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samiv 3 hours ago [-]
There's no paradox here. Distribution of wealth matters. Rich got richer and everyone else didn't. Simple as that.
abirch 3 hours ago [-]
As Ray Dalio has mentioned, you should measure results on how it impacts the bottom 51% of the people (the majority) it's a lot more illustrative than looking at the average.
samiv 2 hours ago [-]
Yep. I'm not an economist but my social democratic common sense would tell me to look at the bottom 10% income bracket and see how they're doing.
Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent.
In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
Bottom 10% are outliers though. Bottom 50% is much more reasonable.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
Treatment of bottom 10% and treatment of bottom 50% are both interesting metrics, but for very different reasons, and they are often contradictory.
The "bottom 50%" is a measure of how well you make it possible for everybody to succeed without extraordinary help.
The "bottom 10%" is a measure of extraordinary help.
onraglanroad 2 hours ago [-]
The capitalist response to that would be that the investment in companies is better because it makes everyone richer in the long term by increasing overall wealth.
I'm not sure I buy it but it's an effect to consider.
kubb 2 hours ago [-]
That does sometimes happen - investment does cause development. The mistake is to assume that's always what happens, and that everybody can benefit from the development.
onraglanroad 34 minutes ago [-]
Oh I agree with you. I suspect it happens less than is the conventional wisdom, but I might be wrong.
ajmurmann 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kubb 2 hours ago [-]
You're conflating compounding market value with economic growth. One counterexample is when inflation raises prices, but not economic output. Asset prices grow but there's no growth.
ajmurmann 1 hours ago [-]
What do you think happens with the money that goes into stock? It doesn't simply vanish. It ultimately gets invested in salaries, construction of data centers and factories.
kubb 1 hours ago [-]
That's most certainly not what happens! The money that goes into buying a stock is being transferred to the people who sold you the stock (which, outside of the IPO are almost always market players).
A company with a high stock price can "save money" by paying employees in stock, borrowing money cheaper, but it's NOT a primary way of funding the company.
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
Or hoarding real estate.. which is not particularly productive since it turns out higher prices don’t really stimulate supply sufficiently.
Also its not exactly obvious how much inflated stock market valuations benefit the economy that much or at all.
paulryanrogers 2 hours ago [-]
Then why is so much money going into real estate and greater-fool crypto?
ajmurmann 1 hours ago [-]
BTC market cap is $1.2T. S&P 500 market cap is about $66T.
Why would we not want for money to flow into real estate? It's an area with massive demand and money flowing in to create supply is exactly what we need and is productive. What is not productive is the NIMBY scum that's preventing supply from being met.
zhoBEENG 2 hours ago [-]
Should we perhaps look at the top 51% instead? Why pick one perspective over the other?
I’m not familiar with Dalio outside some weird pseudo-academic paper he wrote where he attempts to provide a new grand theory of economics based on “transactions”, but I would be interested to hear this perspective supported.
Edit: samiv above answered my question
rcxdude 2 hours ago [-]
Well, if you're looking at the bottom X%, then you can be confident that the rest of the population are in a better position.
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
Technically yes but its not that straightforward.
Take a country like Sweden for example everyone is reasonably well off (if not exactly thriving) since income inequality is quite low. At the same time wealth inequality is extremely high since the rich pulled the ladder after them and there are hardly any options for the middle class to accumulate much wealth. In turn that probably doesn’t help productivity and innovation that much. Why work harder if you won’t get anything in return? Which is a general vibe vibe in Scandinavian work culture.
Then again they (well Denmark at least since a petrostate like Norway doesn’t count and Sweden hasn’t been stellar and the Danish government is hellbent on turning the EU into a fascist dystopia so maybe its not a price worth paying..) are doing quite well economically compared to most other European countries.
abirch 2 hours ago [-]
Ray Dalio created one of the most successful hedge funds ever and as he calls himself "a professional capitalist." The guy even helped with launching the Chickent McNugget (advising McDonald's with Poultry futures)
If you look at the top 51% things are going extremely well, but as this article shows it can hide a lot. I loved his explanation of how the economic machine works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0 his book Principles is pretty good too.
radu_floricica 2 hours ago [-]
Considering how skewed tax participation is, this would be a very one sided view. Just tax the top 49% more, no matter what's their current level of taxation, and redistribute to the lower 51%. It'll always make this criteria look like a success.
Problem is, this creates systemic effects. If you look longer term, a society that does this will end up a lot poorer than one that doesn't. Even for the bottom 51% you were optimizing. Because there are two variables to control: the redistribution, and the actual productivity. If you just focus on splitting wealth, you stop growing wealth.
Growing wealth on the other hand will make everybody richer, including the botton 51%. Simply participating in a richer economy has advantages. Plus the smaller redistribution percentage will actually end up bigger in absolute terms.
Garlef 2 hours ago [-]
> If you look longer term, a society that does this will end up a lot poorer than one that doesn't.
Got data to back that up?
(On the serious level, I'm really curious; But on the polemic level I'll call BS - I highly doubt there ever was such a period in any capitalist country ever)
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
The median is usually used for this; it throws away outliers on both sides.
rcxdude 2 hours ago [-]
This is not quite the same as the median: it is possible for the bottom 50% to improve but for the median to stay the same (i.e. imagine if everyone in the bottom 50% suddenly equaled the best of them). But the median is a lot better than the mean for not being distorted by large changes in the top and bottom percentiles.
mannykannot 2 hours ago [-]
This seems to tacitly assume that the outliers on either side have equivalent weight with respect to whatever is being investigated, while the explicit premise behind this proposal is that in this case they do not.
neves 2 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I think economists don't know what a median is.
BariumBlue 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like housing again:
> Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union
My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west").
in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though.
I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
dlcarrier 8 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
It's one of the oldest civilizations in existence. Combine the trend of NIMBYism building up over time, with most every city being an archeological site, and one of the least stable economies in Europe, and you aren't getting much housing investment.
spystath 2 hours ago [-]
You are right that it's due to housing but in my opinion most of unaffordability comes from immense pressure due to tourism. Housing situation is better outside the touristy areas (and Athens). If anything Greece has seen massive housebuilding up until the economic crash in the early 10s. I remember block of flats appearing left and right in most major cities in a span of months. They still do but in a lot of cases they are almost exclusively short-term lets (again especially in tourist hubs). Why let a flat for €500 monthly when you can charge €150 per night? It's maddening.
dataflow 2 hours ago [-]
> Why let a flat for €500 monthly when you can charge €150 per night?
Isn't a tax the obvious solution here?
EgregiousCube 2 hours ago [-]
Why are prices up even though population is down over the past ten years? Did everybody decide to move to the city or something?
j16sdiz 2 hours ago [-]
> (at least in "the west").
It is the same in the east - it is either housing, or housing related tax.
bryanlarsen 2 hours ago [-]
The article gives a dozen reasons why people in Greece feel poor. Housing is just one of them. A big one, perhaps, but there are many others in the article.
It's interesting that housing is the one that all the HN commenters pick out to comment on. It's probably the most universal complaint, the one that's easiest to sympathize with from halfway around the world.
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago [-]
>I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
No doubt. You see it in tourism economies the world over.
Cheap services + cultural/historical novelty + nice climate make tourism highly viable -> tourism becomes outsized part of economy -> those enriched by peddling tourism write the rules to their benefit -> it becomes all but illegal to develop any other industry, build housing, etc, etc because all this activity winds up punitively regulated lest someone do something that scared away the tourists.
jaharios 2 hours ago [-]
While income taxes are low for the majority ( the salaries are low anyway) the indirect taxing is the way the Greek Goverment managed to recover.
The prices of everyday goods rose (sometimes more than double) and the profits from VAT(24%) with them.
High duties on fuel + fuel price went up, combined with rent prices (living far away from your workplace) => longer work commute, bad infrastructure and older vehicles ( no money to buy a fuel efficient one when you are poor)
Liberalization of the energy market forced by EU which lead to extreme prices.
(new companies that don't produce anything got in the middleman position with only goal higher profits)
In summary, everything has been and continues to be done at the expense of the majority (low-wage earners), while making them even poorer.
ykonstant 2 hours ago [-]
Feel poor??? Man... this is some prime ragebait title.
lokar 2 hours ago [-]
I could see this was bad reporting right away. Average wealth? Per-capita gdp? Pointless. Give me the decile values, or just show the histogram.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
In no particular order:
- Per capital GDP still awful
- Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature.
- Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.
antisthenes 2 hours ago [-]
Also in that bucket:
- Average is one of the worst ways to measure wealth (use Median)
- Wealth is typically tied up in illiquid assets (e.g. housing), making people feel trapped or anchored to a place that may not be economically mobile (e.g. rural)
jedimastert 2 hours ago [-]
The idea that the answer to this question would not be intuitive to pretty much anyone that participates in an economy is a genuine shock.
Avicebron 2 hours ago [-]
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.
root-parent 3 hours ago [-]
Same with Brazil or Portugal or Angola. Full of billionaires with poor people.
mlinhares 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, its all inequality. Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
> Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.
