[robertlagrant]

> The only clear distinction between the utopia and the dystopia is on wealth distribution.

A utopia where everyone is starving vs a dystopia where some people are fabulously wealthy but almost everyone has basic healthcare and education and opportunity to succeed? Inequality isn't anywhere near as important as the baseline of what most people have available to them.

[benreesman]

Inequality is destructive because it creates upwards pressure on real asset prices, with housing probably being the best example, which creates downward pressure on the real standard of living at the median.

Most of the developed world is going through one version or another of this right now. Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”. By all means build more housing, but if we keep redistributing all wealth upwards constantly that new housing will become expensive AirBnBs and shit, not homes owned by people at the median.

The idea that the person at the median is doing as well as they were ten years ago is a weird religion, the idea that they’re doing as well as their parents is a cult.

Inequality is bad because the basic essentials for the person at the median are some of the best investments for the people at the top.

[robertlagrant]

> Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”.

This isn't recent at all. London workers have got paid more than non-London workers for at least the last 20 years due to housing costs. That, of course, only sends housing prices upward, but then many other factors do to.

London population's gone up by 1.7m people since the year 2010[0], and housing has gone up by 280000 dwellings in that same period[1].

To cope, rent and prices have gone way up, and large homes have been divided into several smaller ones, and there are HMOs as well, as the market reacts to that massive pressure.

> The idea that the person at the median is doing as well as they were ten years ago is a weird religion, the idea that they’re doing as well as their parents is a cult.

It's true for almost everything except housing, which can be explained by the above.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/22860/lond...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/788390/number-of-dwellin...

[mst]

> Housing cost crises everywhere from Vancouver to NYC to Tampa to London are far too sharp, far too recent, and far to correlated with the concentration of assets at the top of the wealth distribution to be “because we need to build more housing”.

And yet Austin actually *has* built more housing, and prices have come down.

Maybe in five or ten years it'll look more like you describe, but it sure doesn't yet.

[ben_w]

That is not the shape of the world in the story under discussion.

Within the story, the dystopia crams the masses into cheap housing, they have no jobs nor possibility of jobs, no freedom even to leave as they are apprehended by robots if they try; and the utopia has no need for jobs, but gives out UBI credits to be spent on whatever you want the machines to make for you, and lets you live out a fantasy life.

[shiroiushi]

Sounds pretty good compared to the current state of things in many places for many people. At least they 1) don't need to slave away at grueling, pointless jobs, 2) have their own housing, and 3) aren't starving.

[ben_w]

I wouldn't say they have their own housing, it's government bunkbeds they can't afford to rent.

> Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria

> It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV — the world’s best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building.

I've visited an apartment in one of the poorer (but not literally slum) areas of Nairobi that was bigger than that.

I can't remember exactly where now, but it had these kinds of vibes on the outside, and it was still better than the government housing in the story: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Y8DAByJPfCiRtQmm6?g_st=ic

[norir]

In that hypothetical world, I am quite sure that people would adapt to their improved material conditions and still become resentful at wealth inequality. A lesser version of this already exists in the US. Go to a relatively poor US community and it is almost unimaginably wealthy compared to past generations and other places in the world.

[forgetfreeman]

Inability to save, class immobility, and insecurity of both food and housing are identical problems regardless of whether smartphones have been invented. It's telling who, specifically, advances claims about the notional fabulous wealth of the impoverished in the US.

In any case the assertion that poor communities are in any way better off than their predecessors is only accurate if you push you compare cohorts ~80 years or more apart. After the advent of social safety net programs in the US the working poor were (at least for a time) significantly more able to eventually join the middle class. Modern limitations on earnings and savings that have been applied to these programs has provably reduced this kind of class mobility.

Additionally, the combination of hyperconcentration of wealth, deregulation, and globalized trade have all played a part in the near total elimination of economic opportunity in rural communities.

[snapcaster]

But relative inequality matters in the social realm. It limits poor people's access to mates and allies. Also it could be that relative wealth is more important than absolute in terms of people's well being

[rqtwteye]

The line that people have it so much better than previous generations or other countries is almost always aimed at the lower ranks of society. Nobody tells the billionaires how good they have it.

[robertlagrant]

> Nobody tells the billionaires how good they have it.

Where do these odd claims come from? Of course people say that, a lot.