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>> The threshold above which people no longer regress into poverty is 9,309 BDT (504 USD PPP) Am I understanding PPP correctly--this is a value equivalent to what $500 buys in the US? That's surprising because the paper states this is above the amount available for conventional microfinance; I didn't realize it was indeed that "micro".
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What does that have to do with anything I'm saying?
I don't agree humanities natural state was poverty. Yes, they were poor compared to now, but resources were shared and no one was "breaking out on their own". If you had a good hunt this was shared with the community, unlike the world we live in now were wealth is hoarded by a small few, so your comparison makes little sense.
If you think we're more violent now, in the age of plenty...
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>You're imagining a society that has overcome the default state and maintains their progress. They haven't changed the default. They have changed the default from the perspective of an individual in that society, or if the society is large enough to encompass the majority of people, they have changed the default even more. The default state in the abstract sense is not only poverty, but the struggle against a state o…
The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. What happens when a society stops doing anything, does it remain in it's current state? Then that is the default state and they have truly altered it. But it doesn't, of course. Any individual may perceive it to be the default because they've never experienced anything else, but it would be foolish to believe it to be the actual default. History has taught u…
This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent on the true default of human labour and appropriating nature. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the absolute sense) doesn't provide any new information. Humans need to make things to have wealth.
>If wealth was the default, we'd just need to take care not to do some certain things that would change it, and had it happened, we'd just need to stop doing those things for it to automatically return to the default state.
Why is this an important point to make? Even Marx famously claimed (in defence of his theory of value) that every society must constantly maintain itself, or it will perish within a week. Others have gone further and argued that society must constantly maintain its ideology and relations of production too, not merely the fact of production. It's unclear who denies that society needs constant maintenance and improvement, even just to stay in the same state.
This is something I enjoy about our jobs up in Scandinavia - the salaries are very compressed around the mean. Engineers, Lawyers, and other similar professions tend to earn 2x-3x of what the absolute minimum wage jobs earn. That's quite the difference compared to other countries, where Engineers can earn 5x-20x. People here are still motivated to seek higher education and better paid jobs, even though they could liv…
How many unhappy people do you know do end up stuck doing work they hate because of money? There are many, and uneven compensation is a prime cause of their misery.
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I agree but considering the minimum wage is 0 I don't understand how you came up with the 2x-3x number.
Nordic countries have minimum wages defined by collective bargaining agreements rather than the law - because unionization is so strong and the agreed minimums are relatively good, they don't really need national legal ones.
Even most people in Sweden think there is a legal minimum wage and are surprised to hear it's 0 and that you can legally pay someone 0.01 an hour.
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Poverty is the base case. It's the default state. How does prosperity increase at all?
Poverty is not a natural state. It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.
"Natural state" is not a very useful predicate because, even if you can define it (what hominid and what period) first you need to define poverty unambiguously.
But I'll bite. If we settle on stone age, in my very humble opinion, poverty is a natural state. Someone can argue that paleo people were happy or in harmony with nature or whatever, but then they were at the mercy of elements, diseases and wars. That's poverty to me.
It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.
This seems a description of a lawless society. By the way, law of the jungle is the natural state. Property law is a cornerstone of civilization.
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I don't agree humanities natural state was poverty. Yes, they were poor compared to now, but resources were shared and no one was "breaking out on their own". If you had a good hunt this was shared with the community, unlike the world we live in now were wealth is hoarded by a small few, so your comparison makes little sense.
Ah, the noble savage myth. Go read up just how friendly relations were between those noble savages were and how high the incidence of violence was. If you think we're more violent now, in the age of plenty...
Don't strawman me, I didn't say that, or anything about violence. All I was talking about was distribution of income.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. What happens when a society stops doing anything, does it remain in it's current state? Then that is the default state and they have truly altered it. But it doesn't, of course. Any individual may perceive it to be the default because they've never experienced anything else, but it would be foolish to believe it to be the actual default. History has taught u…
>The default mode is what happens when you stop interfering. This sounds reasonable, but it seems that the 'default' state of humans is to interfere, to change their environment and process it with human labour. Accepting that, any talk of a 'default' state of life is metaphysical and removed from the actual reality of human production. The state of wealth being a default or not (in the relative sense) is contingent…
I'm not so sure. There are a few (more or less) "unconctacted" tribes left that are pretty stable in their environment and haven't progressed beyond a certain state that's very close to the default mode (and which we would call poverty if compared to us). I see no reason to believe in inevitable progress.
> Humans need to make things to have wealth.
That's short and correct, and it's why I think it's important to keep in mind that poverty, not wealth and comfort, is the default. It's not that anybody denies that you have to maintain and improve, but it helps to understand what came first: the effort or the reward?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poverty is not a natural state. It's artificially created and violently enforced through property law.
Poverty is not a natural state. "Natural state" is not a very useful predicate because, even if you can define it (what hominid and what period) first you need to define poverty unambiguously. But I'll bite. If we settle on stone age, in my very humble opinion, poverty is a natural state. Someone can argue that paleo people were happy or in harmony with nature or whatever, but then they were at the mercy of elements,…
GP specifically mentioned property law.
>Property law is a cornerstone of civilization.
This is a dubious claim, but I believe GP is specifically referring to property rights and law under capitalism, which until quite recently in human history was not the cornerstone of civilization. Property law worked much differently in pre-capitalist societies, and through the enclosures in Western Europe and imperialism off the continent, it is by no means a stretch to declare it as originating in violence and requiring a monopololy on violence by the state to continue to exist.
'If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.'
>> The threshold above which people no longer regress into poverty is 9,309 BDT (504 USD PPP) Am I understanding PPP correctly--this is a value equivalent to what $500 buys in the US? That's surprising because the paper states this is above the amount available for conventional microfinance; I didn't realize it was indeed that "micro".
Yes. You'll be surprised by how much $100 can get you in a developing country and how few people actually have access to even that amount of money.
>this is a value equivalent to what $500 buys in the US?