It’s not poverty though. If you can afford a car, an iPhone, laptop, plenty of food to eat, TV, refrigerator, washer and dryer, and all sorts of other toys and time saving appliances, you’re not in poverty by any global or historical standards.
You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty.
> You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty.
But this sentence contains no reference to how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer. It contains a description of how Y could be better off if Y had more.
If inequality was eliminated by making it so no one had access to safe schools, it would not solve the problem at all.
If you don't want to call the problem poverty, whatever, but it's definitely not inequality.
I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment.
"how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above you in the hierarchy of A (A is whatever measure you want, usually its financial wealth or social status). This involuntary comparison allows you to derive your relative position, and this is a biologically stressful activity when you are toward the bottom of the hierarchy. This constant reflexive update is not great for people in a highly unequal society because its a constant stress inducer and has direct physical and mental health implications that bleed over into things like the political sphere.
Both "pointy" hierarchies and flattened hierarchies are bad. Flattened hierarchies are when we are all equal, and thus society stagnates. Pointy hierarchies are the traditional kings at the top, serfs at the bottom. These inevitably collapse at some point for multitudes of reasons. There is probably a happy, more stable medium. Societies that are becoming unequal have a gradient trending toward the pointy hierarchy state.
Poverty is a specific threshold of material wealth, and is related, but ultimately orthogonal to the discussion.
I don't think there's any escaping the stressors of deep hierarchies. Social status is a scarce commodity, and will continue to be scarce regardless of wealth. I think the better solution is to proscribe severe punishment/suffering for violating the peace a la Japan. Classical conditioning works on people too.
