> How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it?
The entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many?
Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries?
If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.
> If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice?
Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well.
I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people.
People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.
Only on Hacker News can you have an article detailing the systematic ways in which America holds people in poverty and have someone respond with a 30-year old anecdote about how great America is. Thanks for reminding me that 30% of this site is never, ever, ever going to grasp the concept of class consciousness.
Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation.
America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.
> Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States
Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade.
>many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.
can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand
Not the US, but anecdotally, I've heard the main cause of homelessness in Australia is not being poor. Generally there is some mental health component that prevents people from getting help. Yet more anecdotally, I'm 2 degrees away from a few people who have been homeless and it was fairly easy to get back on their feet.
But the comments on this are still pretty crazy and maybe miss the point. Even if the comparison isn't quite exact, wouldn't you expect the worlds richest country to do the best? Even the life expectancy is declining in the US. And even if COVID had an impact on life expectancy, again world's richest country.
All of these stories are valid and probably true for the people that tell them. But I can't help but also recall the stories I read of people talking about being poor in the 3rd world, and it being so much less stressful because everyone else was poor and it wasn't seen as some failing but rather everyone was dealing with together.
Being at the bottom of the social pyramid, even if not poor, has its own problems. Circumstances obviously change from person to person and place to place but some individuals seem to react better to being the middle a country of poor than being poor-rich in a much rich country.
This is disingenuous. People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar. It says nothing about their lives here vs in other places.
> People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar.
That's not representative of the whole.
Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves.
Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.
Well, I assumed that you're knowledgeable enough to know why people immigrate illegally to the US, so I went with disingenuous. If you don't know then misinformed is the better term.
>That's not representative of the whole.
I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.
I would predict with tighter security, those with families would be more likely to get caught (and thus recorded in the statistics). If you've ever travelled with a child, you'll understand what I mean. Whether that means the proportion that are families is greater or less is an open question. The model being used for illegal crossing right now has changed a bit, as we have an agreement with Mexico to immediately send them back while allowing (most?) others to claim asylum and not be sent back until seen by a judge. Mexican are more likely to have single men working crossing than most other latin nations, for example.
The effect is the cartels are dumping the families and "other than mexican" to intentionally get caught (they want to get caught to claim asylum. Legit asylum seekers go through the process and fakers just disappear after release), overwhelming the resources of the CBP, and then while CBP is overwhelmed the Mexicans and others like migrant workers cross the desert. Such action would seriously skew the statistics.
I agree with you but unfortunately beggars can't be choosers. America speaking English, strength of the USD, all contribute to making the US the most attractive (if not the only) option. When you're poor and just taking chances, you make the best of what you're presented.
I'm gonna ask you a question, and want you to answer very seriously. Do you think the homeless should be eating out of the trash? I have no problem with them having steak dinners.
... but I bet you will never answer for that. Beggars SHOULD BE CHOOSERS.
Maybe don't present a problem as "American" when the problem is global? The problem is not so much that America manufactures poverty as much as that the consumerist(/capitalist) economic system the majority of the world depends on manufactures poverty. The article is just listing out American symptoms of a global disease.
If somebody were to post their personal experience with chlamydia would you reply with be “It’s a hot take to not mention the very serious problem that chlamydia poses to koala bears. When I read about something happening somewhere, I assume that that means it isn’t happening elsewhere.”
A hot take is defined as "a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction (as in response to current news)"
So you can't really do a hot take on a personal experience. Because a personal experience generally isn't "hot". You'd just be an a-hole. You might be able to have a hot take specifically about chlamydia in koalas though... ouch. Lets try...
"Koala bears keep dying because they cant keep it in their pants"
Only some aspects are shared globally, like a lack of affordable housing and labor exploitation. Payday lending, forced storage charges upon eviction, low take-up of available benefits, using the tax code to assist the middle class instead of direct spending to assist the poor, lots of these seem uniquely American.
