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?
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OP you really need to define this better. 10k USD in some countries is multiple times the average yearly wage. But let’s stick to the US so I can give you a real answer.
“What if we give everyone x money a day” it will lead to inflation, the actual amount doesn’t really matter. Whether 10k or a million a day it will cause inflation. Really like the USD, Euro, Pound you think of the ‘dollar’ as the big number and the ‘cent’ as the small number, but if you did what you’d propose the dollar would be seen more like the ‘cent’ like how some places (for instance Japan and the Yen) don’t really have a ‘cent’
*Note, there is a difference between OP’s suggestion and a universal basic income where everyone gets ‘enough’ to survive
As far as ‘middle class’ there really is no way to define that but based on your context yes it is possible for everyone to have ‘enough’ the problem comes down to for some people there will never be enough and they will bribe politicians to make sure the law works to give them even more
Ideally everyone gets the food, shelter, medical care, access to education and training, transportation. We should strive for a base line for all people. We don’t need rich people.
Even if you look at people working fast food jobs in America, they have a better life than most of the world. The poorest in the world don’t have to be so poor in order for the rich to have what they have (and rich here means anyone earning over $35,000/year). Most of the supply lines that wealthy country and wealthy people use don’t actually involve the countries where the poorest of the poor live.
But if we’re worried about the environment, the answer would be yes. In order to experience the lifestyle of an average American it would require about 20 more planets earths to exist. America alone (representing 4% of the world’s population) consumes about 20% of the world’s resources.
People who work at McDonald’s live a better life than kings did 200 years ago. So, the answer is that everyone can get richer but not everyone can be the richest.
There are some fields that are fundamentally very complicated but everyone has to interact with anyway, and thus everyone has an opinion about without that opinion being well grounded.
Economics is one of those. I would ask this on r/askscience or r/askeconomists if you want a well informed answer.
Preempting the inevitable assertion that economists have some conservative bias just because they think markets are a useful tool, economists in actuality vote disproportionately liberal.
If you want one that represents that view maybe check out Robert Reich’s YouTube channel, secretary of labor under bill clinton.
“There’s always a bigger fish”
There is a GREAT video I just watched that explained why this is a fallacy.
Basically. There are a ton of low skilled, shit jobs out there that nobody wants to do. So only the people who have no other options will do them.
The more we advance our technology and automation, the more of those jobs need not be done by humans, amd the dynamics may keep changing. Hard to say.
Poverty is a component of the current system to force people to do work that they wouldn’t otherwise do. If your choice is to shovel shit or starve, you shovel shit.
Work (usually) creates useful goods and services that are then traded around for other useful goods and services.
Capitalism does require poverty in order to maintain the distribution of production. Marx called it the reserve army of labor, but the same basic concept exists within so-called mainstream economics as the Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. The theoretical argument is that if unemployment gets too low, scarce goods get consumed too quickly and that causes inflation as buyers compete by bidding up prices.
Tons and tons of the comments in this thread contain the fallacy of the fixed pie. They are literally making the analogy “imagine there are 1000 beans.” This is immediately wrong because there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. When you cut down trees, turn it into lumber, and build a house, you have *created* value. There was zero houses and now there is one. You just increased the amount of wealth in the world. That house will also deteriorate over time and need repair. Its value will decline. The total value of wealth in the world is changing ever second of every day in millions of different ways.
Poverty and starvation is the natural state of humans. Some of us have benefited from a very slow, generations-long crawl up out of that. Unfortunately we’ve left a lot of debris in our wake, making poverty – in some places – worsen than it would have been in the past.
No one has to be poor, but everyone who has not been pushed or pulled up out of it will continue to be so. Those of us pushed up by our ancestors probably have an obligation to pull up those less genetically fortunate.
Though, i doubt we will ever be successful.
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