[pcstl]

Fair enough. But my point is to be disruptive.

I don't think the author has a point here. I think he's appealing to the fact that, on an emotional level, humans think they're entitled to always have their standards of living be equal or better to what they were before to make people think they live in uniquely hard times.

Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.

I think it is important to differentiate people's subjective feelings of being let down from there actually being a problem, or their lives being "nasty, brutish and short".

[Zababa]

> Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.

My understanding was that this is the opposite. In the US, the standard of living is pretty high, but not improving. In most of the world, standards are lower but improving. I think your point is that people should focus on what they have compared to the rest of humanity and the world, rather than compared to the generation before.

Feel free to correct me if I misunderstood you.

[pcstl]

My point is that even if US millenials' standards of living are decreasing, they still have it better than most of humanity. This is not to say that US people aren't allowed to try to claim a better future, just that keeping problems in scale helps ward off overreaction that might just worsen the issue.

[Zababa]

Fair enough, thanks for the clarification.

[dontbeevil1992]

People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay in a desperate bargaining position so they can be exploited. Some people have less BECAUSE other people have more, and for no good reason besides the fact that our society supports the haves in exploiting the have-nots. It is a choice that our society works this way, and there is another way for things to work, and we must make that choice to change.

[pcstl]

Life is not a zero-sum game. The reason why some people have little is not that some people have a lot. This is not something we will agree on.

I agree that the distribution of wealth could be a lot more equitable, but I fundamentally disagree with this idea that "If some people have little, that is only because evil/stupid people don't want them to have more". The world is a lot more complicated than that.

I live in a country with crushingly high taxes. Our public services suck. If it were just a matter of raising taxes, we'd have no issues.

[dontbeevil1992]

Agreed, life is not always zero-sum, and higher taxes don't always translate to better services.

Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.

Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.

The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.

[licebmi__at__]

Physics is also a lot more complicated, but we have some simple approximations that help us describe a lot of our world.

I agree, life is more complicated than a zero-sum game, but can you argue that it doesn't behave like it is for most people?

[pcstl]

I don't think it does, no. I think our intuition is that it does, because that intuition works pretty well for tribal, hunter-gatherer life, but it doesn't really work in modern society.