I love this and Pratchett’s “Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”. Imagine the cost to the poor if we discovered immortality before we eliminated poverty.
That’s a good point. Living forever before we eradicate poverty (and inequality) is a big issue that would, doubtlessly, create a lot of social upheaval.
Eradicating poverty could be done today, IF we could change everyone’s mindset. In my opinion that is harder to do than immortality. Heck, we could end war with a much smaller change in mindset and we can’t even do that.
Not quite today — I'm not even sure if it could be as early as by 2030 even if you eliminated all corruption and just had everyone working to build roads to and utilities in the remote towns and villages most in need of development.
We can certainly do more, don't get me wrong, but I don't think we could change so much for 750 million on a short timescale, even though that's just 10% of the world and we've clearly got the stuff in total.
China is, I think, doing a pretty decent job of getting itself out of poverty, but even they were "only" growing at 10%/year in this process.
> could be done today, IF we could change everyone’s mindset.
Oh yes! But capitalism extracts labor from wealth gradients, and extraction is more efficient the higher the gradient. Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?
I think it's more extractive of wealth from information gradients than anything else. If two corporations do roughly the same thing, the staff switch to whichever pays more while the customers switch to whoever charges less or provides a superior product/service.
> Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?
Me? I already clean my own toilet. My partner sometimes makes me coffee, but I make my own too. I don't eat much beef, but I don't mind slaughtering my own chickens.
Honestly, if I had the time I'd be able to enjoy doing a lot more "menial" labor than I currently do. Living a simple life is nice, but because everything in modern society is tied to competition and the outcomes determine my standard of living, I am forced to constantly level up just to tread water.
This is the sort of thing that sounds very truthy but I don't think that's actually very true. I don't think that this property is particularly unique to capitalism. As long as people have existed society as a system, whatever 'isim' it was labeled with (and even before) has extracted labor from power gradients. It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
That’s true, but in capitalism wealth and power can’t be separated. Even in democracies, economic power gives the very rich political power that’s only achievable otherwise trough elections.
> It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
Until the system collapses because of its rigidity.
Definitions such as food security? We don't have that. Housing for every person? Nope. How about the ability to ensure our health? Nope. Jobs? Nope. Help when you need it for your mental health? As if.
The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.
Agreed on lack of housing, which is largely due to progressive local governments preventing the construction of new housing. Housing is far more plentiful and cheaper in red states.
Agreed on health. Replace the US system wholesale with one of the many more successful models in other countries. Ironically, our existing government run programs are already better in terms of cost and quality than private insurance.
Recent unemployment rates reflect essentially full employment.
> The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.
Tell that to the millions of families in the US who are food insecure TODAY. And calories alone are not enough.
"the USDA found that nearly 7 million households were so financially squeezed last year that they had to skip meals at times because there wasn't enough food to go around. Almost all of these households said they couldn't afford to eat balanced meals." ~NPR
As for employment, that 4.3% unemployment (per MSNBC on 8/3/24) still represents some 13 million people. I'd hesitate to call that "full employment" by any metric. And it doesn't count the other roughly 20% who are not counted in that statistic who are not working (intentionally or not).
It's a departure from what we previously worried about - people not having food to eat.
Look at the definition of "low food security" - the most extreme food insecurity the USDA measures.
Low food security — These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting food from community food pantries.
"obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake". So none of these people actually didn't have enough food to eat, they just had to change how they got their food.
In terms of food security - what does that mean? I hear (unverified) there are places such as Venezuela where the population is starving, which is horrendous, but I haven't heard of this in the US.
