Walt Disney had the same attitude during the 30's. I'm reading his bio (it's crazy how similar he was to Steve Jobs) and he's been quoted as saying the Depression was the best thing that ever happened to their studio because not only did the revenues of their cartoons keep going up (unlike the rest of the industry) but also they were able to scoop up tons of talent that hit rough times at other studios.
Disney's studio did great work during this time and even made a hit song that became an anthem for the Depression, "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf".
I recently talked to an IT engineer at a mid-size financial services company downtown, and he complained that his budget is being slashed every year, as he's expected to do more with less. He's over 40 and sees no chance of getting hired at one of these sexy startups run by 20-somethings and funded by VCs who are younger than him.
That seems like an odd "complaint," since, if you go work for one of those startups, you're going to be expected to do even more with even less. And that will probably be the case whether it's a sexy or boring startup, run by 20-somethings or 40-somethings.
Besides the weird age comment, I also thought it odd how an "IT engineer" (is that what guys in the IT support business are calling themselves these days?) is trotted out as a member of the "tech industry" whose life isn't joy and might identify with the OWS people. (Personally I consider the "tech industry" to be tech companies and their most important employees, aka smart CEOs, programmers, good designers, engineers, and inventors (sure I'm leaving some out). (Sometimes all being one person.)) The startup I'm at doesn't need "IT engineers", it needs "designgineers" just like almost everyone else.
Cisco laid off some thousands of people, but who were those people? Turns out mostly management. And according to the linked article about a third of them still got an early retirement.
So in general I agree with the article's main point that it's a profession bubble, not a geographical bubble, but I thought the attempts at saying "but you don't even really have a bubble from these complaints, because of layoff counts and this guy I talked to!" pretty weak.
> You can get a five bedroom, three-bathroom house in the southernmost part of San Jose for less than $500,000 -- about one-third the price it would cost in Mountain View.
Seems like by considering a 500k house inexpensive reinforces the point that we are in a 'bubble' in Silicon Valley.
As a guy who lives in a 7x5m studio somewhere in Eastern Europ, in a building like this one http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3152/3082829290_9653703b1e_b.j..., I try and try again to find out why would you need three bathrooms and five bedrooms, but I really cannot think of any reasons.
Not the ghetto, just a normal neighborhood. A bit dicier than your typical picket-fenced suburb but that really just comes with living in the midst of the great recession.
I left the valley two years ago specifically because I was losing my sense of perspective; there is a culture and mindset that is found nowhere else in the world. Overall, it's probably a good thing; and I'd go back there if I needed to start a tech company from scratch again. But, it also leads to a very limited worldview, and I think it's risky even for startup founders to buy too heavily into the reality distortion one finds in the valley.
The number of people who are making clones (with slight differences) of companies no one outside of the valley has ever heard of just blows my mind. Sometimes I'd meet two or three people at one party working on the same stupid idea in different startups. It's too easy to lose connection with your customers when you spend so much time in an echo chamber.
As a native, I couldn't agree more. I've witnessed a transition from heavy hardware-based long-haul investment thinking to short-term low risk internet investment. Sure this is totally logical, but the hive mind of VCs who follow every buzz word (social -> big data, etc) is pathetic. These VCs should be the most creative, ahead of the curve investers in the world. Instead they're more often followers excited to be on the cutting edge, but too risk-averse to invest in anything meaningful. It's like another iteration of the quarterly-oriented corporate mindset. Sad. All the hardware is moving to East Asia...
Schmidt's comment doesn't seem to be attacking their effectiveness, though; he seems to instead be arguing that there's no problem in the first place, because the economy is doing great, everyone is hiring, etc. Which, as the article notes, is only true in a very specific segment of the economy. Schmidt presumably just doesn't talk to anyone outside of that bubble.
I don't think Schmidt is saying that. I think he's saying there's a specific section of tech where there are different economic conditions at play - he seems perfectly well aware of how the rest of the world is.
And I agree with him. Talk to any startup about how hard it is to hire people and the insane sign-on bonuses/perks/referral bonuses some folks are having to resort to. Or look at the number of LinkedIn messages most people on HN probably get. It's a very small part of the 'big picture' but it definitely exists here in the SF Bay Area.
he seems to instead be arguing that there's no problem in the first place, because the economy is doing great, everyone is hiring, etc
He doesn't seem to say that at all. In the article he recognizes that he and SV are in a bubble. He points out that the OWS reality is not his reality. In fact anyone who is good in tech has a completely different reality than OWS. It's not just SV where finding good people is hard.
