> quality of employment, the quality of general life for the average person in the West seems to have only degraded in the last decade or two.
can you cite some data sources for that claim?
can you cite some data sources for that claim?
http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/05/01/in...
http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/working-paper-domesti...
https://www.amazon.com/When-Good-Jobs-Globalization--unioniz...
http://www.ledevoir.com/documents/pdf/CIBC-eqi_20150305.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/twec.12238/full
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01301803.html
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-...
https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/13q1tuzem...
Income inequality for example measures relative equality, not absolute "how well off" someone is. If for the sake of argument an alien benefactor made everyone in on the planet 100x richer in the sense of material wealth, there'd still be the same levels of wealth inequality as today. The articles about job quality and job polarization also do not address how well off people are in an absolute sense.
Speaking from my experience (note, I'm not even from the US, I'm from Canada) what I said appears to hold true, for example just the other week our finance minister told people get used to the job churn as the employment field has entirely changed. Recent graduates aren't able to pay off their student loans either, and the government as of today (November 1st) is issuing student loan payment halts on incomes below 25,000. On top of that the housing market in Canada is going insane, prices skyrocketing in multiple major cities for detached housing, while interest rates and growth is stagnate. If that's not a sign that things are getting worse, I'm not sure what is. As far as I can tell the news in other Western parts of the world is just as bad.