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The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

johnkay.com

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Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#71

Post by Kluny »

tn13 wrote: post #67
quaunaut wrote: post #8

Y'know, I have seen Mr. Kay talk before, and I wouldn't regard him as an idiot. However, he's seemed to have missed the entire point Bill was making. > So what about China and India? Their recent growth performance has been exceptional, but both are still desperately poor countries by the standards set by Switzerland and Norway. The gap will take many generations to eradicate. Which Bill completely acknowledges? Howe…

When it comes to development rhetoric I think it is totally influenced by western thought. India is poor by western standards no doubt. But if India is poor and malnourished then how come its population continues to explode ? We need to realize that what people think of "prosperity" may not be same everywhere.

I'm not sure which way you're trying to argue, but Bill Gates's letter also did a great job of explaining why poor and undernourished populations continue to explode. The short version is that when each child has a low chance of surviving to adulthood, parents have more to hedge the chance the one of their offspring will make it. In addition, in poor countries where adults can't count on social security, they have children instead of a retirement policy.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#72

Post by kiba »

bsbechtel wrote: post #59
old-gregg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, that's why I say "perhaps... some things". While technology may have worked well for food, I just don't see how this can be applied to housing, education, healthcare, legal expenses and taxes [1]: these tend to expand/shrink based on how much money you have and "pin" the poor to a certain "ceiling" of disposable income leading to the perpetual hand-to-mouth cycle despite encouraging growth of metrics like…

I'd say you're just not thinking creatively enough. Manufactured homes significantly reduced the cost of owning a home, and just the other day I saw an article talking about 3D printing homes with concrete and how it could drive the cost down even further. The same goes for the other things you mentioned....flood the market with doctors and healthcare costs would go down, we just need med schools to accept more peopl…

Manufactured homes significantly reduced the cost of owning a home, and just the other day I saw an article talking about 3D printing homes with concrete and how it could drive the cost down even further.

The problem is the cost of land, not the manufacturing of homes, per se.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#73

Post by kiba »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #64
bsbechtel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Perhaps it's an inherent property of capitalism: some things always end up barely within reach of a lower class. I wouldn't say that's true, we just need to figure out ways to produce those things cheaply enough (through automation, other technologies) that everyone can enjoy them. Take a look at agriculture in the US...even the poorest people here have access to (not very healthy) food whereas just under 100 years…

> we just need to figure out ways to produce those things cheaply enough (through automation, other technologies) that everyone can enjoy them But, therein lies a paradox, right? I mean, when you seek to lower the cost of production through automation, technology, etc. you wind up displacing human workers, reducing labor demand, and putting downward pressure on wages. BTW, I'll add that lower wages are another signif…

In other words, this "race-to-the-bottom" walmart-ization of our economy seems to be, in large part, responsible for the income disparity we see today.

It does the poor no good if they can't even afford the cheapest good.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#74

Post by drewcrawford »

FD3SA wrote: post #12

I've always been baffled by the investment choices of billionaires. If you accept an empirical view of the universe, no matter what you do, you will eventually die. Your experiences of the world will cease to exist. Therefore, the only rational investment would be in life extension technologies (SENS, advanced prosthesis, etc.). At first, this might sound repulsive. The idea of a group of elites discovering and hoard…

> Your experiences of the world will cease to exist. Therefore, the only rational investment would be in life extension technologies

It is certainly not the "only" rational investment. It might be the only rational investment for a person who shares your views on the importance of staying alive and your optimism for SENS research, but there are plenty of people who fail one or both criteria, and they're not all irrational. They're just optimizing for different criteria.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#75

Post by bsbechtel »

kiba wrote: post #72
bsbechtel wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you're just not thinking creatively enough. Manufactured homes significantly reduced the cost of owning a home, and just the other day I saw an article talking about 3D printing homes with concrete and how it could drive the cost down even further. The same goes for the other things you mentioned....flood the market with doctors and healthcare costs would go down, we just need med schools to accept more peopl…

Manufactured homes significantly reduced the cost of owning a home, and just the other day I saw an article talking about 3D printing homes with concrete and how it could drive the cost down even further. The problem is the cost of land, not the manufacturing of homes, per se.

That's a fair point.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#76

Post by benched »

gesman wrote: post #42

Poor are not staying poor by their "struggle to prosper". Poor are staying poor by keeping doing things that keeping them poor, like getting further down in debt, not acquiring new skills, not being productive and not expressing their creativity. And of course rich have their habits as well. Give money to poor guy, take all the money from rich guy and see where they are in in 5 years. Chances are they'll be back to t…

I hope that someday, saying garbage like this is considered the same as saying that women aren't as good at math as men, or black people aren't as hardworking as the chinese.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#77

Post by AnimalMuppet »

huherto wrote: post #68

The article was frustrating since it is not clear on what the disagreement is. My guess is that John Kay is referring to the first myth. "POOR COUNTRIES ARE DOOMED TO STAY POOR" According to Gates, poor countries are making progress. According to Kay, there is a ceiling on how much progress a country can make. So really, the positions are not contradictory since there is a big space between the current state of poor…

And, if I understand him correctly, the ceiling is set by the quality of the country's institutions. That's really hard to fix.

Gates may be right that most countries will be out of absolute poverty. (In fact, I hope he is right.) But I suspect that Kay is right that most countries still won't be in the "rich" camp, even by 2014 standards.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#78

Post by benched »

tptacek wrote: post #61
rayiner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're defining rationality pretty narrowly. You're assuming that the only thing that is rational is living as long as possible. People invest for the happiness it brings them while they're alive. If I were a billionaire, I would derive much more joy, in the present, from seeing the real reduction in suffering and increase in human joy that can be achieved with my investment, than I would from spending that same mone…

Give it a few years. Paralyzing fear of death sinks in at age 32.5.

I realize this is at least partly tongue-in-cheek, but at 36 I'm not really afraid of death. I am, however, rather terrified of aging further, since that's a thing that's happening right now. It's become very current in the last couple of years. And 'dying', since that's basically the very worst phase of aging.

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#79

Post by bsbechtel »

kiba wrote: post #73
unclebucknasty wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we just need to figure out ways to produce those things cheaply enough (through automation, other technologies) that everyone can enjoy them But, therein lies a paradox, right? I mean, when you seek to lower the cost of production through automation, technology, etc. you wind up displacing human workers, reducing labor demand, and putting downward pressure on wages. BTW, I'll add that lower wages are another signif…

In other words, this "race-to-the-bottom" walmart-ization of our economy seems to be, in large part, responsible for the income disparity we see today. It does the poor no good if they can't even afford the cheapest good.

You guys are opening up a whole other can of worms getting into labor. We tend to think of labor as a cost of production and something to be minimized. Maybe we need to start thinking of labor as a (actually, the main) party responsible for creating the value the firm produces for society. Anytime value is created, it can go to 4 parties - the consumer (lower prices), the government (taxes), the shareholders (through profits), and the employees (labor wages). Maybe the reason our economy is so screwed up right now is because employees are getting a smaller and smaller share of the pie, not because technology is displacing jobs. If more people are out of work because of technology, great! That means we have more people who can go work on things like curing cancer and colonizing space :-)

Re: The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

#80

Post by tptacek »

benched wrote: post #78
tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give it a few years. Paralyzing fear of death sinks in at age 32.5.

I realize this is at least partly tongue-in-cheek, but at 36 I'm not really afraid of death. I am, however, rather terrified of aging further , since that's a thing that's happening right now. It's become very current in the last couple of years. And 'dying', since that's basically the very worst phase of aging.

I'm 37, not paralyzed by mortality, but sickened by the purported invincibility of 30 year olds. :)
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