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.

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.

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

The median is usually used for this; it throws away outliers on both sides.

Sometimes I think economists don't know what a median is.

> Why let a flat for €500 monthly when you can charge €150 per night?

Isn't a tax the obvious solution here?

> 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..

> 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

> 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.

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.

> 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

How privileged is a period?

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.

So what? That seems entirely tangential. Unless your point that economic inequality inherently accelerates technological progress (which seems valid at least to some extent)?

And yet we are also living in some of the strongest wealth inequality in the last 100 years at least.

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality