Because ‘poverty’ is a moving waterline generally pretty divorced from material circumstance in developed countries.
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
Cost of living, accommodation in big cities in particular. ZIRP had a lot to do with this - rents rose in line with values.
Working hours and conditions that are not family friendly.
Pressure on couples with kids to both work full time, which then means a lot of money goes on childcare so they are not that much better off (but landlords and banks are happier with the lower earnings multiple anyway) - but it boosts GDP and profits so that is fine.
A benefits system that reduces payments too rapidly when people earn. It means people keep very little of what they earn. Personally I think there is a good case for UBI as the solution.
> Around 70% of children living in poverty have at least one parent in work.
That should not be happening given there is a reasonable minimum wage.
Its not a UK only problem. The article says.
> De Schutter noted that the country conformed to a pattern of increasing inequality seen in other wealthy countries.
I think a lot of it results from a shift in attitude. The people in power increasingly think poor deserve to be poor, and that they are all "gammon" (to use the British term) and untrustworthy anyway.
Nitpick: "gammon" as a constituency refers to boomers and older Gen X, typically financially comfortable, who are declining in intellectual openness and increasing in strength of opinion. They are called "gammon" because their faces go bright pink as they rail against the EU, immigrants, woke nonsense, and the laziness of today's youth. They can come from any strata of society, but they are made by being insulated from economic reality during their intellectual decline. Their defining characteristic is that they are choleric about topics of which they know nothing, and this makes them easily led by jingoistic tubthumping.
It's awfully condescending to insinuate that these people are in mental decline just for having the opinions you don't like. You don't have the answers to these problems you speak of, any more than the older and wiser plebs. You might like woke nonsense, infinite immigrants, loss of national sovereignty, etc. but frankly you ought to know better or at least be open to the idea that you don't know it all.
Tosh. The axis is not leave/remain or pro/anti-immigration, it's having an interest in nuance versus settling for simplistic answers. You think you can define me, because I scorn gammon - you must think you're still on Facebook.
>You think you can define me, because I scorn gammon - you must think you're still on Facebook.
I don't use Facebook, lol. You just defined yourself by checking off all the usual liberal talking points and practically claiming that conservatives are old and brain-addled simpletons. There was no nuance afforded to conservative views anywhere in it.
>The axis is not leave/remain or pro/anti-immigration, it's having an interest in nuance versus settling for simplistic answers.
There are simple wrong answers and nuanced wrong answers, and the left employs both kinds of narrative to achieve their ends. I do have nuanced views but I refuse to take part in further fence-sitting and waffling when it comes to issues that affect me.
It's unclear which meaning of "betrays" you intend. If you think it's counterproductive to be so direct and emphatic, let me rephrase it: I am against all but a small amount of immigration of very high-quality people, whereas liberals are in favor of practically unlimited immigration. If you think I "betrayed" my intent by expressing this clearly, it was no secret or mystery to begin with.
Your misrepresentation of opposing views betrays a lack of intellectual openness. For example:
> liberals are in favor of practically unlimited immigration
Do you think "liberals" (are you from the UK btw?) are in favour of 5 billion people immigrating to the UK? Of course not. They just disagree that the current levels of immigration are as big a problem as right-wing media makes out.
I simply do not buy this. I don’t know the UK context very well, so cannot comment on this - but I do know the US context and we vastly inflate malnourishment numbers relative to what is actually measurable by relying on self-survey with misleading questions and overly broad criterion.
Friend of mine was gathering survey results for a kids programme in London. They take council estate kids to events and do childcare and a bunch of other stuff. When asked what they liked best, the kids kept talking about the food and how you could even have seconds. Meanwhile we’ve got food banks up and down the country struggling to keep up with demand. I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books. I can assure you pretty is very real in London.
It seems to me this may be one part of the problem. De-industrialisation means people in developed nations have surged towards cities because that is where most jobs are. But lower paid jobs just don't pay enough to support a reasonable life for a poor family in London. It would be far easier support a family on a minimum wage job in the NW or NE of the UK than in London. But there don't seem to be enough jobs to do that.
Additionally, and I say this admitting I am speaking from a position of relative ignorance, there are a huge number of non UK born immigrants, living in state subsidised housing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I don't fully understand why this is, but maybe it is because people are placed close to other family, maybe because of jobs.
