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Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

I guess this is the real motive behind the article:

But here’s the thing. Regardless of intent, these Millennials are telling an older generation of elite Americans — the very people whose policies and financial decisions kneecapped the economy — what they want to hear: that everything is more or less okay, and young people just need to be more thoughtful about their money. And that’s a shitty idea to perpetuate. Because whatever happens in the years ahead, penny-pinching will likely remain a lifestyle enhancement for bourgeois Millennials who possess enough money to enjoy the dividends of being thrifty. For most of us, there are no dividends: just thrift.

It's not about the advice itself -- the advice all seems pretty reasonable -- it's about the place that advice has in the story we tell ourselves about young people. I myself practice many of these thrifty tips, but I cringe to think that the blog posts that people write about them will be used to justify continuing to build a world where they are more and more necessary.

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> continuing to build a world where they are more and more necessary

My grandmother can still, to this day, recount living in an apartment with no furniture except a mattress, with my grandfather who was employed as an engineer in New York. It took, by her estimate, about two years to have enough furniture before she was willing to invite over any sorts of company.

Today you can furnish an apartment reasonably with about a months worth of wages. I know this because I helped take a friend who makes a bit over minimum wage to IKEA to get all their furniture for an apartment they moved into.

The myth of decline is that - a myth. The economy is better then it has been in decades, violence is at an all time low, and jobs are widely available in many areas of the country.

I have friends who complain about the economy "being destroyed", who max out credit cards to buy brand new cars and buy expensive home theaters. I have one friend who despite making six figures a year, took a predatory payday loan because she had spent her wages on expensive unused tools.

That's not to blame "millennials" anymore than to blame any other generation. Bad financial choices have existed since the dawn of human history, but in many cases today they are choices, not pre-supposed economic outcomes. We can help correct that by teaching good finance skills (budgeting, doing things yourself instead of hiring people, focusing on cheaper hobbies, etc).

So, your proof that decline is a myth is that you can buy cheap, moderate quality, mass-manufactured furniture that didn't exist in your grandparents age? Something seems awry there.

I think GP does have a point while missing the bigger picture. Yes, low to average income people can today afford more stuff to make their life a bit better. But they also can‘t afford an apartment close to work (loosing anywhere from 2 to 5 hours of their day they cannot spend e.g. with their kids) and they cannot afford college tuition. That‘s what‘s creating perpetual poverty, i.e. low social mobility, which is IMO one of the most important aspects of a fully developed nation.

My grandmother couldn't afford a chair. Most people today have reasonably furnished apartments, smartphones, some kind of vaguely functional computer with (low speed) internet access, and probably a car.

Food went from being very expensive (people actually died of starvation not that long ago!) to being so cheap that obesity is a major epidemic among the poor.

Since 1940, the percent of the US with a high school degree went from < 50% to over 80%. The percent of the US population with a college degree went from < 10% to over 20%.

What is your argument that the economy is in decline? That you don't magically get a two story house with a yard, a new car, and the ability to support a family of four? That has never once been the case in US history. It's a great myth in the past that the 1950s were somehow a magical time when everyone had a house and the income for a family, but it's that - a myth.

Not sure how the cost of chairs is relevant, compared to the costs of things like housing, student debt, health care, transportation, you know, the things that are actually keeping people today from saving.

I make about 4X what my parents combined made as schoolteachers, yet my housing costs about 10X what theirs cost. In order to get that great price I had to move about 2 hours from work (and pay for the required transportation), compared to their 10 minute commute. I came out of grad school six figures in debt, whereas theirs was cheap enough that they barely had to finance it. They paid for reasonably priced doctor visits out of pocket, compared to my high deductible "healthcare plan" that still has me dropping $hundreds for a single X-ray.

But I have a cellphone so I'm a reckless spender.

This is, of course, because technology has brought those costs down. Or in the case of education, government subsidies have made college "free". Not because living wages or the economy have improved.

> Food went from being very expensive (people actually died of starvation not that long ago!) to being so cheap that obesity is a major epidemic among the poor.

Food being cheap is not the reason for the obesity epidemic. It's because food has become of such poor quality. Also, it is engineered to cause you to overeat.

Otherwise, I agree with your overall point.

Mass produced goods including furniture is cheaper nowadays but everything else is more expensive. This includes essential things like housing and healthcare.

Further the needs have also grown: without a car it’s impossible for most people to have a job

> but everything else is more expensive

Yes and no. One thing to keep in mind is inflation, so we always need to compare prices to average incomes. A house is listed as being <10k in 1940, but the average yearly salary was also <2k, and the minimum wage was $0.30 per hour.

However, things have genuinely gotten more expensive in some cases usually due not to the economy, but due to safety. That's a good thing - we no longer have asbestos and lead paint, cars are safer, and working fire alarms are a thing. However, those things do cost money. You can no longer buy an all metal box that goes 80mph without seatbelts or airbags.

I find the car claim to be somewhat of a red herring. Yes, you need a car now whereas before a bicycle might of sufficed. However, a decent car can be had for two thousand dollars - not a pretty one, but a functional one. You might be able to go cheaper if you have any mechanical ability, but we'll assume the average person doesn't have that.

In addition now of course you need drivers insurance, and you probably need to take a drivers ed course before getting your license. Those things do add cost, but they also save lives.

Yes and no.

The median home value in 1940, adjusted for inflation to 2000, was $30,600 ($2,938 pre-adjustment).[1] The median income for a man was $9,948, using the same inflation factor of 10.406639 ($956, unadjusted).[2]

The median home sales price in 2015 was about $300,000[3] while median household income was $54,000.[4]

[1] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/valu...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2012/04/02/149575704/the-1940-census-72-...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

[4] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

You're ignoring that the percentage of people living in cities has gone up by 50% (56% -> 75%) from 1940 to 1990 (couldn't find later data).

The size of homes has also gotten much bigger.

So the $30,000 home in 1940 (in today's dollar) wouldn't look anything like a $300,000 home today.

I'd be more interested to learn what a townhouse in Manhattan cost in 1940 and 2010.

And you need to count in something else, the actual changes in living standards.

Nowadays the cost (for a new house) for "utilities" (water, electricity, heating, A/C, etc.) plants/hardware is a considerable factor, as a rough estimate 20-30% of the construction costs, and a large house in the 40's would probably have had one single bathroom/WC (if any[1]) for a 3 bedrooms home.

jaclaz

[1] In rural parts it was not so unusual to have an external loo

Healthcare is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison from many decades ago. There are definitely serious problems with healthcare, but we are also increasingly getting options in healthcare that were not available 30, 40, 50 years ago and contribute significantly to costs.

With housing, on the other hand, we are routinely seeing people pay upwards of 500% what people were paying for the exact same property a few decades ago with few or no changes, even with the effect of inflation removed.

> Further the needs have also grown: without a car it’s impossible for most people to have a job

In parts of the US. For most parts of the Europe, and indeed many cities in the US, a car is not a requirement.

My grandparents also lived through the depression. And how did they cope with it? Joined a labor union, joined the socialist party. Maybe not such a bad idea?

As a counter-anecdote, my grandmother is still alive: she was born in 1918. She just voted for Trump, to give you an idea of where she stands politically. She coped with it by scrimping and saving every penny. She literally washes saran wrap to reuse it, despite having enough pension these days to get by. She saves grocery-store bags. She eats every crumb on her plate. She never wastes leftovers, ever. She went to college at 40 years old, which was not thought of highly in her time, and had a 20-year career as a schoolteacher. She still corresponds with some past students, who are her last living friends.

My grandfather's college fund (to be a dentist) was wiped out, the bank closed. He worked at a GE factory his whole life, work that I will say was far beneath his potential. He never complained. He once traded his easy job on the line for a much harder one, where he had to lift each engine block twice to inspect some fiddly bit on it. He traded to get a 5-cent raise. If you offered my grandfather a government subsidy, he might not have been able to conceal his contempt.

I don't think the decisions of any of the individuals we've mentioned are great indicators of what's correct or incorrect, but the depression didn't influence everyone the same way.

> He traded to get a 5-cent raise.

A five cent raise in today's currency or back then? Per hour or week?

Assuming it's hourly, if it's from "then" could you convert it to modern currency, or present it as an percentage increase so we can understand what kind of relative increase that was?

Five cents sounds like nothing today, but 70 years ago it would have been significant.

According to https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm $0.05 in 1930 works out to $0.73 today.

Figuring out a percentage increase is a bit complicated without knowing how much mod's grandfather earned. According to https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/spring/1... in the 1940 census average (yes, not median) annual income was $1368, which works out to $24,505 in 2018 dollars, or $12.25/hour assuming 40 hour weeks and 2 weeks of vacation.

