instead of bombing the crap out of many of these poorer countries, making refugees and migrants, one should invest in those countries to improve them; people should not run away to a better place, but they should (at least try to) build up their own countries, given half a chance
I think a simple way of comparing living standard can be cost of major consumable goods/ median wages. Like how many kg of pork or beef a US median wage can afford vs how many kg a Nigeria median wage can afford; Or how many month of median wage is enough for a average car. The living standard contrast is very significant and real
Income inequality increases exponentially as a result of industrialization and even more so with the creation/invention of high-technology and robotics, because those things serve to leverage the productivity of the talented and the skilled, but do little or nothing to enhance the productivity of the untalented/unskilled. Within agrarian economies, the most skilled farmer might be 50% more productive than the unskilled farmer. However, a highly talentd, highly skilled entrepreneur or manager in a high-tech economy (think a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates) can easily be 10,000 times more productive than a laborer.
Okay, point taken. But here's the question, are the returns on increased productivity justified to the extent that we notice in our current era? I mean these returns are exponentially large for these tech entrepreneurs and managers; to an extent where you can label them as a destabilizing force in our global economy.
@@ZainKhan-sm8gr Clearly, your answer (and my answer) to that question represents a personal 'value judgment'. The answer of the 'cold-hearted' free market appears to be "yes".
I understand this to be the case between industrialized and pre-industrialized nations. But within nations, we expect that technology doesn't only scale the capacities of the talented, but lowers the barrier of entry across the board. If this is not the case, the concern is whether or not we are losing that potential productivity for whatever reasons- and if we aren't how can we actually show that the vast majority can't reduce that exponential variable no matter what (I can get on board with an exponent being in this equation, but there is still a matter of what that number is). The statement that technology is doing little to enhance the untalented/unskilled is a bit strong because they, too, provide market signals to make their work easier. But this also ties into the matter that the percentage of 'unskilled' in a population needs to remain somewhat constant for income inequality to exacerbate using this concept. One can counter and say that 'skill' is a relative term and that the average of a population can be defined to be 'unskilled' no matter what, this definition leaves me further skeptical that a person can be something like a million times more productive than the average if the average skill can also increase, given the scope of finite demand. I'm reserving judgment of whether a mixture of skill and technology is the primary driver of income inequality or wealth inequality within a society. It very well might be the case in certain specific societies that have a bunch of other interacting rules and components. But to me, it's a complicated value that is a reflection of varying combinations of market signals which are an even more complicated reflection of the entities that generate those signals (namely non-ideal humans with limited information and imperfect reasoning and bodies of those humans (governments, corporations, etc) of varying motives).
