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Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.

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Helping the less rich Americans does nothing for the 1% either. What's your point?

I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.

That's actually not true. The number of people living in absolute poverty (for various definitions of it) has gone down drastically.

http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworl...

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-11797610...

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners. (Non-white westerners seem to have improved their situation by quite a bit also.)

We haven't just lost status. We've lost leverage and loyalty too. Globalization has made the demand for lower class labor in the US drop to the point where the uneducated cannot do well anymore. In a balanced economy, there's a demand for everyone, yet in our outsourced service economy, only the highly educated do well. The opioid epidemic isn't here because of a loss of status.

> Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners.

You're saying there have been literally no negative effects from globalization? That unemployment in the rust belt has had no effect on standard of living?

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