[runarberg]

I think the backlash to this post can summarized as such:

Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes.

If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.

[Jensson]

> and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal

Not if you count the global poor, the global poors standard of living has increased tremendously the past 30 years.

[runarberg]

Has it really? I’ve seen a lot of people claiming this since Hans Rosling’s famous TED talks, but I’ve never actually seen any data that backs this up. Particularly since Hans Rosling’s talk was 15 years ago, but the number always remains “past 30 years”.

Off course any graph can choose to show which ever stat is convenient for the message, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the lived reality of the individual members of the global poor. And as I recall it most standard of living improvements for the global poor came in the decades after decolonization in the 1960s-1990s where infrastructure was being built that actually served people’s need as opposed for resource extraction in the decades past. If Hans Rosling said in 2007 that the standard of living has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, he would be correct, but not for the reason you gave.

The story of decolonization was that the correct infrastructure, such as hospitals, water lines, sewage, garbage disposal plants, roads, harbors, airports, schools, etc. that improved the standard of living not productivity gains. And case in point, the colonial period saw a tremendous growth in productivity in the colonies. But the standard of living in the colonies quite often saw the opposite. That is because the infrastructure only served to extract resources and exploitation of the colonized.

[Mil0dV]

The prosperity gap has shrunk quite a lot, and these trends are broadly in the right direction since ~1990:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/updated-estimates-pr...

For extreme poverty progress has recently slowed down, the trend there is still positive but very slow - improvement there is needed.