Ultimately this is going to correct. My preference is that it corrects by governments enforcing a fairer distribution because otherwise it's going to end violently and we're rapidly approaching a point of no return where the wealthy hold so much power and there's nothing left to steal. Basic human necessities like food, water and shelter are being eroded.
You can look at a bunch of warnings like this. Food bank usage, claims for various forms of welfare (such that it is), homelessness (and housing insecurity more generally), levels of debt, etc.
Sadly, I personally believe we're beyond the point of no return where it comes to solving these problems with electoral politics. The world is going to sink deeper into fascism and for awhile "order" will be maintained with ever-increasing police states.
In the UK in particular, Labor has predictably completely failed to address affordability issues. Keir Starmer will likely be ousted in a leadership challenge and the likely winner of the next election is Reform.
All so a handful of people can have even more wealth they just don't need.
also self entitlement, reliance on the government is at the highest, individual autonomy is at the lowest ever
Almost every year in almost every country will have:
- record GDP
- record government spending
- record total wages
- record stock market prices
- record asset prices
- record government debt
You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.
For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.
Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.
Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...
no, I speak in relative values to GDP
only during WW2 was spending higher.
on top of it UK does no longer spend on military or infrastructure, it goes overwhelmingly to consumption of dependent population
> Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY
It's not just nominal. You can see on the Institute for Fiscal Studies website that, as proportion of GDP, public spending has not been notably higher than since the second world war:
https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-data-item/uk-government-spe...
there are no poor in UK, just wasted opportunities.
if you want to listen how massive inequality is created in UK, start by looking at immigration
There's just no ability to get anything done. Whether it's big projects (HS2) or the basics (emptying bins, fixing potholes), nothing seems to work any more. And it feels like most of our tax is being converted directly into private profits while getting very little done.
That has two faces though, as it means if you are earning minimum wage or have some kind of disability and can't work it's probably a worse place to be, as the social support is a lot weaker.
On the other hand if you are earning a decent wage (think generic office worker) you can live a pretty good lifestyle. Safety, health care, education, housing, opportunties are all much better than the UK. Taxes are about the same, corruption I'd say is worse (on paper it's better), roads are worse (partially due to our climate being harsher).
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwp-benefits-statis...
in addition to the usual free everything
free health care free roads free housing (often) free education
free riding and on top of it you get to complain about the rich!
"Budget 2025: how inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty"
And indeed this is an article against the 2-child benefit cap.
This is obviously full of warm feelings but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford. The article interviews a family with 4 young children and apparently no money, for example...
Regarding poverty in general, I think the main issue in the UK is that there has been no economic growth since the financial crisis and GDP per capita is decreasing, i.e. people are getting poorer, which bites those on low/no income first and most.
This is also all on the back of people complaining about declining birth rates!
This sounds like a reason not to have them though. It's like saying the probability of X is high if I do Y. I do not want X to happen, but I will still do X even if I have no obligation to do so. Your decision might make sense to you but the way your comment reads it doesn't sound like a logical argument supporting your decision
[0] being HN I know I'm running the risk of having have some contrarian edgelord arguing about parents' rights to innovate with calorie restriction and whatnot.
Consider carefully your sentences before making deep moral judgements about people and situations you might not be familiar with. That, I think, was their implied point.
It’s a very difficult area to navigate, politically. While it’s entirely understandable that there’s public discomfort with the idea that a family could bring in more in benefits than the average national wage (like, why the hell am I bothering with working in a system like that?! Am I the sucker here?), you also have to take into account that kids are going to need a certain amount of support, just to stand a chance in life.
So how do you ‘punish’ the parents, or even just balance the feeling of what’s ’right’, while not punishing innocent parties?
I agree though - the underlying cause is that the UK is stagnating, the average national wage is really not good anyway. And that’s the driver of a lot of the problems we see with anti-migrant sentiment, with benefits restrictions, with all sorts of stuff. If the country was thriving it wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
As others have said as well - people’s lives take all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. Jobs are lost, economies change and make whole sectors irrelevant. You can’t just assume everyone with more than two kids needing support has always been in that situation or always will be.
I had to rely on food banks when my parents kicked me out at 16. I had to again my second year of marriage while I was still in graduate school and our car got hit, forcing us to use our food budget (and we did have a budget that we followed) for the family.
For the second time, I had kids, I had a good job, so did my wife, I was seeking higher education to advance in my career. But times were tight due to factors out of our control, and we needed help.
What should we have done differently?
> but ignores the tough question of the individual responsibility not to have more children than one can afford.
Which seems quite relevant. The only fool-proof plan for anyone is to have zero kids, which is ridiculous.
My wife and I live beneath ours means, save as much as possible, live debt free, and we instead try to afford as much as possible for the kids.
A job loss or major accident/medical problem where we survive is terrifying from a financial PoV.
It's not 'can't afford kids', it's 'don't prioritise having kids'. And IMHO, they've been taught to think this way. To put career and materialism above family. There's also the constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism - which helps justify 'I don't want to bring new life into this world' logic.
Other cultures continue to have kids even in relative poverty, they don't choose to stop having families because times are tough.
There's Africa, sure, and maybe Mongolia. But it's not clear that it will hold or that they have any secret sauce beyond just not having been yet hit with the full blown modernity.
What if reducing birth rates at this point in time is rational?
On the employment side, we have rapidly advancing automation and AI that are dramatically reducing the work force required to maintain society.
On the ecological side we have a combination of climate change, soil depletion, and many other factors that at least threaten to impose a bottleneck on us. We are smart and adaptive but adapting takes time and energy. During the transition it may be harder for us to support vastly huge populations.
Put those things together and… are we, in fact, doing the rational thing here?
Keep in mind that no trend is forever.
In the 1970s people predicted global Malthusian collapse in part by extrapolating past birth rates infinitely far into the future.
Seems to me that population collapse alarmists are doing the same thing. “If this trend continues forever there will be nobody left!”
Or perhaps, and I know this is a wild idea, we could attempt to address these problems instead of complaining about the "messaging" ?
If the two child benefit cap was in place then, we would have been in food poverty in one of the richest nations on earth.
Not every situation is as mind numbingly simple as you paint it. Most people don’t have additional children in an attempt to game the system. That’s a moronic point of view.
quite the juicy implication there, chief
> political willpower is not enough
That the economy is in terrible shape shouldn't get in the way of the rich getting richer. No one knows where all that money is coming from but people are also miraculously to poor to buy, build or rent a home. With all that nice scarcity in the market, whatever units are left make a lovely investment opportunity to put all that extra money into which again feeds into the scarcity. So much winning it's tiring!
If you still don't have enough, it's out of sheer incompetence and greed
People love saying “it’s just capital seeking returns” as if that explains anything. It doesn’t. Accumulating money isn’t the issue. Being able to buy policy outcomes is the issue. Once private interests can tilt regulation, spending, and national infrastructure in their favour, you no longer have a market problem. You have a governance problem.
Food banks didn’t explode because Jeff Bezos has too many zeroes in his account. They exploded because governments funnel public money into offshore middlemen, contractors billing ten times the real cost, multinationals avoiding scrutiny, and regulators pretending this is all fine. That’s not the “cycle of capital”. That’s a parasitic state captured by rent-seekers.
Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?
Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.
Yes, I am not of the view that a public official should have a private career too. It creates influence.
But as housing has been commoditized, it will be very tough fight to change it. Even people in governments can be land lords…
All other branches are commoditized as well and owned by big players who own markets.
It's funny that for some people, the answer of the enormous failings of Marxism is always "We need even more Marxism!"
So if that's your metric, US is at par with China.
US food is affordable. To the extent that food in China is cheaper, I'm pretty sure the main reason is dramatically lower cost of labor.
But the premise of your comment is just wrong.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It's taken by the government from people.
Subsidies don't make things cheaper. They just obscure the real cost and can be used by politicians to buy votes from pickFrom([farmers,students,renters,teachers,...])
If US government didn't spend $35 billion/year subsidizing food production, food would be more expensive but an average worker would have $214 more per year to spend on food.
This is the fact, and I would say that almost no one is immune to money offer. (You have to be very financially secured. But then, you are probably from the similar class as corporate people. -> simulate level of greed)
If you (as governmental employee) have some issue to solve, e.g. alimony or faster mortgage repayment, you are vulnerable… and you have to have very strong conscience not to accept any “services”. It is similar to be strong not to ear sugar or fat-loaded chips or drinking…
But you are free to give us an example of a planned economy that worked properly and brought freedom and prosperity to their citizens. Just one single example will suffice.
P.S. I see the downvotes, but I don't see a single example. Just one...
Take MI5. Their remit explicitly includes safeguarding the democratic system. Yet when you’ve got a government holding cosy meetings with global asset managers and, like magic, Digital ID turns into a flagship national policy nobody voted for, where are they? Nowhere. They’re busy pumping out LinkedIn-based “espionage alerts” about Chinese headhunters while ignoring policy capture happening in broad daylight. They don’t even need the Prime Minister’s blessing to investigate that kind of threat. They just… don’t.
So yes, we have oligarchic corporatism. But the real failure is that the institutions meant to keep it in check have basically checked out.
To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.
I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.
There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.
ultimately its a very politically difficult situation since you're entering the quagmire of what constitutes being poor. that's a discourse where political careers go never to return - easier to just throw your hands up in the air and just give everyone as much free food as they want.
ofcourse this then leads to the discussion of "wait... why don't we just do that anyway? arne't we a first world country?" but then you wind up with a whole enterprise of getting food for free (or steep discount) only to sell it to another community that doesn't have access to it and taking a profit. i think a similar problem (?) exists in the US, with SNAP food rations being (re?)-sold to latin americans.
