You’re getting awful personal.
I guess the only thing I’d want to say in response is that when I first brought up first class and the rest of it, I was talking about people who do all those things routinely. Not people who budget certain things. Not people who get upgraded once in a while.
I think that was pretty clear, and your attempt to twist it around is pretty lame.
Of course, that’s not what you said though. That is, perhaps, what you meant to say, but you said:
I’m twisting nothing here, merely addressing what you actually wrote, as opposed to what you might have thought you were righting. Sorry if pointing this out to you is ‘lame’, but there you have it.
Of course, no one is really rich who needs to work for a living, which most people still do.
I hate the “we’re all rich compared to 1515” argument because wealth and poverty are relative to what exists, not what used to exist or what may exist. I doubt many of us feel poor because we can’t go to Mars for our vacation. In 1960 I didn’t feel poor because I didn’t have a computer, a microwave, and a DVD player.
So the question shouldn’t be “will everyone be rich” because by our standards most will be. It should be “in the future will everyone be closer to the richest of us?” Now that is far from certain.
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In 1960 I didn’t feel poor because I didn’t have a computer, a microwave, and a DVD player.
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No…you probably never even thought about the fact you had access to clean food and water and electricity either. The point isn’t the specific technology that you didn’t know existed, but your relative access to things like entertainment or basics like food, water or medical care.
None of these things makes you ‘rich’, of course, but comparing what life was like decades or centuries ago shows a definite progression (upwards IMHO) for the poor, and is useful in discussing the question being asked.
What standards are you using for who is or isn’t ‘rich’, if not our own standards? 
Agreed. As long as we have a hierarchical society you’ll always have ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, even if we get beyond the need or use for money or other symbols used to denote wealth. Kirk will still be the captain and those poor red shirt bastards are still going to be beamed down to die in every episode.
Right. As long as we have some people who say, “I think we should do X, Y and Z” and other people who agree with the idea and make it so, then we have something akin to wealth and poverty, even if we’ve done away with capitalism and money and private ownership of the means of production.
We have a guy who organizes and leads the creation of what would be a multi-trillion dollar (if only we still used primitive concepts like money) expedition to Alpha Centauri, and other people say, “Great idea cheif! I’ll get the stasis pods, you get the fusion generators, you guys get the magnetic resonance chambers…” while other people sit around and watch holovision and no one gives a shit what they think, then we have a leader and followers and the irrelevant.
But we can have a guy who decides we’re going to Alpha Centauri, and gathers together the people and materials to make it happen, and still not declare that the leader-guy owns the ship, or the materials to make the ship, or the people who worked on the ship. Captain Kirk controls the Enterprise, but he doesn’t own it, just like a neolithic chieftain might control the tribe’s longboat and decide when to go out hunting or raiding, but he doesn’t own the longboat, the tribe owns it. Or more precisely they don’t apply the concept of ownership to goods like the longboat or the fields or the river or the blackberry bramble. Is the chief rich compared to the teenage hunter? Maybe? I mean, his clothes are probably better, he has more tattoos, he has more wives, everyone listens to him, nobody shoves him out of the way when he’s standing by the fire pit. But calling all those things his personal wealth is probably not the best way to think about his advantages, just like a General who commands a division isn’t considered rich while a 2nd Lieutenant who commands a platoon is poor.
But in 1961 I lived across the road from a Congolese Army camp which did not have water - they came to us for it. There we were rich with a servant and a chauffeur. Not to mention anyone driving around Leopoldville saw plenty of poor people. Hell, we had water but not clean water. I was plenty aware, thanks.
In 1900 the average woman had to spend hours doing wash. The somewhat richer woman hired a servant who spend hours doing wash. Today everyone has a washer doing wash. Today rich people have people driving them around. IN 50 years we’ll have robots driving us around. But when everyone has a self driving car (maybe with rust and dents) is everyone rich? Doubt it.
There will still be outliers, but what is the standard deviation? Today it is quite big on the more income side. Will the distribution be tighter? if it is, we probably won’t be having the income inequality discussion as often.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
But in 1961 I lived across the road from a Congolese Army camp which did not have water - they came to us for it. There we were rich with a servant and a chauffeur. Not to mention anyone driving around Leopoldville saw plenty of poor people. Hell, we had water but not clean water. I was plenty aware, thanks.
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Well, that’s good that you are aware…most people who post in these kinds of threads weren’t or aren’t and take that sort of thing for granted, never realizing that it actually represents a type of wealth. But the point I was making was that it’s not about specific inventions or gadgets we have today that we didn’t have 500 years ago, but the relative access to to things like entertainment, food and water, sanitation and all of that. Our entire society…the society of the world really…is much, much richer today than it was 500 years ago…or in 1961 when you were a kid.
Probably not, because when that happens it will simply be a natural progression and people will take it for granted…sort of like they take for granted clean food and water, or having even the shittiest car on the road to drive about in or clothes that aren’t rags even though they come from Goodwill. But if you asked that average woman in the 1900’s whether she would be rich if she had devices that would save her hours and hours of work every day, I’d guess she’d be all over that, and the ‘rich’ folks of her day would probably be jealous of things most take for granted today.
But if there is still a gap of any kind people will still complain about it and be discontent with it, regardless of if the gap is huge or small. Look at today. There are huge differences between the ‘rich’ of today and the ‘rich’ of the gilded age (since Cecil recently did an article on this), the biggest one being that there are a lot more ‘rich’ today, by any definition, and that the relative quality of live between the ‘poor’ today and the ‘poor’ of that age is huge, IMHO because as a society we are so very much richer today than then.
100 years from now I have no doubt that this trend will continue and the ‘poor’ of that day might live as well as the middle class does today, and have access to many things that even the ‘rich’ today would envy. But these class differences will still be with us and folks on the intergalatic-net on the future StraightDope will still be arguing about this and probably bringing up the same points because the ‘poor’ in India at that time only have access to one beat up and shitty flying car and can only get the old brain mods (freaking version 7 only, with only the 5 orders of magnitude enhancements…what a bitch!), etc etc. And the richest person will finally cross the $1 trillion mark, have an estate in orbit and a country palace on Mars and the Moon, the dirty bastard!
In access to gadgets, yes. Personally I’m a lot richer than my family was. But my father never got to go to college because of the Depression. Despite that he had a pretty good middle class job, we lived in a great neighborhood, we never worried about the mortgage, and and while money was sometimes tight it was an issue. Today someone like him would never be given a chance, and we’d be relatively speaking a lot poorer.
In the '50s there were rich people and there were poor people, but so many (white) people did fine that inequality was not something we talked a lot about. The rich were rich but for the most part they weren’t greedy bastards, trying to screw workers to get a bigger salary. For the most part.
Wealth and poverty are relative, not absolute terms. That person would be comparing herself to her neighbors - she wouldn’t feel so rich if told they’d all have washers also. A guy today working two jobs to keep up is not going to feel rich even if he has a smartphone.
The reason I talked about outliers on the top was that we as a society try to cut off outliers on the bottom as much as possible, through food stamps, housing allowances, and other things those on the right hate. That’s why this comes up. It is not “we’re lucky we can afford to keep people from starving” it is “those slackers are so rich (relative to 150 years ago) let’s cut their food stamps.”
Discussions of income inequality are so prevalent because income inequality is. If the gains since the recession got distributed more evenly than it did, we’d likely not be having this discussion.
There is a difference between being able to do something once and dealing with the consequences and doing it all the time without consequences.
Maid service? There is a difference between a once a week cleaning service and a true 5 day a week maid. Eating out? McDonalds, yes. Spending $100 on dinner for two without thinking much about it, no.
A good metric can be seen from the “what would you do with $1,000” threads. For some people it would be life altering. For some people it would be highly life improving. For some people it would be a non-event.
Yeah, exactly.