The history of the end of poverty has just begun

> Who needs plumbing when you have a servant to bring you whatever you want?

I like hot showers. I bet you do, too. Besides, what do you think happens to kings when they get a toothache? No anesthetic, nothing to be done except an idiot with a pair of pliers and filthy hands. I doubt many kings had teeth after 35 or so.

> There’s a lot of stress to life unless you’re rich,

I'm afraid that's pretty presumptuous. The rich just have different problems.

> and you also don’t have very much control over things around you. A king has a significant amount of control by definition, and that probably contributes a lot to their quality of life.

When you're the king, everyone wants to kill you. Including your own brothers and sisters and kids. You have no friends. The losers in the game of thrones are always killed.

And they live longer, too.

If you had to choose between being Louis XVI or Henry VIII and a middle class American in Cleveland, Ohio, what would you choose?

Belarus?

Bulgaria welcomes you

Germany had made a few baby steps towards socialized healthcare at the very end of the 19th century, but other than that socialized healthcare systems didn't start until the 20th century and universal coverage not until after World War II.

I infer you've never spent time in a war-torn country.

My father told me that in Germany after the war, if you were smoking a cigarette, people would follow you until you threw the butt away. They'd fight over the butt, and the winner would combine the bits of tobacco left with other bits and sell the result.

Accurate figures are not known, but likely millions starved to death in Germany after the war.

They didn't live in ruinously expensive, heavily fortified castles for nothing.

They endured constant plots against them, from everyone, and to misjudge those threats meant death.

And there is nothing romantic about being poor and ignorant at the same time. Even if hot running water is now considered a colonial luxury.

We all were equaly poor and even if you had money there were few things you can buy anyway. You had a house (build by yourself) and food. If you were in good standing with government, you might get a chance to go to international holiday (in other eastern bloc country). Going anywhere in west would be totaly cost prohibitive even if they allowed to do it. Buying coffee in Vienna (closest big city) would easily cost 3 months of your paycheck.

So you were poor and you know you are poor, but it doesn't matter that much. 30 years later you can easily spot the difference in what does it means to be poor in developed economy: easily available loans and brain drain destroyed the periphery communities as whole. Now people are poor, they know it and they can compare to more well off everyday.

If you consider yourself in any way a Marxist or a leftist, you _aren't_, you are pretty far from it. You are not making a rational analysis of society, humanity or reality based on historical materialism. Going back 200-1000 years is not progress. Period.

Clearly, underdeveloped tribes living primitive lives are poor in almost every sense of the word. They may not be poor spiritually, which is debatable, but that's it. There is no colonialism boo-hoo here. Their means, technologies and knowledge are primitive compared to most current day humans. You are romanticizing them based on tedious with current day lives, but if you analyze their situation they _are not_ in a good position compared to humans in more advanced places in the world.

If you think you would like being one of them just think what their average lifespan is, or what their access to drugs, medical treatment, etc is, or what happens to them when there is a drought.

There is nothing to romanticize about it. They have it very rough and they are poor. You shouldn't based your world view on the "noble savage" myth.

In a world with limited resources, huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else. It also tends to concentrate political power in the same small group. Many people would say there is something inherently unfair about this.

I think these things aren't as separate from your concerns as you make them out to be.

> people don't hate inequality - they hate unfairness.

You seem to contradict yourself in the span of two paragraphs.

Inequality is OK (according to you) if it is fair. So rich people are superior to poor people?

(It’s not about “feeling” inferior in any case. It’s about having enough money to live. And yes, the interests of the rich often work against the interests of the poor in such a way that the lives of the poor gets to be more and more difficult.)

Or maybe we’re just seeing unfair inequality right now? Well then the distinction doesn’t matter much in any case. When was the last time that inequality was fair?

Rich people are created off the backs of relatively poor people, i.e. the working class. To a large degree, rich people need other people to be relatively poor in order to maintain their wealth. Why do you think that businesses hate when workers organize for better pay and conditions? I guess they should be fine with it if the inequality was “fair”…

Bah. Maybe my reading comprehension is off.

In industrial capitalist societies, measures of inequality are historically the best predictors of political crisis, including but not limited to the the election of Hitler and the Holocaust. I think people have plenty of good reason to consider them.

You are confusing the metric of inequality with the ideal of equality. These are very different things. Statistical measures of inequality have always been highly correlated with measures of societal health in some way or another, but different measures mean different things depending on the type of society it is. For example, you are focusing on the very poor vs. the very rich, but most Americans tend to associate inequality with the size of the middle class.

>the problem doesnt have anything to do with equality. there is a loss of control, of autonomy. no chance of growth or the ability to change your circumstances.

A lot of people think there is a chance for success and spend most of their lives learning there isn’t. They idolize Bezos and Musk because the media does, and guess who runs the media…

People are not the same, but they weigh the same.

No, I'm trying to properly define property, instead of leaving it as a hazy term.

And this includes income inequality, because what's considered poor is not static (see my example regarding the feudal peasant in their hut, the early 20th century immigrant family, or a modern trailer poor).

>It's unclear why you want to redefine "poverty" to also mean "income inequality".

It would have been "unclear" if I haven't already given several arguments for it on the comment you've replied to.

> “A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.”

Yes. And we could ask the same for things the poorest medieval peasant had, that a caveman didn't. Would you say the medieval peasant wasn't poor?

>Even if they are, does it really matter?

Yes. We're social animals.

Here's another way to look at it.

Would it be ok if the poorest black person in the world had a car, a home, food, and water, but the poorest white people had much more? If not, why? It would be better than today, no?

Because it's racism? But if the same situation is good if we omit the racial qualifiers (which makes it your example, which you claim we should consider ok), why does it turn bad when the subsets are selected racially?

I'd argue it was already bad even in your original example (when the rich vs poor dichotomy didn't have the race qualifiers). It's just than in one case it's bad as class+race, and the other it's bad just because of class.

It might matter. I think the relative levels would be less important that the perceived ability to change one's level, and perceptions of if the different levels are earned. If everyone has basic needs met to a higher level than today, but hopelessness persists, and you still have violence and crime as a result... that's an outcome I'd want to change.

But maybe that's less a result of what the baseline is, and more a result of being stuck, regardless of the baseline.

No, constant psychological distress e.g. anxiety about the future is extremely relevant.

For example having "home, food and water" without universal healthcare or without personal safety.

I had a short stint in the US with a work & travel program and, my personal experience kind of painted the picture that people in the US are simply horrible with their finances. I was young, and I was smart and coming from, what I now realise, was poverty. It seemed to me I could have _easily_ had a good life over there, without even trying. Basically the ethos of FI community would have worked beautifully there. Spend less than you earn, try to have a clean life. Easy.

I think people need to have at least a little while living in poverty to understand what it really looks like. I remember my childhood in one of the ex communist countries, it was... wild. Uncertainty everywhere, we could not afford basic shit. I saw catalogues from some nice EU country and I was _flabberghasted_ that people could afford such nice things. And I was young, I couldn't even process things properly. But there was obvious disconnect between my life and some of the media, promotional material, films, cartoons I was seeing. It certainly gave me a interesting perspective.

You could give everyone $1 bajillion dollars a month. The cost of housing would go up until a lot of people are still homeless.

Discouraging multi-ownership and preventing residential ownership by business mes needs to happen as well.

We also refuse to move to cheaper places. I still think from time to time, "what's stopping 10k smart young people from just moving into empty land?"

If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI.

And of course, the higher you set UBI, the less point there is to work like a chump and pay 2x current tax rates so other people don’t have to, so fewer people would work (which is one of the promises of promoters of UBI), meaning taxes would have more than double to make the payments.

The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.

For example if you put $30T into UBI, and everyone saved it, you wouldn't have any inflation.

I'd be interested to see a relatively detached, objective analysis on the speed and extent to which poverty is alleviated by different social policies. There's some clear variation there that deserves analysis.

Edit: misread the post I replied to, "could" as "should".

This really isn't the case. There is a very heavily regulation of industry in many developing countries and it impedes their growth. Often it even provides the basis for corruption. You could argue the that the nordic countries have smarter, or better regulation, but in many ways they operate freer markets than much of the world.

Some people seem to think more is always better, and that we should just dowse the car in gasoline and light it on fire to make it go faster. Why they think that would work is beyond me.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty#historical-povert...

They often note on the show itself that it is in fact replicator tech itself that sealed the deal for their era of post-scarcity, so yeah, that would imply some kind of scarcity in handmade goods.

I think when people generally talk about "post-scarcity" it isn't that literally everything that could possibly exist is plentiful, at your fingertips, its more talking about the things we find scarce now (housing, food) being plentiful.

See Afghanistan drought right now. I'm sure we can solve those problems with enough money and tech, but we could do that right now and feed millions but we choose not too.

https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-lines

> But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about what is happening relative to higher poverty lines. The evidence shows that there is a clear and continuous relationship between material deprivation and subjective well-being, so it would be wrong to celebrate shifting daily incomes from $1.89 to $1.91, even if this shift technically means abruptly reducing extreme poverty. People living on $3, $5, or $10 per day also face substantial hardships, and are still living in poverty.

Taking into account these other bands of poverty, you can see the absolute number of people in the lowest bands of poverty has increased from 3.3 billion in 1981 to 4.66 billion in 2017.

Furthermore, inequality is actually rapidly increasing in many societies.

Yet, one can cherry-pick an arbitrary threshold making the whole analysis profoundly misleading.