I have to say I prefer the type of book review that you see in the New York Review of Books. This is basically 95% pure summary with a tiny and vacuous conclusion. I find the discussion at the beginning of Auten and Splinter puzzling and it makes me wonder if the author understands AS or PSG beyond a few tweet storms on Econ twitter.
The focus on inequality is a massive mistake. The focus needs to be on absolute living standards. I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires. In point fact, I don't see how that second world is better for anyone. Literally nobody is better off in that scenario even if inequality has dropped.
There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off. Inequality is an interesting indicator but gets far more airplay than it is worth.
You might think that, but many/most humans care more about relative differences than absolute.
We are social creatures which calibrate our satisfaction to our circumstances. We can be happy with little, and equally happy with plenty.
In the 1930s, Keynes imagined that humans would live lives of leisure as productivity doubled every 20 years. However, the human hunger for material comforts is bottomless, largely because it is not the absolute quantity, but relative amount that matters.
For the most part, people have no measure for the material quality of their lives besides comparing it to others in they see. It doesnt matter if you have wealth and comforts beyond your grandparents wildest dreams, if it seems like you are worse off than 90% of the people on the street.
I agree with pretty much every word. But what those words are identifying is (1) there is an emotional response at play and (2) it is a heuristic for something else that in the modern age is no longer an reasonable heuristic (ie, your instincts don't understand capitalism and the benefits of having vast amounts of capital on hand, they are calibrated for a hunter-gatherer society with maybe some light farming and a few hundred people).
The emotional response to inequality has led to some of the biggest government-sponsored mass murders in history [0]. It is perhaps the worst-scaling social response that evolution has cursed us with. Focusing on it is stupid, and we'd all be better off if we focused on absolute living standards instead.
I tend to agree with you in principle as an aspirational goal. I'm not sure people are ready from the practical sense. I hope we can navigate through this period of hyperfocus on inequality.
In my opinion, attention on the monetary differences exagerates the difference in experience and comfort. That is to say, Wealth inequality is much less relevant than difference in consumption and utilization, to the degree that either matter.
Musk might have 1,000,000x the net worth of the median American (200B vs 200K), but he is not eating one million times as many hamburgers, living in a house 1 million times larger, ect. People struggle to understand that "net worth" is simply a name on a paper associated with resources someone else is utilizing. It is not proportional to spending or consumption.
Please just read the article. Would you like to cut to a much more direct measure? What is the price of labor? By this is your society's wealth or poverty measured.
>Or as Adam Smith would later put it, in what Milanovic stresses was a Copernican shift in perspective: “The high price of labor is to be considered not merely as the proof of the general opulence of society which can afford to pay well all those whom it employs; it is to be regarded as what constitutes the very essence of public opulence, or as the very thing in which public opulence properly consists.”
Sometimes it’s crab mentality that gets people thinking it’s better everyone be equal but less better off on average so long as there aren’t egregious examples of people getting on really, really well.
There literally is reason to believe that. “Logical” by your assessment or not, inequality is a far stronger contributor to unhappiness than absolute wealth.
The premise of your argument is absurd. If we were to accept it, we’d have to expect that people in the 1100s were all just depressed/angry/anxious — including the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet — to a degree that is literally unfathomable to a modern first-worlder.
Brains just don’t work that way not because other people are fickle emotional messes, but because a brain like that wouldn’t work.
(Yes, obviously poverty sucks and higher standards of living are preferable to lower, just to head off some strawmen)
I like your comment because it was logically consistent and there is actually an argument in there that I respect.
However, you appear to be saying that the 1100s (where people were, I note, substantially more equal than today in absolute terms) are comparable to 2000s. I disagree - I would be unfathomably depressed/angry/anxious if my living standards reverted to my social equivalent in the 1100s, conditions were basically inhumane. We should be aiming to get society as far from 1100s as possible, both temporally and in terms of absolute living standards.
I don't care if the wealthy are much better off than they were in 1100 if I get functional plumbing, air conditioning, reliable food, an electric car, Amazon and improved medical care out of the bargain. And I get much more than that [0]. Their wealth seems to be to my benefit. The wealthy got wealthy because my life got better along the way.
[0] This is rhetorical, I don't own a car. But since I've already mentioned Musk ...
How about this argument? This is kind of how I look at the problem:
Would it be OK to have a single individual worth $1e24, while everyone else has the standard distribution of wealth as we know it in 2024? A septillionaire could give $1 trillion to every person on the planet every year for 100 years and still have 99.99% of his money left. How much power and influence over the world would someone like that have, while the rest have comparatively close to zero? I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society--we have to have some limit. We probably also agree that $1million is probably too low a limit. So it's not a question of whether there should be a limit but where that threshold is.
That is a bad argument - you're starting with an internationally absurd hypothetical and drawing conclusions based on it without drawing it back to the real world on the key points. We need to know what form the wealth is and why it is divided up in such a lopsided distribution before the argument gets interesting. Eg, maybe the septillionaire has a magic coin that everyone agrees is worth one septillion just because. He can't give a trillion dollars to everyone in the world because his wealth is indivisible and apart from the magic coin there aren't any real resources to divvy up. If the "wealth" is money in a bank account a similar problem occurs - if he gives out cash payments, there aren't more real resources so the only thing that happens is lots of inflation. Real living standards might not change.
You can hopefully see the logical issue here with the argument - we can both just pick absurd premises and point out that we could get our preferred moral outcome from them.
Although my hypothetical isn't as absurd as it might seem on its face. Zuckerburg's wealth is divorced from physical goods for example. Facebook's real consumption is only a couple of server farms worth of stuff. We could seize all the servers but it is hard to see what resources could be freed up for better uses in the real world.
> I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society--we have to have some limit.
No we don't. If the highest living standards (in a for-everyone sense) resulted from infinite inequality, we should go with that.
You’ve snuck in my own argument though. Correct, you’d be sad if you reverted to those conditions. That is because you will have a comparison point, i.e. you are acknowledging that the entire issue is one of relative wealth and standard of living as compared to some other comparator.
In your just-provided example, the comparison is to your modern life. In a world without time travel, people can and do compare themselves to others living today because that is how brains work.
If your argument is that we should aim to raise absolute living standards, then I agree with it.
If your argument involves accepting 1100s living standards as acceptable, I disagree with it. The conditions in the 1100s are only acceptable as far as they led to the improvements found in the present. We don't need to compare to them to usefully make judgements about the present. It is a baseline that everyone should have opportunities (and results) far in excess of what 1100s peasants could achieve.
Neither of those is my argument and it's quite obvious you're arguing in bad faith.
Here's my argument restated: "inequality is a far stronger contributor to unhappiness than absolute wealth."
This is an empirical fact, not a belief or a wish about the way the world ought to work, and it overrides your belief/wish that people "should" just care about absolute living standards.
You said, "there is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off." This is quite literally incorrect. This has been studied. There is plenty of reason -- i.e. empirical evidence -- to believe exactly that.
Here's a simple question: was every person in the 1100s woefully depressed/anxious/angry to a far greater degree than any modern first-worlder dissatisfied with their station in life?
If no, then your premise is disproven. People's happiness and satisfaction are not determined by their absolute standard of living (regardless of whether you think they should be).
> Here's a simple question: was every person in the 1100s woefully depressed/anxious/angry to a far greater degree than any modern first-worlder dissatisfied with their station in life?
Again, I like the logical rigour in your argument. The only problem you have is that the underlying point is stupid. The answer is yes. The 1100s is woefully depressing/anxiety inducing/infuriating compared to the modern first world. Nobody would choose to go back to the 1100s. Trying to defend that position is dumb and a disservice to the very real problems in the present caused by low real living standards. There is an urgent and pressing need to get poor people (indeed, all people) cheap energy, more goods and better services. Telling them that they'd have had to suck it up and cope in the 1100s isn't a path to good outcomes.
I think you're probably trying to make a point about hedonistic adjustment? It isn't a bad point in the abstract but it doesn't work in this argument. The people who account for that usually end up taking vows of poverty or Epicurean-style hedonism. Which is cool and all but the logical end of that philosophy is maximising inequality. The wealthy are still wealthy but the adherents are as poor as they can manage because they'll be happy regardless of what inequality is present.
> This is quite literally incorrect. This has been studied.
You've asserted that twice, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong. A fairly cursory glance at reality and the literature suggests that people can't actually detect inequality with any reliability [0, 1] and I don't think people are at all consistent on defining what the word means. It is hard for the average person to get worked up about something they can't detect. You have no idea how equal we two are, for example. And even among peers in meatspace it's a struggle to estimate any real metric - credit is a huge confounder.
People do get worked up by being in a lower class or in an unpleasant spot in the status hierarchy - but that isn't inequality as much as 10% of the population is going to be in each decile as a statistical matter of fact. It isn't possible to change that.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590051X2... - "Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, the reality is contrary to people’s perception since low (high) actual income inequality in the region is often reflected in its overestimated (underestimated) perception." is a choice tidbit.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214211062... - Leads with "While some scholars suggest that awareness of income inequality is strongest when the actual level of inequality is high, others find that individuals’ awareness of income inequality is largely unresponsive to actual inequality"
The thing is, of course, that being richer, beyond a certain wealth, does not, in fact, make you better off – it may well make you worse off (people will hate you because of it, your security costs go way up, etc.).
"Being richer beyond a certain wealth doesn't make you better off" is a common, and perhaps the standard, argument for aggressively taxing the wealthy. The logic being, which I think is sound, $1 given to a millionaire doesn't improve the millionaire's life at all, while $1 given to someone destitute impacts their life a lot. And related, $1 taken from a millionaire does not impact the millionaire's quality of life at the same way $1 taken from a waged employee. The comparative impact is very different for different levels of wealth.
By that pattern, the more wealthy you are then the more risk, and higher risks, you can take on without impacting your quality of life, your better off-ness. A billionaire can take on more risk than a millionaire, and a millionaire can take on more risk than waged employee.
And further in that pattern, wealth over a certain amount translates into increasing risk tolerance. And leveraging that tolerance to take on risk, and it paying off, leads to more wealth. But the only thing you can use the increased wealth, since it's beyond whatever the threshold for comparative impact is, for is taking on even more risk.
I suppose we need to have an understanding of what "better off" is and how it is measured.
>I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires.
Fair. And I think in fact most people probably would agree with you as a hypothetical. Where I think we would disagree is whether we think an economic system that produces 10x the Musks is an economic system that could also eliminate homelessness. Would the political leaders in such a system want to spend money eliminating homelessness, or spend money on the Musks who e.g. finance their elections, or provide them with well paying jobs?
" I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires."
Right now we live in a world with a growing number of super billionaires and we have tons of homelessness. Especially San Francisco and LA have tons of super rich people but also many homeless. So it seems to me that breeding more billionaires is not going to solve anything.
California proves that even extreme level of tax income from taxing rich people doesn't help solve these social problems. The solution is to have a competent government, no amount of taxing or punishing the rich will help otherwise.
So voting on people just because they say they will punish the rich is a good way to not solve the problem. Vote on competent people, not people looking to assign blame.
I agree. I was more pointing out that the previous comment stated that we basically have a choice of 10x more Musks and no homeless people or equality with lots of homelessness. I think there is zero evidence that increasing the number of rich people will help the issue at all.
You don't get to be Musk level without reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people and taking it for yourself. All you have to do is look at the propaganda surrounding "PPP loans" versus the money given out to stretch people's paychecks during the pandemic. Most businesses weren't affected in any substantial way, but governments still gave away trillions, and the companies got to keep the money. Meanwhile, we're supposed to hate ole Jimbob because he's poor, his hours were cut, and he received a $1200 check.
> reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people
I think you're right, but not in that way.
Tesla charged wealthy people a lot for the original tesla roadster. Then they took what they learned and charged wealthy people a lot for a better car, the original model S. Then the X.
He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people for further updates to the model S/X, updating the motor, then motors.
Now the model 3 and Y are available for less wealthy people. I'm sure the next generation of tesla cars will be more affordable, maybe even Jimbob.
If you want to understand the problems, spend less time worrying about the parts of the economy where over time you pay less and get more, and spend more time worrying about the parts of the economy where over time you pay more and get less. That's where it's broken. Health care, housing, education.
But does everybody need another 100 years of gasoline cars?
