[philwelch]

Here's the thing, though. On a global level, poverty is measured by a threshold of whether or not you can sleep through the night without getting bitten by malaria-infested mosqitoes. Gig workers in Western countries aren't anywhere near the left-hand side of the tail. Most of these distributive justice arguments have a nationalistic bent where the global poor don't matter at all.

[mlthoughts2018]

I agree with you completely, and spent a lot of time in the past decade reading around 80000 Hours, Giving What We Can, Peter Singer, etc. But I do think there are other forms of suffering, for example severe mental suffering that co-occurs with extreme addiction-related problems, combined with poverty conditions that are surprisingly quite bad, even on a world scale, in parts of the US. In general, I think far too little attention is paid to the way overall quality of life degrades in the presence of psychological trauma. You can have plenty of first world resources and still be living one of the worst lives on the planet, in terms of experienced suffering.

My comment was couched in terms of creature comforts that we have in most parts of the first world, but that's not necessarily the specific standard I'm advocating for, and the more general idea is just that people towards the left of the distribution should never be made to feel like they "shouldn't have" the comforts further to the right -- basically that we all should see progress as somewhat tied to both driving the mean to the right, and reducing the variance so that people at least in the far left tail are continuously brought closer to the far right tail.

[darkerside]

But that existential psychological suffering will ALWAYS be there. No matter how we move lines and curves. Some people will always be missing out, and giving them more won't fix it if we provide the same benefit to all their peers as well.

There are other better ways to resolve the vicious psychological cycle you describe, but they're not material.