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The history of the end of poverty has just begun

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Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#301

Post by rustmachine »

kragen wrote: post #250
boucher wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inequality has nothing to do with feeling superior or inferior to others (though, our culture absolutely does encourage those beliefs). In a world with limited resources, huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else. It also tends to concentrate political power in the same small group. Many people would say there is so…

The world has limited natural resources, but it doesn't have limited human welfare or enjoyment or wealth. Moreover, natural resources are not consumed, except for helium, energy, and the contents of spacecraft. The natural resources in a big plate glass window are a double handful of sand. The natural resources in a Rembrandt are the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a sheaf of flax and a handful of powdered colo…

The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system built up around it to maintain it. From shipping and transport to cheap labor in a 3rd world country.

If all the people of india and china were to maintain a similar way of life as mine, the eco system would collapse right away.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#302

Post by mellavora »

nikanj wrote: post #288
Ericson2314 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no poverty between the control of fire and civilization. We got our calories nice and easy.

Then why was the population so low?

because every person had a huge chunk of land! Compare population density today in a rich suburb to a poor inner city.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#303

Post by nopenopenopeno »

barry-cotter wrote: post #261
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effective purpose of a UBI (why the ruling class likes the idea) is to constrain risky tendencies of a highly financialized economy that depends on a large supply of dirt cheap labor without too much inflation. With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Everyone else will be a reserve army of cheap labor that serves to bare the weight of the financial ebbs…

> With UBI, gainful employment will be an elite luxury only accessible to those with existing wealth. Gainful employment is when the product of your labor is worth (much) more than you are willing to sell your labor for. If you’re not rich and you want to become rich working for Google at $200K a year is clearly superior to a UBI of $40K a year. Even with an arithmetically impossible UBI[1] like that there are still…

Those people won’t have access to jobs at Google, partially because Google would be a much smaller company if we had UBI because the number of people with disposable income would be minuscule and the internet would be scummier than ever before it gets shut down, which would absolutely happen if we implemented UBI in the U.S. because you simply can’t have a 2-tier society with free discourse.

Realize the economic problems that UBI would address are caused by transitioning our economy from creating value to collecting rents over the past 40 years. Tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night, but the fact that advertising does not create value for our society (or any society) is not a moral claim. It’s one of the cold realities that put us into this situation. Financialization has allowed us to deny the facts for a few decades and UBI will be the neoliberal New Deal, but without any of the good parts of the New Deal. It will effectively serve as a method of control. The contradictions of capitalism laid bare.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#304

Post by kiawe_fire »

__john wrote: post #168
sokoloff wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you doubled federal individual income taxes for everyone in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen around $750/mo in UBI with that increase. If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI. And of course, the higher you set UBI, the less point there is to work like a chump and pay 2x current tax rates so other people don’t have to, so fewer people would…

I wonder how many businesses could survive doubling the federal income tax?

Likely not the very business owners that would benefit from UBI the most.

Thereby likely forcing those business owners to rely on UBI entirely for income, thus removing their upward mobility.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#305

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #213
mbrodersen wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Why don’t you ask homeless people with no access to shelter, health care or dental care if they feel like Kings/Queens?

They can walk into any emergency room and get free care. Kings had zero access.

Kings had access to the best doctors of their era. Medical knowledge was just less. Not due to lack of access though. And Kings didn't need to do 99% of the back-breaking back modern poor have...

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#306

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #279
mbrodersen wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the minimum legally required (for them to not immediately die). After which they are shown the door.

Kings didn't have any. They didn't even have clean water.

Where does that impression come from?

Even whole cities had running water, all the way back to the Roman era. Heck, Rome I said? Ancient Knossos, over 3000 years back:

"Water technologies included running water within the palaces and other settlements, drainage systems, piping systems, rainwater harvesting, and other technologies."

https://iwaponline.com/ws/article/17/4/1106/15032/Hydro-tech...

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#307

Post by coldtea »

post_from_work wrote: post #292
Frondo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's poor can't travel (it costs! even if you bus it, you need time off work, a place to stay, etc), they can't have gourmet food delivered (it costs!), they can't fetch a driver (it costs!), they often can't drive themselves (cars cost!). They also generally can't afford medical care, child care, a wide variety of leisure activities (plays, shows, even movies cost!) They do have access to information and music,…

>>>if I had to be a medieval king or a poor person in Cleveland, it is such a no-brainer I can't even understand how the question is being asked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England#Death The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food. Diarrheal disease deaths are barely on the radar of US fatalities. https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/despite-reductions-i...

>The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food.

So? Many people die from even baser diceases today too. Including homeless and poor people in the US. And they toil their whole lives before that, and are made to feel insignificant, and have no power or servants, unlike the kings.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#308

Post by coldtea »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
DarylZero wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defaulting on a debt isn't the same thing as getting something for free.

That's exactly what it is.

If you're a rich person with stuff in your company's name, or some kind of structured impersonal assets (and ultimately, relatives to take care of you, and friends to do you favors every time you bankrupt and default Trump-style) yes.

Otherwise, there are repercusions from one that aren't there on the other - up to incoming a debt slave to your default's arrangement, not getting any credit anymore, and even ending up homeless.

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#309

Post by hohloma »

rustmachine wrote: post #301
kragen wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world has limited natural resources, but it doesn't have limited human welfare or enjoyment or wealth. Moreover, natural resources are not consumed, except for helium, energy, and the contents of spacecraft. The natural resources in a big plate glass window are a double handful of sand. The natural resources in a Rembrandt are the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a sheaf of flax and a handful of powdered colo…

The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system bui…

I bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".

Re: The history of the end of poverty has just begun

#310

Post by coldtea »

BurningFrog wrote: post #275
buscoquadnary wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many of the places I have heard of the people who are moving to the sweatshops themselves are rejoicing in the change because the alternatives are subsistence farming or sex work, and staying around with their "tribe".

The people who work at sweatshops do so because it's a better option than any other in their society.

If a burn down your house and farm, and you end up working on a McDonalds or a sweatshop to make ends up, you'd do it too because it's "a better option than any other" for you.

Same if your parents took you there, because the state is rigged in favor of the rich guys, which have fucked over their prospects, pocket money that would go for development and infrastructure, sold national resources for cheap to foreign companies that bribed them, and so on.

What's the "better option" is not some neutral natural given state.

But people who haven't experienced those things, think all is well in the best of all possible worlds, and these sweatshop guys should be thankful for the greay opportunity.

(To add insult to injury, more often than not, those people live in the countries benefitting from both exploiting the sweatshop countries to underdevelopment, and from the resulting cheap sweatshop products).

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