On the back of an article pointing out how the well known "starving artist" profession now includes a "starving YouTube artist" category you make an interesting semi-sequitur into the social ill of economic inequality.

The thing is. The world is getting better for pretty much everybody. What is happening is that for the certain differing quantiles the world is not getting better at the same rate. For some quantiles in feels like you are not keeping up with the Jones's and you'd be right, you are in fact very much not keeping up with the Jones's. As global wealth increases who then are the losers and who are the winners relatively speaking?

I know that's hard to believe, but it is only (and I used the emphasis advisedly) the very very poor wherever they live and the lower middle classes in the developed nations that are being left behind. The famous elephant curve† on inequality explains it visually far better than I could.

(I know in my case that I have only maintained my living standard with help from family and for me this is a source of constant shame. I haven't been able to afford to take my kid on holiday in years. If anything goes wrong with the car I can't afford to fix it. Am I to blame though? You judge. I refuse to do many sorts of jobs that I consider too repetitive or boring. I am completing a PhD which at the moment is basically more money out than money coming in. I do this because I want to spend my life doing something I value (philosophy/coding). I have no idea how representative my case is. All the major tech companies are in my country, I could turn my back on philosophy but I choose not to.)

Steven Pinker in his new book Enlightenment Now uses data, stats, charts, diagrams, info-graphics to show that by any reasonable measure life is getting significantly better all the time for vast swathes of the world's population. We in the developed world need to remind ourselves that illiteracy is still a thing in some countries. Child mortality is still a thing. And so on.

But, and this is important, growing economic inequality is a very real social ill. Pinker dismisses economic inequality because globally so much good is being done. This ignores the daily hardship of 100s of millions. It ignores the fact that as the world gets wealthier there'll be _less_ people doing better relatively as they move up the food chain so to speak. If things keep going the way they are going we are going to have a class of 100 billionaires while some people still live without proper sanitation and running water. The situation is already untenable and disgusting, it's only going to get more so.

Jordan Peterson recognizes that social and economic inequality of a truly vicious social problem, one that predates capitalism. (There's a name for these truly intractable problems, it's not coming to me just now.) We need to figure out collectively how to architect a society that isn't punitively restrictive on people's ambitions to succeed but that still manages to redistribute wealth in a manner that is fair for all.

I sympathize with your lot Doreen. For a certain type of person who is unwilling to "play the game" society as it is architected means you do something you hate and keep your head above water or you follow your heart and drown a little bit more every day.

† https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2170721... (this was the first link for the search term <elephant curve inequality> so you could and should look for other sources of info.)