eli5 Keeping economics as a point of view, is a world possible without poor?
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Everything is relative so someone is always going to be poor in comparison to someone else. Even if everyone is paid the same in a communist way, there’ll be people who save and people who spend unnecessarily.
When you say ‘keeping economics as a point of view’ does that mean I can’t proppse political solutions?
I’d like to say yes but I’m stuck between yes and no because as far as I’m aware there’s always gonna be the line between the richest and poorest people even if the poorest person on earth is a billionaire.
Depends on what you mean by “poor”. Economics is about numbers, not words. There will always be some people with less access to resources than others. There will always be economic forces which enable those with more access to resources to benefit (beyond the resources themselve) from their “fortune”. So those with less access to resources (poor) will be disadvantaged by that circumstance, regardless of the details, measurements, or systems involved.
Whether the disadvantaged will be *further* disadvantaged, their access restricted even more, beyond the lack of access or resources alone, is not really an issue of economics, but politics. And I don’t mean a simplistic categorization of an economic or political system; neither capitalist nor socialist paradigms really have any major impact on these questions, nor does participatory democracy or autocratic alternatives. It is the details of policies and practices, not simply governmental but social, which either mitigate or amplify the inevitable economic inequality that is part and parcel with the real world.
So the short answer, as a wise man observed thousands of years ago, is that there will always be poor people. But whether poverty is self-reinforcing, and whether it is life threatening, is not something that can be kept within an “economics point of view”, but is theoretically possible.
a fair part of the world lives far better than they have a thousand years ago, with a far smaller fraction of destitutes.
yes, theres still far to go, but its definitely doable.
No. No matter how well off a society becomes, someone with less will always be viewed as poor. Humans are too diverse for every difference to be accounted and compensated for even if it were fiscally possible.
In a sort of Utopia, where everything is provided equally, there will still be issues of genetics and health that will create inequality. When money is no longer the issue, those with defects or health issues will become known as the poor.
So, if you made everyone the exact same and have them the exact same, each of their independent decisions would then create the division.
I don’t believe it’s possible to eliminate the poor without eliminating our own humanity. But, I’d love it if someone proves me wrong.
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