Moderator removed post
CMV: Inequality has only ever been significantly reduced by natural disasters, violence, or pandemics
When natural disasters, war and pandemics happen, the poor have to spend all of their money just to survive.
Meanwhile the rich see it as the perfect opportunity to buy up land and small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy on the cheap.
"When the streets flow red with blood, buy property"
"Never let a good crisis go to waste"
And of course the all-time favorite:
"Too big to fail"
During the Black Death a lot of poor people died, because they couldn’t isolate like the rich. However, the ones that did survive were able to bargain with the rich for higher wages as workers were now a valuable commodity
Can't do that anymore as the jobs are offshored
Because at the time you didn’t have the internet to be able to recruit cheap labour in from offshore
Moderator removed comment
14d
Your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 5:
Comments must contribute meaningfully to the conversation.
Comments should be on-topic, serious, and contain enough content to move the discussion forward. Jokes, contradictions without explanation, links without context, off-topic comments, and "written upvotes" will be removed. Read the wiki for more information.
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
COVID was the biggest wealth transfer from the middle class and poor to the rich in recent history
I don't think OP means that. Imagine the state collapses so all your money is just paper.
Seems like a tautological view?
"The only time we see dramatic social changes is during dramatic times when those social changes can change dramatically"
It's not natural disasters, pandemics and violence that cause the change. They break the status que which allows changes to happen rapidly that would otherwise happen gradually.
I'd point to the New Deal (social security, TVA, etc) and the Great Society (civil rights and medicare) as exceptions.
To some degree, but social programs inevitably run into problems with lack of funding, ineffective bureaucracies, corruption, fraud, etc which can lead to a decline in public support. Moreover, social programs are only able to be protected by a robust court system and permanent sources of funding. People often point to Norway as a model; however Norway’s wealth state is built upon fossil fuel exploitation. These activities directly contribute to air pollution and climate change leading to inequality (too complex to explain in one sentence I know)
Yeah, consider that those social programs were created to stop a postulate for workers to directly control workplaces, they are a tool to appease workers without fundamentally changing their relation to their workplaces.
The world is a vastly different place than even 100 years ago. For the vast majority of history this likely was true but I think it is completely wrong today.
Malthus observed that even if all the suitable land on earth was converted to farmland it would only produce enough food to support ~2 billion people. Yet populations still grew at an exponential rate dooming most people to an inevitable cycle of poverty and starvation.
Malthus wasn't unique in this observation, he is remembered because he was the one to make it just as it was starting to become false.
A large part of this was the industrial revolution and green revolution.
The black plague raised the standard of living in Europe after killing 1/3rd of the people. Economics back then was mostly a zero sum game where there was plenty of labor and what mattered was land and gold.
Modern economies are positive sum games and focused on production rather than stockpiles of wealth. Global extreme poverty has dropped radically in the last 100 years. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-cost-of-basic-needs
Covid didn't raise the standard of living or reduce inequality, and a new plague today killing 1/3rd of the population certainly wouldn't either. Countries like Japan and South Korea are starting to have economic problems due to declining birth rates.
First off I find it very hard to believe that anyone has been able to study 10 000 years of history and find every instance where inequality was reduced. It's just too much history too many events it's just simply too much. So knowing I've never read the book I find it more likely he found big instances where inequality was reduced and just pointed at them. But for example look at France
https://images.app.goo.gl/b5quA5oHrojdqkiR7
There their inequality dropped drastically not after WW2 but during the 60s. There was a war at the time then but it wasn't a huge mega mobilization of all ressources war like WW2.
https://images.app.goo.gl/MHsjA9z52hHnJfEv9
Or Sweeden which also dropped without it being involved in any massive war and they weren't really affected by the Spanish flu to justify it through that either
Inequality has also been amplified by violence, for the most part.
From quickly skimming the article, it appears that the author is conveniently happy to ignore the amount of violence necessary in maintaining and reinforcing current inequalities.
ETA. We live in the era with the largest recorded slave population in human history, for example. Are these slaves not kept into slavery through violent means?
So yeah, violence might be necessary to change things for the better; but the same violence is necessary to keep things as they are.
ETA. We live in the era with the largest recorded slave population in human history, for example.
The comparison is iffy at best.
The transatlantic slave trade involved 12 milion people and when it ended in 1807 the world pop was a mere 1 billion.
In today's terms that would mean 96 million slaves.
Some estimates of the global total human trafficking victims are at 50 million. But again, the data is iffy.
We could be missing a lot of victims. And we could have missed a lot more in the past as well, given how much less interconnected the information in the world was.
Is it that they're ignoring it or that it's irrelevant to the conclusion?
I think it takes away from their conclusion.
If violence is required to do both things, what’s so special about it?
If violence is required to do both things, what’s so special about it?
The end result? I don't think it's fair to ignore practicality and what conclusions end up leading towards.
But that end result isn’t inherent to violence. Violence can lead to different end results.
Well, per the info provided, one has a chance of reducing inequality and the other...has no data.
But it also has the chance of perpetuating or increasing inequality.
Also what’s “the other”, a lack a violence? You don’t think a lack of violence has ever led to a decrease in inequality?
But it also has the chance of perpetuating or increasing inequality.
That's irrelevant to the conclusion. The correlation still exists
Not much of a correlation if it sometimes has the exact opposite result
You'd have to demonstrate the chance of perpetuating or increasing inequality is greater, first.
Per the thesis, "what's so special" is that reducing inequality has a chance to happen at all. Otherwise, it doesn't no matter what.
User deleted comment
14d
The knife was the first equalizer. It moved the needle from strength to just being trained/swift. A small well trained swordsman could slaughter dozens of far more physically strong but not martially trained farmers.
The time and effort to become a great swordsman was still high though. What the gun reduced was the skill level to be able to kill someone with ease and an massive increase in the range at which this could be executed (again archery was an extremely high skill task).
Now any person could walk up to within a reasonable range, pull a trigger, and accomplish a kill.
Not really. Technology is only as good as those who know how to use it. Moreover, technology (like quality stuff) is usually only available to the upper classes. A poor person can buy a gun with enough ammo for a platoon, but they are limited by their lower funds for other priorities. If they want to target their rich neighbors to take their wealth they will be opposed by the police, security systems, their own time constraints, own moral code, etc
This is just wrong look at the US from 200 years ago until now. In the US the average person lived off of $1 in todays money and now is the richest nation in the world. The people here are extremely wealthy and if you walked onto the street and asked people how their computers work in its entirety or even their phones you would be lucky if you got 1 person to answer you. Despite this the average person makes more money than 99% of all humans to have ever lived on planet Earth.
Look at women and what advanced their equality in the western world it was technology: plumbing, tampons, contraceptives, etc. The idea that technology is only available to the upper class is really absurd when even the poorest of the poor in the US have in their pockets a cell phone capable of computations more advanced than was ever used during the Apollo projects. Every person has access to literally all information you could ever seek to have.
Then lets look at what these advancements have done in recent years the UN set a goal of pulling half of the people out of abject poverty. They set a time restraint and managed to do this in half the time they put forward. Then lets look at inequality, would you say the inequality in the US is even remotely close to how it was 200 years ago. The answer is absolutely not. You wouldn't even say the inequality in the US is as close to it is in China. These advancements didn't come from technology in the slightest but the pushing of human rights around the world. Then as human rights expanded technology rapidly expanded. The level of advancements in the last 200 years outdoes all advancements in the last 10,000 years, and at the same time inequality has gone down dramatically. You can claim well the rich are getting richer, but the poor are also getting richer. People may want to complain, but the vast majority of people who are doing unwell in the US are usulaly in large amounts of consumer debts. Even in the US to not end up in poverty you only have to 1. get a GED or High school diploma 2. get a full time job 3. not have children out of wedlock. Now imagine you asked someone in 300BC what are your chances of ever becoming a millionaire the answer is literally 0% unless you are born into it.
Yeah but I don’t have as much as other people do, so that’s their fault right? It can’t be mine.
What does that have to do with anything? It’s talking about the differences in inequality over time that lowered overtime not through any of the things he stated in his post.
I agree
Didn’t inequality absolutely skyrocket during the most recent pandemic? We created a bunch of new billionaires?
I think this demonstrates that a historical perspective is not necessarily useful here, as the nature of wealth generation and economies have changed so drastically.
The pandemic was weird. people didn't really die during the pandemic. Of course many DID die but it's not really comparable to the plague or even the spanish flu (which itself was too small a pandemic to make much of a dent).
If say something horrible like 33% of boomers passed away due to the pandemic you would certainly be noticing the massive wealth transfer.
Also, we just shut down/ make wfh jobs that aren't essential services. I imagine during the plague everyone was calling priests home, calling doctors, etc... and quarantining / wfh was hardly a thing.
During world wars everyone is employed in some capacity in the war effort. It's clear why thats a different engine.
Well now we are heaping a great many qualifiers.
A pandemics... but not that pandemic... and more people need to die... but not these other pandemics in which more people did indeed die but somehow weren't enough...
Feels like a whole lot of special pleading.
Also, dying boomers doesn't really do anything. If we talk about wealth in terms of families, which we usually do, dead boomers keeps the income inequality exactly where it is thanks to a number of inheritance rules available for exploitation.
I said the Spanish flu wasn’t enough. The bubonic plague example WAS enough. You’re misrepresenting what I have written.
Re: Boomers passing doesn’t Change anything…
Younger people invest differently and put their capital in different places than older people.
This is true in all aspects of life. From something as mundane as “collecting fine china” to something as grand as “is my default investment buying CD’s or is it buying Bitcoin?”. The way capital moves and which problems get addressed IS extremely different from generation to generation.
So if there is a big generational wealth transfer there would suddenly be the appearance of a lot of progress, since capital is going into places where it never went before.
For example, in my ridiculous bitcoin example if that cryptocurrency marketcap shoots up because young people with capital are investing here suddenly a lot of abstract algebraists are needed to keep up with industry demand beyond what the cryptography industry normally hires.
In order to meet this demand, just like grade schools today are teaching basic programming, 10-20 years down the line grade schools might start requiring students to learn about group theory and field theory in math.
So in this example Boomers pass -> young people buying some bitcoin with money that would have normally sat in treasury bonds -> obscure mathematicians are now earning upper middle class salaries -> 20 years down the line high school curriculums are adjusting.
For a small slice of this example (the obscure mathematicians getting higher paying jobs) it really DOES look like wealth inequality is being reversed.
Moderator removed comment
14d
Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. See the wiki page for more information.
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
Did you mean *cynical? If so yea
No, cyclical as in cycles.
If we're talking about inequality how many digital pieces of paper would be a fair trade for all of someone's assets, then you'd be mostly correct. You'd be wrong if you're talking about people's standard of living. Usually, individuals only get logarithmically increasing returns with increasing wealth. The monetary difference between not being able to afford antibiotics to being able to afford it is minuscule compared to the difference between flying coach and flying a private jet. However, being able to afford antibiotics would be a bigger quality of life improvement.
On the other hand, imagine if disaster or war disrupts supply chains such that ordinary people can no longer afford antibiotics, but billionaires lose 99% of their assets, but can still buy antibiotics. Paper inequality would decrease, but inequality in people's standard of living would increase.
Don't labour/safety net laws decrease inequality?
I pretty much agree. Read Thomas Picketty. Capital In The 21st Century is a long read, but explains in a hard to refute way how the disasters of the world wars (with a little help from the great depression) destroyed the wealth of the ruling classes, leading to the huge gains of the middle class between 1945 and 1980.
Which of those would you consider the African-American civil rights movement to be?
transformative revolutions
What exactly does this mean?
Wouldn’t it be a boring world if everyone was equal? Let’s just be glad nobody has it as bad as they did beck when things were really bad. You know… back then! Do you really need a jet ski? You’re fine.
10 missing replies
Your post has been removed for breaking Rule E:
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Keep in mind that if you want the post restored, all you have to do is reply to a significant number of the comments that came in; message us after you have done so and we'll review.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.