#Capitalism is a cancer, and the deeper you dive into the rabbit hole, the more deception, lies, and ploys do you find at the core of the system that dominates our modern world. Recently I stumbled upon this great research paper of Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel), called "Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century"
(You can read the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169?via%3Dihub#ab005)

These two gentlemen methodically and rationally take apart the entire hoax about #capitalism having historically improved living standards for the people under its influence, demasking it as a blatant lie.

-----------------------------

"As for the impact of capitalism on human welfare: data on wages, human height and mortality indicate that the rise and expansion of the capitalist world-system from circa 1500 caused a decline in nutritional standards and health outcomes. Recovery from this prolonged condition of crisis occurred only recently: the late 19th century in Northwest Europe and the mid-20th century in the periphery.

If one starts from the assumption that extreme poverty is the natural state of humanity, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in extreme poverty today. However, if extreme poverty is a sign of severe social dislocation, relatively rare under normal conditions, then it should concern us that - despite many instances of progress since the middle of the 20th century - such dislocation remains so prevalent under contemporary capitalism. Depending on the subsistence basket one uses to measure poverty, as of 2008, between 200 million and 1.21 billion people live in extreme poverty[...]."

----------------------------

As the paper proves and going by many other indicators and research done on #capitalism, the system doesn't view poverty as problem to be solved, but rather as a desired state of people and countries.

#Colonialism (now #neocolonialism) was built on the premise of a few rich and powerful exploiting aborigines and their land to enrich themselves while catering to a lowly and vulgar superiority complex. This continues all the way into modern times, where colonialists (now in the shape of multi-national corporations) extort resources from economically-weaker countries to feed their shareholders. For colonialism poverty plays a key role to keep the local population on a tight leash. After all, those who struggle to make a living have no time to think of rising against their oppressors, right?

But, this isn't limited to international relations either.

Take the US, the land of the free which embraces the capitalist mindset the most, for example (of course the same applies to all other capitalist countries but sadly the US is furthest down the line when it comes to implementing the worst aspects of capitalism).

Here you have companies artificially keeping a certain percentage of citizens poor because those people can then be used as leverage against the working citizens. #Poverty is being weaponized as a threat and as a state to be frowned upon. But, because of the social shunning and capitalist outlet labeling poverty as proof of "laziness", the 38 million poor Americans (figure according to US Government for 2021) cannot fight back. They're busy trying to survive. In a land that can fork over 900 billion dollars for its annual defense budget.
And to make clear that the US isn't an outlier with this either, Germany (my current homeland) has 17 million poor people (according to the Paritätische Sozialverband) - a country that has no problem spending billions to subsidize big corporations during Covid.

As such, you can see that capitalists and the governments steered by them have no interest in resolving the issue of poverty. Instead, they artificially create it to use it as a tool to extort ever more money from other countries and their own citizens.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I feel addressing poverty is a very important topic because the poor (of which I used to be part at some points of my life) don't have enough of a voice in media, politics, or anywhere else.

#SocialInequality #Social #systemchange #exploitation #corporategreed #capitalists #science #research #society

#Climatecrisis and #SocialInequality Simple Solutions - Part 2: Communalize land (no private ownership) and use this to enforce massive renaturation (forests and swamps), remove sealing of soil where it's not absolutely necessary, avail housing for everyone, and regulate agriculture so that 'Living alongside nature" becomes the guiding principle instead of the current "Exploit the land for all it has."

#Climatecrisis and #SocialInequality Simple Solutions - Part 1: Disown billionaires and millionaires, and distribute their properties to the needy while using their assets to fix some of the mess they produced.

@Padjo

That's what capitalists want and what they use their private-owned media for. Spread doubt and misinformation so that people don't band together against #SocialInequality or to fight #climatecrisis, because that would inevitably lead to their demise. Instead they distract by starting meaningless, dumb cultural wars over nothing.

The Empire Strikes Back 🤷‍♂️

@dmacphee

@tmstreet

Yes, people can help climate change by adjusting their habits. But there's something else we can do on an individual level; something that is far more important.

Band together and change our current system.

We won't solve any #ClimateCrisis or #socialinequality under capitalist rule.

The first step towards getting the necessary, drastic changes started would be for the people to take back control over their lives. We cannot change anything if we don't have full control over things. And we need to change a lot. Really a lot.

The idea that #climatechange will be fixed by people eating less meat and driving less SUVs/trucks sounds nice, but is nothing but capitalist propaganda.

As long as a small group of people is allowed to own such ridiculous amounts of money (power) and assets that they can virtually influence any policymaking, they'll steadily sabotage any attempt to fix things. Out of sheer interest to keep their power.

