But at the same time this shouldn't preclude a conversation about why, given the massively increased pool of wealth that has been created in the last few decades, the poor and middle classes are expected not to share in it.
It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" then I think it's only natural to feel cheated if the answer is "be happy with what you have and stop asking questions!"
What specific goods and services do you believe have become available, but not for the poor and middle classes? Can you name a few?
It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!"
Luckily, the answer is "to the poor and middle class".
Since the subject is "where does the money go", how does that graph look if the changes in income are absolute rather than percentage changes of a power-law shaped pre-existing income distribution?
As you would be the first to agree though, wealth increases need not be zero sum. For the most part, growth in developing and middle income countries isn't at the expense of wealthier countries at all.
On the other hand, rising costs of London property - referenced in the article as a key concern of "millenials" - is pretty close to a zero sum game, and it's generally not poor and middle class people, and certainly not the lower deciles of world income, that are winning it.
Actually I'm trying to change the subject from money. Who cares about green pieces of paper multiplied by chained CPI [1]? What matters is goods and services.
As noted above I don't think you can name a single good and service that the bottom has less of, beyond maybe obsolete goods like land lines or investments like "shares in BRK.A" or "land in central London".
The graph I link to demonstrates things are definitively not zero sum - virtually everyone has experienced gains.
[1] Chained CPI is meaningless over time, since the basket of goods changes every year. Not to mention the biggest contributors to CPI growth - health care and education - are not hedonically adjusted.
But the subject of the article is younger low/middle income people in wealthy countries like Britain now getting a raw deal relative to older asset-rich people because the young people spend most of their incomes on maintaining a level of property older people paid for at much lower cost (in terms of real goods or as a proportion of income), whilst simultaneously having more of their income diverted to the older, often asset-rich people's rising-in-real-terms public pensions. Your graph of world income changes does not demonstrate that British public policies aimed at boosting house prices and transferring a greater proportion of national income to today's pensioners aren't [close to] a zero sum game stacked against the young, or that the chief beneficiaries of this increase in economic rent captured by older generations and the asset-rich in Britain are the global poor, which obviously isn't true.
It might be open to question how many young people with much less living space than previous generations actually are worse off given that thanks to economic development they'll live longer and have access to digital goods that didn't exist and more opportunity to avoid expensive housing through increased relocation opportunity than their elders did at the same age. But then again, if I wanted a graph which indicates a large fraction of people in countries like Britain who would be considered low-mid income by national standards are actually worse off, I could always use yours...
If you scroll up, you'll see I was responding to a person who said there is a problem if the new wealth is not going to the poorest economies.
If you are simply advocating in favor of ending left wing policies like exclusionary zoning and buying elderly votes with cash taken from the young, I agree with you.
As I read their post, they were actually saying something more akin to "it's perfectly fair for low and middle income people in rich countries to complain about policy regimes limiting their ability to share in domestic productivity gains even though there are much poorer people overseas, since those policy regimes aren't actually anything to do with those poorer people"[1]
Which didn't strike me as the sort of sentiment you'd tend to disagree with either.
[1]by implication they're arguing they'd be less bothered if their purchasing power wasn't growing due to outsourcing competing with their job, since at least that'd be helping poorer people out.
But at the same time this shouldn't preclude a conversation about why, given the massively increased pool of wealth that has been created in the last few decades, the poor and middle classes are expected not to share in it.
It's definitely healthy for me to recognise that I as a middle class westerner live better than almost everyone in a developing economy but if the answer to "where has all the new wealth gone?" is not "too the poorest economies!" then I think it's only natural to feel cheated if the answer is "be happy with what you have and stop asking questions!"