The Rise of the Non-Working Class
iwf.org
iwf.org
With housing becoming an investment increasingly dominated by cynical corporations with no empathy, only greed, even hard workers have to spend every cent they have with no source of significant savings (other than the death of a relative, not available to most) and not even the illusion that they will ever afford a home or be able to raise a family in a middle class lifecycle.
Massive corporations have been built off American workers and American infrastructure - the regulations and taxes that provide us roads, utilities, clean water, safe food, safety, and more. Since at least the 1980s these corporations have abandoned the belief that they need to give back to or invest in these communities and have gone to great measure to slash worker pay, fight regulations, and tear down the educational systems and social safety nets that enabled America's growth in the twentieth century.
Even safety is far from guaranteed - minorities have known forever that the police are not there to protect them, but it's increasingly apparent to everyone that they're an organized crime protection racket, refusing to discipline or remove abusive cops, refusing to do their jobs and throwing hissy fits at the slightest suggestion that they be subject to any accountability. In cities across the country, the mere suggestion that officers not be allowed to physically abuse people leads to a refusal to go on patrol and no consequences.
Meanwhile, at the very top billionaires accumulate more and more wealth and face no consequences for their actions. Whether it's manipulating financial markets (and being fined far less than you profited) or blatantly stealing and mishandling classified documents and not even being charged, the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident.
Hard work isn't rewarded and is often punished with higher expectations (whether that's an increased quota or a 'manager' title) with no increase in pay. Long gone are the days of joining a company as a janitor with the dream of working your way up; upper and even middle management is an incestuous club who would rather hire someone externally than train someone internal.
Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
Here's the kicker - they adamantly believe the Republican talking point that providing massive tax cuts to the 1% will somehow improve the quality of life for the remaining 99%, i.e. them. They've bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I used to argue with them but now I don't bother. I reckon if they haven't been able to work out cause and effect during the past four decades then they likely never will. The sad thing is not a single one of them will be able to retire, they're all going to have to work until the day they die. They pray they don't get sick because then they have no income and they would have even more bills to pay.
This is the reality of a huge swath (majority?) of Americans and Americans refuse to look this problem in the eye and acknowledge its existence. Much less do anything about it. It seems as though if you're not in this boat then you're taking everything not nailed down before this ship goes down.
I just figure things are going to get worse before they get better. You don't even want to know how bad I think things will get before we have a national Come to Jesus moment and turn this ship around. It's the stuff of my nightmares.
Hard to win them over while demonizing them non-stop.
Historically, because the alternative is worse -- literally starving. For most of modern capitalism, most men had such jobs, because they had no choice.
I haven't listened to/read the piece, does he go into how these people survive? Are they doing black/grey-market semi-legal or illegal stuff (which I'd actually consider "working", even if they don't get counted in the visible labor force), or getting government benefits, or living off savings, or being taken care of by family, or what?
Here's the section that I think answers your question:
> Who’s paying for this? Well, again, if we look at government numbers, it looks like it’s friends and family, meaning girlfriends, other family members, and Uncle Sam. Disability insurance programs pay some benefits for more than half of these unworking men, it seems. Disability benefits do not provide a princely income, let’s be clear about that, but they do allow for an alternative to life in the working world, which is exactly the opposite of the original, and I think quite noble, intention of disability programs, which is to provide for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, couldn’t work.
(I'm not justifying or excusing disability fraud, just explaining what's been happening.)
https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
> There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.
It's like lot of people have simply lost hope.
That does sound like a problem. If this really is a dire problem, then let's start by forcibly disappropriating multi-generational landlords and people with trust funds of their inherited wealth, thereby forcing them to work. If that doesn't free up enough laborers to keep the machine humming, then we can start thinking about carrots and sticks for the ppors.
The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it. No pay, no discretion to make decisions, and your entire management chain feels like they're in the same boat.
Working for a small company where you're treated with respect and given a chance to grow or flexibility or whatever is one thing.
Working for a soulless corporate chain that consistently underschedules so that you're overworked and then writes you up if you want to go see your sick/dying relative is soul draining.
Working for a corporation that refuses to give you a consistent schedule but expects you to come in on your day off to cover someone else is soul draining.
Working for a corporation who will schedule you for 36 hours even though they're short workers because otherwise they might have to actually give you some garbage-tier healthcare is soul draining.
>The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it.
For all of these people complaining about "jobs these days" I would love to hear what period of history they think had it easier.
In fact you might expect there to be more people on disability in 1960, seeing as WWII ended only 15 years before that (PTSD, etc). I suppose that those people simply couldn't get onto disability back then though.
Overall this is a very sad state. The author describes it as a train class for a death of despair, which feels accurate. This is far more than an economic issue.
Yes throughout all of human history you had to do some sort of labor to not die, I'm not disputing that. However until very, very recently you weren't forced to sell your labor to survive.
The current state of needing to sell your labor to survive is unprecedented even in relatively modern time. During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did. During the great depression not nearly as much of our individual survival had been commodified: nearly every family could hunt, farm, create clothing they needed, maintain their home, and cook their food (something surprisingly many people cannot do any more).
The commodification of nearly all aspects of our material lives means today we are much more dependent on Capitalists than ever before in history.
I think for the average person the tradeoff has been very positive - look at life expectancy and health outcomes from any point in history versus today. Just look at the incidence of famine in Europe historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Europe
For sure there are philosophical, etc. questions that come up - but they are decidedly higher on Maslow's hierarchy than basic survival. If the old state of things were so appealing - people have the option to go back and start their own farm. Almost nobody does.
The fact that people glorify (or wear rose colored glasses about) how things were in the past is just exemplary of the bubble we are all living in.
The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
This is healthier for a society, not because of any high moral vision, but simply because the collapse of the ruling class does not mean the fundamental destruction of everyone. Peasants know how to till the land with or without a king.
Today when have an unprecedented interdependence of the two classes. For example this is fundamentally incorrect:
> people have the option to go back and start their own farm.
A select few individuals do have this option, but all of society cannot return to an agrarian system because we do not have the resources for a population of our scale to live off the land without the massive industrial system required to maintain modern agriculture. Billions of people would die in this case.
This interdependence is particularly troubling due to the inherent nature of the ruling class to seek to exploit the labor class. Though it is to the short term advantage of the capitalist class, in the long run it threatens all of industrial civilization. We are quite literally seeing the consequences of this right now.
I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on.
Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.
But I get your point that initially there were still people -- in the USA -- surviving by owning their own farm not selling their labor, and that this number has continued to decrease. But yes, I think that's precisely the nature of modern capitalism, to decrease this number. (and the number was initially much higher in the USA than, say, Europe, largely because non-elite immigrant settlers were able to avail themselves of "available" land, something not available to the otherwise "working classes" in Europe...)
In any event, it would be suprising if today most of these non-working men were supporting themselves by subsistence farming and foraging/hunting, indeed.
> During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did
We need to be careful about being slippery with these categories though. Some of those people who "worked on farms" historically were, in fact, selling their labor -- and from GP, "working for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings" in pretty dire conditions. And prior to 1865, many of the people in the USA who "worked on farms" were enslaved in forced labor, which is not in fact "selling your labor", but it's of course worse in all respects.
According to the article, everything from government checks to money from spouses/friends. One would have to assume some criminals are included as well, but I'd guess there aren't too many statistics covering people's illegal side gigs.
A portion of it is government benefits, but he attributes the majority of it to being taken care of by girlfriends, family members, etc.
I have a lot of sympathy but at some point you have the draw the line between someone needing help and a leech.
"But the 1984 change “substantially liberalized the disability screening program,” according to economists David Autor of MIT and Duggan in their extensive review of the program. The reforms shifted screening rules from a list of specific impairments to a process that put more weight on an applicant’s reported pain or discomfort, even in the absence of a clear medical diagnosis. In addition, workers could qualify if they had multiple conditions that affected their ability to work, even if none of the conditions was disabling on its own.
Not surprisingly, more and more workers were awarded disability benefits based on ailments that relied more on patient self-reporting and that often were not easily diagnosed independently. For example, “musculoskeletal and connective tissue” problems, which includes back pain, accounted for just 17 percent of new enrollees in 1981, but 33 percent in 2010. The share of awarded benefits based on mental disorders — ranging from schizophrenia to mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder — climbed from 10 percent in 1981 to 21 percent in 2010. Mood disorders alone now account for 15 percent of all workers currently on disability.
Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found, is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s, because of the way initial benefits are calculated. That’s particularly true at the lower end of the income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of income replaced by the disability program climbed from 68 percent in 1984 to 86 percent in 2002 among lowerincome men aged 50-61. A possible indicator of the effect this has had, Autor and Duggan note, is that “the increase in [SSDI] enrollment during the last two decades was largest for those without a high school degree.”
https://www.lexissecuritiesmosaic.com/gateway/FEDRES/SPEECHE...
Obvious to who? The unemployment rate is really low, and certainly the average person who has a high-paying job is someone who had a lower-paying job before and worked their way up (either via hard work on the job, at education, at networking, at entrepreneurship, or some combination of those).
This sounds like weird dystopian ideological stuff.
> Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
What are "starvation wages" in your view? The bureau of labor statistics says that the median wage for a 35 to 64-year-old man in the US is around $1300 per week, or $67,600 per year. My family of six spends about $250-$350/wk on groceries, even at a higher-end store. Those seem pretty far from "starvation" wages.
"The average monthly expenses among all households totaled $5,253, or $63,036 annually. That's up 3% from 2018."
That's not much of a margin for error or opportunity for savings. If you're dual-income, child care will eat up the entire second income. Most couples I know having children these days have one parent quit their job and stay home, even if they were in an otherwise lucrative field such as software and especially if they're in anything else such as teaching, retail, warehouse, etc.
But let's assume you weren't. $1300 per week adds up to $5,633 per month. If you're comparing that to average monthly expenses of $5,253, that means the average household has $400 left over per month. That's a savings rate of around 7%, which is actually higher than the measured U.S. average of about 3%.
What's the old saying? Figures don't lie but liars figure? Like I said, the liars have been working on these figures literally for decades now. I think we've been covering up the damage brought about by Nixon's unilateral dismantling of the Bretton Woods Agreement.
The second change I believe was made during the first Bush administration and that was to include in the U.S. GDP those goods manufactured abroad so long as they were manufactured by American corporations or American-owned corporations. Suddenly the manufacturing GM was doing in Mexico and Ford was doing in Canada counted as U.S. GDP. The reason given for this change was the manufacture of goods that contributed to the bottom line of American corporations listed on American markets improve the health of American markets and thus the American economy. Critics pointed out this hid the amount of American manufacturing being moved overseas.
We can debate back and forth whether these changes are reasonable but one thing is clear - when comparing historical GDP numbers you're necessarily comparing apples to apples.
The American dream isn’t dead, a decent chunk of people are just demoralized.
Otherwise? Poverty in the US gets intense real fast
The U.S. certainly has issues and disparities and everything else. But it has vast vast benefits that you can only understand if you've lived somewhere else for a while.
That said, Europe probably does a better job at creating a more liveable society, at least since WWII.
But even by objective standards. I actually feel it for working poor, especially immigrants - they don't get much help because US welfare state is completely out of whack. But non-working poor with free healthcare because hospitals have to treat them, food stamps and tons of private food charity, section 8 and other housing help, etc.? By world standards they live in luxury and they deserve none of it.
What a disgusting thing to say
What a disgusting thing to say
Also: but is it true?
Like, sure, it's a step up from "100% of serfs died a serf", but it's not good, either. It's certainly not "the American Dream". Maybe try "the Danish dream".
We all know the answer here, but it’s taboo for whatever reason
One person who puts in weeks or months of dedicated searching may find an apartment within an hour's commute of their job that they can afford or a good deal on a used car. Such opportunities do not exist for everyone even if everyone expended the same amount of work.
Anyone know of large polls attempting to measure these sentiments over the course of at least a few decades?
Young people should leave high cost of living cities. Housing is still affordable across most of the US.
The opportunities these cities once held have been destroyed by real estate hyperinflation.
That and I'm not just talking about rural areas. There are dozens of medium sized cities with fairly affordable housing, especially in the Midwest. Texas isn't bad either if you stay away from tech exodus hotspots and trendy/posh areas.
Try just doing a nationwide job search with salaries adjusted for housing cost.
It also limits your mobility dramatically. By working in a HCOL city, even if I'm struggling to save, I'm maxing out my 401(k) plus match and more every year. If I want, I can do that for a while and then move to somewhere cheaper. My family in the midwest, despite saving enough for an incredibly comfortable retirement there, couldn't purchase a home anywhere within 1.5 hours of Seattle if they wanted to move there now.
Medium sized would be places like Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Phoenix, etc. Austin used to be high on that list before it got inflated.
Small cities are a good option but wasn’t great for me especially when I was dating with the mindset of trying to find a wife. Options are limited and when I moved to NYC the dates I was able to go on exploded which helped me eventually find my wife.
You also have to be a specific kind of person (like me) that wants to do outdoorsy things for entertainment to live outside the major cities.
That being said there are several major small city hubs that fulfill a lot of the requirements that people are looking for from big cities especially in Texas like you mentioned, the triangle in North Carolina, parts of Colorado etc.
As for starting your own business, why not? There's plenty of demand for welding services right now.
This may or may not be true within some circles, but it is absolutely not true for American society as a whole. The majority (~2/3) of households own their home.
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/home-ownership-ra...
Warning: Bad graph callout. The graph there is not 0 based for its Y-axis, and the fluxuations look a lot bigger than they actually are, but I haven't found any with better graphs.
If this is the case, then to me this data simply illustrates that up to 2/3 of American households were able to obtain bank loans. Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but recent history has shown us that being able to obtain credit doesn't necessarily mean you can afford the underlying thing.
It definitely does, but most people don't lose their homes. Even in 2008.
Actually the swing from the absolute high of 2005 to the low of 2016 is only ~6% of the population owning their homes (never goes below 60%).
Longer term graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Now, might some people have to downsize? Absolutely. Some people are absolutely living beyond their means. That being said, mortgages are pretty safe. If you get one, there's a real good chance you will end up owning your home at some point. The problem with mortgages in 2007/2008 were that people were taking higher risks and trying to chop up the numbers in a semi-fraudulent way (and in several cases, blatantly fraudulent).
