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http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/01/what-oxfam-doesnt-want-you-to-know-global-capitalism-means-theres-less-poverty-than-ever/ http://blogs.spectato

by vixen99 12y ago

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/01/what-oxfam-doesnt-want-you-to-know-global-capitalism-means-theres-less-poverty-than-ever/ http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/01/what-oxfam-... (What Oxfam doesn’t want you to know: global capitalism means less poverty than ever)

noelwelsh 12y ago
Not the same issue. Inequality can continue to grow even while the poor become wealthier.
- cheald 12y ago
  Right, but the trick is the inequality doesn't imply poverty. Wealth isn't a zero-sum game; FatCat having more doesn't necessarily require that SkinnyCat have less, even though the size of the pie slices grows or shrinks; the pie grows as well.
  - nmeofthestate 12y ago
    "Your new TV is bigger and slimmer, so why should you care the planetary economic system rewards a tiny minority with wealth that is almost incomprehensible?" Okay, but the trouble is, it's a feeble argument for persuading people not to pay attention to the fact that 1% of the planet has half the wealth. People actually care about the fairness of how wealth is distributed. Did these fabulously wealthy people start working even harder, to justify the even more unequal wealth breakdown? The 1% used to own <50% of all wealth. Soon they'll own 51%. What changed? I'd argue they've done nothing to deserve this increased wealth, and it's entirely justifiable that humanity is allowed to look at how to redistribute that wealth. Of course we have to be careful not to kill the golden goose - maybe they'll all emigrate to Mars where taxes are lower...
    - realusername 12y ago
      Not to mention the democratic problem of having 10 people weighting so much into the balance.
  - AlisdairO 12y ago
    In the south of the UK (the part where most of the jobs are) housing is a dominant cost in most people's lives. Since there's a shortage of housing and buildable land, the cost of housing goes up with people's ability to pay. This absolutely trends towards a zero sum game, so income distribution is a clear concern. Political power is also purchasable to some extent in virtually every country, so income inequality matters there too.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    But sometimes it's not the size of your piece that matters, but it's the size of your piece relative to others. Examples: - buying a law. - legal bribes, like endowing a chair at Harvard to ensure your kid gets in - hiring personal servants - real estate: the average price of a house anywhere with a functioning banking system is approx 2-3x the average salary For example, a bright Indian software developer faces the choice: do I make $40K in India or $200K in Silicon Valley? The latter can afford a fancier car, the former can afford more servants. Absolute wealth matters when purchasing items that can be created by spending dollars: cars, computers, food, energy, et cetera. Relative wealth matters when purchasing items which cannot generally be created by spending dollars: land, people.
    - cheald 12y ago
      I was careful to not say "the poor have it just as good as the rich", because I specifically did not mean to say that. The rich certainly have far more power, opportunity, and resources available to them because economics, but I've noticed a trend to conflate inequality with poverty, or to assume that those with more only have it because they took it from those with less, and both are rooted in the fallacious assumption that wealth is zero-sum. Greater relative wealth means greater purchasing power of scarce resources. But the production of wealth is a consequence of the production of additional resources, which results in greater accessibility of things that were once solely the domain of the rich. I'm not making a value judgement about wealth inequality here - I'm simply pointing out that the rich becoming richer does not mean the the poor are able to afford less - and in fact often indirectly means that the poor can afford more.
pyre 12y ago
The wealth of the poor is growing slower than the wealth of the "1%". It's not a hard concept to grasp.
- jp555 12y ago
  How are you measuring wealth? My current car is a lot more efficient, safe, reliable, and comfortable than my last car, and I'm paying the same price. That's an increase in wealth for me. My next TV will be a lot bigger and perform a lot better than my current one, and will cost less. That's a big jump in wealth. My new smartphone consistently captures better pictures of my growing son than the last one I had; which makes me much more wealthy. I can video chat with relatives all over the world for almost $0, while my parents had to pay $X.XX/MINUTE to barely talk (over poor connections) to their families decades ago. Wealth is the things we want, not the money we have. I think the whole narrative of the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 99% is deeply flawed as it's way too narrowly quantified.
  - andreasklinger 12y ago
    from my point of view. your current car is better than your last. and the next one will be again better. and then at some point you might not even need a "car" (as we understand it now) anymore. but that is closer linked to technological progress than to increasing wealth. if i understand above's argument right than the wealth gap has less to do w/ how much people have but (on the longer run) how much chance they have to change it (relatively).
  - pyre 12y ago
    Well, part of that narrative also pertains to things like (e.g.) upper-class salary growth vs. middle-class salary growth.
  - wolf550e 12y ago
    When technology improves, your standard of living grows, but your share of the global pie shrinks. It means that when you get a Tesla and realistic VR porn, your net worth will be roughly the same as it would have been if technology didn't improve productivity, but someone will be a trilionare.
astrodust 12y ago
If everyone in the 99% was earning barely $2/day then you could also argue we've "eradicated poverty" by that metric. There's two problems here, one of which is the non-1% is being squeezed hard even if the lowest 20% is seeing modest gains.
- JackFr 12y ago
  You (as well as this article, though less so) are conflating wealth and income. Wealth is a stock; income is a flow. In any economy what is produced is split between wages and profits. Wages are the returns to labor, while profits are the return to capital. Income to households can be both returns on wealth or returns on labor, so clearly higher income will be correlated with higher wealth, and wealth inequality can be both cause and effect of income in equality. What the Oxfam article fails to mention, is that quality of life and income have improved DRAMATICALLY for billions of people over the past 50 years, and ironically what is standing in way of the bottom 50% are often legal and cultural obstacles to accumulating capital -- wealth -- at both the individual and national level.
  - astrodust 12y ago
    I have no idea why you insist on splitting hairs here. Most people have marginal income and zero or negative wealth. Those with higher incomes have higher wealth. The correlation here couldn't be stronger even if it's not strictly linear.
mikeash 12y ago
Rather than assume that they're a bunch of evil people who are trying to hide the truth from us poor suckers, maybe you should think about why they might not think that "less poverty than ever" invalidates their point.

by vixen99 12y ago

noelwelsh 12y ago

Not the same issue. Inequality can continue to grow even while the poor become wealthier.

cheald 12y ago
Right, but the trick is the inequality doesn't imply poverty. Wealth isn't a zero-sum game; FatCat having more doesn't necessarily require that SkinnyCat have less, even though the size of the pie slices grows or shrinks; the pie grows as well.
- nmeofthestate 12y ago
  "Your new TV is bigger and slimmer, so why should you care the planetary economic system rewards a tiny minority with wealth that is almost incomprehensible?" Okay, but the trouble is, it's a feeble argument for persuading people not to pay attention to the fact that 1% of the planet has half the wealth. People actually care about the fairness of how wealth is distributed. Did these fabulously wealthy people start working even harder, to justify the even more unequal wealth breakdown? The 1% used to own <50% of all wealth. Soon they'll own 51%. What changed? I'd argue they've done nothing to deserve this increased wealth, and it's entirely justifiable that humanity is allowed to look at how to redistribute that wealth. Of course we have to be careful not to kill the golden goose - maybe they'll all emigrate to Mars where taxes are lower...
  - realusername 12y ago
    Not to mention the democratic problem of having 10 people weighting so much into the balance.
- AlisdairO 12y ago
  In the south of the UK (the part where most of the jobs are) housing is a dominant cost in most people's lives. Since there's a shortage of housing and buildable land, the cost of housing goes up with people's ability to pay. This absolutely trends towards a zero sum game, so income distribution is a clear concern. Political power is also purchasable to some extent in virtually every country, so income inequality matters there too.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  But sometimes it's not the size of your piece that matters, but it's the size of your piece relative to others. Examples: - buying a law. - legal bribes, like endowing a chair at Harvard to ensure your kid gets in - hiring personal servants - real estate: the average price of a house anywhere with a functioning banking system is approx 2-3x the average salary For example, a bright Indian software developer faces the choice: do I make $40K in India or $200K in Silicon Valley? The latter can afford a fancier car, the former can afford more servants. Absolute wealth matters when purchasing items that can be created by spending dollars: cars, computers, food, energy, et cetera. Relative wealth matters when purchasing items which cannot generally be created by spending dollars: land, people.
  - cheald 12y ago
    I was careful to not say "the poor have it just as good as the rich", because I specifically did not mean to say that. The rich certainly have far more power, opportunity, and resources available to them because economics, but I've noticed a trend to conflate inequality with poverty, or to assume that those with more only have it because they took it from those with less, and both are rooted in the fallacious assumption that wealth is zero-sum. Greater relative wealth means greater purchasing power of scarce resources. But the production of wealth is a consequence of the production of additional resources, which results in greater accessibility of things that were once solely the domain of the rich. I'm not making a value judgement about wealth inequality here - I'm simply pointing out that the rich becoming richer does not mean the the poor are able to afford less - and in fact often indirectly means that the poor can afford more.

