Comment by monadINtop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monadINtop | Hacker News Reader

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Cherry picking problems that have been solved in the last few decades are not relevant to a discussion focused on declining standards of living in relation to the economy and it's structure and how the average person experiences it - it's a specific problem related to wages, inflation, productivity, inequality, and how revenue has been chosen to be distributed etc.

For someone interested in "rigor" I'm not sure how useful it is to weigh an arbitrary collection of goods like the EPA, eradicating smallpox and polio, etc. to a time before them in order to encourage me to answer that "I would rather be alive now". Angels on a pinhead etc. Seems a lot more useful to actually acknowledge the problems people complain about and think carefully about the specific dynamics that generate them rather than try convince them that everything's fine actually and they should just think about how good the polio vaccine is compared to Victorian work-houses.

>But it’s not like you’re not doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

Huh?

Let me shorten my point and maybe it’ll help you understand what I mean:

Increasing income inequality does not automatically mean that living standards are declining.

It can mean that the living standards of the wealthy is growing faster than the living standards of the less wealthy.

As an example, jump over to your LLM of choice and ask it to compare the rate of air conditioning in homes of people at the poverty line, comparing now to 1995. The numbers have jumped substantially since the cost including running cost (energy efficiency) of that technology has improved greatly.

You were confused at that statement of mine that you quoted. What I was trying to say is that you complained about posturing but then engaged in very similar posturing. You’ve made the baseline assumption that living standards are decreasing obviously without any substantiation.

And maybe you’re right, but you haven’t substantiated it, you’ve just engaged in the same style of posturing that you criticized.

Here’s a couple pieces that substantiates my point, which is that global poverty is decreasing (certainly with continuing challenges but overall decreasing): https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/WLD/wor...

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

To keep my reply brief, wealth can refer to many things including material goods but let's restrict ourselves to money, since both of the articles you've cited does the same. Money is not a resource. You cannot eat or build with it. Money is a tool used to determine the distribution of resources. If total wealth has increased but inequality has also increased, it means the majority of people are increasingly losing the ability to decide the distribution of resources. This is bad even if you ignore the fact that the majority of people are also responsible for the production of said resources.

Side-note but the articles you cited are funded by various non-profits including Bill Gates' foundation, departments of the british government and so on. It's a discussion for another day and I'm obviously not accusing it of outright fraud or anything but in my experience such "non-profits" and think tanks are tend to be most guilty of unhelpful or outright obscurest analysis of wealth inequality, unequal development and so on (as you one would probably expect of any institution funded by capital benefiting from such dynamics)

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