[emphasis mine]
I somewhat disagree: at least during the COVID-19 times the government did have a plan to partially fix it: At that time there were a lot of discussions whether work from home will be there to stay or not.
If it would have stayed, that would have partially solved the problem (not for everybody, but for a substantial subset of people):
Since people can live at places where rent or the price of houses is much lower, companies can pay smaller salaries, but employees (after subtracting the cost of living) still have more money. In other words: both sides get their slice of the pie: employers can decrease salaries while employees still have more money.
Unluckily, when COVID-19 was over, companies decided they basically want people to come back to to office (working from home should be an exception).
This was the central reason why this plan failed.
microgpt 2 hours ago [-]
Renting itself isn't inherently the problem if you have very strong tenant rights. Imagine renting came with all the rights of owning except the money flowed differently (like a perpetual mortgage) - that'd be pretty okay, actually. It is within the power of a government to enable something like that.
_puk 2 hours ago [-]
But renting is a problem if there's no asset at the end of it.
Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour.
And the inverse.
Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house you, and you stop earning, you cannot live without reducing your overall capital.
So rental means a lack of opportunity to reduce your labour dependent income over time (important as you age), and a reduced ability to weather negative life events.
microgpt 2 hours ago [-]
Paying to consume something continually isn't inherently wrong. We do that with food. If you like, you could offset it with UBI.
A separate concern is who should receive the money and how we morally justify that, since they didn't produce anything or work to earn it.
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
It can work (and did in some places in Western Europe for a while) if housing stock is mostly state owned and/or communal. Of course that introduces some other issues
bluefirebrand 3 hours ago [-]
> Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it
This seems to be the plan basically everywhere though. Yes, some countries still have a ladder for average people to own property and find success, but the global trend seems to be that this possibility is shrinking for the vast majority of people
That's what happens when average people have to compete with real estate conglomerates for housing though
lebuffon 2 hours ago [-]
The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
Spooky23 2 hours ago [-]
Nah, it will be triggered by a debt crisis.
Remember the plurality of the rich are working off asset loans on paper wealth. Those credit lines get cut by an event, that triggers an asset sell off which creates a vicious cycle.
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
>
The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. [...] Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
I rather believe that the individual problems in each country are very different (even though you summarize them by "this wealth inequality is so common around the world"). Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country, so I don't believe that people from different countries will club together, and have common wishes.
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
> that the individual problems in each country are very different
When it comes to housing prices and general cost of living the patterns are extremely similar in most Western countries. Especially after covid and the infinite money hoses..
jedimastert 2 hours ago [-]
> Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country.
I find this honestly kind of difficult to believe, except when it comes to distractions by the people who want to stay in power
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago [-]
Just to give one class of examples:
Should a country implement some very nationalist policies that serve the interests of the not so well-off people in its own country, but will be against the interests of other countries and their people?
Think of the uprise of right-wing, nationalist parties in many European countries that often present themselves as "the new worker parties", i.e. they intend to implement policies that are good for the workers in their own country, but on the other hand make it very clear that they have not the interests of people of other EU countries in mind.
jedimastert 2 hours ago [-]
These kinds of policies are exactly what I meant by "distractions", those policies tend to help the wealthy far more than workers, and then those same policies are turned towards the workers when there aren't any more immigrants to hurt
sgt101 2 hours ago [-]
Frustraged by the endless prattle about GDP, europoors and Brexit, me and my agent frien's sat (manifested) together and brewed up some alternatives:
I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP.
2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) perception that things were good under Trump 1. The European war starts and China is left to dominate Asia.
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
Also massive influx of money from Europe especially due to the dominance of the US megacorps and the tech sector in general.
Basically you had companies like Google or Meta constantly leeching from everyone while providing approximately zero real value in return.
BurningFrog 2 hours ago [-]
"Poor" is a relative concept!
If everyone gets 10x richer, half the people will still be in the poorer half, and will still feel poor in some sense.
This is surely not the only factor in this story, but it's you need to keep it in mind in these discussions.
erdeibit 3 hours ago [-]
Capitalism optimization: make the rich richer making the poor poorer
password54321 2 hours ago [-]
You live in the most privileged period in human history.
You’re posting this like it’s a counterpoint, but it further highlights how disgusting the situation is. We have people becoming trillionaires while 10% of the world’s population is considered to be in extreme poverty. It’s ‘less bad’ than in the past but it’s still absolutely horrifying.
password54321 2 hours ago [-]
How much of that trillion is liquid? If people stopped buying a Tesla, would that somehow help the poor?
Making electric vehicles more mainstream seems like a net-positive to the world.
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
Possibly. If they invested their money into something more societally productive and/or the government took their money to do that or they weren’t allowed to accumulate enough surplus wealth in the first place. Of course the last two options have been a bit problematic historically.
2 hours ago [-]
microgpt 2 hours ago [-]
Objection: irrelevant deflection.
password54321 2 hours ago [-]
Bot account with a dramatic amount of comments in a short period of time. How do we let this nonsense through?
microgpt 2 hours ago [-]
How privileged is a period?
jedimastert 2 hours ago [-]
And yet we are also living in some of the strongest wealth inequality in the last 100 years at least.
I would call that holding steady worldwide in the last decade, which honestly is still unacceptable with how much more wealthy the world has gotten
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
So what? That seems entirely tangential. Unless your point that economic inequality inherently accelerates technological progress (which seems valid at least to some extent)?
password54321 2 hours ago [-]
You don't think capitalism played a role in eliminating poverty?
wqaatwt 2 hours ago [-]
No, I implied it did.
I actually think that free market competition has been the main driving force behind human progress for quite a while now. The issue is that the “winning condition” of capitalism results in the complete subversion of that process. So it’s always a balance.
Because, to the surprise of literally nobody who's ever been on the receiving end of these sorts of policies they cook up in far away think tank offices and the ivory towers of academia, there's a million ways to make the number go up that doesn't actually make normal people any better off.
nosioptar 2 hours ago [-]
At this point, I'd settle for not being better off. It'd be a helluva lot better than everything getting worse.
We need to eat the fucking rich. Bnch of parasitic fuckwads.
alephnerd 2 hours ago [-]
Gotta love HNers who never read articles and use it as a soapbox:
"The scale of the destruction that followed the debt crisis was extraordinary. Between 2009 and the trough of the bailout years in 2016, average household wealth fell by roughly 35%, wiping out more than a third of Greek families' assets"
...
"The labour market has improved markedly since the darkest years of the crisis, with unemployment falling sharply and the informal economy shrinking. But structural weaknesses remain deeply embedded. Long-term unemployment, low participation in the workforce and a high reliance on self-employment continue to shape opportunities and outcomes"
----
Tl;dr - Greek households still haven't recovered from the Eurozone and Greek Debt crisis.
Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent.
In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.
The "bottom 50%" is a measure of how well you make it possible for everybody to succeed without extraordinary help.
The "bottom 10%" is a measure of extraordinary help.
I'm not sure I buy it but it's an effect to consider.
A company with a high stock price can "save money" by paying employees in stock, borrowing money cheaper, but it's NOT a primary way of funding the company.
Also its not exactly obvious how much inflated stock market valuations benefit the economy that much or at all.
I’m not familiar with Dalio outside some weird pseudo-academic paper he wrote where he attempts to provide a new grand theory of economics based on “transactions”, but I would be interested to hear this perspective supported.
Edit: samiv above answered my question
Take a country like Sweden for example everyone is reasonably well off (if not exactly thriving) since income inequality is quite low. At the same time wealth inequality is extremely high since the rich pulled the ladder after them and there are hardly any options for the middle class to accumulate much wealth. In turn that probably doesn’t help productivity and innovation that much. Why work harder if you won’t get anything in return? Which is a general vibe vibe in Scandinavian work culture.
Then again they (well Denmark at least since a petrostate like Norway doesn’t count and Sweden hasn’t been stellar and the Danish government is hellbent on turning the EU into a fascist dystopia so maybe its not a price worth paying..) are doing quite well economically compared to most other European countries.
If you look at the top 51% things are going extremely well, but as this article shows it can hide a lot. I loved his explanation of how the economic machine works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0 his book Principles is pretty good too.
Problem is, this creates systemic effects. If you look longer term, a society that does this will end up a lot poorer than one that doesn't. Even for the bottom 51% you were optimizing. Because there are two variables to control: the redistribution, and the actual productivity. If you just focus on splitting wealth, you stop growing wealth.
Growing wealth on the other hand will make everybody richer, including the botton 51%. Simply participating in a richer economy has advantages. Plus the smaller redistribution percentage will actually end up bigger in absolute terms.
Got data to back that up?
(On the serious level, I'm really curious; But on the polemic level I'll call BS - I highly doubt there ever was such a period in any capitalist country ever)
> Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union
My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west").
in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though.
I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
Isn't a tax the obvious solution here?
It is the same in the east - it is either housing, or housing related tax.
It's interesting that housing is the one that all the HN commenters pick out to comment on. It's probably the most universal complaint, the one that's easiest to sympathize with from halfway around the world.
No doubt. You see it in tourism economies the world over.
Cheap services + cultural/historical novelty + nice climate make tourism highly viable -> tourism becomes outsized part of economy -> those enriched by peddling tourism write the rules to their benefit -> it becomes all but illegal to develop any other industry, build housing, etc, etc because all this activity winds up punitively regulated lest someone do something that scared away the tourists.
The prices of everyday goods rose (sometimes more than double) and the profits from VAT(24%) with them.
High duties on fuel + fuel price went up, combined with rent prices (living far away from your workplace) => longer work commute, bad infrastructure and older vehicles ( no money to buy a fuel efficient one when you are poor)
Liberalization of the energy market forced by EU which lead to extreme prices. (new companies that don't produce anything got in the middleman position with only goal higher profits)
In summary, everything has been and continues to be done at the expense of the majority (low-wage earners), while making them even poorer.
- Per capital GDP still awful
- Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature.
- Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.
- Average is one of the worst ways to measure wealth (use Median)
- Wealth is typically tied up in illiquid assets (e.g. housing), making people feel trapped or anchored to a place that may not be economically mobile (e.g. rural)
"The Rentier Black Hole"
A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.
[emphasis mine]
I somewhat disagree: at least during the COVID-19 times the government did have a plan to partially fix it: At that time there were a lot of discussions whether work from home will be there to stay or not.
If it would have stayed, that would have partially solved the problem (not for everybody, but for a substantial subset of people):
Since people can live at places where rent or the price of houses is much lower, companies can pay smaller salaries, but employees (after subtracting the cost of living) still have more money. In other words: both sides get their slice of the pie: employers can decrease salaries while employees still have more money.
Unluckily, when COVID-19 was over, companies decided they basically want people to come back to to office (working from home should be an exception).
This was the central reason why this plan failed.
Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour.
And the inverse.
Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house you, and you stop earning, you cannot live without reducing your overall capital.
So rental means a lack of opportunity to reduce your labour dependent income over time (important as you age), and a reduced ability to weather negative life events.
A separate concern is who should receive the money and how we morally justify that, since they didn't produce anything or work to earn it.
This seems to be the plan basically everywhere though. Yes, some countries still have a ladder for average people to own property and find success, but the global trend seems to be that this possibility is shrinking for the vast majority of people
That's what happens when average people have to compete with real estate conglomerates for housing though
Remember the plurality of the rich are working off asset loans on paper wealth. Those credit lines get cut by an event, that triggers an asset sell off which creates a vicious cycle.
I rather believe that the individual problems in each country are very different (even though you summarize them by "this wealth inequality is so common around the world"). Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country, so I don't believe that people from different countries will club together, and have common wishes.
When it comes to housing prices and general cost of living the patterns are extremely similar in most Western countries. Especially after covid and the infinite money hoses..
I find this honestly kind of difficult to believe, except when it comes to distractions by the people who want to stay in power
Should a country implement some very nationalist policies that serve the interests of the not so well-off people in its own country, but will be against the interests of other countries and their people?
Think of the uprise of right-wing, nationalist parties in many European countries that often present themselves as "the new worker parties", i.e. they intend to implement policies that are good for the workers in their own country, but on the other hand make it very clear that they have not the interests of people of other EU countries in mind.
https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/pho...
I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP.
2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) perception that things were good under Trump 1. The European war starts and China is left to dominate Asia.
Basically you had companies like Google or Meta constantly leeching from everyone while providing approximately zero real value in return.
If everyone gets 10x richer, half the people will still be in the poorer half, and will still feel poor in some sense.
This is surely not the only factor in this story, but it's you need to keep it in mind in these discussions.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...
Making electric vehicles more mainstream seems like a net-positive to the world.
https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/inequality?tab=line&cou...
I actually think that free market competition has been the main driving force behind human progress for quite a while now. The issue is that the “winning condition” of capitalism results in the complete subversion of that process. So it’s always a balance.
We need to eat the fucking rich. Bnch of parasitic fuckwads.
"The scale of the destruction that followed the debt crisis was extraordinary. Between 2009 and the trough of the bailout years in 2016, average household wealth fell by roughly 35%, wiping out more than a third of Greek families' assets"
...
"The labour market has improved markedly since the darkest years of the crisis, with unemployment falling sharply and the informal economy shrinking. But structural weaknesses remain deeply embedded. Long-term unemployment, low participation in the workforce and a high reliance on self-employment continue to shape opportunities and outcomes"
----
Tl;dr - Greek households still haven't recovered from the Eurozone and Greek Debt crisis.