Looking at the charts from Capital in the 21st Century [1] it's obvious that previous relative equality of wealth was largely due to the incredibly destruction of the two world wars. Factories blown up, colonial lands lost and war debts inflated away wiped out many fortunes.[2]
So the reduced power of post war rich, combined with fear of communism resulted in the Democratic Socialist consensus that gave us high taxes and a big middle class. (And Vietnam but I digress).
Since fear of Communism has eased and the rich have again massed giant fortunes there's little to stop them weakening the rules that prevent our Democracies from being bought.
To me this is a compelling explanation for how you end up with Trump running against Clinton two historically disliked candidates. Almost everything in the news is just noise to the slow grinding power of wealth accumulation. Occasionally you get a glimpse as WaPo is bought by Bezos, Trump gets elected and Zuck clearly starts to form some presidential ambitions. But largely everything is a distraction to pull your eyeballs, after all that's what our media is paid to do.
I think everyone should read Nickel and Dimed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed) by Barbara Ehrenreich. She goes undercover and tries to survive working minimum wage jobs. I don't think I'm spoiling the book by revealing that she wasn't able to. After three months she were so deep in debt that she had to abort the experiment.
That book was well written but incredibly condescending to people who do live those lives and don't get to 'abort the experiment' when they aren't comfortable with the step down in lifestyle anymore. And obviously there are millions of people who live on those wages in the real world, not in the fiction she created for herself. She was obviously trying to make a point about the difficulty of being poor or 'working poor' which is hard to dispute. Obviously it is difficult being poor and it always has been.
The real questions of import are left completely unanswered in that book: what meaningful policy changes can be made to increase jobs, training, education, lower costs (that's a big one--she never mentions the supply side at all) and other meaningful metrics that actually move the needle rather than merely evince patronizing sympathy from her Prius-driving, suburb-occupying, Ivy League-educated audience.
I wonder if this is just a lack of knowledge on how to survive while poor. I'm in a good economic position compared to most of the US and certainly most of the world, but I can't see myself having much of an issue with this. Growing up there were times where my family was homeless, and my first job I was a carpenter's apprentice, paid under the table, for less than minimum wage.
It's not that being poor is extremely difficult in the US in particular, but rather that those born wealthy who have never been poor, have no idea how to operate in that environment.
It's probably more about lack of liquidity than the lack of knowledge. Housing costs are higher if you are living in a daily motel and can't afford to pay 2-3 months of rent in advance. Food is also more expensive if you don't have access to proper cooking utensils and your own oven and so on.
It was a long time since I read the book, but I recall that the experiment ended because she had more unforseen expenses than she could keep up with. I think her car broke down a few times and as she had no money in her pocket, she had to take out payday loans to get it repaired. Eventually she couldn't do that anymore so no car, no way to get to work, no job and no income.
> I think her car broke down a few times and as she had no money in her pocket, she had to take out payday loans to get it repaired. Eventually she couldn't do that anymore so no car, no way to get to work, no job and no income.
Part of her experiment was to move out of her social network. And carpooling doesn't work unless you know other people who also needs to move from point A to point B at time C. She didn't know such people.
Besides, she worked as an hourly employee which meant that she, as most hourly workers, didn't have a fixed schedule but would receive one on a weekly basis from her manager. Making car pooling even harder.
There exist tables in the internet how to optimize your grocery shopping while still getting all the necessary nutrients if you are short on money. Use them. I know that it will not be comfortable, but to me there is hardly any excuse for not using them.
I can tell this article is preaching to the choir because it doesn't bother to explain why inequality is bad. It just assumes that we agree it is. So why is it bad? Especially since most Americans don't even know about it, how can it be hurting them? Two possibilities I can think of:
A) Jealousy
B) Risk of revolution
US hospitals charge exorbitant money for their services. Spending on schools, while not nearly as exorbitant, is still higher than in many previous decades. (Don't get me started about college tuition.) it's not lack of finite resources that is the source of their problems.
Of course, medicine and education could put some more money to good use, but likely invested very differently.
Is expenditure on schools proportional to attainment? Very often not. Given that health care spending in the U.S. far exceeds that of other high-income countries, is injecting yet more cash the answer to a better outcome?
These threads are always depressing on HN. They reveal a worrying sociopathy that one can only hope is not reflective of a wider pattern and limited to a small subset of readers here.
This is why more power in the hands of SV companies like Google, Facebook and other VC funded startups become worrying as with power they will build a desolate soulless uncaring world.
