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Inequality in itself seems mostly fine to me? Like, the poorest people today live lives with access to better stuff than literally kings of the past. That is fucking incredible. But add in people doing better than us and we quickly get not okay

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Your model of poverty is incredibly bad if you think that being poor today is *better* than being a king in the past.

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Obviously there's a level of poverty that's probably worse than being a king in the past, especially in third-world countries. But we have access to a huge variety of food, our kids actually survive out of infancy now. Poor people still have refrigerators!

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Your original claim implies that this should make us not concerned about the the well-being of the poorest 10% today, though. Which I think is untrue — there are still tons of real injustices (prison system etc) that afflict those people. Which is what “inequality” talk targets.

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I definitely don't mean that we should be unconcerned about the wellbeing of the poorest 10% or anybody. I just mean that *inequality in itself does not seem inherently bad*.

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Like, I could push a magic button to put every person in the world at the poverty level to totally eliminate inequality, but I would consider this a much worse world.

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But I think this is a straw man. Most people who talk about inequality are talking about *problems that disproportionately affect the poor and not the rich*. They are not literally talking about the Gini coefficient. So you’re not steelmanning the argument IMO.

Aella

@Aella_Girl

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@nabeelqu

Kinda yes but kinda no? Most of the arguments I hear are often fueled by the idea that it's *not fair* that other people have easier lives than you. A lot of problems the poor have is *because* they're poor, like bank fees, but that doesn't seem meaningfully different

9:30 PM · Apr 26, 2019

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The unfairness is probably mostly perceived in the system that gives rise to the inequality, not the mere fact of inequality. It’s more like complaining that a game has bad rules than complaining that some people play better?