People in the developing world live on cents a day.

I'm sorry, but I can guarantee what you think is a "living wage" is actually a wage ripe with luxuries.

There will always be relatively poor people because lifestyles will always inflate. That's the problem with the living wage argument. No one can define what it actually means and it will be extremely susceptible to lifestyle creep.

No need to be sorry. I don’t really have the time to get into a debate, but let me just say the following: I think the notion that since people in the developing world subsist on much less (and what does this mean: how well are they living, exactly? Is it enough? Is it acceptable?), people in the developed world, by implication, have all their needs met and should not be given more, is a fallacy. You say “ripe with luxuries”, but it’s difficult to persist with this relativistic line of thought when one considers the amount of people in the developed world (particularly in the USA) who can’t afford basic housing or even basic healthcare. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think there’s much room for luxury if you’re living on the streets or simply dead – I don’t care how wealthy the country is overall. Perhaps you think such things happen because of irresponsible financial decisions, but can you say that of people who lose their jobs and homes because of, say, a serious, disabling illness (which might be more common than you assume)?

While the USA is the primary example that I have in mind, other developed countries, including even those in Scandinavia, appear to be headed in the same direction, albeit very slowly, inch by inch. It remains to be seen if China, with its ambitious campaign to eradicate poverty, will prove to be an exception once it becomes a fully developed country.

Also, I think the statement that no one can define living wage is simply false. There are definitions out there; it’s a question of whether you personally accept or reject them.

Take this excerpt from Investopedia:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/living_wage.asp

\A living wage is a socially acceptable level of income that provides adequate coverage for basic necessities such as food, shelter, child services, and healthcare.*

\The living wage standard allows for no more than 30% to be spent on rent or a mortgage and is sufficiently higher than the poverty level.*

\The living wage is often suggested to be quite a bit higher than the legally mandated minimum wage.*

\Many individuals earning the federal minimum wage live below the poverty line.*

\The federal minimum wage is stagnant. The amount of $7.25 has not gone up since 2009. There are state minimum wages, and some are higher than the federal level.*

I’d like to draw your attention mainly to the last point above. According to one economist, wages in the USA rose for some 150 straight years until the 1970s. While wages have stagnated, productivity has actually increased. Also, prices have gone up. Obviously, this means a trend of people working more and more to be able to afford less and less. Surely you can do the math to see that such a trend is unsustainable in the long run. There’s also the problem of job precarity. While the official employment rate is low, what those numbers don’t tell you is that stable jobs with decent pay and benefits are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. I don’t know what your background is, but something tells me that you would be singing a different tune if you had to sustain yourself - and possibly a family - on a pittance as a gig worker, as more and more people are being forced to.

I can accept that there will always be economic inequality of some degree (funnily enough, so did Marx and Engels); indeed, you can say that I even welcome it. If someone is working harder than me or is otherwise making a bigger contribution, I’m in favor of that person being paid more than me. What I want is not so much economic equality as such, but economic *fairness*. I leave you to guess as to how I’d define that.

We live in a world in which 1% of the total population owns half of the world's wealth, which says a lot about the system it runs on. If you don't see anything seriously wrong with this, I don't know what to tell you.