I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!
I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.
It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.
That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.
I’ll agree with you, I don’t think I’ve made my point all that well. That most recent comment you’re replying to here was rushed and did a poor job, that’s my bad!
I didn’t really want to make it about COL at all, and I’ve asked myself why, and I think I take issue with the way it papers over deeper problems sometimes (but to be fair, the opposite thing where people don’t understand COL differences is super frustrating).
I have several issues with it, it turns out, and you may end up rejecting them all, but I did a shit job earlier and you asked what I meant, so here goes. Gonna be long lol, sorry. But yeah, complaining about wealth disparity, not COL, but also COL doesn’t invalidate my complaints, IMO.
It’s my understanding that folks on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder do fare worse, the higher the COL. So while things scale (that’s the idea after all), I don’t think pay scales evenly across compensation ranges. I have to acknowledge that I have no source on this and I may have a shaky basis for that belief. I should probably improve my rigor there. It does look like homelessness is higher, per capita, in larger cities, which seems like at least a very rough proxy for my assertion. So that’s one problem for me, COL doesn’t erase that magnitude or make it more in reach necessarily, for the chronically broke.
Not all goods and services are priced locally. People making high COL wages have inherent advantages over people making low COL wages when paying for anything that isn’t priced locally.
That issue really extends far when you apply it abroad to things like aid that could be given to people for whom even a single dollar a day can be a tangible improvement. I’m placing this separately because we all value the well being of one another differently by proximity, unfortunately, so some folks may accept #2 as a problem and not see #3 as their concern. I do personally try to give what I can charitably, split between local food banks and sort of “maximizing impact wherever”.
At any rate, folks who feel badly disadvantaged due to these do fit into what I meant by the “versions of life” phrasing, but I mostly intended just the chronically broke there. You can be broke enough, basically anywhere in the US, such that roughly everyone you know never uses professional paid childcare, priced moderately or otherwise. So COL only goes but so far for that reason too.
But to be clear, I was thinking of wasteful rich people. We both made an assumption about what kind of people/situation the original content referred to, neither is really more valid than the other. I absolutely understand that COL has big impacts and is sometimes left out. But there’s a lot of nuance to COL, and I don’t really feel I need to make a disclaimer about it to make statements like I did. It’s fine if you disagree.
Edit: minor phrasing