In many cases someone will settle for a very low standard of living, and set aside a small amount to support family living in a country with a much lower cost of living.
Now, what is a low standard of living? We know that the world doesn’t have the resources to let everybody live like an average American. Sooner or later, resource usage has to be reduced. Everybody will have a very low standard of living unless we figure out how to live comfortably with less.
In objective terms the lifestyle framed as the American ideal is unsustainable and inequitable, but much of the material value of the lifestyle carries little value in relative terms for genuine well being. Planning the built environment, cooperating in the community and workplace, and sharing benefits and burdens across our lives, would allow us to achieve a very high standard of living for everyone at a much more reasonable material cost.
I am not understanding the general theme of your various comments in relation to one another.
To put it bluntly: if they shape society, is that no contribution?
With some struggling, workers could invest part of their wages but they live paycheck to paycheck, of course often also not entirely by their own choice.
Instead of asking everybody to save, money is pooled in billionaires who don’t struggle when they invest.
That creates an unfair power imbalance but workers could change everything with taxes if they suffered too much.
Billionaires shape society in their own interests, for unbounded accumulation of private wealth, generated from the labor of others, despite their not contributing any labor of their own, nor making any other contribution.
But they also supposedly earn less. My point is that there are options to save money. The problem is bigger than having to increase wages.
In many cases someone will settle for a very low standard of living, and set aside a small amount to support family living in a country with a much lower cost of living.
Now, what is a low standard of living? We know that the world doesn’t have the resources to let everybody live like an average American. Sooner or later, resource usage has to be reduced. Everybody will have a very low standard of living unless we figure out how to live comfortably with less.
In objective terms the lifestyle framed as the American ideal is unsustainable and inequitable, but much of the material value of the lifestyle carries little value in relative terms for genuine well being. Planning the built environment, cooperating in the community and workplace, and sharing benefits and burdens across our lives, would allow us to achieve a very high standard of living for everyone at a much more reasonable material cost.
I am not understanding the general theme of your various comments in relation to one another.
The theme is that I think that workers miss their opportunities when they frame the situation as a billionaire problem.
Fighting among ourselves for the crumbs left for us by those who pillage and hoard hardly seems the same as seizing the best opportunities.
Billionaires are the problem.
They hold all the power, but make no contribution. They shape society against the common interests of most of the population.
I prefer to think that billionaires are not the only ones who can bring an end to the infighting.
The population chooses to be shapen.
The population can choose differently, unless they reaffirm each other that only billionaires can create change.
Who claimed “only billionaires can create change?”
I figured because you wrote that they are the problem.
Extra comment for billionaire contributions.
To put it bluntly: if they shape society, is that no contribution?
With some struggling, workers could invest part of their wages but they live paycheck to paycheck, of course often also not entirely by their own choice.
Instead of asking everybody to save, money is pooled in billionaires who don’t struggle when they invest.
That creates an unfair power imbalance but workers could change everything with taxes if they suffered too much.
Billionaires shape society in their own interests, for unbounded accumulation of private wealth, generated from the labor of others, despite their not contributing any labor of their own, nor making any other contribution.