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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

Real wages have been flat since the 1970s (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...). "Okay, so people's living standards are about the same since 1970?" Not even close. The problem with inflation is that its calculation is fraught with all kinds of selective weighting, bias, and politics. Take a look at the relative differences between the things which have decreased and increased in cost in real terms (https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2017/5/29/saupload_i...). Okay, so TVs and cellphones are cheaper, but necessities like college, childcare, and healthcare are up significantly.

And when you drill in more, there are other issues. For example, the housing metric appears relatively flat in real terms, right? Except, that doesn't tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housing costs are down in all the areas where jobs are disappearing. In practise, housing costs are actually significantly up for most Americans, but because the CPI is calculated across the entire nation, the government can claim inflation is low. This allow them to keep the fed rate low, which keeps stock valuations high. This LOOKS great and generates great headlines, but the reality is that most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s.

And then we come to the other elephant in the room: why are real wages flat? Given the incredible performance of the American economy since 1970, shouldn't real wages be significantly UP? This is yet another reminder that wealth is being squeezed from the bottom and funnelled straight up. As a non-American, it's heartbreaking to see efforts to unify the underclass completely derailed by this ridiculous race war. Poor people in America have FAR more in common with each other than the rich, no matter race. I really hope you all manage to set aside the obvious red herring of race and unite in tackling your staggering wealth inequality.

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Glad this was the top comment.

Wages have not kept up with cost of living for 50 years in the US.

We need to stop pretending flat wages are some modern problem of inflation, and we need to stop pretending inflation is some problem caused by the pandemic.

We also need to stop pretending that flat (i.e. depreciating) wages are normal

but wages aren't flat? In gp's post it's only "flat" when adjusting for inflation, which means it's not depreciating.

Inflation at the levels we are seeing it is certainly a problem caused by the pandemic and the reactions to the pandemic.

Markets and corporate profits were at record highs pre-pandemic, and even with any supply chain issues the market and corporate profits are at new all time highs now.

The pandemic is just a convenient scapegoat and excuse for decades of congressional over spending and bad policy ultimately responsible for the current inflation.

Since Clinton the national debt doubled under every administration (Trump was on track if he won a 2nd term). Each administration also had trillion $ bailouts/stimulus bills. Biden already has a trillion $ stimulus ($1.9T), and that is blamed/justified on the pandemic. However, we can already predict the next administration will also have its own trillion $+ bailout/stimulus its just a question of what that will be “blamed” on to justify it.

I don't get why minimum wage isn't tied to the CPI by default. I supposed there's a risk of it creating a positive feedback loop, but only a small portion of the workforce is paid at minimum wage. It seems capricious for minimum wage to only be increased when the legislative branch decides it's popular enough to fight for.

Because both parties are owned by oligarchs who would lose money if that happened.

Minimum wage hikes chew through profits and profits are pretty much the #1 legislative priority because that's the primary concern of those doing the campaign financing.

Same reason gun control wont happen no matter how many people get killed - ultimately its because gun manufacturers would lose money.

American politics is the art of trying to shape public opinion just enough to be compatible with the desires of campaign financers.

And the reason countries like NZ seem to be able to quickly and efficiently pass sweeping gun reform laws is because it’s not effecting any major gun producers bottom line. In America that is very much not the situation.

Additionally, even if profits were a moot point, the 2nd amendment is a culture war wedge issue that runs bone-deep for the average American.

The gun industry started the culture war for profit and fans the flames for profit.

Take away the profit margins and have a few more mass shootings and I imagine the 2nd amendment would melt away as easily as the 4th did.

A few more mass shootings? HA! A few more at this point would be like a raindrop in the ocean. It's obvious that's not a factor for anyone with any real political/legislative power here.

Even if we entirely ended the manufacture and sale of guns, there are far too many guns already in private possession for it to matter (I.e. there are more guns in circulation right now than there are people in this country). As a gun owner, it is obvious that to eliminate mass shootings we would have to eliminate private ownership of all semi-automatic firearms. That is so incredibly far outside the realm of possibility. The ability to engage in a mass shooting is not going to change; we need to engage the issue from other angles.

I disagree that it was the gun industry that started the war, but they absolutely fan the flames for profit.

The 2nd amendment will never go away as long as conservatives use it as a wedge issue. It's far too important as leverage, and they've been incredibly successful in cementing it further into law even very recently. My state just passed Constitutional Carry into law this year.

Fresh Air recently aired an interview with former gun industry marketing exec Ryan Busse, about their responsibility in the American culture wars. I can't remember off the top, though, whether he claim they are only fanning it or are the main origins of it. Anyway, an interesting listen.

Conservatives will happily do away with the 2nd amendment if you arm a bunch of black people, and have them constantly open carrying while black

Not sure about your location, I see about a 50/30/20 (white/black/Hispanic)racial mix at my Atlanta Bass Pro gun counter, which about matches this counties’ demographics. People just want to be able to protect themselves; don’t take Brunswick as the norm for everywhere.

They’re referencing how California republicans were lightning fast to legislate away gun rights as soon as the Black Panthers started organizing and flexing their second amendment rights.

The reason NZ can pass any gun law they want is that they do not have the right to own guns written into their Constitution. US are unique in this regard - most of the laws passed would be struck down by the Supreme Court anyway.

Does NZ have an equivalent of the 2nd Amendment?

In the US, States can regulate, even those without strong ties to manufacturers. The fact that many haven’t makes me think the 2A is a bigger issue than profits.

> Same reason gun control wont happen no matter how many people get killed - ultimately its because gun manufacturers would lose money.

Depends on what you mean by gun control though. Many (myself included) are pro 2nd Amendment so it's not just the gun lobby/NRA who oppose some (not all) regulation.

I guess my point is that gun control (whatever that means) won't happen not only because of gun lobbyists but because many Americans support gun ownership.

It's not the tail wagging the dog, though. The large contingent of Americans who throw their political weight in an organized way behind gun ownership as a point of principle were rallied by the gun manufacturing industry. It wasn't organic.

It didn't happen in Australia or New Zealand or the UK even though gun enthusiasts exist in all of those countries.

But that ability to organize is also protected by the US Constitution. You may consider it unethical, but it’s not illegal.

> It's not the tail wagging the dog, though. The large contingent of Americans who throw their political weight in an organized way behind gun ownership as a point of principle were rallied by the gun manufacturing industry. It wasn't organic.

Idk exactly what you mean by organic, but if it means what I think you're trying to say, idk what's more organic than creating the Second Amendment which was created long before there were gun lobbyists.

> It didn't happen in Australia or New Zealand or the UK even though gun enthusiasts exist in all of those countries.

America is a different country isn't it?

> idk what's more organic than creating the Second Amendment which was created long before there were gun lobbyists.

I think the whole debate over gun control is not as important as people make it out to be, so I don't have a huge dog in this fight.

That said, 2A was not interpreted (at least by the courts, but also it seems from historical research, in public discourse) the way it has been until the late 90s and early 21st century, particularly in DC v. Heller.

Historically, there was generally broad latitude given to cities to have arms restrictions going back to the 19th century. My guess is that the crack epidemic and associated things in the late 80s and 90s is what shifted attitudes here.

Replying to Pydry, adjacent to parent:

None of those countries enshrine as law the concept of self defense in the form of gun ownership, though. The "right to bear arms" is considered the fundamental way to protect against tyranny in the United States. One of the founding fathers (Jefferson?) even posited that revolution was a responsibility of the people when a government became too overbearing.

Couple that with the Judeo/Christian concept of "value of life" and you have a people (who, though not Christian in practice, inherited these worldviews) that believes life is sacred and will fight for even the ability to defend themselves and others. Do note that the Judeo/Christian worldviews that benefited the West have been attacked and eroded over the last century and a half, and that the sanctity of human life is actually a big question mark for many. But there remain a staunch few that will continue to hold to their ideals.

I am not convinced that "Judeo/Christian worldviews" have led to a more developed or dominant West than would have developed in the absence of those worldviews.

The biggest gun manufacturer you can buy stock in is Ruger (RGR) with a market cap of 1.17B. Add Smith & Wesson and you're at 2B. Throw in Vista Outdoors which owns many of the top US ammo brands (plus some minor firearm and accessory brands) and you can get the total up to 4.3B.

I'll multiply that by 10 to guesstimate privately held companies, local gun stores, and the rest of the long tail. So let's say we're at $43 billion for the whole gun industry in the US.

Isn't that kind of podunk scale for an industry to have a rock solid hold on US politics? Snapchat alone is valued at $72B. Ford is $80B. Pfizer is $330B. Dollar General is $51B. Heck, Office Depot is worth more than S&W or Ruger.

Yeah, that's weird in perspective. Snapchat's valuation doesn't give them buying power, but Apple has nearly 200B cash on hand -- they could theoretically buy and close down all of these manufacturers and test the hypothesis that Big Gun is causing all the shootings.

Theoretically, could Apple buy S&W and…just shut it down? Would the government allow it? Curious…

I imagine that if they bought them all at the same time, it would be seen as anticompetitive. But if they bought them serially, and shut each down before acquiring the next, would that skirt the law? Curious indeed.

From my non-lawyer understanding: the Sherman Antitrust Act and any further bills/amendments aren't exactly explicit on what it means to be "anticompetitive" because it depends on the circumstances, and the writers wanted to allow the definition to adapt to changing circumstances. Regardless of if they buy them all at once, or buy and shutting them down serially, it's still arguably "anticompetitive". It's ultimately up to the courts to decide (if the FTC presses charges).

Most arms manufacturers have contracts with the government, including contracts to operate govt-owned ammunition factories.

Even smaller companies that don't make a product with a major govt/ military contract often have contracts as secondary suppliers of 3rd party or military spec'd parts, like scopes, mounts, triggers, etc.

A buyer could shut down a company that holds such a contract, but then it would just go back up for public bid.

Additionally, military standards for ammo are very high, and companies make money selling "factory seconds" (that don't meet military qa/qc, but are otherwise fine) to the public, which is an included perk of these govt contracts. And isn't a negligible fraction of required production.

So even a hypothetical buyer that would meet its contractual obligation to the govt would do so at an additional cost compared a company selling seconds and surplus manufacturing capacity.

In short, the market won't change without major policy change, no matter what major players might be hypothetically bought and shut down.

Sell consumers guns at silly prices, but only works if you hold it correctly...

as long as there is a market for guns another company will just step into its place. Much like as long as there is a market for drugs new dealers step up fast as you can arrest them.

> Snapchat's valuation doesn't give them buying power

This isn't true in practice. Sure, company stock is not as great as the almighty US dollar, but can be used to purchase other companies, and its valuation directly affects how much cash the company can raise.

>Isn't that kind of podunk scale for an industry to have a rock solid hold on US politics?

Not when a Constitutional Amendment makes that industry "too big to fail" because its thesis on the necessity of the right to keep and bear arms depends on there being an industry manufacturing arms to begin with (at least at modern scale,) and when the industry overwhelmingly supports one political party, driving animosity with fear-based rhetoric against the other.

You just don't have the same intersection of identity politics, culture and even religion with any other industry in the US that you do with guns, even if the money spent elsewhere is greater.

The individual right to keep and bear arms is a natural right of all free people. It doesn't depend on the existence of the small arms industry. When the US Constitution was written there was hardly even an industry; most firearms were craft built.

If what you're saying were true, it would mean that manufacturing guns and/or ammunition for anything other than personal use could be made illegal without running afoul of the 2nd Amendment. Which is absurd.

This entire thread is why gun control constantly keeps existing as an issue, you two people who should be political allies are now splitting hairs over relatively minor issues compared to the cost of healthcare and wage stagnation

Apparently, this can be pursued at the State level, so it may not be unconstitutional.

https://malegislature.gov/Bills/192/HD4192/Cosponsor

> When the US Constitution was written there was hardly even an industry; most firearms were craft built.

You mean at the dawn of the industrial revolution, before which, you know, everything was craft built?

Yes that's what I mean.

We live in the 21st century, not the 18th century. If liberty requires that access to guns be a universal and inalienable right, then the capacity to manufacture and provide guns must scale with the population, and a small arms manufacturing infrastructure is necessary now to supply 300 million Americans with the access to firearms that the Constitution deems necessary for the US to remain a free state. Otherwise liberty diminishes because fewer guns wind up in fewer hands.

The Second Amendment does very much depend on the existence that industry, because if the government were to allow small arms manufacturing to fail, it would be de facto abridging the people's right to keep and bear arms. It's the only industry that has to exist in the US, by fiat.

Guns are almost a drug to the fading significance (psychologically, economically, politically) of the middle class white male. It's phallic, it makes you feel powerful and safe, it goes boom, and it is intimately tied to the mythos of the United States of America (well, and the Confederate States of America).

The amount of guns purchased by "gun nuts" reminds me of the stats on alcohol consumption: something like 80% of alcohol is consumed by alcoholics.

So you can mobilize a very rabid base politically.

Also, the gun manufacturers are tied in with the military and the diplomatic powers that be of the US (aka THE power brokers of the US government and the world).

>You just don't have the same intersection of identity politics, culture and even religion with any other industry

I think this kind of monolithic homogenous group is fiction. I hear the same thing from other people about tech. Both sentiments lack a nuanced perspective.

>Isn't that kind of podunk scale for an industry to have a rock solid hold on US politics?

relevant: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...

>all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)

Good article. It's amusing how one throw-away statement didn't hold up:

> As rich as Elon Musk is, he’s only one of five hundred billionaires, and some of the others are even richer.

I remember reading an article on how relatively cheap it is to "buy" politicians, on the order of just a hundred thousand dollars of donations in some cases, for favorable votes on relevant bills and whatnot.

I would assume if normal,everyday citizens started banding together to buy votes the corporations would up the ante and price us out pretty quickly, but as things stand right now there's no point without competition. Power of the free market baby!

It "costs" that much because that's just the monetary value. The value of the connections required to get that dinner is where the real cost is.

You forgot to mention that the left is mostly funded by anti-gun interests. That is where the majority of gun control legislation comes from. If money from Bloomberg or Soros helps you win, you push gun control in return.

I also think trying to pin the 'culture war' on gun companies is bizarre. Are you from the US? Your take on this seems like something you would see on MSNBC.

> You forgot to mention that the left is mostly funded by anti-gun interests.

It’s...not.

> If money from Bloomberg or Soros helps you win

Neither Soros nor especially Bloomberg are or especially fund the left; Bloomberg is center-right, Soros is, frankly incoherent; while, yes right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories focus on his funding of organizations to the left of the Republican platform, among the organizations he funds are ones like Cru, the organization known as “Campus Crusade for Christ” before its recent rebrand.

(The Democratic Party is a center-right to center-left coalition party, where dominant power is held by the center-right, neoliberal corporate capitalist faction.)

> Same reason gun control wont happen no matter how many people get killed - ultimately its because gun manufacturers would lose money.

This is ... derailing. If Americans didn't love guns, they wouldn't go and buy guns. There is close to 400 million unregistered firearm in the USA. I don't think it's only Republican's. The companies who make guns will try to protect their business but at this point they are just secondary.

Also both Canada and Finland are in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

A person with a gun is not necessarily dangerous. An idiot with a gun is. An idiot without is still as dangerous.

Canada and Finland and very different rules and regulation around ownership and licensing and what you can and cannot do with them.

> A person with a gun is not necessarily dangerous. An idiot with a gun is. An idiot without is still as dangerous.

just adding some facts here -- 1.2% of gun deaths were accidents https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/21/jason-miya...

A person with a fun is dangerous, whether they are an idiot not.

It's the same as all code having bugs, regardless of whether the programmer was skilled

By that same logic, a person with an oil truck is more dangerous. Yet, we trust these people to drive these things in broad daylight?

Truck drivers are licensed. Twice, actually.

> gun control

We must also keep in mind that the most likely person to be killed with a firearm is the person firing it-- ie suicide. Furthermore we have to question what percentage of the ~37% of gun deaths as murders would be curbed by gun controls, particularly what percent of those murders will happen via an illegal firearm or just some different weapon (are we going to have knife control, poison control, strangle control...)

IMO America has a (largely male) mental health issue more than a murder/firearm issue, I suggest we treat the root not the symptom. How? apropos to the thread one potential solution is we might give people some economic hope via a good working wage. (Perhaps it's not the right solution, but still emphasize the roots not the symptoms)

some sources for food for thought:

[1]: https://bigthink.com/the-present/switzerland-high-gun-owners... Switzerland has lots of guns but few mass shootings

[2]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/21/jason-miya...

[2]:

Is it not a problem? Wages rose substantially in the years between WWII and the 1970s but isn't that the actual aberration?

When people are exploited systemically, they tend not to turn against their exploiters (which are often hard to identify) but against each other.

I think part of the promise of increasing the quality of life of everyone after WWII wasn't only out of the goodness of the heart, but also to avoid reaching the level of generalized hate that made it possible in the first place.

That’s part of it. It’s similar to China from the 90’s to the 2020’s. Likely Chinese will not see real wages go up at the same rate in the 2039’s as they did the previous decades.

That said, what’s eating real wage growth is outsourcing. It’s simple. If I can build a fridge by paying workers in China or Mexico $2/hr vs paying a US worker $22/hr in a manufactury plant, my competition will eventually lose market share and shutter if they don’t also move manufacturing to a cheaper labor market.

Without any import taxes to adjust for labor conditions and costs, thus will put downward pressure on stateside labor markets.

People know this. But they ALSO complain of stagnating wages, while at the same time NOT wanting their US manufactured good to be more expensive than those made over seas!

In the post war period the US was manufacturing goods for not just domestic use, but for the entire world. Pretty much all industrial capability was here in that period, so foreigners were forced to buy American goods. Those days are over and are never coming back. Most countries have their own industrial base now. There will never again be american employment in manufacturing like there was in the post war period, even if imports were completely banned.

It’s not only manufacturing though. And we don’t have to export to the world. We just need to support our own manufacturing and our own service workers.

My school janitors used to be able to send their kids to college and afford a humble house. Retail store clerks (Married with Children). All that is now cheap labor --you can't expect to pay a mortgage and send kids to college/uni. You may be able to afford the cheap apartment and beer --you'll probably end up with some addiction, i nthat situation.

These days that janitor is farmed out to some company that hires either cheap foreign labor or sometimes illegal labor. We see this in chicken processing plants too. And people wonder why the middle class is hollowed out. And why black and white working poor are sick and tired or corporate antics.

agree, also look to the tech giants who practice outsourcing. 50%+ of Google's employees are contractors[1], imagine if they were all employees what a brighter future so many families would have and what a gigantic boost to the economy it would create.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...

Why do Americans deserve jobs over foreigners who are willing to do them for less?

Every State has the obligation to look after its own citizens. Otherwise, we should organize into a state that will as no other state will look after us. Can I go to Brazil or Russia and say, hey Russia, hey Brazil, you know, I'm neither Russian nor Brazilian and I didn't contribute anything to your country nor my did my ancestors, but I'd like some of your pie.

Also, we can't cry "wages have been stagnant since the 70s" and also want to continue ex-patriating jobs and ability to command better pay.

But what if you compare it to GDP? Production per capita has increased, yet the workers wages have not. I tend to think the “aberration” was due to the increase of private union membership, which has decreased since the 1980s.

Could be. It might be that the existence of a substantial middle class, rather than a long tail of poverty, was an anomaly. Of course, we could choose to redistribute wealth to create any shape of curve we desire.

Wages ARE the cost of living. Who do you think make your food, your clothes and your light ? Are you sure it's not your own desires getting ahead of your wage ?

I feel we can do things our grandparents couldnt even dream of (mines remember a time in his French village when horses would collect garbage, horses!) and that our parents suspected only. Hell the fact I can speak English and all it cost was a few taxe raises in education is already money well spent.

Tiring a bit to hear people bemoan a golden era where tv where black and white, religion prevalent, people disconnected, books expensive, knowledge hidden and medicine an embryo of what it is now.

Toil a bit, build more for your children and keep your eyes away from your selfpity.

The idea that those who are falling through the cracks in the system is because they aren't working hard enough is crap. Thanks to the "golden age" you correctly say we live in, automation and globalisation have steadily eroded the value of human labor since the 70s (a big part of why real wage growth has been negative). Thanks in part to financialization and in part to anti-competitive regulations that benefit monopolistic incumbents, growth is increasingly driven by financialization and rent-seeking from capital owners. The fact that you are on HN likely means you benefit from your ability to assist the upper class (billionaires) increase their share of the wealth by diligently creating more and more intellectual property capital. The numbers don't lie, and the numbers show the poor are getting poorer (despite working just as hard), and the rich are getting richer (and none more so than the billionaires who own the intellectual property capital that let's them extract ever-increasing rents in exchange for granting ever-decreasing access to the latest innovations - particularly in pharmaceuticals and technology).

What’s your wage?

There are costs besides wages.

Eg. Profit, tax, and rent

The other side of this to remember is that highly compensated employees are still subjects to this reality.

The numbers themselves dont actually matter. It doesnt matter if highly compensated to you means $88k or $150k annual compensation, $450k or $750k.

If a single earner cant buy a home outright in 5 years in that area, then the compensation isn't high enough compared to when wages were keeping up. There was a housing shortage in the 1970s too, so the supply side isnt a worthwhile deflection.

The oppression contest and olympics from the masses earning way less isn't really useful because that just conveniently perpetuates the reality.

> There was a housing shortage in the 1970s too, so the supply side isnt a worthwhile deflection.

Uh, source on the housing shortage in the 1970s being even remotely close to this level?

Because, yeah, demand outstripping the heck out of supply is the "deflection" I'd pick.

Regardless, landlords set the price. They always had the opportunity to post ridiculous prices, and they bring them to the price people accept. They dont have to go to the edge of what someone would accept. But they do.

The same tech worker (or whoever a local municipality happens to be pointing fingers at) would pay $1200/mo in one area, or $7500/mo in the other area. A wealthy class of people have always existed that can pay rent or mortgage or own at pretty much any price.

The landlords are the greedy ones - the neighbors and corporations that were already there for the most part. I’m not arguing for anything (in case someone mistakes this for a rent control argument), just have been in enough cities to hear it all.

Landlords are price takers, not price makers. The market for apartments is highly competitive.

If that was true, apartment pricing would be flat or even trending down, as landlords would compete on price.

But they don't. Instead, landlords fight against the construction against additional housing so they can limit supply and increase prices.

I had a 900 sq foot, 2br, 1 bath apartment in the suburbs in 2012 that was $800/month. Each annual lease renewal was a higher price. When I moved out in 2015, the price was $950 at the time. If I had renewed, it would have been $1,100/month. That apartment now is $1,500/month. In less than 10 years, that apartment has doubled in cost.

Rising prices do not indicate a competitive market.

Rising prices have nothing to do with whether it is a competitive market.

I agree with most of the rest of your comment, but none of that means that the landlords are price setters.

Nor does it show that discussing supply is a "deflection."

Supply and demand is a factor. You can talk about it. It is not a unique enough factor to this time period. I feel like you wanted someone to acknowledge that.

Perhaps property sales and rentals should require attestations about who offered what price and we can use that data to consider deterrents or levies on those who moved the price up from the prior owner or tenant. Sure there are some prospective occupants that will say a higher price just to skip the queue, I dont think they are really the majority of people even when well funded transplants descend upon a town. I think the majority just take whatever the landlord offers.

> I think the majority just take whatever the landlord offers.

Taking the price offered for a particular property is not the same as ignoring prices. Apartment shoppers search for the combination of quality and price that best satisfies their preferences. I have a hard time imagining an alternative. Would that be going to an apartment search engine and simply picking the first result, regardless of quality and price?

When I go to the grocery store, I don't negotiate with the cashier. That doesn't mean grocery stores aren't competing with each other.

Yes and the shoppers find one, the trend is that the unit they find and pick - no matter what the shopper lands on - was rented higher than the last time, because the landlord set it higher than the last time. This didn't have to occur, the landlord could have done the prior price, the lower price, even in the face of demand and people willing to close quickly at the new higher price.

Why would the landlord choose to rent at below market rates? I think we've drifted from the question of whether the rental apartment market is competitive.

If a landlord chooses to consistently rent below market rates, for whatever foolish reason, then they'll probably wind up selling the building to someone who knows what the market rate is. It might take a while, but it'll happen eventually.

The point is to place the gentrification blame on the landlords instead of the people who happen to be able to afford the stated price

I wouldn't blame anyone for gentrification. It's just a thing that happens.

> If that was true, apartment pricing would be flat or even trending down, as landlords would compete on price.

It is possible to have rising prices in a competitive market. For example, the automobile market is competitive and experiences rising prices. When I was shopping for an apartment not long ago, I saw several signs advertising discounts. This is evidence that landlords compete on price. However, lack of advertised discounts would not be evidence of a monopoly.

[1] is a bit noisy because it's monthly data, but if you give it a 12-month moving average, it definitely seems like housing availability was substantially above current levels from about 1973-1992.

I'm curious if there are any theories besides wage stagnation that caused that change?

[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSACSR

Hm. I'm not sure that is actually really measuring supply so much as liquidity.

>Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

If this wasn't a predictable outcome when inflation is triggered, it would be imposed by design.

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s

I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.

There are many pitfalls with measuring long-term inflation. How much did an internet connection cost in the 1970s? What about a computer? What about a smartphone? These modern technologies make peoples lives much better and were somewhere between impossible and impossibly expensive in the 1970s so an inflation metric can’t really take their price changes (from infinity to cheap) into account. Another is quality. Compared to the 70s, a new car is faster, safer, more comfortable, and more fuel efficient. Similarly, most houses are bigger and better in America today.

I think it is important to note that talking about long term inflation is different, and perhaps harder, than talking about short-term inflation which is what the OP is about.

What good is new tech if you cannot afford to buy a house or a new'ish car for the minimum wage, even if you live frugal and save?

Are metaverse gonna replace lack of owning a house (and travel) soon? /s

Don't even jest, I heard something similar told at work without the /s part.

That sounds similar to The Matrix.

Maybe you could just live in a coffin and jack into a more spacious metaverse simulation of an apartment /s

lol, this will actually happen.

An apartment that comes with total surveillance. Like Alexa on steroids. How do we get off this train?

You just described japan.

For example, it lets you live in a less expensive city and work remotely wherever you want.

Also it allows you to learn and raise your earning potential.

Finally modern transportation options less expensive than cars like e-bikes and e-scooters allow you to commute easier.

Genuinely curious, are you or were you lower class in America?

Sure, some people can benefit from remote work. But remote work is also not typically minimum wage. And to access those higher wage jobs, you’ll certainly need access to capital to invest in education.

Have you considered using an e-bike in the US? This could only be feasible in a minority of situations…

It sounds like a techie meme of what life could be, but is certainly not.

I am not American. I come from zero money but lucked out with a stable family that highly valued education. They sacrificed a lot for it but they strongly believed that you can improve your lot in life through hard work and perseverance.

I share those believes and am living proof they work.

Thus funneling more wealth to the already wealthy. That's the point. The average is okay but the distribution of wealth is messed up.

90% of the US you would get killed on your commute if you tried to use an e-bike or e-scooter.

I saaw that happening in Budapest. Every young person has a new iPhone and wearing new sneakers, but living with parents.

yeah and most of those parents have been refinancing their homes to support their spoiled children. That is going to end real soon and many of those kids are going to witness their parents lose their homes and become impoverished due to their lazy yet extravagant lifestyles.

It's not about spoiled children, I see janitors walking around with 800 euro phones here. It's just a psychological way for low earning people to 'keep up with the Kardashians'. AS they can't buy cars or houses they buy gadgets.

It’s amusing to me to contemplate that I work in tech and buy 1-2 year old iPhones for $300-500. I’m glad so many people have to have the very latest and so recycle great tech for 50+% discounts.

So how is the $50 per month savings is going to help you buy that $1M home?

I saw this in Myanmar. There were people living in mud huts but they had smartphones.

I also had the same thought - it's the one luxury they can actually afford if they save up.

I dont really get how people can look at that and think that these people are better off than a middle class 1950s US family. It's insane.

Phones are also not expensive unless you want them to be. You can get a great phone for any use for about $100 used. Streaming, playing Fortnite, productivity tasks. Any 5 year old phone can handle all that. It’s very cost efficient to get free entertainment, communication, portability

$100 might be tough to get, but my Moto G Power was $200, and I don't feel it's limited in any way.

Heck, with the SD card slot I can film terabytes worth of videos and not worry about storage ever, and it lasts 2 days on a single charge.

That said, the extra $400 worth of difference between that and an iPhone 12 won't exactly turn a millionaire into a pauper. If $200 is the cost of necessity, then $400 expense on top of it to feel good for whatever reason is pretty damn low as far as spending goes.

It's less than furniture, less than expensive watches, less than anything close to luxury clothing (or even solid quality winter gear). $400 is a decent bicycle.

I don't get why people care so much about other people buying expensive things that they themselves wouldn't buy.

I mean alright but even if you pay $1,200 every other year for a new phone... that was never enough to cover rent anyway.

Some people are probably blowing $1,200 a month on stuff they don't need... but it certainly isn't the source of widespread income inequality.

Besides, given how necessary cell phones are now, perhaps especially for the low-income, spending a little more for one that works really well and is very reliable isn't crazy.

The statement was that most Americans are significantly worse off now than [their equivalents in] the 1970s. Do you claim that most Americans fit your description of someone living on minimum wage or are you trying to argue against a point I wasn’t trying to make?

I’m not saying there aren’t problems but even someone with a very low income who is forced (by American life) to run a car for a lot of their money is unlikely to be using a car from the 70s (50 years old) and more likely to use something from the 90s or 00s less safe and efficient than cars of today but still better than cars of the 70s.

Many people have a misguided belief that home ownership was easy in the 70s, 80s or even the 90s. Yes the prices were lower and maybe the cost/average income ratio was lower but I can attest to the fact that it was no easy feat even back then.

Plenty of people lost their homes, renters had far less rights and although when looking at things through averages seems to indicate a better off middle class, the wages of the top 10% middle class (Mostly Unionized) were propping up a huge amount of the middle class that were grinding it out living paycheck to paycheck with none of the social safety nets currently in place.

I find it incredulous that so many people are blind to what is coming in the next few years, there is a huge sense of entitlement and victimhood based on some idea that the world was easier back then. We are coming out of what I consider almost 35 years of prosperity resultant from "Winning" the cold war but a reconning is right around the corner.

I don't expect many to take my advise but if I was in debt, renting a home and unemployed, I would stop bitching about minimum wage and would be finding a job real fast, the days of help wanted signs in every window are about to end.

>> maybe the cost/average income ratio was lower

There’s no maybe about it. In the 70s, average house sale price was 4x the average salary. Today it’s 8x.

How many lattes would you need to have skipped to have bought two homes at the time you bought your first? How many holidays would you have needed to skip to pay two mortgages while you were paying one?

That is the scenario - well except todays generation would only have one house at the end of the day, not two.

My house is currently valued at 100K USD that is not an unreachable goal. It might not be right next to your favorite coffee shop but that just one of the sacrifices You make when You want to own a home.

BTW in the 70s we didn't have lattes, it was just plain old coffee and what is this holiday's thing You are talking about? It sounds like something the privileged think they are entitled to.

Of course it wasn't 'easy' to make mortgage payments back then. Mr Market always prices monthly outgoings for housing to some % of typical income.

The difference is those who managed to get on the property ladder in between the 70s and 90s saw falling rates and their LTV ratios being crushed as property prices sawed. Today many of those people live in 7 figure homes in the middle of prime city centers, or bought second properties and became landlords, intentionally or accidentally.

Young people today face the opposite. Just like stock market multiples, housing is at the highest the market can bare. Either we embrace inflation and wages rise, or interest rates rise, the market crashes, and millions upon millions of people end up underwater.

>>>Today many of those people live in 7 figure homes in the middle of prime city centers.

Many of those people live in their same homes, the city grew up around them. At risk of making a generalization, too many young people feel they should get to start at the top. People who bought homes in the 70s spent a lifetime accumulating their wealth, many of them have supported two generations of children and are still working to support the next generation. It is much easier to just throw up your hands and cry out "The World is Unfair". A choice is made to just give up rather put in the hard work required to succeed, that choice is about to go away along with the opportunities that todays youth have squandered.

Hard times are right around the corner, the good news is that housing prices are going to come down. The bad news is it won't make a difference to the people complaining about not being able to afford them as the cost/wage ratio means nothing when You don't have a job.

> too many young people feel they should get to start at the top.

I wouldn't call a dual income couple in their mid 30s paying >40% of take-home pay for a 2 bedroom flat "the top", but ok.

I guess my parents who started with a 3 bed family home on a single blue-collar income started at the fucking apex.

So what You are saying is You and your partner are Dual Income No Kids or (D.I.N.K.s) and still struggling to get by? Now is the time to make some changes, You probably both have cell phone contracts totaling over $100 USD per month, chances are there is a just as much going out in other digital subscriptions, maybe You even have that stuff that makes your toilet water blue...literally flushing money away.

IDK your situation but have heard the same excuses for a long time. You have the ability to make changes before You get tied down with responsibilities like kids and debt, make the choice to change your lifestyle now before that choice is made for You.

It's a nice fantasy, but you need to brush up on Amdahl's law and apply it to saving. Our rent is currently 25% of our joint take home pay. It's contractually tied to inflation and goes up every year. Housing goes to 40-50% if we buy, but half of that will be equity and the other half at least won't be making my landlord, who owns at least a dozen properties, even wealthier.

And we're not DINKs by choice. We want kids.

I put 50% of my personal take-home salary in to savings/investments and have been doing so for 3 years. We have decided not go give more than token gifts this Christmas as we really want to reach our spring savings goal.

Meanwhile house prices have gone up 10-15% over the last year. I earn good money but if it's this tough for me then believe me when I say it's fucking hopeless for most people my age.

I've also heard this bullshit before from older generations, including my parents. Sure they faced hardships. Different kinds of hardships. Unemployment. Inflation. High interest rates...but don't think people have it any easier today because they're they spend $30/mo on a phone contract. Spending $30/mo on Netflix and Disney+ today is like spending $4/mo on whatever crap people wasted money on in the 1970s. They did it too.

>>>I've also heard this bullshit before from older generations, including my parents.

Mark those words my friend...There is truth in them and one day not too long from now that same BS will be coming out of your mouth, I guarantee it!

On a side note, put some of your savings into physical precious metals it may very well be the only thing that will allow You to prosper in the next decade.

This reminds me of people from a certain generation who say "You'll be more conservative as you get older!" which happened to them because they accrued wealth and assets and (somewhat naturally) want to protect them.

But when you can't accrue wealth or assets (for all of the reasons other posters have listed above), you probably don't end up becoming more conservative as you get older. Quite the opposite.

You're trying to tell us the rules for a game that no longer exists in the way you played it

Yep. I'm pushing 50, and over the last 20 years, I've gone from being a progressive liberal to a Marxist-Leninist. You don't get more conservative as you get older, you get more conservative as you get wealthier.

> Either we embrace inflation and wages rise

But then, probably, so would assets (stocks and real estate). I don't see an easy way out of this mess...

One of the key issues is around deposits for homes.

When prices are lower, so are deposits. When they're consistently increasing for long periods (with low/no wage growth to boot), deposits become impossible to achieve because price growth outstrips the ability to save.

What you end up with is a large class of renters who can clearly service a mortgage (they service their landlords) but cannot save for a deposit.

Was it a walk in the park in the 70s and 80s? No. But it was possible for a great majority of people. These days, without help for a deposit, you're screwed as an "average" worker in a population centre.

Is it reasonable to expect that a minimum wage earner should be able to afford to buy a house and a newish car? Were minimum wage earners doing that in 1970?

Yes they were

The minimum wage went up to $1.45/hr in Feb, 1970. 2000 hours of that would be $2900. I used the following assumptions: 7.5% fixed-30, median house $17K, down payment of 20%. That was unaffordable by a factor of almost 2x.

The house that seemed affordable with no car payment was a little over $9K (down payment of $1800). Adding in a $50/mo car payment took the affordable house down to a little over $8K, less than half the price of the median home in 1970.

Was there a minimum wage worker sometime in 1970 who bought a house and a newish car? I'm sure there was. Was it typical to do so? I don't think so.

Refs: http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29590190 , https://www.bankrate.com/calculators/mortgages/new-house-cal... (I used a 10x multiplier, so I modeled in the calculator someone making $14.50/hr, a median house of $170K rather than $17K, etc, and then divided them by 10 to cite the figures above.)

If I apply the same calculation today, on a minimum wage of $7.25…

  Wage: $7.25/h
  per-month affordable: $362.50
  median home price: $374,900
  3.519% fixed, 30-yr
  20% down
  required monthly payment -> $1,350

which is unaffordable by a factor of almost 4x.

In fairness, the comment chain you're responding to is talking about the thing you're responding to in your comment, but I think the increase in unaffordability at the minimum wage still speaks to the problem: while it wasn't likely to allow home ownership in the past, but it's even less possible now, and that translates up into the higher wages where people then might have afforded a home, but cannot now.

Plenty of maps have been drawn to show that minimum wage can't even afford to rent median 1-bed apartments.

I agree that it’s gotten worse; I just think people underestimate how much it has always sucked to be among the lowest earning households.

You can look at these retired 70-something boomers driving nice cars, owning a house, and taking a couple trips a year and assume they lived on Easy Street their whole lives when in fact they were probably struggling to pay bills 40 and 50 years ago as well.

Yes it is.

Why should the minimum wage not provide a sufficiently secure life for the worker?

I say this all the time: if you can't afford to pay your workers a living wage you can't afford to be in business.

Because minimum wage job is supposed to be temporary. You do it right after high school, for couple years, before you decide on what you want your "real" job to be. Or you do it part time to pay your expenses while attending college. No minimum wage work should be something you do your whole life.

I wonder: what's the average age of a worker whose wages would increase if the federal minimum wage increased to $15/hr? There's "supposed" and then there's what's actually happening. I suspect most people in those jobs are not the people you're saying should be doing them.

The average minimum wage worker is 35. 80% of minimum wage workers are over 20. 56% are women, 28% have children. On average, minimum wage workers earn half of their family's income.

Source: Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-older-88-percen...

> Because minimum wage job is supposed to be temporary.

Historically, this is flat-out wrong. It's a lie. It's just a new talking point invented by corporations to convince the population to vote against minimum wage increases.

This is nothing but a platitude that attempts to shame businesses for not meeting some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be.

There's no hard rules about what wages should or should not be, as with any other market price. A business will pay however much they need to attract and keep the labor they need. If no one wants to work for them they need to increase the wages they offer, which may in turn result in higher prices for customers which is also an undesirable outcome. If what they provide is of enough value that customers will continue to pay for it then the higher costs can be absorbed, if they don't, they will fail. If they can't attract workers they will likely also fail. Delivering value at prices people are willing to pay while still covering costs is ultimately what keeps a business in business.

I sometimes wonder if minimum wages are a net benefit at all as it creates several distortions. Some laborers aren't worth paying a minimum wage, they wind up earning nothing from not having work instead of what their true worth is and being able to build up skills. I think it could also remove some negotiating power from laborers. Businesses can peg their wages at the minimum and balk at those asking for raises, they pay the legally mandated price for that tier of work after all. Try to find a new job and you would also find other businesses doing the same, not paying an iota more than legally necessary instead of a more fluid labor market with people switching jobs for marginal gains, driving wages up. What may more naturally be a range of prices, both higher and lower, gets compressed to the minimum, unless that minimum is so low as to not have any effect on wages at all because no one would willingly work at that price.

> some idealistic vision of how the world ought to be

Yeah, I think it's a tragedy that we have constructed a society where everyone doesn't have basic needs met. I think it's a bigger tragedy that the alternative to the current system is considered idealistic. You don't have to agree with me, but if nobody talks about the ways that things could be, not the way that they are, then things will never change.

I'm not sure I follow your last paragraph. Are you suggesting that minimum wages are bad because it sets a minimum for employers to pay as though without a minimum wage they would pay a rate more in line with value? If folks earning a minimum wage today, in a world with a minimum wage, can't afford basic living expenses, would you expect more people to afford basic living expenses without a minimum wage? If so, can you justify that? If not, what are you optimizing for?

I don't have a strong position either way on exactly what the best minimum wage is, but I think it's clear that there are people who have skills and abilities in line with creating maybe $10, $12, or $15 per hour of value for a business. If you make it illegal for an employer to employ them at a rate where it's profitable, you're either forcing them to be out of work, to accept a quiltwork of hours ("we will only employ you for 2 hours at lunch and 3 hours of dinner rush"), to be in a precarious situation at work, or to find an employer willing to dress charity up in work clothes and lose money by employing them. I don't know how common it is, but I'm quite certain that I know people (in the sense that I can name them) who fall into that category.

I think substantial increases in the minimum wages force those people into a lottery where some are made better off and others are made worse off, but where the ones made worse off are made much worse off (out of work, higher barrier than today to finding work, everyone around them has more money and everything is more expensive than today).

Yeah, I think this speaks to a much broader problem with how we attribute value in our society.

Monetary value has no bearing on actual value. For example, a smartphone is only $1000 because some people were paid $0 to produce it. Did those people not produce value? Take a fast food hamburger, it only costs $1 because it's not real meat (mostly), and the person who heated it up is being paid a wage with which they cannot afford reasonable housing and healthy food.

Monetary value is the value to the business, though. If Pat can only serve enough customers to create $10 in value (above COGS) that customers are willing to pay for, a business can't pay Pat $15 for that work on a sustainable basis.

My objection to the parent post is the notion that a business which can't pay a living wage shouldn't be in business. It insinuates that businesses should be responsible for paying a living wage out of some sense of it being morally right, which is ignorant of how economics operates. Wanting people to be able to meet basic needs and have some financial security is, I believe, universally desirable. Please do think that I don't want this as well. To expect it to come via altruism is idealistic.

> Are you suggesting that minimum wages are bad because it sets a minimum for employers to pay as though without a minimum wage they would pay a rate more in line with value?

Yes, that's basically what I'm saying. Most literature focuses on people being priced out of the labor market (see https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/negative-effects-minimu..., for one such analysis).

I'm also suggesting there could be other effects due to loss of agency over one's labor price, similar to how collusion of employers to fix wages harms employees. Maybe someone has studied it, maybe not.

>If folks earning a minimum wage today, in a world with a minimum wage, can't afford basic living expenses, would you expect more people to afford basic living expenses without a minimum wage?

Ultimately prices are fluid based on what people can afford, especially so for local markets like housing. If minimum wages increase one would expect increased housing prices as those prices were set in line with what people could afford. If they make more, now they can afford to pay more. If you were making marginally above minimum wage you now also want an increase to protect your increased buying power.

W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that modest minimum wage increases have minimal affect on prices increases while larger ones can create price increases. This makes intuitive sense, based on market theory. https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...

With no minimum wage, you create a race to the bottom on wages in jobs that are currently minimum wage. No matter how little you pay, you'll find someone who is so desperate for scraps that they'll accept less.

And with that, you create a drop in the standard of living, where even having your own bedroom is considered a luxury.

> Some laborers aren't worth paying a minimum wage, they wind up earning nothing from not having work instead of what their true worth is and being able to build up skills.

No, what happens then is they work 3 jobs to survive and die an early death.

> I think it could also remove some negotiating power from laborers. Businesses can peg their wages at the minimum and balk at those asking for raises, they pay the legally mandated price for that tier of work after all.

That makes absolutely zero sense whatsoever, that someone would make MORE money if there wasn't a legal minimum? What?

Laborers don't have negotiating power in the bottom end. As I said above, there are enough desperate people to create a race to the bottom. If you eliminate the minimum wage, then you're not giving them leverage, you're just creating more desperate people.

My grandparents had my mom at 17 in 1965, were disowned by their parents, and bought a house at 19 on a single carpenter's apprentice salary. They bought a new car a couple years later.

My grandmother only started working part-time ~1980 as things started getting harder to afford on a single salary.

I think about this a lot because even with two people working full time we couldn't afford a house (in the same city) until we were in our late 20s, without a child. Still have never owned a new car.

Carpenter's apprentices look to make around double the federal minimum wage today, which checks out that they could afford a house in the mid 60s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29593398

Alright but I've been making quadruple the federal minimum wage...

> I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.

The answer to the question of “are we better of than we were in 19xx” is somewhat subjective.

Take your points: cars are faster/safer/more comfortable/more fuel efficient and houses are bigger and better.

Ok so cars and houses are better today than 1970, but how does that relate to us?

1970 Average salary/median house cost/median rent/new car: $9,870/$17,000/$108/$3,542

2020 Average salary/median house cost/median rent: $56,310/$329,000/$1,463/$45,031

So yes cars are better, houses are bigger now than 1970; however, people and households are less likely to afford these things, and are significantly more indebted now than 1970.

Also there is the elephant in the room of college loans which were essentially non-existent in 1970, but have indebted 10s of millions of kids, nearly 1 million of them default on those loans ever year, financially ruining their lives (good luck getting that car loan, mortgage, credit check on a apartment).

I have a circa 1970 car, and a modern car. The 1970 car is very cheaply built, and is mechanically simple. The quality, complexity, and sheer number of parts of a modern car has increased enormously. Much of that is due to regulation, most every aspect of a car is heavily regulated today. None of this comes for free.

Housing is also more heavily regulated today. Various places have different regulations for hurricanes, earthquakes, and other things.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the reasons the modern car has more parts and is not mechanically simple is not the boogeyman of regulations (although I suppose it could have caused some things like say seat belt alerts and airbags) but rather feature creep in the automotive industry, and computerization of everything.

The people who dislike something will see it everywhere and blame it for everything. Regulation especially is very versatile as a scapegoat.

Cars are much more reliable now than they were in the 1970s, and they can drive more miles.

They have to because services are distributed and it's super expensive and disruptive to sell an owned-residence.

Do you have any sources for that claim? Anecdotally I believe that to be entirely false, but if there are studies you’ve read that back you up I’d love to read them.

Here is one JD Power survey although you'd probably have to dig to find numbers over a longer period of time.

In my experience, it's clearly true overall. In the 1970s, say, you're probably looking at a car in the snow belt lasting 5 years because of rust and 100,000 miles was generally considered very high mileage.

That's because the majority of cars bought in the snow belt during the 70's were American made, and US car quality was terrible during this period.

My family tended to have European cars and they were just as bad.

An example of this is the change to automatic transmission from manual has increased costs. People could have voted with their dollars but manual is (unfortunately) on its way out in America. In a way, they have as it seems vast majority of people buying new cars want automatic but the segment who prefer manual were unable to convince others to buy manual.

This also came with a caveat as automatic is more expensive to manufacture and repair.

I mean it’s just not something most people find appealing. Shifting gears. I’d rather have the car handle that.

What is the pro of manual transmission? I used to have those cars in the EU and thought it was just an annoying extra thing I have to pay attention to when driving.

> What is the pro of manual transmission?

1. enjoyment

2. keeps you awake

3. more reliable

4. more control in stuck or slippery conditions

5. thieves don't know how to drive them

6. the kids are terrified of it and won't ask to borrow it

7. can push start the car

8. can restart the car while moving if the engine stalls

9. can coast

10. can drop the clutch and get off the line faster when drag racing against some teen at the traffic light

11. get to enjoy double clutching and mastering heel-toeing and pretending you're an F1 driver

12. The Cat cannot reach the clutch pedal, frustrating its plans for putting me in the trunk and depositing me in the Kat Fud Factory

13. you can nurse the car home and to the shop with a broken gearbox. With an automatic, it's a tow truck every time

14. the sheer joy of a winding mountain road, a powerful V8, picking the gear for the next turn, managing the traction and engine speed, etc.

The main thing is that manufacturing it is cheaper than automatic and thus the cost to buy it is cheaper. In a longer term, it will also save money on repairs being neeeded.

I've paid more to get a stick :-)

This is a clear example of regulation making cars more complex! In the 70s, there were no crumple zones, airbags, backup cameras, traction control, lighting intensity requirements, or a whole host of other things that are mandated today. Those things do cost money.

That said, this is also a clear shift in consumer demand too - a 1970s $3500 car is going to be a sedan, small, and pretty featureless. Compare that to a $20k Corolla today - which is the same proportion of median income that the $3500 car was in the 70s. It's larger, more reliable, safer, and has a whole bunch more features.

Isn't it possible that the average salary is skewers due to more women entering the work force today than in the past?

