I'm talking about in real terms, standard of living has gone up across the world for decades, even as the population has grown.
No, but their parents had longer to save. The average person born in 1990 has a higher average real wage than their parents did. Given the novelty of college debt, it’s difficult to say much more, but mean statistics point to a wealthier American population at all levels today than any time before. The issue is the rich have gotten richer faster, not that the poor are getting poorer.
Mean, yes, median, less so.
> but mean statistics point to a wealthier American population at all levels today than any time before.
“mean statistics” don't tell you anything about “at all levels”, and are misleading because of the increasing top-heaviness of the distribution.
Median quite so [1]. Every class of American is getting richer, just not as fast as the ultra-rich.
Even leaving aside that outside of abject, starvation-level poverty, relative deprivation is a bigger contributor to disutility than absolute deprivation, such that everyone getting richer in absolute terms but the already rich getting rich faster would actually be a bad thing even if true.
I'm perfectly fine discussing the outcome of systems, or the individual aspect of systems, but you can't compare the net outcome of system A to the individual problems of system B
Edit: before anyone questions what my hisses might be they are as follows. I believe that capitalist US ended up better on a whole than communist USSR for the betterment of humanity. I also believe its inaccurate to different aspects of their systems and pretend one way was wholly better than the other
It has gone up in the US.
The poor in the US are radically better off today than they were 40 or 50 years ago.
Medicaid only came into existence in 1965. Today, after decades of expansion, it covers the bottom ~22% of people in the US with free healthcare.
The Food Stamp Act came into existence in 1964. In 1990, 20 million people received food stamps. Today, after decades of expansion (including large expansions under the Bush Administration, an unpopular fact), it covers 40 million people. The SNAP program has gone from paying out $15 billion in 2001, to $63 billion in 2016.
The real per capita income transfer, for welfare policies, has nearly tripled since 1980. The US social safety net is almost infinitely better than it was in ~1967 near the peak of global US economic dominance post WW2. There was hardly any social safety net back then. And it's considerably better than it was in 1980 or 1990.
The cynics take this to mean the US economy is much worse off than in eg 1980 or 1990 (Rhetorically does that mean Denmark's economy is collapsing? Their welfare state is far larger than the US welfare state as share of the economy). That's not the case, the US welfare state has been expanded to include more people. That has helped push homelessness and poverty to near record lows currently.
Buffet had a nice, pretty old article about why leaving huge loads of money to your children is a bad idea but I can't find it at the moment.
Summary quote:
Buffett is not cutting his children out of his fortune because they are wastrels or wantons or refuse to go into the family business -- the traditional reasons rich parents withhold money. Says he: ''My kids are going , to carve out their own place in this world, and they know I'm for them whatever they want to do.'' But he believes that setting up his heirs with ''a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb'' can be ''harmful'' for them and is ''an antisocial act.'' To him the perfect amount to leave children is ''enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.'' For a college graduate, Buffett reckons ''a few hundred thousand dollars'' sounds about right.
That’s in 1986, so the equivalent figure is more like a million bucks and change today.
I’m sure Buffett and Gates are doing it for other reasons. But generic_billionaire donating paltry amounts of money is just buying goodwill from the public, other rich people, the local community, politicians, etc. A rich person donating 1% of their wealth each year may be donating a lot in absolute terms but very little relative to what they have
And when someone donates a lot of money, we just say they are buying PR and have calculated the ROI like the terrible capitalist they are, with zero evidence at all this is the case.
It's like running a company nowadays and wondering why your employees have no loyalty. Yea, maybe you're the one group that has acted honorably, but 90% of your peers have been rat bastards and you can't be surprised if the average person assumes you are too
Yes, that's correct. What, you think Bezos and Ma are genius visionaries for coming up with the idea of buying things on the internet? A democratically managed worker's co-op could have accomplished the same things as Amazon and Alibaba with almost none of the disgusting exploitative labor practices and wide scale human suffering.
Rather, the entire capitalist system, tax loopholes, and corrupt politicians have lead to increased disparity between the rich and poor.
I'm fine with the claim that some people who create value and are net-positive, such as many of the rich people, absolutely should have significant wealth.
However, they should not have the level of wealth they have now, wealth that is enough to feed every homeless in their cities for centuries, wealth that could house and clothe the needy for decades....
We should not have loopholes like the estate tax reductions which mean even after they die, their family line can greedily clutch onto the money for generations to come, creating a severe class divide.
Just because we are angry with the system does not mean we all think rich people are innately evil.
Also, we have all the evidence we need to condemn the current distribution of wealth: the current distribution of wealth is self-evidently disgustingly bad.
Preferential attachment in the absence of proactive redistribution leads to accelerating inequity.
As you know, too much inequity undermines democracy.
If we want a Liberal, democratic society, we need progressive policies. Some mechanisms to offset windfall profits, level the playing field. Debt jubilees, entitlements, UBI, Keynesianism, something.
While I'm (very) sympathetic to "late stage capitalism" rhetoric, I think it's besides the point. Inequity predates capitalism and won't be remedied by eliminating capitalism.
The actual statement is "The gap between the rich and poor is widening".
Of course the rich will be rich. That's a tautology.
They don't have to be rich at the expense of the rest of society, which is where we're at now.
I give a higher percentage of my income to charitable causes than any of these "philanthropists" and I manage to not waste an insane amount of money on a disgustingly wasteful life of luxury at the same time, but for some reason I don't have an army of sycophants defending my every action on the internet.