As an immigrant to the UK myself, I'm aware that I should be very sensitive to criticisms of the system, but it does feel weird to have more than 50% of social housing in the capital allocated to people not born in the country. Please take this comment with as much charity as you can, I fully admit I am not close to the reasons for this.
> it does feel weird to have more than 50% of social housing in the capital allocated to people not born in the country
It's worth adding the context that more than two thirds of that 50% have a British passport [0], and that around 40% of London's population is foreign-born [1]. This is more a natural product of circumstance than it is anything to do with preferring immigrants over British-born individuals.
As I said, I don’t know the UK context. In the US context, I went to a pretty destitute public schooling system and we provided breakfast, lunch, and (to a limited subset) dinner - plus there is SNAP/EBT.
> I know families with three kids to a room smaller than the one my youngest fills with books.
Housing is much more of an issue for the very poor, at least in the US. But I don’t agree that it has gotten relatively worse on a large timescale.
I volunteer my time with Food Not Bombs. 20% of American children do not know where their next meal is coming from. Many are simultaneously overweight and malnourished, because the foodstuffs the US government subsidizes are calorically dense but nutritionally destitute.
Food banks, subsidized school meals, and SNAP/EBT prevent what would otherwise be children starving to death. As it stands though, the relief is insufficient. Many children from food insecure households have stunted growth and lifelong learning impairments from insufficient protein, calcium, etc.
It boils down to whether people can afford basic essentials like shelter, heating, lighting, and clothing. They do check their income levels. Maybe some people would lie about this, but I don't know why they would.
We know the prices of shelter, heating, lighting and clothing - and we know how much money people make. I see no need in self-id here. The equivalent of these surveys in the US place some people making six-figures in the food insecure bucket.
In the UK at least, we don't generally know how much money people make, nor how much of it goes to debts or other dependencies. Income below £10k does not have to be declared.
A UK organisation with treasonous, multi-generational experience, that's cited in the article, that people refuse to read or believe? Thanks for re-sharing <3
It's very cheap to get food, mostly because we can put out cheap junk. Whether or not this qualifies as 'nourishment' is, frankly, debatable.
If a child is obese, they are not necessarily nourished. They might very well be deficient in multiple vital minerals and vitamins, and could be paying the price in terms of their thinking ability, strength, growth potential, and overall health.
The US is actually a perfect example of this. Our government subsidized food, a lot, but a lot of that is corn. Most ultra-processed corn products are essentially nutritionally worthless.
Agreed, this was an example of a similar phenomenon as to why you can’t trust self-id economic situation surveys. FWIW, we see similar effects in food security surveys with six-figure households being classified as food insecure.
I can definitely see a situation where a renting single-earner six-figure household in a place like SF may require assistance. It's all about the relative cost of living and financial situation, you can't really make ground pronouncements like this without ignoring the data.
> Single-person households making under $105,000 a year are classified as “low income” in three Bay Area counties by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
Are you saying that based on the semantics of "poor" vs "may require assistance"
vs "low income", or...? My comment has a link that's backed up by a government website.
If we look at $105k in San Francisco, minus federal, state, and local taxes, you're looking at roughly $6,400/month take home pay. If you make a budget out of that, you get $3,000 for rent, $800 for groceries, $250 for transit, $250 for medical, $150 for Internet, $600 for entertainment, $900 to retirement, and then finally $400 towards an emergency fund. If you do not have all those things in your monthly, you are poor. Now, there are certainly people who have less than that, and we could argue the semantics of being destitute, vs simply poor as colloquially defined terms, but the brackets that California’s Department of Housing and Community Development has are: acutely low, extremely low, very low, low, and moderate income.
We can use https://saul.pw/mag/wealth/ and say that even with a $105k/yr salary in SF, you're sitting at ↑3 or ↑4 or so, instead of using the emotionally loaded term poor if it would contribute to having a more thoughtful and substantive discussion.
don't they choose to live in SF because that's where they got the job? if they would move they would lose the job, because you generally can't take your job with you. (remote work being the exception)
if life in a place is expensive, and jobs in the same area do not pay enough to cover those expenses, then a person with that job in that area is poor.
I don't know whether you've been to San Francisco, but most (about all?) people who can get a 100k job in SF has quite a bit of mobility w.r.t. where they could live or who they work for.
I would love to see a sample of a handful of cases of these 100k earners who we should consider poor and in need of assistance to make ends meet.
how long would the commute be though. if you have to spend more than two hours commuting each day in order to afford living with the money you earn in SF then i'd see that as a problem.
Do you really believe there are a million destitute starving wet and unclothed children wandering around outside in the UK? Obviously there is some gross exaggeration going on, like most of those million are "cold" because they have worn out hand-me-down jackets and maybe go without dinner sometimes, mostly because their parents are junky pieces of shit who can't be bothered to open a box of slop for the kid even though they're on government programs to pay for the food.
That's funny. Because I lived in Peckham for a decade, and it's obvious to me that money is fucking fucking tight for a lot of working families.
It's obvious to me that zero-hour contracts have massively reduced labour power.
It's obvious to me that energy bills are crippling.
It's obvious to me that there has been galloping inflation over the last decade.
It's obvious to me that all food has become more expensive since Brexit, notably including fresh fruit and veg.
It's obvious to me that rent is increasing faster than wages, and that it's well over 50% of income for millions of households.
It's obvious to me that benefits can be speciously cut at any moment, by policy of "climate of hostility", leaving a recipient unable to cover bills for a month while they take time off work and chid care to bang their heads on the bureaucracy.
When I say "obvious", I mean it literally: these things are in plain sight. When you say it, what I understand you to mean is that you have strong preconceptions making your blind. Could you kindly not Marie Antoinette in my country, thanks ever so.
So? One million kids going without food, shelter or warmth is scandalous. It's scandalous if it's because welfare payments are too low. It's scandalous if it's because we're failing to identify neglect. Scandalous either way.
Why would a story about parental neglect be framed with discussion about Britain being one of the wealthiest countries, if not to deflect blame from neglectful parents onto society as a whole by insinuating that not enough money is spent?
I mean I agree that that's not the perceived thrust of the article. However, parental neglect is largely a product of the environment. Parents rarely just naturally don't care for their children. There's usually other factors; stress, debt, addiction, mental health issues etc... . These are things that a state can provide support with. It's very challenging to access good quality talking therapy, for example. And a well-funded welfare system could do more to identify children in neglected situations, and to work with the families to bring them out of it.
Essentially nobody in the US (except the very elderly with dementia) dies from malnutrition. This would make the malnutrition profile of the US very unusual relative to other developing countries with similar rates of malnutrition as we claim on self-id survey.
The reality is that, compared to other constraints (like housing), food is widely available in the US and even if you are really struggling you can generally get food.
Our surveys classify many families making >$100k as food insecure. [0][1]
> Hospitals are incentivized to diagnose malnutrition by the Inpatient Prospective Payment System, which uses Medicare Severity Diagnosis‐Related Groups to identify a “payment weight.” When severe malnutrition is included on a patient's diagnosis list, a major complication or comorbidity (MCC) classifier is almost always added to the hospitalization claim. 5 Adding an MCC classifier increases reimbursement
If you look at the table, there is almost no relationship between income and likelihood of being marked as a malnutrition case by the hospital receiving reimbursement. (top 25% of income = 20% of cases, bottom 25% of income = 30% of cases).
The median age of these people with severe malnutrition is 70 years old. This is completely consistent with the claim I made around dementia, especially when you consider these people are repeatedly hospitalized oftentimes.
The point I'm making is that we don't see people dying from malnutrition because they generally end up in hospital rather than dying. However, I also just saw that the article I linked excludes children below the age of 18.
It found around 6.4% of child hospital admissions were diagnosed with malnutrition in 2019.
This other article says there were around 1.6 million child hospital admissions in 2019, suggesting around 100k cases of malnutrition in hospital admissions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10616761/
Some of that will be due to newborn feeding difficulties, e.g. babies with tongue-tie or a challenging latch. But most parents will usually find a way to feed their baby before it gets to the hospitalisation stage.
We're not talking about famine, we're talking about people living in poverty? What's your argument here? That because nobody dies of malnutrition we don't have true poverty?
I was not the person who changed the conversation from ‘relative poverty’ to hunger - the person who replied to me did and I just engaged in that on the merits.
My argument is that you should expect a similar ratio between famine and malnourishment across countries if you are measuring the same thing when you use the word ‘malnourishment.’
I think it is fine for different societies to consider the poverty level to be at different places (e.g. the “poor” in the first world are nothing compared to poverty in many parts of Africa, for example).
Having said that, how do you think about poverty in Britain (or the US)? What, for you, is the poverty line?
I think it's stated elsewhere that people are overweight yet malnourished due to calorie-dense but low-nutrition food. This leads to overweight health issues that can be attributed to malnutrition but don't fit the profile of "starving to death". The cause of death are other nutrition-related afflictions like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and even some forms of cancer.
So yes, they're not bones-through-the-skin malnourished, it's more complicated than that.
The share tells a story that poverty is decreasing at all levels, relatively speaking. The distribution tells the additional story that population has increased: there may be less change in the number of people at the $20-30 level and the $30-40 level in recent decades than the share alone would suggest.
It's interesting, because I read that and the following comment, “Most of the increase in child poverty has occurred in large families,” as almost getting the point.
The point should be, "how to we forestall demographic collapse?" Well, one way was immigration, but they're doing the opposite of that, so better make it easy to have lots of kids!
if you want to nudge people to have kids that they can’t support to solve some fertility crisis (despite automation proceeding at breakneck speed), then just ban abortion.
And also provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Recently after dropping no-fault divorce, more onerous child support laws, "red flag" and other temporary protection orders that can be obtained on little more than a mere one-sided claim (David Letterman famously had one against him for "sending coded [abusive] messages through the television"), alimony that relies on old timey presumptions a divorced partner can't work, etc, the calculus is looking ever more desperate.
Nowadays marriage still has most the downsides, but the upsides are looking less and less. And even more, the contract can totally change out from under you, you are basically agreeing to a vague contract that society can arbitrarily change at any moment and all the meanwhile scream "you agreed to this" no matter that it was unilaterally changed by a 3rd party to the contract and the playout of the actual terms of the contract hidden within places like family court where it's literally illegal to release the proceedings that allow one to make a rational decision upon ("think of the privacy of the children").
> provide incentives for marriage, which is associated with higher fertility rates.
Not causally it isn’t.
I disagree with this entire social project, babies aren’t interchangeable and I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments. Need to encourage people who are doing well supporting themselves to have more children rather than squeezing out the tenth from two-timing Jimmy.
Please provide your evidence there is no causal association between marriage and fertility rates.
>I don’t want to encourage more children from people whose primary blocker was child support payments
A prime reason why I didn't have kids in my 20s was because I could afford the kids in marriage, but couldn't afford to spend 20% (more like 30% post tax) on child support, as I had calculated it out. And knowing divorce is always possible, not willing to risk that. The actual cost of my kid is like 10% of my income, but because I'm married I'm not forced to spend closer to 30% as a transfer payment with no check it actually goes to the child. Without poorly thought out child support laws I'd have had kids sooner, and possibly more, and the kids would likely have been better off because when I was younger I had more energy and better genetic material to produce them.
I would even assert the people thinking ahead of time about child support actually calculated in a way that achieves roughly enough to take kids out of poverty, rather than basically a % of income, are exactly the type of people that should be parents. Under the current system child support can be next to nil, or extremely high if you're high income, rather than revolving around ensuring it is actually a number and check and balance to ensure the payment and spending is to bring kids out of poverty. The current system has less child support for poverty-born children but higher for wealthy-born children, meaning the incentives are precisely backwards from incentivizing children born into higher income marriages and the CS incentives higher for higher-income families to divorce and fall back into the lower-fertility unmarried bucket.
Those are support for marriage. Despite the stereotypes, the limiting factor for marriage is women -- there are more men that want to marry than there are women. Things that lower the costs and risks of marriage for women will make marriage more common.
Women have risks from pretty much all the things I've mentioned.
I struggle to find any data that shows positive (increasing) correlation between modern family law and marriage rates, so I'm curious where you got your conclusion from that those things are improving women's proclivity to marry.
pretty obvious. the cause of the fertility crisis writ large is not men choosing to not have children, the entirely reply is clearly projecting some personal injustice the commentator felt into some broader social issue.
Would that work? It would be a strong incentive for effective contraceptive use, and some people who would have otherwise had a child later will already have one, etc.
No idea how it would all add up, but its not obviously true.
It’s not obviously true that a ban on abortion would lead to more children? Contraceptives aren’t 100% effective. The availability of contraception + abortion is absolutely going to block more children from being born than contraception alone.
This was exactly my thought. Poverty reporting has gotten very weird.
While housing, food, etc costs are rising, I still also see teenagers and their parents who I know are very poorly off with $400 sneakers, wearing AirPod Pros and getting $6 lattes from Starbucks.
It's something I was discussing with a friend of mine. It's very easy to spend money in the US. It's very hard to save money. We reduce friction to consumption, but we put barriers on savings. It's also just simply skipped in school. We don't teach fiscal responsibility to most kids but they are bombarded on TV nonstop with calls for consumerism and even associating that with quality of life and people. I'm not saying they're justified in wasting their money on conspicuous spending, but it's not just solely irresponsibility. There's a whole chain of bad situations that leads to the irresponsible behavior. Good mentorship when young, good parenting, good education, these all make major differentiations and none of which have to do with the individual but everything to do with the environment they grew up in, which they did not choose. By the time they are adults, there's little choice left for them to make. Why not do something that brings immediate gratification? They can't afford to move to a better place, so they choose something that makes them feel good, at least for the short term.
I neither agree nor defend this, but I am posting just to say, it's more complicated than them being just leeches on society, like I think some comments are implying. Forgive me if I'm wrong in my assumption, but I see the argument so much without so much as a bare-minimum attempt to try to understand the others' situation.
It's a measure of inequality, not poverty as such, sure.
But practically it's obvious just by looking at the lives of "poor" people that, yeah, they are materially still struggling. I can't speak for Britain but I can speak for the USA: if you did both the "relative poverty" analysis and the "basket of goods" analysis, you'd find a lot of overlap. Splitting hairs over how exactly poverty is defined is just being dismissive of the actual people who are actually experiencing some form of material poverty, and shifting focus away from making things better.
Because world population has exploded, old people are living longer and expecting increasingly complex/costly modern healthcare, and we've used up all the easily accessible fossil fuels and other natural resources.
Endless growth on a finite planet is impossible. And we aren't prioritising expanding beyond the one planet.
That would be a different metric. This want to know how many people can’t afford the basics rather than how many people can’t keep up with the relative Joneses.
I'm asking why we shouldn't expect what is considered "the basics" to increase over time, as technology, aggregate wealth, etc. increases? An example to make this obvious: we should probably consider residential indoor plumbing part of "the basics" now, but of course even the richest people wouldn't have had that 500 years ago. In my view, there's no privileged point in history after which we should stop increasing our expectations for quality of life.
What social metric in particular? Also, for better or worse, social metrics are easily gamed. While a basket of goods can also be gamed, it's easier to see what's going on and to explain it to people, since it's composed of concrete goods. Also, a basket of goods can be expanded if we want to increase the baseline as living standards in society improve, which we do - a smartphone should now be part of that basket, even though they barely existed 20 years ago.
If the poverty hinders them too much in pursuing opportunities in education or work, for instance. Something like that. Something to keep an eye out for once the million kids who can't stay warm, dry, clothed and fed are taken care of.
I’m happy to just look at real median income quantiles. I don’t need it to be tied to an evocative word like ‘poverty’, I think there is still real work to be done to improve the lives of people who are in lower income brackets even if they aren’t in a situation similar to what people imagine when they think of ‘poverty.’
Don't worry we (the people in the political west) are quickly reverting back to the historical norm that was also in effect during the Victorian era. Few rich people, minimal middle class and lots of poor working class people.
After all capitalism is the same as system as slavery or feudalism. Only the names of the roles are different but the dynamics in society in terms who owns capital and who own the means/result of production and who don't, are the same in every system. (Small minority who own everything)
I find it interesting to read the threads on this topic. There is little discussion of how to fix the problem, mostly conservatives trying to disengenuously argue that the problem is somehow exagerated. This is absurd of course. What's the point of living in a developed nation if we still have large numbers of people living in poverty? The ideal outcome is that there aren't any.
You can debate the exact statistics all you want, but to anyone not well off right now, both in the US and the UK, it's pretty clear there's a growing cost of living crisis and governments are failing to address it. Frankly a lot of people here have no idea what living in poverty means.
After 2008, others pressed Keynesian stimulus. The UK chose Hayek. Austerity. Councils took the hit. Services vanished. Early-years centres. Youth work. Local welfare. The safety net thinned, then tore. Families slipped through.
Then Covid. Then Ukraine. Prices surged. Wages didn’t. A decade of inflation stacked up while pay stood still. For many, that was a silent pay cut.
Truss turned strain into crisis. Unfunded tax cuts. Markets panicked. Gilt yields spiked. Mortgage costs jumped overnight. Another blow to households already on the edge.
So we end up where CNN reports: record child poverty, even among full-time workers; parents unable to cover the basics as the social architecture collapses.
Into that anger steps Reform UK. They offer a protest vote. But their plan is the same old mix: deep cuts, a smaller state, and migration as the scapegoat. The very recipe that helped bring us here.
Huh? There were stimulus packages under Gordon Brown, up until 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7745340.stm
Then until 2012 the Bank of England did a lot of "quantitative easing", hundreds of billions of pounds of it, supposedly a kind of stimulus.
Yup. And the other side has put out "A quarter of a million 11-year-olds overweight - including almost half of the poorest kids" at the same time ! Hah.
I don't know what you mean with your comment, so I want to add here for clarity that obesity is nowadays a strong sign of bad quality food, which incidentally is also the cheapest food. Or in simpler words, the bigger you are the chances there are you got there by eating junk food. Are they starving? No obviously not. Are they healthy? Also obviously not. This means an increased burden on the health system and at least some inconvenience on everything else - starting from bigger seats in the buses. And no I don't accept that my society lets them suffer and die - I'll be adding this before somebody starts suggesting things like "their fault".
Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth, and then they buy legislation and elections, to take even more.
A challenge is that usually, within an attempt at a fair and equitable society, some TPOS will try to be a king or billionaire, or to ride the coattails of one. The society needs to tell those people no, and get them mental health care, to heal whatever makes them act like a TPOS.
The total wealth owned by UK billionaires is estimated at a small fraction of that (£300b?). Even seizing all of it isn't going to solve anything long-term (but will create new long-term problems)
Billionaires are a symbol of unfairness, but eliminating them won't make a significant long-term difference to those at the bottom. Unless they're put out of work as all that wealth, mostly tied up in companies, is liquidated.
Billionaires are a very small group. There is far more wealth held by people with assets of, say, over £100m, or even £10m?
> Unless they're put out of work as all that wealth, mostly tied up in companies, is liquidated.
No one is going to close down profitable businesses because they have to pay more tax. The value of shares might fall a bit, that is all. I do not even think that, because money will just shift around, not disappear.
> but will create new long-term problem
I do not think it will. IMO it would be a net benefit.
We can point fingers at the rich for making more money but really we should be hounding our government for wasting money. All the taxes and confiscation in the world won't fill this bottomless pit
Just today:
"£700m nuclear conservation plan would save one salmon every 12 years"
Both. Today's rich are wealthier than the rich of the past, but today's poor are also wealthier than the poor of the past.
It's also the case that quality of life differences have shrunk between the two groups, not because life has worsened for the rich, but because it's improved for the poor. Bill Gates' car, music, TV shows, phone, pants, meals, etc. aren't that much better than the average person's, today.
In the UK, it seems that it's mostly spent letting the boomers live long and relatively luxurious retirements that younger generations can only dream of.
Your government is not "wasting" money. It's intentionally putting money in the hands of the rich for a personal kickback to the involved politicians, under the guise of incompetence for plausible deniability purposes.
This is the fixed pie policy, which assumes there's a limited amount of wealth to go around. And therefore, any time somebody gets "too much" of it, the conclusion is they must be why others have less.
This is not true.
And it's important to understand that it's not true, because understanding a problem is the key to helping solve it.
In pre-agricultural times, the average person was lucky to own a few dozen items. Today, the average person in a developed Western country owns a few thousand goods. Western households possess over 100,000 goods on average. There's vastly more wealth than ever. Especially if you multiply these numbers by the massively expanded population of Earth compared to prehistoric times.
Therefore, it's necessarily the case that wealth can be created and not merely stolen or shared.
OP is talking about "share of the world's wealth," not a fixed pie. While the raw amount of wealth (the pie) in the world does grow, the important measurement is what percentage of that pie is captured by the rich. And the rich are capturing an increasing percentage of the growing pie. That's where the inequality lies.
In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off.
> the important measurement is what percentage of that pie is captured by the rich
And this is where we fundamentally disagree. I think the important measurement is how much pie the average person has. I think the important measurement is how much pie the people with the least pie have.
> In a world of two people, where today I have one piece of bread and you have two, then tomorrow I have two pieces of bread and you have 10, I am worse off.