I think the important numbers here are the salary and housing cost ones. In 1970 the average house could be purchased for less than 2 years of salary. Today it costs 5.8 years of salary. The cost of housing has sky rocketed relative to income. Housing is the largest bill for the vast majority of people and it eats a massive portion of their take home. Likewise the cost of a vehicle has seen a very large increase percentage wise and very often transportation is the 2nd or 3rd largest cost for a family. So if housing and transportation costs are vastly more expensive then its stands to reason that financial pressure has increased proportionally on most people reducing quality of life. Arguments about 'having cell phones' means we are better off now make no sense. Another thing to consider with that argument is all of those cell phones are built in China where most manufacturing jobs have fled leading to the collapse of an industry that used to fuel the middle class and could comfortably provide a living and sense of pride for so many people.

>think the important numbers here are the salary and housing cost ones. In 1970 the average house could be purchased for less than 2 years of salary. Today it costs 5.8 years of salary.

But no one pays cash for their house. They get a mortgage and so the monthly mortgage payment is (mostly) what matters. Back in the 70s you're paying 10%+ on your mortgage while today it's more like 3.

The reason rates were so high was because of interest. Back then you could expect your income to increase so the interest wasn't as bad as the nominal rate.

That is true, but somehow elides the reality that even if interest rates were zero, you would still end up having to "divert" 5.8 years of median salary to own a median house in 2021, which has significant implications for lots of other aspects of life, particularly but not limited to retirement.

But, again, you're using purchase price which is not how people buy homes. For $100,000 borrowed that's $422 a month at 3% and and $1,264 at 15%. Mortgage payments as a % of income are at historic lows:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP

This is an unusually good time to be a home owner. You can borrow at near 0 or even slightly negative real interest rates and buy an asset that is almost guaranteed to hold/increase in value.

But again, you're missing the point.

People live in homes for their entire lives. If they decide to be owners rather than renters, over the course of their life (actually, typically somewhat less than their whole lives) they will end up mortgage free. This is an important component of most people's retirement planning, in fact.

What's the cost to get to that point? It used to 2x annual salary, it's now nearly 6x annual salary. That's 4 full years of earnings which vanish into owning a home. If you do not reverse mortgage or sell during retirement, you effectively "lose" this money.

>What's the cost to get to that point? It used to 2x annual salary, it's now nearly 6x annual salary.

It's just not. You're not accounting for the interest paid over 30 years of a mortgage.

No, I'm assuming best case: zero interest.

You might be arguing that 1970's cost-as-multiple-of-earnings plus 1970-accumulated-interest exceeds 2020's equivalent. Is that your point?

That "best-case" is unrealistically favorable to the 1970s buyer. In 2020, you can almost get that zero interest mortgage. In the 1970s, you are going to be paying at least 10% on top of that.

Come on. I just purchased my first home in my late 20s and I am one of the very few in my circle to do it. To suggest anyone has a 400 dollar mortgage payment is just ridiculous and untrue. MY rate is 2.78%. I pay $1000 and thats on the very cheap side for where I live. Average is 1700 and up(I live in an isolated area, but an extremely dense/populated state)

Your comment seems disingenuous. You're also discounting the fact that you need a large downpayment (10,000+) to even get a mortgage in the first place. Do you not live in the USA? Housing prices are a real problem for my generation.

Sure, but the same inflation that was driving up mortgage rates was also reducing the real value of the balance of the loan. You can't just look at rates here.

We're talking about affordability here. And my point is that to determine if something is affordable you have to look at monthly payment and not the purchase price.

OK, sure. But inflation has an effect on the monthly payment as well. Assuming stagnant real wages (pay raises pace inflation exactly) if inflation is at 7% but you're paying 10% interest, by the end of a 30-year loan your fixed payment is effectively 8x smaller in real terms than it was at the start of the loan.

In other words, in that environment it was feasible to stretch to buy a home even at a high interest rate, because you knew that every year your fixed payment would decrease significantly as a share of your income.

By that measure you also have to take into account that while you are renting to save up for the down payment you are paying a rent much greater in proportioning to your income. You are making a car payment much greater in proportion to your income. You also very likely are paying a student loan payment that did not exist for the 1970 home buyer. It is much more difficult to save up for even the down payment and more difficult to get approved for a home loan because you already have significant debt which the 1970 home buyer did not. In totality the debt driven economy makes homes less affordable…it’s not just about a monthly payment.

Sure, because no one has 5.8 years of cash on hand, its almost an impossible target for most. 2 years of cash is possible though. Even the ability to put down 6 months of cash would have a massive impact on a loan for 2x your salary and not so much on a loan for ~6x salary.

Not paying attention to the total and only focusing on the monthly payment is how most people get into future crushing debt and very much not a good thing.

27 years to save for a deposit for a house in Auckland

>there is the elephant in the room of college loans which were essentially non-existent in 1970, but have indebted 10s of millions of kids

Also, health care/insurance costs. Growing up as a kid in the 1970s/1980s in a blue collar household, my father's job provided health insurance at a far lower % of salary than is common today and with minimal out of pocket costs for receiving care. Also, retirement. Back then most companies provided defined benefit (pension) plans rather than defined contribution (401K) plans - you put in your years and then you retired at a decent % of final salary for life.

Internet connections cost poor people nothing in 1970 because they weren't necessary and could happily live their lives without one. The real item we're looking at here is *communication*, which was cheap: the stamp you needed to send in the form for your taxes cost a few cents. You could get away with using payphones for the few phone calls you absolutely needed to make.

In 2021, internet connections and cellphones are both expensive and mandatory if you want to participate in modern society. Your minimum wage job probably texts you your schedule, so if you don't have a cell phone, you can't even work. Many government forms have been moved online, with legacy options either unavailable or poorly services. Payphones are all but gone. If you're lucky to have a local library then maybe you can get some time on a decrepit computer with slow internet access, but the majority of the poor rely on their cellphone for internet access.

An internet connected smartphone is not equivalent to the postal service (plus a pay phone or landline I guess). It may be that you use a computer or something else for the things that most people use smartphones for, wand so don’t realise how much they cover.

You also didn’t mention having to go to the library (distance + fuel/car/travel costs + more time) for information, finding jobs from newspaper advertisements or word of mouth.

But the claim I was disagreeing with is that most Americans are worse off now than in the 70s and the description “most Americans” does not match the sort of very poor people whom you describe. So I feel this comment is only partially relevant

I’m curious - what personal experience with poverty in the USA do you have?

I’ve found that shapes people’s perspective on the topic significantly.

Poverty is not just about absolute purchasing power adjusted for location and time. There is also very much an unspoken social context, sometimes even codified into law.

In 1970, obviously nobody expected you to own a smartphone because it didn't exist. Noone had access to such a thing. Not so in 2021 western Europe. The example very much holds in that sense. You could fully participate in society without that expense.

I'm not speaking of keeping up with the Joneses here. I'm speaking of pervasive implicitly embedded demands on people's lifestyles.

What do you think about the effects of the way housing insulation requirements are often written?

What do you think happens when you invite someone to a party at your place in the countryside that is only reasonably reachable by car?

One of the best ways to get a feel for this kind of thing is to go live in an area with significantly lower median purchasing power for some time, a place where the average trustworthy hard-working person has difficulties making ends meet. I've done so. Even if I lived a lifestyle of relative luxury myself, it helped widen my perspective. I can absolutely recommend the experience!

Seems like you are talking about social inequality (a zero sum game) vs poverty (a non zero sum game)

The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.

Can apply this to any technological advance. So for eg. in the 1800s no one expected you to own a car. So the invention and subsequent technology driven deflation of car prices didn’t make everyone’s lives better.

> Seems like you are talking about social inequality (a zero sum game) vs poverty (a non zero sum game)

The two are not opposed. There is significant overlap significantly in many ways, even in the way government treats the very definition of poverty. In most countries, you'll find that poverty is defined as a percentage of median income.

Let me try to rephrase to make this more tangible. The minimum of things and services I need to procure to get minimally acceptable social inclusion is lower in some contexts than in others. 1970 versus 2021. Silicon Valley versus rural Latvia. I hope you get the point.

> The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.

I was certainly not claiming that! Cell phones or cars can clearly enrich the lives of those able to afford them. Their existence also creates a potential gap between haves and have-nots though.

Or to formulate it more sharply, you couldn't be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 1970. You can be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 2021. Does that mean a cell phone is a bad thing? Of course not!

> Or to formulate it more sharply, you couldn't be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 1970. You can be poor because of not being able to afford a cell phone in 2021. Does that mean a cell phone is a bad thing? Of course not!

So.. how does that imply that people are worse off now than in 1970? Your entire thesis seems to be that the jealousy people will feel from seeing others have things they don't will outweigh all of the material gains of the last half century.

That seems.. obviously false? to me

>So.. how does that imply that people are worse off now than in 1970? Your entire thesis seems to be that the jealousy people will feel from seeing others have things they don't will outweigh all of the material gains of the last half century.

As an American, I don't subscribe to that thesis. At all.

What I do see (as someone in his mid 50s) is that the biggest difference is that folks back then believed (and it actually happened for many) that they would be better off than their parents.

That's no longer the case. There are a variety of reasons for this, not least of which are the systematic[0] changes to our economy that pushes wealth and resources to the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.

This didn't happen by accident, and I'm not really surprised that folks here on HN aren't focused specifically on that issue -- primarily because most of us are beneficiaries of said systematic changes.

The worst part (IMHO) is that these changes will only benefit those at the top for a limited time. Given that 70% of the US economy is consumer spending, taking purchasing power away from the vast majority of consumers is a recipe for a bad economy.

Increasing wages and safety nets makes good economic sense, as it broadens the market for consumer goods, makes it easier for folks to act in entrepreneurial ways, and in the medium to long term expands the economic pie, creating a healthier, more resilient economy.

Pushing wealth/resources to the top just doesn't do that at all. How many yachts/houses/cars/dresses/suits/pizzas/kale smoothies/etc. can one person reasonable purchase/use?

Even if you spread the money around more broadly, the wealthy will continue to be wealthy, and the rest won't have to work two or three jobs just to feed their kids boxed macaroni and cheese five times a week.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/systematic

? I absolutely agree with you. Inequality nowadays is quite bad, overall welfare could be much better if we weren't hamstrung by it.

But I don't see how this means I'm ideologically committed to the absurd thesis that we haven't seen quality of life improvements for the average person in the last half century - going from a time where we had only recently eliminated actual starvation in the US, schools were still basically segregated, inflation rampant, a draft, etc. etc.

>But I don't see how this means I'm ideologically committed to the absurd thesis that we haven't seen quality of life improvements for the average person in the last half century - going from a time where we had only recently eliminated actual starvation in the US, schools were still basically segregated, inflation rampant, a draft, etc. etc.

I don't believe my comment even implied that.

Rather, I was providing my own take on your assessment of markvdb's comment[0], which I don't disagree with, I just wanted to address the elephant in the room (the systemic changes pulling more wealth/income to the top at the expense of those at the bottom) that hadn't been addressed.

That's not to say you didn't make a good point. You did. But I felt there was more to say.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592162

> So.. how does that imply that people are worse off now than in 1970? Your entire thesis seems to be that the jealousy people will feel from seeing others have things they don't will outweigh all of the material gains of the last half century.

The point is that there are many things you are now required to have to meaningfully participate in society, that were just not required in 1970. For example, to get vaccinated in my country for COVID, you need to access a web page, sign up using email, and you'll get an SMS notification when your registration is accepted.

So, without an internet connection and mobile phone, you have to rely on someone else who does own one of these.

The conclusion being: someone who can't afford a mobile phone and internet connection may be poor in 2021, even if people without an internet connection or mobile phone were perfectly well off in 1970.

> to get vaccinated in my country for COVID, you need to access a web page, sign up using email, and you'll get an SMS notification when your registration is accepted.

I guarantee you that if you live in the developed world there are alternate pathways to getting vaxxed.

> someone who can't afford a mobile phone and internet connection may be poor in 2021, even if people without an internet connection or mobile phone were perfectly well off in 1970.

Funnily enough, a greater proportion of people have smartphones in the house today than had landlines then (60s & 70s), so even by this (absurd) metric where having a smartphone is equal to having a landline in terms of utility/welfare, we still have seen material improvements.

I am surprised that this has prompted such an argument here. I am curious as to the ideological motivations behind denying any progress in the last half century, this sort of rhetoric didn't seem nearly as popular even a few years ago.

People aren't denying progress, they're denying the idea that inflation should treat that progress as a decrease in prices.

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s

This statement seems obviously false to me and is what I was disagreeing with. This entire conversation was spawned because many people felt the need to defend this statement.

>This statement seems obviously false to me and is what I was disagreeing with. This entire conversation was spawned because many people felt the need to defend this statement.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't disagree with your point at all.

Materially we've got more stuff, sure. The issue I pointed up (and perhaps that others were alluding) is that social mobility has been negatively affected over the past 50 years.

And the prospect that one won't be able to "succeed" (whatever definition of success you want to use) because the deck has been systematically stacked against you in favor of those who are already wealthy is definitely a factor in why folks feel they're not as well off as they'd like to be.

What's more, it's been getting harder for the poorest Americans to make ends meet for quite some time. And that situation has been making its way up the economic ladder too. That result is no accident either.

As such, it's no wonder many folks wonder why they can't get ahead even if they do what they're told is necessary to make that happen.

That's a cultural and economic problem that has been growing for a long time. And one that cheap gadgets and technology can't fix.

What could help is sharing the economic benefits of the increased productivity enabled by technology. But we're not doing that, are we?

> social mobility has been negatively affected over the past 50 years.

I'm really not at all confident this is even true, unless you are restricting your sample to white people & men.

Seems like social mobility for women, who comprise half the population, is markedly better than it was 50 years ago.

I don't think it is true that it has been getting "harder" for people to make ends meet for quite some time. Again, in the time period we're comparing to, people were quite literally starving to death/dying from malnutrition at times. Nowadays, people have their ends met well enough that this does not happen in America.

This is in spite of rampant inequality, but still - measurable improvements on pretty much all measures. Really, many of the bigger causes of early death now are due to self-destructive things people can do with more material abundance.

> The idea that no one was expected to own cell phones so they didn’t enrich our lives is clearly false.

It's not like everyone in the 70s was walking around completely depressed waiting for some breakthrough in computing technology so they could carry a computer in their pocket and ease all their ills. People could be content and maybe even happy without access to technology that didn't exist. Many Americans would likely be happier if they got rid of the "smart" part of their phones.

Well happiness and material wealth are two very separate things.

People can be very content and happy with very basic necessities. Some of the happiest people on the planet are renunciate monks and nuns based in brain scan research (for eg mathieu richard)

And of course people can be depressed even to the point of being suicide while being wealthy. (Any number of high profile cases)

I get what you're saying and I absolutely think the invention of phones, the internet, etc. made everybody's lives better.

But it's also true that these things become necessities when everybody is expected to have them. There is a low but non-zero level of "keeping up with the Joneses" you have to do just to keep living your life reasonably, because things change around you. Job applications are done over the internet now. Most higher education requires a good computer, webcam, and internet connection. You hail a cab with your phone. People suck at giving directions because they assume you have GPS. Stuff like that.

So I think it is fair to price some of these "luxuries" into the cost of living even though in the past people got along just fine without them.

Affording Internet access and a cell phone is no problem for me, but the only reason I have either is because they're de facto required for my work, for my spouse's work, and for our kids' school. I do use it for other stuff since I have it anyway, but I absolutely see it as a ~$140/mo tax on participating in the economy. Stuff like streaming services only makes sense because I already have to pay that "tax"—it'd be way cheaper to just buy all the media I want otherwise. $140/mo + (cost of streaming services) buys a lot of movies, books, TV shows, and music.

Overall, I think having the Internet makes my life significantly worse except for how it makes it possible for my family to participate in the modern education and the modern job market. It's a benefit mainly because you're shut out from things that previously did not require it if you don't have it.

[EDIT] ~$140/mo is my home Internet service and roughly what it costs for Internet service on two cell phone lines. I'd probably keep phone + SMS service even without the societal requirement to have Internet service.

>I absolutely see it as a ~$140/mo tax on participating in the economy

* for most people they'd be paying for the internet/cell phone regardless of whether it's required for their job or not. I doubt the pandemic pushed up internet adoption rate by much.

* $140/month seems to be on the high side. are you really paying that much for the bare essentials? Or are you paying for gigabit home internet and a 25GB/month cell plan?

Um good luck finding the car of your choice these days. Even before pando/trade war an in-demand model took weeks or months while other cars sit on lots.

