On: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of ho...

[dragonwriter]

Wealth is not utility. There are very strong reasons to think that the greater the level of absolute wealth, the greater the impact of relative condition vs. absolute condition is on what people actually experience, and that therefore, as the overall level of wealth increases, growth with poor distributional features goes from being beneficial (yes, some people are getting much richer, but a large mass of people are going from starving to less starving) to neutral to a net negative in social terms as the baseline moves up.

Now, of course, the best solution, if and to the extent possible, is to keep the growth and lose the distributional problems, rather than the other way around.

[prottog → dragonwriter]

> to keep the growth and lose the distributional problems, rather than the other way around.

Historical evidence so far shows that this is very difficult outside of monoethnic cultures with strong productive inclinations, i.e. Northern Europe.