It probably is a bizarre way to look at things, but the wealthy people are paying to develop EVs, then the not so wealthy to develop even more practical cars and so on until they are practical for normal folks. And they reach price parity with ICE cars.
People have been saying that the economical/low impact car to buy is a used car that was already built. Now you can buy used teslas.
> He continued reaching into the pockets of wealthy people
I'd argue he used subsidies from the government, both direct and indirect.
Buyers get a tax credit for electric cars. SolarCity received hundreds of millions of dollars in direct grants from different state governments, I believe this all went to Tesla.
Tesla's high curb weight causes more damage to roads. Tesla's lack of unionization means that it relies on mistreatment of workers to get its cars made.
There are a lot of examples of Musk taking money both directly and indirectly from those who are not in his customer base. I won't argue whether or not Tesla has been a net benefit or not for the USA, but the result of this is that Musk can point to his company's success and marketing to pump the share price-- and he is now attempting to dump it.
The sneaky thing about inequality is that a lot of the direct costs are externalized. Musk can still appear "self-made" when he has externalized so many of his costs to the taxpayer and his workers.
> Buyers get a tax credit for electric cars. SolarCity received hundreds of millions of dollars in direct grants from different state governments, I believe this all went to Tesla.
Those cars wouldn't have been made or bought without those grants, the grants offset the extra cost of electric cars so they didn't put money into anyone's pockets, its just the government investing in getting electrification happen earlier.
Without them that money the profits would just have went to combustion car manufacturers instead like before.
Sure. But acknowledging the source of the investments would be swell. And it's a bit cheeky to be vehemently against govt and taxes after being one of the largest beneficiaries of said govt.
This kind of zero-sum thinking - then notion that accumulation of wealth necessarily means it must have been taken from others - is extremely detrimental to society.
It's true the the economy is not a zero-sum game, but it's also true that many aspects are zero-sum. Maybe some portion of Zuck's wealth does genuinely come from his innovations, and otherwise wouldn't exist. But I think it would be hard to argue that all of it is - if he had been hit by a car his first day at Harvard, maybe MySpace Tom or friendster or the Winklevoss guys would be stinking rich.
So, the question is, how much of his wealth did he actually create versus simply grab from others? When it comes to MySpace Tom the answer isn't super important, but it is very important for the masses of poor people who make up the vast majority of the planet.
If a company creates a better, or cheaper, or otherwise superior product and garners more sales than it's competitors is it "grabbing from others"? If so, then consumers benefit when companies do their best improve or invent new goods and services in their quest to "grab from others".
Also, I'm not sure why the hypothetical situation of what would happen if Zuckerberg hadn't founded Facebook would be particularly relevant to people in poverty. If MySpace became the most popular social networking company rather than Facebook, how would the poor be in a different situation?
>Also, I'm not sure why the hypothetical situation of what would happen if Zuckerberg hadn't founded Facebook would be particularly relevant to people in poverty. If MySpace became the most popular social networking company rather than Facebook, how would the poor be in a different situation?
If we recognize that broadly the same pile of money would exist absent Zuck, and instead belong to Tom or Joe or Jane, this provides us a nice justification for not letting Zuck have quite so much money anyway. He's the guy who hit the lotto. It's not such a bad thing to say the government is going to take a lot of it and spend it on poor people.
No, I'm not seeing the logic behind this at all. If someone invented assembly line production before Ford, that person would accumulate an immense fortune. But said hypothetical person didn't invent assembly line production. Ford did.
The lotto ticket is a great analogy. If other people picked the winning numbers, they'd have won a lot of money too! But they didn't. Does that create an obligation for the real winner to compensate all the hypothetical would-be winners?
No. But if the tax man came and the winner said that he shouldn't have to pay because he was simply better at picking lotto numbers than all the hungry chumps out there, we'd recognize it to be a farce.
Sure, tax evasion is bad! But even after taxes, they'll still be making a lot of money. Is your allegation that Zuckerberg or Musk has engaged in tax fraud? That's a totally different statement than insisting that by simple virtue of having amassed a lot of wealth, they must have deprived others of wealth.
> If a company creates a better, or cheaper, or otherwise superior product and garners more sales than it's competitors is it "grabbing from others"?
How do they make the better or cheaper product? Did they do it by, perhaps, exploiting the people or resources of another, poorer country? Or skirting safety regulations? If so, I would say they are "grabbing from others", yes. And they are motivating other companies to follow along to keep up.
Or they may make a cheaper product by applying novel techniques like an assembly line. Or deploy heretofore unused (or under-used) technologies like electric cars. In the the case of SpaceX the big win was the more efficient gas generator cycle in the Merlin rocket engine.
If the allegation is that people made money but skirting regulations or otherwise illegal things, then it's crucial to explain the nefarious practices at play. Not just asserting that someone who is wealth must have acquired that wealth through underhanded means, simply on the basis of being wealthy.
> Also, I'm not sure why the hypothetical situation of what would happen if Zuckerberg hadn't founded Facebook would be particularly relevant to people in poverty. If MySpace became the most popular social networking company rather than Facebook, how would the poor be in a different situation?
If it was state sponsored and without ads, people would get much happier since they are no longer constantly mentally assaulted by ads intended to create cravings or feeling of missing out.
If "wealth" is the value of labour, then there is a limit to the value you yourself can generate with your own. After that, to become more wealthy you must work out a way of taking that value from other people, and making it your own.
Wealthy people make others more productive. Key example: By writing an engaging story, you make the people managing the printing presses more productive since it lets them print higher value stories than before and thus sell better.
The author writing the story didn't take millions of dollars from the persons manning the presses, without the author the work done by the presses wouldn't be as valuable and those millions of dollars of value wouldn't have materialized.
The same goes for most of the people who got rich on their own, they realized a way to create more value using the same number of workers, so they get rich and it didn't involve taking from anyone, just giving more value to customers.
> It is zero sum: there are finite goods and services in the world, and we're all competing for them.
Zero-sum (or fixed-sum, since zero-sum strictly means the aggregate quantity is not only fixed and finite but actually zero) doesn't just mean the total is finite (which is obviously correct), it means that output is fixed and the choices made only affect distribution, not the quantity of goods and services that are produced and made available. This is not the case.
