All animals are equal, but you see, pigs are more equal than other animals!

Many of these articles are being written, probably because there's a paying customer. The late Soviet Union had an army of publicists whose job was to dismiss real and growing concerns with "but we just had a record crop and milk production is up".

Lots of western academics have seemingly started writing for Pravda these days. They are (deliberately?) missing the point: human perception of economic wellbeing is relative, not absolute. Antibiotics and running water are nice, but they are expected bare minimum.

Upvoted for discussion, but this is a pretty junky article with opinions more than facts. Most of the facts (wow look at that per capita wealth increase!) make me question if the author understands basic math. Wow, the average went up! I wonder why he chose not to show the median and standard deviation?

One main point seems to be that the middle class is actually rich if you add up our home values and social security benefits. Those things aren’t liquid like AMZN or META stock, nor can I use them as collateral for loans to buy a yacht or manipulate elections (I guess I could get deeper in debt and risk losing my house with a HELOC).

Quote from the article: “capital taxation should target income rather than wealth or inheritances”.

Does the author not understand that billionaires have dozens of loopholes performed by dozens of accountants and lawyers to make them have minimal income on paper?