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0 pointsnoahtallen4y ago0 comments

I do really like that video and the book Factfulness.

However, income inequality is definitely one of the things getting worse with time. And it’s scary for everyone, because if you don’t have money, your ability to survive is reduced, and if you do have money… look back to what happened only a handful of centuries ago or even less when the proletariat revolted.

Sure, we aren’t there currently, but the trajectory is not going in a direction which inspires confidence in our future.

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rogue74y ago

At first I really liked Hans Rosling's book. But afterwards I read some very valid criticism [0].

> We see that while per capita income has indeed increased in the global South, the global North has captured the vast majority of new income generated by global growth since 1960. As a result, the income gap between the average person in the North and the average person in the South has nearly quadrupled in size, going from $9,000 in 1960 to $35,000 today.

> In other words, there has been no “catch up”, no “convergence”. On the contrary, what’s happening is divergence, big time.

The same goes for the other topics, including biodiversity.

[0] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/3/17/two-hump-world

derriz4y ago

Jason Hickel's criticism is either disingenuous or demonstrates basic innumeracy. The criticism uses absolute differences to "prove" that divergence is increasing.

This does not make sense. If A and B went from earning 30k and 45k respectively to earning 70k and 90k respectively, Hickel would claim this was "divergence" - because the gap between them has risen from 15k to 20k.

But it simply isn't - A is converging with B (the gap has narrowed from 50% to 28.5%). If this trend continued linearly, A's income would surpass that of B within about 3 more periods of such "divergence".

korantu4y ago

Is income inequality even good measure in the forst place? More and more people of this world are rising out of poverty, and getting education, why specifically does uphieval would occur?

raducu4y ago

Measure of what?

Income is a proxy for a lot of tings.

While completely understandable and rational, people racing to get out of poverty at the same time as the great climate change catastrophe, feminism (sexes "wars"), all sorts of minority/ perpetual victims/ alternative motivation groups/attention wars -- I don't see how we'll navigate these centrifugal forces and chaos in a wise and beneficial way for the planet and for us on the long term.

kortilla4y ago

No, it’s not a good measure, but it is a useful tool for people to build support for political upheaval that wouldn’t otherwise be justified.

diordiderot4y ago

The thing is, it's all relevant. You can't pretend human psychology doesn't exist

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