Yeah but the material conditions of an individual's life are determined by the goods and services they have, not by the total amount of goods and services that exist in the world. Moreover, certain material conditions--safety from harm, freedom of expression, and the political power to maintain those things--absolutely do not increase in some global sense the way that economic output does. Consequently, it's the distribution of wealth that determines the quality of an individual's life, and that's what concerns me.
So no, I don't give a fig if "total wealth" whatever that is is somehow going up in aggregate, not if it's not being shared more uniformly.
> Yeah but the material conditions of an individual's life are determined by the goods and services they have, not by the total amount of goods and services that exist in the world.
That's obviously why distribution matters as well as total production (or aggregate utility), but fixed-sum means that distribution is the only thing subject to change, and that for someone to gain someone else must lose equally. (There's also an argument that things get closer to fixed sum in utility terms if you first lift everyone out of extreme poverty, because relative wealth/deprivation becomes a much more significant source of utility/disutility than absolute wealth is of utility once you are beyond extreme poverty, but even there its much more complex than fixed sum.)
> Moreover, certain material conditions--safety from harm, freedom of expression, and the political power to maintain those things--absolutely do not increase in some global sense the way that economic output does.
They certainly don't increase in lockstep with economic output, either globally or locally, but neither are they fixed-sum, where for someone to have more someone else must have less in the same degree (except maybe "political power").
> for someone to gain someone else must lose equally
Oh, you can gain love, satisfaction, respect, and all the other things that money can't buy and it doesn't cost anyone else a thing, but the minute you gain something that money can buy, you've gained a little bit of trading power within the economy, which everyone else has lost.
> They certainly don't increase in lockstep with economic output, either globally or locally, but neither are they fixed-sum, where for someone to have more someone else must have less in the same degree (except maybe "political power").
Safety from harm and freedom of expression, perhaps, don't come at the cost of others, but those examples were meant to illustrate that some things of value--economic value even--truly are "fixed" and do not increase simply because of progress and innovation. But "political power" is the biggie, anyway. That's the most important one. That's what extremely wealthy people are buying. It's not yachts and mansions. It's political power, which has enormous implications for the rest of us.
Technology is the application of knowledge. Often to improve one's material conditions. Even an average person in this day's age has amenities that nobody, not even the wealthiest noble, could have achieved in preindustrial eras. We have air conditioning, electricity, antibiotics, vaccines, antiseptic, and near-instant communication worldwide. Our material conditions have drastically improved. Wealth is not finite, not even remotely.
I suspect these people do not have ready access to air conditioning, electricity, or even antibiotics, and they're not going to get it simply by appealing to "technology."
The entire world lived in those conditions a couple hundred years ago, now it's a handful of countries experiencing that level of deprivation. That's huge progress!
I'm not. It wouldn't hurt, but it wouldn't help much, either. Evaporate the wealth of about 400 other people, then go after the next level of 4000 and then the next 40000 and then we'd be getting somewhere.
Nobody can predict the future, not even you. So you have no idea if that would have an effect on the economic output of those countries (which is what you mean by "wealth" even if you don't know it). One thing we do have an idea about and can say with certainty about some of the effects it will have on the people in those countries. We can say with certainty that 400, or 4000, or 40000 people will become less wealthy, and everyone else will become less poor.
It's technology, which is information not material goods. The technology--the information--necessary to create an iPhone didn't exist in the world 40 years ago, but it does now. So what? Armed with that information alone, is that somehow going to get you an iPhone?
No, goods and services are not finite. This is just patently false. How many automobiles existed in 1800? How many jey liners existed in 1900? How many smartphones existed in 1950? The pool of goods grows in absolute terms.
It's not just goods, services too grow in absolute terms. We invented radio in 1900 (ish) and introduced a wholly novel set of services. Before photography, in order to get one's likeness recorded you had to sit for a portrait painter. After practical photography was developed, portraits became much more accessible. I could go on.
Humanity is increasing the pool of goods and services in absolute terms all the time.
> Humanity is increasing the pool of goods and services in absolute terms all the time.
The ever-increasing amount is still finite, at any given time and even aggregated over the entire history from the evolution of humanity to its inevitable extinction.
Because not all wealth exists in the present. It is like counting from 1 to 5 and concluding that the maximum size of an integer is finite because so far the count has only reached 5. It is not so, however. The maximum size of an integer is infinite even though any particular integer is finite.
Not all people on Earth exist in the present, either. At any given time in the past there were fewer of them, and at any given time in the near future at least there probably will be more of them. Does that mean that the number of people on Earth is infinite?
While you're thinking about that, think about this. You and I live in the present. Of what use is it to us in the present if there's more total wealth in some future long after we're gone?
The number of people is potentially infinite. It depends on unknowns like whether we can grow exponentially, what the progress of science looks like and whether the universe is finite.
That article describes a variety of different kinds of infinities, in mathematics, physics, logic, and philosophy, so you haven't made any progress in explaining which one you're using.
Let me help you out, because I actually know what you mean when you say the number of people on Earth is "potentially infinite" even if you don't really know what you mean. You mean that that there's no upper bound. But, that can only be true under a set of unlikely conditions:
There is no upper bound to the existence of Earth.
There is no time in the future when Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Given that the most unassailable models in science make it practically certain the Sun won't exist as it does now within 10 billion years, your necessary conditions are unlikely.
> Let me help you out, because I actually know what you mean ... even if you don't really know what you mean.
^_~ You do you, I suppose.
> Given that the most unassailable models in science make it practically certain the Sun won't exist as it does now within 10 billion years, your necessary conditions are unlikely.
Everything that happens is unlikely. There isn't anything in particular stopping either of those conditions being fulfilled if progress keeps up at the rate it has for all of recorded human history and the upper limit is a long way away. We'd have to move the earth at some point in the next few billion years.
It does seem most likely that we bump in to a hard limit somewhere under the same logic as the Fermi paradox - but we don't know what it is yet and until we do it is simply the case that the number of people on the earth is potentially infinite. As is wealth, as far as we know - especially since wealth doesn't have to have mass.
Sure, it's finite in that it's can't grow with literally no limit: there's a fixed amount of mass an energy in the universe.
But the above commenter states that goods and services are zero-sum, which is not true. Goods and services do grow in absolute terms. His whole thesis is that accumulation of wealth necessarily entails the depravation of others. This is not at all true: wealthy can and does grow in absolute terms.