Exactly. I'm broadly supportive of Occupy, but couldn't bring myself to support the Vancouver branch. The only people hurting here are the perennial hurters; the only ones protesting are the rent-a-crowds who show up at every protest. We never had a housing crunch, or an employment crunch. It's still a great place to live and work, so the rank and file simply don't think about the issues that concern OWS. I recognize the serious issues they are fighting against globally, but locally they just don't exist.
Note that I'm saying "exactly" to the problems being localized, not that they don't exist.
There's a also a hidden message - why don't the legions of unemployed/underpaid go into tech? Or why don't occupy wall street people join the 1 percent, ie. get trained in finance/tech and compete in that sphere, take some of the rich folks money from them.
I don't think people are equally good at all things. I mean, I'm good at tech, but I'm not that good at music. If suddenly violinists were the hot commodity, I'm not sure I could transition. I'd probably just keep doing tech for lower pay. Similarly, if writing well became a big thing in 10 years, I'm not sure what percentage of Google engineers could successfully transition. Not sure why we'd expect the other direction to be more doable. Google in particular I think goes out of their way to only hire people who are really techies through-and-through.
As for the latter point, I think the perception is that the 1% overall is about old-boys' networks, scamming, crony capitalism, corporate/government entanglement, and general under-the-table sort of business. Nobody wants to go into that; they want it gone.
Right, we actually had that problem in the .com boom where a guy with a month of Flash training was commanding 100k, the problem was when it popped those guys did not just flush out of the industry in a few months and managers are notoriously bad at spotting talent. It lead to some tough times for many developers while the market corrected. Eventually those 1 month Flash in the pans got their real estate licenses and moved on, but not until it dealt some real damage to the industry. One of which was it gutted the CS programs which has created some of the supply deficiencies we see now.
I keep hearing that - most people won't have the intelligence to do tech/finance etc. However, a recent datapoint, the stanford ai class had over 1000 brilliant students, but only a handful in class at stanford itself. Watch the recent video chat sebastian thrun, peter norvig, and salman khan had on this topic.
Also, you could go back in history and say the same thing. 200 years ago most be people were "unintelligent" illiterate farmers, and yet today there descendents are literate, many doing highly intelligent work. The implied "genetic potential" arguments on intelligence are all wrong i believe, though i have no data to back it up.
Relative differences matter of course - there can only be one chess world champion - but most of tech or even finance is not in that winner-take-all space yet.
200 years ago most be people were "unintelligent" illiterate farmers, and yet today there descendents are literate, many doing highly intelligent work.
The parent commenter was speaking about making a transition in one's own career. Like him, I have doubts about my ability to become a top-notch violinist, especially since you have to find the tone centers by ear for that instrument. I don't know of anybody ever developing perfect pitch as an adult. Similarly, I doubt my grandmother, who even now is an extremely talented cellist with perfect pitch, could ever become a good programmer.
However, her son did become an excellent programmer, I am confident that my own children could become excellent programmers, musicians, visual artists or speakers of any language... if they start as children or adolescents. Yes people can change an learn... but drastic changes rarely happen after a certain age.
It's not about intelligence as much as the kind of intelligence you have. I don't really consider myself a stupid person, but I don't know if I could go into, say, finance, even finance-related programming. I particularly doubt I could do a decent job and stay sane.
I do downtown Oakland to Mountain View in 45-70 minutes, depending on traffic. It's bad, especially at rush hour (or during any unpredictable traffic delay), and moving to MV is one of my goals for 2012. However, if you don't have to go to the office every day, and if you sometimes go to SF instead, it's possible to buy a 1BR/1BA condo in downtown Oakland for about $100k. Just don't count on using any city services (schools, Oakland PD, hospitals), or going anywhere worthwhile (other than whole foods) without driving to SF or Mountain View, or maybe Berkeley or Emeryville.
You're right that Oakland is in Alameda County, but you're totally wrong about the highway. Even in morning rush hour it's only 60 minutes from Oakland to SV. I used to commute from Berkeley to San Jose every day.
With no traffic you can totally get from Oakland to the Googleplex in 45 minutes.
When he says they live in a 'bubble', he literally means they(or we) live in a bubble isolated from issues. I'm sympathetic to OWS, but on the other hand, I come here and worry if my salary (which is X% greater than the average American's) is too low, because people on HN are making Y% more than me(or at least claiming to).
However, I'm not in the 1%. It's a little hard to fathom, but there are a handful of people at GOOG in the 1%, but we tend to act more like we(tech people, I don't work at GOOG) are the 1% than the 99%. I don't know if Schmidt is point out the divide, or oblivious. I'm hoping for the former.
Even if some of us aren't in the 1%, there's nevertheless this desire to get there and instead of just wishing for millions of dollars people here are actively working on earning those millions. Some of us aren't in the 1%, but a lot of us are soon-to-be or trying-to-be there. As Schmidt put it, "Young people can work hard and make a fortune." (And the 1% cutoff point is only around $300k per year; the critical issues affecting the 99% are mostly affecting the 85% below $100k.)
Does Silicon Valley not have janitors, cooks, maids, postal workers, garbage collectors, fire fighters, teachers, or any number of other jobs which are either already low wage or increasingly insecure during an economic recession? My guess is that the only bubble is the one inside Eric Schmidt's head that makes it impossible for him to acknowledge those who share common cause with Occupy Wall Street: jobs that don't pay poverty wages, housing as a right, protection from a banking system that tax payers (yes, even those making poverty wages) had to bail out while their schools get sold out, and a government that is actually responsible to the majority rather than the minority which increasingly controls the wealth of this world. The growth of Silicon Valley, or any city for that matter, should not be taken as meaning that we have escaped poverty or unemployment. Far more likely is that the cities that boom have been attractive to business specifically because they have a surplus of low wage workers (again it takes more than engineers to make Silicon Valley run), government subsidized land, adequate transportation built with tax payer money, etc. The high unemployment rate in Santa Clara quoted in the article should give Eric pause but he'd likely just consider that of minor concern because of the fraction of residents that are not hurting (who he wants to continue attracting to the area).
In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup. High unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap unimaginable wealth in the process. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” says Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. “And what a world it is: Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”
I do not see how the extended source quote in any way contradicts the point sfgate was making, which is that the valley schmidt is talking about has no connection with the valley they see around them.
Which, I might add, is a very true point. The tech startup scene is very small and incestuous subculture of the SF bay area--and I say this as a 3rd generation resident (my grandparents settled here after WW2 when the land between Cupertino and Santa Clara was mostly orchards). Growing up in Santa Clara Valley, back when it had that name, my friends parents all worked for the government, in manufacturing, education, (non-tech) sales, etc. There were a few engineers of course, but they mostly worked for large firms founded a generation prior.
Tech startups are back in fashion and the business is good--but only for a small, tiny little segment of this valley's population. He's right to call it a (reality-distorting) bubble, but he's wrong to generalize it to the greater geographic region.
I find this comment to be more or less true. Where I work we cannot find enough qualified people to hire, and we are hiring as fast as we can. These are very highly paying jobs.
Also, to hell with occupy wall-street. Banks may not be looking out for 'the little guy', but since when are we surprised by that? What do these protestors want exactly? For bigwigs to go to jail for causing all their personal problems? I can't help but think that these same people weren't exactly great success stories before the financial meltdown, and would be barely scraping by if things were great. To be supplied with an income to reward them for years spent putting no effort into gaining useful skills? Bah, I say let them eat cake. If they can't be bothered to learn how to do anything that is worth paying them to do (despite years of free educational opportunities, heavily subsidized community colleges, etc), and they can't be bothered to take their future into their own hands and start a business, then I simply cannot be bothered with them.
Does your opinion apply to children born into poverty?
Kids whose parents can't afford healthy food for them so their brains don't develop?
Kids who are unable to get educated because their schools are corrupt and 90% of the high school students graduate illiterate?
People who were abused as kids and so have mental illnesses and live on the street because they can't hold a job?
People who had their health insurance scam them and had to go $100,000 into debt to pay doctors?
Kids who were brainwashed from birth by parents, teachers, media that they no matter what the expense they must go to university, and now find themselves 22 years old and $100,000 in debt with nothing to show for it?
You live in an extremely exploitative society where the powerful coast while the vulnerable drown.
The majority of the sufferers are people who were born into their situation. They are chronically ill from lack of access to healthcare and quality food. They are mentally ill from being abused and discarded and having nowhere to turn. They are in financial ruin by following the mainstream, standard advice regarding mortgages, investing, and education.
If you were King of America, what would you do with all the destitute? You're right - there were already tons of miserable pre-2008. I just want to know what your plan for the unwashed, stupid, suffering masses is. Because it sounds like you're saying we should just let them wallow in their misery and watch as more cities crumble like Detroit.
When you tell mentally ill homeless addicts to "use their bootstraps" you're really just advocating for the growth of the vast American ghettos that are already the shame of the nation.
I voted the comment up not because I agree with the view, but because I think it's an interesting blurry-mirror into society at large (not necessarily the "1%"). Similar to Tim Minchin's "Fuck the Poor" song. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdtVD8X1-A ) People might claim to care about mentally ill homeless addicts and strongly disagree with the comment, but their behavior suggests otherwise. How much effort do people spend lobbying the government for a structural change that could help the mentally ill homeless addicts? How much money do people donate to them? How many of their actions directly benefit mentally ill homeless addicts? People care about the poor a lot less than they profess; I don't think that means they should necessarily stop professing (though it is worth an examination to see if what they are professing is the best thing to be professing), but instead to work a bit harder on making their professed beliefs better match their behaviors by changing their behaviors.
How many people can afford to lobby the government? By talking to people I am reaching out trying to make structural change. There is no poverty in Sweden. America does not need to be such a heartless country.
I've dedicated my entire career to helping people who are wallowing in misery and are simply unable to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But it's an extremely hard job because the nature of the economic system is that the most valuable services such as healthcare, education, psychological treatment, healthy food, and child card are NOT available for the people who are desperate for them. You have any idea how many mentally ill people people, after much misery, have told me they simply cannot afford the treatment they need and they simply go without? If you saw these cases like I have you would have nightmares.
The easiest way to make money is to sell to the already rich who don't really need your services. The easiest way to be poor is to spend your time helping the miserable ungrateful masses who have nothing to give back.
For my own sake I wish I could just forget about the miserable poor because my life would be a lot easier. But the demands of conscience make it impossible for me to slide into the comfortable cognitive dissonance of silicon valley.
You're implying that I'm all talk, but I'm not. But talk does go a long way. Right now silicon valley elites have enough money, talent, and resources to reshape society into either a technocratic heartless corporate grinder, or into an egalitarian higg tech civil society that recognizes the inherent worth of all people ala Sweden.
I left the computer field years ago to enter the mental health field. From my new perspective, of being in contact with the underclass, I am continually horrified at the heartless elitism displayed by computer people who I used to consider my brothers and sisters in creating a better world.
Political change isn't a fucking mystery. You tell your politicians to take care of the poor, you tell them to fix crony capitalism, you tell them to stop their imperial wars of aggression, and if they accept bribes you tell everyone you know how corrupt they are. You build a positive vision of a society without ghettos. You hold up examples like Sweden - a social structure that mos Americans would prefer if they just looked into it.
In reply to the dead comment by oelewapperke, I just want to say that while the poor in many countries are worse off, this kind of palliative comparison should not make anyone feel better.
America as a whole puts its best and brightest to work on playing zero-sum wall street games and making trivial things like FarmVille, while America's poor and the world's poor descend into barbarism and resurrect horrible forms of social organization long thought on their way out, from slavery to theocracy to communism.
"Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century"."
The most powerful and wealthy nation to have ever existed, spanning a continent, with a global empire and previously unimagined technology, is overseeing global economic collapse because it is too short sighted to even look 5 years in the future and reign in blatant destabilizing social injustice.
No, this has nothing to do with poverty. This has to do with people who believe they are entitled to the 'american dream' but refuse to sacrifice or work hard, or compromise in any way to achieve that dream.
I was raised on government cheese. I am alive because of foodstamps. You are arguing with strawman. I'm all for helping the poor. We need a safety net, specifically to help children. However, that doesn't mean that every hippy who hasn't succeeded is the victim of some grand conspiracy where the rich tilt the system in their own favor.
