Comment by friedturkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friedturkey | Hacker News Reader

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Averages lean upwards due to some people making millions.

Federal taxes aren't the only taxes. State and other taxes are factored in.

Rent may average at $1100 in an ideal world, but near cities, $1100 is increasingly rare. Every time this is mentioned someone will chime in and say "yeah but I live in rural Nebraska and pay less than that." Which is fine. But then your employment options are slim, most jobs aren't paying $40k a month, not everyone is a tech contractor making 200k a year from their bedroom on a lakefront, not everyone wants to be or can be a tech contractor, and a lot of jobs performed by "normal" people (people on HN are generally highly paid and anything but typical) will involve long commute times unless they're living in the middle of town... in which case rent prices shoot up fast.

The average person also needs to pay for health care in the US (even if their company provides insurance, they're fucked when they get sick because insurance covers very little for most people not in very expensive programs). They have car loans. They have college loans. They need to pay deposits just to move. 9-5s are being replaced with 9-6s and people have less free time.

When you factor in all of that, the "average office worker" looks like a dream life to a lot of people. What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of "average" people. Comments claiming it's "easy" for "average" people here make me think some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.

This most interesting part for me is this "What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of >>average<< people". It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Or maybe 1965s are idealized? Are there people looking on this? I have zero knowledge to understand all of this, unfortunately.

I don't mean to suggest there are no problems with cost of living. In broad strokes here's what happened since '65, or let's go back a little further to the start of the post-WW2 world.

1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)

2. The government went off the gold standard

3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization

Those are the three biggies. Expanding the number of available workers kicked off the pressure on wages. Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. Globalization shrunk the number of jobs available and was the nail in the coffin.

So that's why we don't have the same economics as a nuclear family in the 60s.

Now in practice a lot of essentials in the US CPI have stayed pretty cheap. Technology enabled a lot of things to stay or become cheap. But a few big ones are a train wreck. Home ownership, health care, education, all skyrocketed.

So when I see someone on the median income say "Man I'm getting older and I don't know how you can afford to settle down and buy a house and start a family" yeah that's a very real problem which is grounded in facts.

But when someone says "life sucks for the 24 year old who has the resume to work in the Valley and pulls down almost a quarter mil," here's what that is: horse shit.

Your premise needs a reality check.

> 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)

The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change. That's a narrative pushed by "traditionalist" thinkers that found a simple thing to pin social upheaval on

The real change was accelerated industrialization during the first half of the 20th century. Millions moved from farms to factories, men and women alike.

> 2. The government went off the gold standard

So what?

> Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation.

If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".

The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.

> 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization

I agree with you here, but again I think you overstate the impact. The US was once in the position of SE Asia today: (relatively) educated workforce, cheap labor, lax standards compared to Europe. In it's time, the American South was the jobs-export market for the North. These trends have been happening basically forever.

More importantly, the remaining manufacturing jobs, and there are many, are high wage and high skill. They're also high productivity, so there are fewer.

That leads to another force at work, which is a bigger threat than exported jobs: automation. Most manufacturing jobs didn't leave, they disappeared.

> The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change.

WW2 is just where it started, it went from 28% around then to 47% as a percent of labor force, a huge change.

The male labor force doubled in absolute number since then, but the female one increased almost 4X.

How much of that is child care switching from not counted to being counted? Women were working before that, just in an uncounted way

If it went from 1 provider on 2-3 child care to 1 on 20 daycare, the effect is similar to if it had been counted anyway.

One significant source of uncounted labor was removed with the washing machine. Enormous amounts of time were spent manually washing clothes. But automating this likewise had a similar effect to making child care more efficient and increased downward wage pressure elsewhere by allowing more to enter other parts of the workforce.

If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".

The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.

I have literally never seen this argument before, and I've been reading economics books for 10 years.

I'm more curious than anything. Please tell me where I can find more.

The US was never a low-wage economy. Sure, there was crippling poverty in places, like the Dust Bowl, but labor has always been the bottleneck in a nation richly endowed with natural resources, which is why American logging practices are much more wasteful than European ones, they are designed to maximize the productivity of the workforce. When the International Watch Company was set up, it was by an American looking for cheap labor in Switzerland.

> The real effect has been to stabilize the economy.

The economy only needed stabilization because it was running on usury. If you ban usury, as Islam does, then you wouldn't need fake money that can be printed at will, and these crazy periodic cycles won't happen. It's not like today is stable anyway, I've spoken to several people in finance and they admitted to me these things.

