this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Not really, and especially on a macroeconomic level it's the opposite of the truth.
The happiness described here is not monetary. It's stuff like gay people existing. Your economic status and your queerness shouldn't correlate. So queer people being happy with their lives doesn't take away anything from anyone else.
And on a macroeconomic level, more equal societies produce more growth and thus more wealth for everyone.
My bad, didn't appreciate it was referring to happiness in terms of social freedoms.
I meant for someone to have a good life without monetary worries on one side of the world it almost necessitates worse conditions elsewhere.
No, that's what I just described above.
Ok well I guess I disagree then. Look up countries that have experienced the most economic growth recently and they'll generally have fewer workers' rights, longer hours and worse working conditions.
Western countries that have the highest economic growth are either tax havens or have high quantities of fossil fuels. Both of these negatively impact others indirectly.
And that is backwards thinking. The undeveloped countries catch up to more developed countries, but not more. If they get too expensive, another exploited country is needed.
The West had it fastest growth during a time when inequality was relatively low and taxes high - 50s to 70s.
In case you want sources: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00181-021-02152-x
Just search "inequality gdp growth" you can find a lot of sources disagreeing with you.
That's my point.
Western countries had the fastest growth during those two decades due to a post-war boom. ie. Workers were glad they were no longer being sent to die and the future looked bright.
The study you linked isn't conclusive and even mentions in the abstract that different measures could yield different results.
The results it found might not hold true everywhere because it uses data from places where poverty is very high, meaning that the conclusions may not be as broadly applicable as they might seem at first glance.
This source, which I found searching for "inequality gdp growth", explores that further: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-59858-6_19
There are other issues with it surrounding data quality as there often are with economic studies and as such they shouldn't be held in the same regard as scientific ones.
But more fundamentally, capitalism works by paying workers less than the value of what they produce, thus extracting surplus value from their labour. That is what I was getting at with my original point.