Where did this 0 based graph fallacy originate? There is nothing magical about 0, and in many graphs it doesn't make sense to show at all.
Do you criticize atmospheric CO2 plots because they don't start at 0 CO2 which hasn't been the case for billions of years?
Do you think you should plot human body temperature reading with 0 in which the human body is more than frozen?
Should BRK-A stock movements always be plotted from 0?
The limits of a chart should be scaled to the meaningful realistic values, and it's okay to have the bottom and top of the chart be some epsilon smaller/lager than the highest magnitude observed extremes. This has the nice visual property of conveying "near the top or bottom means it's more extreme".
Home ownership has never realistically been close to 0, showing zero to hide the fluctuations is not "more honest", it's less so. Most meaningful data cannot be visualized and understood correctly if you assume that all charts should have zero.
Is that actually up for debate? Do you believe it's actually getting worse, or do you have data to back that up?
Last I saw economic mobility was alive and well in the US.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/10/2...
No, hard work does result in success, but you just have to do the actual hard work part. I have never, ever met somebody who works really hard who isn’t rapidly seeing their life improve.
Some other lessons to take from first generation immigrants:
1) Focus on your family.
2) Traditional values are traditional because they work.
Don’t get caught into the contrarians trap of believing that conventional wisdom is wrong.
“Ackshually working hard doesn’t work” is demonstrably wrong. You may just have to do some work that isn’t very fun.
I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.
You're right that working yourself to the bone will improve your quality of life if you start from the very bottom.
You're wrong in that many people are in an lower to middle class life cycle and no amount of working hard will improve their situation.
I wish people just spent more time around these communities they want to talk about. If you’re honestly going to tell me that you’re spending time around working class first generation immigrants, (my experience is working specifically with Mexicans) and not seeing a very strong obvious positive correlation between hard work and success, then I just frankly don’t believe you.
that's a ridiculous statement and doesn't belong here. Hard work is required for success but not all hard work will lead you there. You have to know where to work hard and that comes from identifying and fighting for opportunities. Lots of first gen immigrants do this very well. If didn't work hard to leverage opportunities presented to them then they wouldn't be first-gen immigrants to begin with.
What do you think this signals to people? That he may be conservative.
> I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.
Yeah and you could work really hard for free and not scrape by at all. It's not that all hard work results in higher income, it's that working hard __to raise your income__ tends to raise your income.
This is the same crowd that told all food service workers to "get a real job" and then go out and complain that Starbucks is having trouble retaining workers.
1) Housing price-to-income ratio in the US is low by the developed world standard, and has not increased much faster than inflation over long term before the last 2-3 years, when it went noticeably up... not due to corporations.
2a) Massive corporations provided railroads, utilities, etc. well before the government started regulating them and taking over certain responsibilities. I can maybe grant you clean water.
2b) Education funding, even adjusted by inflation, has increased massively over time.
3) De-policing results in much more suffering, especially among minorities. While to an extent any police force is basically a gang currently in control, the alternative - as literally any collapsing society from Ethiopia to post-Soviet Russia to parts of current Mexico show - is a different gang, and as far as these things go US police at least generally do their job, and police brutality is a minor, statistically insignificant issue blown out of proportion by activists. Look up numbers.
4) " the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident" - except pretty much all of history, and most modern countries. While not a factual error, I like how accumulating wealth by a large number of people is conflated in the same sentence with a few criminals, to taint it. A typical trick of malicious propaganda.
5) Very strong and non-quantified statement comparing an improbable anecdote with another improbable anecdote. Don't know what data would disprove this, but basically a lie.
6) "Starvation" wages in the US are some of the highest in the world, and disposable income a median American enjoys makes many other developed countries look like "3rd world" countries compared to them in turn.
Of course, as this whole thing develops, US also starts as a ~sole industrial power in the world (with others either undeveloped or bombed into oblivion) with strong demographics, and ends as a much smaller percentage of the world economy (primarily because others develop), and with an aging population. Even in a perfect system you would expect decline in relative standards, so it's actually a marvel how well US is doing so far.
Companies create exactly what we people need.
Well it certainly helps. IQ has always been the biggest predictor for future income though.
In fact, in my case, I accumulated capital in spite of my hard work, not because of it.
How do you get a high paying job? You identify the requirements and work hard towards them. Did you do that?
You can make $30k/yr making $14.42/hr @ 40 hours a week. Spend the extra 30 skilling up. When you make so little hourly, it doesn't even pay much to work more. Spend that time improving your skills instead.
Seattle: $2334 (almost 30K/year) Boston: $3774 (more than 30K/year) Des Moines, IA: $982 (a significant chunk)
Plus healthcare. Plus utilities. Plus food. On and on. Skilling up won't do much if you're not networking, and that costs time and money too. The bootstraps discussion doesn't work in the real world.
Oh, and don't forget to somehow go out and date, find a partner, and have tons of kids (and pay for them somehow) because as the bootstraps-evangelists point out, we need the labor force and our entire economy is based on an assumption of population growth.
The gist of it is that you have to put in effort. If you put in a lot of effort towards increasing your income over a long period of time, you're almost always going to see signficant results.
COL in Seattle and dating is irrelevant to whether or not putting in more effort tends to increase your income. You're demoralized, we get it.
be it a private business or a public one, it typically is owned by a (large) group of shareholders, who put their hard earned money including retirement savings into those evil companies and just trying to get a better return than CDs in the bank after they spent (lots of) time to study about the market, or spent money to hire specialists. And yes there are lots of risks associated with that move, many of them lost money in the end.
These evil corps are not Satan sitting somewhere in the darkness counting for the money they just stole, they're just a proxy for tens of millions of ordinary people to invest like you and me.
yes some individuals are earning way more than the rest, they're typically taxed half of that away in the end, maybe they should be taxed more. The fact is still, about 50% never pay federal tax, and the top 1% earner paid 26% of all the taxes, how far can that go?
I'm a regular worker and I lost investment in those evil big guns all the time, I just never understand why people blame the 'evil corps' for all the troubles while those people might have bought quite a lot stocks investing in those evil entities themselves, it looks me to you're cursing yourself.
Between a communist utopia and an unregulated greedy-driven capitalism nation, here is what we got, not optimal but works better than average. Neither big corps are evil nor poor people are lazy will be able to fix the problems. There is still hope if you keep working hard to fulfill your dreams in US, the worst is doing nothing and blaming all the faults to the system, the big companies, the rich, the COVID...it will make things worse.
Where is he blaming mothers for this situation in the statement you quoted?
the IWF grew out of the ad hoc group "Women for Judge Thomas," created to defend Clarence Thomas against allegations of sexual harassment and other improprieties. [1]
The IWF has been described as "a virtual 'Who's Who' of Washington's Republican establishment."[1]
FactCheck.org labeled the IWF ad "a false appeal to women's fears", finding that the IWF ad relied on "old statistics, faulty logic and false insinuations[1]
Over the years IWF has received funding from Altria, Phillip Morris International, and vaping giant Juul. Without disclosing its its tobacco funding, IWF has defended the vaping industry using Juul's own talking points. [2]
"Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position. "[3]
IWV made $67,242 in independent expenditures aiding Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin with calls and independent voter outreach in November 2012, after Akin claimed on August 19, 2012 that rape victims couldn’t get pregnant because “if it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”[2]
"IWF has repeatedly defended right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh,[24][25] including supporting Limbaugh after his misogynist comments towards Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke on his show in 2012.
A report by The Nation and the American Independent Institute found that Limbaugh gave about $273,000 to IWF in 2007, making him the group's largest donor that year. The report noted that in later years, "donors to the IWF began cloaking its contributions by running them through the right-wing's biggest donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust," making it difficult to know how much Limbaugh may have contributed since then."[2]
Independent Women’s Forum President Sabrina Schaefer offered to help American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislators “sell” corporate-backed alternatives to paid sick leave, equal pay, quality childcare, and workplace flexibility in their home states in a meeting with ALEC in July.[2]
As of September 2020, Heather Higgins, chairman of the Independent Women’s Forum, is a gold circle member of the Council for National Policy. Council for National Policy. The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a secretive, Christian Right organization of funders and activists [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Women%27s_Forum
[2] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Independent_Women%27s_...
[3] Lisa Graves, Kim Haddow and Calvin Sloan, Independent Women's Forum and Independent Women's Voice Use “Independent” Brand to Push Right-Wing Agenda to Women Voters, ExposedbyCMD, August 17, 2016.
"Independent Women’s Forum President Sabrina Schaefer offered to help American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislators “sell” corporate-backed alternatives to paid sick leave, equal pay, quality childcare, and workplace flexibility in their home states in a meeting with ALEC in July.[2]"
^ Well this makes the whole narrative reasoning for going on about people not working pretty clear doesn't it?
Western society has basically just reverted to feudalism, IMO. Assets are simply too expensive, so circumstances of birth become the most important factor in your quality of life. Working hard doesn't matter because even with the most prestigious jobs in society, you have no way to catch up. The losers who weren't born into a favorable position, such as myself, just occupy themselves with digital bread and circuses. What else is there to do? I'm basically just a bitch of the Outer Party and I've accepted it.
And we're pretty far from "feudalism." What "assets" are you talking about that you need to get a decent job? The only one I can think of that is truly locked away behind high prices is education, but even there lots of people succeed by working hard and taking on debt for school.
It hurts the efficiency of discussion. You write a post that 100+ people will read many of them not immediately knowing what some of those are. You may have saved 5 seconds typing abbreviations, but wasted quite a few minutes of their time in aggregate.
P.S.
NEET (from urban dictionary):
> This is a term used in the field of education. The acronym stands for "Not in Education, Employment or Training" but young people have started to use it as a term for bums/layabouts with no future.
GINI is a way to measure value of some definition of inequality.
Did you not read the article? Do you not know what the GINI coefficient is? It strikes me that you're being disingenuous.
It says a lot about western society when many would likely see company towns as a hugely beneficial move these days. An example is bloomberg calling Amazon's potential factory towns as champions for the working class. What a backwards world.
Maybe we are more aware of it than previous generations were, maybe humans are just animals and we function better with idealistic blinders of nationalism.
I would say "I have a software job" is the healthiest quality you listed with the other things ranging from a little negative to neutral. By all means pursue your own interests, but we all know people choose things that aren't good for them all the time so simply professing a preference doesn't undermine concern.
Instead it was "the uppity and lazy lower class is now refusing work for poverty wages; we need to saddle men with children and debt or we won't have cheap labor off of which we can profit".
1) a multi-year gap in the CV is generally looked at less suspiciously when the reason is child-rearing or some other positive commitment; you'll have to have an explanation for that gap that doesn't reduce confidence in you as a candidate.
2) There is a selection bias, I presume, with the immigrant comparison.
Not saying these things invalidate the claim, but should be considered before accepting the claim at face value.
BTW, the claim in the article was fairly weak: since women do return to work after child-rearing, then it is possible that an applicant can get hired after a multi-year gap in the CV.
Why should I even give a shit as long as fourth generation land lords are living off of rent checks?
Need more labor? Start by at least disappropraiting the trust funders and petite landlorders of any revenue stream that comes on the back of the working class. We can talk about the rest later.
This should have been the subtitle of this article.
With that said, UBI is very much a fringe policy prescription, and Andrew Yang was pretty much kicked out of the Democratic party. He offers no prescriptions as far as I can tell other than an organic great awakening arriving, in other words a collective delusion convincing everyone to work and work hard.
Something has to give with housing I think. The ramifications of policy there would impact trillions of dollars in wealth and any debates would be sluggish and full of inertia.
Unfortunately, I think these two things are working against each other. Regardless of the hypothetical virtues of UBI, I am increasingly certain that our political powers that be see it as a primo-grade mechanism for creating dependence, and they like dependent people. They do as they are told. I expect UBI to rapidly leave "fringe" status in the relatively near future for precisely this reason.
I think anyone reading my little post here who fancies themselves a UBI advocate should take some time to do a red-team attack on a society using UBI and consider the possible outcomes with the real politicians we have, rather than hypothetical ones. However wonderful a well-administered UBI run by caring, selfless politicians may be, the more I think about it the more it's handing the keys to eagerly-worn iron collars to our political class.
The Belters see Earthers as the head of the snake. The Martians jeer at them for being listless, directionless planet destroyers on the dole.
The thing is that there may be a solution for UBI that also reduces the planet destroyer aspect, and that’s to claw back mineral rights and charge companies for their extraction. From land, from water, or just to burn the air. This treats the Physical wealth of the US as something owned by her citizens, who are entitled to recompense for the consequences of exploitation.
It’s not without its flaws, because getting paid more tends to make people want to say yes, but right now there isn’t even a question you own the rights you can do whatever you want and skip to the bank feeling safe about externalization of the risks. The government is your personal janitor.
Money runs out or runs low for government benefits, the benefits paid go down and people go back to work. The problem self resolves due to the money supply.
Now, instead the same thing happens but we print more money, causing inflation. Cost of goods goes up. People need more money to survive and the cost of labor goes up…which further drives up the cost of goods. But the way our government benefits work, if you go back to work you lose them in many cases.
The inflation cycle is dangerous and it only happens because once you vote in dependency programs you can never vote them out.
It’s made worse because of the benefit cliffs that make people want to stay below certain income lines to avoid losing the benefits that come with it.
It’s a situation born entirely from far too much government intervention.
This is insane. I had no idea it was that many.
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2022/whos-not-working...
There's a whole class of these guys who have basically retired on the state dime and use MGTOW tropes like blaming women, the work force, home ownership, etc to justify their laziness.
I used to be sympathetic but when you meet these guys, they're basically a "big rock candy mountain" hobos and have a myriad of personal problems they refuse to fix since the state freebies make it possible to live this way.
My understanding is that many people on disability could plausibly do _some_ work, but if a past injury or illness makes it difficult to be on their feet throughout the day, and the jobs available to them in their communities are in some way physical (even just standing at a register), they end up out of the workforce.
I wonder if it would be better for everyone if there was a middle tier for people whose disability makes them unable to get a job in the market with their current abilities, but doesn't preclude them from doing something useful (e.g. volunteering in their community) or from studying to be able to do other work, and require them to do one or the other to continue receiving benefits. Perhaps this, coupled with greater support for employers making accessibility affordances for workers could get more of these people reengaged with society.
Kind of like when you say "Chicago has the most murders!" without pointing out that it's solidly safer per-capita than a number of mid-size cities that don't have the same reputation.
https://www.13wmaz.com/article/news/local/georgia/report-put...
While Atlanta has experienced substantial economic and population growth in recent years, the city's high violent crime rate continues to hinder the area's quality of life. There were 1,084 violent crimes reported in 2016 per 100,000 Atlanta residents, nearly three times the national violent crime rate of 386 incidents per 100,000 Americans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/upshot/murder-crime-trend...
More than half of people in the survey think Chicago is #1, when it's not!
There's a big difference between people understanding that Atlanta or DC have generally high crime, versus crime being a nationally-recognized brand and identity like it is for Chicago.
Chicago having the most murders is true. That's what they are known for. Breaking down by per-capita doesn't change anything.
Hey did you know there are more murders in Europe per year than in Chicago? Europe is more dangerous than Chicago!!
^ That’s why per capita is the most important consideration.
(Another problem with comparing cities directly is the borders of city limits and metropolitan statistical areas but that’s a whole different topic)
If you have a good job and live very frugally in a cheap COL area with roommates, cooking your own food, and no one else to provide for, it's achievable to only work half the time and live off savings the other half.
Wonder if there's a generation of men who have stints of trying to make an app, or learn coding, or make it big as a YouTuber or soundcloud rapper, etc. who don't show up in employment statistics.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I also have a friend with a "fake" job at a family business. They have an income, but don't actually work for it.
Shared flats/houses with no official subletting. Basically you have a friend (of a friend) who can barely but legally afford a place for themselves that are happy to give you a room/couch/corner for pitching in some money.
The 9-5 with 2 weeks vacation work thing is a relatively new invention for humans. We have spent far more time evolving under more fluid time management situations like seasonal work or doing different work during the course of the year. The current pattern is specialized and somewhat mind numbingly repetitive.
> The 9-5 with 2 weeks vacation work thing is a relatively new invention for humans.
I don't think it could be that though, because conditions have generally gotten better, and there was less resistance to work at time where working conditions were worse. Say 1950's or so.
I mean the environment where we work from home and have very flexible hours, retirement, healthcare, generous vacation policies, etc. is pretty new an spectacular in relation to past work environments. These sorts of things used to be the privilege of some business owners who weren't critical to daily business.
Does a person that lives a sailing cruiser life style count as being employed. Many people in that category make money on Youtube, move rich peoples boats in the off season and do boat repair work and cleaning etc. They simply do not have a traditional job.
All the government budget goes to fund broken pension systems. All the private money stays within the oligarchs circle.
0 investments + huge overheads + aging population = death spiral
I would love to spend my life free from the endless cycle of meaningless work that is the every day reality of a software developer. When I have more than a couple days off, I can find happiness and meaning from walking around and looking at a tree.
I will have to work for 20 years before I can pay off a house. I don't get that many vacations. I usually spend the weekend recovering. Work sucks out the energy that I would otherwise be able to use for anything that brings me joy.
You have one life, if you don't wan't to live it as a forced laborer, why should you? Why would you?
You envy people who have absolutely nothing to live for? No job, charity, religion, community, children, no hopes, no dreams?
These are not people who said "NO!" to the 9-5 rat race and are doing their own thing; they literally do nothing. For me this is the saddest existence I could imagine, a fate worse than death.
Downside is that software engineering is not really a thing, so you really need to make an effort to get a job, but once you're in you will have no serious concerns like those you mention... additionally there is a lot of potential for meaningful work, or plenty of avenues to help the community with your talent.
It's not perfect,not at all... but it's a much simpler lifestyle, much more quiet... seems like the opposite of a life in any large city, alas you will unlikely every be on 100k
Because until recently in history, the choices for most humans was work or starve. And nowadays the choice is work or take advantage of the generosity of others. And note that said "generosity" is usually collected under threat of violence via taxation.
So if you feel morally ok taking advantage of those who actually do work, you do you. Just don't be surprised when those who do work resent and despise you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state has an introduction and also contains various links to individual state's current setup. Germany is currently in the process of increasing welfare (Bürgergeld, literally "citizen money") to something like 60% of average post-tax income.
"Der Regelsatz des neuen Bürgergelds für alleinstehende Erwachsene soll monatlich 502 Euro betragen (von bisher 449 Euro)."
Bürgergeld is increasing Arbeitslosengeld 2 aka Harz VI. They want to increase it from 449 to 502 euro per month.
https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslosengeld-2/auszahlung-...
"Arbeitslosengeld II bekommen Sie normalerweise für 12 Monate".
You usually get it for 12 months.
It sounds like you're having a cognitive dissonance where your idea of what's happening in Germany doesn't match reality. That might explain why you think my post is a joke.
That's the cash-part of it. They also pay for housing + utilities, health insurance and additional costs, it comes down to about 1000-1200 Euros per months for a single adult.
> You usually get it for 12 months.
Yes, and then you get it for another 12 months. And then another. And another. They require you to renew your claim once a year ("Folgeantrag", "Weiterbewilligungsantrag"), but there is no limit on total duration, the idea is (allegedly, maybe it's just to annoy people, who knows) that you have to prove your eligibility and you'll commit fraud if your claim is fraudulent.
Nowadays the choice is "do meaningless tasks to make someone else much wealthier, or cease to exist with the social institutions created explicitly to exploit the lower classes".
Why are you morally OK with forcing people into this system of exploitation?
This is just romanticizing the past to make it look like a children's book.
Are your tasks at work not fulfilling? Perhaps another hour long meeting will give you the same joy as turning your harvested crops into a simple cake.
Protip: you will struggle to find any book of the past that brings up their daily routine tasks for sustenance as a major source of agony in the same way we do about our modern office jobs. There is a reason for this and I hope you figure it out soon.
Obviously the twitch thing seems to be about how charming you are to all the fans, but if that's your thing and you're making that money, it's a pretty crazy thing
/not a woman, so no cam aspirations but the rest sounds about right
The people I'm talking about are legitimately scared of doing these things.
BTW it is “lose” not “loose”.
From the book: Today, in 2022, American men suffer Depression-era employment rates, even though they inhabit the wealthiest and most productive society ever known. After the pandemic, we have gone from men without work, to work without men
In general, I haven't seen much attempt when all adults in the household are out-of-work to raise a family, because how would they afford it?
I don't think we know what things look like if we restructure the economy to say "You have enough money to raise one or more children on even if you do not have a job."
We are in a 21st century western civilisation where food (= no hunger) and entertainment (= no boredom) are cheap and abundant. If you somehow manage to find an abode (the hard part), why would you "have" to be working for money? Why is the assumed "issue" here even labelled as an issue to start with?
1- At the personal level: What do really every human yearn for? We need to stop generalizing our value-system. Even if you are poor, without a college education or a job. you can still be growing inwardly (= better person) and contributing around you in many non-monetary ways (= better [virtual]community).
2- At the society level: what do the world really need/want among all this busy-ness and activity (= growing GDP)? aren't we, to a great extent, just carried away with the momentum and weight of the modern world, unable (and unwilling) to collectively change the course of this high-speed, problem-riddled train ?
The rise of the Non-Working-for-Money (and not work per se) Class is not an issue. It is just a symptom. We need (and will have) more of them.
Who?
The Aristocracy.
Them that are better than us common people. They who are comfortably idle.
I don't care much anything the social media or government (together with their law) did, because i know, they're not capable of doing the right and fair things to the people. They just know how to make the most profit as possible from the system as they have the right to do so.
So, that's the end of the world, some day.
What did part of the submission guidelines does this article go against?
Curious for future submissions myself
Wouldn't be surprised to see it labeled as "disinformation" or something like that. Quite frankly I'm shocked that there is so much resistance to the ideas in this video. Kinda proves the point I guess.
That said, the article is just a discussion with an author. Not seeing how this falls under misinformation here, but maybe I'm misguided ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It doesn't. But there are people who are reporting it because they dont like the source
> agree, and I just flag content like this that comes from untrustworthy sources.
Upon visiting the site, a popup window was sent my way that was trying to toss a transphobic article at me. If you search for "transgender" on their site it's full of anti-transgender and TERF articles with titles like "‘Women’s Bill of Rights’ Introduced to Counter Transgender Ideology."
Now onto the article itself...
Again, it's really obviously a conservative-slanted article, even including a random dig at Nancy Pelosi for...ya know, the standard reasons.
The article is making the argument that this new fangled society is disincentivizing work. Ya know, the same "nobody wants to work anymore" line that we've heard from capitalists for decades and decades. [1]
The article is basically slapping us in the face with the Protestant work ethic, very unscientifically connecting the lack of a need to work with drug use and "despair."
Apparently, this negative side effect of degenerate drug use only applies to men. Undoubtedly these authors have no problem with the close to 30% of mothers who are stay at home parents, but I guess the 7% of fathers who are stay at home parents are at home taking drugs and looking at screens when they should be out digging for coal and hauling logs.
I do wonder how this concept of despair applies to the non-working members of the ownership class! Let me guess, they worked their way up with their bootstraps and earned their wealth?
Doesn't this entire idea fall apart when you think for five seconds about retirees? Under this philosophy, how do they have a happy life if they aren't working? Is everyone 65+ just sad all the time and doing drugs to cope with their despair? Weird because every piece of demographic information I can find talks about how retirees are the happiest age group.
You want men to work the "dirty" jobs they used to work back when "America was Great"? Pay them! If these jobs are all left open, clearly the companies that have these job openings don't need to fill the roles all that badly, because otherwise they'd raise the pay rate.
You'd think an economist like the one engaged in the conversation would understand supply and demand!
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymo...