It’s amazing to me how many political philosophies can be boiled down to: “Hey, you - thank your fucking stars you live in the present day. Imagine if you were a serf. That would suck, right? Now that you understand - get back to work.”
I mean, it’s generally great for the r/neoliberal crowd because they’re primarily anxious pmc libs with email jobs. Yes, things are good for specifically them even if they have to step over the homeless or you never know when another black swan type event might just wipe them out (hence the anxiety). So, when you have commies reminding them that there is another way of life and a reactionary CHUD wave threatening to overwhelm them but you actually want things to stay them same (cause you’re currently benefitting) and you went through the ideological car wash and came out self-styled neolib… well, your only option is “actually things are good mr homeless man, maybe you should try a drop shipping business, I’ll make sure to vote for people who will implement a land value tax and lax zoning laws so you can have a house now please excuse me”
Damn are we really backsliding so fast that the neolibs have to compare things to literally 1800 to make themselves look good?
They always had to, in order to imply growth under capitalism is always expected to happen.
Their shoddy made-up data for anything before 1970 is so they can go “look how America was in 1900 vs now. All those 3rd world countries are now actually doing better than America was then, so this means clearly we don’t need to change any ways or think of our relationship to exploiting the 3rd world since they’ll get where we are now eventually”.
They also like to conveniently ignore that the poverty line of $2 a day is too low (this $2 is actually already adjusted to buying power, and sets the global poverty level to how well someone in the USA lives on $2 a day). And that China drove most of that growth out of poverty.
Jason Hickle (degrowth economist, not sure if he’s socialist but he seems cool) wrote a bunch about these neoliberal poverty statistics lies on his blog
so the neolibs are taking credit for all these metrics since 1800? someone do one for the ascension of neoliberalism in the 60s-70s until now
Wait, so, according to that graph there’s a decent chunk of upper middle income people and a tiny portion of high income people that still can’t afford a healthy diet? :agony-minion:
Wonder if that’s a relative global thing? Like is a minimum wage employee in the UK or Canada counted as “high income”?
That’s probably it, I’m a dummy and didn’t notice the data is for the whole world, not the US. I thought those numbers felt off, but nothing about amerikkka surprises me anymore :shrug-outta-hecks:
Still, :yea: . Humanity collectively produces enough food to feed everyone, and this is what capitalism does with that. Not even living in the more well off countries guarantees you a basic healthy diet. Sick and monstrous system.
That doesn’t make sense to me. A healthy diet should be a fixed price… right? What are these people spending money on that isn’t food?
I casually dated a rich girl for a couple years who told me she spent around $600 a month on food because she almost exclusively ate take out. I mentioned that I usually expensed out my groceries to $150-200 a month because rent and bills sucked up the majority and it looked like it physically pained her to try and visualize it.
Spending 51% of your household income on food alone is also considered “affordable”
“Noooo capitalism is good, the world is better than it was 223 years ago you tankie fucks” :wojak-nooo: