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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
by 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 agofrom 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 agoWell, part of that narrative also pertains to things like (e.g.) upper-class salary growth vs. middle-class salary growth.
- wolf550e 12y agoWhen 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.
- jp555 12y agoAre you're saying it's an issue of "fairness"? By who's measure? If one values VR Porn, going from not having it to having it increases one's wealth immensely. The outliers are just that, outliers.
- transfire 12y agoThe fact that you have a car and a smartphone puts you somewhere around the richest 5% of people in the world. I don't think most 1st worlders like yourself -- especially those with the time and means to visit Hacker News -- have much of a clue about the poverty that exists in the world.
- jp555 12y agoI don't think zillionaires are made by keeping everyone else poor. I think it's much more likely the opposite, zillionaires arise from creating the most wealth for the most people. My issue is that "wealth" tends to be conflated with "money".
- urlgrey 12y agoWealth is synonymous with net-worth: total assets minus total liabilities. Yes, the quality of the goods available today is unquestionably better than the quality available 30 years ago, but many of those goods are being purchased on credit subsidized by the super-wealthy and have a shorter useful life (replace rather than repair). Read the following post from the Century Foundation titled "Graph: Household Debt and Middle Class Stagnation": http://tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-household-debt-and-middle-class-stagnation http://tcf.org/blog/detail/graph-household-debt-and-middle-c...
- jp555 12y agoOver 500 million new people have joined the middle class in the last 13 years - https://www.allianz.com/en/press/news/company/point_of_view/150115-a-bit-of-inequality-is-good.html https://www.allianz.com/en/press/news/company/point_of_view/... I do agree we need to look for more effective policy to better manage natural power-law effects (inequality), but globally in many ways things have never been as good as today.