Devaluing other human beings is like cutting the branch you sit on, you only devalue yourself. You can't build a healthy country or society without a collective and empathy. What happens during harder times?
One wonders if this is because of religious ideologies like calvinism and others in their ilk or some taking sociopathic ideologies by people like rand designed purely to appeal to egoistic individualism and the rich seriously.
It uses wealth as a measure of inequality, which is an instant sign that it's not written by someone who has thought about the problem and tried to honestly change minds. I'm about to start a first job at one of the big programming shops next month and have been able to pay for Bay rents; according to a wealth calculator, 0% of Americans are poorer than me. This is an idiotic result.
Its really important to take a step back and see what they really mean. They are talking about NET WORTH. Its an almost guarantee that a fresh college student has a negative net worth, but does that mean they are poorer or worse off than an begger who just received a dollar? To use their logic, the day I broke 0$ net worth, I owned more than 50% of the nation's wealth.
hardly. The only thing that video shows me is people dont really think very hard about their expectations between the very top and the very bottom.
I've never understood using income inequality as a measure of the health of a society. As Milton Friedman said, the only place where people are equal is in a prison and in the grave.
If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.
However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome?
Personally, I don't think the current levels of inequality are remotely optimal. We could drastically improve thousands of people's lives for amounts of money that some rich individuals wouldn't get out of bed for, so I'm not convinced that reallocating that wealth would be harmful overall.
Income inequality is probably not the best measure. The thing I'd really like to see is a good study of income mobility across 3 or more generations. But inequality can act as a proxy for mobility. Check this:
So now that we have organized our thinking, let us consider the empirical evidence. Most famously, it comes from the recent work of Miles Corak, building on previous studies by Gary Solon, Blunden, Gregg and Macmillan, Björklund and Jäntti and others. What these authors find is that there is a strong correlation between current and inter-generational inequality, or in other words, between inequality and low social mobility: the more unequal the society the less likely is the next generation to move upwards (or conversely, the less likely is the decline of the rich). So in terms of our simple diagram, Corak finds that societies are aligned along the diagonal: there are no outliers, whether the societies exhibiting the American dream or the guild-like ones.
The implication of that finding which was dubbed by Alan Krueger the Great Gatsby curve is that there is no American exceptionalism. The comforting picture of high inequality which does not impede mobility between generations turns out to be false. US does not behave any differently than other societies with high inequality. High income inequality today reinforces income differences between the generations and makes social mobility more difficult to achieve. This is also the point of my recent paper with Roy van der Weide. We use US micro data from 1960 to 2010 to show that poor people in US states with higher initial inequality experienced lower income growth in subsequent periods).
There is no such thing as a measure of the health of a society. Inequality is one of many indicators that can help you predict the social stability and quality of life achievable in a particular society.
Inequality is important because of the studied link between peace and prosperity. Individual participants of a civilization give their social system power by buying into a social contract that their (mostly) nonviolent participation secures them the necessities of life.
When we have natural disasters, we sometimes see the rupture of the social contract. Now, imagine that there's a continuum of levels of nonviolent participation depending on individual cost-benefit analyses occurring all of the time around you.
When inequality shifts so dramatically over just a generation or two, there's reason to be concerned that people's buy-in on the social contract might shift, too.
There is a lot of information there along the general lines of inequality is bad, which shouldn't be surprising. If you spend $1m of raw resources on building a bigger house, there is no benefit to society; theoretically it might incentivise somebody, but it's probably just pure waste.
> I've never understood using income inequality as a measure of the health of a society.
Relative deprivation is empirically shown to be a significant source of disutility. Further, even if only absolute deprivation is held to be significant, aggregate statistics don't show you the degree to which that is present in a society without distributional measures. Either of these reasons, much less both together, make distributional measures important alongside aggregate measures.
> As Milton Friedman said, the only place where people are equal is in a prison and in the grave.
The “in a prison” part is obviously and flagrantly wrong, but even beyond that the observation is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. That some inequality will always exist in real societies does not mean degree of inequality is unimportant alongside other measures, just as the fact that some aggregate output will exist in real societies does not mean that the degree of aggregate output is unimportant.
That is a strawman - total equality (prison, grave) is not being advocated, merely reducing the current extreme inequality.
And inequality is a good measure because the benefit of an extra N dollars is greater, the less money one already has. So, all else being equal, smaller inequality leads to greater average quality of life.
Inequality is also a measure of for whose benefit a society is working - the benefit of the ones accruing the most wealth. So the more concentrated that wealth, the more the rest of society is being ignored in favour of the richest few.
A common counterargument is saying that as long as the wealth of the lower classes also rises, then why worry about inequality. But it has been stagnant for several decades in the US, the poor have to work long hours, all while more and more wealth flows to the top. So it becomes clear that merely improving the economy won't help, as the benefits are captured by those already rich.
When one person has 10 Ferraris in their garage while someone just a few miles away can't afford to feed their children, it's unfair and unsustainable. You don't need to advocate absolute equality to see how that situation could be improved.
It's not a strawman. This topic is now so fashionable as a news item (regardless of your view) that people will target any kind of inquality in western democracies as inherently wrong.
What counts as extreme? Has much really changed in the last few years since this became something discussed daily? Why do such articles ignore payments in kind and fail to address subtleties to do with the different measures (personal income, household etc).
I don't personally consider the existing situation extreme, and the fact that people underestimate it doesn't change my view.
The article doesn't set the standard based on any kind of cogent argument. It assumes the ideal is what people say it is based on instinct, and the result is not 100% extreme, but it is pretty extreme. This is even more true if you consider the other questions I raised. The researcher compares this to living on a kibbutz, although the article then assumes this is a good thing.
There are many other examples of people's instincts being off by surprising amounts, including in ways that do not affect them positively.
That's what I intended to address. Don't really see the need to get personal and extrapolate hypocritically.
It all depends on what you want to optimize for. But for me, and I suspect a lot of people, the happiness of society seems like a decent starting point (let's assume for the moment that most Americans / 1st world citizens are at the point where base survival is not in question)
The current rate of inequality is massively inefficient if you're trying to optimize happiness. The bottom 2 quintiles of Americans control so little wealth that keeping food on the table is their primary concern. Meanwhile, an extremely small and shrinking proportion of the population control an outsized amount of wealth, to the point where it's not reasonably usable in an efficient way by those people.
It's like saying that the proper way to divide 100 loaves of bread between 100 people is to give 1 person 95 loaves and every other person a slice of bread. No one is starving, but you're making 1 person very happy at the expense of 99 others.
The bread analogy doesn't make any sense. Inequality is a relative metric, not an absolute one. If I only need one loaf of bread to survive, who cares if my neighbor has 100 or 1000?
That depends on whether one loaf (my example was slice, which is maybe a bit more evocative) is the bare minimum to survive or enough to be fully satiated. At that level, it (and wealth inequality) can be viewed as an absolute metric. I absolutely care if my neighbour has 100 loaves if I'm emaciated and unable to think about anything but hunger, even if I'm eating enough to survive.
My argument is, for the bottom 40% of Americans, it is at that level. The fact that the top 20% holds a vastly disproportionate share of the wealth isn't bad because the 40% are losing a dick-measuring contest, it's bad because the lack of wealth of the 40% has a real effect on their happiness.
If the true intention of 'inequality' arguments is to highlight the plight of the emaciated and hungry, then it certainly doesn't come across. I don't know where you're getting the 40% number, but 40% of Americans are not 'unable to think about anything but hunger.' 14.5% of Americans are below the poverty line (that's about the same % of people on SNAP). 5% of Americans are considered 'extremely food insecure.'
I understand how '85% of Americans are doing just fine' isn't great political rhetoric, but don't you think it's disingenuous to pretend that 'inequality' arguments which mostly highlight what % of wealth the wealthy have compared to everyone else is really about the poor, and not what it's really about, which is soaking the rich and middle class for higher taxes? I mean, after all, that's why phrases like 'the 1%' exist in the first place, to create some sort of camaraderie of outrage amongst the 'proletariat' to pursue a particular economic policy, right?
In any event, if people who truly cared about the poor advocated for solutions to poverty, instead of focusing on 'inequality', they might find their arguments fall on less deaf ears.
Do you have any evidence that that will work? Can you point to a situation in history when a 'massive retroactive redistribution of wealth' has solved poverty?
True, but 'do not covet thy neighbor's goods' is also one of the oldest traditions we have. There's a reason such moral imperatives have developed in our culture; they are more often than not destructive.
I think the problem here is that people with a single loaf are looking around and seeing some guy with 1000 loaves of bread on the news saying that the fact that he has to pay 10 loaves to the government is immoral and that poor people would be fine with half a loaf.
Tax cuts and the cuts in government programs that come with them directly affect those with the least. Telling people not to covet and not actually addressing inequality is how you get things like the French Revolution.
You won't find an argument with me that the tax system should be fairer, or at least have fewer loopholes (fair is obviously a matter of opinion). But note that we have moved the goalposts here from a discussion about economic opportunity/inequality/what have you to a discussion about government policy and taxes...so I'm unclear if the original point is still being addressed.
It's in the article. In the 60's the CEO-worker pay ratio was 20:1. Now it's 354:1.
Do you think that this kind of disproportion doesn't affect the way the whole system works? I expect the voice of a CEO to be heard more than that of a ordinary worker, and at 20:1 maybe I can sort of keep up. But at 354:1, how will I ever keep up? That's stopping the CEOs of the world from banding up in a gang that distorts how democracy works up to a point where I don't matter at all?
Well, one possible reason is that we may have an inbuilt sense of "fairness" - capachin monkeys have been demonstrated in experiments to get angry if they get unfairly rewarded. So might not people feel angry in the same circumstances?
A valid criticism of socialism for running societies (rather than institutions) is that it doesn't align well with "human nature" - but it might also be the case where the "winner takes all" aspects of capitalism also have similar problems.
It's key that monkeys, like humans, object to unfairness--not 'inequality.' Turns out that relative contribution matters a lot to how monkeys/people judge rewards.[1]
But inequality arguably leads to unfairness though - is it "fair" that someone who is successful can get better chances for their kids through better environment, schooling and connections?
I'd argue that inequality pretty much always leads to unfairness.
Edit: And I say that as someone who pays for their kids to be privately educated at a prestigious private school because it is obvious that doing so gives them an unfair advantage.
And extreme economic inequality leads to people using their money to control politics and the media to stack the system in their favour. It's not simply the inequality that is the problem its what the rich choose to do with their money that is causing problems.
I'm not talking about the rich as a class. I'm in the UK where we have an unhappy combination of remarkably venal politicians (with some notable exceptions), media interests that are either overtly political (e.g. News International and the Daily Mail and related newspapers) or selected from a rather narrow privileged and biased group (e.g. BBC).
I'm not a Labour supporter - but the fact that a hard left party is within striking distance of winning the UK general election (despite the horrendously biased media coverage) shows that there things have got so bad for many people that extremely far left wing policies (by US standards) are starting to look attractive to an awful lot of people.
Not all rich people abuse their positions to obtain disproportionate political influence - but to get disproportionate political influence you have to be rich. Wealth isn't the problem - abuse of the power that wealth can bring is the problem.
Edit: Labour's motto of "For the many not the few" sums up the current political mess rather nicely.
How is society becoming more feudal? I've heard this from so many people and the evidence doesn't seem to support it. For example, ~64% of Americans own a home. What % of feudal peasants owned a shovel, let alone a home?
Never said that. But does the widespread ability of most Americans to finance a house, a car, and in general a better standard of living, without having to be rich, powerful, in the right caste or social strata not far trump feudal sharecropping/indentured servitude, one-step-removed-from-slavery conditions for a vast portion of the populace?
The claim was that society is becoming more feudal. I would like to see some evidence that is the case.
Not necessarily, as historical Communist societies show. It just could be more of the lower class, nearly zero middle class, and, unavoidably, some comrades that are much more equal than the rest of the population.
Reducing inequality down to the point of literal equality was shown to lower the quality of life.
>The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
>We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.
You'd think they'd sanity check their poetic description against professed beliefs. If your metric says that most Americans "would like to live on a kibbutz", then your metric is wrong.
What this actually shows is that most Americans have no idea what wealth inequality looks like. Ask the same group of people their predicted and ideal income inequality measurements. I predict you'll get the same numbers, plus a little noise.
>Norton and Ariely (2011) set out to answer a remarkably important set of questions: How much inequality do ordinary Americans believe exists in the U.S.? And how much inequality do they desire? These questions have a range of important policy implications. However, the initial answers to these questions need to be reconsidered. Our findings indicate that the remarkably low estimates of wealth inequality given by Norton and Ariely’s respondents depended on the particular measure (quintile percentages) that was used. When asked to state quintile percentages for either household wealth, teacher salaries, or web page clicks, our respondents seemed to use an anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic leading to very similar responses across very different domains.
