[TheOtherHobbes]

Politics is everything.

We have wristwatch and pocket supercomputers with access to a global network.

But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, the global network is far too much a source of poor-quality or tainted information and toxic social experiences, monitoring and manipulation of all kinds are pervasive, and a compulsory personal ethic of branding, consumption, and selling is far more prevalent than anything more adventurous or creative.

[eru]

> But many people also live in a far more precarious economy, [...]

What? Global inequality has dropped through the floor compared to the 70s. People in India and China used to starve, now they have smartphones.

[mahogany]

To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former.

Also, from a US-centric point of view, it seems to me that economic inequality has gotten worse since the 70s, or at least the 80s. See for example: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-... or https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/37/4/921/17127....

I'm not sure what the parent commenter meant, but when I think "precarious economy", I'm thinking about things like wage stagnation and rising costs of healthcare, housing, and debt, rather than the fact that people now have iPhones (which for many are only affordable if paid for in monthly installments over years).

[eru]

> To be pedantic, a reduction in poverty is not the same as a reduction in inequality. Your example of India and China seems to be pointing to the former.

No, I meant that not only has absolute poverty declined, global (!) inequality has also declined.

There is now more inequality inside of China then there was when everyone was really poor in Mao's time. Yes. Hence the emphasis on global: the vast mass of Chinese people are closer to eg American standards of living than ever in the past.

(American) wage stagnation is a myth mostly produced by being sloppy with inflation adjustment.

[mahogany]

> No, I meant that not only has absolute poverty declined, global (!) inequality has also declined.

Sure, that's true. The pedanticism was pointing out that your second sentence was a non-sequitur. Starving and smartphones are about poverty, not necessarily inequality.

> (American) wage stagnation is a myth mostly produced by being sloppy with inflation adjustment.

Obviously it's more nuanced and complicated than this, but even if I grant you that wage stagnation is a myth, what about the other (majority) parts of what I said and cited? Would you argue that economic inequality has decreased in US over the past few decades?

[eru]

> The pedanticism was pointing out that your second sentence was a non-sequitur. Starving and smartphones are about poverty, not necessarily inequality.

I don't know how inequality came into the discussion?

The original point I commented didn't mention anything about equality, did it? "But many people also live in a far more precarious economy [...]" sounds like a complaint about poverty, not at all about inequality?

> Would you argue that economic inequality has decreased in US over the past few decades?

I don't live in the US, and don't care too much about that country. Even its poorest inhabitants are already rich and well off by global standards and are offered opportunities many can only dream off.

From what I absorbed over the Internet, it seems the answer to the US specific question depends a lot on exactly how you operationalize it:

The Gini coefficient is one common way to measure income inequality. It seems to have gone up slightly. See eg https://www.statista.com/statistics/219643/gini-coefficient-...

I (and many economists) prefer measures of consumption (in)equality, because people don't eat money. Presumably income is only a means to the the end of consumption.

See eg https://economics21.org/html/when-it-comes-inequality-consum... for that perspective. (It's just one of the first Google results for 'consumption inequality'.)

Though to be honest, I suggest we should care much more about the absolute welfare of poor people than about whether rich people have slightly more than they did yesterday (ie inequality).