[gervu]

We have lots of abundance. The problem is that the future is, as they say, not so equally distributed.

It's hard to solve things like poverty when a tiny minority is hoarding most of the increase in wealth, and in fact often profits or draws political power from maintaining inequality in its various forms.

[wait-a-minute]

Then why has poverty been going down drastically, even faster than anyone would've expected?

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17

On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication.

Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."

[gervu]

The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced.

I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.

[wait-a-minute]

The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet.

So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.

Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.

[snikeris]

> The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance.

What Keynes means by economic abundance is not the state where everyone has equally large bank accounts. Economic abundance is when even poor people have machines clean their clothes for them.

A tiny minority isn't hoarding all the washing machines, cell phones, and air conditioners.

[gervu]

Based on your quote, I think you may've meant to respond to the other reply.

But a great many people don't have washing machines or air conditioners. You can rent the former, at the cost of more money and time. People die every year from lack of access to the latter.

It's not like air conditioners themselves are necessarily insurmountably expensive, although that varies by location, but you have to factor things like socioeconomic access to housing that comes with or allows it, as well as the cost of power to operate it sufficiently, plus having it be affordable enough that you already have it before it's a heat-stroke-and-die problem for you to not have it.

Sixty year olds with bad hips and fixed income don't generally go out and buy an air conditioner because it's hotter that year. Not everyone is a healthy twenty year old male with flexible disposable income, and sometimes people die because of the assumption that those form a useful ideal model of the overall population.

[snikeris]

No, I meant to reply to you. I felt like you didn't have a good understanding of what wealth is, so I gave some concrete examples you might have nearby.

[gervu]

I have a highly complex understanding of wealth but I'm also very tired and typing into a web forum with a touchscreen. Some simplification is entailed.

Particular definitions of wealth depend on what's contextually useful, and are thus quite varied. But I've yet to see one that deals with having an increasingly poor Gini coefficient in a way that makes that a desirable outcome, or which absolves people of intentionally pulling on it for their own benefit without regard for how that impacts millions of others.

People doing obviously shitty things to society are doing shitty things to society, and you'd expect a good definition or model to show as much. If you fit an elephant to the data and squint in a way that makes it sound like it's actually good, when that contradicts observable reality to first order, it's probably a bad model.