Just how bad is it?
The institute said that the typical British worker would be £4,000 per year better off if the productivity growth and wages of the UK had matched those of the US.
People dismiss the fact that China has raise 800M people out of poverty.
In China, things are looking up.
In the West, not so much.
by Listen2Wolff
12 comments
Honestly, the upper class in all western countries have it in for workers and spend all their time and effort to combat equality, worker’s rights and work:life balance. We can only grow as countries if we bring everyone along. That’s how we get rich. Not by increasing the wages of the CEO and normalizing the gig economy.
Relax, Brexit will fix it all. You will see! YOU ARE ALL GOING TO SEE!
The first increase to get out of poverty is easier than the second increase to keep it high.
When you are in poverty, people want/demand change, so governments are forced to act and people willing to do whatever they need to ensure their base needs (physiological and safety needs) are met, so they are willing to invest in time and money to make it happen
When the majority of the population are at a certain mid level of the Maslow hierarchy, everyone takes their foot off the gas and that’s when the decline happens. The upper class can shoot to the stars, the rest of us get pushed down as a result and whilst we aren’t pushed down into the poverty we were once in a decade/century ago, our relative needs are met less and less as the gains made deteriorate in relative terms and the proceeds of growth get funneled upwards as economic resources are used to fulfill self actualisation needs of a fourth yacht for a CEO rather than affordable housing.
This is why it was great for the western world in the late 1800s and China in the late 1900s – they were industrialising and making the “easy” first steps of taking people from absolute poverty to giving them decent housing, food security, modest access to luxury goods. Now they are both struggling with the ideology that got them there -we have entered (again) a gilded age of unfettered capitalism and China has a similar problem (they are far from communist these days, they just retain the authoritarian trappings for social control purposes)
Solutions are hard to find, especially when policy is limited to only one country and not global in scope. Wealth redistribution (or more accurately, stopping wealth being funneled upwards whilst security and physiological needs aren’t met) is hard to get past an entrenched elite, especially as we have designed global systems that allow them to escape the worst excesses. We need a coordinated approach and that requires a social revolution on a scale rarely seen (the late 1800s/early 1900s were the closest we have seen, where the elite actually gave up some wealth/power as a compromise to prevent an even greater loss of wealth/power if socialist movements took root.
Whilst I very much doubt we will ever see an actual functional socialist economy in our lifetime, the outside pressure of socialist elements (crazy notions like free/affordable housing, no starvation level poverty etc) may keep enough resources to placate the masses and keep them squalor, just to prevent an actual overthrow of elites by a pissed off and impoverished majority (and we have seen rumblings of that with Brexit and MAGA, even if it just replaced an ineffectual and indifferent liberal elite with an even more unconstrained economic libertarian/socially reactionary elite)
Wait… is this news? You mean BREXIT had the reverse affect? Who would have thought pissing off all your neighbors by ostracizing them, blaming them, and disrupting trade with them wouldn’t be good? The Conservative Party doesn’t have any answers as usual? Does this have anything to do with their version of Trump running things for awhile? Boy, Russia sure is taking the piss out if everyone with their manipulations, aren’t they?
So with a population of 1.4B there were 800M living in poverty. Thats over 50%, and that’s based on current population so that’s probably low.
“Ooh, China so nice. Half population no longer live like starving kids in commercial. West so bad, China so good. Why no be more like China?”
Compared to the US, Australia and New Zealand most European countries are not rich.
You can’t really compare:
Developing country becomes more somewhat more developed country
To
Developed country becomes even more developed country
You approach a limit and its becomes far more costly and expensive to effect change
Looking at the housing market, you’d think everyone was absolutely loaded.
Crazy how distorted things have become since 2008
Niesr wants government to increase tax-free threshold and undo the 2-child benefit cap in order to decrease poverty.
Could work but doing it leaves less money for government to spend on welfare, infrastructure, public sector etc.
In other words, you have to find alternative ways to raise money if you want these new schemes to have a positive effect, like, maybe raise VAT or wealth taxes with a combination of cuts to infrastructure, welfare and/or by freezing tax bands effectively bringing more people into the 40% tax. Also, less government revenue could mean NHS/pensions, Universal Credit budgets squeeze.
So if these recommendations are implemented without other taxes or macroeconomic factors such as real growth, foreign investment to offset them it’ll end even worse for UK.
Didn’t the coalition government in early 2010s do something similar but introduced austerity measures as a counterweight? Not sure it helped much but maybe I’m focusing too much on the negatives.
Pretty sure there’s parts of China where people still shit in a hut outside. Im not 100% certain they’ve been brought out of poverty.
*People dismiss the fact that China has raise 800M people out of poverty.* After killing maybe 80 million and with western jobs and technology. China has done almost nothing…on its own.
Oh and that figure I have seen is about 300-400 million, the rest still starve or actually leave the cities and go back to farm fishing.
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