Comment by thrance
10 days ago
Go repeat that to the nearest homeless guy. Wealth inequality is rising rapidly, and around a billion people on this planet still can't eat as well as they should.
10 days ago
Go repeat that to the nearest homeless guy. Wealth inequality is rising rapidly, and around a billion people on this planet still can't eat as well as they should.
Poverty is at an all time low. We are consuming way more than ancestors. Life expectancy is at an all time high.
How do you explain this?
I definitely woundn't explain it with speculative market bubbles though.
Every single time the market slips up, it jeopardizes all those achievements you mentioned.
> Poverty is at an all time low.
In USA, it's not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_in_Poverty_and_Pov...
Poverty rate flatlined since the 70s.
> We are consuming way more than ancestors.
Not true of at least several major indicators of consumption vs previous generations according to data I posted in other thread.
> Life expectancy is at an all time high.
> How do you explain this?
The more important question is, how do you believe these things you wrote disprove the comment that the rich and ruling class wants us to reduce our consumption, even if they were true?
Because they do. Up until some time maybe around the end of the cold war, progress and development of countries were measured by (among other things) metrics like energy consumption, meat and protein consumption. The consumption based metrics have basically disappeared and the mantra these days is that we are consuming too much. We should minimize meat, energy consumption. There are many proposals to tax such things directly or indirectly, or even just outright limit the amount of animals that are farmed and so on.
I agree that poverty rate flatlined in USA but world poverty (counting India and China) reduced dramatically in the past 20 years. How do you explain this?
>Not true of at least several major indicators of consumption vs previous generations according to data I posted in other thread.
You posted energy consumption per capita which was due to efficiencies.
>Because they do. Up until some time maybe around the end of the cold war, progress and development of countries were measured by (among other things) metrics like energy consumption, meat and protein consumption. The consumption based metrics have basically disappeared and the mantra these days is that we are consuming too much. We should minimize meat, energy consumption. There are many proposals to tax such things directly or indirectly, or even just outright limit the amount of animals that are farmed and so on.
Because consumption did not reduce holistically no matter how hard you try to cherry pick a few cases. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEC96
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Statistics.
I don't know why you insist on licking rich people's boots for these. None of these good thing came from them.
I'm telling you: around a billion people are still hungry, and that number has been stable for 50 years. In the face of massive, global wealth inequality, this is unacceptable to me.