So at a guess, $0.05/hour was less than a 10% raise, but more than 1%. I expect it was /hour, not /week, because weekly wages would have been in the ballpark of tens of dollars.

Disclaimer: I am not mod, and this is not my grandfather we're talking about.

This happened when my father worked at the same factory, so it was all the way in the 60s. My father passed up on the same job because he didn't think it was worth the raise. He's the one that tells the story--the entire thing was not noteworthy to my grandfather.

Nobody's denying that the world has improved. The relevant question is "where are we relative to where we could be, given all that we have to work with?" One answer, in the opinion of many informed people, is that we (Americans) haven't done nearly as much with what we have as we could have potentially done.

It took, by her estimate, about two years to have enough furniture before she was willing to invite over any sorts of company. ... Today you can furnish an apartment reasonably with about a months worth of wages.

You do understand there's a difference between a month of wages and having a month of wages saved to spend, right?

Considering most people live month to month... saving an entire month would take many people more than 2 years.

Really shows how some people in HN have never experienced poverty. If a households main income earner is making minimum wage they will not be making shopping trips to IKEA to furnish their whole apartment lol. IKEA is cheap but the $50 you have left over after bills won't get you much. Many months you will have a negative balance after you've paid for essentials.

>If a households main income earner is making minimum wage

Maybe you shouldn't start a family when you are making minimum wage, in a city with a high cost of living.

I don't see what that has to do with what I said but sure, the poor shouldn't start families.

Then start lobbying the red states to stop placing restrictions on birth control and family planning.

It surely seems now that the biological imperative is just a luxury for the rich...

Personally I agree that in modern society its a good idea to wait to have kids until you can provide for them....

But its a little weird that a Caveman's most basic prerogative (To procreate), is not something many people in modern society can afford to do.

It's also something that is fairly important to the continuation of our species, so hopefully we can figure out a way more people can responsibly afford to have children.

Did your grandparents retire? At what age? How are they doing now?

For comparison, when do you plan to retire?

Now do the same run down for your entire cohort.

My grandfather retired at 67 due to failing health. He was primarily supported by his military pension, and to a smaller extent by a pension from working at a major grocery store. My grandmother only worked odd jobs, but collects a small amount of social security. She's still doing quite well and spends most of her time reading library books and painting (though notice both of those are extremely cheap hobbies).

I'm a distinctly unfair comparison, since I could retire as early as 55 to 60 (I doubt I will, I do terribly when left without something to do, but who knows.) That being said, I recognize my situation is very unlike most of my peers.

My cohort falls into three categories:

+ Those with high income and good financial management. Like me they are capable of retiring without any government assistance at 60ish in most situations.

+ Those with high income, but no financial management skills. Even now with no family to support and no "required" debts, they struggle to remain afloat. Simply throwing more money into the fire doesn't help it turns out.

+ Those with low income. Universally, and not for lack of intelligence, they have no 401k, no major longterm savings. If they retire it will be through programs such as Social Security (assuming it still exists). This is the group that worries me the most, because I don't have any answer for how to improve their situation. They're simply caught in the spiral of not having enough money to make progress on saving.

Please don't take my argument as "Everything is perfect now!". Mostly my argument is, "Things aren't majorly worse and are generally better." Nor am I making the claim that the future will forever be better - Social Security might collapse, pension programs dry up, etc. We shouldn't stop assisting the poor, teaching financial literacy, or behaving intelligently. Simply that the average condition of people is better than it was.

"Please don't take my argument as..."

Ok. Peace.

"...average condition of people is better than it was."

My generation (X) griped about student load debt, which seemed crippling at the time.

No comparison with today's kids. Then pile on housing costs, rising insurance premiums, day care & pre school (for anyone choosing to have kids), ...

I despair for the millennials.

That's a patently false statement.

Inflation has been 3% a year for decades and wages have stayed flat.

Your example of home furnishings has been improved by industrialization.

Property value have skyrocketed, vehicle prices have skyrocketed, college, healthcare...

Things you NEED have become way more expensive. Luxury goods have gotten cheaper.

Wages have remained flat when inflation is taken into account, i.e. real wages are flat, nominal wages continue to increase. We also have seen upward movement in median household income recently, and we should expect that trend to continue. So the idea of flat wages may be coming to an end.

What hasn't remained flat is the wages paid to the top N% which has greatly increased and accelerated the wealth gap. It is this gap that leaves people less satisfied despite being generally better off.

I would qualify: people aren't just dissatisfied because of the "unfairness" of growing inequality. The growth of the wealth gap has some very real ramifications, ie: on the distribution of power in politics.

As if the poor ever had any power in politics. Huey Long might have been a lightning rod for poor people, but it's not as if their votes have been courted since I've been alive.

>Inflation has been 3% a year for decades and wages have stayed flat.

Every time I read this claim and go looking for data, I find data that says that real wages are roughly flat, which means that they have kept pace with inflation. (That's the definition of real wages: that they are in inflation-adjusted terms.) It seems a common journalistic (and often political) talking point to say exactly what you said, which makes the math or reading comprehension challenged assume something quite different. While the author or speaker is not technically lying, they are merely misleading the reader/listener with a confusing (and sometimes confused) combination of nominal inflation and real wages.

See figures 3 and 4 here: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

> Property value have skyrocketed, vehicle prices have skyrocketed

This next chart is in nominal dollars (meaning, not inflation adjusted): http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/pricechanges....

It shows that vehicles have not gotten more expensive (even as they've gotten much, much better, safer, more reliable, etc) and that housing and food/beverages have inflated by less than wages and by roughly the same amount as general inflation (which is no great surprise, given that they are a substantial component of the inflation calculation and that it would be difficult to sustain inflation over a long period of time in a consumer-driven economy in the absence of [nominal] wage growth for consumers).

College and healthcare have indeed risen much more quickly than wages or general inflation.

Do you have contrary sources?

Figure 3: "When it comes to the pace of annual [real wage] increases, the top 1% wage grew 138% since 1979, while [real] wages for the bottom 90% grew 15%"

Figure 4: "Middle-class wages are stagnant—Middle-wage workers’ hourly [real] wage is up 6% since 1979, low-wage workers’ [real] wages are down 5%, while those with very high wages saw a 41% increase"

I wouldn't exactly describe those figures as "misleading". In fact, they're pretty clear: one group is benefiting much more than the others.

As for the second one, is it really saying that real new-car prices have declined by ~50%?

IMO, the graphs show that the quoted statement is absolutely misleading: "Inflation has been 3% a year for decades and wages have stayed flat."

I agree that they would likely not refute a different, unmade, point about income inequality.

The second reference is saying that real new-car prices have declined by about 36%. ==> 1-(100/155.6)

Median wages have decline by 4% since 2000.

Median wealth has fallen by 28% in a decade.

The middle class has been reduced by 11% since 1971.

Even in the chart you posted, things people NEED have become steadily more expensive while wages have remained flat.

Student loan debt has skyrocketed over 200% since 1990 which is needed in most cases for a good job.

How is this not decline?

* http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

I think that you're correct.

People who knew me early on in certain contexts thought that I was "rich" comparatively speaking.

They didn't see the 10 year old car, 4 roommates (in a cheap city), camping vacations, sale clothes, etc. I was debt free quickly. I'm in a fairly well compensated gig now but kept the habits. The car is a 2003, my house is older, vacations are in nicer hotels but we drive, etc.

That's not to say that people have challenges that are tough... but so did I!

Whether or not a bad financial choice is a out of necessity is highly situation-dependent and the situation doesn't look great for the majority of millennials. I think this point sometimes gets lost among the HN crowd for whom a bad financial decision is most often a choice.

Things like the extraordinary rise in the cost of higher education -- which has become a near defacto requirement to obtain a livable wage -- should not be discounted. The example of student debt is particularly salient because it appears to materially impact the vast majority of millennials. Even those of us fortunate enough to be making six-figure incomes spend many years pouring money into debt instead of retirement or brokerage accounts. In most cases this setback leads delays in home ownership, starting a family, and retirement. This is a problem that cannot be remedied by teaching good financial skills.

I think there’s real value in spreading the message of thrift. The 20th century saw a massive build up of the consumerist lifestyle. It’s going to take a lot of work to back that out, so we might as well start now.

I’ve personally seen people with high five figure student debt go on regular international trips. These people more or less live paycheck to paycheck and save specifically for travel (or use credit cards — if they can get them).

Educating people as to why that might be a bad idea and creating a supportive culture of anti-consumerism seems like a good idea. Sure there are policy decisions at play too, but being “frugal” can hardly hurt.

No doubt. Again: the tips are great and many people would do well to listen to them. However, the larger question of the place that these tips have in the story that we tell ourselves about society is still an open question. There are multiple ways to place these tips in a larger context while still following them and regarding them as worthwhile. It's important to understand that there is a choice to be made here about the story we tell ourselves.

I don’t think there’s a way to place them in the larger context that makes them less useful though. It’s tough out there, try to be frugal, seems like great advice. I like that it’s not political as well. Once you move the discussion to policy, people get territorial.

The “American dream” of the 20th century was never sustainable. We’re just now realizing that en masse. Being frugal is just a natural realignment of culture and reality.

I agree on the first point, but I think part of the point of this article is that there no such thing as "not political" since everything you say in public has a place in the public consciousness which is the engine of democracy.

Regarding the American dream, maybe it's sustainable or maybe it's not, but it's clear that it would be a lot more sustainable if people where willing to create a world with fewer obstacles to attaining it e.g. by implementing universal health care. If we tell ourselves that people who can't afford health care probably deserve to struggle with money because they're not being frugal, then that's a problem.

This is my point. We agree that being frugal is good. Great!

As for universal healthcare, good luck getting everyone to agree on that...

I disagree that every word spoken in public is political. “Don’t touch the hot stove” is great advice. Let’s be free to have those kinds of conversations without dragging them into the political mud.

I guess I should say that everything said in public has the potential to be political. Something that's political, in my mind, is anything that has significance for running the government or the larger social machine. "Don't touch the hot stove" could be political in a world where malfunctioning stoves are burning people. I think that "don't spend too much money" is political in a world that couldn't continue to function without the existence of people who will never have enough money no matter how frugal they are.

Why not? They're screwed by the economy, so might as well go all in.

We need to get to the idea that there are not enough good jobs for everybody. Once we get to that point, we can start to figure out what to do about it.

> Regardless of intent, these Millennials are telling an older generation of elite Americans — the very people whose policies and financial decisions kneecapped the economy — what they want to hear: that everything is more or less okay, and young people just need to be more thoughtful about their money.

Perhaps the article got that wrong though.

It could be just as likely that the Millennials are saying that they are shunning the crass consumerism that the 'older generation of elite Americans' are steeped* in.

* Boomers, "You're soaking in it." ;)

It's kind of hard for me to believe that some people's analysis of their own behavior is this tragically dependent on what other people think.

Most young people do need to be more thoughtful about their money, though. And the economy as a whole is, by multiple different metrics, the best it’s ever been. It’s just that this greatness needs to be spread a bit wider. In the capitalist system with a labor market as tight as we’ve ever seen it this is addressed by getting another job for more money. Now is a good time to do it. You are responsible for your own success.

> In the capitalist system with a labor market as tight as we’ve ever seen it this is addressed by getting another job for more money.

Is it tight?

I see very few occupations with rising wages. That's the REAL test for a tight labor market.

Let me be anecdotal for a moment ...

I was at a conference recently where the companies had a panel session complaining about getting more people into the business. Unlike most software disciplines, they really do have an infeed problem. In addition, they are also getting poached and losing their junior guys from the shop floor.

Okay, think I, I was a hiring manager in the DotCom Boom(tm), I understand getting poached in a narrow field.

So, do you know who their primary opponents are?

Amazon and Foxconn.

Two of the worst employers on the planet. You are losing employees from your manufacturing line to Amazon warehousing and Foxconn manufacturing.

Um, please go bankrupt and may your industry die in a fire if you treat people so badly as to lose them to Amazon and Foxconn.

Wages are rising at the highest rate since 2009: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/02/582641530....

And black unemployment is at historic lows a well.

Rates do not matter unless they are over big time scales. You have conveniently picked a year just past the banking crisis...

Does the absolute inflation and purchasing power adjusted value even match 90s?

Sounds to me like you’ve already made up your mind if “rates do not matter”. Because objectively they do.

AstralStorm's point is somewhat divergent from the thread of the conversation. It is that, for playing "catch-up" to years of wage stagnation, this month's wage growth rate doesn't mean much. We need years of high wage growth, not just one month or even one year. In this sense, AstralStorm is right that instantaneous rates do not in fact matter. And you sound like you're going to just label everyone who disagrees with you as having their mind already made up, rather than actually thinking about what they say.

That said, the original discussion was about the rate of wage growth as a measure of how tight the labor market is. In that sense, the instantaneous rate is fine.