The above commenter is me and I say that goods and services are finite because they are. So what if there were fewer in the past and there will be more in the future. We live in the present and in the present goods and services are provided by people through labor which is finite at any given time. We're all competing: for housing, healthcare, and the political power to determine our material conditions. If wealth doesn't allow you to outcompete other people for those things then what the hell is it for?
> The above commenter is me and I say that goods and services are finite because they are. So what if there were fewer in the past and there will be more in the future.
What you're describing here is literally the opposite of zero-sum. The total set of goods and services in increasing. It directly contradicts your claim that the accumulation of wealth necessitates the deprivation of others.
At one given instant sure, but the key thing is that over time the collection of goods and services grows.
Adam, Bob, and Charlie are all shipwrecked on an island. They divy up the ship's goods equally. One day, Charlie decides to build some furniture. Now he has more goods than Adam and Bob. Did he deprive others, to achieve his comparatively greater wealth? If you just looked at one snapshot of time, you'd see Charlie with more wealth than the others, though.
> I'm glad we finally agree that wealth is finite.
Wrong, wealth is not finite and it can be - and is - increased. Yes, the amount of wealth at Monday, 03-Jun-24 04:12:33 UTC is going to be finite, because that's a fixed point in time. This is just a pointless tangent, because in our world time is not frozen. In our reality, where time flows, wealth is not finite and is indeed grown in absolute terms.
> That's cold comfort for people who never live to see a time when they can compete for those goods and services.
Yes, people who lived in preindustrial societies saw more or less fixed living standards for generations. But fortunately for us, we live in one of the most economically dynamic points of in all of human history [1]. Your statement does ring true for most of human history, but not in our age.
>>> At any given time are there, or are there not, finite goods and services?
>> At one given instant sure
> Wrong, wealth is not finite
Perhaps you could make up your mind.
> Yes, people who lived in preindustrial societies saw more or less fixed living standards for generations. But fortunately for us, we live in one of the most economically dynamic points of in all of human history [1]. Your statement does ring true for most of human history, but not in our age.
These people do not live in a preindustrial society.
At any one given instant in time, the planets have just one position around the sun. Does that mean orbital paths are a lie?
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at any one point in time is fixed. At a particular instant in time, there is an exact number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. And that number is fixed and doesn't change, unless you pick a different timestamp. Does that mean we can just keep burning fossil fuels and the amount of carbon dioxide doesn't change?
No, because time isn't frozen. We don't live in a world where time is fixed. Seriously, I can't believe how much time I've wasted on this.
> Seriously, I can't believe how much time I've wasted on this.
Then let's cut out fanciful stories of the planets and the birds and the bees and cut to the chase.
In the 8 years between its IPO and Elon Musk taking it private again, Twitter (now X) made a profit in only two, according to Wikipedia. Meanwhile according to Glassdoor it has a median total comp for a Twitter Software Engineer in SF at $250k. But the median restaurant worker in SF makes about $40k according to Ziprecruiter. All of these people, Twitter engineers and regular restaurant workers, are generally competing for housing in the Bay Area. Tell me. Who's typically going to win those bids for housing, the Twitter engineer or the restaurant worker?
Sure, the tech workers are going to be able to afford better housing. But what happens if tech workers move out, and stop generating revenue for the city? Life would be even worse. That restaurant worker may lose their job because there's not as many customers. The city will have to raise taxes or cut services to make up for the budget shortfall from the exodus of higher paid (and thus higher tax paying) residents. This isn't speculation, this is actively happening: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/san-francisco-budge...
This is one of the more pernicious aspects of zero sum thinking: people engaging in zero sum thinking assume that reducing the wealth of some people means it'll end up redistributed to others. The reality is that it often just results in everyone being worse off.
> But what happens if tech workers move out, and stop generating revenue for the city? Life would be even worse.
No, a different mix of workers will move in. If they flatten the income distribution then life will be better for the non-tech workers who already live here. San Francisco's economy wasn't always so focused on tech, just as other vibrant cities in the U.S. aren't so focused on tech.
> That restaurant worker may lose their job because there's not as many customers.
The different mix of workers that would move in may go to restaurants just as much, and if they don't then sure, some restaurants will go out of business. So what? Some of the restaurant staff can adapt to other jobs, and they'll have longer to do so because their rent won't be so high.
That article doesn't even mention tech. What it says is:
The snowballing shortfall is primarily caused by formerly reliable streams of revenue — namely, taxes generated by tourism and a once-thriving downtown — sputtering amid the post-pandemic recovery.
Sure, the once vibrant Manhattan-like downtown is now a ghost-town, but that's largely due to remote work to which the tech sector is acutely vulnerable. Ironically the City actually would've been buttressed against the remote work sea change had it had a more diverse, less tech-dependent economy.
> This is one of the more pernicious aspects of zero sum thinking: people engaging in zero sum thinking assume that reducing the wealth of some people means it'll end up redistributed to others. The reality is that it often just results in everyone being worse off.
If reducing the wealth of some people and creating a flatter income distribution "just results in everyone being worse off" then evidently increasing the wealth of some people and creating a skewed income distribution will have the opposite effect. Suppose you lived in a place and a time with a highly-skewed income distribution with severe winners and severe losers and you're the loserest loser of them all. Suppose as luck would have it everyone else makes more money than you do. Evidently that would "just result in everyone being [better] off" even you, right? In that case, you should be thrilled with that arrangement. What do you say? Would you be thrilled to have the lowest income in your city?
> If they flatten the income distribution then life will be better for the non-tech workers who already live here.
This, right here, is the crux of your incorrect worldview. No, a flatter income distribution is not inherently better. Which is better: 90% of people with $60,000 income and the top 10% with $600,000, or 100% of people with an income of $10,000? The latter is flatter, but even the poorest people were still much, much wealthier in the former than the latter.
> Suppose you lived in a place and a time with a highly-skewed income distribution with severe winners and severe losers and you're the loserest loser of them all. Suppose as luck would have it everyone else makes more money than you do. Evidently that would "just result in everyone being [better] off" even you, right? In that case, you should be thrilled with that arrangement. What do you say? Would you be thrilled to have the lowest income in your city?
