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by glangdale
2686 days ago
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Yes, awareness of positional goods and Baumol's cost disease is usually the mark of a utopian fantasist. You seem fixated on this schoolmarmish "gratitude" angle to the point that you don't want to think about not just the future we want to build but the actual prevailing situations in the countries we are living in now. Roping 'global' comparisons into discussions of first world disadvantage represents a subtraction from the level of understanding, not an acknowledgement of "what's real". As a cartoonish and extreme example, you can be a bum on the sidewalk in NY collecting 10x as much as an African subsistence farmer takes in, but your take won't buy you somewhere to live, health care, etc. Excessive global/historical comparisons generally ignore the fact that you can't travel to the other side of the world (or hop in a time machine) to buy cheap goods and escape the local cost of positional goods. Somewhere in Vietnam, there's a teacher who could teach your kid computer science and math for a fraction of the cost of, say, NY. You could buy a mansion in the south of France circa 1850. So what? |
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Sure, there are almost certainly some poor people reading HN who have tough lives in places where it's dangerous and/or there may be food scarcity or other serious systemic issues. But by and large we're rich Westerners. You mentioned the proverbial NY bum. Do we have more posts on the front page talking about how to help the bum, or insufficient cubicle walls? That's my point. I'm not saying that these concerns aren't worth some attention. But I think we might be out of balance around here.