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I agree with everything you just said.

So what are we going to do about it? I suspect nothing until people start rioting

That is the sad reality: to fix the institutionalized inequalities we are going to have to tear everything down, because as time has shown attempting anything less drastic enables the superior manipulating communicators to take over the entire enterprise and make themselves kings.

I don't see how you can tear everything down and get to a better place. Tearing everything down will leave you with nothing. Endless examples of "people's republics" where the power gets concentrated and people are left with none. The total wealth has expanded with capitalism. Large numbers of people lifted out of poverty.

Yes, housing is a problem. But then fix the regulation that inhibits development of housing and makes it more expensive. And then go work in construction as houses don't build themselves. Wealth is to be created not to be redistributed until there is nothing left.

There is a spectrum of possible actions. Some things will need to be entirely replaced. Others maybe only 70, 40, 10%. And solidarity to effect the most painful changes.

The current trend is reaching the breaking point.

Here are the latest numbers on inequality. Bottom 50% of people paid just 2.3 percent of federal income taxes. Is this something to be replaced?

Does anyone know of an organisation doing good work in this area?

Bernie Sanders and his team.

> You used to be able to get into a university relatively easily, with decent but not top few percent grades. When you got there you wouldn't be saddled with huge debt. When you finished there was a decent chance to stay in the academy

Academics, or even "smart" work aside, you used to be able to pay rent, buy a car, and save for a house on minimum wage, and later still with a strong entry level salary in pretty much any blue collar work.

Now, minimum wage will leave you homeless in most places.

> On top of it all the ideology of the previous generation is that it's all your own fault.

We're a few generations past the boomers, but you're right, Millenials and Zoomers (and the oldest of gen Alpha) definitely have to deal with this

A city I used to live in was like this. The working class people used to live densely in apartments and houses.

The city did not like all those cars parked out front so they instituted a policy which targeted these people, levying fines through shady and aggressive tow companies.

You had to have a car to get to work though - and although they could partly solve this by painting bike lanes to make biking more viable, they did not do that either.

But the city wanted to have its cake and eat it too - so it incentivized local factories to expand their operations to bring more of these folks to the city to work, making the problem worse.

It is like that scene from "History of the world Pt. 1". Fuck the poor!

Sounds like Denver, today.

Not just that. My dad bought a car, paid for an apartment, and paid for college in cash while working near minimum wage… today?

The only thing your dad could own today would be an iPhone and a '98 Civic.

"Now try buying a house with that average job. You can't, not even with years of work... People who had a huge leg up after the war seem to believe it was all them and everyone should should just work harder."

I sometimes wonder if Boomers find it funny when people say things like "people who had a huge leg up after the war" given what that leg up consisted of.

The problem isn't the work. Houses are so different today (considerably larger and built with amenities like air conditioning, fireplaces, dishwashers, garbage disposals) that you are simply not buying the same thing. A house was apparently as likely to lack running water in 1950 as it is to lack air conditioning today. Same deal with cars - a household then would only have one and by modern standards it was an unsafe gas guzzling under-powered abomination.

The problem is not that your income is low compared to your parents (it is not; they were statistically probably impoverished compared to you), the problem is it's impossible and in some cases literally illegal to buy stuff as crappy as what they owned. We've priced the poor out not by cutting their salaries but by destroying old housing stocks, NIMBYing out affordable housing, imposing fuel economy standards, killing acid rain, and just generally making the entry level of everything more luxurious because the economy was awash with easy money.

The exception (as Yglesias notes) is university, which really is generally more expensive for the same or probably lower quality.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/nostalgia-economics-is-totally-...

Eh, no.

It is not the house that is expensive, it is the real estate.

(Prefab houses today are built far more efficiently than anything before, accounting for both materials and man hours. Same with cars.)

Kind of my point though. If you can find someplace they'll let you build a prefab house, and you cut the amenities and size to what was expected on a 1950s house, you should absolutely be able to buy a new house that's cheaper than any new house your parents could afford.

But as the Yglesias article points out, your parents (unless very rich) were probably not buying a new house. They had old housing stock lying around. You don't. And if you want to build a new modular home, it's probably illegal to put it where you want and probably impossible to finance it if you can:

https://www.finelinehomes.com/biggest-problems-modular-homes...

The income/house ratio was way way lower back then.

Even if your parents bought a house twice as expensive, it would be cheaper. They could have used the extra money on insulation or piping or whatever the difference was, they just didn't.

Besides this is like saying televisions were all crappy black and white units so your parents didn't have it so easy. But the hedonic adjustment is just that, you can't buy a crappy unit now so you pretend the difference matters.

What went for a house then has got to be the standard, surely.

If what went for a house back then is the standard then the problem for Gen Z is solved. You can afford a 1950s house, a car built to 1950s standards, and to send 2 of your 3 kids (probably not the girl) to college one one income, with plenty left over that your Boomer parents (or grandparents possibly) didn't have.

The point is the hedonic adjustment. It's not that the kids don't live like the Boomers because they can't, it's that they don't live like the Boomers because both the government and the market wouldn't let them if they wanted to, which they don't.

Eh, again no.

> You can afford a 1950s house

Where I am from in Europe, most houses from 1950s are in use. The apartment buildings are generally constructed to higher standards than modern ones (thicker concrete, less use of aerated concrete, no plasterboard interior walls, and so on). Apartment buildings from maybe 1890-1940 are considered premium due to better architecture, higher ceilings, robustness etc. New buildings to those standards are simply not possible.

Old buildings have been continually updated with amenities; water and sewage, central heating, internet. The cost of these are rounding errors compared to the market value.

Modern buildings are cost-optimized to a whole new level. If you honestly have difficulties understanding this; it's equivalent to comparing modern flatpack furnitures with semi-handbuilt ones from 1950s factories. The cost in man-hours and materials of modern furnitures is a fraction of the old ones.

I agree with where you end up ("Now try buying a house with that average job. You can't, not even with years of work.") but I can't follow the complete reasoning?

Why would getting tenure be harder nowadays? If it really is, probably because there are more people getting a PhD in the first place (because more people are going to university in the first place).

But perhaps this is also somewhat of a tangent to your main point.

> Why would getting tenure be harder nowadays?

It seems to be partly volume but also that universities are very reluctant to give tenure. If you're a younger academic you're probably working at multiple universities on short term contract. My wife is taking some university courses and one of her professors works at 4 different schools to make ends meet.

Yet universities are at an all time high for administrator cost and bloat. You have to ask where the money is going.

Tenure is just one of many forms of dependable income that is harder to get now that it was a few decades ago. I suppose it's because there is more competition: more people at university in the first place, more students per professor, and people who are profs started as students. Universities have also figured out that they've got you by the balls once you decide you want to try the tenure track, so you end up doing a lot of postdoc before you get that prize.

I sound like Karl Marx himself when I say it, but it's the capitalists extracting as much work as possible from the helpless workers. (I don't think I'm normally even on the left, but here we are.)

I'm as far from a marxist as you can get. But we right now have this unholy union of capitalism and weird cultural norms, together enforced by the state. Example: instead of people having generational households and wealth, we're forced to ship kids out at 18 and force them to start from 0$. It's the cultural norm for people to save just enough for retirement so that there is nothing left for kids. People buy a house that's huge, instead of a smaller one and then buy one for the kids when they leave house. And other countless such examples. Cumulatively it means that "something" was extracted away from humans and transformed into fungible monetary things that the "evil" capitalists can insert themselves into.

>Smart kid, likes math and science? You used to be able to get into a university relatively easily, with decent but not top few percent grades. When you got there you wouldn't be saddled with huge debt. When you finished there was a decent chance to stay in the academy. Try getting tenure now.

You're neglecting the fact that nowadays there is very little actual use for a university. If I want to study something, I have instant access to it.

Do you know a lot of working mathematicians without degrees?

A lack of people pursuing the option doesn't mean the option is any less viable. Nobody's stopping you from downloading a book on abstract algebra, or statistics, or lattices, or whatever it is that tickles your fancy.

> A lack of people pursuing the option doesn't mean the option is any less viable.

Ok, so as long as we're clear you're asserting this claim without any evidence, just your belief that reading a book somehow grants the same education as, say, a higher level formal education.

There is very little difference between paying to read a book, listen to a lecture and occasionally take a test, and just reading a book & listening to a lecture. You don't even need it to get to know academics.

I've been told on numerous occasions by people that I was right about university (I've been telling people not to bother for like 7 years now), and that it wasted their time and drained their bank account for nothing.

> There is very little difference between paying to read a book, listen to a lecture and occasionally take a test, and just reading a book & listening to a lecture.

Unless you're trying to convince someone else you did those things.

> I've been told on numerous occasions by people that I was right about university (I've been telling people not to bother for like 7 years now), and that it wasted their time and drained their bank account for nothing.

People can say lots of things, until there's proof there's no reason to believe it. Again, if you have examples please let me know.

>Unless you're trying to convince someone else you did those things.

This is very easy to do if you've actually done those things.

How do you prove you have extensive and deep knowledge on dozens or even hundreds of topics? And it's so easy why is no one doing it? It should be way easier to read a few books than to get a math PhD, right?

By having an actual portfolio of work that demonstrates your ability. You don't need a PhD if you've actually done something valuable. The reason people don't do it because their parents told them to go to uni, because their parents told them to go to uni because etc, it's that simple.

If Ramanujan did it you can too.

> By having an actual portfolio of work that demonstrates your ability.

No, no, you've skipped the vital steps - how do they get the work? Just reading a book or three doesn't give you the ability to get that work. Or are you of the belief that if you watch an online lecture and read a couple of books you can start making valuable contributions to mathematics? Again, examples would be good.

> If Ramanujan did it you can too.

I'm just going to say if you're most contemporary example you can come up with is from 150 years ago you may have a problem with your argument. The academic landscape has slighty changed in that time. But I'm feeling generous, I will accept that one person every 100 years can probably do it. That doesn't make it "very easy to do", in fact it's an argument for the opposite. It would seem it's easier to become president given that there have been a lot more example of those in the last 100 years.

>Or are you of the belief that if you watch an online lecture and read a couple of books you can start making valuable contributions to mathematics

Yes.

Well, that'll be easy to prove contemporary examples of people without formal education who contributed to and got jobs in mathematics, right?

That's not the only use of university. It also confers prestige and social capital which you can cash in when you enter the job market.

There are ways of obtaining social capital with a much better ROI

Like what?

Visiting rich neighbourhoods and joining whatever it is they do. You just have to look the larp, and a bespoke suit and train ride is a much cheaper investment than three years at uni.