[danschmitt]

It is always nice to see such narratives based on robust data. For similar stories backed by data I can also recommend the book "Factfulnes" by Hans Rosling [1].

When we talk about basic needs, our global community is making tremendous progress. At the same time, we should not forget that the same system that abolishes poverty also creates enormous inequality, which not only makes people unhappier, but also leads to enormous social tensions within whole societies. So while we should be celebrating the decline in poverty, we are somewhat also left with a sour taste about the side effects that occur.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness

[kryogen1c]

> creates enormous inequality

i dont know why everyone keeps getting away with statement like this.

the proposition of equality as a meaningful metric is absurd at every level of examination. no one is equal to anyone else except on the most trivial and simplistic terms about anything.

do you feel inferior to rich people? do you feel superior to poor people? what hogwash. i reject this axiom that inequality is bad.

people don't hate inequality - they hate unfairness. they hate having their house repossesed because they took a loan they couldnt afford while the banks get a taxpayer bailout for making financial decisions THEY couldn't afford. people don't hate gates, jobs, buffet, or bezos; they love and idolize them. but if the system that purports to give commoners a path to wealth like those people instead shackles them with 200k in debt you have to fucking die to get rid of... things start feeling a little rebellious.

the problem doesnt have anything to do with equality. there is a loss of control, of autonomy. no chance of growth or the ability to change your circumstances.

[boucher]

Inequality has nothing to do with feeling superior or inferior to others (though, our culture absolutely does encourage those beliefs).

In a world with limited resources, huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else. It also tends to concentrate political power in the same small group. Many people would say there is something inherently unfair about this.

I think these things aren't as separate from your concerns as you make them out to be.

[kragen]

The world has limited natural resources, but it doesn't have limited human welfare or enjoyment or wealth. Moreover, natural resources are not consumed, except for helium, energy, and the contents of spacecraft. The natural resources in a big plate glass window are a double handful of sand. The natural resources in a Rembrandt are the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a sheaf of flax and a handful of powdered colorful rocks. The natural resources in a bottle of the finest wine are half a handful of sand, and the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a bunch of grapes. The natural resources in an anti-malaria bed net are what is needed to grow a single cotton plant. A Rolls-Royce contained the same natural resources as a large Yugo.

Poverty comes from lack of opportunity (usually due to centralization of control), perverse incentives (often due to lack of centralization of control), ignorance, delusion, and other kinds of mental problems, not from limited natural resources or from "a small group of people consuming vastly more."

[rustmachine]

The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system built up around it to maintain it. From shipping and transport to cheap labor in a 3rd world country.

If all the people of india and china were to maintain a similar way of life as mine, the eco system would collapse right away.

[hohloma]

I bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".

[rustmachine]

100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.

I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.

[kragen]

This is a common set of misconceptions, so I'll try to explain why they're wrong.

The people of India and China can absolutely maintain a lifestyle with your energy consumption and use of manufactured luxury goods without causing ecological damage.

80% of electricity produced in Denmark is renewables, mostly wind. Historically, renewable energy other than hydroelectric and low-efficiency wind had a poor EROEI, so it wasn't really a viable alternative to fossil fuels, more like an extremely compact battery that had to be "charged" with fossil fuels and then required sunlight or wind to "discharge". That hasn't been true for 20 years, though, and EROEI keeps getting better as PERC gets adopted, PV cells get thinner, tracking gets cheaper, windmill rotors get bigger, etc.

But only a small minority of the energy used in Denmark is electric, about 15%, which is lower than in many other countries. About 10% of the rest is waste heat, and the other three quarters is currently fossil fuels. Replacing those fossil fuels will require not only increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 but also converting a substantial fraction of that energy into easily transportable fuels such as ammonia, biodiesel, propane, or aluminum, in order to power things which cannot practically run off the power grid like ships, airplanes, and long-distance trucks. That fuel does not need to be produced locally in Denmark; it can be produced, for example, in China, Australia, or Tunisia, and exported to Denmark.

Increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 may sound daunting, but worldwide solar and wind energy production doubles about every 3 years, so that transition will probably take about 5-10 years. The cost of PV and wind energy is now far below the cost of fossil-fuel energy in most of the world, although in Denmark in particular PV is not economically competitive with fossil fuels yet. The available solar resource is about four orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, and I think the wind resource is about one or two orders of magnitude larger.

Cheap labor is not critical to manufacturing goods; if it were you'd be importing your fridges, phones, and TVs from Bangladesh and Malaysia, not China and South Korea. (Open up a recent cellphone or TV sometime and look at the country names printed on the chips.) Modern manufacturing is highly automated, and the non-automated part is highly skilled. As you're surely aware, Nokia made their phones in Finland until only a couple of decades ago. Moreover, cheap labor does not create ecological damage, only human failure to thrive.

You could imagine an economy in which the labor productivity of goods like fridges, phones, and TVs was so low that the people who made them would be unable to afford them. This is the case, for example, with skyscrapers: it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort to build a skyscraper, so it would be impossible to pay each of the construction workers enough money to buy a skyscraper of their own. (An attempt to do so would raise the cost of skyscrapers by a factor of 100 or more, back out of their reach.) As should be obvious, this is very much not the case with fridges, phones, and TVs, whose labor cost is measured in person-days per instance, not person-centuries. Paying the workers Denmark wages instead of China wages would not render the production of fridges, phones, and TVs uneconomic; it would just make them more expensive. Even in Bangladesh, where many people live on US$3 per day, it is common already for people to own fridges, phones, and TVs, a situation that will only improve further when Bangladeshis are not denied the opportunities they are today. Whatever you have been told, your standard of living does not rest on exploiting the poor in faraway countries.

Shipping and transport are not a significant part of the resource usage of supplying you with fridges, phones, and TVs; shipping a TEU halfway around the world costs up to about US$7500 (though "return" rates, like from Los Angeles to Shanghai, can be as low as US$700, because the objective is just to get the container back to China, and the more usual cost is US$1000-US$2000 over the last ten years; see https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2021ch3...). A TEU weighs 24 tonnes, of which normally 21.6 tonnes is payload, giving a cost of US$0.35 per kg (and more realistically half that because of the return-cost thing). Part of that cost is the cost of fuel, which is the only resource cost of shipping. At the moment crude oil costs US$86/bbl, which means that if all of that US$0.35 went to fuel, and the fuel were unrefined crude rather than diesel and kerosene, it would buy 650 g of crude oil. That's 27 MJ/kg or 7.5 kilowatt hours per kg.

So if your fridge weighs 200 kg and uses 1000 kWh per year, running it for a year and a half is guaranteed to use more energy than it took to ship it to you from China. Because most of the cost of shipping is not actually fuel, a more realistic number is probably three months. But you will probably use that fridge for 10 years, and it is very likely that manufacturing it took more energy as well.

You can strongly bound the energy use of the whole manufacturing process in the same way. A new fridge costs about US$250 retail, which means it can't possibly require more than 2.9 barrels of oil to make it, and that only if the costs for things like labor, steel, and taxes were literally zero. 2.9 barrels of oil burned for energy is 18 MJ, 4900 kilowatt hours, though typically only 40% of that can be used for useful manufacturing things like turning motors and electrolyzing aluminum. In California with its 29% PV capacity factor, 2000 watts (peak) of solar panels produces 18 MJ every year, all high-quality electric energy, not low-grade heat. That's 10 square meters of solar panels costing under US$400. So, you can see why renewables are taking over.

This is also how you can know that your US$250 fridge doesn't require person-years of effort from a labor force in Bangladesh, even without going there. Bangladesh's per-capita GDP is US$2500 per person per year, nominal, and its Gini coefficient is a reasonable 0.39, so at most that fridge could be a couple of person-months of work, including all the components. (But in fact it was probably made in China, US$14000 per person per year, or South Korea, US$35000 per person per year, and with lower inequality.)

They might have to eat less beef, pork, tuna, herring, and mackerel, and burn less biofuels than you do, though. Those may be renewable but environmentally they are catastrophic.

[rustmachine]

Thank you for a very thorough reply. Interesting read. We very obviously read different things. Basically what I hear you saying is: we have the technology, we can do it. Please correct me if im reading you wrong. And sure, that is the hope, and I'm not saying that we wont be able to find solutions - simply that our current solutions wouldnt work if scaled to the world. My argument is simply that we're on a massive ecological clock, and I dont see our current political systems or power structures being able to support the necessary change.

What I think your calculations miss is two things: 1) producing a fridge is harmful to the climate not just because it takes ressources to produce and ship and maintain, but because it uses limited ressources and pollutes after it is thrown away [1] and prices doesnt currently reflect the real cost on the environment. And 2) Technology is worth very little if politics and infrastructure doesnt support it. We could avoid a large part of the pollution of fridges if we recycle, but we need recycling plants, a government that mandates it, a culture of recycling, not to mention we need to share technology across borders.

My argument is not that its physically impossible, but that it isnt realistic in any way to imagine we could scale our way of living to the entire world with our current political, tehcnological and cultural infrastructure. Right beside everything you describe, there is an on-going climate-crisis of extreme proportions going on. The way we live in the west is built historically on fossil-fuels and direct exploitation of other parts of the world, and it has led us to the brink of ecological ruin. Even if technology might be able to ensure that the rest of the world wont need to rely on fossil fuels in the same way we've done historically and still do, there is not the political will or the infrastructrure to do so. There will be, maybe, in 10 years - we'll see.

So yes, my standard of living rests explicitly on poorer countries not living like me. Because we dont have the technology or infrastructure in place to support such a massive increase in living standard without it impacting the climate. It doesnt matter if we have the technology in ten years if its impossible to implement at scale.

[1] The cooling industry play a huge part in glomal warming: "Part of the problem with refrigerants, however, is that much of the harm they cause is after we as consumers have finished using them. It occurs out of sight, and so largely out of mind." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201204-climate-change-h...

[avgcorrection]

> Poverty comes from lack of opportunity (usually due to centralization of control), perverse incentives (often due to lack of centralization of control), ignorance, delusion, and other kinds of mental problems, not from limited natural resources or from "a small group of people consuming vastly more."

“Mental problems”—did people fail to Think and Grow Rich or something?

[kragen]

Listen, I don't know if you have anyone in your family with mental problems, but it's very common for them to result in poverty, despite having what would appear to be opportunity, well-aligned incentives, knowledge, and correct beliefs. And I really don't think this is a thing you should be making fun of.

[avgcorrection]

I was making fun of the apparent idea that some people are poor because they have the wrong attitude. So that was not what you meant. You are still wrong however, and your opinion is harmful in my opnion.

Mental issues may only cause poverty if there is a lack of safety net. Homeless people with Schizophrenia is ultimately caused by policy decisions. Schizophrenic people are more likely to be homeless in certain developed countries compared to others.

[Guvante]

Oil isn't renewable and the rich tend to be the ones in control...

[inimino]

> huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else.

Why would you think so? Inequality means wealth inequality, it does not measure consumption. There are still people starving in the world; that is because they cannot afford to buy food, not because Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are eating 1000000x more food than the average person.

[refurb]

huge levels of inequality necessarily means that a small group of people are consuming vastly more of the available resources than everyone else.

Are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk consuming vastly more available resources?

I mean most of their wealth is invested, in companies, that provide a livelihood for tens of thousands of individuals.

Let’s say we stopped Elon and Jeff from accumulating such wealth (i.e. stopped their companies from growing and/or forced them to divest their investments and captured it via taxes).

I think we can all agree that both companies would likely be much smaller. So how many jobs not created? How many consumers paying higher prices? How much was technology advances delayed?

I don’t have answers but they are questions worth asking.

[BurningFrog]

The world has limited resources, but that doesn't mean wealth is limited.

People create wealth by work and trade.

[Kbelicius]

How does it not mean that wealth is limited? I mean, how can you have more wealth than the value of world resources?

[BurningFrog]

Here is an example:

Oil was an annoying sticky substance until the liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine was invented in 1876. This invention turned it into the most valuable resource in the world for the next 150 years.

That invention turned useless goo into gazillions of wealth.

[avgcorrection]

> do you feel inferior to rich people? do you feel superior to poor people? what hogwash. i reject this axiom that inequality is bad.

> people don't hate inequality - they hate unfairness.

You seem to contradict yourself in the span of two paragraphs.

Inequality is OK (according to you) if it is fair. So rich people are superior to poor people?

(It’s not about “feeling” inferior in any case. It’s about having enough money to live. And yes, the interests of the rich often work against the interests of the poor in such a way that the lives of the poor gets to be more and more difficult.)

Or maybe we’re just seeing unfair inequality right now? Well then the distinction doesn’t matter much in any case. When was the last time that inequality was fair?

Rich people are created off the backs of relatively poor people, i.e. the working class. To a large degree, rich people need other people to be relatively poor in order to maintain their wealth. Why do you think that businesses hate when workers organize for better pay and conditions? I guess they should be fine with it if the inequality was “fair”…

Bah. Maybe my reading comprehension is off.

[WithinReason]

> So rich people are superior to poor people?

Some people have higher earning potential than others. Does that make them superior?

[avgcorrection]

No. It makes the world unfair. But the OP seemed to presume that the world was fair.

That’s a common wrong presumption that these “poor people are actually rich” people have: that the world is fair.

It’s also a popular assumption on message boards populated by high-income folks for obvious reasons.

[nopenopenopeno]

> the proposition of equality as a meaningful metric is absurd at every level of examination

In industrial capitalist societies, measures of inequality are historically the best predictors of political crisis, including but not limited to the the election of Hitler and the Holocaust. I think people have plenty of good reason to consider them.

You are confusing the metric of inequality with the ideal of equality. These are very different things. Statistical measures of inequality have always been highly correlated with measures of societal health in some way or another, but different measures mean different things depending on the type of society it is. For example, you are focusing on the very poor vs. the very rich, but most Americans tend to associate inequality with the size of the middle class.

>the problem doesnt have anything to do with equality. there is a loss of control, of autonomy. no chance of growth or the ability to change your circumstances.

A lot of people think there is a chance for success and spend most of their lives learning there isn’t. They idolize Bezos and Musk because the media does, and guess who runs the media…

[froh]

Yes! It's the level of inequality that's problematic, not the inequality per se.

People are not the same, but they weigh the same.

[pasquinelli]

creates inequality is kind of like a cop saying the suspect became deceased. i'd change from "creates inequality" to "relies on exploitation."

[djrobstep]

What are you talking about? Equality is a well-established concept. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or that people don’t believe in it.

[ausbah]

and the system thats causes such unfairness isn't perpetuated / influenced by those with massive amounts of wealth more than everyone else?

[greysphere]

>we should not forget that the same system that abolishes poverty also creates enormous inequality

Is this true? The post uses Sweden as the exemplar, which has the lowest poverty (on its chart) and also one of the lowest inequalities as measured by the Gini coeffcient (30).

This page [1] seems to offer a handful of data, but nothing that outlines a clear 'higher Gini -> less poverty.' If anything it seems pretty uncorrelated. It does posit the related: higher average income _allows_ for a higher Gini because there's a limited amount of poverty people can suffer before dying.

A bit more research into Sweden specifically reveals that its Gini has gone up a bit the last 30 years, but seems like it was trending toward more equality before then [2].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality

[2] https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-...

[dustintrex]

You could argue that the wealth of Swedes comes from the (indirect) exploitation of the poor. IKEA and H&M are household names that give Swedes and the world cheap clothing and furniture, virtually all of which is made by comparatively much poorer people in China, Bangladesh, etc.

[guerrilla]

I think that's definitely true but we have some heavier examples than the ones you listed and at the same time massive natural resources which include iron (and many other metals), hydro and timber as well as significant local value generation in high-tech and services. The lack of inequality comes definitely from the very strong labor movement though.

> The main industries include motor vehicles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, industrial machines, precision equipment, chemical goods, home goods and appliances, forestry, iron, and steel

> The 20 largest Sweden-registered companies by turnover as of 2013 were Volvo, Ericsson, Vattenfall, Skanska, Hennes & Mauritz, Electrolux, Volvo Personvagnar, Preem, TeliaSonera, Sandvik, ICA, Atlas Copco, Nordea, Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, Scania, Securitas, Nordstjernan, SKF, ABB Norden Holding, and Sony Mobile Communications AB

[e4e78a06]

Volvo - exploits poorly paid non-union workers in countries like Mexico to make cars and/or car parts

Ericsson - charges telecom companies a fortune for crappy gear because there's only 2-3 leading edge 5G equipment providers, which in turn makes it more expensive for people to get telecom service

H&M - sweatshop labor for clothes manufacturing

I only went through the first half but there are a number of companies in there that exploit poor people. I'll also add this link [0] which shows Sweden has very low corporate income tax and most of Swedish government income comes from taxes on labor and goods (VAT), which is hardly the high corporate tax model that most left wing Democrats are pushing today.

[0]: https://www.oecd.org/ctp/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-swede...

[nivenkos]

Yeah, Sweden is anti-progressive. As a worker I pay ~40% income tax and 25% sales tax.

Meanwhile there is no inheritance tax, relatively low capital gains tax (or none on ISK accounts), and low corporation tax.

It's designed to preserve wealth for those who inherit property.

[guerrilla]

> I only went through the first half but there are a number of companies in there that exploit poor people

I didn't say that they didn't, I said that they did but the GP listed weren't the biggest examples.

[greysphere]

That's an interesting point that measuring inequality as a property of a country may be less meaningful with more and more globalization.

[deepnotderp]

Sweden does however, have a very high wealth Gini coefficient.

[pchangr]

It’s a shame I don’t know Max’s handle in HN but if you follow him on Twitter you’ll see he’s a very big fan of that book. I think it’s mentioned in the about page of OWID.

[rogue7]

This book is very biased, see for instance the "one-hump world": https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world

For a full review (in french): https://paulboosz.github.io/2020/analyse-nouveaux-optimistes...

[Abishek_Muthian]

Wealth is a zero sum game, And when 1% holds more than 50% of entire wealth then inequality becomes the root cause of every social issue as the 1% has enough incentives to preserve the status-quo.

If declining poverty means at the end forced to serve that 1% by shitting in bags because there's no toilet breaks, Then I'm not sure 'celebrating the decline in poverty' is on their minds.