Comment

Comment by JuniperMesos

If you raise people from poverty, they'll want to spend the money they now have as non-poor-people on things like taking airplane flights, cars, and eating beef, because those now no-longer-impoverished people consider access to those things to be part of their good quality of life. In particular all of these things happened to over a billion people in China as China has gotten less impoverished over the past half-century. Another way of looking at it is that causing there to be fewer flights, beef, and fossil fuel car journeys is literally the same thing as making most people poorer - the only way to make there be fewer of those things is to make them drastically more expensive so that even people who are generally getting richer (like, for instance, the average person in China) find it harder to afford them.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton