Poverty is always relative to how other humans live, it has no inherent meaning. And inequality is rising at accelerating speeds, that's just a fact. You can dress it up however you want, changes nothing.
This article discusses American poverty though. In the US, isn’t inequality wider now than it was 40 years ago? Every real wage chart I’ve seen suggests as much.
You'd need a chart that shows the different percentiles of wages.
A single line of average real wages wouldn't do much, and also doesn't actually show any decline.
There's an infamous chart that seems to show that real wages lag behind productivity. Alas, that chart uses different measures of inflation for the two lines in that chart. Thus it's completely useless.
You can have a look at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG for the 'Share of Labour Compensation in GDP': if you are only interested in inequality, you don't need to worry about inflation, you can just divide total nominal labour income by total nominal gdp to cancel out the price level.
The labour share of GDP in the US has been remarkably stable. FRED has data since 1950, and the labour share has stayed between 58% to 65% in that time.
(If you want to dig deeper: the capital share of GDP has been mostly constant. It's the share that goes to land that has increased.)
In any case, as I said above, the average income from labour has done just fine. It's the difference between workers that might be interesting to look at: eg CEO vs burger flipper.
That’s a great chart. I’ve always assumed that the major drive behind the diverging percentile lines was capital capturing most of our productivity gains. But 64% to 59% is really not all that large.
CEO vs burger flipper seems to be the lion’s share of the difference.
I once assisted a photographer who spent weeks, in some cases months planning a single photo, scouting locations etc, then hauled her gear (big format film) there, and took the photo which more or less turned out as she imagined. After spending time in the darkroom and then post-processing the scans on her giant Mac, that is ^^ But she knew what exact photo she wanted, and how to get it, and then "just" worked her ass off to do just that.
It's not what I like doing -- even if I had it in me -- because I like finding things, and also looking at things nobody thought of, until there was a photo of them; but it still deeply impressed me. It really was as if she was painting with light.
I agree that it doesn't come by itself, it takes will and dedication and work... I don't think we can take for granted that everything will go by itself. I'm quite pessimistic as to the actual outcomes, to be honest -- but not because I think it's impossible, but I think we're in the process of kinda failing at it. We're certainly not excelling.
> As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. [...] This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> It's much better to be in "poverty" today than 50 years ago.
And if there was something justice and fair treatment, it would be EVEN better. So that argument is worth exactly nothing.