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Comment by hcurtiss | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand these kinds of comments. On every measurable metric, there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America. It seems to me that people's expectations are outpacing our relatively abundant affluence. That may still be a problem, but it has little to do with "what we're being handed for a future." My suspicion is that hit has more to do with the rise in social media and the fact that we're constantly comparing our lives to other people's highlight reels.

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Remember most of us on Hacker News make well over the national average. The annual median personal income is about 31k a year. This means that there are a lot of people working mind numbing, dead end, minimum wage jobs (likely retail, service industry, or warehouse jobs with no benefits or bad benefits), barely struggling to survive paycheck to paycheck. They don't feel like "there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America".

Social media is bad, but it's not the cause. Our society is seriously suffering, and the gap between those of us who are privileged and those of us who have nothing is just getting wider.

I get tired of people blaming social media for societies ills.

Most of these ills existed long before Facebook. Facebook just makes it more apparent. Common people are on twitter, on reddit, on all the big networking sites directly pointing out that "everything is far from okay" and for a certain segment of the successful population of the world, they almost take that as an insult to them personally, because they're doing well and they assumed everyone else was too.

The reality is there are huge segments of the global and even American population that are being largely left behind by our new shiny future.

I keep hearing that there's growing fraction of impoverished people in the US, but the data tell a very different story. See figure 1 and 2 here: https://www3.nd.edu/~jsulliv4/2017%20Consumption%20Poverty%2...

Eh I disagree for a multitude of reasons, first is that I really don't agree with the government assumed line of "what is poverty" and I seriously doubt that is the first thing that jumps into everyone's mind when they say people around them are "impoverished". Strictly speaking for 2018, 13064 is the official poverty line for an individual with no dependents below the age of 65. You can easily make above the poverty line working those jobs above, but working minimum wage is quite frankly poverty level in my mind, even 50% more would be pushing it.

Secondly there are additional items that are necessary for this next generation that I don't believe are really accounted for. A lack of good internet access in the form of a smartphone or pc is a literal handicap, if someone can't justify affording that, I would very much consider them impoverished. Time is literal money and denying the most advanced tool in our day and age that will save you large amounts of time/money is poor from my perspective.

Yes I realize this measures something else, but it is rather opaque, and it fails to account for other things like debt.

Look at a graph of inflation in rent prices and cost of living compared to the official poverty line over the years. Basically the government is keeping the poverty line number low even as the cost of living skyrockets.

The result is that that there are a lot of people who are officially in the government's eyes "above the poverty line" but who in reality can barely pay rent and afford groceries.

I guess if you can convince someone they were only successful because of their privileged it's easy to see depression as inevitable.

Of course depression is inevitable.

At my current job I work really hard, but I feel incredibly lucky that what I do is valued such that I am able to put about $3k per month extra money into a Vanguard mutual fund that has about 7% return. This money will continue to accumulate and grow with compound interest. I literally get more free money for already having money. That is privilege.

Meanwhile for many other people it's the exact opposite. They work equally hard (arguably perhaps even harder than I do) but the work they do isn't valued so they get paid almost nothing. After they pay their bills they don't have any extra money to invest. In fact they might have a small shortfall which over time turns into credit card debt. Now their net worth is compounding in the opposite direction.... down instead of up.

Someone in the second group has every right to feel depressed. I'd argue they probably even have every right to be mad as hell. They say that depression is just anger internalized. Some people are reacting to their situation by getting angry at the billionaires and super rich in our society. Others are experiencing that internalized anger that turns into depression that causes them to suicide slowly with drugs or alcohol.

>On every measurable metric, there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America.

Not sure there has ever been a time so many people are in debt with no possibility of being able to repay. Consider 1M student loans go into default every year. That's 1M a year, mostly young people, who will have these loan debts for the rest of their lives with no way out.

That's just 1 area of debt to highlight, but more of these young people will never buy a house, probably not own a car, likely not have families, and die younger than their parents.

To tell these people there has literally never been a better time to be alive is an insult, any time in history was relatively good so long as you had wealth, the same is true today.

I guess, but every quintile is either improving or staying flat.[1] No quintile is declining. And poverty is declining too.[2] As a society, things are improving, though admittedly faster for some than others. [1] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/11/2... [2] https://www3.nd.edu/~jsulliv4/2017%20Consumption%20Poverty%2...

Poverty rate has improved in since the recession, but the improvement is to get back to basically the same rate as the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

That's true only if you don't account for transfer payments (e.g., food stamps, state health care, etc.). I would refer you again to the second document I linked above.

That document claims that accounting for transfers not in income (eg. SNAP payments) are a better measure of "consumption poverty rate", yet food insecurity rates are barely returning to 1995 levels. So to me it's really not clear that this other "consumption poverty rate" is an improved measure.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

Young people with college degrees and debt will never own a car, never have a family? This seems like a gross exaggeration. I know many people with student debt and they all manage to have a car and relationships/families.

It's not impossible but it shouldn't be this fuckin hard. I'm struggling personally in an in-demand industry with a competitive job, and I don't even have children. I own a home but it's in no small part thanks to family helping me out.

>I know many people with student debt and they all manage to have a car and relationships/families.

How many have defaulted on their loans? Again 1M default every year...how many do you know?

Home ownership, car ownership and marriage are all down with this demographic and millennials overall.

"On every measurable metric, there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America."

I mean, we have a measurable metric right now- young people dying in high rates, suicide is up, average life expectancy is down?

If this were Reddit, I would like to wave away parent's argument with an "OK, Boomer" meme. I think it's simply propaganda that "things are better now then they ever were before! wee!" The statistics shown here and highlighted by other posters make this clear: we have many problems.

And things are always better in the developed world, that doesn't inherently mean people fortunate enough to live here instead of say, rural Africa, have nothing to fucking complain about. First world problems are still problems afterall. Yeah the people living in isolated hunter-gatherer societies most assuredly have it worse, but just because you're in America with a car you can barely afford and are eating a steady diet of boiled rice in a studio apartment with no furniture in it, and are thusly compared with that hunter gatherer person doing okay, doesn't mean you have no right to complain that your boss, Jeff Bezos has over TWENTY homes all worth more than you'll ever make in a LIFETIME.

Your argument fails spectacularly. Mark Twain covers it better than I could:

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

The wealth of people like Bazos, Gates, Buffet, Greenspan, etc turn the suffering of entire generations into rounding errors.

> On every measurable metric, there has literally never been a better time to be alive and living in America.

I love how the common HN statement of, "if there's a metric, it will be gamed," never makes it's way into concerns of societies ills. The United States is an incredibly lonely and alienated place and, while GDP may be going up or whatever gamey mechanism you want to measure does the "right " thing, it does nothing to affect the very real material concerns of the average person: the ever-increasing precarious nature of work, healthcare concerns, student loan debt, increasing rent, and it just gets worse every time you wake up.

I think this is a result of looking at the mean vs. the median. While the average GDP continues to rise, the median remains stagnant -- only up 2.8% since 1999[0]!

The saying "never cross a river that is 4 feet deep on average" is applicable -- the skewness is a critical factor.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

GDP has little to no indication as to whether people have a life worth living.

The fact that it's mentioned at all in a discussion like this is a testament to how effective corporate media has been in convincing people to pursue economic growth at the cost of everything else.

Who cares if the planets burning and suicides are up!? Don't worry about financial security and medical expenses! The NASDAQ thing went up! That's all that matters afterall, as long as the made up fuckin numbers are nice and big, have a party!

You're right, a lot of these metrics are improving.

Some demographics that should be doing fine perceive the world as worse than it is [1].

Even though the demographic's metrics are improving, the perception of their metrics might not be improving.

[1] https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/413140/

This was a fascinating article. Thanks for sharing.

No problem, glad it was interesting. Some friends grew up in an environment like this, I know it first hand.

We also have politicians in the USA saying that civilization is going to end in 12 years becaue of climate change. Savvy people and organizations are taking advantage of outrage culture to influence viewpoints, but if someone doesn't have the energy to be outraged, they'll probably end up depressed instead.

This metric was recently posted on HN, but received little comment. The Jobs Quality Index shows that the available jobs for Americans have been declining in quality (despite rising classical metrics like GDP).

https://qz.com/1752676/the-job-quality-index-is-the-economic...

>On every measurable metric

Life expectancy has dropped for three years running.

Don't blame it on social media. It's bigger and deeper rooted than that.

Life expectancy is going down every year. These are good times for a few privileged elite, everyone else is moving backwards.

The data tell a different story. I've offered them in a another comment, but see increasing household income for every quintile here [1] and decreasing poverty here [2]. While income inequality is increasing, that doesn't mean quality of life is decreasing or "moving backwards." [1] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/11/2... [2] https://www3.nd.edu/~jsulliv4/2017%20Consumption%20Poverty%2...

Poor people are literally dying younger, and you're trying to argue that they are somehow better off? This is some Monty Burns level of delusion.

Other modern nations have just as much social media - why then is this a pronounced US phenomenon?

On nearly every metric we’re better except hope. Its quite possible to talk yourself into despair and I think your seeing that in action.

This!

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