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>Our working conditions are deteriorating

My paternal grandfather, in common with many of his generation was sent to work in a coal mine at the age of 14. Had he not died from a dust induced respiratory disease a few years back I can well imagine him dying from laughter on reading such a ridiculous statement.

Todays work places are nearly devoid of physical risks and yet rife with psychological and spiritual ones. Sure, RSI maybe the biggest physical risk. But think of the damage caused by unkind work environments, constant fear of losing one's job, the demand to work 45,55,or 65+ hours per week. Having to work those hours despite the research indicating its idiotic. etc. etc.

People are unhappy because their workplace (and maybe society in generaly) is full of happiness landmines that didnt exist before.

You're right of course, silly me. Stupid things like being surrounded by things exploding and the constant possibility of being trapped underground in complete darkness with no possibility of rescue just pale in comparison to your 40 hours in an office with distasteful wallpaper. The horror.

Happiness land mine wise, I am deeply unconvinced. Nothing new under the sun in that department.

Being facetious doesn't advance your argument. You are of course right that appalling working conditions are not new. The labor movement was a response that such conditions. But the key point being made is not that conditions today are in all regards worse than all conditions in the past but rather that despite all our much vaunted progress and productivity gains many people don't experience the benefits and are in fact working in toxic work conditions that are profoundly stressful. And that point is, I believe, not especially difficult to substantiate.

I'd agree, but a common doom-mongering narrative is "things are worse than they used to be and they're getting ever worse!"

Very few people say "the present has a number of trade-offs that's arguably not much better or about as bad as the past." That said, I think a lot of the gains are invisible to white professional class heterosexual secular/christian males, which is part of the problem.

As a pure issue of labor, the average work conditions are probably the same or worse than in 1970 and purchasing power is about the same. Both of those are bad things that need to change, but there are vast cultural and technological improvements that often get diminished, and I think the comment above is a pushback against that, which does advance their argument.

If you only identify with the historically most privileged group, a lot of the advantages like "not being provided with inferior safety equipment because of your race" or "living in constant fear of your career being destroyed because of your sexuality" don't seem very important. What seems "toxic" to the most privileged group can seem like "acceptable tradeoffs" to other groups, and this also speaks to the attitudes of many immigrants and H1-B employees.

> [... ]but there are vast cultural and technological improvements that often get diminished, and I think the comment above is a pushback against that, which does advance their argument.

The comment at top of thread was that relative to the ultra-rich (top 1%), things had got worse for the rest (the other 99%). The commentator expressly accepted that s/he was in a traditionally privileged position - yet it was still difficult.

There are many improvements required to help groups within the other 95%, whether that be by country, ethnic group, gender or anything else. But, you're simply having a different argument, when point of consideration is the much biggest gains that the top 1% is making relative to ALL other groups. This both includes the group you define as privileged and underprivileged.

Even to engage with your argument - the "trade-offs" you're citing that have led to 'cultural and technological improvements' for disadvantaged groups are social movement that weren't created or aided by the ultra-wealthy or large corporates. Quite the reverse. Using the principle of charity, the only 'improvement' I think you could put in this category would be globalisation - and honestly it's too big a change for us to know the outcome on that one.

In 1900 you would not just have been fired for different sexuality or skin color. The consequences would have been worse.

Racism in any period in time other than today was far, far worse. Not just, of course, for non-whites in Europe. What were the survival chances of a lone white man in Moorish Spain ? Not good. In India ? You would have been attacked and killed because you were probably trading goods they could steal. Africa ? Same. Japan ? It was illegal for foreigners to be in Japan, punishable by death, before the Meji restauration.

Especially for minorities today's living conditions are amongst the best that have ever existed. Even today's Saudi Arabia is more tolerant of women and homosexuals, and especially much more tolerant of black/otherwise different ethnical people, than the Ottoman empire was 100 years ago. Yes, they kill them, however they don't publicly torture them first anymore.

Racism is not something that's new or unique to our portion of history. It is a constant throughout the entire history of the world that not being part of the majority ethnicity was very, very bad for you, with few exceptions, like the Roman Empire.

I think you're on the right track with the second part of your argument though. Working conditions for the middle class today have, imho, clearly deteriorated compared to 10-20 years ago (depending on whether you're talking Europe/America/Asia and which "class"). This is a constant across most (all ?) of the world, and certainly seems to be getting worse. And there is an exception : China, although that's begun to deteriorate as well. India still seems to be moving forward. But today's level in the west is still at 1980-1990 level conditions, no worse. Compared to before that, we've still advanced. But a hell of a lot of middle class people were better off in 2000 than today.

Not everyone was a coal miner.

But there's a good chance your grandfather had the cojones to join a union to fight for better working conditions. It's better to live a life where you can actually improve your lot than live as a subservient cog holding on for an ever smaller piece of the pie.

> But there's a good chance your grandfather had the cojones to join a union to fight for better working conditions.

Sure, there's a good chance: if he was white and middle-class, a statistically decent bet on this website. But otherwise there's a better chance your grandfather was deprived of a decent job by a union, so that the union members could earn more (at the expense of the hypothetical grandfather and the employer and its customers.)

Which isn't to diminish the part about fighting for better working conditions, mind you, which was real enough... but just to point out the checkered nature of this history.

That sounds horrible. My previous statement used overly strong words and perhaps over-generalized. I do think that working conditions in some industries are better (in particular for blue-collar jobs).

My focus is more on white-collar jobs (which apparently makes up most of US jobs today: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/great-news-weve-become-a-w...). We have become boxed-in and subjected to deteriorating work conditions.

I think allowing white-collar workers to work remotely would be a huge step forward. Then more flexibility with regard to work hours would be another big step forward. These two things are so easy for most companies to implement (and studies suggest they would actually benefit form this financially) and yet they don't do it because the executives at these companies want to feel 'in control' of their employees.

As a remote developer for over a decade, I can agree with this. The thought of going back to working in a box on the warehouse floor they call an office 5 or 6 days a week, makes me dizzy. I will never do that again, now that I know what its like to leave the dark side.

I kind of miss the nerf gun fights that broke off from time to time.

"No complaining! Someone has it worse!"

These types of statements are not constructive in any way.

"People today are unhappy. Our working conditions are deteriorating and we are starting to feel like slaves. Our rents or mortgages are massive and we cannot afford to lose our jobs. People are no longer allowed to be themselves because saying the wrong thing to the wrong person might have serious negative repercussions for their careers and livelihoods. People are turning to video games and drugs to give themselves the feeling of fulfilment that they desperately need."

When has this not been the case? "The good ole days"?

As a child in the middle class, there was a widespread sense of progress and opportunity in life ahead. If you were a good person, and followed the Way: study hard, stay on the good side of the law, get a degree from a respectable college, ..., then the good life was waiting for you: land, house, career, stability, recreation, community, romance, health, etc. After all, this is America, the greatest nation ever with the greatest kind of government ever. And! through the glory that is science and invention, the intellectual giants of today are the peons of tomorrow's intellectual giants, you just wait because it's going to be awesome. Your middle class existence now won't even compare to your life in the future, because you can't even imagine what will be in play. (Remember, I was a kid.)

Well, decades later, by so many measures, many things are pretty amazing, if you are wealthy or are willing to live as an ascetic and are smart enough to be in a field that at least somewhat resembles its former self's wages. Modern computing devices, building materials, medicine, tools, educational resource availability, and international travel & communication are here, and they are great!

Soon, even the automation of truly tedious, mind-crushingly boring and dangerous but needed tasks that are non-trivial, like driving, will be accomplished. (all the people who have staked their lives on this work whom are no longer needed, please, just don't look at them, they'll figure it out. No problem, Okay?)

Where is all the wealth? Where is the growing middle class? Where are the new cities? Where is the new infrastructure? Where is the game-changing innovation, lifting humanity and life on Earth higher and higher, spawned from the vast business landscape, fomenting living centers all across the nation, an America of much greater population size and no obesity epidemic? Where is the efficiency?

You want a home? You're ready to contribute to society, you're smart, you're burning to make your mark and live? Well, you didn't do it right, so do it right this time and save and be smart and someday you'll be able to afford a home next to a job. A place to grow a family in, in safety and stability. Maybe you'll still be living in your parent's home when they die of old age.

How old are you? Your memory of "how things used to be" may not go back far enough. I have photos of my grandmother in school in 1930's Georgia with people that didn't have enough money for shoes. They made their own clothes. No one was getting an advanced education but those that could pay cash and afford to not be working to help support the family in the meantime. Most people rarely travelled more than several hundred miles from their home in their lifetime. Women and blacks were treated like second-class citizens, if that. Life expectancy was what we call middle aged now. It wasn't uncommon to sleep several people in a bed, head to toe, in houses that were, by today's standards, shacks. And on and on. So, what are you comparing, exactly, and how are "big successful entrepreneurs" devoid of reality? Because they're not considering your personal level of happiness?

So you're saying that in 80 years, we shouldn't have advanced massively as a society?

Well the news is in, and we have. But only for those at the top. People at the bottom still work dangerous jobs. Things like mining might be safer than they were before, but they are still very dangerous professions; and these days the job security is worse than it was in the 1930s in such industries. There's also the constant assimilation of jobs by automation.

Many people in first world countries still can't afford shoes, while the richest 1% today are in real terms far wealthier than any 1% has been in the last 100 years.

Devoid? Perhaps not. Completely out of touch with reality? Absolutely.

> The distribution of income seems so unnatural

Actually, what's striking to my mind is how mysteriously consistent the income distribution is with the same family of power law distributions (Zipf-Mandelbrot, Pareto, etc.) that describes such other, disparate, natural phenomena as the frequencies of words in natural languages [1], the sizes of cities [2], the sizes of asteroids [3], the abundances of species [4], the sizes of grains of sand on a beach [5], the magnitudes of earthquakes and avalanches [6], and many other things in the world.

Anyway, my point is simply that the shape of the income distribution should not be so surprising, or strike us as "unnatural", given how often we observe the same shape of distribution for all kinds of things, both in economics and in the natural world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%E2%80%93Mandelbrot_law

[2] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/zipf.pdf

[3] http://250words.com/2014/07/the-mathematics-of-asteroids-ear...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_abundance_distributio...

[5] http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0412004.pdf

[6] https://books.google.com/books?id=x8nSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA57&lpg=P...

A challenge: find a symbolic system which does not obey a Zipfian distribution or has a heavy tail. You will fail. Programming included.

There are plenty. For example, phoneme distributions and syllable distributions (as opposed to word distributions) are known not to follow Zipf's law.

Are the sizes of cities and asteroids "symbolic systems"?

Anyway, my point (consistent with yours in fact) is simply that the shape of the income distribution should not be so surprising, or strike us as "unnatural", given how often we observe the same shape of distribution for all kinds of things, both in economics and in the natural world.

You may feel like a slave, but you can retire after 5 years of working.

Even the other 95% of us have almost always have been poorer than we now are. Here in the suburban northeast a person can work about 40 hours per week at any restaurant or department store or do almost any other kind of normal menial labor to bring home something like $20k per year.

On that income, they can live a much better life than almost anyone ever did 50 years ago. Sure, they'll spend half of their income on housing, never be able to afford much time off from work, and may never travel anywhere by air, but people have always lived like that. Meanwhile they benefit from ever improving medical technology and the boundless educational opportunities afforded by the worldwide web.

People may be incapable, for psychological or emotional reasons, of taking proper advantage of the exceptionally good circumstances they find themselves in. That doesn't make them poor in my book.

I mostly agree with your comment except for > benefit from ever improving medical technology

As I understand it (not a US citizen) most of this technology comes with a mortgage sized debt if you aren't insured? If so I think this reinforces the GP's case.

I'm not an expert on this, but google searches yield the following prices for various medical undertakings in US Dollars:

----

MRI: ~$2.5k

Laparoscopic surgery: $2k -$5k

One day of hospital inpatient care: ~$2.2k

Heart bypass: ~$100k

3 months chemotherapy: $20k-$30k

----

I'll let you judge for yourself whether these are outrageous and crippling or not.

I'll only add that, from my limited experience here in CT, the hospital will waive most of your bill if you show financial need. I'm not sure if the state picks up the tab or if the hospital just eats the cost when this happens, but I've seen the waiving of medical fees firsthand.

I have no experience with the big expensive ones like chemo or heart bypass.

Yes, the waiving of medical fees sometimes happens, but "financial need" is a pretty high bar to meet. I was saddled with around $10K of medical debt after a bike accident a few years back when I was unemployed because a) I had made $70K the previous year and b) they don't consider student loan payments when calculating income. And that was with insurance (a high deductible combined with some things not being covered because they were out-of-network; the accident occurred on a different coast from any in-network-provider).

Would love to see any data on that. I think people are probably taking all the good stuff for granted and developing a sense of entitlement and that is probably a problem.

