Comment by prolikewh0a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prolikewh0a | Hacker News Reader

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Are you sure you're putting blame in the right place and not just falling into some manufactured consent?

Every day income inequality gets worse, workers are treated like garbage[1], wages are going down[2] with unemployment going down, people can't afford health insurance and even if they can they will probably still be broken as deductibles and out of pocket costs rise, 80% of all people are living paycheck[3], 50% of all people in USA are defined as poor or low income[4], 80% of the country makes under $65k/year while the value of our money becomes less[5], 1/5 of children are in poverty[6].

I really think this is a natural occurrence to the failures of this corrupt capitalist system that provides for the few instead of the many. Things are shifting left, and it's certainly not because Russia spent $50k on advertisements on Facebook. You can also argue that the UK was a far greater influence with Cambridge Analytica, but it's something people like to ignore.

These are absolutely our own policies having this effect.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/30/accidents...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

[4] https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...

[5] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2016

[6] http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html

HN is not the place to wage the culture war.

Depends on where you are standing. The best metaphor I've seen for the world these days is Scott Adams' about us watching two different movies in parallel at the same time.

It's equally possible to look at the same world, and see that business is booming, the stock market is at record highs, employers are hiring and making investments at rates we haven't seen in years. Tension in areas of the world that have been problematic my entire life appear to be on the ebb at the moment. Maybe it's a regional thing... But things are looking pretty fricking awesome over on this side of the fence.

You can go a long way towards flipping between these parallel universes by logging in and logging out of social media.

You're looking at things from the side of the elite and I absolutely agree, that side of the fence looks fantastic.

Business is booming for the elite, the stock market is almost entirely owned by the top 10%[1] so nobody is really seeing those gains except people who already have plenty, employers are hiring but nobody has really seen a wage increase since the 90's[2] and wages are actually slightly falling[3]. Where's the bargaining power as we close in on full employment? It's nowhere to be found, and conditions are getting worse for the people who do the work.

[1] http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

> wages are actually slightly falling

According to your source wages fell, in real terms, between May 2017 and May 2018 by 0.1%. They're up from 5 years ago, up from 10 years ago and way up from 50 years ago. The principal cause of that real decline was gas prices rising unexpectedly.

Are you adjusting for inflation? Most Americans haven't seen any real wage growth when adjusted for inflation since the 70's. If they have seen real income growth, it has been extremely small. Wages have actually dropped since 1970 for the bottom 40% when adjusted for inflation.

https://www.businessinsider.com/record-median-household-inco...

> Are you adjusting for inflation?

Yes. "Without adjusting for inflation, these 'nonsupervisory' workers saw their average hourly earnings jump 2.8 percent from last year. But that was not enough to keep pace with the 2.9 percent increase in inflation, which economists attributed to rising gas prices" [1].

> Most Americans haven't seen any real wage growth when adjusted for inflation since the 70's

This is not true for people employed full time [2]. Real hourly wages for hourly nonfarm workers [3] are up. About the only people I can find who are earning less, in real terms, than they were in the 1970s are manufacturing workers, and even they are up over the last decade.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.t01.htm

I mean the question you need to be asking is if things are getting better or getting worse. A year ago, you would have included "nobody is hiring" in your list of criticisms, but now you are forced to say "employers are hiring, but...."

Clearly improvements in the things you mention can't happen overnight. But improving the availability of jobs and having the stock market going up instead of crashing are objectively better than the opposite.

The article you cite explains that the net loss of YoY wages was entirely due to inflation, and in nominal terms wages actually increased YoY, and it also cherry picks the "production and nonsupervisory" group of workers (inflation adjusted wages for all workers actually increased) -- so its somewhat dishonest to not clarify those aspects. Inflation adjustments are also a notoriously tricky business, and without delving into the details of what inflation metric was used, and if it was applied on a region-by-region basis, hair splitting over the effects of inflation on wages to drive a narrative around wage growth (when the direction is generally "upwards") seems wrong.

You seem to be looking for reasons to explain why the trajectory of the US economy is negative, but I'm afraid that the evidence is mounting that wage growth and job opportunities should be expected to improve over time going forward, absent some new financial crisis.

edit: Also worth mentioning: staring at medians around wages is, imho, missing an critical aspect to understanding the actual experience of participants in the economy: income mobility. There's evidence that upward mobility has been stable despite an increase in point-in-time income inequality [1]. The question we should be asking is if income inequality at a point-in-time is necessarily bad if participants in the economy have ample opportunity to move up to higher levels of income. I don't have the answer to this, but any arguments about wage growth or income inequality need to take into account mobility, and they almost never do.

https://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356290/study-upward-mobili...

Wage growth without accounting for inflation makes any wage growth insignificant. The lower 40% of Americans have seen NEGATIVE wage growth since the 1970's, and the 40%-60% of wage earners have seen a measly 0.5% increase since the 1970's when adjusted for inflation [1]

Stock market is entirely irrelevant for most of Americans [2]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/record-median-household-inco...

[2] http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...

If you assume that people are locked into a fixed position in the economy, then yes, those people have seen negative wage growth when adjusted for inflation.