pyre 12y ago

The wealth of the poor is growing slower than the wealth of the "1%". It's not a hard concept to grasp.

jp555 12y ago
How are you measuring wealth? My current car is a lot more efficient, safe, reliable, and comfortable than my last car, and I'm paying the same price. That's an increase in wealth for me. My next TV will be a lot bigger and perform a lot better than my current one, and will cost less. That's a big jump in wealth. My new smartphone consistently captures better pictures of my growing son than the last one I had; which makes me much more wealthy. I can video chat with relatives all over the world for almost $0, while my parents had to pay $X.XX/MINUTE to barely talk (over poor connections) to their families decades ago. Wealth is the things we want, not the money we have. I think the whole narrative of the top 1% owning more wealth than the bottom 99% is deeply flawed as it's way too narrowly quantified.
- andreasklinger 12y ago
  from my point of view. your current car is better than your last. and the next one will be again better. and then at some point you might not even need a "car" (as we understand it now) anymore. but that is closer linked to technological progress than to increasing wealth. if i understand above's argument right than the wealth gap has less to do w/ how much people have but (on the longer run) how much chance they have to change it (relatively).
- pyre 12y ago
  Well, part of that narrative also pertains to things like (e.g.) upper-class salary growth vs. middle-class salary growth.
- wolf550e 12y ago
  When technology improves, your standard of living grows, but your share of the global pie shrinks. It means that when you get a Tesla and realistic VR porn, your net worth will be roughly the same as it would have been if technology didn't improve productivity, but someone will be a trilionare.

astrodust 12y ago

If everyone in the 99% was earning barely $2/day then you could also argue we've "eradicated poverty" by that metric. There's two problems here, one of which is the non-1% is being squeezed hard even if the lowest 20% is seeing modest gains.

JackFr 12y ago
You (as well as this article, though less so) are conflating wealth and income. Wealth is a stock; income is a flow. In any economy what is produced is split between wages and profits. Wages are the returns to labor, while profits are the return to capital. Income to households can be both returns on wealth or returns on labor, so clearly higher income will be correlated with higher wealth, and wealth inequality can be both cause and effect of income in equality. What the Oxfam article fails to mention, is that quality of life and income have improved DRAMATICALLY for billions of people over the past 50 years, and ironically what is standing in way of the bottom 50% are often legal and cultural obstacles to accumulating capital -- wealth -- at both the individual and national level.
- astrodust 12y ago
  I have no idea why you insist on splitting hairs here. Most people have marginal income and zero or negative wealth. Those with higher incomes have higher wealth. The correlation here couldn't be stronger even if it's not strictly linear.

mikeash 12y ago

Rather than assume that they're a bunch of evil people who are trying to hide the truth from us poor suckers, maybe you should think about why they might not think that "less poverty than ever" invalidates their point.