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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

Its really not that crummy a hand. Maybe it’s not as good as being born in 1948, though they had to deal with medical issues that you never will, not to mention the military draft. But that’s not the only point of comparison ever. The destruction in Europe created a period of unprecedented prosperity in the US.

The student debt that is endlessly whined about has been transformed over the last decade from real debt to a marginal tax on income. This is the same system that’s used in Australia and the UK.

Then there’s the run up in house prices. A real phenomenon but this idea that home ownership is the sine qua non of a happy life is a transitory culture artifact, not any kind of human universal.

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I would say having housing is pretty important and rents are rising too.

Real income after housing costs is still very high both in historical perspective and as compared to other industrialized nations today.

This is like US doctors complaining about malpractice insurance cost. Sure, it’s high, but even after that look at income vs Canada or the UK.

“Sure, we’re moving in the wrong direction, but at least we’re not as bad as those guys yet” isn’t that comforting.

“who were already dealt a pretty crummy hand”

Which is it?

Yes, I am not one of those people who is foolish enough to think that it would have been better to have been born in 1940 than today. Of course quality of life and real incomes are higher.

But I think in the microscale, it might have been better to be able to invest in this most recent bull run when housing was also lower cost than the next decade or so.

It's a crummy hand when the cause is increasing wealth gaps. The money was there and is there. Policy has shifted how much of it the middle class ends up with. That's crummy.

I admit I don’t get the obsession with inequality when the absolute numbers are so high. It feels like a generation is treating envy as a virtue rather than a vice.

It's not envy. It's rightly expecting a fair share of the pie you helped make.

Some people are contributing to making that pie bigger and a lot of people aren’t. Why should the people whose contribution is steady or negative get a fixed fraction of the pie? What’s fair about that exactly?

That's a different topic. We are talking about the middle class getting less than they did in the past, and that extra money going to the rich.

It’s the same topic. Lots of middle class professionals have essentially the same output as their forebears did 40 years ago. They are not expanding the pie. They are nonetheless richer in absolute terms, but have pulled away in relative terms from those that are much more productive than their fore-bearers. This is perfectly fine but for envy.

> Lots of middle class professionals have essentially the same output as their forebears did 40 years ago.

No, they have much higher output.

> They are not expanding the pie.

They are.

> They are nonetheless richer in absolute terms

They are not. It takes two incomes to do what one income used to pay for. Lots of middle class people cannot afford to even buy a house. Something most of their parents managed to do at a young age.

> but have pulled away in relative terms

Yes, this has also happened.

> those that are much more productive than their fore-bearers.

Much more productive? That's also not true.

> This is perfectly fine but for envy.

If it were envy, the middle class wouldn't be asking for better wages. They would be asking to become rich. It's not envy.

“Lots of middle class people cannot afford to even buy a house. Something most of their parents managed to do at a young age.”

This one thing seems to be something of an obsession. How much did it cost their parents to have a child at 40? Or to cure prostate cancer?

Owning a house is not an obsession. Shelter is a basic human need and people across many cultures own houses.

And no, it's not one thing, it's just one example. People aren't getting paid as fairly as they used to.

Yes quality of medical care has improved. That's not the discussion. We're talking about fair pay.

You made this up. Average labor productivity has steadily increased over this time.

What's fair about Zuckerberg becoming billionaire by basically pure luck? There are millions of people more hard working and more intelligent than him but they were unlucky. If not Zuckerberg then someone else would create Facebook, he was surprised by how successful FB was. Calculus was discovered independently in the late 17th century by two mathematicians and it would be discovered if they both would die before doing it. It's all statistics, you can have the best idea in the world but be in a wrong place at the wrong time and you will fail.

I might have been elected president. I wasn’t, but I might have been. Should Biden have to split Air Force One with me?

Seems like a straw man, it's like asking - I'm not husband of this woman but I could, so should she split this kid with me if I want to? This is different to sharing wealth, we already tax people so we share their wealth with the rest of the society but we don't share other people kids, wives or Air Force One.

You want more of the other guy’s wealth but you don’t want to give more of what you have to the many many in the world that have a lot less than you.

I get it. I just don’t respect it.

No, it's the rich who want our money. And they were getting better at taking it. With the labor shortage working class folks are starting to realize no one gets rich if there are no workers and people are demanding better pay. Good for them.

Accusing people of being jealous isn't engaging with their complaints.

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