So why am I harassing you about your answer to AstralStorm, when AstralStorm was disagreeing based on something that was outside the scope of the discussion at hand? Because of the way you answered, with dismissiveness rather than actually thinking about the point raised. That's not cool.

> Does the absolute inflation and purchasing power adjusted value even match 90s?

Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682711 for references. (Wages rising slightly faster than inflation over decades long period.)

That's not a meaningful stat, considering 2009 was the onset of the Great Recession. Wages are still not great.

The economy is the best its ever been, but wealth inequality is the worst its ever been. The cost of living has gone up far, far faster than income has, while wages have stagnated or dropped, meaning people these days are earning less money and have more expenses than before.

To hear someone who was making $10/hour out of college and bought a home for $40,000 say that the reason millennials can't buy a home today is because they're buying avocado toast and not because equivalent homes cost $1.6 million today is infuriating. Relatively speaking, millennials are doing better, frugally, than baby boomers were (saving more, spending less, etc), but the cost of the things that people are complaining about has grown exponentially.

Meanwhile, almost all of the growth of the economy has gone towards the top 1% of people. If you look at, for example, Canada, the average CEO makes as much by January 2nd as the average worker does by December 31st.

CEO pay growth over the last few decades has skyrocketed (compared to inflation, worker wages, or even corporate profits), while worker wages basically track inflation. In other words, people are making the same amount of money as people 50 years ago, even though a lot of things cost more (e.g. housing).

Blaming the economy inequality on the fact that people aren't willing to take on second jobs ignores the fact that wealth and power is all being concentrated in a small number of people and the rest of us are forced to fight over what they're willing to leave behind for everyone else.

Demand more money. You’re now in a position to do so.

Do you actually care about the well-being of the poor, or do you just hate the rich? Because you seem much more concerned about the relative difference between the rich and the poor than you do about the nominal well-being of anyone. Population densities have increased and it's more expensive to live in cities. That's for sure. We opened up free trade which gave the American middle class a minor kick in the pants at the expense of bringing huge swaths of India and China up to a position of basic food security, increased healthcare, education, and just about every other measurement of well-being you can think of.

Your essential argument is that from a relative perspective the American middle class is not as well off as it was during a unique time following WWII during which the American middle class reached the highest levels of relative wealth in the history of the planet. Okay, but they're still nominally better off than they were back then and an almost unimaginable number of people have had their lives dramatically improved across the globe in the process.

No one's talking about hating the rich here but you.

We can all care about societal inequality, and how it probably suggests that the levers of civilization need to be jiggered a bit, without hating anyone.

I think housing in the PNW is way unaffordable but that doesn't mean I hate either the developers, the planners, or the numerous other social and geographical factors that have led to this situation.

In short, please don't bring up things like "hate the rich" when no one else is.

Your primary complaint could have all the wind taken out of its sails if we just magically took all the money away from wealthy people and burned it. Because wealth inequality would go down. It wouldn't actually help anyone, but wealth inequality would go down.

Affordable housing is a problem best addressed by the people who live in the areas that have a lack of affordable housing. It's not something that needs addressing on the national scale.

It might help, actually. Your assumption is that what the rich do with their mmonet doesn't actually hurt the poor; but it can. Itcab be used to purchase narratives and political influence in ways deeply harmful

You're still focusing your attention on supposed bad behavior of the rich rather than the wellbeing of the poor.

If you think the poor need something, like say more funding for inner city schools, then say that and suggest a reasonable tax, perhaps a tax on luxury goods that would disproportionately affect the wealthy. Or if there's a specific bad behavior, such as pharmaceutical advertising, talk about that. But just complaining about wealth inequality sounds more like hating the rich than caring about the poor.

But rich people largely advocate against policies that favor poor people, like generous welfare and equitable taxation. Rich people advocate for policies that protect their status and the value of their properties and investments. They advocate against redistributive inheritance taxes, so that their own children continue to have enormous advantages over anyone else. They advocate policies that guarantee they can continue to extract wealth from rents rather than productive avtivities, dragging down the economic well being of all. And the rich are more likely to cheat on their taxes, try to bribe officials, or flat out disregard the law. And the rich have disproportionate power to do so, and work very hard to make it stay that way.

>But rich people largely advocate against policies that favor poor people, like generous welfare and equitable taxation. Rich people advocate for policies that protect their status and the value of their properties and investments.

Do you suppose it's possible for you to advocate for a specific amount of welfare that you feel is "generous" without attempting to villainize the very people you hope to pay for it?

>They advocate against redistributive inheritance taxes, so that their own children continue to have enormous advantages over anyone else.

First, one of the major motivations of achieving success in life is so that your children will be better off. So all you've established is that rich people are good parents. Secondly, you're still just upset that someone has a lot, rather than focusing on a specific problem that some group of poor people has. You're just hating the rich rather than showing an interest in helping the poor. Third, fortunes generally disappear after 3 generations, so it's not as if huge dynasties are being created that last forever. If you're rich, your grandkids get to go to a nice private school. That's pretty much it.

>They advocate policies that guarantee they can continue to extract wealth from rents rather than productive avtivities, dragging down the economic well being of all.

Yes, things like regulatory capture are a problem. I will hold up a sign and protest it alongside you. But do you see you you're STILL pointing to the "rich" rather than "bad policy?"

>And the rich are more likely to cheat on their taxes, try to bribe officials, or flat out disregard the law.

I've never met a person who worked for tips that didn't cheat on their taxes, have you? But more importantly, we're back at the same place. Rather than advocating for or against a specific policy, you're just slinging mud. You care more about saying mean things about rich people than you do about issues the poor might be facing.

Your saying that I do doesn't make it so. You should read more carefully. Look at is absolutely as simple as this: the interests of the rich and the nonrich are systematically at odds, yet only one of these groups have any great power to see to it that their interests are served. A society so structured is unjust, fragile, and generally suboptimal. Such societies lend themselves to demogougery and collapse. One needbt even resort to claims of moral and ethical failure on the part of those who have power to conclude this thing, and yet it is also true that power and wealth have deletrious effects on a number of features of that which we might call virtue, including empathy.

>the interests of the rich and the nonrich are systematically at odds

This is not universally true. It is not true across individuals among the rich/nonrich nor is it true across specific agenda items. This caricature you've created for these two groups is called classism. You are no better than the people who think all poor people are stupid or lazy.

>yet only one of these groups have any great power to see to it that their interests are served.

Okay, let's talk about campaign finance reform. Or is making sure there's no rich people more important to you than making sure everyone has equal political power?

Systematically does not mean universally. It means, at a minimum, that their interests diverge non randomly.

Saying that rich and nonrich have different interests is not controversial, except to those intent on denying what is obviously true.

Either you are ill equipped to engage in a discussion on this topic or you are being utterly disingenuous; certainly you have misrepresented what I have said in ways that push a rather tired narrative, one trotted out every time someone pushes back on the status quo of enormous wealth disparity by noting that it has serious negative consequences.

>one trotted out every time someone pushes back on the status quo of enormous wealth disparity by noting that it has serious negative consequences.

You just can't help yourself. Once again you express more hatred for the rich than you do concern for the wellbeing of the poor.

I'm not denying that there are consequences to wealth or income disparity. I just think you don't appear to care about the wellbeing of the poor beyond the minimal lip-service you have to pay it to justify voicing your hatred for the rich.

Your class warfare demagoguery is entertaining. The entirety of notable human civilization is defined by exploitation, and nobody who matters will ever care. Except politicians who will use your whining and vote to do whatever they were planning to do anyways. Vast inequality is, and always has been, the mark of a great civilization.

Sometimes wealth is the problem.

You're free not to care about inequality, so go for it.

I haven't seen any convincing evidence-based argument that a high degree of inequality is either neutral or good for society as a whole, nor do I have any philosophical leanings that suggest that it is an acceptable byproduct of an otherwise fair and just society.

Going by both evidence (health outcomes, class mobility, etc) and by my philosophical leanings that it don't seem right for so few people to own so much (when ownership itself is a purely fictional thing), I'm going to keep talking about inequality as a Bad Thing to be addressed.

Don't like it? You do you, but telling me I'm focusing my behavior on one thing or another is about the least compelling thing to say.

> The cost of living has gone up far, far faster than income has, while wages have stagnated or dropped, meaning people these days are earning less money and have more expenses than before.

Common talking point, not borne out by data.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16682711 for references.

"The economy is doing great, all you need to do to flourish is work a second job in addition to your first one!"

I didn’t say a “second” job. I suggested to merely change the one people have right now. In my experience this is by far the surest way to increase one’s compensation. Do this once every 2 years, it adds up.

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