Who wants to fix schools? Schools are corrupt in bad neighborhoods not because they are being sabotaged (they often have very high levels of funding), but because bad neighborhoods have bad parents and a poor PTA, so there is nobody with any incentive to fix the schools that also have the ability and experience to do anything about it. A poor inner city parent has never seen a school that works, and has never recieved any education to speak of, so they have no idea how to 'fix' their child's school, and most of the time they don't even know that is something they should be concerned about. Their priorities are all fucked. How is that the fault of me or anyone else in the 1%? How is protesting wallstreet in any way related to this? Your points are all entirely off topic.
Health insurance scam them? What does that have to do with wallstreet? Seriously, though, if your biggest problem is long term debt, you are pretty fucking rich in absolute terms. There are people in Africa who's #1 problem is starving to death. After all, our western legal system is completely friendly to debtors these days, they can have all debts removed (other than student loans) by declaring bankruptcy.
It's not my fault people are too stupid to major in a field that will let them pay back their student loans. The humanities do not lead to jobs, everyone knowns this. Hell, it's repeated so much it's a cliche! Blaming other people because you wanted to do an easy major and fuck girls in college while going into debt is an insult to those of us that worked our asses off so that we could make money later. This is just 'the ant and the grasshopper', don't blame the ant.
Actually, I was born into and lived in poverty almost my entire life before the age of 18. I attended many bad schools, and had no support. I don't feel exploited at all, in fact I think I'm lucky to live in an age where even the poorest people, who's parents make the worst decisions (drug use, alcohol abuse, child abuse) are able to attend school, and in fact are compelled to. If you can afford a big screen TV, and you have 500 channels of television, you are not being exploited. Turn off the TV and do something before you start bitching about how unfair life is.
Everyone has access to quality food. If you are too poor to afford quality food, foodstamps are provided for you and your family. If you choose to buy McDonalds and cheetos anyway, what then? Are we supposed to force feed people carrots? Because that is the only way you'll get many poor people to eat healthy food, by forcing them to. Is that what you advocate?
I think if you turned the anger down, you would see that there isn't a class of evil conspirators at the top. The solutions to our problems are not clear cut, and you don't have any answers to any of the problems you think you see. There is no silver bullet to the problems of society, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of lessons to move forward a little bit every generation.
The generations aren't moving forward, they're moving backward. The middle class has shrunken by 10% since 1970 and poverty has gone up, both worldwide and in America.
TVs are not good things to have, they're brainwashing machines that make people stupid.
Wall street moguls run the government and own the media. They are more powerful than presidents.
We barely have a social safety net anymore.
It's sad that the people who came from poverty often have the least sympathy. What you are missing is that not everyone can be born with above average IQs and work their way out. You got lucky and the social safety net is quickly crumbling behind you.
What you miss about ghetto schools is the school board corruption. The school boards eat all the funding in salaries and perks and corporate pork projects.
I'm not telling you or anyone else to sacrifice their well-being. I'm saying you should take a look at the demographic trends and recognize that for your own sake you need to play a part in bettering the communities of the unfortunate. Because your own livelihood depends on an intact civil society with a functioning non-corrupt government that is not owned by a few corrupt industries.
The society that gave you the opportunity to enjoy wealth did not just spontaneously arrange itself. It was designed and protected by altruistic, honest, competent and intelligent people just like you. Except you aren't playing a civic role in your community but the corporate lobbyists and Christian fascists are, which threatens your lifestyle.
Your social mobility was enabled by the middle class, through hardwon political and social battles with robber barons. You inherited the social traditions that made you more than a serf, but are not passing those traditions on to the next generation. They are quickly going away through corporate owned lawmakers creating a neo-feudalistic corporate fascism.
All I want is for people like you to spend some of your time engaging in community leadership and politics, like my grandfathers did after the war to create and defend the middle class, the social safety net, and social mobility. You came from a poor background, but I come from an upper middle class background whose ancestors played roles in creating those social programs that kept you alive and gave you access to educational resources. They did it for future generations of poor children like you were, and I want you to pay it forward through civic participation. Don't just tell the poor to go wallow. Lend a helping hand.
A helping hand doesn't always help. You act as though we know what the problems are, and what the solutions are, but refuse to act because of idiocy or bigotry.