If you think you're worse off in a world where you have twice as much stuff, just because your neighbor got more than you, to me, that speaks more to a psychological problem.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a safe, happy, secure, abundant, middle-class environment in the 90's. Meanwhile, Bill Gates was accumulating billions of dollars, more than 10,000x what my parents made. Despite that, I was happy, I did not feel worse off than middle class kids from generations before me, and I would certainly not trade away 50% of the fortunate childhood I had just to see Bill Gates cut down to size.
You're responding to the words "grab" and "take", and leading up to an argument in which wealth is created, by a Great Man, who deserves the wealth and power that He created, or else He wouldn't have incentive to create wealth?
People can collaborate to create wealth that they share.
The problem is when someone says "I am so great, that I deserve more wealth and power than other people".
Because of a bad experience in kindergarten, or because their parents told them that.
Everybody always takes this argument to the extreme, as if it has to be a 0 or a 1, black or white, either people deserve the wealth that they created or they don't.
There is no such dichotomy.
On one hand, markets and incentives work. When people can earn and gain more, by providing more value to their fellow man, people do work more + smarter + better + provide more value to their fellow man. This is not speculative or just a theory, this is an actual fact that has been observed for hundreds of years across dozens of societies. This has nothing to do with some moral imperative about what people "deserve". It's just pure incentive -- it's better for society as a whole if you incentivize people to work and provide services, to create new technology, to complete engineering projects, etc etc. We absolutely should give people more money if they create more value.
On the flip side, of course these people aren't 100.000% responsible for their own success, and completely entitled to all the profits, or deserving of holding all the power in society. If you build a fortune in a capitalist, market-driven economy, that's almost certainly only possible because you are making good use of the economic and political "rails" that have been laid before you and that made this possible. For example, your country almost certainly has a police force and a military that can protect the safety of you and your business. It almost certainly has a judicial branch that have created legal frameworks to limit your liability and allow you to take entrepreneurial or scientific risks. Etc. Pretty much everybody agrees with this. Which is why every western country has a progressive taxation system that taxes the rich at higher rates than the poor or middle class. In the United States, for example, the top 1% of earners paid 40% of the nation's income tax.
While that's true, there's still enough "fixed pies" that inceasing inequality does make people worse off. Land, attention, positions of power, etc. will all be taken by the wealthy, because only they can afford those things in an environment of high wealth inequality.
Partly this is a huge problem. But partly it's intentional.
It's a huge problem for the obvious reasons. Nobody wants a country where only the rich people have a say, or have influence, or wield political power, or own all the land. Because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the rich then bend the rules to favor themselves. For example, I personally think it's ridiculous that we need a lower capital gains income tax rate to "spur investment." Investment was just fine back when capital gains rates were the same as normal income tax rates, and I see this as a way for the rich to just benefit themselves.
That said, a system where the wealthy benefit is partly intentional. The whole idea of incentivizing people to earn wealth is that the wealth should be useful. It only works if it's useful. If extra wealth doesn't allow one to buy more land, or exert more power, or gain more attention, or live more comfortably, then it's pointless and does not serve its purposes as an incentive. This is literally the entire point of it. The issue is not that it happened, it's the degree to which it happens.
My fear with #1 is that the degree of difference will be too much. This is absolutely something to keep in check. It's a tough problem to solve. But on the flip side, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Any political or financial system that we have is going to have some inefficiencies and some disadvantages.
My fear with #2 is that people have lost the plot, and believe so firmly in "equality of outcomes" that they can't stomach any amount of inequality. Some inequality is okay! We're never going to have a completely equal world, and that's okay. I had a happy, safe, abundant middle-class upbringing, and it didn't bother me one bit that Bill Gates is a billionaire.
I think the problem with allowing even a moderate amount of inequality is that over time it'll always lead to large inequality, because after a certain level of comfort the only interesting thing you can do with with wealth is to attempt gain more power and influence, and are even forced to do it because if you don't someone else will. It's like the markets' tendency to consolidate. For example at the beginning we had "low inequlity" media where we had a lot of regional newspapers, but in a competitive system eventually the winners take it all, and now we have only a few large players left. Moderate inequality will be used to increase the inequality, because the people who don't do it will lose to the people who do.
I believe the only way forward that won't always lead to large scale war and destruction is to come up with a system that does not allow any amount of concentrated power. That means as close to zero wealth inequality as we can get while keeping a functioning economy. But for that we'd first need better ways to make decisions collectively, as political power can't have any centralization either.
I don't know if I buy this. The most wealth equality humanity has ever had was probably in the pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer era. It was also undoubtedly one of the more violent times in human history, with homicide rates that dwarfed those of today, and many deaths in war as well.
Also, most industries aren't winner-take-all. There is constant disruption, new entrants, etc. Very few huge companies last 100 or even 50 yers. And the vast majority of all companies are small. We have more artists than ever, more entrepreneurs than ever. Media has fragmented more today than ever before.
But my biggest concern with thought experiments like this is with throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Poverty is decreasing at a rapid rate, quality of life is improving, widespread famine has been largely eliminated, major warfare has maintained historic lows for 70+ years, technology is rapidly bringing education + communication + entertainment + transportation + medicine to more people than ever at cheaper prices than ever. We've essentially solved most of humanity's biggest problems with our current systems. Why press "reset" on all of that, just to eliminate a much smaller problem (some rich people having more than the rest of us)?
The comment I replied to said, verbatim, in its opening line, "Children are in poverty because some people grab vastly more than their share of the world's wealth."
That is literally the fixed pie fallacy.
Nobody is arguing that extreme inequality is a good thing, but to say that child poverty exists due to other people literally taking their "share" of the wealth is untrue.
the problem with your problem with the fixed pie theory, is that the people with the bigger pieces of the pie get even bigger pieces of the bigger pie and the people who didn't have enough pie to begin with still barely have enough to eat.
And what I'm saying is that these statements aren't related. Yes, some people don't have enough pie. Yes, other people are getting even bigger slices of the bigger pie. But the latter is not what's causing the former.
In fact, it's generally the opposite. The forces that are allowing people to get bigger slices of a bigger pie (investments in science, engineering, and technology, driven by market competition) are also what are driving the pie to increase in size, and giving more pie to everyone.
Global poverty has been decreasing at an incredible rate. Widespread famine has disappeared. There's more cheap access to transportation, medicine, food, and entertainment than ever before. Almost everyone's pie is increasing.
I don't understand why you would prefer a world in which people have less pie, just so it could be more equal to others' pie.
"Richest" means nothing in 2025, given the UK has a great track record of not understanding what they have and selling off their prized companies and assets overseas. This decline has only accelerated since then, beyond poverty.
It's gotten to the point where this Labour government is considering an IMF loan given the dire state of the countries finances.
I predict that the UK will become a third world country by the end of 2038 if they don't reverse this urgently.
The advancement of AI, the UK is again behind and "AGI" or "ASI" will make their decline 1000x even worse before at least 2030.
You could ask the same question, why are the kings/emperors/despots and their rich oligarch friends of any given country XYZ wealthy and living luxurious lavish lives in palaces and private yachts etc while the common folks live in slums?
That'll definitely help. But you need a certain amount of forced re-distribution to reduce relative poverty significantly below 30% because it's defined as 60% of median.
Either that or find a way to significantly reduce the number of children that people in the bottom 30% are sprogging.
So, I am saying Capitalism is the cause, not the solution. Capitalism concentrates wealth and you need a redistribution system if you want that to not result in child poverty. It's not rocket science.
Because resources are finite, and already divided amongst older generations. It's a basic flaw in economy that the older folks don't want to talk about.
Depends whether you're considering the total useful resources of Earth (diminishing, e.g. fossil fuels), or total accessible resources (increased by technology). Or either of the above per-capita...
Except our resources are not so finite. At least in the first world, we have plenty of food for everyone. Grocery stores throw away millions of tons of food a year. We could use that food to feed people instead of letting it go bad, but instead children will go hungry "because a profit cannot be taken from an orange."
You're right though that there is a basic flaw in the economy that older folks don't want to talk about.
Its a misnomer to say British kids live in poverty. Poverty is living without access to food and education. these are guaranteed for them. If they are worried of going under dressed to school then that is not poverty.
In the UK most kids have to buy a uniform for school. I'd rather not have kids be so poor that they can't afford things that the school deems to be a requirement.
I donot want them under dressed too.
But calling kids who have access to good (probably the best?) education and very good food, poor is unacceptable to me. May be its just me.
> Around one-third of Britain’s children – about 4.5 million – now live in relative poverty, often measured as living in a household that earns below 60% of the national median income after housing costs, a government report published in April found.
It makes no sense for poverty to be a fully relative measure, it should be against a basket of goods.
reply