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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Good grief; this has been the case for as long as there have been people. Rich people and extravagant gifts aren’t some kind of new invention. Not everything has to be a commentary on class struggle or some kind of Marxist validation. And the world isn’t burning; it is more prosperous and has higher standards of living as well as the lowest absolute poverty than any other time in history. Life expectancy has never been higher: the world isn’t burning and unlike the time of Marie Antoinette, people aren’t starving in the streets. Our poor people are actually fat. Poor people during that time actually starved to death in some cases.

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The WHO still considers hunger the greatest public health threat (more than AIDs, malaria, etc.). Starvation is far from a solved problem.

Just because things are slowly improving doesn’t mean we can’t critique the status quo.

I disagree. You argument is because something exists, that has always existed, it should be criticized. Yet this has been consistently declining. So we are making improvements on it year over year.

Rate of change is as important a concept as change itself.

You surely must be aware that life expectancy is dropping in your country, that starving in the streets still does happen, that the wealth gap is very real, and that the planet is on a path to being uninhabitable. And yet you propose that because poor Americans are fat, that the world must be OK?

I'n not disagreeing that history repeats itself. It does. And there is good in this world. But you might want to take a wider look around a bit before declaring how great everything is.

All of those statements are frames for our astronomical & rising across-the-board material abundance.

a) We have so much food and so little need for the human body to expend energy (cars, infrastructure, oil, etc) that it’s a public health crisis.

b) We’d rather have $0 than see our neighbor get $10 while we get $5. Indicating that we have satisfied all material desires and the only thing left to do is play social status games. It’s seriously incredible that inequality (rather than deprivation) can be anyone’s main concern.

c) The planet is profoundly affected because participation in (a) is getting less unequal, spreading from rich countries to the whole world.

You are describing the tradeoffs of too much improvement, not a general downward trend.

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