Suppose you were given a budget of $100Billion USD to spend however you wanted. Now, give me your plan to fix something, anything. Tell me how this 'helping hand' will be used, and I'll respond with a long, long list of ways you are actually going to do more harm than good. It's not out of idiocy and bigotry that I advocate these positions, it's out of a desire to not simply waste resources (and thus cause harm) when we have no idea how to actually help.
Now, to your specific points, you are just full of shit. You are spouting a bunch nonsense. I could refute one point at a time, but your MO seems to be to just move on to new talking points when old ones are refuted. No doubt you win arguments by simply wearing out your opponents with your endless stream of ill-posed statements.
Honestly, I would be happy to demolish your arguments one at a time. So, if you want to have this debate, lets start with one important theme, and go from there, not 500 assertions that you'll just abandon and replace with 500 more in your next post.
Just to be completely clear, I don't claim to know what all the problems and solutions are. I claim that you don't know what the problems and solutions are, and should stop criticizing people just because they don't advocate the same radical positions you baselessly hold.
These are solvable problems. You are way too aggressive with me.
University researchers have many consensus, scientifically based viewpoints on how to improve social issues. The simple fact is that the research is just ignored in favor of radical emotionally-potent ideologies.
Many political ideas have been scientifically tested. I spent years in university learning about them and I certainly don't know them all, but I know professors who have worked on these issues for decades and have been able to draw strong scientific conclusions.
Economists throughout the world are able to reach consensus (defined as 90%+ agreement) on many issues. Their consensus is ignored politically.
Psychologists are able to reach consensus on certain questions of public mental health and the mental health of the poor. Their conclusions are politically ignored.
This is the pattern. The pattern is that other countries have demonstrated social success stories and other countries have put the University social science into practice and reaped success. The USA does not. American political policy is a combination of Christian fascist social policy, corrupt Democratic/Republican fake social program pork barrel, and Military-Industrial-Security complex pork barrel.
People with reasonable views based on consensus science are underrepresented.
If you actually think you can "demolish all my arguments" then you've lost my respect for your lack of humility. You're just one man, you don't have time to be an expert in every field.
My opinions are mostly informed by the consensus views of social scientists. When implemented, social science has been very successful.
What do I want to do about the poor? I just want scientifically literate people to put more time into politics so that they can counteract the voices of irrationality that currently dominate lawmaking.
I want smart people to act on the good science that is out there instead of having the wealthy and intelligent throw up their hands and pretend it is someone else's problem.
I'm too aggressive with you? You are the one that says I advocate positions that are obviously wrong and hurt children. I suspect you aren't accustomed to having someone competently push back when you go on one of your rants? Either you think I advocate hurting children, or you think I just post bullshit to HN without thinking it through. Either way, you are far more insulting than I have been. I have the distinction of being direct, both with my arguments and with my insults.
Again, you give a dozen assertions, and again it's without any context, argument or evidence.
I would love it if you would give one of these near-universally accepted truths that economists all agree on. I also look forward to your rationalizations when you have to restrict who is a 'real' economist (I really doubt you will find 90% agreement among economists that are Chinese Socialists, members of the Austrian school, distributionists, working economists at major brokerage houses, etc). I suppose you want to limit it to 'mainstream' western economists at big name universities?
Try to keep it concise this time, and see if you can give me an example without bringing in another dozen unrelated 'facts'.
poverty has gone up, both worldwide and in America
I don't have the figures to hand for the US, but worldwide the opposite is true. In percentage terms the proportion living in poverty now is roughly half what it was in 1980[1]. In absolute terms it has dropped from 1.5 billion in 1981 to 1.1 billion in 2001[2].
"in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century"
You do realize that one with of the world regressing and less people living in poverty can both be true, right?
I'm quite familiar with the IMF report. That 1/5th was comprised mostly of former communist nations who's population was much worse off during the transition to market economies. That didn't always drop them into global poverty levels though.
There are plenty of bad things in the world, but the fact is that less people are starving to death now than 30 years ago and that is worth acknowledging.
I'm earning a very comfortable income and I want the people who've exploited our lax and corrupt laws to go to jail for doing so, along with the politicians involved in passing those laws and rubber-stamping their behavior.
OWS isn't about scruffy street kids - they're there too though, because fighting an inefficient, corrupt, and warmongering system is something almost anyone can get behind.
Disney's studio did great work during this time and even made a hit song that became an anthem for the Depression, "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf".