The average American has so little buying power that they have become absurdly price conscious. If a big player muscles into my business, they can undercut me and ruin me with no recourse. Why would I get into that?
I don't really understand where that's coming from because it takes a minimal amount of research to figure out that the BLS unemployment statistic tells us virtually nothing(even Adam Ruins Everything covered that). Wages have been stagnant in comparison to productivity since around the 1970's(adjusted for inflation), the labor force participation rate is in decline, I don't know anyone who doesn't think housing and rent is absurd right now, Americans are buried in debt, medical care is expensive and often enters scam territory, etc.
And we're supposed to become entrepreneurs? lol
Things aren't adding up, and we're probably not going to even accept that we're in a decline until we're well into it.
The problem with much of these things is that we're on a hedonic treadmill that we refuse to get off, even as further expansion of consumerism is destroying our planet. The big problem we have is policy that has promoted a society of which economic growth and even wage gains fails to provide a meaningful improvement in peoples lives.
Policy reforms could allow for the majority of people to live in cities in relatively new buildings serviced by public transit all at a lower cost than what we have now given our current system of inflated land values and high automotive transportation costs (i.e. cost of new construction is still relatively affordable when compared to the cost of land and public transit is far cheaper to build and service than automotive infrastructure). Reforms around healthcare that currently restrict the availability of doctors and enable overcharging of medical components would go a long way as well, and lastly, reducing the overhead around university administration while restricting lending would go a long way.
tl;dr: We aren't in decline, we just need reforms around housing, healthcare and education as their costs make poor economic sense and are only high due to protectionism and loose lending/insurance laws.
That however stopped translating to things being good for the average American in like the 50s
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages...
Essentially, up to the 1970s, wages followed closely with productivity. Quite suddenly, wages stopped growing while productivity has continued to grow with no sign of catching up.
Take a look at this chart from the BLS:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJ9l_q6VYAERRDt.jpg
What we can take from that is while prices for certain things have declined(e.g. technology, new cars, software, toys, clothes), the price of arguably more important things (child care, medical care, college tuition, textbooks, housing, food) has gone up. Sure, we've been bearing those costs, but the maximization of profits from those expenditures will inevitably cause an adjustment when Americans can't pay for those things anymore.
Americans might technically have a higher buying power than 1900, and especially 1930, but not necessarily in every area or even the areas that are important. If we were to say that Americans have more access to food, clothing, computers, education, etc., it doesn't mean that Americans are actually paying for those things; a lot of the wealth we think we have is coming from record amounts of debt that were unseen in the early 20th century. The things that make it seem like we have more spending power than we did a century ago are being made possible by what could be a ticking time bomb.
That is, once the dollar dropped the link to gold, and money could be printed, a lot if things went increasingly haywire, down to the circus of bailouts in 2008 and "quantitative easing" afterwards.
What’s to say that currency won’t be tied back to commodities? What makes you so confident?
I think our leaders just said “why not both?”.
It’s going to be an interesting few decades.
That's plenty of time for an entire generation to be raised with an awareness that any entrepreneurial enterprise they may attempt can be crushed and consumed in short order by a competitor with the backing of the moneyed elites. If you try to manufacture a quality product in the US, and bootstrap your business, the instant you prove there is a market for it, someone will gather up some financing, knock off your product in China, and run you out of your own business. If you build a fun game app, Zynga or King or some other chop-shop with their model will instantly clone it and kill you with their marketing. If you open so much as a lemonade stand, the city will come round asking about inspections and permits.