> Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch.
Is that really true? The two largest corporations in the world by market cap are Apple and Microsoft, both founded in the 1970s.
Is that really true? The two largest corporations in the world by market cap are Apple and Microsoft, both founded in the 1970s.
But anyway, they didn't specify all industry leaders, and it's pretty solid that many leaders were knocked off their perches.
If you're talking about the current AT&T, then I'd argue it's not a great example. The relationship between old AT&T and the company currently calling itself AT&T is tenuous. It would be more accurate to say the brand name survived, because it has good name recognition value.
The comment talks about "quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally", "knocked off their perch", and "within a few years", which doesn't seem like an accurate description of what happened with Yahoo.
Apple had the obvious comeback, but even Microsoft had to reinvent itself away from windows.
I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.
Huh?? What world are you living in where the standard of living hasn't increased in the last 50 years?
- Are we just discussing the first-world middle class? Obviously if we extend our scope to all of humanity there have been remarkable jumps in standards of living.
- Does the idea of 'standard of living' include only access to goods, services, and information or also intangibles like access to safety and (more pertinently to this particular discussion) security? As a 34 year old American, I feel that my material standard of living is much better than it was in 1992, but my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive.
Doesn’t that imply a decrease in standard of living? Not easy to quantify one. I personally see not living in fear as a staple of standard of living.
Also American society is pretty disdainful of security, historically.
The argument against this would be things like homes being larger now and housing standards having risen (even slum units have things like fridges and electricity). I don't think those are compelling arguments because often going without those things is not allowed/not an option, but that's what the other side's argument would be.
While it's hard to say, that might be the news you read, rather than reality.
There's also that I am a disabled American and we're generally not in great spots. As an American, your ability to have things like housing is directly tied to your ability to be economically productive, and as someone with MS, I have to roll the dice each morning on whether or not I will be able to work. I don't know how long my career can last which creates a lot of stress. But then that's also true for all Americans: How many of us could survive our main/only earner getting cancer? That's the sort of stability I mean: The ability to be wiped out by things outside of your control is higher (which is partially down to society deciding everything is an individual problem and if a tornado flattens your house that sounds like a you problem) and we're moving towards a lower-trust society and the community bonds that were existent but frayed in the 90s (see Bowling Alone) are pretty torched now. Who and what can you rely on?
Which is more relevant if you consider that a lot of Americans have medical conditions and that things like the move from a single-income to dual-income household as the standard means that losing one adult can cripple a household financially. I'm also basing this on things like my peers' ability to do things like pay for child care since mid-30s are prime 'give all your money to daycare' years.
I also was in school during 2008, so I entered college under the 'get a degree and you'll be fine' years and exited it into the bloodbath of the Great Recession. There are many realities and my personal one is less secure than it was and this is true for many Americans.
What's your opinion on the following assertion: countries (such as mine) with socialised medicine make sure everyone has a certain standard of care, but that standard only goes so far. The US lets people pay for any possible treatment, and so people who would be put on palliative care in, say, the UK, would be bankrupted in the US by trying to beat cancer with expensive drugs.
It's phrased as an assertion, but it's really just something I've been thinking about. What do you think?
It isn't just socialized healthcare, though. It's also things like the US not mandating time off - for instance, I haven't had my Ocreveus infusion because I literally can't afford to take the time off to go to the infusion center. And the US is also very binary: Either you work full time or you get nothing benefits wise. For those of us who could comfortably work ~25-30 hours a week this results in either us overworking ourselves to the detriment of our health or not working at all. I'd love to work and just have a little bit of help for when I have a bad week or month, but that doesn't happen here.
The other problem with the American healthcare system is that it siphons off wealth from those in their end of life. Good luck planning a good life for your children: The government will take everything you own for your nursing home. That also has major impacts in term of stability.
But of course in socialized healthcare you do need to decide what is and isn't worth treating in some way and when cuts are needed you end up in dark places like Canada is with MAiD.
It's hard to say. I'm inclined to believe there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach.
The ties between government, big pharma, insurance companies and hospital systems must be so entrenched that it's very difficult to see a way out.
Add that to America disintegrating into a low-trust society where one almost has to assume that any stranger one meets is out to scam you/get your money somehow and it results in a country where it's terrible to be vulnerable. Which is one of the ways we grow as people, thus leading to emotional stunting amongst the populace, which in turn makes us less resilient and willing to act (particularly since we can't cooperate anymore) and therefore in my opinion sow the seeds of our own destruction.
Far more per head — part of which is higher cost of labor and that healthcare is extraordinarily labor intensive. But, its also fairly high as a GDP share, for which excuses like that don’t work. The US just genuinely has a healthcare system that is ludicrously inefficient unless your goal is maximizing the wealth-based quality differential, in which case Mission Accomplished.
Or more precisely: efficiency is distorted by compassion. Which is then recovered by efficiency. Which is again modified by compassion. If your system is a bewildering mish-mash of cost increasing political interventions and cost reducing market innovations then it's never going to work. But lawmakers need something to do to stand out, and so do business people.
The only mention of wealth was describing the effect. Yes, politics is a key part of how that effect is acheived. (Of course, advocacy by those with wealth is a key part of how the politics happens, and... well, the politics/wealth interactions here are basically a near-infinite chain. They aren’t competing explanations.)
And since 1979 people have far more basic 'necessities' like internet and electronic devices. And other necessities like housing, education, and healthcare have all increased in cost far beyond nominal inflation figures. So a person in this situation is most certainly going to have a substantially lower quality of life in modern times. You have to keep in mind that in the past most families were single bread-winner, so wages and life were organized around the vision of one working individual being able to support at least 3 others, in a nuclear household. It was a very different economic vision than what has emerged in more modern times.
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The one thing I'd say these numbers miss out on is opportunity. I think in modern times there is dramatically more opportunity, but if you're just going to live a normal, as expected, life without really aggressively going after the opportunities we all have available - then you'd almost certainly be better off living on the median in the 70s than today. And since most people should be expected to live these sort of perfectly average lives, as that's precisely what the average is, that's a real problem.
If you consider housing, food, medical insurance, car prices, education - all of these things are ridiculously expensive compared to what they used to be.
"But we have the Nintendo Switch!" does not alleviate what we're going through right now.
Wages have remained flat, cost of consumer electronics have gone down, cost of education, healthcare, and housing has gone way up.
That might even be related (i.e., wages for workers are being depressed in developing world as workers see competition from other workers in developing nations). And capital owners benefiting from increased availability of labor.
TBC, agree that gini coefficient re: wealth in developing world is increasing.
Look at India, they don't come close to China if you compare how the standard of life improved for the masses.
Easy trade right.
The technology you take for granted is huge. Warren Buffet said he would rather give up flying on a private jet, than give up his smartphone.
Your phone does not mean that you don't have to work three jobs to have a roof over your head and can't have a family. Having a phone does not make you rich.
This does not mean it’s still difficult to get housing. It’s just a point that one aspect of our lives is unfathomably better than before and now we take it for granted.