But if you assume that new entrants to the economy develop skills and move up over time as they acquire skills and responsibility, as is likely a closer reflection of reality, then their wages have grown over time. The observation you are making shows that for new entrants to the economy at low income levels, there has not been a net increase in the starting wages those people earn since the 1970s.

I guess the question to ask is: should we expect the real earnings of low level, low skill jobs (not people) to increase over time as the economy does? As you said, these are relatively flat. I have no reason to assume someone performing low-skilled labor in 1970 should be paid more in real terms than someone today doing the same job, in pure economic terms. For that to be true, they'd need to be performing some kind of increased value in their job relative to 40 years ago -- but if they were doing that, they wouldn't be performing a low-skilled job anymore, and hence would be moving up in income level!

The underlying argument is that although the economy is improving in some aspects for some people, what good is it if the majority of the population sees no to negative benefit? If a journeyman level low skill worker makes less real wages today than 30 years ago, and the majority of the country is comprised of low skill workers, how on earth could anyone consider the recent economy a net positive for the country?

>If you assume that people are locked into a fixed position in the economy, then yes, those people have seen negative wage growth when adjusted for inflation.

80% of the country makes under $65k[1]. They're pretty locked in. This talk of "upward mobility" is not really true. Only a few will move up the chain, but not the majority. Not everyone is moving into management, not everyone is becoming a software engineer. With the costs of college education & textbooks rising exorbitantly, less people are able to afford to get the skills to move up [2].

>I guess the question to ask is: should we expect the real earnings of low level, low skill jobs (not people) to increase over time as the economy does? As you said, these are relatively flat. I have no reason to assume someone performing low-skilled labor in 1970 should be paid more in real terms than someone today doing the same job, in pure economic terms.

The cost of everything necessary is rising[2] while income's have stayed the same since the 70's when adjusted for inflation, so yes I expect "low skill" jobs to keep up. "Low skill" jobs are still a necessary part of the economy and someone hast to do them; who's going to pick up your trash at work, who's going to make your smoothies, who's going to prepare your breakfast sandwiches, who's going to pick up trash at event stadiums, who's going to cut your hair?

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2016

[2] https://www.abi.org/newsroom/chart-of-the-day/price-changes-...

> 80% of the country makes under $65k[1]. They're pretty locked in. This talk of "upward mobility" is not really true. Only a few will move up the chain, but not the majority.

Do you have a citation to support these claims? A cursory search yielded a study that showed at least from 1995-2005 these claims were completely false, and the majority of people moved up from the lowest quintiles of the economy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...

> The cost of everything necessary is rising[2]

If you look at your reference this is also false. Some necessities are flat, some have gone up. And most of the necessities like food and housing that have gone up, at least according to your reference, have tracked inflation so in real terms have not gone up and hence we should not feel like flat wage growth has reduced the availability of these necessities to the people who are economically immobile. And of course, in real terms, clothing and other necessities have gotten cheaper. You also gloss over that non-essential items that improve quality of life like tech have dropped radically, increasing the overall purchasing power of people within those spheres over time.

The remaining items like medical care and college education cited are cause for concern, but if we're being honest both of those areas are effectively in a state of crisis right now due to out of control costs, broken systems, and predatory lending practices. On the education front at least there is cause for hope due to the increasing availability of alternatives.

You paint a particularly bleak picture that is not backed up by your own sources, I'm afraid. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement in income mobility in the US or reducing the costs and waste in systems like healthcare, but like I said there are plenty of reasons for optimism and a belief that the trajectory is a positive one.

> With the costs of college education & textbooks rising exorbitantly, less people are able to afford to get the skills to move up [2].

It is cheaper in most fields to skill up than it ever has been.

It's just more expensive to get a piece of paper....

> I expect "low skill" jobs to keep up.

Then I hope you are against all low and semi-skilled immigration.

I don't understand the down voting of comments like this. Is there something controversial here?

For some, it's heresy to express such opinions, and confirmation that the speaker of such blasphemy is a no-good terrible person.

Precisely.

And regardless of the magnitude, we would surely be hypocrites to keep finger-pointing. The US has been implicitly meddling heavily with international elections for decades.

It’s quite sad that Americans are not taught the basic lessons of the 19th century French Revolutions, because learning these lessons the hard way is yet again proving catastrophic.

The “liberals” (known to Americans as the ‘Democratic Party establishment’) forego moral action for moral identity. The “proletariat” (or, working class, Democratic Socialists) must overcome the denial of their self-identity which is, in American culture and media, a battle on all sides.

The average American’s head spins when they try to interpret polical nuances of foreign nations. They are limited to 2 dimensions; every opinion is either good, bad, or moderate; every piece of information is either fact, fake, or partially fact. I cannot tell if the left-leaning American pundits are being sincere when they act surprised at the newish factions in the American left. Are they truly so ignorant of history and political theory? Serious question. It’s one thing that’s American citizens are so simple-minded, but I find it hard to believe the media is not simply playing dumb. It’s truly agregious.

Whether approached through morality, love for one’s neighbor, mathematics, or otherwise, capital precarity has every reason to be the first place to look, and must therefore be proven not the culprit before it can be discounted.

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