although, that difference speaks a lot about how one might see this argument. I suppose some people may be willing to have a worse life if the tradeoff was a more egalitarian world.

ilaksh 9mo ago

[flagged]

FloorEgg 9mo ago
That's not what legitster said at all. You just completely misrepresented their point.
legitster 9mo ago
I am unclear how you got that out of my statement at all. I am arguing that we have made huge leaps of progress that we should not be willing to give up. A good illustration of this is in Hans Rosling's books. We're making unprecedented bounds on metrics that matter - like childhood poverty, disease, illiteracy, hunger, child labor, violent crime, lead usage, etc. Some of these things we are at risk of backsliding on, but for even the poorest person in America the quality of life is so much better today than it was even 50 years ago.
- ilaksh 9mo ago
  But that isn't nearly good enough, and it's much worse for people in many other countries. And that is largely despite many structural aspects of our society. There have been some improvements to social structures, but almost all quality of life improvements have been from technology gains. The social structures are fundamentally based on elitism and exploitation. The prevailing counterviews seem to be basically 1950s style centralized planning. I'm not saying we should throw the baby out, but we need a more fair, refined, and technologically sound foundational worldview. I don't think we should abandon money or centralize things. But we do need, for example, protocols and/or protocol registries enforced by government for sharing information effectively, such as about energy and resources. We also need the monetary systems to be integrated into truly democratic government in such a way that resources and power are distributed in a sane way.

OkayPhysicist 9mo ago

"All of existence" is pretty wildly wrong. "All of civilization" might be a bit more on track. I wouldn't describe hunter-gatherer societies as particularly hierarchical. There may have been individuals in charge, but the concept of a leisure nobility class didn't seem to form until we developed agriculture.

legitster 9mo ago
I was specifically talking about quality of life, I wasn't even thinking of hierarchy. Although, that difference speaks a lot about how one might see this argument. I suppose some people may be willing to have a worse life if the tradeoff was a more egalitarian world.