this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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What are "Decent Living Standards?"
I'd bet that they're at least one step down from what the usual Westerner is accustomed to.
I bet you are basing your concept of the "usual" Westerner on your own experience, and you might be surprised at how the actual average person lives even in the "West".
But to answer your question, the article defines decent living standards as:
Nutritious food is unavailable to an alarming number of Americans, transit is a mess and almost exclusively car-centered, healthcare and education are severely stratified along economic conditions, and almost everything on that list is a commodity. The USA has sanitation systems almost everywhere, but that's just because rich poop and poor poop all smells like poop. Wherever the wealthy can isolate their own sanitation, they do.
Out of that the US lacks health care for all, and it lacks transit pretty much everywhere outside of the large cities. Even the cities pretty much have nothing that reaches all the way out to the suburbs.
Where I live, you have to have a car to have a decent quality of life. People give up their homes before they give up their cars. So transportation needs to be addressed in order to have the quality of life promised. Most of the places that are food insecure are all about politics and bad people blocking food resources rather than the food not being available.
That's exactly what the article proposed:
'Drawing on recent empirical evidence, we show that ending poverty and ensuring decent living standards (DLS) for all, with a full range of necessary goods and services (a standard that approximately 80% of the world population presently does not achieve) can be provisioned for a projected population of 8.5 billion people in 2050 with around 30% of existing productive capacity, depending on our assumptions about distribution and technological deployment. "
So if you and everyone are willing to live on 30% less "money", worldwide poverty would be eliminated.
That is definitely not what is presented in what you quoted.
Out of our current productive capabilities (how much money is "created" if you want), we would only need 30% of it to get 8.5 billion people to a "decent living standard".
That isnt a 30% reduction, it's only needing to make 30% of what we already are doing.
That's the same thing. The paper is arguing against the need to increase production vs redistribution of what is currently produced.
Where does that 30% come from? They are explicitly saying that their analysis isn't about increasing production of anything. Redistribution means taking away from the rich developed population to give to the poor. They said take 30% and redistribute it. If you are on Lemmy, that includes you.
That is not my interpretation on the paper. It's not taking 30% and spreading it. It's we only ever needed to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed for everyone to reach those standards.
"Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments."
I don't understand what you mean by those two sentences. They seem to be in conflict with each other.
You have 100 coins. To say we need to be making 30% of our total being reasonably distributed means you now have only 70 coins.
"leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.”
You had 100 coins and now you have 70. You can still buy luxuries but 30% less than what you had before it was redistributed.
I think my sticking point is that it's not 30 of your coins, necessarily. This is probably where I'm going wrong, but I might only have 100 coins, but there's a multitude of people that have 1,000 coins, and some still that have 10,000 coins.
I feel like I'm muddling up production/living standards and just plain wealth, but not every individual would need to give 30%. There would be a total amount equaling 30% that is re-allocated.
The article was about production, not wealth. While Bezos certainly uses 1000x the production compared to a regular person, he doesn't use the 1Billion times that his wealth represents. He doesn't eat 1B cheeseburgers every day. So while you'd get more out of the 30% of extremely wealthy, it wouldn't be proportional to their wealth and there's only .1% of the population that's in that category.
Jesus christ dude give it a rest.
Easterners have running water, they have cell phones, they make trash that goes to landfills, they also have A/C systems, they drive cars
When I read "West", I read "developed world".
Japan, South Korea, Tawain, etc, are as developed as the West. Most of China is now too, but there are billions more that aren't developed.
"Global north" is probably a better term to describe level of development. "West" also includes a cultural component.
Westerners eat meat everyday, nearly everyone drives cars everywhere, they buy heaps of cheap clothes and electronics made by slave or near-slave labor, they drink coffee and eat chocolate grown by the same. They go on expensive, polluting and disruptive globetrotting vacations. You think all that and more will stick around in a more equitable society?
I'm sorry I wasn't inclusive enough in my chastising, Commissar. It'll be the same story for them, too.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-017-1650-0
If we take all the type of living standards into consideration from all over the world
Then I guess the median living standards would be the living standards of the middle class people of countries like Indian, Brazil and all (the developing countries basically)