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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 9797951" data-attributes="member: 42856">Thing is, those individual situations are not showing at a more macro level, so for every family that lived worse due to the change, another family lived much better than before, so it is more than compensating overall. It is of course of no comfort to the family that is living worse, but that's why societies, in general, have developped public policies to mitigate the widening of inqualities.And despite what it seems, it is somewhat working. Here is a graphical representation of the part of the income of the 1% wealthiest in the total revenue by country, over time:[ATTACH=full]421930[/ATTACH]Inequalities between the wealthy class and the average population decreased worldwide from 1870 (before the graph, but trust me) and roughly 1975. Then it rebounded slightly, more in the US (dark blue line) than elsewhere, though.Focusing on average households, the same observation can be made: even excluding the top 10% of wages, the average, inflation-adjusted wage increased by 43,7% between 1979 and now in the US according to the economic policy institute. Being a measurement of wages and not overall revenue, it isn't affect by the capital gains that explains a lot of the rebound of the dark blue line in the above graphic.It doesn't mean nobody in Detroit suffered, it means that on average, workers got wealthier, so any observation of a single family being negatively affected is more than compensated, overall, by another family getting richer at the same time (ie, for one affected family in Detroit, there is a family that is living much better in the Silicon Valley).What makes the situation difficult, and which colors one's perception, is that this situation might not be mitigated by social safety nets to ensure that the mass of wealth created by technology is shared equally. A problem to which different countries have responded with different intensity, and different means:[ATTACH=full]421936[/ATTACH]This graphs shows that social spending as percentage of GDP has the US in the second highest position when it comes to net social security spending, yet ranks at 23rd position in public welfare spending. Basically, it shows that while there is a lot of collective wealth used for social security, it has the widest gap between public spending and net spending, the difference being tax breaks with a social purpose. Of course, the latter doesn't help the poorest (who pays very little taxes in the first place) but helps first and foremost those who benefit from the evolution in the job market (not only are you getting richer, but public policies helps you save money for your retirement).Basically, the technological progress since the 1950s didn't make anyone suffer in Detroit. It made people richer overall, and the focus of redistributive policies allowed some people in Detroit to suffer. Cum hoc, send non propter hoc. The pie got bigger, but some families in Detroit were denied a part of the pie.(There is even a possibility that even the suffering families got better, but since poverty relies on a comparison to the mean, the feeling of living worse got widespread even if the situation objectively stayed close to what it was before. If everyone around gets richer, staying at the same level will make one feel disclassed, for no longer being part of the middle class.)Sure, and public welfare policies is the way to adopt wealth-creating technologies while protecting those who will be affected. Approaching things thoughtfully might require a political approach and has no link with technology adoption (you can get large inequalities without a lot of tech, though you need obviously some tech to allow for inequalities to happen -- hunter-gatherers were notoriously equal).But being a proponent of technology (or an enemy) has no bearing on whether individual countries will choose to mitigate and manage the change. The rational approach is to boost wealth-increasing techs and mitigating policies so the pie gets bigger and nobody's share of the pie gets smaller. The opposite stance sounds like fighting the cure for cancer because only a few will be able to afford it -- the "right" answer to me is not to stop cancer research, but to invent the NHS.The pie-sharing outcome can range from Gini-ideal situations of 1 (everything belong to a single citizen) or 0 (everyone gets the exact same share) or any situation in-between. It is disconnected to technological progress and dependant only on our collective choices on how to cut the pie (in democratic countries).</blockquote>

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