Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats. The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.
So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards?
Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.
Money is also how we exert power and leverage over others. As inequality increases, it enables the ever wealthier minority to exert power and therefore control over the majority.
The problem isn't the money. The problem is the power.
Humans are interesting creatures. Many of them do not have conscience and don't understand the notion of ethics and "not doing of something because it's wrong to begin with". From my experience, esp. the people in US thinks that "if that's not illegal, then I can and will do this", which is wrong in many levels again.
Many European people are similar, but bigger governments and harsher justice system makes them more orderly, and happier in general. Yes, they can't carry guns, but they don't need to begin with. Yes, they can't own Cybertrucks, but they can walk or use an actually working mass transportation system to begin with.
Plus proper governments have checks and balances. A government can't rip people off like corporations for services most of the time. Many of the things Americans are afraid of (social health services for everyone) makes life more just and tolerable for all parts of the population.
Big government is not a bad thing, and uncontrollable government is. We're entering the era of "corporate pleasing uncontrollable governments", and this will be fun in a tragic way.
The employees of the government and those elected are not seen as the ruling class by progressives, but just normal people that have the qualifications and are employed to manage the government on behalf of the people.
It's important therefore that those elected and put in charge of the government are in a position where they don't have the power to benefit themselves or their friends/family, but are in a position where they can wield power to benefit the people who hired them for the job (their constituents), and that if they fail to do so, they can get replaced.
The modern political binary was originally constructed in the ashes of the French Revolution, as the ruling royalty, nobility and aristocracy recoiled in horror at the threat that masses of angry poor people now posed. The left wing thrived on personal liberty, tearing down hierarchies, pursuing "liberty, equality, fraternity". The right wing perceives social hierarchy as a foundational good, sees equality as anarchy and order (and respect for property) as far more important than freedom. For a century they experienced collective flashbacks to French Revolutionaries burning fine art for firewood in an occupied chateau.
Notably, it has not been a straight line of Social Progress, nor a simple Hegelian dialectic, but a turbulent winding path between different forces of history that have left us with less or more personal liberty in various eras. But... well... you have to be very confused about what they actually believe now or historically to understand progressives or leftists as tyrants who demand hierarchy.
That confusion may come from listening to misinformation from anticommunists, a particular breed of conservative who for the past half century have asserted that ANY attempt to improve government or enhance equality was a Communist plot by people who earnestly wanted Soviet style rule. One of those anticommunists with a business empire, Charles Koch, funded basically all the institutions of the 'libertarian' movement, and later on much of the current GOP's brand of conservatism.
You've literally reversed the meaning of the term "progressive" by replacing it with the meaning of the term "oligarchic".
Progressives argue for less invasion by government in our personal lives, and less unequal distribution of wealth and power. They are specifically opposed to power being delivered to a ruling class.
> The problem isn't the money. The problem is the power
These are nearly inseparable in current (and frankly most past) societies. Pretending that they are not is a way of avoiding practical solutions to the problem of the distribution of power.
Separately, is it "rising tide lifts all boats" or "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" that drives the common person's progress? You seem confused which metaphor to apply while handwaving the discussion away.
The Luddites asked a similar question. The ultimate answer is that it doesn't matter that much who controls the means of production, as long as we have access to its fruits.
As long as manual labor is in the loop, the limits to productivity are fixed. Machines scale, humans don't. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about a cotton gin or a warehouse full of GPUs.
Separately, is it "rising tide lifts all boats" or "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" that drives the common person's progress? You seem confused which metaphor to apply while handwaving the discussion away.
I haven't invoked the "bootstrap" cliché here, have I? Just the boat thing. They make very different points.
Anyway, never mind the bootstraps: where'd you get the boots? Is there a shortage of boots?
There once was a shortage of boots, it's safe to say, but automation fixed that. Humans didn't, and couldn't, but machines did. Or more properly, humans building and using machines did.
That mattered a lot in communist places, we saw it fail. Same thing with most authoritarian regime today, it's a crap shoot. You simply can't entrust a small group with full control on the means of production and expect them to make it efficient, cheap, innovative, sustainable and affordable.
Apparently people who are not wealthy enough to buy a boat and afraid of drowning care about this a lot. Also, for whom the tide rises? Not for the data workers which label data for these systems for peanuts, or people who lose jobs because they can be replaced with AI, or Amazon drivers which are auto-fired by their in-car HAL9000 units which label behavior the way they see fit.
> The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.
So, the amount of money they have is much more important than everything else. That's greed, not wealth, but OK. I'm not feeling like dying on the hill of greedy people today.
> Money is how we allocate limited resources.
...and the wealthy people (you or I or others know) are accumulating amounts of it which they can't make good use of personally, I will argue.
> It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.
How will we make resources less limited? Recycling? Reducing population? Creating out of thin air?
Or, how will they become less necessary? Did we invent materials which are more durable and cheaper to produce, and do we start to sell it to people for less? I don't think so.
See, this is not a developing country problem. It's a developed country problem. Stellantis is selling inferior products for more money, while reducing workforce , closing factories, replacing metal parts with plastics, and CEO is taking $40MM as a bonus [0], and now he's apparently resigned after all that shenanigans.
So, no. Nobody is making things cheaper for people. Everybody is after the money to rise their own tides.
So, you're delusional. Nobody is thinking about your bank account that's true. This is why resources won't be less limited or less necessary. Because all the surplus is accumulating at people who are focused on their own bank accounts more than anything else.
We've already done it, as evidenced by the fact that you had the time and tools to write that screed. Your parents probably didn't, and your grandparents certainly didn't.
No, my parents had that. Instead, they were chatting on the phone. My grandparents already had that too. They just chatted at the hall in front of the house with their neighbors.
We don't have time. We are just deluding ourselves. While our lives are technologically better, and we live longer, our lives are not objectively healthier and happier.
Heck, my colleagues join teleconferences from home with their kid's voice at the background and drying clothes visible, only hidden by the Gaussian blur or fake background provided by the software.
How they have more time to do more things? They still work 8 hours a day, doing the occasional overtime.
Things have changed and evolved, but evolution and change doesn't always bring progress. We have progressed in other areas, but justice, life conditions and wealth are not in this list. I certainly can't buy a house just because I want one like my grandparents did, for example.
