I'm going to post a chart you've seen a million times before (the myth of wage stagnation)

[Recursion]

114. I live and work in a city where 10,000 people die from waterborne illnesses every year

and I make a ton less than I could in the private sector doing some embedded systems work for an NGO that is trying to distribute workable water filters to cut that down to 6,000 per year (that's a pie-in-the sky goal, sadly, and I don't think we're going to reach it this decade). So I get impatient with Americans (whose median income is about twice what I make, and whose median income is about 10 times the median income in Mumbai, which is a "rich" city by Indian standards) complaining about having simply maintained over the past 40 years a lifestyle that is an impossible dream for about 80% of the world. I just want to scream "You have clean ****ing water! Consolidate that. Make sure you'll have that in 20 years. Because that's not a given." And then particularly to hear it from the segment of America that has been and is still doing the best (that is, the white men who are the only ones who saw stagnant incomes over the past 40 years) is particularly galling. (Think about that for a second: white men have had stagnant incomes for 40 years and white women haven't. White women still only make 80% of what white men do.)

This is a resource-constrained world, and the only resources that aren't particularly constrained are human labor and ingenuity. And there's about 4 billion hard-working, ingenious people in the developing world who are going to do everything they can over the next generation to claw back the absurd amount of other resources that we have hoarded to ourselves. And we're buying the shirts they make because they're $4 cheaper at WalMart. Well, there's a lot of things I blame WalMart for, but not that. Consumerism is America's religion, and it's probably going to get a wake-up call pretty soon.

But the 4 billion hard-working, ingenious people in the developing world are in for a surprise, too, because as they develop their wages go up, like ours did -- and, yes, the past 30 years have seen the largest reduction in world inequality in human history. More people have left poverty in that time than at any time in history. That's great. But as Chinese and Indian and Bangladeshi workers earn more money, the day when a robot is cheaper than they are gets closer, just like it did in the US (again: the US manufactures more today than ever before -- and we do it without those expensive employees).

I don't think there are easy answers to this, and I get impatient with people who preach them.