Of course poverty exists in many places outside the United States, and people in poverty are universally exploited. But much of that poverty outside the US, at least so it seems, to be rooted in much the same causes: poor governance and corruption. This book seems to question how poverty persists in a country which seems beyond such "third-world" concerns.
Payday lending, forced storage charges upon eviction, low take-up of available benefits, using the tax code to assist the middle class instead of direct spending to assist the poor, lots of these seem uniquely American.
I’m guessing you haved lived in many places outside the US? Those are common in a lot of countries.
How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies?
What does the size of the US economy have to do with the rate of relative poverty?
The fact questions like this are asked - questions that compare two unrelated measures - makes me think the analysis isn't all that rigorous.
> What does the size of the US economy have to do with the rate of relative poverty?
A larger economy roughly means that more value is created in that country. Combining that with a higher relative rate of poverty means that the extra value created is not captured in a similar proportion. How are those two unrelated metrics?
Your observation makes the point. We’re living in a nation almost drowning in wealth, yet many among us see no issue or feel no culpability in bettering the dreadful state of our neighbors.
As a society we like to cast moral failures to circumstance. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the trailer trash and ignore the reasons why those folks are where they are.
Unfortunately poor people are not free to acquire the food they need or live in shelter without being violently attacked for doing so if they fail to pay money to property owners.
Poverty isn't voluntary - it's violently enforced at the point of a gun.
I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think the measures are completely unrelated. Would a per-capita adjustment drastically change the argument? Anyway, I think the point was to draw attention to just how large the pie really is before asking the principal question:
> Why do many of us seem to accept that the problem is one of scarcity—that there is simply not enough to go around in our very rich country?
"Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970?"
Because we keep changing the measure for "poverty".
It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago. If you aren't that old, read a book about the time period. Life will never be perfect but it is tremendously better.
Yes, the old hedonic index theory that since a new TV is much bigger and sharper and has more channels than a TV from 1970, it counts as more than 1 TV.
Libertarians love that one. Get ready for the chart where TVs are cheaper.
Oh interesting, never heard of that before. So there's a standard TV Unit representing a standard TV, with standardized dimensions from the dawn of the TV, like a horsepower. (Horses generate anywhere between .5 and 1.5 HP, depending on the horse.) How does this TVU account for the flatness of modern TVs compared to the days of yore. It's not like the depth of the device impacts everyday enjoyment, just goes.to how cumbersome it is when moving.
Yes. As a European transplant to the US, my meta-observation about social issues as discussed in largely US-centric communities is that Americans tend to quickly dismiss issues related to unionization, inequality, healthcare and so on with a set of regurgitated generalizations. The discussion ends before it begins, so to say. In some cases, social problems that are glaring in the US have been eliminated decades ago elsewhere, and yet there’s a collective belief that it’s an unsolvable problem in the economic powerhouse of the world.
I can understand the political differences, but there’s something else at play here.
The American ethos of “anything is possible”, which is very much alive in the private sector, stands in stark contrast with the collective civic apathy. So if not for a lack of imagination and creativity, it must be something else. Bootstrapping myths? Unawareness of how bad these issues really are? Helping the poor means less money for oneself? The poor needs to be punished for being dumb? A need to feel better about oneself relative to the poor? Fear of socialism? Lack of trust in government? Exhaustion from a perpetual two-party stalemate?
The US is a country that I love dearly but keeps harming itself in ways I can’t understand.
>Yes, the old hedonic index theory that since a new TV is much bigger and sharper and has more channels than a TV from 1970, it counts as more than 1 TV.
so, poor people today don't do what my parents did, put the TV in hock for months at a time and borrow an old little one from their grandparents?
If it's defined as only having access to an income below some percentage of the mean (or even median), it has some value, though it's certainly debatable how much.
I'd be more interested in measures that looked at what percentage of people remained in poverty for most of their lives. If poverty primarily only affects, say, people who have just moved to a wealthy country, but they're all able to climb out of that state, then it's reasonable to conclude there's no longer any significant poverty problem as such.
Poverty is always relative to how other humans live, it has no inherent meaning. And inequality is rising at accelerating speeds, that's just a fact. You can dress it up however you want, changes nothing.
This article discusses American poverty though. In the US, isn’t inequality wider now than it was 40 years ago? Every real wage chart I’ve seen suggests as much.
You'd need a chart that shows the different percentiles of wages.
A single line of average real wages wouldn't do much, and also doesn't actually show any decline.
There's an infamous chart that seems to show that real wages lag behind productivity. Alas, that chart uses different measures of inflation for the two lines in that chart. Thus it's completely useless.
You can have a look at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG for the 'Share of Labour Compensation in GDP': if you are only interested in inequality, you don't need to worry about inflation, you can just divide total nominal labour income by total nominal gdp to cancel out the price level.
The labour share of GDP in the US has been remarkably stable. FRED has data since 1950, and the labour share has stayed between 58% to 65% in that time.
(If you want to dig deeper: the capital share of GDP has been mostly constant. It's the share that goes to land that has increased.)
In any case, as I said above, the average income from labour has done just fine. It's the difference between workers that might be interesting to look at: eg CEO vs burger flipper.
That’s a great chart. I’ve always assumed that the major drive behind the diverging percentile lines was capital capturing most of our productivity gains. But 64% to 59% is really not all that large.
CEO vs burger flipper seems to be the lion’s share of the difference.
I agree a lot of poverty statistics are meaningless, especially comparing different times or places that have differing costs of living. However the kinds of abusive and exploitative practices described in the article that ensnare people in economic traps are still a real problem.
I'm old. Your statement that things are tremendously better does not jive with observed reality. Social programs had much fewer barriers to entry, had fewer strings attached, which in turn lead to better outcomes. The barriers to social mobility are higher now than at any point since the Great Depression.
Nonsense - things are far better today than they were in the 60's and 70's, with the sole exception that people are "touchier" today - they get offended far too easily.
- (signed) A guy who, in the late 60's rode his bicycle from the "good" side of town across the RR tracks to the "bad" side of town to hold a part-time job at a grocery store that catered to and employed people of all races and creeds.
Horseshit. Clearly you didn't spend any part of the 70s or 80s on welfare programs -AND- have no direct experience with their modern equivalents. Congratulations on your bike ride I guess?
So having admitted in your own words you have literally no experience with the matter under discussion are there any other topics you'd like to display your ignorance of or can we just call it a day?
To some extent, this is true, but it should never be used as an excuse for refusing to help those who are in poverty today.
There are many in poverty today who don't really have it better than 50 years ago. They're living under bridges, bouncing from shelter to shelter as they can, barely managing to get enough food to eat.
There are many others in poverty who do, indeed, have it "better" in some senses (for instance, they may have a smartphone—some of the time, in between times when it gets stolen, or broken, or they can't pay for the service), but who are still in desperate straits. They're living in their car, working three part-time jobs just to be able to continue to live in their car as opposed to on the street like the first category. Or they're couch surfing, relying on the patience of the last couple of friends who haven't already kicked them out while they apply to job after job after job and continually get ghosted even for fast-food positions.
Just because "poverty" in the 21st century doesn't look like the stereotypical Dickensian picture of starving children with nothing but a stick to play with doesn't mean it's not real poverty, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to end it.
Note that Desmond has been widely criticized for focusing on a poverty measure that does not include the impact of government transfers. If you include these anti-poverty programs, rates of poverty have declined significantly since the 70s: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/3/10/23632910/povert...
This guy Matt Brueig says EITC and child tax credit skip the poor. I think this guy may be a trolling by trying to convince me these things don't help the poor thus they should be repealed.
He also says health care doesn't count as bills so it shouldn't count.
I honestly can't tell if this guy is just so fucking rich he has no clue what's going on, or he's trolling.
Are you familiar with these programs at all? They contain a “phase-in” design that means they deliberately give less (or even nothing at all) the very poorest.
The way he phrased it made it sound like EITC drawers aren't poor, and that's why it doesn't count. If the people earning it are poor, it should count towards figures that are helping the poor. It's also worth noting some programs phase out below the EITC phaseouts, so EITC helps keep these people from falling off a cliff on the income producing side or being punished too harshly for earning more money, while simultaneously providing additional benefits that financially incentivize employment.
I don't agree with Brueig here, but if his claims EITC, Medicaid, and CTC don't help alleviate poverty that's a damn strong argument he's making to eliminate them.
Housing part is a scary box of worms to open. Unpleasant truth is that it's absurdly easy to fix: you "only" need to either scrap market economy - so the Party builds houses and distributes them for free as it sees fit; or democracy - so people's voting intentions based on their will to prop up their property values, do not matter - then zoning will cease to exist, and developers will build millions of homes, as long as they can break even on material and labor costs - flooding the market and dropping the housing prices multiplefold, turning almost every city, except those having no land left, into slums, but very affordable ones.
When >50% of people in a democratic country have their housing situation fixed, construction almost stops because it becomes a democratic will of the people, and for the rest, housing becomes unaffordable. It's incredibly hard to fix it in any way at all without destroying the very fabric of society.
Housing (zoning, etc) policy _systems_ should be either state (province) or national level. Failed application of those systems should be something courts can resolve.
This would answer your second issue; the voting one, by allowing those who cannot remain within an area they'd like to live in long enough to meaningfully vote in that area to vote in the general state-wide process specification level which would then have more local effects.
> then zoning will cease to exist, and developers will build millions of homes, as long as they can break even on material and labor costs - flooding the market and dropping the housing prices multiplefold, turning almost every city, except those having no land left, into slums, but very affordable ones
Experience in many parts of the world has shown that this is very much not true. A few examples:
- China: the history of the past few decades has very much been the history of demolishing slums because they're too dense and building much more expensive housing on top of it. You can make arguments about the housing bubble there, but slums are being demolished, not built, and affordability is still very much a dream (partly as a result of state policy, partly other factors)
- Singapore: as a city-state, city zoning policy is national zoning policy. The mandate is very much public and affordable housing for all, and local control over zoning is non-existent. The HDB's job has been pretty much demolishing slums and turning them into public housing.
- Malaysia (my home country): local municipalities have a small degree of control over zoning policy, subject to national control and state oversight. Same story here: there is a systematic effort to demolish slums and turn them into high-rise developments (partly because the zoning authorities have been captured by the developers). They reluctantly follow low-income housing quotas due to politics too complicated to explain here
- Japan: localities can only do so much, the story of Tokyo (same for Osaka and Nagoya) has pretty much been a story of top-down national control with the explicitly policy of managing urban density. Same story with a concerted effort of demolishing slums.
So your claim of either slums or high housing prices doesn't really happen in reality. If you have examples where this happened, please do share, but having lived in many Asian cities this doesn't bear out at all.
By "slums" i simply meant "districts where affordable housing abounds and kind of people who needs affordable housing, predominantly lives"... Which also means, others will quickly leave those areas because they will become unsafe and undesirable.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadThe entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many?
Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries?
If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.
Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well.
I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people.
People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.
Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation.
America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.
Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade.
One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand
But the comments on this are still pretty crazy and maybe miss the point. Even if the comparison isn't quite exact, wouldn't you expect the worlds richest country to do the best? Even the life expectancy is declining in the US. And even if COVID had an impact on life expectancy, again world's richest country.
Being at the bottom of the social pyramid, even if not poor, has its own problems. Circumstances obviously change from person to person and place to place but some individuals seem to react better to being the middle a country of poor than being poor-rich in a much rich country.
The millions of folks traveling from all over the world to enter the US, often enough illegally, suggests that lots of people would choose the US.
Don't impugn my motives.
> People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar.
That's not representative of the whole.
Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves.
Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.
>That's not representative of the whole.
I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.
The effect is the cartels are dumping the families and "other than mexican" to intentionally get caught (they want to get caught to claim asylum. Legit asylum seekers go through the process and fakers just disappear after release), overwhelming the resources of the CBP, and then while CBP is overwhelmed the Mexicans and others like migrant workers cross the desert. Such action would seriously skew the statistics.
... but I bet you will never answer for that. Beggars SHOULD BE CHOOSERS.
If someone were to post “How McDonald’s makes their burgers” would it be a hot take because In-N-Out also makes burgers?
https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...
If somebody were to post their personal experience with chlamydia would you reply with be “It’s a hot take to not mention the very serious problem that chlamydia poses to koala bears. When I read about something happening somewhere, I assume that that means it isn’t happening elsewhere.”
So you can't really do a hot take on a personal experience. Because a personal experience generally isn't "hot". You'd just be an a-hole. You might be able to have a hot take specifically about chlamydia in koalas though... ouch. Lets try...
"Koala bears keep dying because they cant keep it in their pants"
See the difference?
AKA Click Bait.
Of course poverty exists in many places outside the United States, and people in poverty are universally exploited. But much of that poverty outside the US, at least so it seems, to be rooted in much the same causes: poor governance and corruption. This book seems to question how poverty persists in a country which seems beyond such "third-world" concerns.
I’m guessing you haved lived in many places outside the US? Those are common in a lot of countries.
What does the size of the US economy have to do with the rate of relative poverty?
The fact questions like this are asked - questions that compare two unrelated measures - makes me think the analysis isn't all that rigorous.
A larger economy roughly means that more value is created in that country. Combining that with a higher relative rate of poverty means that the extra value created is not captured in a similar proportion. How are those two unrelated metrics?
Then it adds India, a poor country where the poor are much worse off than in the US.
Then it compares the size of the economies of that mish-mash of countries to relative poverty in the US.
So what exactly am i supposed to draw from this comparison?
As a society we like to cast moral failures to circumstance. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the trailer trash and ignore the reasons why those folks are where they are.
Poverty isn't voluntary - it's violently enforced at the point of a gun.
> Why do many of us seem to accept that the problem is one of scarcity—that there is simply not enough to go around in our very rich country?
to me, it seems like a question worth asking.
Because we keep changing the measure for "poverty".
It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago. If you aren't that old, read a book about the time period. Life will never be perfect but it is tremendously better.
Libertarians love that one. Get ready for the chart where TVs are cheaper.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/204491639305574605/
I can understand the political differences, but there’s something else at play here. The American ethos of “anything is possible”, which is very much alive in the private sector, stands in stark contrast with the collective civic apathy. So if not for a lack of imagination and creativity, it must be something else. Bootstrapping myths? Unawareness of how bad these issues really are? Helping the poor means less money for oneself? The poor needs to be punished for being dumb? A need to feel better about oneself relative to the poor? Fear of socialism? Lack of trust in government? Exhaustion from a perpetual two-party stalemate?
The US is a country that I love dearly but keeps harming itself in ways I can’t understand.
so, poor people today don't do what my parents did, put the TV in hock for months at a time and borrow an old little one from their grandparents?
If poverty is defined as percentage of people in the bottom 20%, then this must always be fixed.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago.
And if there was something justice and fair treatment, it would be EVEN better. So that argument is worth exactly nothing.
Huh? Global income inequality has been falling for quite a few decades now.
A single line of average real wages wouldn't do much, and also doesn't actually show any decline.
There's an infamous chart that seems to show that real wages lag behind productivity. Alas, that chart uses different measures of inflation for the two lines in that chart. Thus it's completely useless.
You can have a look at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG for the 'Share of Labour Compensation in GDP': if you are only interested in inequality, you don't need to worry about inflation, you can just divide total nominal labour income by total nominal gdp to cancel out the price level.
The labour share of GDP in the US has been remarkably stable. FRED has data since 1950, and the labour share has stayed between 58% to 65% in that time.
(If you want to dig deeper: the capital share of GDP has been mostly constant. It's the share that goes to land that has increased.)
In any case, as I said above, the average income from labour has done just fine. It's the difference between workers that might be interesting to look at: eg CEO vs burger flipper.
CEO vs burger flipper seems to be the lion’s share of the difference.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-...
To avoid paywalls:
https://archive.is/5FpzQ
https://archive.is/d5sMM
https://archive.is/wip/tXlT9
the first one, the productivity and compensation is very misleading.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-m...
- (signed) A guy who, in the late 60's rode his bicycle from the "good" side of town across the RR tracks to the "bad" side of town to hold a part-time job at a grocery store that catered to and employed people of all races and creeds.
No I did not: I got a job ASAP and have worked ever since. You're the one who's spouting horseshit.
No we don't.
> It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago.
No it's not.
> Life will never be perfect but it is tremendously better.
No it isn't.
Mr. Vibrating: Yes it is.
Man: No it isn't. It's just contradiction.
Mr. Vibrating: No it isn't.
Man: It is!
Mr. Vibrating: It is not.
Man: Look, you just contradicted me.
Mr. Vibrating: I did not.
Man: Oh you did!!
Mr. Vibrating: No, no, no.
Man: You did just then.
Mr. Vibrating: Nonsense!
Man: Oh, this is futile!
There are many in poverty today who don't really have it better than 50 years ago. They're living under bridges, bouncing from shelter to shelter as they can, barely managing to get enough food to eat.
There are many others in poverty who do, indeed, have it "better" in some senses (for instance, they may have a smartphone—some of the time, in between times when it gets stolen, or broken, or they can't pay for the service), but who are still in desperate straits. They're living in their car, working three part-time jobs just to be able to continue to live in their car as opposed to on the street like the first category. Or they're couch surfing, relying on the patience of the last couple of friends who haven't already kicked them out while they apply to job after job after job and continually get ghosted even for fast-food positions.
Just because "poverty" in the 21st century doesn't look like the stereotypical Dickensian picture of starving children with nothing but a stick to play with doesn't mean it's not real poverty, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to end it.
Seems like an intentional “cooking the numbers to look as bad as possible” to me.
This is a good video response from Matt Bruenig that goes into these stats in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBdFHA8KvU
He also says health care doesn't count as bills so it shouldn't count.
I honestly can't tell if this guy is just so fucking rich he has no clue what's going on, or he's trolling.
I don't agree with Brueig here, but if his claims EITC, Medicaid, and CTC don't help alleviate poverty that's a damn strong argument he's making to eliminate them.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
When >50% of people in a democratic country have their housing situation fixed, construction almost stops because it becomes a democratic will of the people, and for the rest, housing becomes unaffordable. It's incredibly hard to fix it in any way at all without destroying the very fabric of society.
This would answer your second issue; the voting one, by allowing those who cannot remain within an area they'd like to live in long enough to meaningfully vote in that area to vote in the general state-wide process specification level which would then have more local effects.
Experience in many parts of the world has shown that this is very much not true. A few examples:
- China: the history of the past few decades has very much been the history of demolishing slums because they're too dense and building much more expensive housing on top of it. You can make arguments about the housing bubble there, but slums are being demolished, not built, and affordability is still very much a dream (partly as a result of state policy, partly other factors)
- Singapore: as a city-state, city zoning policy is national zoning policy. The mandate is very much public and affordable housing for all, and local control over zoning is non-existent. The HDB's job has been pretty much demolishing slums and turning them into public housing.
- Malaysia (my home country): local municipalities have a small degree of control over zoning policy, subject to national control and state oversight. Same story here: there is a systematic effort to demolish slums and turn them into high-rise developments (partly because the zoning authorities have been captured by the developers). They reluctantly follow low-income housing quotas due to politics too complicated to explain here
- Japan: localities can only do so much, the story of Tokyo (same for Osaka and Nagoya) has pretty much been a story of top-down national control with the explicitly policy of managing urban density. Same story with a concerted effort of demolishing slums.
So your claim of either slums or high housing prices doesn't really happen in reality. If you have examples where this happened, please do share, but having lived in many Asian cities this doesn't bear out at all.