For that matter, why is the OP only comparing to Africa and Asia, and only the poor. How does poverty in the U.S. compare to that in Sweden or Norway? Why do the wealthy in the U.S. need so much when the richest people in Africa get by with so much less?
Why is supply-side economics and growing wealth inequality bad if living standards are better all ar
No-one has really picked up on this, so let me be the one to say it: this is a very misleading, if not outright wrong view.
If you can afford to buy your own apartment here in Shanghai (where average prices are among the highest in the world*), you can probably afford a luxury car with the change; and accordingly there are many such cars on the roads.
And no-one would call themselves upper-middle class if they couldn’t send their children to one of the high schools that are among the best performing in the world, and subsequently send them to the US or Europe for their Bachelor’s. It’s common to follow that up with an MBA too.
Shanghai is something of an outlier to the whole of China, but similar to other first-tier and even second-tier cities.
Don’t get me wrong; you see a heck of a lot more poverty in Shanghai than most US cities too. I’m not trying to say they are better off on average.
But no, there is a significant middle class here and they have many of the trappings of wealth you are familiar with. It’s not comparable to being poor in the US.
- As long as we’re talking within Shanghai proper e.g. within the subway map. It’s pretty sprawling, and some figures include houses built tens of kilometres from the centre.
I haven’t been to China in over a decade, so maybe I’m out of date, but I don’t know that it’s fair to compare Shanghai to the US in a discussion of China. While the city may house billions of people, they’re still a minority of the total population and are, probably, in the top 10% compared to the rest of the country.
Shanghai was very similar to Tokyo, and the middle class there seemed pretty equivalent to the middle class of Japan. But the middle class of a different Chinese city might be more equivalent to the middle class of Mexico. And some of the people in the countryside could probably be time traveled to 1500 AD and barely notice the difference.
tens of millions*
This is exactly backwards, a rich society such as the US or western europe can afford a bit of redistribution. However, poor societies need as much wealth creation as possible in order alleviate the worst poverty. The problem with poor nations is not an unequal distribution of wealth but an overall lack of wealth.
Well how big a group is “upper middle class”?
I think if the OP had said “equivalent to low- to mid- middle class Chinese quality of life”, I would have shrugged and though “Yeah…I guess…in some ways that’s true. No need for comment”.
But it was upper midde class.
I had to respond to it because it smacked of a misconception of what developing countries’ economies are like. As though if you went to a city in china wearing real Levi’s you’d be among the 1%.
But no; there are millions of wealthy people here now by whatever objective standard you like. I’ll bet the absolute number of middle class defined in international standards of purchasing power is comparable to Europe.
Also 10 years away is a lot actually; house prices have more than doubled within that time, for example.
Agree about the countryside, and some cities, but it’s not just Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong that are the outliers any more. Tianjin, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Guangzhou et al are not as internationally well-known, but have vast numbers of “new money” too.
Point of order! Unless it’s in physical cash then that $7T is indeed being invested and managed. By the banks. The banks don’t let those trillions go unused: they have to pay interest on that money. And to earn the money to pay that interest they lend out money and charge interest or employ people to provide services for which they garner fees.
We should divorce this argument from ‘supply side economics’, as it’s debatable whether supply-side changes are always the correct thing to do.
Let’s just say in general that we have two options: One keeps the income of the poor the same, and also keeps the income of the wealthy the same. The other increases the income of the poor by 5% per year, but the income of the rich by 10% per year. Which policy should we choose?
And it should be pointed out that in terms of material goods capitalism has worked out better for the poor than any other system. That Heritage link is not wrong - the median poor person in America is better off than the global average. The poverty line in the U.S. is more than twice the global average income. That’s an astounding success for capitalism.
However, the poor also tend to live in bad neighborhoods plagued with violence, and the schools they send their kids to suck. I would rather be middle class in India than be a poor person in inner-city Detroit, even if the middle class in India has a lower income.
But note that these are not failures of capitalism or of wealth redistribution - they are failures of government. They are the failures of teacher’s unions who refuse to reform bad schools or fire bad teachers. They are the failures of civic governments who let their public sector unions extort them into bleeding off the money that could have been used for policing and hiring better teachers. They are the failures of a culture that enshrines the soft bigotry of low expectations, that rewards single mothers for having children but locks up young men in prison for smoking a joint. They are the failures of a ‘drug war’ which has made it more lucrative for your poor people to enter a life of crime than to get a good education. They are the failures of well-meaning progressives of the 1950’s and 1960’s who thought it would be a good idea to build vast swaths of public housing projects, which subsequently turned into ghettoes and left inner city poor people without role models, without job opportunities, and without hope.
The major problems facing the poor in America today will not be solved by wealth redistribution. These problems can only be fixed through extensive reforms to the education system, community policing, elimination of the drug war, and other political changes.