> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?
The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was.
You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
If you thought the people at the top had power now boy you'd really hate feudalism.
I think a lot of modern society's wealth goes into unexpected places, which is one of the things you see if you try living in places with different national GDPs. I'm in a well off European country right now, and the biggest differences I see compared to the US are things like older cars and worse appliances. The technology is older, and cheaper. Everyone having the latest SUV and pickup truck is actually a HUGE investment in wealth!
If you spend some time in lat am countries with even lower per person GDP you see older, simpler buildings, cheaper clothing, simpler food, etc etc.
If you wanted to live in the united states with a 1950s car, in an old house, with appliances from the 80s and shitty healthcare, you could live pretty cheap as well. The advances in productivity has brought us SOMEWHERE it's just not always obvious where.
People have a profound recency bias. I wonder if it's that people don't study history enough but I'm always amazed at posts like the grandparent's, which talk about oligarchs today discounting the influence of, you know, actual oligarchs, as in those few who legitimately ruled over others.
The system we have today is the single greatest driver of human prosperity the world has ever seen.
Yet there are people who wield the wealth equivalent to a moderately rich country's GDP. A great deal of our collective increased value output is going straight to those individuals.
I think most humans today massively underestimate just how absolutely shitty the life of a medieval peasant was.
You would have lived in a one room house without electricity, worked the fields from childhood (if you survived childhood), eaten simple foods without spices, watched your friends die from illness, then maybe get conscripted into a medieval war.
You don’t have to go to medieval times for that. The first half of the 20th century was like that for a lot of people in what is considered rich counties today.
In the cities many large families (or multiple families) shared a tenement and TB and polio ran rampage. Outside the cities many families lived inn1 or 2 room homes with dirt floors and no plumbing in many cases. This was common in Appalachia and parts of the south into the 1960s.
Millions fled many parts of Europe for these conditions in part because it was better than what was going on over there.
We are all seriously lucky to be alive today with what we have. And although these things are relative there’s no guarantee our societies continue to have such plentiful access to food, comfortable shelter, and basic medicines like antibiotics and vaccinations.
"It could be worse" is and always has been a garbage argument.
The problem is those oligarchs are using their outsized accumulation to lobby for and purchase a worsening world for their benefit. Sure, things got better for some people for a while. Now they're getting worse from what flows out of the discretionary spending of those oligarchs.
Claiming society hasn't massively benefited from productivity increases over the last century is certainly a take.... typical western raised privileged person claiming how terrible everything is.
It's definitely slowing the last couple of decades and in some aspects - reversing.
U.S life expectancy is one measurement confirming this.
Depression / anxiety among teens is higher.
And the last decade was pretty comfortable economically, it's going to get much much harder now.
I don't mean to say that there has been no benefit to the masses. I'm saying there benefits are clearly massively unequally distributed as the 0.1% get an ever increasing share of the wealth.
Is what you could claim if inequality wasn’t a detrimental to quality of life in and of it self, a fact which psychologists and sociologists have pretty well established at this point.
Also ignoring climate change, and how disproportionately it affects those less well off while overwhelmingly caused by the rich. Your quality of life may be better than in the 1950s, but this is going to be reverse really quickly over the next 50 years when we are hitting 2-3 degrees of warming, unless you are part of the 1% that can buy your self out of the crisis.
Sure, you can downplay the effects all you want, but this has been thoroughly studied, and there is a consensus within the scientific community that the negative effects of inequality are real. Disputing it at this point is kind of like disputing climate change.
If all of Bezos, Musk, Buffett, Ellison, and Gates’ wealth were instantly destroyed, inequality would fall quite a bit and yet my life would not be improved in any discernible way.
That is not how this works. Collectively (all else being equal) a lot of lives would indeed improve, or at the very least, the collective perception of the quality of life would improve significantly (in a statistical sense).
What you are saying is the equivalent of stating that today is cold, so climate change must be false.
Their possession of vast wealth is not a negative for me, nor would its destruction benefit me. There’s very few cases where we are competing against each other for goods and services.
If you’re asking whether I’d be better off if you instead seized it and gave me some, of course I would, but it’s important to understand that that improvement comes from being given money, not by the reduction of inequality.
Its been a while since I read the literature, but if I remember correctly, this effect you are describing is usually controlled for. If I remember correctly, it is the inequality it self, that decreases quality of life, and is independent of the increase in wealth among the poorer public.
That is, over a certain baseline, an increase in wealth does not yield significant improvement in quality of life (i.e. diminishing returns). Redistributing the wealth to increase inequality will improve the collective quality of life, not because the general public has more money, but because there is more equality.
Again it is up to you if you don’t believe this, just be aware that your believes are contrary to the scientific consensus.
I’m not sure if you’re inadvertently or intentionally trying to move the goalposts in our conversation.
There’s no doubt that money has a declining marginal utility. That’s as established an economic fact as they come.
There is still a leap from that fact to concluding that reducing inequality by vaporizing the wealth of five well-known billionaires would improve the economic lives of hundreds of millions of people. I believe it would not.
I do agree that if that were true, it would be strong evidence that inequality standing alone is causally negative (rather than merely a lack of redistribution being the actual negative and inequality being merely a correlated outcome, which is what I think is the case).
I’m sure this is not this simple, and I’m sorry if hinted that it was. Just how rich the richest 5 people in the USA are, is really emblematic of the wealth is distributed, you can’t just take away their wealth and leave it at that, you’ll have to shave off the wealth of the right-hand side of the wealth distribution curve such that the 5 richest people aren’t so filthy and unbelievably wealthy as they currently are. This is how things work in the real world, and what social scientists create their models after, and that is what I’ve been assuming you meant. Not a magic scenario in which the five richest people, and only the five richest people have their wealth erased.
Throughout this thread my goalpost has always been that inequality is in and off it self a detriment to the quality of life for most people. This effect has been measured, thoroughly studied, and is real, we shouldn’t be debating about that, because, if you don’t believe it is real, you’re believe runs counter to the scientific consensus and there is nothing I can say to convince you. However you seem to be in disbelief about how it works, so I’m gonna provide a plausible scenario. Note, I am not a social scientist, and surely there are more informed guesses out there, if you have the time, and are so inclined, you can probably find better sources on the web that explains this better.
In an unequal but wealthy society access to basic needs might be available to all. However access to other things which affects your quality of life is distributed. You might have access to education, but of lesser quality than the richest 10%, this gives you lesser access to better jobs, etc. Healthcare has a similar story, and so does recreation. You might have to settle for a badly moved lawn shared by dozens of people, while in another part of town the rich have a giant polo-field which is hardly ever used. In a more equal society, that polo-field may be repurposed to serve more people, access to health care and education is more equal, and the overall quality of life is improved. This is regardless of how much money is in the hands of the lower classes.
Note that this is just me—not a social scientist—guessing how this works, so take it with a pinch of salt. Other people have done quality research into this, and know it better than me. However, it may very well be that the mere fact that you have people that are this rich, really incentivizes the society around them to accommodate them, and their interest, at the cost of accommodating the rest of society.
In all those stories, it is the redistribution of something better to people originally without it that is the agent of change/improvement.
The analog where inequality alone is a problem is if you take the polo field from the wealthy and make it unusable by everyone. That doesn’t make anyone any better off.
People who talk about inequality are almost always actually seeking redistribution but have the sense to realize that arguing “I want what these other people have without working for it” garners much less sympathy than if they frame it as a global inequality.
That's by design. The whole point about making you fight between blue or red in the US and other fake dichotomies around the world, and have you overindex on some specific social/Identity issue is so that you don't realize that the divide is socioeconomic and democracy is mostly a sham because whoever gets in power doesn't have to serve the interests of its voters but those of its lobbyists, and that's exactly what happens.
But hey, that's radical talk,sentiment analysis suggests we should disable this kind of speech and keep our head down, lest we be denied more rights...
There isn't really any non-violence. The common solution to depriving people of their ill-gotten wealth is state coercion under threat of violence. I don't know if that would work in the case of the 0.1%, but we surely can't limit ourselves to non-violent solutions for the ultra wealthy when we have no trouble with violent solutions for the less wealthy.
It's time for the "without violence" to, once again, become of no importance compared to "ill gotten" (plus, with ever expanding definition of "ill"). That's what tends to happen, historically. We'll then get a decade or two of reconciliation and then will again start pretending that we're not murderous primate bastards we are, just like we did for the past 50 years (and even that not nearly universally).
Why should you play with a handicap? The "oligarch" forces you to work with violence. They've already violated the non-aggression principle.
No work? No money. No rent payment? Eviction (with violence). Stealing food? Arrest and imprisonment (with violence). It's violence all the way down. It always was. It's just a question of how it's organized and rhetorically justified.
How do you do it even with violence? How would you seize and “redistribute” Jeff Bezos’s (for example) wealth? It’s mostly in stocks that would start to lose value if you tried to cash them all out at once.
This is a non-issue; the stock will temporarily lose a bit of value through the increase of supply and that's it. Amazon as a company would still intrinsically be valued at hundreds of billions if not 1+ trillion, even if Bezos were to die tomorrow and his will would say that all of his shares should be sold on the market within a day. The fact that you might only end up redistributing $70 billion instead of the $80 billion he was worth when alive doesn't matter, it's still $70 billion being redistributed.
Laws that force Bezos to open up his platforms to competition would likely collapse the share price while not killing the actual value of what was built.
Tax is another.
The problem is getting into a position where you could pass those laws without violence. I'm not sure it is possible to do it democratically in such a corrupted political system. 3rd parties are essentially impossible and oligarchs have a lock on the other 2.
You disable his AWS account and badge and stop inviting him to meetings, likewise for any other hands that that stock falls into. It's not valuable if it doesn't give the holder enough power to make changes happen.
Think one step further. What happens if you do? Doesn't the USSR example teach you anything? You will have a different breed of oligarchs, that's all (yes, there were oligarchs in the USSR, just not in the way you think, money is not everything and oligarchy is not about money).
This is one of the most important questions we should be asking today. I'm not even joking as I think it's a critically important part of fixing society
As dumb as it sounds I genuinely think it's a concerted effort to change people's minds - specifically those people who want to become capital class or otherwise are on the way to the capital class.
If we can 1. Prevent new billionaires from being created and 2. then create structures to allow the capital class to feel like they are important to the process of reducing their own power and democratizing the economy, there might be a chance.
The extra value has gone to enrich the oligarchs rather than to the people. Maybe that should change.