cause if everyone was getting 10k USD per day and was rich the value of money would be gone ofc
we have people working fastfood jobs or driving taxis barely making ends meet, could the world still function if everyone lived a comfortable life? maybe everyone was at least middle class?
In: 245
I was just talking to someone who mentioned that when she checked her carbon footprint, it said that if everyone lived the way she did we would need 12 Earths. She’s just an average American. So if that’s true I would say that the only reason I can enjoy the luxuries I have is because most people around the world live in abject poverty.
>the value of money would be gone
No? Thats a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works
It sounds great on paper, but think about it. Why should a doctor who spent years and years going to medical school and worked his butt off be paid the same as someone who picks up trash in the park?
Why should the hard workers not be compensated for their hard work? If everyone had the same work ethic then yeah sure, but that’s just not the case.
What is broke?
The standards of living are super high compared to how people lived 100 years ago.
Will there always be people with significantly less material wealt than the average? Will there always be some jobs less desirable than others?
ELI5
You have 10 friends for dinner, 9 of them give the other 1 all of their food except a one bean.
The 1 with all the food says “sorry we just need you to eat one bean so the world can sustain itself”
–
The reality is: the vast majority of the world lives in abject poverty while the very small minority has insane wealth comparitively. Often on the backs of the most poor.
We don’t need broke people for the world to function. We need broke people for the world to function with the Indulgence we want
we don’t, a billionaire contributes nothing more to society than a multi-millionaire. There’s absolutely nothing useful someone can do with over a billion $s. And yet we have the highest number of billionaires we’ve ever had in modern history, and at the same time the highest level of poverty since over a century ago.
Because the way our society is structured means that richer people have more avenues to get even richer, whereas poorer people face more risks of getting poorer. For example:
* if you are rich, you can put some of your income into investments, which will make you money without you having to do anything
* if you are extremely wealthy, you can use your wealth to promote politicians who will cut your taxes and fund propaganda campaigns to convince ordinary people that this is a good thing
* if you are poor, you are likely to live in substandard housing in an area with lots of pollution and crime, and are therefore more likely to develop health problems or become a victim of crime
> cause if everyone was getting 10k USD per day
Well, clearly that would be an extremely disruptive thing to do, but there have been plenty of more serious proposals to share out wealth. Some have even been implemented to a limited extent (e.g. progressive taxation). There are two fundamental problems, though. First, people who are currently wealthy generally want to protect their privileged position and prevent something like this from happening. Second, how do you structure this society so that it works effectively and defends itself from the emergence of a new wealthy class?
I’d point out that the main objection people seem to be making in this thread – that if everyone were paid the same, nobody would become a doctor – is completely unrealistic. Many prestigious, highly educated professions are actually not that well paid, particularly for the people in the lower echelons. There are even some fields in which it’s normal for people to start off by doing unpaid internships. But people still go into them because they want the challenge, the presitge, and the interesting, varied work. It would likely be more difficult to get people to go into dangerous and unpleasant jobs. But there are various possible ways to deal with this. You could have a job-sharing system where some people get especially desriable jobs for part of the year and undesirable ones for the rest of the time. Or you could vary the material rewards that people get from work a bit – just not to the point where some people earn many thousands of times as much as others.
If everyone has 100 million dollars, then absolutely nobody is rich. It just simply does not work like that. You can’t give everyone money and expect it to hold any meaning or value.
What you are probably imagining is full blown socialism. No more need for money, we just share and distribute resources as equally as possible.
Here’s the thing… thus far we have not yet successfully implemented a system that can do that. It has failed every time we have tried.
All of the problems you can find with our current systems… guess what, they don’t go away if you completely change the system. Corruption, greed, inefficiency… it’s all still there.
At this time, it is probably likely that the world can’t really function without the rich. Some people just want more than others, and they’re going to get it whether we have capitalism or socialism.
I didn’t quite answer the question though, sorry. We don’t need “broke” for it to work, but that is sort of a relative thing.
So, the current economic system requires ”an underclass” — broke people. It requires this because cheap labour is a necessity to ensure that people can get products (cheap, and in large quantities) to meet demand.
We don’t necessarily need broke people for the world to function, but for the current economic system an underclass is needed. As for percentages, I can’t give you accurate guesses really – but the majority of people need to be relatively poor to support the vast wealth of the upper classes, and a minority need to live in dire (or absolute) poverty to support the relatively poor. It’s like a pyramid.
If everyone had a comfortable life, the world would still function – society would continue ticking along – but it would look very different to the society we understand today both economically and culturally.
Of course it’s not necessary. But people like power, so we structure society in hierarchical orders and deem them meritocracy. There are quite a few board games that illustrate this and Monopoly was literally designed to show that profiteering is unsustainable. There’s a reason economies crash regularly.
Latest Answers