>When respondents were relieved of aggregating their intuitions about inequality into quintile percentages, another picture emerged. According to this new picture, Americans do not tend to have extremely biased perceptions of current levels of inequality. Nor do they entertain an ideal of near-perfect egalitarianism. Rather they seem to prefer a world where the poor are not as poor as they are today. Further investigation into this more tractable ideal might provide a basis for workable policy prescriptions.
To me the worse problem is: While I can understand that it is an inconvenient situation to be poor (and I have some kind of compassion for them), I really cannot understand how one could even come to the idea to give rise to children if one is not in a high quantile of earning. If people applied this reproduction strategy consequently, poverty would simply die out.
I apologise for being rude but it sounds like you have limited compassion if you haven't been able to think this one through. What do you want to do, sterilise the poor?
I would remind you that despite a poor background children can and do still excel and even if they don't these children are often the backbone of our industry. You might not approve but these people are still the workforce and generation of tomorrow so you should afford their inception a little more respect and empathy.
> despite a poor background children can and do still excel
Only occasionally. And that does not justify raising children in a difficult environment!
> What do you want to do, sterilise the poor?
I agree that the parent phrased that post very poorly.
However many countries did a lot of effective work to prevent unplanned parenthood, including education and access to contraceptives and abortion rather than sterilization or punishment.
> even if they don't these children are often the backbone of our industry
This sounds like the world need enough desperate people to accept exploitative jobs or go to war and so on? I hope humanity can do better than that.
> Only occasionally. And that does not justify raising children in a difficult environment!
You and I both know neither of us have enough information to assert how often it happens. I am merely stating it DOES as a counter weight to effectively killing off poor geniuses or rather poor "good enoughs".
> However many countries did a lot of effective work to prevent unplanned parenthood, including education and access to contraceptives and abortion rather than sterilization or punishment.
Yes! This is the available path to us which we should take.
> This sounds like the world need enough desperate people to accept exploitative jobs or go to war and so on? I hope humanity can do better than that.
That's a very extreme way of interpreting my words. Many of these children will become construction workers, carpenters, plumbers, administrative types, catering workers, chefs, musicians, entertainers, IT admins, etc, etc, etc.
I am suggesting that my parent post is underestimating the reach of some of these children and falling for the gutter-press focus on the worst case examples. Many of these people will become good enough citizens.
I live in a vaguely deprived area and the kid across from me isn't educated and is definitely working class but he's learnt from his tough upbringing and has a pretty good head on his shoulders. For every worst-case example there are tons of kids like this. Baby => bathwater.
Empathy doesn't come into play when we make ppl take a drivers test before we allow them to drive. Why? Cause we don't want them hurting other ppl or themselves. Same rule should apply to parenthood imho. As more data roles in like so https://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2017-06-mother-personality-...
Absolutely. Why not? Having children is a very expensive thing for the family and the society, but people can easily make this decision foolishly and then offload costs onto everyone else.
Having children is a luxury, we only need to start treating it like one.
RESPONSES
(THANKS FOR THE ANTI-SPAM, HN! IT MAKES IT SO MUCH EASIER TO HAVE MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS)
> Why are you focusing only on the financial aspect and ignoring the parents education, general behavior and mental health, and living conditions, safety and so on?
All these qualities (1) heavily correlate to their wealth and (2) much harder to have any objective measure of.
because we can't even yet justify forcing parents to abort downs babies due to the freedoms we allow our peoples. At least wait for this topic until we've managed that.
Why are you focusing only on the financial aspect and ignoring the parents education, general behavior and mental health, and living conditions, safety and so on?
So only rich people deserve to have a family? Only the rich deserve to find joy in nurturing and raising others? A lot of people, even though they don't have much, they find fulfillment in their family. If you think they shouldn't have children, that means taking away the only joy in some people's lives. Weird sentiment you have there.
Nothing in life is due to us. There is no "deserve".
Also, you are painting a false dichotomy between "rich" and "poor". A lot of middle and lower class people can raise healthy and happy children unless they have problems with mental health / violence / substance abuse & so on.
> taking away the only joy in some people's lives
Looking at children as a source of joy instead of a recipient of unconditional care and effort sounds very narcissistic.
I don't understand your point. Many people find joy in raising children, it fulfills a purpose in their life. Not everyone does, but many do. There is a biological desire to procreate and continue the species.
> Many people find joy in raising children, it fulfills a purpose in their life. Not everyone does, but many do.
Many people find joy in other expensive hobbies, too. The difference is: Doing such a different expensive hobby won't make someone who you produced suffer because you lack the necessary financial backing.
