Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy. They do this by belonging to the ownership class. There is not enough room there for everyone, because owners make money simply through owning, because others do the work for them, while the owners pay themselves with the profits these workers generate for them.

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WalterBright 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Unfortunately our society’s structure is such that only a small number of people can ever be wealthy.

History says otherwise. The mass immigration to the US in the 1800s was all poor people arriving with nothing but a suitcase. They moved up into the middle class and beyond en masse.

Middle class people live better than medieval kings.

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grafmax 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Living standards have risen due to productivity gains being distributed across society. Factors such as wise policy and labor unions contributed to this effect. These factors are largely absent today. Productivity gains have flowed mostly to the ownership class since the mid 1970s (this is the pay-productivity gap). As the article notes, 50% of people identify groceries as a major cause of stress, which doesn’t sound like a medieval king. Society has the capacity to make life better for everyone. It requires collective action to redistribute wealth from the ownership class across society however.

Even raising living standards for the poor through redistribution wouldn’t solve all our problems. Concentration of wealth is itself a net negative because it is concentration of power. Greater wealth concentration makes society more undemocratic, even if the bottom 50% were to become richer. Today billionaires have so much money that a group of them has gotten together to fund the abandonment of democracy in the US. They are largely succeeding. We are collapsing into “illiberal democracy” - a phenomenon that has been spreading across the globe in recent years. Our greatest problems, like climate change, worsen as wealthy interests prop up policies of denial rather than effective solutions.

A medieval king had political control. If society was heading in a direction that was going to harm them, they could do something about it. But members of the modern day middle class have virtually no political control. That is concentrated in the hands of the few and harms us all.

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TFYS 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not the definition of wealthy. Wealthy is a relative term. It's meaningless to say that a lower middle class person today is wealthy just because people 500 years ago could only dream of the things they have. If other people in the society they currently live in have a million times more, they are not wealthy.

I'm sure you understand how capitalism works. If you do, you should understand that not everyone can be an owner, someone has to do the actual work.

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WalterBright 3 days ago | parent [-]

> not everyone can be an owner

Anyone with $10 and a phone can be an owner of the means of production (by buying stock).

> It's meaningless to say

The meaning is the massive improvement in the standard of living due to free markets.

BTW, if being "poor" means being in the bottom quintile of income, there will always be "poor" people, regardless of how well they live.

	▲	TFYS 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way. Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or median income is the most useful definition. Someone earning less than half of average, for example. That tells you how well they can afford the limited resources of any society, as those track the average purchasing power.