We can’t argue that quality of life is sooo much better when production is such a mess. The only reason we hear the complaints is because of quality of life.

People with money can handle $1 more for an order of pretzel nuggets but make them wait and extra 2 minutes for it and the labor shortage is all over the news.

> in-demand model took weeks or months while other cars sit on lots.

America's model of making a bunch of random models and shipping them out to sit on lots in the hope someone wants that model is bizarre.

In most other countries you order exactly what you want and they build it.

It is also in part due to the explicit tie in of the dealership system by which we buy cars. Dealerships can't go away because they have baked the law around them. Automotive manufacturers are forbidden from building their own stores. Though this is a state by state issue, and Tesla is the manufacturer skirting this rule.

We also have franchised dealers in the UK. They have show-rooms and help you design the model you want and sort finance if you’ve got limited funds, and then they get it built and shipped.

Same thing - only difference is they don’t have cars in stock. It’s done on demand.

That’s what I did with my new car just a few weeks ago (Ford). Built and ordered online. People like shopping in person so it makes sense to have that “mall” like experience. And having the car available to test drive on the spot must make for more sales

Not all dealerships let you order the trim you want, even if it's ok to sell in your state.

Chrysler pulled this on me so I substituted the good with one from another maker. Months later Chrysler called with all trims magically available. This was well before the panorama but during the trade war.

The reason is actually that it costs the factories more money to shut down and wait than to keep things running. So they keep producing cars and trucks without chips, and letting them sit in lots. I know this first hand with family and close friendships with folks in production management within General Motors, Dana Corp.

The dealership and lot model has been the case in the US for many decades - it isn't anything caused by the pandemic or anything to do with the chip shortage.

> “We can’t argue that quality of life is sooo much better when production is such a mess.”

Not for nothing, but I’d bet my crispest dollar that our quality of life is still outrageously good. If you have to wait a few months for the $60,000 custom build F150 of your dreams, so be it. If someone’s gotta wait 5 minutes for their McNuggets, it’ll build out their patience.

Sure the system is under stress, but the problem is and always was us. The wealth inequality exacerbates it all and we’ll all eventually act like animals over it.

Technology has been advancing yes. And in some cases it enabled a group of people, like us, to become more independent/free. Many of us literally own their means of production, and the market is in the favor of labor. For now.

But let’s not pretend like that’s true for everyone, nor that technology is a panacea for social and economic problems.

You can't eat a smartphone, you can't sleep in an internet connection, you can't do your nursing job through a computer.

Formal education is more expensive. A balanced diet is harder to get, and more expensive. Housing is more expensive near your work. But gas as well if you live far from it.

Today's people debt is higher, and you can't easily work one job, raise a family, and afford education plus buy a home.

It was more common in the 70'.

Let's not forget securities. Today most people live in some state of constant existential dread, because they know, if they somehow lose the flat, they can't afford a new contract; they can't plan long term, as their job isn't safe (although, that point is in interesting turmoil right now, /r/antiwork and all); they can't work towards a pension plan; ...

The promise of salvation past generations had with their working lifestyle doesn't hold truth anymore. I think that's why we see more "new religions" popping up right now, like conspiracy narratives, new nationalism, "white man identities" (the group without a distinct identity in the past; their self-efficacy experiences seem to be in decline, too), the MLM-fantasy of self-employment/all-in hacks/dire fight for "untapped markets" (podcasts, porn, stock market ...).

Late stage capitalism.

Oh come on. People were literally starving in the US in the 60s-70s. Not really something that is easy to happen nowadays, even if it is difficult to get a balanced diet.

One in 9 people in the US suffers from food insecurity (not having regular access to adequate meals). During the height of the disruptions from the pandemic last year, one in 4 households experienced food insecurity.

Sources:

https://sail.gmu.edu/program/hunger-banquet-2021/hunger https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...

Why are you bringing up "food insecurity" rather than deaths by starvation which is an objective measure of food shortness, and what the person you replied to is talking about?

How many people starve to death in the United States?

> Compared to the 70s, a new car is faster, safer, more comfortable, and more fuel efficient. Similarly, most houses are bigger and better in America today.

What good does this do to someone with nowhere to live and that can't drive to work?

> How much did an internet connection cost in the 1970s? What about a computer? What about a smartphone?

This is the elitist fallacy that somehow having access cheap smartphones and plastics mostly manufactured in China at the back of our working class jobs make your life better while all else indicates life expectancy and quality of life across the board is declining for majority of Americans. Many Americans including my millennial generation feels we are worse off than our parents generation.

How does having cheap access to internet makes the quality of your life better if I may ask? Does it help with the ballooning cost of housing prices throughout the country? Or healthcare? Or education for that matter? These are three basic costs and they all have gone over 100% in most cities in a decade or so. Not to say people are more lonely and isolated than they ever have been.

> How does having cheap access to internet makes the quality of your life better

Whoa that's a bit of a reach no? How about the ability to drive around with GPS? Or stay easily in touch with family living far away? Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free? The ability to learn almost anything for free?

I'm not saying it's all great, it isn't, but we can't deny the benefits.

> How about the ability to drive around with GPS?

Maps, and the ability to read them.

> Or stay easily in touch with family living far away?

Phones, you know good old land lines

> Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free?

Why do I need physical photos stored in the cloud?

> The ability to learn almost anything for free?

Have ya heard of libraries?

Does technology make these more convenient? Absolutely. Does it make them materially better? Not in my opinion.

I'm fairly convinced that having to do things as you described was better for mental health as well. The always on, always connected lifestyle has big downsides.

Driving with a map was better than how it is now? We're 10 years from having the damn thing drive itself for us. I suck at directions, I can imagine without the internet I would just avoid drives to places I wasn't familiar with and miss out on a bunch of things.

Yeah, you have to use a map but your kid only has to interact with the school bullies at school and you aren't temped to reach out to your college fling behind your wife's back beacuse you never see her bikini photos.

Things have gotten better, but in lots of ways they have gotten worse.

Have no argument with you there, I'm not saying it was all a win. Mental health problems seem to be increasing and the internet is part (but probably not all) of the problem.

You would discover you are better at directions than you think, if you need to find places without a phone and GPS.

You suck at directions because you rely on GPS. Navigating is a skill like any other.

> Maps, and the ability to read them.

You basically need another passenger with you otherwise you'll have to do a lot of stops. I'd even say its a bit risky to drive like that.

> Phones, you know good old land lines

So you are saying having a high def video call with my brother living across the world, for free, is just like calling him in the 60s? It used to be crazy expensive to call abroad. And you couldn't see!

> Why do I need physical photos stored in the cloud?

Do you physically develop all your photos? If you do you are an exception to the rule, most people develop maybe 1% of their photos.

> Have ya heard of libraries?

Come on now. Try learning C++ in a library, good luck with that. Also, it's only the rich world that has high quality libraries accessible to everyone.

> You basically need another passenger with you otherwise you'll have to do a lot of stops. I'd even say its a bit risky to drive like that.

Oh, FFS. Pre-GPS, I would look up my destination on a map or street atlas and learn the route. If a portion was especially tricky, I might jot down a few reminders, or pull over before that leg and review the map.

Is GPS a wonderful convenience, especially with traffic monitoring & such?

Hell yeah, I love it and wouldn't want to go back to maps without a damn good reason.

But don't pretend it's somehow vital.

> So you are saying having a high def video call with my brother living across the world, for free, is just like calling him in the 60s?

The vast majority don't use video calling.

Still, constantly available communication is, IMO, a huge net positive.

> Do you physically develop all your photos?

That was obviously how it worked before ubiquitous digital cameras.

Photo situation is better today, though I might argue that the low marginal cost of each photo leads to people robbing themselves of vivid memories of what they're seen. There's some research that supports that idea, though I don't have a reference immediately on hand.

> Come on now. Try learning C++ in a library, good luck with that.

That's exactly what I did. Checked the ARM out of the library. Eventually bought my own copy when I decided it was worth it.

As much as I love the wealth of information available on the net, I sometimes miss how good libraries used to be.

So many misunderstandings in here, probably because you're too young to have done any of these things. (Source: I am pushing 50.)

Driving with maps doesn't require another passenger or a lot of stops, generally. You plan your route with the map before starting out, and if necessary write the turns on a piece of note paper. You may need to stop and consult the map if you miss a turn. I'll grant that GPS is more convenient, but maps worked better than you think they did.

Phones vs. video calls, I'll mostly grant you. Long distance calls were expensive, and video gives you facial and body language cues. On the other hand, audio quality was a lot higher when everyone was on land lines, so you didn't need those cues as much to make up for indistinct audio.

Physical photos: before 2000 or so, everyone developed all of their photos. Most cameras were film, then. Even when digital cameras came into widespread use, it was common to print the best pictures. People really only started not developing photos when smartphones became common.

Libraries: I learned C from a couple of textbooks, and C++ (such as it was in 1993) from a book published by the company that sold me the compiler. All of these would have been available in a reasonably sized library, or in a small library via interlibrary loan.

> I learned C from a couple of textbooks, and C++ (such as it was in 1993) from a book published by the company that sold me the compiler.

You ignored that part of my argument about only the rich world having high quality libraries. What if you'r from India or Africa or even rural America? Now even a poor Indian can solve Hackerrank challenges on his phone. It's not as easy or as convenient but it's much better than his prospects 30 years ago.

Unfamiliar cities could certainly be more challenging to drive around prior to GPS, you got lost more often, and yes you often needed to have a paper map. It took me a while before I really developed a decent mental map for driving around the Boston area. But I find people seemingly arguing that travel to unfamiliar places was this daunting task absent GPS availability rather amusing.

For photos I shot B&W (which I printed selectively) and then slides. But most people just took their roll of print film to the pharmacy or whatever and got a stack of 3 1/2" x 5" color prints back.

I’m not trying to be condescending but I’m guessing you’re pretty young?

>> Try learning C++ in a library, good luck with that.

How do you think people learnt to code before the internet? I borrowed large textbooks on Basic/VB, C++, and Turbo Pascal from friends and libraries. And this wasn’t a long time ago. I did this as recently as 2005.

>> Do you physically develop all your photos? If you do you are an exception to the rule, most people develop maybe 1% of their photos.

Why would you take photos and not develop them? When I finish a roll I take it to the local store and they develop the photos. I then put them in an album or store them in another way. People have been doing this for a long time.

>> So you are saying having a high def video call with my brother living across the world, for free, is just like calling him in the 60s?

Most people I know disable video in meetings. The majority don’t do video calls with friends unless they have some friend that calls them that way. I find audio calls much more enjoyable that video calls and I definitely don’t think I’m in the minority there. If you haven’t seen someone in years and they live far away a video call might be nice but in most cases audio is not only enough, but better.

>> You basically need another passenger with you otherwise you'll have to do a lot of stops.

Most journeys people make repeat. You learn the route. The modern obsession with GPS is so we don’t get there a minute early or late. For infrequent, really long drives you can plan your trip in advance, noting down the steps of the journey rather than following the map constantly. It’s also amazing how far you get just following road signs when you know the general towns on your route.

> How do you think people learnt to code before the internet? I borrowed large textbooks on Basic/VB, C++, and Turbo Pascal from friends and libraries. And this wasn’t a long time ago. I did this as recently as 2005.

I'm not denying that, I'm just sating progress was way slower - especially for newcomers before the internet. Imagine trying to solve problems without Google or Stackoverflow when you're a 15 old kid trying to learn programming. You're stuck on some shitty installation of Linux or some missing package and have no idea why the compiler gives this error message. How do you even get Linux? Have no idea how they did stuff back then but it was for sure harder to just to get something up and running. So easy to give up. Programming in that era used to be something 1 in maybe 50 children tried. It was no way near as accessible as it is today.

The flip side of that is that since it's now easier for everyone to learn new skills and solve problems, the requirements and expectations from workers pretty much went up proportionally.

Have you traveled using maps and GPS? They are very different, and not even comparable.

It seems to me like comparing a shovel to a ditch digging machine.

It is possible to navigate using maps. But not practical for the mass audience of GPS who can’t use maps. And impossible for the industries that require GPS (uber types).

Technology is a multiplier that increases the returns on things my removing labor and letting it focus on other, more productive things.

Similarly, arguing that the internet isn’t 1000x easier to learn things because libraries exist is odd to me. Have you ever tried to use a book in a library to find that it’s checked out? Or not available at all. Inter library loans used to take 30 days, if I had access to a good library, and now that information is available to me for free.

This doesn’t mean the world is perfect or that we don’t still have so much work to do. But it’s just an odd perspective that seems unmoored from reality, since these things can be objectively measured.

Am I in some kind of weird HN bubble where no-one has ever used a physical map?

I've travelled extensively pre-turn by turn navigation using physical maps, i spent a year motorcycling across mainland Europe in my early 20's using nothing but physical maps, I did the same but in the US during the early-mid 2000's.

Was it as easy as sticking a zip code into a magic box and having it tell me where to go and when to take a turn? Probably not. But it wasn't much more complicated because I know how to read maps and can remember things for more than 10 seconds.

I was having the same bizzaro-world thoughts.

These guys are screwed if they ever come across a treasure map.

Well as a society we are super screwed if some event wipes out the internet or computers. The dependence is gonna keep increasing. I wonder when we'll hearing stories about Amazon servers shut downs inadvertently killing some people.

I'm not sure it's an HN bubble so much as a people under a certain age bubble. Smartphones in the modern sense have only been mainstream for a bit over 10 years. The internet was only mainstream for about 10 years before that. But a lot of people seem to assume that we were hunting woolly mammoths with flint spears before that time.

Yes today's communications are nice but we really didn't need GPS or cell phones to leave the house however primitive paper maps and, yes, some degree of planning seem.

I used a physical map, but especially inside cities how the hell are you supposed to keep your eyes on the road and navigate at the same time? A 30 minute drive can have idk 50 turns. Do you memorize those 50 turns? What about places where the street signs suck?

Lol... no it's quite the opposite and far less distracting to actually navigate by map. You read the map, interpret the relevant bits, hold (in broad strokes) the entire strategy in your mind, and then just drive. Most of the small decisions don't matter. In fact, this greatly improves situational awareness. I don't need to pay attention to navigating every interesection when I just read the map and realize that every road as long as I'm heading roughly east will dump into the big collector road that I need to get to. I remember whether I'm on one side of the freeway, or the other, and I can find my way onto it without any additional assistance.

Interestingly, it's often MORE efficient than using Waze or some navigation app with ADHD that can't see the forest for the trees. I pity those that never learned to see the forest.

This is not a bubble, and driving using physical maps outside of major highways is a nightmare.

Less pleasant than GPS, sure, but by no means a rare skill or impossible to achieve. Would you get the road wrong more often, and have to stop and re-check? Yeah, definitely. Would you still get from A to B in roughly the same time? Yeah, definitely.

For what it's worth, my experience is the opposite. When I read the map and know the whole path ahead of time I'm far more likely to get it right the first time compared to using an app in the city that tells me to turn right 200 feet from the intersection when I really needed that information 200 yards from the intersection. Or sends me on some weird right then left then right thing instead of realizing I can just go straight.

I don't think anyone is disputing that technology makes things easier.

And I've frequently commented that early career me would be incredibly frustrated by the difficulty of accessing information about just about anything were I to be transported back in time.

But it's also the case that we were actually able to travel, communicate, and learn about things in 1990. Yes, it was generally higher friction and relied more on physical artifacts like maps and printed photos but we were able to manage quite well.

>And impossible for the industries that require GPS (uber types).

By uber types, you mean taxi types? The same taxis which have existed in some form for a hundred years before GPS was invented?

When I was younger and lived in California, people had Thomas Guide maps. These were the best. As a pizza delivery dude in college, it made it pretty simple to find a house/apartment. And it didn't require batteries etc. Now it wasn't as easy as an iPhone with maps built in, but it wasn't like it was impossible.

You believe it's not practical to navigate without a GPS?

Watch an old movie-- like the Graduate, or the funny comedy it's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world, people had maps and asked for directions at gas stations.

There used to be a whole trope of men (especially) not wanting to stop and ask for directions. I'm sure there are younger people who would watch a movie or a TV show where this happens and go "Huh????"

There are also any number of plot points that revolve around not being able to reach someone that also wouldn't make a lot of sense in general today.

I did a cross country drive back in 2008 without GPS and it was great. In fact I would argue by removing all the components of randomness out of your life, you make yourself fragile and your susceptibility to risks much worse.

As an example, I lived in NY for three years and recently when I went there at my cousins place (who is GenZ) our batteries died and we had to walk our way to subway. Despite living there all his life my cousin was having a hard time finding the subway station in Astoria (because he just uses the Map) whereas I could remember from my vague memories of alleys and shops to find out rather quickly.Or how about driving into that diner you have never been instead of looking at Yelp or Google review and finding the best reviewed store? You deny yourself simple pleasures like that when you rely too much on Google or other technologies. I am not saying they don’t have their places but saying without them our quality of life would decline is a fallacy.

I would also argue writing letters and occasional/less frequent long formed phone calls were much better than frequent short form SMS or DMs which most of the time come off as devoid of same level of care or efforts. Keeping in touch with people we know have become such a low effort thing, try writing a letter or making a phone call next time instead of texting and realize how much more effort it required.

> Or stay easily in touch with family living far away?

The flip side is that technology has made it more likely to not live near friends and family, and the accompanying challenges for mental health.

Quality of life is pretty subjective but US life expectancy rose from about 70 to 79 between 1970 and today.

You clearly haven't looked at life expectancy in other places. Life expectancy in other places rose more than in the US. That's what's being discussed here.

Yeah this is akin to saying our GDP growth is X% or inflation is 2% so everything is fine.

The measures for a quality of life I mentioned are something that every American or anyone in a first world country has to bear no matter what. Housing, healthcare, education. All of them have disproportionately gone up while the wage have stagnated. Average middle class family can’t afford to buy a house in most cities now, same with education without 22yr old kids taking on 150k loans. Or healthcare being the mess it is. But sure, everyone has a cheap smartphone and access to socials where they are busy fighting the culture war so everything is fine and dandy right?

While life expectancy going up is certainly not a bad thing, it can be hard to decipher what the quality of life is like in those later years. The life expectancy is going up because of drug/medical advancement, but obesity levels in the USA are at/near all time highs. Often times people are just moving surgery to surgery or drug to drug just to stay alive...

Having access to cheap internet just makes it easier to perform all the additional life administration stuff that people in the 70s didn't have to do but we have to do on top of busting our asses for 40 hours a week to pay off someone else's mortgage.

Comparing utility providers to ensure you're not getting absolutely shafted? Made easier by the internet!

Booking flights? Made easier by the internet!

Having to go through your bank statements to ensure you're not being ripped off by a shady fly-by-night operator? Made easier by the internet!

The causes of decreasing life expectancy are fairly well understood and have little to do with the economy.

We know many young people are dying early deaths of despair. We can make mental health easier to access (there’s a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy just to get pills for well understood mental illnesses).

We can help folks avoid drug overdoses. One piece of low hanging fruit is to make opioids over the counter — that ways people aren’t _accidently_ overdosing on mislabeled fentanyl. And when they do OD, we can make sure they have safe consumption sites and narcan available (this is no different than a bar, where sometimes an ambulance has to rush away someone with severe alcohol poisoning).

We can help folks fight obesity — calorie counts should be included on everything and farm subsidies should be reallocated to healthier foods and low-calorie alcohol sugars instead of HFCS.

And lastly, COVDI-19 has been a big contributor to increased mortality. Anytime the US wants to get serious about the virus we can.

Your point is very strange to me since every single one of the things you listed: deaths of dispair, drug abuse, even obesity are strongly correlated (inversely) with economic health.

The Bay Area is booming, and yet even here this is a problem. There were more drug overdoses than COVID-19 fatalities.

did you know that in the 70s no matter how poor you were you could make a phone call for just ten cents even if your cell phone was out of power!

>and more fuel efficient

more fuel efficient is only of interest if you are talking about how much it costs to run a car. Cars are more fuel efficient now than they were in the 1970s because it costs so much more to run them.

Funny enough of course that increase in prices started in the 1970s.

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...

Most working class people who own a car are interested in running that car and the associated costs. (It’s not likely a museum piece for them.)

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s

  > I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.

In terms of mental health, job security, stability (e.g marriage/divorce rates) they may very well be worse off.

Physical health as well. Obesity has exploded since the 1970s. Normal weight people are already a minority.

Divorce rates and abortions exploded in the 70s and have been coming down since then

There’s a lot of pitfalls measuring inflation in general especially when you add tech to the mix.

Technology is known to be deflationary; getting faster and cheaper over time.

This is how some fast food prices have been mostly staying the same; though even here you sometimes see shrinkflation.

It’s unfortunate that there’s so much politics around the inflation numbers, things that are deflationary are deliberately used to reduce the inflation numbers.

If something is too inflationary it either stops being measured or new ways of measuring are introduced that reduces the numbers.

It’s also hard to measure environmental factors like air quality is better now than in the 70s (thanks unleaded gas).

The challenge is when specific areas that are worse off (wages) are lumped together with a general negativity (we’re worse off).

I wish there were better metrics, but at least we have tools like CPI. It’s just so tempting to use these data for the wrong analyses and conclusions.

If you value material possessions only then your right.

However, the past generations in my family were able to have one working parent and still provide for the family.

I have a wonderful “tech job” and still need my wife to work fill time so we can raise our two kids and we still can’t purchase a house.

Anecdotally, I don’t understand how we are better off, but you are correct; the tvs are much higher resolution in 2021.

> These modern technologies make peoples lives much better

That's true in some ways, but in other ways these technologies make our lives better in the same way Heroin does.

> Compared to the 70s, a new car is faster, safer, more comfortable, and more fuel efficient. Similarly, most houses are bigger and better in America today.

Do you think these things are tied to meaningful improvements to people's overall happiness, mental and physical health, and well being?

Absolutely yes. I'm happier because my bathroom has two sinks so my wife and I can get ready for work at the same time. I'm happier because my house has more than one toilet so that I don't have to wait because someone is sitting on the only available toilet. I'm happier because my car has air conditioning. I'll absolutely be happier if an airbag saves my life, and infinitely happier than that if one saves my wife's life or my kid's life.

Yes. Technology and wealth makes our lives better and makes us happier. Yes.

>I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.

What you think of this graph? https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Because by my reading, it looks like the average American is not reaping the gains of this country's GDP output by a significant margin.

I think it's more useful to compare work requirements. In the 1970s, a family could be supported by a single earner. A house, a car, and college for the kids assuming they had decent grades. Today, that's largely impossible for the majority of Americans. Even with two incomes, (and the subsequent lower quality of life for any kids in the family), it's a huge challenge.

You don't even need to compare to tech that didn't exist.

How many projects apartments from 1970 would you have to combine to assemble a full suite of working appliances and utilities. Now run that same test for the rural shacks and early mobile homes. How many of those people owned cars, a decent set of seasonally appropriate clothing, got their nails done, ate fresh produce out of season, etc. etc. etc?

Now run that comparison for 2021.

We're a fuckton richer. But proportional increases in the amount of our income sapped by shelter, education and medical care have more or less cancelled out all the gains in material wealth.

> How much did an internet connection cost in the 1970s? What about a computer? What about a smartphone? These modern technologies make peoples lives much better

Completely ridiculous. I don't need internet or smartphones to live and they don't make my life better. I need food, shelter, and some transportation, and the point is: these things have become much more difficult to afford each year since 1970.

We are much worse off when measuring the amount of time it takes to hit milestones.

At what age are people moving out, having children, buying a home, retirement?

The age for all of this has gone up massively. Because it takes much longer to earn enough money to afford to do these things.

> I think this is obviously false and hurts the credibility of the rest of this comment.

It is not OBVIOUSLY false.

Look at education costs relative to the cost of living. Consider that your only recourse to a decent salary is through higher education, since the middle class union job is dead (and REALLY dead for someone young since all the ones that do exist are held by older people that sold out the younger generation in successive union negotiations).

You really think housing is cheaper or better now? I'm assuming you live in silicon valley. The only thing built is "bigger and better" because that is MORE EXPENSIVE and people have to PAY MORE for it. Nobody builds 'affordable housing' which you are obliquely criticizing people for not choosing. There is no choice for 'affordable housing': all of it that exists is occupied. That's why there is a housing shortage and rental shortage in practically every major urban market.

And then there is health care...

Food has dropped in quality even if one argues it has maintained cost parity.

Jobs are far worse that they used to be. Like food, the number of jobs is cooked to seem the same, but the quality of the job is far worse, which leads me to...

A great deal of consumer cost advantages have been due to globalization/arbitrage of foreign near-slave-labor. The cost of better consumer goods is destruction of the middle class and US manufacturing.

All the major milestones of the happy capitalist worker's lifetime are all very very very much more expensive or worse.

All of these structural degradations to the US are being propped over with financing shenanigans such as low interest rates. The Pandemic is all that on steroids.

All those shenanigans are sensitive to disruption. COVID is pushing our currency manipulation/control to the brink.

> As a non-American, it's heartbreaking to see efforts to unify the underclass completely derailed by this ridiculous race war.

Yeah, well, it's not like things are much better in Europe. Far-right parties are now mainstream in most major EU countries, and their n.1 priority is exactly the same.

Signed,

a Brexit victim.

Please don't generalize. Far-right parties are not mainstream everywhere. Europe is complex, as much as the US.

The issue with this way of thinking is that you look away from countries which might have good policies. These policies could be used in the US.

> not mainstream everywhere

FR: Front national IT: lega Nord DL: AFD ES: Vox

They're taking over Europe because neoliberals are full of shit, and the left wing has their hands tied.

Normal people have nowhere else to go.

DK: Dansk Folkeparti

Well, they lost of a lot of their voters... because most of the middle-seeking parties adopted their hostile foreign policy and made them irrelevant.

The far-right parties in Europe are usually focused on immigration rather than race. Look at the Brexit parties in the UK, the big enemies were the Poles. And the FN/RN in France has always taken pains to show that it is "pro-black" (and anti-brown..)

Meh, it's always about those terrible "others", no matter what the actual term is. Who's in that group varies on what gains the political players.

> Look at the Brexit parties in the UK, the big enemies were the Poles

In the South of England, maybe. In the North they barely exists, here "the enemy" continues to be South-Asian communities (which, ironically, were also heavily pro-Brexit, because of the correct calculation that British policies would then be forced to fall back on Asians for cheap immigration).

> immigration rather than race.

Two sides of the same coin.

A large section of people are left out of benefits of improving economy. Lions share of the gains go to the Uber rich people. And politicians play immigration card to whip up their voter base.

More or less exact phenomenon played out in Bombay, India. Except that the immigrants were Indians from other states (Gujarat, Tamilnadu etc). But when the political party did come to power they did absolutely nothing to improve their voter base’s life. Bombay continues to be a shit hole, worse so, that it was and the city floods every monsoon like a clockwork.

Perhaps they just see that wages are being suppressed through mass immigration of a cheaper labor force?

Businesses are responsible for that. I'm not sure how you're making that leap.

Racism isn't the same thing as colourism. Eastern Europeans and Muslims are both groups that get racialised in Western Europe.

We saw this coming. I read predictions of a right wing backlash to immigration as a kid. In the 80s.

Even in the USA, the nation of immigrants, where we assimilate immigrants the best (comparatively), increased immigration has always leads to a reactionary backlash.

Being very pro-immigration, a big of Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans thesis, I have no clue how to move forward.

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

That's a country specific problem, not a Europe problem. I don't mean just Brexit for the UK, either.

What does happen in Europe is far-right parties get a platform to speak on. The big continental countries have an election process that lets everyone be heard, and the far-right get heard plenty - allowing the electorate to smell their bullshit.

In the UK we don't have such elections. We have a two horse race, and token efforts given to fringe parties, and state media that are "maintaining balance" by constantly inviting candidates who haven't been elected after 8 attempts to frequently tout their bullshit (and critically without being challenged on any of it).

The far-right thrive here because they are unchecked, unquestioned, and ultimately not properly exposed. They relish in the "underdog", "cancelled", and/or "repressed" argument to win votes.

Also when our leading party receives £160k from the wives of former Russian minsiters to play tennis with the prime minister[0] you have to wonder who is really pulling the strings.

[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28158479

Brexit happened because a third party tore chunks out of the voting base of one of those two horses.

Yes, as a result of what I said above. Farage and goons were unchecked. They rarely, if ever, had their bullshit fact checked by anyone that interviewed them.

Dominic Cummings, an extreme libertarian[0], was in bed with various far-right (and also libertarian) people from the west, took office as the Special Advisor to the Prime Minister after riding the Brexit wave to success. A role that meant he had the power, without the need to be elected. He kicked everyone out that didn't agree with him, and/or had their own opinion(s). His one goal was to completely reform (read: dismantle) government. Unluckily for him, COVID came and revealed just what a cluster of dickheads he had left in government. Then he managed to get caught going on a 300 mile road trip after testing positive, including a trip to a Castle on his wife's birthday. The resulting mess of media coverage left the government with little choice but to "fire" him, but even that was a shitshow that took 6 months longer than it should have.

Now we are left with cabinet of useless, and I mean useless, puppets with no puppet master.

Side note: They (the right) also had clandestine social media campaigns. Cambridge Analytica's main purpose wasn't to identify who to send the bullshit to, it was to identify who to keep the bullshit from so that they wouldn't be challenged.

[0]: https://lloydhardy.com/news/Why_Brexit_Happened/

I disagree with Cummings on a lot of issues (e.g. Brexit, the importance of international law, etc.), but I don't recognise that description of him. He's certainly not an extreme libertarian. By all accounts, during the pandemic response, he was very much in favour of government intervention. Johnson was far more laissez-faire, even to a ridiculous degree.

I actually think Cummings is an interesting guy and worth listening to, but I don't think he should be anywhere near the levers of power.

He's got the mindset of a junior developer. He idolizes valley culture and wants to tear everything down and rebuild from scratch.

His ideas are kind of staid and recycled. He's smarter than Boris or most of the cabinet for sure but that isnt saying much.

Ultimately he rode a wave of mass discontent and somehow managed to fuck it up and achieve nothing while at the peak of his career when even the prime minister thought thought the sun shone out of his arse. He wasnt some genius mastermind.

You have equivalents of Farage in any EU country these days, believe me. And yes, they are often funded by comrade Vlad at the moment, but they started their rise well before he became a factor.

> allowing the electorate to smell their bullshit.

I wish I was as optimistic as you. In Italy and France, far-right views are now solidly held by roughly a third of the electorate, year-in year-out. Party names and figureheads can change, but the message stays the same. In Germany it's a bit better, but then you have Austria and the Visegrad block, where they command relatively solid majorities.

> I wish I was as optimistic as you.

I think if everything is laid bare - facts are proven to be facts, and lies are exposed as lies - yet the electorate _still_ vote it in, then that's fair. I'll emigrate.

But the biggest con about Brexit (as a particular example) is that _everything_ from the Leave campaign was bullshit and not one claim, pledge, or promise from the Leave "side" was ever checked, questioned, or since held to account and, in my opinion, it is _that_ which stinks the worst.

> allowing the electorate to smell their bullshit.

You need to look at the numbers. Far-right parties are growing everywhere in Europe... One is nearly the largest party in Sweden.

I mean.. as long as it's a fair election and not a campaign of lies, maybe the problem isn't the political parties and actually, people just really want the right to reign?

> people just really want the right to reign

Many people do. I see this as a dangerous problem. Weimar Germany also really wanted the right to reign and it didn't turn out well. The party here was founded in part by two literal Nazis and a bunch of skinheads. I don't really care what people want when they want them to rule.

I'm caught in a (philosophical?) dillemna though: I don't want the right to rise to power because I fear for the future of freedom, but I would be repressing freedom by ostracising/excluding the right from electoral eligibility. Is technocracy the answer? Have some kind of determinable objective truth rule? How do we mitigate for failure to identify the objective truth in that case?

.. and on continues the shower thought.

Overall I'm worried, though. There are many hallmarks about the current political climate that have been present in the not-that-long-before any major conflict in history. I really, honestly, am worried there will be some large conflict in our lifetime.

I think your comment is insightful but I don't have an answers to any of this. I just wish that stuff was what we were trying to figure out of a society rather than the trash going on these days.

I think you're right that we could definitely be on the eve of something about to happen, especially combining those observations with recent geopolitical updates.

This is the paradox of tolerance. A truly tolerant society would tolerate intolerance, which makes the society not truly tolerant anymore.

So a society would need to be a bit intolerant to stamp out intolerance, making it overall more tolerant.

I do hope that, and believe society should strive for, the utopian ideal of education that is plentiful enough it would make the need to be intolerant (of intolerance) redundant. I understand it might be immature/naive to expect that "if only they understood the facts, they would change their mind!" but one can dream.

It is indeed one great famous weakness of democratic systems, the fact that they typically end up incubating anti-democratic systems that replace them. The ones who do not (e.g. UK Parliament) usually manage to survive by negating their democratic nature when it is expedient to do so (i.e. limiting representation with very draconian measures, so that "revolutionaries" are kept out of power).

Forget tolerance I want liberty back. What makes tolerance so good that it should be prioritized over everything else? I want everyone granted certain inalienable rights and then allowed to live how they want as long as they abide by their rights and the rights of others. If people want to use their right to vote, follow the process, and support something that others disagree with, that's liberty in action.

If you'll forgive the following.. what the hell is liberty without tolerance?

You _need_ tolerance to accomodate liberty. Otherwise those who do not tolerate your liberty will prevent it.

Perhaps the answer is more ignorance. I doubt most of the political groups any of us worries about is actually as large and as ill-intentioned as we imagine, but rather than have no idea we always know just enough to feel in danger. Feeling in danger, we seek to control first and understand later, and that makes our political neighbours feel threatened, and so it goes until the centre cannot hold.

Perhaps the paradox of tolerance requires a deliberate agnosticism about how people unlike us live, a turning away from information that would turn us reactionary if we only had part of it. That used to be the default in an era of slow communication, but it could be cultivated deliberately if it's what's needed.

>(...) as long as they abide by their rights and the rights of others.

In other words, you want to prioritize tolerance over liberty.

Not even the most hardcore anarchist wants to live in a society where someone else's right to swing their fist doesn't end where their own nose begins, which is what true liberty entails, although they will vocally denounce any form of tolerance even as they implicitly accept it for themselves.

And it's worth pointing out that you don't even actually disagree with the paradox of tolerance in this regard, since the inflection point of tolerance/intolerance Popper claims should be a party refusing to recognize the rights of others or to act within legal bounds - the paradox of tolerance was written as a response to the result of German "tolerance" for Nazism at the time.

No one is actually arguing that mere civil political disagreement shouldn't be tolerated, but rather there is a recognition borne out of history that authoritarian beliefs, if not pushed against, will overwhelm the body politic in a similar way as cancer. Accepting the paradox of tolerance means recognizing that some prejudices and systems of belief are inherently harmful and that their adherents will never simply accept peaceful coexistence with others within the framework of a just and civil society.

Nazis will never play nice, and casting them as a victimized and oppressed group with legitimate grievances with whom we should empathize, and whose arguments we should consider (or reconsider, since nothing the far right has to say is actually new,) will not end well for anyone.

And to serve the forum's inevitable reflex towards whataboutism, this is not to let extreme leftism off the hook. There just happens not to be a surge in hard left ideology happening around the world at the moment, so mentioning the left in the context of this specific conversation for the sake of "balance" wouldn't be relevant.

I've always viewed the popularity of the far-right as being a result of a general sense of hopelessness that turns to resentment.

Right wing media feeds off that hopelessness and apportion blame to a convenient target, one that usually can't speak up for itself. The homeless, immigrants, benefits claimants are favourite examples.

At the same time they portray the people responsible for the decisions that lead to that hopelessness as uniquely competent by taking a tough approach on the scapegoats.

The only real way of reducing the temperature is to make those people more secure, financially and socially. You don't care if your neighbour is a Polish plumber if you're not worrying about making rent/paying bills.

Conservative parties normally won't enact the measures necessary to cool things down, since they typically benefit electorally and convincing those already in the pipeline is extremely difficult.

>Is technocracy the answer? Have some kind of determinable objective truth rule? How do we mitigate for failure to identify the objective truth in that case?

That's probably not even the most pressing problem. The most pressing problem is that the rulers in a technocracy are also self-interested, and simply knowing how something works is no proof against being a bad actor. Recent history is rife with experts tilting things to their advantage, and deflecting criticisms of unfair behaviour by saying the unwashed masses simply didn't know enough about the decisions that just so happened to transfer a lot of wealth upwards doesn't inspire confidence.

If you don't respect democracy as a way to harness the wisdom of crowds, maybe you can respect it as a pressure-relief valve.

I see that as a reaction to the previous raise of the intolerant left. If that is so, it's self correcting and the entire extreme right will go back into being treated like the clowns they are as soon as they get any power.

I can't speak for the whole of Europe and I might be a sheep - but at least in Scandinavia, these far right parties are more of a symptom of the mainstream parties refusal to talk about problems related to immigration combined with US cultural influence. Sweden is no.1 in Europe when it comes to gun violence right now and only last year non-right political parties started discussing current crime waves link to integration / immigration. It's not surprising that the far right - hard on crime and hard on immigrants thrive in this political climate.

Hard on crime and hard on immigration IS the far right. Sure, if the old parties had veered far-right, new far-right parties wouldn't have shown up.

The problem are not the parties, the problem are the policies. Kicking immigrants out or licking them up will not improve the life of the local lower class, despite all the promises. It may improve the life of the rich, who won't have to fear bring mugged. But the reasons why immigration is happening, and why immigrants remain poor, will either continue (no one wants to do the dirty jobs) or mine too the local lower class (let's pray locals less so that they are competitive with immigrants).

I fully agree. I don't agree with far right policies either and the situation in Sweden breaks my heart. But I'm not surprised that the far right is getting traction in a climate where other parties have been ignoring the problems for so long, and I don't think "efforts to unify the underclass completely derailed by this ridiculous race war" applies to the political climate and right wing parties in Sweden or Scandinavia as a whole as of right now.

Ceasing the funnel of endless low-skill, wage-depressing job competitors absolutely would improve the life of the lower class. They also have to deal with increased crime, it's not a uniquely "rich" problem. These parties are growing in popularity because it's a reaction to a real problem that locals are witnessing as their communities are changed for the worse.

Back in the 80s/90s, Sweden was known for bikini teams and ABBA. Now it's known for rape gangs. Sad!

Poor neighborhoods always have more crime than rich neighborhoods. This doesn't particularly change if the poor are native or immigrants.

The real problem is wage theft keeping large numbers of people poor. Whether immigrants or natives, the fact that you can work your whole life for a mega corporation and barely have money to eat is the problem.

You've got the class relationship with immigrants backwards.

Poor people are more likely to be victims of low-level crimes than rich people for a variety of reasons. When criminal immigrants come in, it's poor people they victimize.

It's also poor people who must compete with unskilled immigrants for jobs.

Rich people benefit from low-skilled immigration. They can isolate themselves physically from the bad immigrant neighborhoods, but also hire those immigrants to provide services for them. The immigrants will push down unskilled labor prices by the very simple laws of supply and demand. The immigrants will not compete on the labor market with the rich.

This is why the rich in the modern world have always been the ones pushing for more immigration, and the poor have always pushed against. Upper class businessmen and media people strut around like they're MLK but they really just want to pay their maid and gardener less.

Nothing you're describing would change if we replace "immigrant" with "poor person". This is all a problem of minimum wages, employment law enforcement and others, not a problem of immigration. For as long as people are allowed to hire others while.not paying for a minimally decent life, this problem will continue existing.

You state govt keeps inflation low by manipulating how it's calculated in order to keep the fed rate low, which insidiously keeps stocks up. And this happens, apparently, because the Fed really cares about news headlines? Does the ECB and BOJ enact the exact same policy but for unrelated (but equally conspiratorial) reasons? Are all the central banks and politicians around the world in cohorts, or is there something else going on here?

Long term interest rates have been going down for decades. This is a long term trend, caused by low GDP growth expectations. The labor force participation rate keeps trending down. Healthcare costs keep trending up. Population is aging. These are fundamental problems for which there is no great solution, and interest rates are low (along the curve) as a consequence. The Fed is ultimately only a minor player in this. They can provide excess liquidity, but only for so long. Ultimately rising inflation forces the Fed to withdraw liquidity and the market will inevitably deflate. Fed policy postponed a market crash by a couple of years so it wouldn't hit at the same time as covid, and that's a good thing.

But who benefits from a steady stock market? Regular people. Pension funds. Who benefits from crashes and wild gyrations? The wealthy. Hedge funds. This makes perfect sense, because a treacherous market is best navigated by the most experienced and wealthiest parties.

You seem to argue the opposite: that a market that has steadily gone up and up and up because of Fed/inflation manipulation has somehow benefited the wealthy elites at the expense of regular people?

Yes, workers get paid too little and much in the world is unfair. But your analysis is mostly conspiratorial silliness. I don't know what you mean by "ridiculous race war", but Black people in the US are 20x poorer (by net worth, on average) compared to whites so a race/color blind analysis of the economy doesn't work.

Yes, wealthy people own the vast majority of stocks. It's hard to invest a significant amount when 50% of your income goes to housing.

This is just factually incorrect that the stock market rising benefits 'regular people', the majority of stocks are held by the upper class.

Your whole argument fails because of that.

> Okay, so TVs and cellphones are cheaper, but necessities like college, childcare, and healthcare are up significantly.

It feels like it would be better if the basics were cheaper and the trinkets were more expensive...

There's more to employee compensation than just wages. Real total employee compensation has risen significantly since the 1970s when you factor in employer contributions to health insurance premiums. While some of that money is wasted, employees are getting tangible benefits in the form of new medical treatments that weren't even available 50 years ago.

What we need to do is decouple health insurance from employment.

> What we need to do is decouple health insurance from employment.

The easiest way to do that would be with a national single payer health care system, which would also help lower total healthcare spending. But both mainstream political parties are dead set against doing such a thing.

Yes and:

Corporate profits soared while wages flat-lined. Coincidence?

Would a little bit of profit sharing be so terrible?

I think they have the correct answer as to 'why' this has happened and what the root cause is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY&t=33s

Can you summarize? I don't want to watch this entire video right now even though it seems interesting.

Democracy relies on people being able to vote for what they think is right; with privacy.

We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization. Extreme lobbing. Partisanship. Fiscal policies that only favor the rich.

See this: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

All of this happened after we changed the rules in Congress where they voted and had committees in private, to out in the open.

Interesting but I don't think that privacy would help since those buying the legislation would know they're not getting what they're paying for and deal with that fact in some other way.

fiscal policy changed forever in 1971 when nixon took us off the gold standard

Not just that but the global elimination/reduction of capital controls.

This is interesting. Clearly _something_ happened in the early 70s (noise in the signal makes it hard to be sure of the precise year - if even there is a single discrete event). I've seen the abrupt change in economic trends attributed to different causes by different people:

- The end of the Bretton Woods monetary system

- The occurrence of peak domestic oil production in the US

- (now) removing the ability of senators to vote privately

...

The Average American Has No Influence on Public Policy (Princeton study)

https://medium.com/k-street/the-average-american-has-no-infl...

> We removed senators right to vote for the right things in private in ~1970. After this things have gotten very bad in the US–policy wise. Polarization.

Political polarization has been bad for the US it's entire history. It was certainly worse and more violent in the two decades before 1970 than since, though the last few years have been ramping up.

Partisan polarization was low for much of the post-WWII period because the issues of political polarization were unusually misaligned with the axis between the major parties (because of the unresolved partisan realignments around the New Deal and then Civil Rights which didn't finish shaking out until the early 1990s; as the direction of that shakeout started to become clear by the 1970s, partisan polarization started rising, and really took off from the 1990s, but this partisan polarization isn't a special condition, it's a reversion to the historical norm.

After it therefore because of it.

> Except, that doesn't tell the story for the majority of Americans. Housing costs are WAY up in cities as Americans migrate to where the jobs are, while housing costs are down in all the areas where jobs are disappearing. In practise, housing costs are actually significantly up for most Americans, but because the CPI is calculated across the entire nation, the government can claim inflation is low.

I think this is basically wrong in that it's only true for a minority of Americans -- the kind that are overrepresented on this forum. If you're in tech or finance or law, then there are big payoffs to moving to San Francisco or New York, but this actually isn't the case for the typical American. When you compare cost of living it's clear pretty quickly that the median American is still doing just fine in the vast middle of the country.

The median household income in the NYC metro is $83,160 and the typical home costs $571,556. In St. Louis, say, the median household income is $66,417 and the typical home is $222,076. For the average American, the second option is a much better deal. Sure, you make $16k more in NYC, but does anybody believe that the entire cost difference between the two metros is $16k per year? It's not even close. The median American is much better off in St. Louis.

A lot of people reading this are in households that make many times the median household income and they have understandably concluded that their best options are in a few costal cities. But it simply isn't true for the typical American.

There's kind of a dual (seemingly contradictory) error here in that people both under- and over-estimate how wealthy the U.S. is. They overestimate in that they forget that the majority of Americans are living on much less than the average software engineer, but they underestimate in that they forget that our poorest states are still much wealthier than than the average European country.

See here: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs...

Honestly I do not know how people are getting by given the cost of everything has gotten dramatically more expensive the past few years. In southern California gas is $5 a gallon, groceries usually are $200-300 a week for three people. Housing is beyond insane, every single family house in our city is now above $1M(you could find dozens of houses in the $800k-900k range a year and a half ago). This is not sustainable and I don't know what the final outcome will be but it won't be pretty.

It will be more expensive because other places are. Germany: currently a gallon of gas is €7.65 ($8.63). A kWh of electricity is €0.40($0.45).

A number of responses to this are arguing over whether real wages were really flat since the 1970s or how one would judge given the differences in the things we spend money on (larger houses, new tech, etc). But for any choice of how to calculate inflation which makes worker's wages go up over time, doesn't that imply that the total growth since the 1970s is also larger, and the absolute value captured by the capital-owning class is even larger? You can skew the picture to make the situation for workers less crappy, but not without making the success of the capital owners even more extreme.

Piketty frames stuff in terms of the share of growth that goes to labor vs capital-owners, and I can't stop viewing the situation in those terms. My understanding is that recent data shows that in general, companies selling a lot of consumer goods have improved their margins -- they're raising prices faster than their costs are increasing -- meaning effectively we're shifting money from consumers to shareholders. Every crisis is an opportunity to argue for the richest to enrich themselves further.

I'm having trouble parsing your last sentence, 'an opportunity to argue for'? I suspect the rich often got that way by being able to capitalise on crises, but I'm not sure how that relates to arguing for such opportunity. It might be relevant that Picketty also points out how severe crises are about the only times in recent history that wealth inequality decreased.

I generally like Picketty's analysis, but I wonder whether it might be worthwhile to do a similar analysis and include the portion that goes to co-ordination costs. It might be irrelevant in france for cultural reasons but I suspect it's an important piece of the puzzle in the Americas.

Perhaps I phrased that poorly. Every crisis is used to lobby (argue) for policies which further enrich the rich.

So much of the money that was spent during the covid response was shoveled at businesses and capital owners.

So , the frog has been boiling slowly for the past 40 years, but this year it burnt quite a bit, right? Either way the frog has been boiled

When the federal government can dilute the value of money while giving tons of it to banks and mega corps as near free loans, it becomes inevitable that there is a transfer of wealth up from the bottom.

Something that needs to be at least pointed out is that there is a significant difference between money and currency. Currency is a kind of instrument, mostly to enable current, flow of money in an efficient, productive, and low cost manner to facilitate smooth economy of activities. The problem that we are now facing though is that the governments of the world have committed to defrauding the people, whether to cover up other frauds or to plunder wealth/value.

What we are facing right now with the "money printing" in all its different forms or manifestations, is nothing less and nothing more than just plain fraud. It's really no different than if you were told the painting you are buying is a renaissance masterwork, when it's just a sophisticated fake. It's a bit more nuanced than that because the ruling clan used to understand that they can't get too greedy, but that seems to have changed now since they have just gotten away with ever more brazen frauds over the decades and have not been held accountable in at least a very long time, if at all really ever fully. It used to be "… one for you, two for me, one for you, three for me", we seem to be up to "one for you, 5 billion for me … wow, look how successful and smart I am".

