Linux at NASDAQ OMX

Posted Oct 31, 2010 13:23 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Linux at NASDAQ OMX by kleptog
Parent article: Linux at NASDAQ OMX

On average everyone is wealthier.

In the last 30 years? In the US and UK this is only true because the rich have got so much richer: the rest of us have barely gained a thing.

Linux at NASDAQ OMX

Posted Nov 4, 2010 10:39 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't understand this view, though I've heard it many times. Do you really believe that the average person in the U.S. is no better off than 30 years ago? Were personal computers, safer automobiles, cell phones, the Internet, and portable music players really so minor in improving people's lives that their benefit was negated entirely? I see a lot of ways in which the lower and middle classes of developed countries are better off today and few if any ways they are worse. Can you elaborate on why your perspective is so radically different from mine?

---linuxrocks123

poverty gap

Posted Nov 6, 2010 16:57 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

There is a growing dollar gap between rich and poor. In many industrialised countries the rich have proportionally more money than they did thirty years ago. This worries some people a lot. Even if they happen to be rich, it could be worrying because they sense injustice, or because they fear violent insurrection.

However you and I are interested in the real economy, which is not concerned with money, but with the goods and services which we obtain in exchange for our labour. So we see a different picture. Everybody has better goods and services than thirty years ago, and the richest can afford only very slightly better toys and nicer services than the poor, despite their bulging wallets. Ordinary working people today may easily obtain things that were beyond the reach of the richest people alive a few decades go.

Yet a third way to look at it is happiness. People seem to be not much happier than previous decades, and wealth or poverty seem to have little impact so long as a person is not so very poor that they lack food and shelter and fear for their life.