[chowells]

It is literally impossible for everyone to obtain wealth. Wealth isn't a number or physical circumstances. Wealth is having economic power over the people around you. Success is a little more nebulous, but when thought of as a relative of wealth it's similarly contextual.

The danger isn't everyone but you getting wealthy. The danger is that wealth tends towards concentration. And it tends to concentrate around people who are already wealthy. The danger is, bluntly, that things will get worse for all but a few and most people will be so caught up in a red queen's race that they can't see how to stop.

[SamPatt]

No. The world has absolutely gotten wealthier over the last few centuries.

Wealth is obviously not zero sum. Humanity is far wealthier today than before the industrial revolution, and the trend is still towards increasing wealth.

[chowells]

As Led Zeppelin once said, "you know sometimes words have two meanings". That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust. But it's not the definition of wealth that applies when used to describe a person. A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things. That's a hoarder. A wealthy person is someone who can use their economic power to shape the world around them.

[chongli]

That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust

No, it actually means something. We have access to refrigeration, climate control, near-limitless computation, entertainment, transportation, knowledge, communication, and medicine. All of this stuff would BLOW THE MINDS of medieval kings. Even if you're living in a 1BR apartment, working at Walmart and struggling to pay rent, you enjoy many luxuries Charlemagne could scarcely dream of.

Go to the store, grab a pineapple off the shelf, take it home, and eat it. Then read about the great lengths [1] the wealthy people of the past went to in order to try to grow pineapples in Europe, and how obsessed the culture became with this fruit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_mania

[fragmede]

If you're in that one bedroom, struggling at Walmart, you probably don't have a dishwasher or a washing machine and dryer, and possibly not air conditioning or heating, or at least, your electricity bill is enough that you have to think twice before setting climate control to a comfortable level. Your social life probably isn't anywhere near what Charlemagne had. You have a smartphone and that has brought you news from afar. But that news is terrible! Local politics, things are fucked, climate change is out of control, geopolitics is a whole other shit show. Charlemagne didn't have to deal with Israel and Donald Trump. His world was very different. Sure, I have a fridge and a microwave and can use that to sate my hunger in mere minutes, a luxury inconceivable to Charlemagne, but all the trappings of modern society, with TikTok and Reels hasn't made us globally happier. Seeing the emotional damage from whichever online platform surfaces drone videos out of Ukraine today for me as a form of wealth is one perspective. We've lost the plot, or at least I have. We're solving the problems in front of our faces without asking if that's the right problem to be solved.

[SamPatt]

>A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things.

No one made that claim.

By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier. You can verify this on sites like Our World in Data.

We are healthier, have more leisure time, are less likely to die in natural disasters, etc.

It's willful ignorance to define wealth in a way that wouldn't show humanity as having gotten more wealthy. You're doing harm by overlooking massive gains we've made and understanding why we made them and instead redefining the common sense understanding of basic terms.

[burningChrome]

>> By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier.

I would also point out people living in "poverty" in the US would be considered quite wealthy in other countries like Cuba or Haiti.

Everything is relative to how you define wealth and what you're comparing it to.

[confidantlake]

My father's generation had much more leisure time than my generation. When he was out of the office at 5pm work stopped. There were no laptops, slack pings, etc, etc. Vacations were longer, pensions were a thing. You could get a job supporting a family right out of high school. Things have absolutely gotten worse in the west no matter how much you want to twist the stats.

[customguy]

You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to, so that's a given and more importantly orthogonal to the wealth that buys you goods and services.

The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.

[rmunn]

> ... human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor ...

No, it doesn't. This is an absurd claim, and nobody intelligent should take it seriously. Human trafficking exists because some people choose to do evil things. There are plenty of relatively-rich people who are actively trying to stop the evil of human trafficking.

Furthermore, just being wealthy has not, historically, made you immune to being made a slave. For just one example, look at the story of Joseph in the Bible. He was his father's favorite son, the heir presumptive to fantastic wealth for his time (that "coat of many colors" his father gave him cost the equivalent of what a sports car would today), and yet his brothers who hated him sold him into slavery while his father wasn't around to protect him. Throughout history, cross-border slave raiding has been a thing, too: it didn't matter how much gold you had tucked under your bed if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards: once they hauled you away and slapped chains on you, you no longer had access to your wealth, and your life depended on making your captors happy with your work.

To think that slavery, ancient or modern, is caused by relative wealth differentials reveals an abysmal ignorance of both history and human nature.

[customguy]

> To think that slavery, ancient or modern, is caused by relative wealth differentials reveals an abysmal ignorance of both history and human nature.

I claimed no such thing, you read way too much into your missing the point.

> if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards

Wait, I thought it was just because "some people do evil things", nothing to do with relative power?

[rmunn]

I'm deliberately giving an illustration that shows that relative power throughout most of history had to do with physical strength and weapons, rather than money.

And if you didn't mean that slavery is caused by relative wealth differentials, then saying "... the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today ..." was a very poor way of making your point. So what was your point that I missed, then?

[customguy]

That in this context, it's about the wealth that leads to "having economic power over the people around you". That is zero sum, and the general rise in absolute living standards is as relevant to that as a comment about apples is in a discussion about Apple.

[SamPatt]

>You are talking about access to resources and technologies, which is basically constantly rising, we couldn't stop that if we wanted to

We could very obviously stop our progress in resources and technology. It has happened throughout history many times and we see plenty of modern examples.

You seem to be treating the accumulated products of civilization as though they are geological facts rather than fragile outputs of maintained institutions.

Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising" and 2) why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology.

[customguy]

> Maybe you should ask yourself why you believe that 1) access to resources and technology are "basically constantly rising"

Because people have and share ideas, and I was using that as a shorthand. Even if they aren't, if you completely strike that part -- my point remains completely untouched.

> why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology

Because in the context of "Wealth is having economic power over the people around you.", that is the definition of wealth that is used. To quote a randomly picked one, emphasis mine:

"Large possessions; a comparative abundance of things"

> You are aware that the default state of humanity hasn't been one of continually increasing access to resources and technology?

There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up. Once things get out, they're out, roughly speaking (that's the keyword here), and even in the animal kingdom.

And as I said, even if that's completely false, doesn't matter for the wider point about wealth, and that it can only buy you power over others if they have less of it.

[SamPatt]

>There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up.

No, that's not the shape of the line. You can view it here:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...

The hockey stick upturn in recent centuries needs explanation.

I'm pushing back so hard on this comparative definition of wealth (which I notice is the secondary definition you found behind large possessions) because I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.

Hand-waving away human progress and forcing zero sum definitions of wealth feels unserious. You have terms for things like inequality, why not use those instead of distorting what wealth means?

[customguy]

> The hockey stick upturn in recent centuries needs explanation.

Why? It goes up. As I said.

> I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.

That's not pushing back, that's wanting to talk about something else first. That's just not something I'm interested in.

> distorting what wealth means?

It simply means both things, from context it was obvious how it was used in this instance, you ignoring that and going on tells me explaining it yet another time won't help.

[confidantlake]

That is an entirely unserious graph.