I would like to see data too, but any data would be attacked, or politicized.

I couldn't agree more with the OP. Jobs are hard to get. Even chit jobs are not the chit, I grew up with. They are just Terrible. Even immigrants are leaving them. Unions are declining for numerious reasons. Realeste will be unobtainable for many of us. To top it off--we are being regulated, and fined like no other generation I can remember. Banks, landlords, schools, employers are taking every cent they can from us. Police are basically revenue collectors in my neighborhood. I don't see people out socializing at night. They safely go to the coffee shop, and just go home. Let's go fishing--no, the oceans gave been decimated. Let's go for a drive--well there's global warming. Let's just have sex, well some us still do that, but it's so clinical, and in the back of my mind, "Do I really want a kid from this person who's still trying to live up to the standards his/her mother's, mother grew up in?" (In that last sentence, you can reverse mother/father, and the meaning is the same.) Do I trust my fellow man in business, and moral issues; not like I used to. It's just too cut throat, and I have seen people do horrid things to their brother in order to get ahead financially.

So no, I don't see a lot of happy people.

As to the "good stuff". We don't have a draft. We have access to cheap stuff made in China. Cars are supposedly a bit safer, but I'll take a older vehicle that I can work on over a proprietary computer on wheels. They figured out the genome, but I trust my doctor less than I ever did before.

I ran out--honestly.

> Even chit jobs are not the chit, I grew up with. They are just Terrible. Even immigrants are leaving them.

Chit jobs?

Lets not forget extra expenses that you can't opt out of. You can technically opt out of cell phone and internet, but for me I wouldn't be able to be on call for work so no job. Not to mention how much modern society has shifted to assume everyone has these luxuries. Then there is various forms of insurance. It used to be, if car insurance was too high people could opt out, now your only choice is to opt out of driving (not possible except in some cities). Oh, and that 30 year mortgage you took out? Requires house insurance. Which was $300 a year (on a $180K house) just a few years ago -- now it is over $1600 on the same house (with a market value of $130K). But I can't cancel it, because mortgage requires it. Now the place you work at (which was a 5 minute drive) decided to consolidate to corporate headquarters 30 miles away. Let's not even mention what happens if you need surgery (even with good insurance).

Did you put down less than 20% as a down payment? I was under the impression that PMI was only required if one put less than that down?

I think he is referring to homeowners insurance. Unlike driving a car, you can legally own a home without homeowners insurance. However, if you finance your home with a mortgage, your lender most likely will require you to have home insurance coverage to protect your home in case of damage caused by unforeseen circumstances (fires or natural disasters).

Last time I checked homeowners insurance prices were something between 0.5-1% of the home value annually. It sounds ridiculous but it does not cover flood, you need separate insurance for that.

Edit: Lender will require this insurance until home is 100% paid off.

That doesn't sound that ridiculous - that's an expected value of total loss every 100 or 200 years. If you live on a known a flood plain, I also don't think there should be any expectation of less than a very high premium, unless your house is built on stilts. What we probably need is tools that make the total cost of ownership more transparent, though.

Yes, this is regular homeowner's insurance -- it went from 300 a year to 1650 a year within the span of about 5 years. This was just after the 2008 economic meltdown, so I'm sure the insurance companies had to make up for other investment losses. But their excuse, is that my 180K house (with a market value of 160K) has a rebuild cost of over 350K based on their estimation.

>> Based on US statistics I'm like in the top 5% of household income bracket but I feel like a slave at work

This tells you everything you need to know about happiness. How hard and how many years a person fought to get to the top 5% may have very different views about how happy they are.

> People today are unhappy.

I look around on the subway in the morning and almost everyone has this glum, unhappy expression on their face.

Have you ever taken the bus/train in 1980 ? 1990 ? Was it different ?

In my opinion : no.

> we have never been so poor.

I agree with the thrust of your post: the working class is rich in palliatives and bromides and poor in things that actually make life better, but I do take a small issue with your superlative. I'm certainly glad I'm not a 19th century meatpacker.

Or a 21st century poultry processing plant worker.

I think his point is that those jobs still exist, the working poor are still suffering as much as they always have been, and that there's been a recent reversal in progress.

My ancestors worked in shitty conditions that destroyed their bodies to see that their descendents could have a better life. And, here we are, and their descendants are living relatively as terribly as they did.

Would you prefer to have been randomly born at any other time than today? That's my heuristic.