The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
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Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#12Because, to the surprise of literally nobody who's ever been on the receiving end of these sorts of policies they cook up in far away think tank offices and the ivory towers of academia, there's a million ways to make the number go up that doesn't actually make normal people any better off.
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#13There's no paradox here. Distribution of wealth matters. Rich got richer and everyone else didn't. Simple as that.
As Ray Dalio has mentioned, you should measure results on how it impacts the bottom 51% of the people (the majority) it's a lot more illustrative than looking at the average.
Yep. I'm not an economist but my social democratic common sense would tell me to look at the bottom 10% income bracket and see how they're doing.
Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent.
In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#14There's no paradox here. Distribution of wealth matters. Rich got richer and everyone else didn't. Simple as that.
As Ray Dalio has mentioned, you should measure results on how it impacts the bottom 51% of the people (the majority) it's a lot more illustrative than looking at the average.
Should we perhaps look at the top 51% instead? Why pick one perspective over the other?
I’m not familiar with Dalio outside some weird pseudo-academic paper he wrote where he attempts to provide a new grand theory of economics based on “transactions”, but I would be interested to hear this perspective supported.
Edit: samiv above answered my question
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#15https://rentierblackhole.com/>
"The Rentier Black Hole"
A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#16Same with Brazil or Portugal or Angola. Full of billionaires with poor people.
Yeah, its all inequality. Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.
> Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.
[emphasis mine]
I somewhat disagree: at least during the COVID-19 times the government did have a plan to partially fix it: At that time there were a lot of discussions whether work from home will be there to stay or not.
If it would have stayed, that would have partially solved the problem (not for everybody, but for a substantial subset of people):
Since people can live at places where rent or the price of houses is much lower, companies can pay smaller salaries, but employees (after subtracting the cost of living) still have more money. In other words: both sides get their slice of the pie: employers can decrease salaries while employees still have more money.
Unluckily, when COVID-19 was over, companies decided they basically want people to come back to to office (working from home should be an exception).
This was the central reason why this plan failed.
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#17Seems like housing again: > Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always…
>I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
No doubt. You see it in tourism economies the world over.
Cheap services + cultural/historical novelty + nice climate make tourism highly viable -> tourism becomes outsized part of economy -> those enriched by peddling tourism write the rules to their benefit -> it becomes all but illegal to develop any other industry, build housing, etc, etc because all this activity winds up punitively regulated lest someone do something that scared away the tourists.
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#18[dead]
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#19The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
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The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. [...] Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
I rather believe that the individual problems in each country are very different (even though you summarize them by "this wealth inequality is so common around the world"). Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country, so I don't believe that people from different countries will club together, and have common wishes.
Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?
#20Capitalism optimization: make the rich richer making the poor poorer
You live in the most privileged period in human history.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...