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.
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Like obviously everyone agrees with you that if everybody lived at the poverty line that would be worse. But since nobody is actually proposing that, the argument might be a little more complex than what you are describing.
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If you talk to people who care about it they might describe the problem as like:
“People get evicted and have zero familial safety net and get stuck in an awful Molochian trap for years, whereas rich people can just go live at home for awhile and smoke weed”
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Right - but if there were no rich people, how much would they be complaining?
I'm not saying that they shouldn't be complaining, I just feel super sensitive to the fact that we're not experiencing an *absolute* level of suffering, we're experiencing one that comes out of a story.
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But neither of the above two examples are about a story, they’re about literal physical differences in what happens to the poor vs the rich right now that ought to be fixed. The fact that the “rich way” also exists just illustrates that often these benefits could be had by many.
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The employment participation rate of poor men has dropped over the last 10 yrs & deaths from opioids are way up. Is that because of “contrast” or because things are absolutely worse...?
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Everything is contrast. The employment rate is bad because it used to be better - if it was even worse before and it'd increased, we'd be happier about it.
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