Those people are quite wrong. An unstable unit of value like the gold standard makes bans on usury even less meaningful because you can get into deep debt-deflation even with 0% nominal rates (see "liquidity trap" for what that looks like). Investment cycles can be driven purely by equity investment, although there might be an argument that debt-driven cycles are worse. Anyway, the well-known workarounds that spring up when 'usury' is banned - basically ways of rephrasing 'interest-bearing debt' as 'senior equity'- leave you with practically no advantage over simply having well-designed bankruptcy laws.

The fallacy you're committing is not looking at how the Islamic world was run before the Western banks took over post WWI/II, as interest is prohibited in Islam. It is well documented that in Iraq during the Ummayyad period, there were no more people left to accept Zakat because everyone truly paid their fair share (not the trite slogans we hear today).

There can be cycles due to issues beyond our control, however, the cycles we see today are built into the system because of usury and printing fake money to fuel it. As I said, financial folks I spoke with admitted it.

Just to be clear you’re suggesting high/predatory interest rates are the reason that the economy needs stabilization?

If so, my frame of reference for predatory is like 15%, 27%, etc. numbers like that.

Is that what you’re saying? If so can you expand on your thoughts here and link these two elements together better? I generally associate high interest rates with high risk. I’d loan my friend $500 for 0% interest. But some person I’ve never met who is sketchy? That would be a 25% rate with collateral. Ya know?

Are you tying this into the Federal Reserve somehow? Is it interest rates for mortgages that you view as predatory? Small business loans?

I'm suggesting that any non zero rates are predatory. Loans should be reserved as acts of charity, as Islam dictates. Otherwise, it will open up to running the economy on debt, which is exactly what we see today. Debt fuels more debt, more inflation, it's a rolling snowball. It's no wonder we're in the mess we see today. Of course dissociating the currency from gold or other precious metals allows them to print more money to pay off their ever growing debts. This is how all these factors are connected. Not to mention immoral acts like gambling (aka put and call options) and selling what you don't own (shorting), all of which are prohibited in Islam, are contributing causes as well.

Trying to roll back the clock to the golden age of Islam is not something you’d expect to find in HN’s comments section.

Liquidity fits into your world view how? In its most simple form: A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money. Do they go to the Sultan and beg for a loan based on charity?

> Trying to roll back the clock to the golden age of Islam is not something you’d expect to find in HN’s comments section.

Why, because most people are not familiar with Islamic history? :)

> A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money.

Engage in a fundrise not dissimilar to what people do today with VCs and startups. The investor(s) contribute money in exchange for a portion of the business. If it succeeds, both parties make money, if it doesn't, the investor loses money, and the business owner loses money and effort he put into it. It's true risk sharing.

> If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".

It compounds. Over the course of 50 years this is ~100% inflation.

I'd add that the decades after WW2 were boom times for the Unites States. So many other industrialized nations were reduced to rubble. The effects of having to rebuild lasted decades. Post-WW2 the U.S. made up about half the world's GDP - equal to all other countries and the planet combined.

Things are quite different now. The Unites States makes up less than a quarter of the world's GDP. Those great factory jobs with pensions and benefits are long gone. That dovetails with your #3, globalization.

If you're considering just after WW2, you also have to consider that most industrial countries were in ruins

The apparent "pressure on wages" is broadly a matter of technical change favoring highly skilled occupations over lower-skilled ones. Wages for the former are still comparatively quite high, as we ought to know well here at HN. Of course this is a major source of income inequality, and arguably a social problem because retraining people for these newer jobs only gets harder and harder. UBI can be an elegant approach.

I was born in '65. My dad had a regular job, mum didn't work and I have 3 siblings. We lived, what would be classed today as, a lower middle-class lifestyle.

Aside from earnings and cost of living, the one thing I believe that has changed is that I don't remember knowing of many people living a much better life than I was at the time.

Now it seems everyone is, even those earning much less than I do. Driving a car you could never be able to buy outright, multiple foreign holidays, fine dining and designer clothing are pretty much the norm these days because, somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.

> somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.

How do you think Google and Facebook are trillion $ companies? They run targeted advertising to induce consumer demand via manipulation-as-a-service ("Hey advertisers, not enough people willingly going out to buy your $70 clothes made for $1? Here's the people susceptible to feeling inadequate when you show them how much sexier they'll be after their purchase). The $ they skim has to come from someone's pockets at the end of the day.

See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simps...

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable

The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence. By Dani Alexis Ryskamp

Updated at 11:10 a.m. ET on February 8, 2021.

> It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral.

Whether you agree with him or not, this video highlights how the 70s changed everything (in the US at least)

The Cardboard Box Reform - Nixon's Ghost Bill & A Crucial Flaw in Democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY

>some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.

It would be helpful (and I think recommended in the HN guidelines) to provide some relatable basis for your opinions from your life experience.

Like for example, your context for normal rents, normal cities, normal commutes, normal states, normal experience with health insurance when you can't get it from your employer, what you think a normal car & car loan is, why "boring" is relevant to "hell" and struggling in life, whether and why rental deposits are an abnormal hardship to you, if you have ever had a proverbial 9-5 job...

I'm not demanding an answer to each specific item above.

But when you casually accuse people of living in a bubble, you should show them a different one even if you only have one or two real data points from experience.

i paid 1K a semester to go to college.

Ok...that doesn't paint much of a picture.

If I could rewind things to when I was 18, and go to community college for two years, transfer to the university for the last two, and live at home, it would be extremely cost-efficient, but we all have to make decisions without hindsight, with perhaps the advice of our elders who grew up in a completely different world.

Eh, last place I rented in Portland was $1300. I can hit the gas pedal and make $250k a year if I want, but last year I laid low and tucked in under $100k, took time off, still managed to save a bunch of cash. My GF is a massage therapist and makes $50-60k a year. We've got multiple cars and houses. We're both self-employed so we each pay for our own health insurance out of pocket.

This is the dream to a lot of people... in the third world. The truth is we're both relatively lazy and could easily double our income in this country, tomorrow, if we wanted to.

BUT NOT AS LAZY AS GENERATION TIKTOK.

Cool. Most people aren't given a life that allows them to just make 250k if they want to. As a programmer, tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid. The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.

I know exactly how hard they're busting ass - I was a cab driver, bus boy, waiter, bartender and minimum-wage graphic designer before I was a coder.

It's not those people I'm worried about. They're all learning more as they go along. It's the ones who disdain work. And use incoherent political talking points to justify laziness and being supported by their parents. They have no pride.

[edit] It's also absolutely natural to me, and a sign of vigor in America, that I should have started at minimum wage in the service industry and now command $200/hr. in my 40s. And it's natural to me that other people should go through the same process. It's good for them. It was good for me. It teaches you hard work and humility; being poor teaches you the value of a dollar. This is the only country in the world where that has been possible for generation after generation. My grandparents were immigrants who came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of my colleagues are of other races, and their parents and grandparents were immigrants too. My grandpa died with $1M or so in savings. This was not a green light to fuck off and not work. It was a dire warning that I had to get a job at 14. So it's not like "some people" auto-magically have this incredible privilege of making $250k a year, you have to work for it, and that's what's expected of you in this country. People everywhere else in the world desperately want the chance to do the shit jobs that our kids think they're too good to do. That's a parenting problem. A messaging problem. A civilizational problem.

[edit2] >> most people aren't given a life

This is an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone if you don't know the specifics of their life. I kind of ignored it, but I shouldn't have. It betrays a very specific flaw in your thinking. You assume that everyone who has things must have had those things given to them. Is that what your parents told you? Is that what you tell yourself when you don't feel like working harder? That everyone else was just given what they have? That just means you were brought up with a poor work ethic. Blaming people who work harder than you or even people who were lucky and born rich doesn't get you anywhere. Good; stay in a gutter, but don't pretend to preach to people who put in the time.

Agreed with most of your post until the end - was being American not given?

Surely your ancestors worked for it, but most jobs you are not even qualified for if you are not American (what you get for granted)

I think you are falling into the fallacy of hard work (which is a responsibility and a must), failing to recognize that these opportunities were given to you in the 1st place, which you rightfully justified with a good work ethic after the fact.

The point is a lot of people will not get a chance, even if they busted their asses. With this said, laziness is not an excuse either so I agree that the anti-work youth sentiment is a virus for economy and the entire country.

>The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.

I obviously haven't worked in every job there is but in my twenties up to early 30s I worked as:

busboy dishwasher painter janitor day laborer construction worker

Now it's true this was not all the time, I had significant breaks for school etc. and obviously my body today could not handle what it handled then, but still my experience is that programming when it is going bad is much worse than anything I had with those jobs.

Things going bad as programmer can just be when you are dealing with a hard to solve problem and it grinds you down over days, but also you can end up in places that for some reason everything goes worse (sure I had bosses who were jerks when I was working, especially as a day laborer, but I never had jobs where the whole processes of the company seemed geared to making everything harder like you can sometimes encounter programming)

The physical work made me tired, but never affected me mentally. Mean bosses didn't matter too much, just keep the head down do the work and get out of there at the same hour every day. And sometimes programming can also be tiring, sitting down all day at the computer.

So I mean I believe that I can imagine to some reasonable degree of accuracy how hard people making 1/4 what I do are busting their asses, but it seems that what I imagine must be significantly less than what you imagine?

on edit: obviously my imagining here is limited to the U.S and Western Europe.

>tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid

Wage-fixing cartels aside, tech workers are in high demand and are therefore paid exactly what they're worth.

He said he DOESN'T make 250k. He said he and his non-programmer gf make much less than that combined.

And yet they're still doing just fine.

My post has numbers. So does his. They're earnest attempts to show that the numbers can and do work.

You on the other hand, are spitting out one exaggeration after another in bad faith. No, you don't need to move to rural Nebraska to find cheap rent. No, not all tech workers are lazy. Some of them settle for that shitty commute which you call a dealbreaker. Take a hard look at your attitude.

>> Some of them settle for that shitty commute which you call a dealbreaker

Appreciate the support. Also, I did my time as a junior code-monkey in an office with a miserable commute and a tiny half cubicle, and I learned a ton from it. Taking that job didn't stop me from becoming independent later; I just watched what my bosses were doing very carefully when they interacted with clients and realized I could do it at least as well as they did, and that propelled me to doing my own things. It was actually a necessary experience.

My little brother disdained hard work most of his life. He dragged through college for six years to get an undergrad degree (I dropped out after year one). He just got a real estate license. That was the hardest he's worked ever; and I think he's grown because of it. He still has no real work, but he's got two kids now to support. His life has grown a lot harder than mine now; but mine was a lot harder than his for the first 30 years or so. No bad blood or anything. But I do see how funny it is when people call something "privilege" when really, they're privileged to think they don't have to do the hard part themselves.

Doing the hard part is actually the good part of life. The saddest thing about the anti-work movement is that they're missing the experiences that come with committing to something shitty and moving up. Maybe my gen puts too much emphasis on work as a marker of identity; I'm not immune to that criticism. But if you don't even try or you truly believe that the fact that the whole thing being rigged gives you cover to tune out (and yes, it was always rigged) then on what grounds can you lodge a serious complaint against the rest of us?

No need to be so angry. I said people can’t just choose to make 250k, unlike privileged folks here. No need to rage about the reality.

I was paying far more than 1200 for a spot in Portland a good 30+ minutes from downtown. A friend was paying around that and having to commute an hour. Not everyone is as lucky as you. Countless Americans are struggling yet people here say “I’m rich so I don’t see the problem.” Cool. You’re rich and privileged. Most people aren’t.

I moved to another country. I pay less and get a higher quality of life. It’s wild seeing the frogs being boiled and getting louder than ever about how there’s no problem because they’re not feeling it yet.

If you were paying beyond $1200/mo for a place in PDX a few years ago, 30 minutes away from downtown, that would certainly be either a freestanding house with at least 2BR/2BA, or a newly constructed amazon box off the MAX line near Hillsboro. I know people here who still pay $700/mo for an apartment and when I was paying $1300 it seemed ridiculous, but it was a furnished ADU off Hawthorne, utilities included.

I hear ya about watching from outside. I left the US in 2006 and ended up sort of stuck back here in 2016 when my dad got sick. There's a twofold great thing when you're outside. You don't have to give a fuck about the internal politics in America, and everyone looks ridiculous (believe me - the shock of coming back and turning on TV here takes years to get over); and also, wherever you're living now, their problems aren't your problems. Even if they're rioting against their government every day. You can stand aloof.

No argument from me. I wish we could get all the other people to experience life outside their little bubbles. They wouldn't act so petty and stupid.

>Some of them settle for that shitty commute

Perhaps some people don't think a 10 minute commute is possible either because they don't think that a city with a 10 minute radius is a real city, or they think living close to a highway implies an undesirable neighborhood.

Also, there is the option to commute out to the suburbs in a major metro area where the commute inward is hell. Plenty of office parks and such that people work at.

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