The Democrats’ social-spending package cannot repair the American Dream | Hacker News Reader

The Democrats’ social-spending package cannot repair the American Dream

economist.com

36 pointsesarbe13 comments

The American dream is long dead. Do a simple napkin math - see how much of your monthly spending goes to owner/founder-operated businesses vs. corporations founded several generations ago. There is simply not much place in the economy for people that want to be more than a replaceable cog in the machine.

You can't outcompete Walmart. You can't outcompete Amazon Basics. You can surely start your own Youtube channel about authentic underwater basket weaving and get a few thousand niche subscribers, but you'll still have to stock shelves to pay your rent, because that <$100/month ad check that 90% of the youtubers get, is just not enough.

Most of the negative social changes of the past decades take root from this. Except, it can't be easily fixed, because changing the policy to crash the "too big to fail" incumbents is a political suicide. So we are stuck competing for brownie points and telling ourselves how wanting your own house and a family is bad for the environment.

We're not just competing with big corps, we're competing with each other too. It's not a competition for dollars though, it is an intensifying competition of austerity. Every downsize, skipped meal, and acceptance of worse conditions legitimizes itself and races to the bottom in answering the question, "what's the bare minimum needed to support life?" Every workaround, make do, and acceptance rachets down and squeezes everyone just a bit more.

The truth is that competition is very inefficient. Instead of everyone getting a fair share, the gains concentrate somewhere where they aren't even wanted.

There is a certain group of people that believes saving and investment are the source of prosperity. That's clearly wrong. If you are happy with eating grain porridge and sleeping outdoors in the cold why would you need to invest and save? Why is owning financial assets but eating porridge considered prosperity? That thinking also results in an existential crisis of capitalism. You keep investing and investing for no reason other than that investment has become a goal in itself.

In simplified terms: If you worship prosperity in financial terms, you worship poverty in real terms.

Any sane person would have consumption and savings+investment both in moderation. If you have too much money or assets you can just stop working and let someone else consume, save and invest.

I’m convinced the American dream of the last nearly 100 years has been an aberration. Americans found themselves making up half the global economy post-WW2, the world was decimated but the population grew rapidly, demand surged for American goods, energy was cheap and freely burned. Essentially, America has been able to extract monopoly rent for at decades, and this created a massive surplus for its citizens. Going from poor to rich in a lifetime just can’t be that common. Living standards doubling every 10 years on average simply can’t be maintained.

And the rest of the world has been catching up. Now America is a quarter of the global GDP, total market indices are expected to grow at 3% annualized over the next 100 years in the bullish projections, climate change requires reducing energy demands, billions of humans require reducing living standards. Don’t be alarmed: this is the normal state of humanity. The improvements we’ve seen in our lifetime have come far too fast compared to all our history. It won’t last forever.

Americans still enjoy a monopoly position in many ways. Getting “really rich” is easier in America than anywhere else in the world and it’s really not close, but that won’t last forever and it’s rapidly closing.

Add counter that the share of global GDP is largely irrelevant to the American dream. The American dream isn't about being better off than some random sampling of the world. I think urbanization is what has put in damper on the American dream. Housing security provided from owning one's residence is a central component of this dream. This housing has severely limited in the urban setting. You can look back to the life conditions of someone living in 1950s New York as a as a comparison oh, and see how this has spread to a much larger portion of the population. The places where the American dream is most alive is in the suburbs small cities with functioning economies and reasonable housing cost. In these areas, you can get a college degree or have a small businesses that provides for a home and family.

The share of gdp is relevant as a proxy for competition. A monopoly is what made the surplus charging the American dream. That America is losing that monopoly as reprented by its share of global gdp means: outsourcing, foreign investment elsewhere, competitive domestic prices as free trade and increasing competition abroad means lower domestic wages and lower profits. The America of today is increasingly being competed with on all fronts, meaning the castles in the sky of high paying jobs + cheap high quality goods + affordable living accommodations which were once possible in the monopoly America are increasingly fading as America loses those surpluses.

In short: once we were the place where all wealth flocked and flowed, and like a bloated VC startup, it meant high wages, amazing benefits, affordable housing on tap, and so on. But now the market is more competitive, and if we want to compete those insane benefits are being cut away. The American Dream is a reference to those unsustainably good times during the rarefied airs of global monopoly. Now reality returns and we think things are collapsing.

https://archive.md/z7zLJ

Most of my friends are doing better than their parents. Now, these are people who studied hard, got professional degrees and worked even harder once in the workforce. The ones who are doing worse than their parents are the ones who picked up addictions, such as alcohol or marijuana, and slacked once joining the workforce. They’re the ones I hear complaining about the government not funding XYZ.

What metric are you using? Dollars per year unadjusted for inflation? Age of retirement/financial independence? Square footage of the property? Number of kids?

A lot of truck drivers become drug addicts. Maybe you got the causation backwards?

My uncle was a drug dealing truck driver. Most of his children (my cousins) followed his path. However, one of his sons decided he was going to make a good life for himself, studied and became a professional.

Truck driving is a profession.

Well, that was a grim read...

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