Again: I care about my own material conditions. If a genie gave me the choice to double my income doubling (in real terms, as in the actual value of goods and services accessible to me doubles), while everyone else's income increases tenfold of course that's be a good thing. Why would I forego an improvement to my own conditions, just to keep everyone else's conditions from improving proportionally more? The fact that others benefit more doesn't change the fact that I'm left strictly better off. To do otherwise is the epitome of the crab mentality: It's better to harm everyone just to maintain your relative position.
> No, a flatter income distribution is not inherently better.
I didn't say it's "inherently" better. I said it's better for "the non-tech workers", which is just a stand-in for "anyone below the median." I'm sure flattening the income distribution might not be regarded as better by people above the median. Oh well!
> Which is better: 90% of people with $60,000 income and the top 10% with $600,000, or 100% of people with an income of $10,000?
The latter example is better for everyone except for the people who would've been in the top 10% in the former example. The scale of the dollar amounts is just arbitrary, after all. It could be a flat income distribution where everyone makes $10,000, or $100,000, or $100,000,000, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
> Again: I care about my own material conditions. If a genie gave me the choice to double my income doubling (in real terms, as in the actual value of goods and services accessible to me doubles), while everyone else's income increases tenfold of course that's be a good thing. Why would I forego an improvement to my own conditions?
You haven't. You just experienced a loss in your material conditions. Congratulations. Now, everyone else has 5 times as much income as you (assuming everyone started equally). They can easily outbid you for housing, for food, for vacations, for everything. You better think fast and invent something of value that they don't have so you have a little monopoly at least for a little while, otherwise you're screwed.
> The latter example is better for everyone except for the people who would've been in the top 10% in the former example. The scale of the dollar amounts is just arbitrary, after all. It could be a flat income distribution where everyone makes $10,000, or $100,000, or $100,000,000, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference.
Again, as I wrote the comment I'm talking about real value not just dollar values. Everyone is worse off in the latter scenario.
> You haven't. You just experienced a loss in your material conditions.
No, I just doubled my material conditions. Again, it seems you're just not able to comprehend the notion that material conditions are not zero-sum. The fact that other people gained more does not mean o lost.
Think of this in more concrete terms: I have a 2,000 square foot house and one car. A genie offers me the ability to get a 4,000 sq ft house and a second car, but everyone else gets a 20,000 sq foot mansion and 9 cars. I may become less wealthy relative to everyone else, but I'm still better off than I was initially.
It seems like it's just impossible for you to convince of a scenario where society can collectively experience increases in living conditions. The only way you're able to think about value is in relative terms, not in terms absolute increases. It's pretty a sad, and unfortunately common train of thought.
> Wrong, wealth is not finite and it can be - and is - increased
Possibly the word you want to be using is limited; it is slightly harder for people to make pretend that the pie is fixed with that one. Although your point is much stronger than your opponents - wealth is infinite, since wealth doesn't have to be physical.
> Although your point is much stronger than your opponents - wealth is infinite
LOL on at least two separate occasions my "opponent" has said that wealth is finite. Sounds like they might be your opponent!
> since wealth doesn't have to be physical.
Living in the physical world as I do, I require that my needs for physical wealth be met first: goods and services like food, shelter, safety, furnishings, entertainment, and the political power to maintain them. Non-physical wealth--love, feelings of accomplishment, etc.--are important, but they come later.
What about you? Are you satisfied with non-physical wealth alone?
> Only with the qualifier of, "at one instant in time."
That's a pretty important qualifier.
> Now answer this question: in the real world, are we frozen at one instant in time? Or does time flow?
That's two questions. Obviously, any one of us exists for a finite interval of time, that's for sure. Let's call that "a lifetime." Does technological innovation occur, does the world's productive output increase, and do average living standards rise over a typical lifetime? Sure. Does that mean that wealth is infinite? Not at all. Among other things, it depends on exactly what you mean by "infinite" which, so far, you've never said. Does time flow? I'll leave that to the philosophers.
OK. I've answered your questions. Now answer this one, please.
If a person alive now, today, in the present, is unhappy because they have a meager share of the world's wealth, would you expect them to become happy once you've explained to them that the world's wealth will be larger in the future, long after we're all dead?
> If a person alive now, today, in the present, is unhappy because they have a meager share of the world's wealth, would you expect them to become happy once you've explained to them that the world's wealth will be larger in the future, long after we're all dead?
I'd expect them to be happier when their material conditions are improved.
And how is that accomplished? Under a zero-sum mindset, this requires taking wealth from other people. So the answer is to raid and conquer neighboring countries and enslave their people. The pie is of a fixed size, so the only way to increase your lot is to reduce someone else's. This was true for much of human history, until the industrial revolution.
Fortunately, though, we live in the 21st century. We live in a time where material conditions are rising faster than at any point in human history. Much of this comes down to automation, and better energy capture. My responsibility is would be to invest in a more productive economy to raise living standards across the board. Make the pie bigger. This does not take a long time, world GDP per-capita more than doubled in the span on one lifetime: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Progress-of-the-human-sp...
Again, your statements are just factually wrong. Global average living standards have increased substantially, over the course of one person's lifetime. The growth is not "in the future, long after we're all dead". The average 70 year old has almost certainly seen drastic improvements over the span of their life.
>> If a person alive now, today, in the present, is unhappy because they have a meager share of the world's wealth, would you expect them to become happy once you've explained to them that the world's wealth will be larger in the future, long after we're all dead?
> I'd expect them to be happier when their material conditions are improved.
You didn't answer the question I asked. I mean, you're not obliged to answer any questions, but for the record, you didn't answer this one. Perhaps your justification for not answering it is something like "false premise": perhaps you believe that a person's material conditions will necessarily improve as time progresses and overall wealth increases, such that they won't need you to explain to them that they're better off because they'll be able to see it with their own eyes. If that's your belief then I don't even need to offer my counterargument because surely you must already know it by now, I've already made it enough times. But, maybe I'll give you a little hint anyway.
> world GDP per-capita more than doubled in the span on one lifetime
Hint: "per-capita" is an average, which means you're already on shaky ground
> Again, your statements are just factually wrong. Global average living standards have increased
How can my statement about "global average living standards" be wrong when I never made a statement about "global average living standards"?
> The average 70 year old has almost certainly seen drastic improvements over the span of their life.
I assume that by "average 70 year old" what you really mean is "typical 70 year old" as in "representative 70 year old" but that still demands clarification. Where does this typical, representative 70 year old live? What percentage of the world's population do they represent? However many people that is, what about the people left over, the one's whose lives are not represented by this typical 70 year old? How have their living standards changed, if at all? These are really just rhetorical questions to try to get you to think. Don't feel the need to try to answer them.
> your argument is that new, higher paying jobs are bad because other people make less
My argument is that new, higher paying jobs are bad for the people who don't have them. Is your argument that they're somehow good for the people who don't have them?
> Do you hold a general belief that all progress is "bad"
No. My belief is that progress is not "good" for the people who don't share in the benefits of that progress. Are you going to argue otherwise?
> Would you consider a new cancer drug "bad" because all those people who received an older drug didn't get to experience such good results?
No, but if a person suffers because they can't afford a new cancer drug and regards that as "bad", I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to make that judgement. Are you?
> Is your argument that they're somehow good for the people who don't have them?
Yes
> No. My belief is that progress is not "good" for the people who don't share in the benefits of that progress. Are you going to argue otherwise?
But people do share in them, even if they themselves don't get a new job and higher pay. The most obvious one is taxes - these new jobs create new taxes that go to the government to be spent on society.
Beyond that, isn't it better if your fellow citizen who was unemployed has a job now? Or if they switched from a lower paying job to a higher one? That's a societal benefit.
> No, but if a person suffers because they can't afford a new cancer drug and regards that as "bad", I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to make that judgement. Are you?
You missed my scenario. If a new drug comes out, is it bad that someone benefits when the people who didn't get the new drug (because it wasn't available) don't benefit?
>> Is your argument that they're somehow good for the people who don't have them?
> Yes
This ought to be good. Let's hear it.
> these new jobs create new taxes that go to the government to be spent on society
Wealthy people pay a lower tax rate than non-wealthy people do. That means the tax system is a net transfer of wealth from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. Try again.
> Beyond that, isn't it better if your fellow citizen who was unemployed has a job now?
Not if my fellow citizen outbids me on an apartment, no, it isn't.
> You missed my scenario
No, I presented a different scenario. Sorry for not playing along
> Wealthy people pay a lower tax rate than non-wealthy people do. That means the tax system is a net transfer of wealth from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. Try again.
Please provide a source.
Youre also ignoring the fact that even with a lower rate (which you haven’t proven), they may still pay more overall which benefits society.
> Not if my fellow citizen outbids me on an apartment, no, it isn't.
So you’re prefer if your fellow citizen was left unemployed, rather than you being outbid on an apartment? It sounds like you’d prefer to keep poor people down rather than have to spend more time finding housing. Isn’t that selfish?
> No, I presented a different scenario. Sorry for not playing along
> Youre also ignoring the fact that even with a lower rate (which you haven’t proven), they may still pay more overall which benefits society.
Yes. I'm ignoring it because it's not relevant. Think about it. Suppose for the sake of argument 400 people took 99% of the output of the nation (~$23 trillion in 2023), and since we're supposing, let's be generous to your argument and suppose those 400 pay a higher tax rate of say 40%. That's ~$9 trillion in taxes or roughly double what the IRS actually collected. Sounds pretty good, right! Except...that leaves the remaining 300 million with a per capita income of less than $1000 per year. Would you prefer this supposed situation in which the richest 400 pay even more in total taxes (and tax rate) than they actually do in reality?
> So you’re prefer if your fellow citizen was left unemployed, rather than you being outbid on an apartment? It sounds like you’d prefer to keep poor people down rather than have to spend more time finding housing. Isn’t that selfish?
"left unemployed" is not the only alternative. There are others. "Employed but with an income the same as mine" is one. Given the choice between my fellow citizens taking home so much more than I do such that I can't afford to live in my city, and my fellow citizens taking home the same as I do such that I can afford to live in my city, I would choose the latter. Would you choose the former?
I haven't refused to give my thoughts on your scenario. I chose not to elaborate on your scenario. I did "give my thoughts", however.
No, but if a person suffers because they can't afford a new cancer drug and regards that as "bad", I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to make that judgement. Are you?
Do you that first word "No" there? That's me giving my thoughts on the "yes/no" question you'd asked. The rest is me asking for your thoughts on a different scenario, which as far as I'm aware you've not given. Would you say you "refuse" to give your thoughts on this question?
That's not a source. That's a cherry picked, politically motivated source about 400 billionaires? The average person getting a job at Tesla and competing for your apartment isn't one of them?
Want to try again?
> Except...that leaves the remaining 300 million with a per capita income of less than $1000 per year.
But that's not what's happening. What's happening is someone is getting a job paying a couple hundred thousand at Telsa. And as a result they pay more in taxes.
> "left unemployed" is not the only alternative.
It is in the example I gave. You stated that instead of "losing an apartment" you'd prefer that person never got a job at Tesla.
>> That's not a source. That's a cherry picked, politically motivated source about 400 billionaires? The average person getting a job at Tesla and competing for your apartment isn't one of them?
> Want to try again? Not particularly, no. You asked for a source for my claim that the wealthy paid a lower rate in taxes, and I gave you one.
> But that's not what's happening.
I know. It's called a "thought experiment." It's designed to explore the implications of reasoning. This thought experiment illustrates that even if the wealthy pay a higher tax rate and/or higher overall taxes, the benefits to society of those taxes do not compensate for the drawbacks of there being rich people in that society.
> It is in the example I gave. You stated that instead of "losing an apartment" you'd prefer that person never got a job at Tesla.
Well, no I didn't state that, but even if I did, "never getting a job at Tesla" does not logically imply "left unemployed." There are other employers besides Tesla.
> You refused to answer (you literally stated you won't answer), so I asked why. That's not a loaded question.
No, I literally said, "No, I presented a different scenario. Sorry for not playing along." That's not a refusal. That's simply me choosing not to engage with your scenario at that time. Who knows! Maybe I'll engage with it later (not likely).
Yep. $2T printed into the real estate market, $1T to Wall St, $800b to stimulus checks... and the latter catches 100% of the blame, though it always seems to be people benefiting from #1 or #2 doing the talking.
In every mixed economy, there's a capital side and a labor side. Rich people getting paid for owning things, poor people getting paid for working. There's a healthy tension there, but for the last 50 years capital has been kicking the shit out of labor and it's really starting to show.
I agree with you for what it's worth. I'd rather live in a world in which I can dream my dreams than one in which Soviet Cube #77385 and a dingy metro are and will always be my life.
Playing devil's advocate though, I'm not sure that most people are really that bothered about billionaires, to me it's always felt like a stereotypical lefty trust fund kid thing.
Most of the issues surrounding inequality seem to come about with things like e.g. transit vs driving, big house vs apartment, good diet vs bad diet, etc.
Basically just living next door to people that you* will never be, because I'm not sure that realistically we can give everyone a house on an acre with two cars on the drive.
you*: Not literally you or any individual, it's not that hard to make it out of poverty, but collectively not everyone can/will.
A world with high levels of inequality is also a world where power is highly concentrated, which makes the focus of the majority largely irrelevant... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I would rather live in a world with a 10x Musk and no homeless people than a more equal world like the current one but with no billionaires.
This seems to imply that a reduction in inequality would not reduce homelessness. I don't follow the reasoning here, and I'm not aware of evidence for this reasoning. I can probably find evidence that affluent countries with stronger social safety nets and less inequality have less homelessness.
If that meaning wasn't intended, then it must be implying that billionaires like Musk are linearly motivated by money -- that is, the more money they can make for themselves, the harder they will work to provide value.
Or maybe you are implying that the potential of unlimited riches will attract the best talent?
> There is no reason to believe that one person being insanely well off makes someone else worse off.
There are plenty of reasons to believe that. Wealthy people don't just sit on their wealth -- they use it. To buy power. To have an outsized influence on government and the lives of other people. To employ financial advisors that let them enjoy the benefits of citizenship while evading or minimizing the taxes they pay. To lobby for tax laws that favor people who live off of wealth (assets, stock, etc) rather than income. To buy citizenship in other countries and evade international sanctions. To destroy, directly or indirectly through their influence, resources that are finite or very difficult to replace, like fossil fuels, rain forests, clean air.
Did Putin make his wealth without harming others?
I'll riff a bit here, too: even if the super-rich don't hurt anyone by becoming super-rich, you have to wonder if they wouldn't be better off just being kinda rich. Having billions seems like a very isolating experience. Would you still find it easy to trust other people? Would you have an outsized opinion of your abilities and importance? And what about your children, would they be valuable, upstanding members of society? Would they even be able to take care of themselves? Would they see themselves as intrinsically better than poor people?
It isn’t very charitable if you to purposefully misread an obvious rhetorical device. It made perfect sense to me.
One POV is you’re proving the point: people feel much more strongly about exacting vengeance against antagonist celebrities than helping people generally. They’ll of course say the opposite in worthless Internet comments.
You may want to follow your own advice in reading my first response. People feel strongly about inequality period. It's well established social fact that people's happiness and stress are tied to relative measure of success/status/access to resources etc. It also historically true that greater inequality leads to social instability. Partly because of the first point, but mostly because this top cadre of people are over-powered and will, human nature being what it is, use that power to exploit those with the least power until we're back to a point where there are a whole bunch of very poor people struggling to survive.
So it may be nice to think there could be an option of having supersized inequality (e.g. a bunch of 10x Elons) AND have everyone above the poverty line but the fundamentals of people and society mean that super-inequality is simply incapable with a state in which all of worlds poorest can thrive.
Everyone. There isn't some group we should wish ill on in the abstract. The best way forward is one where everyone is better off. That is how the big leaps forward tend to work - the wealthy get insanely more wealthy, the middle gets more wealthy and the lower end of the wealth spectrum stays where it is but shrinks as a relative share of society [0]. I'd rather that than one of the big equalisation pushes like what we saw in Russia or China last century.
The problem with the excessive focus on inequality is it is an easy way to lead people away from approaches where everyone wins.
[0] Due to mental health and rare people with unusual personal preferences, the poorest person in society will always have basically nothing. I don't think that is theoretically possible to improve on. And the mechanical reason why I think "reducing inequality" is a really bad idea - the only reliable way to do that is drag people towards being impoverished.
I couldn't agree less. Wealth depends on poverty because poverty creates wealth. You'll never get 10x Musk's without creating homeless people. We compete with each other for resources using wealth and power, which at the highest levels are the same.
> Wealth depends on poverty because poverty creates wealth
This is circular reasoning and shows a fundamental lack of understanding of basic economics and what wealth even is.
> You'll never get 10x Musk's without creating homeless people
This is stated without evidence.
> We compete with each other for resources using wealth and power
The classic 0 sum theory of economics. It's a good thing economics isn't actually 0 sum because with more than 10x population growth since the 1700s we'd be fighting over loaves of bread.
It's not circular reasoning because it's not even reasoning. It's a claim. I have not attempted to justify it. I could, and I may, but I haven't tried to (yet).
> This is stated without evidence.
Yes. It's another claim. I'd be happy to explain it if you like.
> It's a good thing economics isn't actually 0 sum because with more than 10x population growth since the 1700s we'd be fighting over loaves of bread.
People still find it difficult to obtain even basic needs like food, even in what another commenter referred to as one of the "affluent" countries.
No, poverty does not create wealth. The wealthiest people tend to come from affluent countries with low poverty. This comment is prototypical of a zero-sum mindset.
Even if that were true, which I'm absolutely not willing to accept without evidence, trade is not the only way that wealthy nations impoverish poor nations. There are others: war, political instability, environmental degradation, etc.
"Searches"? Why would you have to search for evidence you already have in your possession, which surely must be the case? I mean, it's not like you would dream up a claim without evidence, is it?
Less affluent is the default state of things. It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it.
You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year.
Unfortunately, aid is a short term fix for problems. The only real way to help them is to properly invest in them, which requires a stability that less affluent countries often lack.
> It doesn't require a conspiracy or domineering other to create it.
I never said anything about a conspiracy.
> You can argue the more affluent countries didn't help the less affluent ones enough. But there is literally billions in aid that goes from affluent to less affluent countries every year.
I suspect the less affluent countries wouldn't object to less aid and investment from the U.S.
