Then why do inequalities keep rising according to most metrics? Just because the poor fare relatively better (which is debatable depending on which metrics you take) doesn't mean justice is rising.
A related point is why are we seeing equality as something desirable? We don't even question it anymore. This is a rather new development in the last 400 years or so and came about after Europeans arrived at America and started interacting with the natives, which had this equality concept much more advanced than what was common in Europe at the time. This also leads to the recognition of differences between people. What does it mean for us to be equal? I run slower than you, should I carry the urgent message over the mountains because we're equal?
Sorry to just add questions, but I think they are important questions people don't usually ask.
Envy. But it is not a new feature of human nature. So my question is: Why is it only now (for about the last 100 years) such a popular and successful ideology? What has changed?
Is it mass media? Or is it not a new thing at all, but things happen at a bigger scale? Meaning, before you'd maybe get envy bursts that'd devastate a village or a tribe, and that'd be it, now you get it at the country and planet level?
Compare that to the American dream where literally everybody has the ability to get rich (in theory, but the point is that now the "peasants" in general want to get rich).
This is a projection. Revolts are as old as power and inequalities. For the most well-known/well-studied of those, see this wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts
(it's important to understand that most revolts are silently crushed and never documented, and that even for those that were documented in their time we did not necessarily keep good track of those documents over the centuries)
I wasn't saying revolts didn't exist, just that they weren't about wanting to be rich.
Should everyone be equal before the law? Is it possible if half the population can't afford a lawyer?
Should everyone's vote count? How does Democracy survive when a small group of people own half the country?
Equality under the law (both your examples may arguably fall here), but we also have equality of opportunity, equality of outcome, equality by mean reduction.
I personally agree that equality under the law is indeed desirable but some other types aren't.
Which ones are good and which aren't should be made explicit.
Then we can talk about how to increase the good equalities and reduce the bad ones.
1- a child of a billionaire that had private tutoring and connections
2 - a child that grew up in poverty and was malnurished, didn't recieve proper education or attention from parents because they were working two jobs or perished in some kind of tragedy
The thing is to have a destination, a goal. Which equalities are worth fighting for?
You make a very good point! Yet the metrics you measure also matter. For example, it's fair to say that in terms of "free time" or "environmental pollution" things have absolutely gotten worse over the past centuries.
I definitely think it's possible that some communities/States collapsed in the past due to local climatic changes or environmental pollution (for example desertification due to over-exploitation of wood, or water pollution due to rejects from metal workshops falling into the single available source).
But in the past this was the exception not the norm. A few weeks back on HN frontpage there was a survey of hundreds of water sources worldwide, only two of which were unpolluted by medicine (the study did not consider other forms of pollution), and some time later was a study about 1/3 of the world population drinking lead-polluted water.
In that sense, everything is fucked up because even if your local community respects the environment, you can be sure there's a damn industry upstream polluting everything, or a neighboring chemical agriculture field killing the insects that keep your own food sources available, polluting the water sources...
I don't think the "are we faring better?" question can be answered in binary terms, but i think the "negative" side of things is shocking enough that it requires no less than an actual revolution to fix: as long as the people fucking things up for everyone else will profit from it, nothing good can come out of the system.
Disclaimer: i'm not well-versed in anthropology/history, but this has been studied and debated by scholars [0]
If you've ever been to the countryside, you'll notice that everything feels slower. The fast, ever-working "lifestyle" we know today apparently originated in with early capitalism/industrualism and was itself subject to stark opposition (for example from the luddites, who contrary to popular belief were not anti-tech but rather early anti-capitalists).
When that new rhythm was expanded to all areas of life with mass-industrialization in the 18th/19th century, thinkers of the time pointed the absurdity to replace legal slavery with what they called "wage slavery". [1]
[0] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
have you been to India or another country with a similar wealth disparity in the global south?