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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?

#51

Post by bryanlarsen »

IshKebab wrote: post #29
samiv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fract…

Bottom 10% are outliers though. Bottom 50% is much more reasonable.

Treatment of bottom 10% and treatment of bottom 50% are both interesting metrics, but for very different reasons, and they are often contradictory.

The "bottom 50%" is a measure of how well you make it possible for everybody to succeed without extraordinary help.

The "bottom 10%" is a measure of extraordinary help.

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#52

Post by antisthenes »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #49

In no particular order: - Per capital GDP still awful - Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature. - Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.

Also in that bucket:

- Average is one of the worst ways to measure wealth (use Median)

- Wealth is typically tied up in illiquid assets (e.g. housing), making people feel trapped or anchored to a place that may not be economically mobile (e.g. rural)

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#53

Post by wqaatwt »

rcxdude wrote: post #23
zhoBEENG wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, if you're looking at the bottom X%, then you can be confident that the rest of the population are in a better position.

Technically yes but its not that straightforward.

Take a country like Sweden for example everyone is reasonably well off (if not exactly thriving) since income inequality is quite low. At the same time wealth inequality is extremely high since the rich pulled the ladder after them and there are hardly any options for the middle class to accumulate much wealth. In turn that probably doesn’t help productivity and innovation that much. Why work harder if you won’t get anything in return? Which is a general vibe vibe in Scandinavian work culture.

Then again they (well Denmark at least since a petrostate like Norway doesn’t count and Sweden hasn’t been stellar and the Danish government is hellbent on turning the EU into a fascist dystopia so maybe its not a price worth paying..) are doing quite well economically compared to most other European countries.

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#54

Post by _puk »

microgpt wrote: post #24
mlinhares wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Renting itself isn't inherently the problem if you have very strong tenant rights. Imagine renting came with all the rights of owning except the money flowed differently (like a perpetual mortgage) - that'd be pretty okay, actually. It is within the power of a government to enable something like that.

But renting is a problem if there's no asset at the end of it.

Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour.

And the inverse.

Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house you, and you stop earning, you cannot live without reducing your overall capital.

So rental means a lack of opportunity to reduce your labour dependent income over time (important as you age), and a reduced ability to weather negative life events.

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#55

Post by password54321 »

dwroberts wrote: post #43
password54321 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in the most privileged period in human history. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...

You’re posting this like it’s a counterpoint, but it further highlights how disgusting the situation is. We have people becoming trillionaires while 10% of the world’s population is considered to be in extreme poverty. It’s ‘less bad’ than in the past but it’s still absolutely horrifying.

How much of that trillion is liquid? If people stopped buying a Tesla, would that somehow help the poor?

Making electric vehicles more mainstream seems like a net-positive to the world.

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#56

Post by jedimastert »

password54321 wrote: post #20
erdeibit wrote: post #5

Capitalism 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...

And yet we are also living in some of the strongest wealth inequality in the last 100 years at least.

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#57

Post by wqaatwt »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #19
lebuffon wrote: post #11

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?

> 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,…

> that the individual problems in each country are very different

When it comes to housing prices and general cost of living the patterns are extremely similar in most Western countries. Especially after covid and the infinite money hoses..

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#58

Post by wqaatwt »

_puk wrote: post #54
microgpt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting itself isn't inherently the problem if you have very strong tenant rights. Imagine renting came with all the rights of owning except the money flowed differently (like a perpetual mortgage) - that'd be pretty okay, actually. It is within the power of a government to enable something like that.

But renting is a problem if there's no asset at the end of it. Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour. And the inverse. Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house y…

It can work (and did in some places in Western Europe for a while) if housing stock is mostly state owned and/or communal. Of course that introduces some other issues

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#59

Post by password54321 »

jedimastert wrote: post #56
password54321 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in the most privileged period in human history. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...

And yet we are also living in some of the strongest wealth inequality in the last 100 years at least. https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

This seems to apply much more to certain nations like the US while it drops worldwide in recent decades.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/inequality?tab=line&cou...

Re: Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

#60

Post by wqaatwt »

sgt101 wrote: post #35

Frustraged by the endless prattle about GDP, europoors and Brexit, me and my agent frien's sat (manifested) together and brewed up some alternatives: https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/pho... I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP. 2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) pe…

Also massive influx of money from Europe especially due to the dominance of the US megacorps and the tech sector in general.

Basically you had companies like Google or Meta constantly leeching from everyone while providing approximately zero real value in return.

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