On top of that, these people also count as the biggest CO² emitters on this planet.

@breadandcircuses

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/the-subtle-morality-of-kissing-rich?r=1onbpq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email “As more and more of the nation’s income and wealth is siphoned off to the top, an increasing number of people are kissing the derrieres of the wealthy in order to raise money for worthy causes.” #Inequity #SocialInequality #RobertReich

Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Benedikt Preuß & Pasquale G. Frisina have won the 2022 Patrick J. Welch Award of the Association for Social Economics for their paper "The Intersections of Pandemic, Public Policy and Social Inequality in the United States".

https://www.socialpolicydynamics.de/blog/post/?blog=31#blog31

Full paper link (open access) included in the blog post.

#Pandemic #SocialInequality #PublicPolicy #SocialEconomics

A rise in self-service technologies may cause a decline in our sense of community
#Technology #Retail #Inequality #Shopping #SocialCapital #Automation #Robots #SocialInequality #WorkplaceAutomation #SelfServiceTechnologies #Community #Robots
https://the-14.com/a-rise-in-self-service-technologies-may-cause-a-decline-in-our-sense-of-community/

critical response by Roland Paulsen to Hans Rosling with main criticisms being that national averages disregard social inequalities within countries, selective use of GDP and lifespan as indicators for prosperity and health, and problematic message that life under capitalism just gets better and better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoIcsj9ysvs

here is the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

/via Ida Flik

#Data #DataVis #PublicHealth #SocialInequality #CriticalStatistics #CriticalDataStudies #CriticalDataVis

Jezebel: Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth: Sit Tight! The UN Says Gender Equality Still 300 Years Away! https://jezebel.com/sit-tight-the-un-says-gender-equality-still-300-years-1850198131 #Jezebel #academicdisciplines #antc3b3nioguterres #reproductivehealth #socialinequality #genderequality #organizations #genderstudies #unitednations #socialissues #population #midwifery #guterres #articles #gender

6 hours to go! The RC28 Summer Conference Call for Papers closes at 11:59 p.m. EST TONIGHT! Join us in Ann Arbor Aug. 14-17. Get the details: https://inequalitydynamics.umich.edu/rc28/call/ #RC28CID #socialscience #socialinequality #academicmastodon #sociology @sociology @academicchatter

Today's the day! The RC28 Summer Conference Call for Papers closes at 11:59 p.m. EST TONIGHT! Join us in Ann Arbor Aug. 14-17. Get the details: https://inequalitydynamics.umich.edu/rc28/call/ #RC28CID #socialscience #socialinequality #academicmastodon #sociology @sociology @academicchatter

Attn social stratification and social mobility scholars! The RC28 Summer Conference Call for Papers closes this Friday, March 3. Join us in Ann Arbor Aug. 14-17. Get the details:
https://www.inequalitydynamics.umich.edu/rc28/call/ @sociology #RC28CID #socialscience #socialinequality #academicmastodon #sociology

#Introduction repost due to move to science.social. I am a sociologist at #GESIS, specifically working on #wealth and #wealthinequality (https://www.gesis.org/projekte/parentalwealth/home), the broader topics of #socialinequality and #familysociology and recently also on #contraception.

#capitalism #billionaires #inequality #socialinequality

The carbon neutral future of work is having a short walk to a shared office space and having in-person meetings.

We need to organise our (working) lives, so that they require less resources, not more. Having a chat doesn’t require anything else than people being in the same space. The shift towards #remotework fails at keeping it that way and instead creates structures that worsen the #climatecrisis and #socialinequality.

🔔 #JustPublished: Economic and social inequalities in Europe in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic

➡️ Download the report https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/publications/report/2023/economic-and-social-inequalities-in-europe-in-the-aftermath-of-the-covid-19-pandemic

#COVID19 #SocialInequality #IncomeInequality #HealthInequality #PromotingSocialCohesion #WorkingConditions

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/eurofound/status/1618156844572098560

📢Check out what can be done with @ISSP_survey
data on #socialinequality! #ISSP_research #data!
Great article by Ondrej Buchel, Ruud Luijkx (@ruudluijkx) and
and Peter Achterberg (@_PEtErT) published in @Journal_PoPs:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12707

RT @ISSP_survey@twitter.com

Ondrej Buchel, @ruudluijkx@twitter.com and @_PEtErT@twitter.com use ISSP #socialinequality #data in their article published in @Journal_PoPs@twitter.com :

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.12707

#ISSP_research

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/ISSP_survey/status/1613460896457662464

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#inequality #socialinequality