'Deserve' is a weird word; what do you mean by it and think that it's relevant?
Raising children is a very resource and labour-heavy endeavour. Rich people have more resources and labour. It's only logical that they can afford the children while poor people don't.
Not at all. An economy based on competition and inequality automatically generates as many poor as needed to balance out the super rich. It's really basic math.
If there is a sparsity of people doing other jobs, the wages of people doing them will increase (leading to the situation that the condition for "better not reproduce" disappears). That's how economy works.
Preventing some arbitrary part of the population from having children is basically eradicating that population, long term. I just used "kill", for simplicity.
I find that equation of terms troubling. If I take that argument to its logical conclusion, we are all killers because we don't get as much children as previous generations. We're effectively killing our unborn offspring by refusing to procreate.
You're either a wonderful troll, and then: kudos! or you have a very misguided idea of poverty.
Poverty is not a disease, as Quarrelsome pointed out.
Poverty isn't even a constant, it's dynamic. People go in and out of poverty all the time.
We also don't know the correlation and the causation between poverty and various indicators such as IQ, achievements, etc. (are you poor because you have a low IQ or do you have a low IQ because you're poor? etc.)
On top of that, where do you draw the line for poverty? Is it the lowest 10%? 20%? 40%? What if the statistics change next year, and I go from 40% to 30%, am I allowed to have children this year? Are my children taken away from me?
Etc., etc.
You haven't thought this through, or as I said, you're a wonderful troll! :)
Your comment however leads me to ponder the rhetoric: poverty is indeed not a disease, but like diseases, in modern societies it is contagious. Patterns and behaviours that make poverty deeper and more destructive are spreading from person to person and family to family, in neighbourhoods and communities.
Here I mean things like appreciation of education, work, stability of families, etc.
What could we do to change these patterns? (Apart from the usual recipes like making schools better. FWIW I'm from a country which has one of the most equal distributions of both income and wealth, but even this does leave a lot of people quite unhappy.)
My guess is that the best investments are in education and social welfare. Basically try to get people who are down up and keep people who are up from falling down during their worst moments (temporary loss of income, depression due to loss of loved ones, etc.).
Besides this, I guess the next best investment is in refining democracy and its safeguards, as well as the actual government, so that:
a) lobbying by corporations and very rich and powerful individuals doesn't corrupt the system
b) the system is as efficient as possible (there's always going to be inefficiencies but you'd want most of the tax money to actually be used for what they're meant instead of administrative overhead)
More than that, there's not much we can do. After all, at some point we have to rely on free will :)
Exactly my kind of reasoning. To add a point: Since we don't know the exact kind of pathogen(s) leading to poverty, but we know that poverty of parents is a strong predictor of poverty of children, this delivers a way to at least partly quarantine the poverty disease.
Yes, poverty of parents is predictor of poverty of children, but for a large part, it isn't about money. It's about those contagious factors - for instance, how much the parents want their children to do well in school, how much they care about it. So fixing the poverty metric isn't going to change this, something else might.
At least what I read about the number of poor black American kids growing without a father: it's shocking. There seems to be a widespread collapse of culture of having a stable kernel family. What could be done about it?
Poverty is not a disease, its a happening. Like falling over or getting hit by a bus. It prays upon the less agile of us so pray that one day when your agility slows you're not unlucky enough to get hit by the proverbial bus.
Heck you might gain a bit of sympathy then so maybe it wouldn't be a completely bad thing...
> That sounds like killing the poor but with extra steps.
Doing quarantine does not kill the disease agent. That is not what quarantine is for. Quarantine is for preventing the further spread of the disease agent.
For killing the disease (agent) there is the immune system or drugs such as antibiotics or virostatic agents.
So the reduced power of post war rich, combined with fear of communism resulted in the Democratic Socialist consensus that gave us high taxes and a big middle class. (And Vietnam but I digress).
Since fear of Communism has eased and the rich have again massed giant fortunes there's little to stop them weakening the rules that prevent our Democracies from being bought.
To me this is a compelling explanation for how you end up with Trump running against Clinton two historically disliked candidates. Almost everything in the news is just noise to the slow grinding power of wealth accumulation. Occasionally you get a glimpse as WaPo is bought by Bezos, Trump gets elected and Zuck clearly starts to form some presidential ambitions. But largely everything is a distraction to pull your eyeballs, after all that's what our media is paid to do.
[1] http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Fig...
[2] Capital in Britain 1700-2010: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/pdf/F3.1.pdf