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Comment by peisistratos | Hacker News Reader

The article text does not really support the headline

> By last year, the poorest 10% were still earning only a miserly 4.1% more per hour than they did (in real wages) 40 years ago. Median hourly pay for America’s workers was up a little more, by 14%.

With exactly 40 years ago being in the midst of a wage downturn. Go back a little more and real hourly wages have fallen for both groups, despite GDP etc. booming for decades in relation (and out of relation as well) to population growth.

The wealth created by those who work and create wealth goes to the heirs and rentiers in America. The "job creators" who do not work and who parasitically expropriate surplus labor time and the fruits of that time from those if us who do work.

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> The article text does not really support the headline

While that's true, it' mostly because its a bad article rather than the headline being wrong. Of that 4.1% gain over 40 years, 0.9% were in the the past year. America is seeing an economic boom go on longer than expected and low unemployment is allowing people who left the labor market to re-enter and _slowly_ pushing wages up.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

You're comparing apples (average) and oranges (10th percentile) here.

According to Forbes, Vox, The Heritage Foundation, etc.(in other words, people all across the liberal<->conservative spectrum) American poor are vastly better off than the rest of the world, and American poor are moving forward.

The poor in America often have climate controlled environments, cell phones, access to employment opportunities, access to charitable organizations and more. With rising wages, their fortunes are increasing.

It's not easy or desirable to be poor. But if you have to be poor, being American in 2019 is a pretty good spot.

How come so few Americans realize how insanely unfair that is? The USSR collapsed 30 years ago, so there is no Communism to scare people with anymore.

So how do you propose to make things more fair? Why do I have the feeling that knowing the population of HN, who are heavily employed in the tech industry, don’t consider themselves the privileged beneficiaries of capitalism?

The privileged beneficiaries of capitalism are the people that hire the population of HN to make them money.

As for how to make things more fair, a good start would be to allow bad actors (the well connected good ole boys) in the economy to die off instead of bailing them out. Perhaps a better use of that money would be to invest in community owned assets (like low income housing) and businesses (corporations structured similarly to Mondragon)?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

How many people on HN are volunteering to pay more in taxes and give up their income that is probably more than twice the median amount in the US?

All that live in some European countries?

Well seeing that the article we are discussing is “American life is improving for the lowest paid”, I fail to see how what Europeans are willing to do is relevant....

You personally chose to use "people on HN" as your barometer. So, if you failed to see the point you tried to make then you're the only one to blame here.

Are you as an individual volunteering to give more money in taxes???

It's up to the Americans. If they are fine with the way things are I'm not going to try to convince them.

well Trump was elected president in 2016 and there might be a socialist elected president in 2020. so people realize.

I actually like some things about the Economist and I subscribed for years. I feel like people would be better informed about the world if they read it. That said, it's absolutely dripping with ideology and you need to know how to read it. It's a cheerleader for Capitalism, kinda like the Financial Times. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-the-economist-thi...

It's not an uncritical cheerleader, though. They do support free trade and globalisation, yes, but also drug legalisation, gun control, carbon taxes, gay marriage, etc.

For US presidential elections, they endorsed Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.

Are you implying that because their record of presidential endorsements have a (D) after their name, we can thus infer they are critical thinkers?

No, that was a second point: The Economist is often portrayed as a right-wing or libertarian magazine, and I think that's an unfair and inaccurate portrayal. The list of endorsements supports that (unstated) point.

(EDIT: typos)

They are a right-wing magazine (i.e. ardently pro-capitalist). Their endorsements support that idea. All of those candidates that they supported were also ardent supporters of capital.

This is kind of a weird critique though. It's like, it's not enough for a movie critic to think some movies are bad and they should have been made better. They have to hate the whole concept of movies.

Or more like, to be a true critical, you can only like the stuff that no one has ever heard of.

"Oh me, yes, I'm very liberal. I'd tell you about what candidate I support, but you've probably never heard of them..."

If you want to call the candidates from the left party in the US right-wing, sure (when you look at it on a global scale, you might have a point there).

But as I said, while The Economist supports free trade and free markets, they are not laissez-faire, but support sensible regulation, anti-trust, action on climate, etc.

> "The Economist considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability." [1]

> Is The Economist left- or right-wing? Neither. We consider ourselves to be in the "radical centre" [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231949/http://www.econom...

[2] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...

https://web.archive.org/web/20190329063026/https://www.econo...

Considering the shift in the Overton window the last 50 years in the USA, radically center is right wing.

What exactly does an anti-capitalist look like that would be considered something that most Americans would recognize?

Unfortunately I think the Economist is one of those publications where it seems authoritative until they write about something you really know about and realize it is mostly just written in an assertive style.

Granted. Yet, I think about it this way: They're smart kids that have studied their PPE in Oxford and can write well, but know nothing about issue XYZ, say whether to use tabs or spaces.

But now, the issue comes up, and then they send someone out to visit a conference and speak to people and ask around who the experts in the field are, and (because they're The Economist) get an interview with, dunno, Guido van Rossum and Bill Gates and Woz and Don Knuth and Joel Spolsky and Linus and rms, and hear them out. Maybe throw in a few unnamed senior government officials and ambassadors and so on.

Then they take all their notes and condense it in one page for the magazine, providing some background, explanations, "colour" and the consensus (or factions) in the field.

Sure, if you know the subject in great depth, you'll recognise that it's not written by an expert in the field, and some details may be wrong, and maybe you don't agree with some characterisation. Yet, if you didn't know anything about the subject before, you now know vastly more than before.

I think that's valuable.

It isn't so much that they get details wrong. As you say they are smart. It is that they won't present the full picture. Sometimes they even do that, but come up with conclusions that aren't supported.

If they for example supported tabs they would end up writing a story how you could attribute the success of Python and Microsoft to tab usage. The quotes and the numbers would be correct and they would make a compelling case, but in the real world the difference would be marginal at best.

There I disagree. When they write on things I know about - like science and tech - they do a far better job of being accurate than most others. They are one of a very few that I don't start by presuming they misunderstand the science, statistics or facts of the matter.

On conclusions, or political consequence, or what should be done there we can agree or disagree. On opinion we can disagree stridently - their stance is not of the right, or simple "capitalist cheerleading", nor of the left, so even there we can agree or disagree surprisingly sometimes.

I know their stance and view - they make it very plain, have run several features explaining it, and even discuss it on their About page. So even when we do disagree on conclusion I find it mostly a rational view from the other side of the fence.

Pick something like The Telegraph to get a "cheerleader for capitalism". It infects everything, even the footie, and damn the facts. If it's science or tech they're very unlikely to have understood. Thirty years ago they were more like the Economist - we may vehemently disagree on some points, agree on others, but their core facts and striving for accuracy were reasonable.

yes, it’s an absurdly out of touch pro-capitalist propagandistic article.

what really puts the cherry on top is that a market crash is expected soon, with much less ability to cushion it than last time. guess what market crashes due to median wages? very bad things! and the people who own lots of capital will see their fortunes recover soon enough as everyone else is cleaned out. so things look very tentatively positive now and will be very bleak in a couple years.

The real median household income is up over 43% since 1990. It's up 62% for the bottom 20%.[1]

It's popular to claim that wages have gone nowhere for ~40 years, it's never supported by the actual data. The premise requires that one ignores the cost of health coverage in the US that is commonly paid for or heavily subsidized by an employer (the employee would have to pay far higher taxes for that otherwise, given the per capita healthcare cost in the US is now ~$11,000 -- $33,000 for a family of three). It ignores pretty much every benefit that employees receive today, that did not exist in the early 1970s, including 401k matching.

If companies weren't paying for healthcare benefits, the employees would see their taxes skyrocket. That's a dramatic, obvious, direct wage benefit. In socialized systems such as are common in Europe, the companies do not pay nearly so much for healthcare coverage, instead individuals pay far higher personal taxes, while the average corporate income tax rate is low.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-15/wage-s...

> actual data

The data is available from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics https://www.bls.gov . The Economist's gloomy figures were right, but are gloomier if pushed back a few years as 1979 was a nadir any how.

> health

The US is off the charts in terms of health costs compared to other industrialized countries, and big business has arranged it so it is the only industrialized country with people not under health coverage.

> 401k

US Workers used to have guaranteed pensions, the 401k was a backward step, not some new benefit

Plus the fact that Google workers have all these things, and some other workers may have some if these things doesn't modify that wages have fallen.

The US has skyrocketing health care compared to everyone else, with some unconvered unlike every other industrialized countries, and guaranteed pensions no longer exist - not great arguments for an improvement.

People are not stupid, they know things are not better, despite think tank commissars trying to present ways that they are.

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