Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We've come far, and have further to go!
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Wealth inequality is possibly the highest it's ever been in history.
I wouldn't be surprised if food wasted (food that goes straight to the trash) nowadays is also at peak numbers, or close to.
During the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022), Brazil saw a drastic increase in extreme poverty, made worse by the pandemic. Poor people were literally scavenging carcasses for anything that could still be eaten. We're still trying to recover.
Do not take any of those good things for granted, they can be very easily reverted by a small number of psychopath assholes.
Wealth inequality is higher now than it was back when most of us were serfs who barely owned the clothes on our backs while one family lived in a castle and owned the rest of us?
Yes. Modernity made it a lot easier to create wealth out of thin air. However most of the worlds lowest class have it better in pretty much every metric than that family.
That's funny, cause wealth was also measured like this in the GDR.
???
Believe it or not, even the richest monarchs didn't have over a million serfs working directly under them. Even today there are many people who still barely own the clothes they wear
Yeah actually. It wasn't until industrialization that work hours and pay got so bad. Most commoners in the middle ages did just fine on what we would consider to be a half day of work and suffered for things out of human control like droughts.
Not that Feudalism was a better system, just more that people were more scarce, less replaceable, and automation was zero.
I wonder how those people are doing nowadays
There's more wealth being transferred in circulation than ever before
There's more food being produced than ever before
Your points are invalid without the context we need better regulation and methods to prevent collapse and waste. We're literally outgrowing by production over our knowledge.
Wealth being transferred is meaningless when it's amongst the wealthy, and more food is also being wasted than ever before.
We're at a point in human civilization where we should be able to provide more for EVERYONE while expecting them to work less, yet here I am one catastrophic car accident or unexpected massive medical bill away from telling my kids we're homeless. But the very fact that, for now, I have a mortgage and my kids are getting a decent education and three square meals a day means I'm still way ahead of a shitload of people in my country, and I'm filthy fucking rich compared to people elsewhere in the world.
My wife and I work hard for our family, but I know for a fact that others work WAY harder. Since their labor is considered less valuable than mine they make WAY less than we do. The dumbest thing is that if society does implode, the guys working manual labor for peanuts will be more capable and provide more value than me, an asshole who sits on his ass all day fucking with Excel.
Our society is fucked.
This is such a sad realization. As a software engineer I didn't really do anything to deserve the income. I work less hard than a lot of people and I'm valued more, for the sole reason that the computer can scale in a way a hammer cannot. I'm here largely because my parents went to college and encouraged me as a child to be an engineer. I didn't earn any of this.
Which, as lingh0e pointed, is meaningless since most of it is coming from and going to the wealthy.
And yet, hunger is still an issue worldwide. What's the point of producing, say, 100 tons of food if 40 tons go straight to the trash?
What context? Inequality is rising and you can check that with a quick search for "countryname inequality index per year". For the food, it's probably harder to really assess how much of the production is wasted, but it's a significant number.
Good luck doing that, as it hurts profits, and the profiteers will spend more money than you and me will ever make in our entire lives combined to fight said regulations.
Wealth inequality has nothing useful to say about quality of life for people.
It has. That inequality means that a small number of people can drive the price of certain items, such as housing, way above inflation, making it impossible for people who rely on their salaries to buy and own a home, or even manage to pay rent. Being forced to live farther and farther away from where you work, wasting precious time in transit to and back from work (or anywhere you need to be), just in order to have some money, reduces the quality of life.
There is enough money around to fix poverty in most places and still have rich people enjoying their luxurious lives. Inequality has a very direct impact in the quality of life of millions.
What does this mean and why is it a problem?
Yes there are more rich people now with more money than poor people. But they don't exactly have the power of Mansa Musa.
Also, I'd rather my neighbor be a billionaire and me be a thousandaire, than my neighbor be a thousandaire and me be a negativeair
Except we have people like Musk deciding when Ukraine can and cannot retaliate against Russia.
He didn't decide? He said his internet service couldn't be used for a strike at that time. Not defending him, but it's not like he has any authority over then, he just had authority over the assets he controls.
It means that the cake is growing, but your share is getting smaller. Companies declare record profits and celebrate by mass firing people. People with big investments are never at risk of losing money due to inflation. Meanwhile, workers' salaries are in a constant struggle against inflation and cost of living.
There's huge amounts of money circulating around, but most of it ends up in the pockets of very few people. To ensure that even more money ends up in their pockets, they invest in new venues that will get more of your money for themselves. Because a very small number of people can simply buy up "everything", and usually do so for pure speculation, prices rise faster than your salary. Rent and home prices keep going up because of this, people that actually want and need a home don't have the means to buy them, but a single asshole with money can buy a lot of stuff, drive up prices and fuck everyone who can't pay.
If you don't see a problem with wealth getting more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands as time passes, you probably want few people to effectively control the world.
They do. Anyone with over 100 million dollars laying around could easily crash some local economies, maybe not in the USA, but definitely in a number of developing countries' cities.