When was the last time wealth accumulated so greatly in so few hands, the dark ages? It would be really interesting to know what history can tell us about what this potentially means for our future.
Our closest biological relatives, chimps, brutally rip apart their own infants and eat their brains as a matter of course. That's biological reality. That's your starting point. Everything past that is a gift. If we just want to say that we can imagine an even better life than the one we have today and we should work towards that.. I'm right there with you. But how can you look around you and say life isn't good? Not "good" compared to what situation that has ever existed in all of history?
It seems like a college degree is more necessary in order to get a middle class job. So if we equated college with apprenticeship I think college might result in more debt for a similar result. However, I'm not super informed about how apprenticeship worked so I could very well be mistaken.
Imagine median worker income in the 1970s was $100. For a lot of women, they weren't allowed to be workers. Let's increase the population of "workers" by 20% (adding those women), but only pay those women $70 (because patriarchy). What's the median income now? $95.
Let's increase the number of "workers" by another 20% by bringing in 30 million immigrants and their descendants. Those immigrants were making $5 in their old country, but they aren't represented in that original $100 median worker salary. But now they're making $60. Better than they were, but worse than white men because racism. What's the median income now? $89.
This is the real story behind all the drama about median wage stagnation, median household income, etc. We added a bunch of lower wage people into the calculation. Those people are better off than they were before, but they drag down the one stat we look at with tunnel vision. That doesn't mean I deny any of the real concerns people have about racism/sexism/etc. But everything can literally be better for everyone, and as I demonstrated above we can still decrease the median household income.
When you say something like "median household income has barely budged in the last twenty years" that's a very shallow assessment. What's happened to the labor market? What's happened to the housing market? Are there more single people as a percentage of the population? Should we expect single households to have the same income as married households? What has been the historical household income for single moms? Are there more single moms today than 20 years ago? How does that impact median household income?
Is it all down to underpaid immigrants, then?
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That should, on average, cut the household income of those houses in half compared to if two of those singles were married and/or living together. I don't know what the data is for just the last 20 years, but taking a small fraction of the households and splitting them up into two households each making half as much puts a big dent in median once you run the math.
For a household size of 2.6, we wind up with 3,846 households. If there's 3,846 households with a median income of $100, that makes our total economy $384,600.
Now let's assume enough of those families divorce such that there are now only 2.5 people per household. We wind up with 4,000 households. We still have the same total economy of $384,600 but split across more households (4000) that results in a median household income of $96. That's a 4% drop in median income.
Now of course in real life the change in household size isn't just people getting divorced (or never marrying). It's also reduce birth rate. But I hope you can see how a small change in single people makes a relatively big change in median income.
Real per capita GDP rose by around 25% over this period. What accounts for the other 21%?
I'm not making any claims that the gains have been perfectly proportional across all segments of the population. Only that the average worker is really better off today than they were before, and that the median wage charts don't give us very helpful information to gauge how much better/worse off they are.
These new additions to the labor pool don't just add another worker/job at the lower end affecting the median chart, they provide downward pressure on everyone's wages because they compete for those jobs. These workers are productive, so GDP goes up, but there is downward pressure on all wages. That is a big part of the story of the increasing wage/wealth disparity between the rich and everyone else. It's not the only factor, but it's a significant one.
I don't understand why you bring up women entering the workforce again. As I mentioned, that's wrong twice: the proportion of women in the workforce is flat over this timeframe, and additional women in the workforce would push median household income up, not down.
So we're left with immigrants. Thus my original question way up there: is it all down to underpaid immigrants, then?
What is the point of mentioning that decreasing household size could make the number misleading, when household size didn’t decrease by a significant amount? What is the point of repeatedly bringing up workforce participation by women?
It’s fine to say that a measure might be misleading because of other factors. But when those factors don’t actually make it misleading for the example being discussed, I don’t really get the point.
It’s also weird that you focus entirely on the possibility that everyone is better off. Isn’t it also possible that everyone is worse off while the median household income remains flat? Smells of ideological bias.
Not sure what better word could be used instead of overthrown.
Soon enough, the elites will not be overthrowable. The advantage that the many have over the few is the retraction of their consent; without housekeepers, farmers, maintenance workers, the rich have historically been forced to capitulate because they couldn't maintain their standard of living without the workers. With the rising tide of automation, I can see a very near future where the workers are simply obsolete, and the division between classes will become so wide as to be completely un-transversable. Those in control of the farmland and the machines that tend it will have no use for the lower classes any more. That's why we need to work on decentralized production, with households owning a production factor of their own which will keep them producing value. Think decentralized factories.