It's the biggest problem I have with people who make excuses for "taxing the rich", because frankly, they didn't earn it at all when the government is essentially defrauding the lower classes and pumping trillions into the upper classes. Unfortunately the well has been polluted and the only way to fix it would be to rescind all the fraudulently earned "money", e.g., seize all wealth over $5 million, but that won't happen for several reasons, so we will get the tune we paid the piper for by drinking from the poisoned well. Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. History tells us though, likely it will end very poorly for some group of people. Abuse begets abuse, and the ruling clan has been abusing hard again for a very long time.

Something else to add context as far as the complexities of inflation and buying power. Yea TVs are cheaper, but the production of TVs have been shifted more and more to overseas locations where various costs are cheaper such as waste management, labor, etc. So while Americans have better buying power over computers, lets say, a lot of the computers are no longer made in the US.

I agree on the inflation measurement.

Regarding your question there is a simple explenation. YES we are much much productive then before. BUT wages are decided by markets. No one is paying you your "fair" share if it is possible to hire someone cheaper. Its like a commodity in the end. Good devs or spezialized doctors get a very very good sallary, so it just depends on your "market value".

FYI,

(non-farm) Labor productivity declined by 5.2% year over year:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/prod2.t02.htm

If you break these numbers down, you see that total production increased by 1.2%, but it required 7.4% more labor to produce that extra 1.2%. Compensation went up around 3% but of course in real terms it declined -- it pretty much has to decline if you need more labor to produce the same amount of stuff.

Whether or not this is a trend or some weird pandemic related thing will be seen over time.

Sounds strange. What about this graph https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

I would argue that just based on the technological progress total average productivity per person should go up.

Yes, just based on that it should go up, but there's a huge difference about it increasing at 0.5% per annum and 1.5% per annum, and it's not going to go up monotonically, which is the difference between your long run graph and the latest BLS announcement.

In certain situations, when an economy is mismanaged, it will go down for prolonged periods of time, but again one year changes are not a significant trend. But this article about worker pay and inflation is not about long term trends, but recent (since 2020) trends.

As Russ Roberts details in https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRZf05zFBLXIKLD3blbnn... things are more complicated. A lot of the analysis about things being flat since 1970 makes assumptions about things being the same which aren't true.

I honestly think simply raising the minimum wage gradually to inflation-adjusted $20/hour and then adjusting for productivity increases over time would permanently address these issues. Another option is to adjust based on local cost of housing, ie 4 times the average two bedroom apartment rent.

I think life is better today than it was in 1970. You must consider that the 1970s started about 25 years after the United States bombed the bejeezus out of every single major industrial center in the world. America made "the best cars in the world" at a time when factories in Stuttgart, Munich, and Ingolstadt were lying in ruble--and with the world's top scientists, engineers, artists, designers, and architects pouring into the country. The American middle class saw a rapid rise in their wealth and standard of living during this time. An inexperienced worker could walk into a factory job in the US and enjoy a very high level of affluence relative both to their skill and the rest of the world. This state of affairs completely broke down in the 1970s and economic progress in the US after this time has been of an entirely different flavor.

To take 1950-1970 as an example of "the way things ought to be" is highly unrealistic.

Workers in the US are still making more, much much more in most cases, than their counterparts in other countries.

> were lying in ruble

Ironic typo.

I think the most recent experience on inflation is very clear on this. The government reported number is 6%. But for people who spend most of their money on daily items, like rent and grocery, 6% is like lying to my face telling me red is blue.

The number is way low. Housing/rental costs are the largest expense and that's up 20% in many places. Used cars are up 40%.

Many food items like milk, eggs, meat are almost 50%~100% more expensive.

Yep.

"Peter Schiff vs Warren Buffett; The Middle Class in the 50's, and Now"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byxd7dTnlXU

While Peters point of view may be seen as dated and chauvinistic, I do feel like the absolute necessity of dual income living today, especially in the city, has had a huge negative impact on quality of family life.

I don't even have kids and I recognize what he's talking about. By the time me and my partner are home (7pm) and have prepped, cooked and cleaned up from dinner, there's no time or energy left to do anything productive or thoughtful. People mock millennials for eating out or ordering in too much, but the temptation to just eat at work and then claw back precious time in the evening is very high - i'd do it in a heartbeat if my partner let me.

It's just market forces at work of course. Once couples become DINKs, and bid up the cost of housing, the single income families simply can't compete and become extinct. Median house prices are 10x median income. Banks will lend you <5x income. For most here now (the UK), buying a property on a single income is a mathematical impossibility without first saving for a decade, living with your parents until you're 30, and then taking out a 30 year variable rate mortgage.

This is why no one is having replacement rate numbers of kids in cities.

> While Peters point of view may be seen as dated and chauvinistic

A way to un-chauvinistic this point: I'm a male and I'd love it if I could get married to a women and have their income alone support a lifestyle with a house, kids, car, etc and leave me to do house work + cooking. Sprinkle in access to a computer which would let me do some programming and potentially generate extra income and it I'd be extremely happy.

Exactly this. The same people setting wages are setting prices.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

> most Americans are significantly worse off since the 1970s

I wasn’t around in the 1970s, so can someone explain to me how great it was with some examples that would make me want to go and live in the 1970s?

There is a whole website for this, but it's more the 1960's that were golden.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

That’s just a bunch of [highly motivated] financial metrics. I was hoping someone might tell me some real-world benefits like “I used to be able to do X, now I can only do Y”.

Of course I don’t expect to hear much because as far as I can tell, 2020s USA is better than 1970s USA in every way I can think of.

You can’t think of healthcare costs?

Yeah that sucks, but there are many, many more treatments available today than in 1970, so I’d almost certainly prefer to pay 6x the cost of 1970s healthcare to get 2020s-quality treatment.

I'm sorry I don't have sources, but anecdotally, home ownership is so far out of reach for most Americans today. The common rhetoric is that "a store clerk could afford a [desirable] home for their entire family" in 1970 while today they often need double income to rent a 1 bedroom apartment.

Hoping someone comes along with a more evidence based continuation of this point.

> And then we come to the other elephant in the room: why are real wages flat?

A lot of it is because workers are doing less. They may be working just as hard, or maybe even harder. They are doing tasks that enable more production. But they are doing less. And many fewer people are required to do it.

More people do the last mile of work that can’t be automated, requiring 0 skill, and little thought. Low end jobs still used to require a fair bit of expertise, but are now dead ends.

Performance in many of these jobs is upper bounded at just showing up and doing it. It’s not even a rat race.

tl;dr low skill labor supply outstrips low skill labor demand.

Introduce them to identity politics.

Housing supply (NIMBYism by landlords) has not kept up with population growth and immigration in most dense cities. There is also the massive increase in multiple houses bought and left empty by the rich which are ghost houses. Healthcare will go up because that is regulated by politicians who do their best to raise prices for vested interests. The 2003 law passed by Republicans to prevent the government from even negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma is an example. You can’t even do parallel imports of drugs from say Europe. The number of doctors is restricted by the AMA and they even do the guidelines on how well they should be compensated. Educatlon is a third party payment “scam” where there is no incentive to restrict your costs, and there is every incentive to spend money on non-academic activities like massively bloated football programs and bureaucracies.

We reap what we sow.

Very interesting points; there is a scientific clarity in your analysis. But, I would like to add a point: the reality is that the production is in global scale now, the production has no borders, races, nationalities, but the capital has its local interests. The working class is a global class, while bourgeoisie is a local class. But since the bourgeoisie is the dominant class, it makes the working class divided. Like the role of black bourgeoisie in the disguising class struggle under the hood of racial issues. I think this small piece of text helps make my point a little bit clear: http://www.theinternationalism.org/2020/07/return-to-marx.ht...

Imports are only ~15% of the US GDP, they really don’t explain wage stagnation.

A lot of work is moving abroad without becoming imports. US companies own significant chunks of the services and R&D workforce the world over. Even in production, it's not uncommon for a US company to buy a factory rather than importing goods produced in that factory.

That is exactly "export of capital". We also see "import of labor force" since the developed countries struggling with demographic winter.

I didn't mean the point is the imports. The fact is that US is loosing his share of world GDP for decades, and new powers like China are rising. It is just like the decline of British empire at the late 19th and early 20th century and rise of new powers like US, Germany, Japan. We are witnessing the same phenomenon that Lenin called unequal development of capitalism in the imperialist stage. We would also see the same tensions and wars that we saw in the first half of 20th century.

Global GDP is irrelevant for US workers, the value of US exports has grown even as wages stagnated. At some point it just stops being about how much value is produced and becomes a question of how much value is captured.

If a factory produces 10x as many goods with the same number of workers the work those people are doing has increased in value. But, their unlikely to see a 10x wage increase.

> why are real wages flat?

Good question. One answer is the government consumes ever more of the GDP. This is going to negatively impact real wages.

One answer? Or an answer that happened to fit the predetermined conclusion “government’s fault”?

More of the share of productivity has gone to the owners and CEOs compared to the workers over the last 40 years. That’s the fact base that we are working from. Your supposed answer fits like a square in a round hole.

Where do you think all the trillions the government spends comes from?

You could give all the CEO pay to the workers and it won't make any difference, except you won't have a competent CEO anymore.

Any worker can become an owner by buying stock.

> Any worker can become an owner by buying stock.

That’s some real “just stop being poor” advice.

Things with massive government involvement and heavily regulated like are incredibly more expensive: health care, housing and education.

Meanwhile, things provided by the free market have become incredibly less expensive and more powerful: technology, communication, entertainment.

Nothing to do with your rich vs poor class wars.

You're completely right.

Yet in 99% of your peers, OECD countries, those regulated domains are generally more regulated, not less. And we're talking about 40 countries or so, many as diverse as the US, big enough to be comparable.

How do these data point for into your narrative?

I believe that those regulated domains are generally much more expensive in all those countries, no?

You don't need to believe anything, you can check for yourself. The numbers are easily available online.

Healthcare is 2-3-4 times <<more expensive in the US>>.

Education is generally <<free or very cheap outside the US>>.

Housing is expensive outside the US, too, a bit less so.

I feel the problem is not regulation in the US, it's that you half ass it. Americans are all about "rugged individualism" and "small government" when advanced societies are advanced because large groups of people work well together, which is the opposite of individualism. I've been in places where there is an extreme emphasis on individualism and they generally they don't look good (for example Eastern Europe does it due to a huge negative legacy of forced collectivism).

Nothing is "free" anywhere - it's just paid from a different pocket. From people's taxes in those "other" countries.

And the quality of state-provided healthcare is significantly worse than in US. Most people with means get private medical insurance skipping the one purchased by their taxes entirely.

Eastern Europe has two huge problem completely overshadowing their advantage from less regulation: a strong culture of corruption instilled by the years of communism and a gigantic brain drain to a west more than happy to lower their own costs (in health care as well) with the best of the cheap, highly educated Eastern workforce.

If the tax burden is 10% more but you pay 2-3-4-10x less, your point is moot.

And countries with comparable stats like waiting times pay less overall.

Don't die on this hill, it's not worth it.

Living in Eastern Europe, I am paying both the tax burden AND private medical insurance and care since I do not want to end up in state hospitals. I would much rather live in the USA and pay private insurance enjoying the standard of care there.

It's the hill I live on, so I will probably die here.

Well, do what all reasonable Eastern Europeans do and go to an OECD country minus Mexico or Hungary or so :-))

I did that for a while, but I'd rather be part of the solution: I can do much more good and help many more people over here.

And I also do not enjoy the hard left turn of the recent Western politics. Although I am sure they will realize their mistake eventually and turn back to the principles that brought their prosperity - I am afraid it will be a bumpy ride.

The US has the 3rd lowest housing price to income ratio [0]. You just need to avoid the west coast and northeast and you can find plenty of affordable housing [1].

[0]: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...

[1]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

Interesting.

How does the availability of jobs/salaries map to that though? Sure you might be able to buy a 2000sqft house for $40k but what salary are you on?

I do think our regulation is half-assed, but that's mostly due to corruption and regulatory capture. I don't think it has anything to do with our penchant for rugged individualism, and far more to do with price-fixing healthcare cartels, cronyism, a ridiculously broken healthcare insurance system, and lawmakers who have been lobbied hard to not break up these schemes. Regulations have to actually be enforced (not selectively) to do any good, and they have to be created by people without perverse incentives. Small government is not the problem, it's corrupt government

Government is also heavily involved in car manufacturing and air travel those have become much cheaper.

The real reason is non-scaling vs scaling, IP like tech and entertainment and internet are incredibly cheap to scale. Manufacturing has also become a lot cheaper and automated.

In contrast, things that are supply constrained (housing) or mostly depend on human labour have become expensive. A nurse spends approximately the same time per patient as 100 years ago, a car requires a fraction of the human labour compared to 100 years ago.

Houses are supply constrained not because they're expensive to build (there technology helped) but because it's incredibly difficult to be allowed to build, due to... you guessed it - the countless rules and regulations.

There is a deficit of qualified nurses not only because it takes time and money to train one but also because you are not legally allowed to hire one even if you find it, without the necessary papers and certifications. More regulations!

So even if I agree with you - the human labor cost has increased and things dependent on it have become more expensive, the supply is artificially constrained by regulations as well.

Imagine if it was illegal to hire programmers without a certification from a government approved body. Would we still enjoy this explosion of incredibly cheap software in everything?

Cars are very expensive, not because of the car in themselves, but the infrastructure and land use policies required to make them convenient. Think of parking lots and roads.

A more compact society would simply be less costly to maintain, and you can use public transit to scale transportation.

Housing is only very expensive because of land use policies and we don't build enough of them. Once we have a more liberal land use policies, then maybe labor costs will start to matter.

Gonna leave out housing and education, but for healthcare, you are painfully incorrect. European countries has vastly more regulated healthcare and yet pay about an order of magnitude less for it.

You have a good point, USA healthcare has the worst kind of regulation: it did lots of damage and helped very little.

But Western European countries (which you probably compare to) had an immense, unspoken advantage: an incredible supply of highly educated, unexpensive health care work force - the Eastern Europe.

If you want to truly compare the healthcare of USA with Europe's please include countries like Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Moldova and so on. Yes, it's cheap. But you truly get what you pay for.

You can't compare Eastern Europe like that, though. Romania has a GDP per capita of 1/6th the US one and it spends a pitiful percentage of its GDP on healthcare, about 5%. The US spends 18%. So the US has 18 times more money (!) for healthcare.

The other ones are even worse, Moldova's GDP per capita is 1/20th the US one. So probably 30 times more money spent by the US on healthcare.

It's like comparing a maglev train to the original steam locomotive :-)

You are ignoring what EE countries spend on training countless health care workers who then emigrate and work as cheap and highly educated in the West.

And health care cost increase exponentially with quality, not linearly. Bleeding edge research and medical advances appear in the USA mostly. And mostly everybody enjoys the fruits.

I keep hearing about US research but Europe has huge pharma companies: Germany has a bunch, France some more, Switzerland, the UK.

The US has a very parasitic healthcare system so I wonder how much their expenses are for actual research.

The US’s pharma have done a ton with pandemic medicine. Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, Novavax, Gilead, Merck..

Biontech researched the Pfizer vaccine. It's a German company. AZ is British.

Pfizer developed the treatment Paxlovid.

https://www.voanews.com/a/european-drug-regulator-recommends...

The first one is Swedish and the second is British.

The US is much better at creating visibility for its accomplishments.

You want to compare the richest country in history with Moldova? I'm not sure I see the point.

My point was very simple. Out of all of the world's developed countries, the USA is the one with the most expensive healthcare, despite less regulations. My point was that regulation by the government does not lead to "incredibly more expensive healthcare", as you have have stated.

From there, comparing the USA to Bulgaria is simply beside the point, the conversation was about regulation leading to "incredibly" higher costs.

And my point was just as simple: those developed countries enjoy the benefit of cheap, educated doctors from Eastern Europe. Without them, their health care would be much more expensive.

So, in the end, you're accepting that regulation is not the determining factor then.

Not even sure what exactly you think the proportion of foreign-born medical staff is in Europe. As far as I can find, the maximum is ~30% in the UK, while in Germany is 7%. But either way, to think that this is somehow the reason why Americans pay way more than anyone else for basic stuff like insulin and medical bills is ridiculous in my eyes.

Even if what you say is true for Western Europe, there are other countries (pretty much all) with highly-regulated healthcare and they all pay less than the US. But I'm sure there's some niche reason for why that would never work in the US.

No I am saying regulation just guarantees you pay more. How much more depends how bad that regulation is. In USA, the situation is pretty much FUBAR.

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