You're distorting my meaning and trying to make this conversation thread about something that it isn't. The thread started with a discussion of healthcare advances as a means of enabling wealthy family dynasties to grow their wealth while the rest of us didn't have access to that technology. It was rightly pointed out that healthcare advances (excluding specialised labour intensive surgeries) have consistently quickly become available to the majority of people within a country.
Yes, you can always point out that elsewhere in the world people are living in extreme poverty. It's tragic, but if you try and skew every debate on inequality towards this fact you will never get anywhere. It's perfectly reasonable to have two discussions - one, to discuss the great inequalities of our global capitalist system, and a second to discuss the relative wealth equality within individual countries or countries of comparitive wealth. This comment thread was started as the second type of discussion.
Maybe I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you're saying "inequality is only important insofar as it affects me".
Advances in technology (including healthcare) are usually bankrolled by the wealthy - wealthy people and corporations. The middle class doesn't pool together a billion dollars to research drugs for heart disease. University research is funded by wealthy benefactors, grants (in turn funded by wealthy benefactors), Government money (funded by taxes, a disproportionate % paid by the wealthy) and so forth. It seems fair to me that they'd get first dibs.
We're all trying to grow our dynasties, that's why we have kids. It's not inherently evil.
Yes, you can always point out that elsewhere in the world people are living in extreme poverty. It's tragic, but if you try and skew every debate on inequality towards this fact you will never get anywhere. It's perfectly reasonable to have two discussions - one, to discuss the great inequalities of our global capitalist system, and a second to discuss the relative wealth equality within individual countries or countries of comparitive wealth. This comment thread was started as the second type of discussion.