The glass is half full. In other words: high standard of living has been preserved in the western world over the last three decades, despite a rising population and the rise of Chinese manufacturing.
So really, that's a bit of a strawman. The issue isn't that there isn't enough to go around and we should be thankful that we haven't become China. The issue is that a small proportion of the population has manipulated law and the markets to allow them to make off with the wealth, while the rest of us have been screwed over.
...and that's a dangerous thing to allow for many, many reasons.
I was with you up to that point. Do you have a reference for this? My reading was that centralization of wealth was a relatively natural consequence of our economic model and not something that was manipulated into being. Hence the discussions on UBI and other ways to fix it.
End result is increasing income inequality. If nothing is done we will return to the historical norm of peasants and wealthy nobles with nothing in between.
I'm sorry, but that is obviously not true.
In the case of illegal immigration, the illegal immigrant is definitely better off by finding a higher wage and safer life than in his/her home country. The average Central American working illegally in the US, while not afforded employment rights like a legal worker, is still unequivocally better off than his/her options in his/her home country.
Similarly globalization has been a major benefit to the poor in many developing countries. If you compare the median per capita GDP in countries like China, Vietnam, or any African country, it is immediately obvious that economic development and globalization has been good for them.
I think what you are referring to is the it has not been good for the average American while it has been good to elite/wealthy Americans.
But please don't misrepresent that it has only been a benefit to the few simply bc it hasn't helped the majority of people in developed countries. People in developing countries have been benefitted immensely.
Or worse. The amount of control and capital on that 'wealthy noble' side is way more than it's ever been at any time in history, and we are watching the kinds of damage they inflict when they're capable of that much more than just 'buying fancy tulip bulbs'. All it takes is a few crazy ones deciding the best thing to do is kill all the serfs, and their real power will show. We're already seeing it.
I agree that the growth in regulation has negative consequences and that the education system is largely ineffective, but I think these are unintended consequences rather than the result of conscious manipulation by powerful people and organizations.
If HFT were a net positive for market participants then those same participants wouldn't be fleeing to dark pools in an attempt to avoid them.
My understanding isn't without nuance, nor am I trying to claim I have a replacement system. I'm just being intellectually honest about these elephants in the room.
Incidentally another thing happened around 1973 - the incarceration rate began a meteroic rise[4] that did not abate until Obama's presidency. Connecting these facts is left as an exercise for the reader.
[1]https://stephenpruis.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/chart-wages... [2]http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/us-deb... [3]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/2008_Top... [4]https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/cfs-file.ashx/__key...
They don't?
It depends on what you mean by "our economic model."
http://time.com/5280446/baby-boomer-generation-america-steve...
That you frame that as a "natural truth" and not a cultural artefact is part and parcel of the manipulation. Our "economic model" is something that has been arrived at by centuries of manipulation and is constantly being contested and changed in ways large and small.
Markets that allow unregulated investment of private capital have a natural tendency to concentrate wealth through multiplier effects. Basically the more money you have, the easier it is to make money from your money, and the more money you get.
But wealth is power. As you get more money, you have more money you can use to manipulate the political system in any of a myriad of ways. Everything from donating to campaigns, to hiring lobbyists, to funding ads, to the revolving door and regulatory capture, to just straight up bribes.
So I do think there are natural concentrating tendencies that we can introduce policies, like UBI, to counter-act. But there is also pretty clear evidence of those with wealth manipulating the system to grant themselves more of both wealth and power.
Just look at the lobbying the wealthy have done over the past few decades that have taken America's formerly very progressive taxation system down to where it is today. That didn't just happen. People with wealth pushed for it. The same can be said of any number of other changes to the regulatory and economic infrastructure that primarily benefited those with wealth and harmed those with out (weakening of unions and collective bargaining, the weakening of financial regulations, weakening of environment regulations, and so forth). That stuff didn't just happen. It wasn't a natural outgrowth of the system. People made it happen.
Yes, living standard is high, but that doesn't mean that it can't be better.
Or do you mean that wage rises should be compared against only a part of inflation?
People in rural areas where housing costs are not increasing might be experiencing a little wage growth, but there are fewer and fewer future work opportunities.
People in urban areas where housing costs are increasing rapidly, but wages are not increasing rapidly enough to make them feel secure...but they need to stay there in case they're laid off or need to find another employer.
Either situation isn't what's wanted, but the overall statistic is that real wage growth is positive.
Accepting that housing and healthcare costs have outpaced wage growth, that mathematically implies that costs of other goods and services were outpaced by wages by an even larger (appropriately weighted) margin.
See https://medium.com/@6pranavk/insight-of-the-day-cost-disease... especially the graph.
> costs of other goods and services where outpaced by wages
You're implying that all people consume the same basket of goods as calculated by the article. Wage growth and spending is not even across society, so most people could be worse off while all of the above math holds true. labour productivity rose by 75% in America from 1973 to 2016, while average pay rose by less than 50% and median pay by just over 10%. which is largely because between 1979 and 2016, pay adjusted for inflation for the bottom fifth of American earners barely rose at all.
Further, many goods like computing power have gotten vastly cheaper, but that savings mostly end up with people who have disposable income. Spend a lower percentage of your income on such goods and the benifit decreases. This means the the bottom half of the work force is worse off than you might think.
My point is, not everyone has the same high standard of living to begin with.