Stats for nerds
3recommend
8mentions
4people
2011–2022years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A marvelous book comparing income and wealth across centuries is The Haves and the Have-Nots - A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic.
One way to compare wealth is to see how many people's labor an individual could purchase. It differs across time and countries (labor is cheap in India currently for example). This book is a careful historic look by an economist - using evidence from literature, history, etc. Branko uses a variety of ways to compare individuals across history.
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/branko-milanovic/the-haves...
- There are a number of arguments, most are too extensive to fit concisely in an HN comment. Pointers to some might be useful.
At the extreme you have the "utility monster" or "freedom monster" problem. Existential Comics explores both graphically and entertainingly:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/8
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259
Much of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations actually addresses the issues of inequality and the dynamic between wealth and power: "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." That's one of the shortest and most direct sentences in a book given to long and complex writing.
The Spirit Level is a book-length exploration of the problems of inequality and highly-unequal societies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level_(book)
https://www.worldcat.org/title/spirit-level-why-equality-is-...
Thomas Picketty's works (Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology) fit into this discussion.
Oxfam have a set of suggestions as well, notably Branko Milanovic's The Haves and the Have-Nots:
https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/three-must-read-b...
- The fantastic book[1] The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality by Branko Milanovic points out that the 3 most-important correlated determinants of financial success in life are, in order:
1. Geography (which country you're born in)
2. Parents' finances
3. Your gender
These 3 explain the vast majority of the variance in income between people. Knowing these 3 facts about a person allows you to predict their income with high accuracy (small 90% confidence interval).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Haves-Have-Nots-Idiosyncratic-History...
- Branko Milanovic is one of my favorite researchers.
His "Elephant Curve" is well-know. His book "The Haves and the Have-Nots" is excellent.
I used his dataset to replicate his results to show inequality in an interactive form here:
- A fantastic overview of poverty across the history of humanity comes in a short book: The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality Paperback by economist Branko Milanovic, in which he compares wealth and poverty across millennia.
And for a serious philosophical treatment about poverty, informed by numerous statistics comes in a long treatise World Poverty and Human Rights by philosopher Thomas W. Pogge who among other things points out the fudging of numbers by the international community. For example creating seeming amelioration of extreme world poverty by redefining malnutrition (how long it needs to persist for it to count), caloric deficit (for sedentary lifestyle rather than a hardworking farmer), redefining success (proportion of humanity rather than absolute numbers), etc. Link to relevant time in a talk by Dr. Pogge about this subject: https://youtu.be/Dsl9cyaIn-g?t=382
- I strongly recommend Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality as an overview of poverty across millennia.
