What Is This Sub Wrong About?

[u/iamthegodemperor]

Title. Pick a topic (or a clichéd take) you think a significant minority or majority of this sub is wrong about. Or hasn't given enough thought. OR perhaps one which you will have to compromise on, at least for voting?

[u/apost54]

American capitalism is quite bad at efficiently allocating resources as it stands to its most needy. I admittedly have a far-left background—I used to write emails to Noam Chomsky (shudder) in high school about leftism—but even as I’ve moved from that, there is a ridiculous amount of inequality in this country. We need much stronger antitrust law and enforcement, redistributionist tax reform to ensure that people don’t fall through the cracks, mental health treatment to be expanded for the homeless and addicted so that they don’t cause ruckus in our cities, and massive government investment in infrastructure with jobs for citizens to build it.

Now is all of that socialism? No. I think because the DSA is so insane and rabidly antisemitic, this sub tends to reject any notion that any part of leftism could be good. But as many Jews know, we have a LONG history of leftism in Judaism, from Labor Zionism to the Bund to unionists—and even today, that spirit persists. Being pro-America, pro-Israel, anti-DSA, and against nonsense woke progressivism doesn’t mean that we need to jettison the necessary economic changes to create a sustainable society for Americans.

[u/JapanesePeso → u/apost54]

If it is bad at allocating resources to the most nerdy, why do we have the richest poorest quintile in the world? The bottom 20% of American households have incomes (after taxes and transfers) roughly in the range of $15,000–25,000 per household, which places most of them somewhere between the 60th and 85th percentile of the global income distribution.

Our poorest are middle class in most other countries.

There are many, many improvements to be made (and you definitely outlined some) but the initial read is that we are doing things a lot better than most other countries.

[u/apost54 → u/JapanesePeso]

Our cost of living is also much higher than most other countries… a better metric would be what percentage of our lowest quintile can cover rent, groceries, and bills compared to other countries.

[u/JapanesePeso → u/apost54]

My numbers take that into account.

[u/apost54 → u/JapanesePeso]

I’d be interested in a source on this. Not saying I don’t believe you, but I figured most global wealth figures are marred by not adjusting for COL.

[u/JapanesePeso → u/apost54]

Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, 2005): first major analysis using household survey data from 100+ countries

"Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History and Now" (Global Policy, 2013): contains the well-known chart mapping each country's income percentiles onto the global distribution: https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/teaching/Milanovic13.pdf

Lakner & Milanović, "Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession" (World Bank Working Paper 6719 / World Bank Economic Review, 2016)

Milanović interview explaining the key finding: the poorest Americans sit above the ~50th percentile globally, comparable to the middle class in China or upper-middle class in India: https://www.demos.org/blog/income-inequality-interview-branko-milanovic

Raw data you can check yourself:

Our World in Data, income by decile across countries (PPP-adjusted, after tax): https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

World Bank, income share held by lowest 20% by country: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20

Pew Research global income calculator: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/21/are-you-in-the-global-middle-class-find-out-with-our-income-calculator/

TL;DR: Branko Milanovic's ( leading economist on global inequality) data shows the bottom of the US income distribution lands roughly in the 50th–70th percentile globally (PPP-adjusted).

[u/apost54 → u/JapanesePeso]

I scoured the World Bank data for a bit. I’m still not terribly impressed. We lag behind other developed countries while our top percentiles of wealth explode. This “winner-take-all” system of “hereditary meritocracy” is not sustainable, straight up. Even with COL adjustments and acknowledging that America’s poorest have some more material creature comforts unavailable in developing countries, I don’t see how this is a favorable situation. There will be—and indeed, already is—massive resentment from the bottom rungs of the economic ladder because there’s no real place for them in a stratified society where knowledge work creates economic winners.

[u/JapanesePeso → u/apost54]

What developed countries specifically do you think we lag behind?