These are common simple Marxist points you are bringing up.

Your point hinges on: declining material conditions.

It is completely false - the conditions are pretty great for everyone. People have good wages relatively but sure inequality is increasing.

Since your main point is incorrect I don’t think your other points follow.

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jmyeet 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are many ways to attack this assertion. For example:

1. The stagnation or decline in real wages in the developed world in recent decades;

2. Increasing homelessness as a consequence of the housing affordability crisis;

3. How global poverty has increased in the last century under capitalism. This surprises some because defenders claim the opposite. China is singlehandedly responsible to massive decrease in extreme poverty in the 20th century.

Maybe you're looking through the lens of tech. After all, we all have Internet-connected supercomputers in our pockets. While that's true, we're also working 3 jobs to pay for a 1 bedroom apartment where once a single job meant you had a house and enough to eat.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Your first and last points are egregiously incorrect. A simple google search will tell you this.

Extreme poverty throughout the world has dramatically reduced. In Western Europe it came down from 50% to less than 1% through the 20th century.

India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

Wages has been increasing in china, India as well as USA after accounting for inflation. It’s sort of stagnant in Europe.

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keeda 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

What the Wikipedia search won't tell you is that the methodologies and poverty guidelines used in making some of these claims are rather questionable. While real progress has undeniably been made, the extent is greatly exaggerated:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-governme...

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mythrwy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Additionally we can point out the problems of inequality and governmental capture by elite interests (and they are problems) but then the jump to "government will do it better than these greedy people" is a big one and I don't see much evidence for it.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm genuinely glad for the people in India. But that progress doesn't reduce the feeling of inequality here in the U.S.

Dismissing people with arguments doesn't work either. It doesn’t eliminate the feeling of inequality or change people's perspective about absolute vs relative wealth.

Why? Because the promise used to justify labor - that hard work will be rewarded - was deeply believed. The contradiction becomes visible when the wealthy hold 36,000 times more wealth than the average person[1]. No one can work 36,000 times harder or longer than someone else, so the belief is no longer tenable.

That leaves us with two choices: either acknowledge that "hard work alone" was never the full story, or take real steps to fix inequality. Pointing to poverty reduction in other countries doesn’t resolve this. It simply makes people feel unheard and resentful.

Average billionaire has $7B in wealth. Median individual U.S. wealth $190,000.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is not the appropriate way to respond when the poster was clearly incorrect in their main points. Dismissing people with arguments is the rational thing to do.

Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. No it doesn't and it shouldn't. Only work that provides value should matter - you don't deserve more money just for working 10x hard but when it doesn't matter to anyone.

Your entire comment hinges on a zero sum line of thinking and I don't abide by it. Things have improved for everyone as I have said above but I also acknowledged that inequality is increasing. Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.

I literally acknowledged that prosperity has increased for people in other parts of the world.

Why don't you rewrite my comment so that it's acceptable to you and then we'll discuss that?

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

If we acknowledge that everyone is more prosperous now than before (which completely contradicts the post I was responding to) what is your point? Inequality? I think it is a problem but not so much if everyone is getting prosperous in the mean time.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, as I pointed out in my original comment, inequality is my point.

If unaddressed - ie by dismissal - it doesn't go away. It simply festers. It will fester until it ruptures. Ignoring it or minimizing it doesn't make it go away.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure and I think solving inequality must be weighed along with increasing prosperity. Both have to be considered because often increasing one means increasing other - increasing taxes too much and there are no incentives to work and prosperity reduces. We need to find the right balance between both.

I do acknowledge that inequality can have unforeseen consequences and worth talking about and tackling today but only by considering the right tradeoffs.

	▲	kelseyfrog 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm trying to square these: > Increasing taxes too much and there are no incentives to work and prosperity reduces. > Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. If hard work doesn't matter, then why care what incentives are?

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keybored 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Productivity in the US has gone up steadily since WWII (“only work that provides value should matter”) but wages have stagnated since the 70’s.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wages have _not_ stagnated since the 70's. Nor has it stagnated since the 2000's.

Can you provide a source to backup your claim?

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

I investigated the first link with ChatGPT. All the percentiles have increased except 10th percentile. But they do not account for after tax wages and other benefits and transfers.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59510 shows this. Bottom 20% wages after accounting for benefits and taxes have significantly increased. If you want to answer the question: are the bottom 20% materially more well off at 1960's than now - this is your answer. Hourly wages without accounting for benefits is missing a crucial element so not really indicative of reality.

Caveat: this shows the bottom quintile (20th percentile) and after looking at the data it appears to be a change of ~60% of real disposable income from 1978 to 2020. 10th percentile would be similar.

TL;DR: if you use real disposable income that accounts for taxes and benefits (what really matters) the wages have not stagnated for anyone but increased a lot - by almost 60%.

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

you're putting in a lot of work (well, i guess you're farming out the work to a third party service) to prove a portion of your argument with a metric that ignores inflation (including whatever you want to call what's happening right now). why? why is it so important to you to try to dispel a notion that is nearly-universally shared among scholars, experts and those actually experiencing ill effects due to the rise in costs of living compared to their income?

	▲	simianwords 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not excluding inflation which means you didn’t put any effort into actual investigation. You just googled for what you wanted and posted three links without reading it. It’s very telling that instead of refuting my point you instead choose to derail the discussions into a personal attack. Were you discussing in good faith you would try to understand what I said and reply to it. It’s not universal at all that people are less prosperous now. Why don’t you do good faith research and try to answer whether the bottom earners are actually better off now than before? You will come to the same conclusion.