https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GSYwIp2WMAAnUPq?format=png&name=900x900
This century has known a stunning decrease in global income inequality, bringing it down to levels not seen in well over a century. That's the conclusion that Branko Milanovic, one of the world's foremost inequality researchers, comes to in an important essay for Foreign Affairs.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/11/world-income-inequality-ubs-wealth-report
Inequality is not bad, poverty is. If the wealthy become 10x wealthier and the poor become 2x wealthier, that's a great outcome, even though inequality has increased.
But some people will be angered by it as they'd rather have everyone be equally miserable.
Wealth is a zero-sum game. if the wealthy become 10x wealthier and the poor become 2x wealthier, then some other entity have become 20x poorer, usually mother nature, animal species or indigenous tribes.
Wealth is not a zero sum game. That's so nonsensical if you think about it.
Yeah, if it were, then blowing up your house, i.e. the destruction of your own wealth, would return that wealth to someone else, another species, or mother nature. But it doesn't.
Wealth creation may involve the extraction of raw materials, but most of the wealth comes from what you do with those materials. Fixing a bicycle creates wealth, and who loses from that?
Blowing up your house would transfer the wealth to the mold and plants that would colonize it after its destruction. A "fixed" bicycle is a subjective appreciation of wealth, someone can consider that you ruined it with your fix and value it more in what you consider a broken state. Resources have a more objective and consistent value, that's where the zero sum applies.
What someone else's subjective valuation of the fix is is irrelevant. It's not their bike.
Mold and plants? There is plenty of them, feeding an additional kilo of mold is not going to increase productivity.
This should be downzapped 1 billion sats
I agree.
The gini-coefficient measures inequality between the poor and the richest. It can fall because of two reasons:
The gini coefficient is currently falling. Given the S&P00 is currently at all time highs in combination of what I posted here points to the second bullet point being the case
It’s about raising the floor or lifting people out of the so called poverty line
That chart is absolutely worthless if it is not inflation-adjusted...
a limitation or weakness but not absolutely worthless
Real or nominal?
looks nominal usually we see an asterisk for adjusted for inflation and PPP or purchasing power parity
The currency is dollars... the abject poor make one dollar per day, 5 bucks per day?
I don't think this chart is a real. Inflation rate is increasing everywhere, so how is this possible?