Agree; also this post doesn’t seem to address e.g. the fact that the relative sizes of the social classes used to be quite different, and that today there exists a sizeable middle class rather than society being much more starkly divided into the poor vs. the wealthy.
[EDIT: replaced Claude’s estimate of social class sizes with the following:]
E.g. this paper cites economist Thomas Piketty’s research as the original source, shows the share of property owned by the middle 40% of the population in Britain going from 10% to 40% between 1780 and 2015, with the top 10% of the population had 85-90% of the property up to around 1940.
Piketty (2020) has also been able to provide more distributional detail for the two most recent centuries, as shown in his Figure 5.4, reproduced here with permission (Piketty, 2020, p. 195). His estimates show that 1780–1800 saw a slight decline (from 89% to 86%) in the wealth proportion of the top 10% of private property holders, and an equivalent significant rise (from 10% to 13%) in the wealth held by the ‘middle 40%’, with the bottom 50% remaining at little more than 1% [...]
From [1910], however, the wealth of the top 10% began a gradual (1910–42) and then precipitate (1942–90) decline. By 1990, their share of national wealth had been almost cut in half to 48%, while the share of the ‘patrimonial middle class’ – the next 40% – had risen to 42%. Even the lowest 50% now had a 10% share in the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% had ‘only’ 18%.
So even if you buy the argument that there’s a meaningful sense in which poverty hasn’t been eliminated, the fraction of people who are middle class rather than poor has gone drastically up. And maybe a UBI won’t be able to push poverty down to 0%, just as past progress hasn’t, but it could quite possibly contribute another significant reduction.
I wasn’t sure what search term to use to find a good source on this but Claude gave me this:
I… wish people wouldn’t do this? Or, like, maybe you should ask Claude for the search terms to use, but going to a grounded source seems pretty important to staying grounded.
Agree that a real source would be better but I think a Claude-source is better than nothing at all, especially in a case where the point is just to get the rough magnitudes and the details don’t need to be exact. I’m not sure if editing my comment to just the first paragraph would be an improvement.
We’ve all seen the reports on how LLMs get good results on standardized exams and tests of general knowledge, so on this kind of question I’d presume it to be basically reliable (again, as long as we’re talking just rough estimates and magnitudes, and take care not to ask leading questions). If my comment had instead included my own Fermi calculation or a random Wikipedia link, I’m guessing that that would have been more accepted, even though I doubt it would have been more reliable.
Excellent point. But these changes are much less than the 100x wealth increase, which implies that there is a very strong poverty-inducing force, it’s just not completely negating progress.
Hmm, I don’t feel like I have a good intuition for what a 100x wealth increase should look like.
On the one hand, you could imagine a 100x wealth increase that didn’t grow the size of the middle class at all, and just preserved existing proportions, so that 90% of the wealth still remained with the top 10%.
I imagine you mean something like “if the poorest 10% of 1700 had their wealth go up by 100x, then they should still be much better off than the poorest 10% of today are now”. Then an obvious question is, how much has the wealth of the poorest 10% of today gone up relative to the poorest 10% of 1700?
This source, which says it’s maintained by the University of Sheffield, mentions that “During the eighteenth century wages could be as low as two or three pounds per year for a domestic servant, plus food, lodging and clothing. A beggar would normally hope to be given between a farthing and two pence in alms, while a parish pauper could hope for a weekly pension of between a few pence and a few shillings”.
One farthing and two pennies is apparently 9/960ths of a pound, and at the same time it mentions that A man’s suit could easily cost £8, while even the uniform of a child looked after by the Foundling Hospital cost £1 12s. 10 ½d. So (rounding the cost of that uniform down to one pound to avoid dealing with old British units), that implies that a beggar would have needed to beg 106 years to afford one child’s uniform, assuming that they didn’t spend any of that money on anything else.
I do find that a little hard to believe—what did the beggars wear, then? (Maybe the number was supposed to be weekly not yearly?) But even if we assume that the beggar had 100x the income implied here, it seems to me plausible to assume that ownership of a smartphone alone—that many homeless people of today do own—would represent a 100x increase in wealth compared to that, given the complex international supply networks and high-end chip manufacturing that goes into building a smartphone.
Agree; also this post doesn’t seem to address e.g. the fact that the relative sizes of the social classes used to be quite different, and that today there exists a sizeable middle class rather than society being much more starkly divided into the poor vs. the wealthy.
[EDIT: replaced Claude’s estimate of social class sizes with the following:]
E.g. this paper cites economist Thomas Piketty’s research as the original source, shows the share of property owned by the middle 40% of the population in Britain going from 10% to 40% between 1780 and 2015, with the top 10% of the population had 85-90% of the property up to around 1940.
So even if you buy the argument that there’s a meaningful sense in which poverty hasn’t been eliminated, the fraction of people who are middle class rather than poor has gone drastically up. And maybe a UBI won’t be able to push poverty down to 0%, just as past progress hasn’t, but it could quite possibly contribute another significant reduction.
I… wish people wouldn’t do this? Or, like, maybe you should ask Claude for the search terms to use, but going to a grounded source seems pretty important to staying grounded.
Agree that a real source would be better but I think a Claude-source is better than nothing at all, especially in a case where the point is just to get the rough magnitudes and the details don’t need to be exact. I’m not sure if editing my comment to just the first paragraph would be an improvement.
We’ve all seen the reports on how LLMs get good results on standardized exams and tests of general knowledge, so on this kind of question I’d presume it to be basically reliable (again, as long as we’re talking just rough estimates and magnitudes, and take care not to ask leading questions). If my comment had instead included my own Fermi calculation or a random Wikipedia link, I’m guessing that that would have been more accepted, even though I doubt it would have been more reliable.
Excellent point. But these changes are much less than the 100x wealth increase, which implies that there is a very strong poverty-inducing force, it’s just not completely negating progress.
Hmm, I don’t feel like I have a good intuition for what a 100x wealth increase should look like.
On the one hand, you could imagine a 100x wealth increase that didn’t grow the size of the middle class at all, and just preserved existing proportions, so that 90% of the wealth still remained with the top 10%.
I imagine you mean something like “if the poorest 10% of 1700 had their wealth go up by 100x, then they should still be much better off than the poorest 10% of today are now”. Then an obvious question is, how much has the wealth of the poorest 10% of today gone up relative to the poorest 10% of 1700?
This source, which says it’s maintained by the University of Sheffield, mentions that “During the eighteenth century wages could be as low as two or three pounds per year for a domestic servant, plus food, lodging and clothing. A beggar would normally hope to be given between a farthing and two pence in alms, while a parish pauper could hope for a weekly pension of between a few pence and a few shillings”.
One farthing and two pennies is apparently 9/960ths of a pound, and at the same time it mentions that A man’s suit could easily cost £8, while even the uniform of a child looked after by the Foundling Hospital cost £1 12s. 10 ½d. So (rounding the cost of that uniform down to one pound to avoid dealing with old British units), that implies that a beggar would have needed to beg 106 years to afford one child’s uniform, assuming that they didn’t spend any of that money on anything else.
I do find that a little hard to believe—what did the beggars wear, then? (Maybe the number was supposed to be weekly not yearly?) But even if we assume that the beggar had 100x the income implied here, it seems to me plausible to assume that ownership of a smartphone alone—that many homeless people of today do own—would represent a 100x increase in wealth compared to that, given the complex international supply networks and high-end chip manufacturing that goes into building a smartphone.