Analysis of 200M newspaper pages: Sentiment has collapsed over the past 50 years
ft.com
ft.com
It's one thing for a person to buy a newspaper and get his chain yanked every morning, then go about their day, typically either ignoring the stories or discussing them with other live people in person.
It's another to have the rage-farming TV source continually pumping moving video and sound into every space they enter (home, lobbies, bus/train/airport stations, etc.), and programs deliberately designed and tuned to coerce viewers' attention, and they can keep interacting with the story every day with only the announcers.
The same thing at different scale is different.
Yes, do have a big screen to watch movies if you like them, but never turn on the TV reception. Stay away from the on-the-air rage machine, the same way you can stay away from the social media rage machine. Also saves you a lot of time not watching any commercials.
I did not have a TV for last like 25 years, and never missed it. All the news you think you care about are often not; you can get your news fix by looking at the news online a couple of times a day, for a few minutes. You can dig any topic deeper if you're really interested, again online.
I see only one sane use for (cable) TV, and this is sports and other unique live events. Fortunately I'm not into sports, and most live events I care about are also broadcast on YouTube.
I've not had any cable or OTA TV since before 2006. The only thing I miss is Formula 1 racing (which DVR'd and watched over the following week), and it's now finally online if I need it. Been more than fine with streaming content.
When I encounter it in waiting lobbies, it is really jarring just how much cable TV is relentlessly stupid.
The US used to have laws that would have made the current situation illegal. They didn't make much sense for internet news, but they did for radio, television and newspapers.
They were repealed, and each time a law was repealed there was a direct financial tie between the politicians that repealed the laws and the networks that stood to gain. Post consolidation, the networks started running propaganda for the party that enabled the merger.
I don't have a great solution for the current firehose of foreign propaganda, but restoring market ownership rules (no TV, radio or local newspaper owner can have more than, say 25% of the viewership/readership of a given city with over N million people) would definitely help.
They could apply this to the internet by restricting editorial control to the editors of each publication. This would immediately force Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple to change how they aggregate news content.
Concretely, Apple News could be made OK with minor changes: Apple would need to eliminate algorithmic ranking of articles, and replace it with algorithmic ranking of periodicals. Facebook could recommend you follow newspapers and magazines, but would not be allowed to intermingle the feeds. I'm sure the platforms would argue that this is unworkable, but we already have an existence proof. Podcasts work this way, and most people (here) would argue that they're a much healthier ecosystem than written internet news.
For one thing, there's no such thing as clickbait with podcasts. For another, you can cut off an editor with one click if you notice ragebait or sloppy journalism. None of the internet news aggregators allow you to do either of those things.
As for HN (assuming its readership is above some threshold), it would end up turning into a collection of blogs and syndicated tech columnists. I'd have mixed feelings about that, but I suspect having a collaboratively edited RSS feed with independently curated (by Dang and friends) comment sections on each article would be fantastic.
The mid-1990s saw US journalists hounding Richard Jewell, faking car crashes, and amplifying the Satanic Panic.
I like to use satire as a lens of truth for people with rose-colored glasses. Anyone who thinks airport security is a joke needs to watch Airplane and Airplane II and anyone who thinks journalism used to be good "back in the day" needs to watch Robocop and Network.
Yes. This is when Allen & Co really hit the gas pedal and started consolidating the media, journalism and budding IT industry.
My take is that modern communications mechanisms have changed journalism just like they changed music discovery and distribution: tons of content suddenly available at a low cost or free with ads.
Or, put differently: "49 state landslide, 520 electoral votes, and a year later half the country genuinely believed he had to break into an office building to win" [1].
[0] https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-th...
[1] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508
I'd explain his resignation differently: Back then, there was more of an expectation that politicians would obey the law, or at least get punished if caught.
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Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years.
2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss.
3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper)
4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe it's not better relative to our expectations.
Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.
It probably isn't indicative of life becoming worse. These articles are about economics, and the nice thing about macroeconomics is that its reasonably well measured. We can just look at the numbers to see in aggregate what the conditions are like.
To choose just the most dramatic example from the graph: sentiment was generally been more negative from 1975-2020 than it was during the great depression in the 1930s. Things aren't perfect, but no one would claim that economic conditions in the US have been worse than the great depression for the last 50 years.
I suspect that this trend holds outside of economics as well, but of course I have no data to back this up. Specifically, I suspect news-based sentiment of the world conditions have been declining while conditions in the world have not been declining.
Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? Only the second of those two is brought up in this brief article.
This causes issues, since any mild gradual improvements to the world get drowned out. The amount of actual yearly improvement needed to give the impression that things are improving ends up being dramatically more than the small incremental improvements which are normally seen.
The paper discusses this and the ft article quotes it:
> particularly if one adheres to the view that traditional media fulfills a watchdog/surveillance function. Although this argument could explain the average level of negativity in news reporting, it does not address its increasingly downward trend. … Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
Have they? By what measures?
Real wages have stagnated or fallen. Workforce participation is at a low. We can't compete on costs with much of the world. Population is mostly stagnate. It's hard to see how a system built on consumerism is not in trouble when our products must be subsidized to compete on exports (ag), the population is mostly stagnate, and a large portion of the population is either not working or is making just enough to survive. Looks pretty bleak to me. I suppose it looks better if you wrap assets in multiple layers of derivatives.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
The average person has always been working.
The cost of living has risen faster than wages, which have have stagnated except for those who are either in the C-suite or making their money primarily through capital.
My father made half of what I make at the same age. But his mortgage was 1/8th of the size of mine for the same basic home.
> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-re...
i'm not sure the two can actually be decoupled. why do people work? as a means to fulfill their needs and desires. how do you measure if a person's needs and desires are being fulfilled?
you can try to ground economic measurements in something like Maslow's hierarchy, but you can't escape that a person's sentiment is real. give a person shelter, but in such a way that they feel it could be taken away from them at any moment (e.g. "living paycheck-to-paycheck"), and you've only sort of fulfilled their base needs. give a person the exact same shelter but in such a way that they feel secure in it, and it's hard to argue that's not meaningfully better.
so whatever macro measurements you're using, if your goal is for them to reflect anything real to the individual, they ought to have some correlation to sentiment. "household savings" and "job openings" often do proxy the difference between being secure v.s. insecure in your housing. but, speaking to the article, worries you'll see captured and reinforced by the news such as "the other half of the country wants to take away my healthcare" or "the other half of the country wants to obsolete my coal/oil/manufacturing job" proxy these same feelings of in/security, but are likely not captured by any formal measurement... except "sentiment". so if these sentiments aren't proxied by your "things are getting better" measurement, then yes, it would mean that things aren't getting as better as your measurement claims.
If I expect $500 and get $600, I am satisfied, but if I am expecting $1000 and get $900, I am not, despite objectively being better off.
But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed.
Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?
In the US, calorie consumption/person peaked around the year 2000 and has been falling since.
Sure, we're eating more food, but it's increasingly garbage. Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions. It does seem travel has increased and new houses are bigger, but these seemed to be aligned to a particular class of person. I doubt the middle class is doing much of that. Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics.
If you want to argue that real wages have stagnated, you need to argue that real GDP has stagnated.
> Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions.
Yes, that is a problem. See 'The Case against Education' by Bryan Caplan.
> I doubt the middle class is doing much of that.
What's your definition of the middle class in this context? Have you checked any statistics?
> Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics.
The first few decades after the second world war were really rough. But fortunately, global equality has massively improved in the last few decades.
Numerically, that's mostly due to China (but also India and recently Africa) first falling behind and then starting to catch up.
There was probably never a time since at least the Industrial Revolution when global consumption was as equal as today, and the situation is set to keep improving.
What I can argue is that median real wage has stagnated. Distribution matters, unless you truly believe in strict trickle down economics. The vast majority of the increase has gone to high earners.
"Have you checked any statistics?"
Plenty of stats out there if you want to look. One easy one is that median home income requirements exceed that of median household income by more that 25%. Most new houses are significantly above the median in cost and size, pricing out the middle class even farther.
"There was probably never a time since at least the Industrial Revolution when global consumption was as equal as today, and the situation is set to keep improving."
I'm talking about the US domestically, as were most of your comments. There's still massive per capita consumption differences between the US and most other countries (fuel, food, etc).
Nice straw man!
> Most new houses are significantly above the median in cost and size [...]
New houses have almost always been better than existing houses, and have predominately bought by rich people. That's how come the housing stock of 2024 is better and more luxurious than the hovels people used to live in around eg 1800.
When someone build some new luxury homes, a rich person doesn't just magically pop into existence to move in. That rich person used to live somewhere else before, and that other house is now available for someone slightly less rich to move into. There's a whole chain of moves happening.
It's the overall quantity of new housing being build that's important. Even poor people benefit from more housing for rich people. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filtering_(housing)
And I do agree that the US is not building enough for various reasons.
> I'm talking about the US domestically, as were most of your comments. There's still massive per capita consumption differences between the US and most other countries (fuel, food, etc).
Yes, the US is still one of the richer countries. But the gap has started to narrow. And not in the bad way, ie the US falling behind, but in a good way, other people catching up.
Not strawmanning, some people actually belive this. In some limited scenarios or with a limited differences, it can work. Providing there are controls in place to correct any runaway effects.
" and have predominately bought by rich people."
I wouldn't say predominantly. There were times in the recent past when middle class people were the primary builders/buyers of new homes.
"It's the overall quantity of new housing being build that's important."
I understand filtering, but it does have limits. If you have too many rich people building houses that they don't need to sell, or want to keep as investments or vacations homes, them you can end up with problems. Likewise, if the percentage of rich people goes down significantly, many of the larger homes may not be economical for middle class people to live in depending on things like tax or utility costs.
"And I do agree that the US is not building enough for various reasons."
It's not just that they aren't building enough. Population distribution and vacancies are huge problems. Who or what type of entities owns properties, especially in higher percentages in a given area is a problem. But even when they do build, there is still a problem of the new single family housing being almost exclusively larger. There are very few affordable units in most markets for starter or empty nester homes.
Maybe, but they don't call it 'trickle down' economics. That's only ever used as a slur.
> I understand filtering, but it does have limits. If you have too many rich people building houses that they don't need to sell, or want to keep as investments or vacations homes, them you can end up with problems.
Land value tax would be your friend here. Though I don't see the problems: as long as they are building enough, that's great. If rich people want to have a few extra houses, that's fine. Just keep building more, as long as they want to pay for it.
Houses are (or should be) a manufactured product. We can make more of them.
> Likewise, if the percentage of rich people goes down significantly, many of the larger homes may not be economical for middle class people to live in depending on things like tax or utility costs.
Most taxes on houses should drop, if their value drops. Eg that's the case for property taxes.
Utilities don't drop automatically, yes. But you can eg not run the heated pool, or you can retrofit insulation etc.
In any case, capital costs are often the major source of housing costs. Ie that's either what you (or your landlord) pay for the mortgage, or otherwise the opportunity cost of the equity you have in your house.
But those costs can drop a lot just by virtue of the market value of the house dropping. If necessary, they can drop all the way to zero, if the price of the house drops to zero.
So there's an enormous buffer before utility costs by themselves become a limiting factor.
You can also subdivide homes.
> It's not just that they aren't building enough.
No, that is exactly the problem. Another related problem is that it is hard to get approval for anything but a single family home in large parts of the US. So density is illegal.
Vacancies aren't much of a problem.
I don't know what you mean by 'affordable units'? I mentioned already that quantity of units on the market is what matters. If you add a new unit at the top of the market, filtering will make sure that we get another affordable unit at the bottom automatically. Building explicitly shitty (sorry, affordable) housing for poor is a bad move. Requiring developers to do so by law is worse.
Have a look at https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/the-housing-shortage-is-... and the other work by Kevin Erdmann.
I do agree that a land value tax would be an excellent way to raise revenue (without impacting the economy), and then those pesky rich people, and especially rich foreigners, bidding up home prices would just be straight up tax revenue, instead of an ideological war.
Not really. You can't have them taking up land and services for houses rather sit empty. If they aren't used, they aren't helping to alleviate the constraints. Just like all the vacant rental units.
"Most taxes on houses should drop, if their value drops. Eg that's the case for property taxes."
Yes and no. The municipality and schools have costs they need to cover. They can only drop so much, especially when we're talking about the top 10-20% houses.
"Utilities don't drop automatically, yes. But you can eg not run the heated pool, or you can retrofit insulation etc."
The retrofits are major capital expenses that my mention later on. They get more expensive the bigger the house is. You still have larger costs on things like a new roof or flooring since there's simply more of it. Yes, they themselves generally wouldn't become a limiting cost. But neither would the property cost nothing.
There are multiple problems - corporate owned vacancy, building sizes, and even distribution are factors. The root problem is not lack of building new homes, as you claim. It is a distribution and utilization problem at its core. About 10% of the housing stock in the nation is vacant. If you more evenly distributed population and didn't hold units off the market, you'd fix the issue. It would be better for the nation to increase investment (jobs and infrastructure) in moderate or smaller sized cities in depressed areas with higher vacancies. Otherwise you end up with a vicious cycle consolidating people in a dozen or so major cities with people paying exorbitant amounts of money. One often overlooked aspect is that people have preferences towards single family homes. Simply allowing more density isn't going to fix that preference.
They wouldn't be paying exorbitant amounts of money to stay in NYC or SF. They haven't in the past, before America stopped building. The distribution of rents used to be fairly 'flat', without the crazy spikes in productive cities we see today. See eg https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/the-consumption-basket-w...
Yes, many people have a preference for single family homes. If the people who are ok with density were legally allowed to enjoy that density, then there would be more space (even relatively close to city centres), left over for the people who prefer single family homes on large plots.
That also applies for your concerns about rich people taking up land: legalise density and building taller.
> The retrofits are major capital expenses that my mention later on. They get more expensive the bigger the house is. You still have larger costs on things like a new roof or flooring since there's simply more of it. Yes, they themselves generally wouldn't become a limiting cost. But neither would the property cost nothing.
Maybe, but you'd expect homes meant for rich people to have nicer than average roofs and flooring already. So your concern is a bit weird.
The vacancy rate doesn't seem particularly outside of historic norms: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/rental-vacancy-ra... So I'm not quite sure what you are on about?
In any case, even with your much higher estimate of 10% it's not a big deal. Even if you magically went from 10% to 0% vacancies overnight, you'd still only increased the effective housing supply by about 11%. The shortfall in building is much larger than that.
Again, please have a look at https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/the-housing-shortage-is-... and perhaps https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/random-notes or https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-Universit... for a book length treatment.
There is no evidence for this in the USA except among the poorest, for whom support is being withdrawn by the federal and many state governments.
Pay packets are rising faster than costs have been (and costs are dropping). Now those are statistical measures, but the actual data show that consumers are spending as if the are doing better.
It is true that a secular increase in pricing is quite visible — I suffer from this myself even though I can afford it: a bag of groceries simply costs 30% more than it did a few years ago and that bugs me at the check out. It costs me a smaller percentage of my paycheck, but that feels more abstract.
This is like the perennial crime issue: “Crime is out of control — not where I live, but in all those other places.” Today’s NYT interviewed a bunch of caucus voters for whom they support and why. One guy literally said, “the economy is a disaster. I’m doing fine, but I understand it’s actually terrible.”
50 years ago was 1974. Wasn’t USA just coming out of the Vietnam fiasco at the time? Were economic things really that good? I think there was an oil crisis and people at least in Yugoslavia (where my parents were kids at the time) could only fuel up at gas stations on alternative days based on license plate.
Oh and if I’m not mistaken that was when Japanese cars started flooding the US market and US car manufacturing began its downward spiral into oblivion. The beginning of the end for places like Detroit.
My kids talk about how this is the worst the US has ever been, but I point out that there was a whole civil war and things were abysmal before that (overt genocide and slavery, child labor, political violence). And when the Baby Boomers were the “gen z” of the time, it was pretty selfish and shitty.
Over the long term, though, the percentage of wealth going to the top 1% has dramatically increased, which is a root issue that is not improving. (The vast majority of us would be far-better off if there were higher taxes on the richest Americans.)
Doesn't that depend on what you look at? E.g. if you look at gdp then things are getting better but if you look at growth rate then things are getting worse?
(If you look at growth as the ratio between years, instead of as a difference, then yes, growth has slowed down.)
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
I strongly disagree with the idea that the government is a magic God-like wizard, who can bend objective reality and achieve any economic or social outcome by twisting the right knobs here or there. Other countries rose economically to compete with the West and that's not something that the government can magically outlaw, any more than it can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow
Agreed. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838608 on a similar topic recently.
You might like my sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68...
> (Also, how is quality of life lower for Americans than Canada/France/Germany when the median worker is so much richer here? And I said median- not mean)
There are multiple indicators for that. A very neutral and uncontroversial one is that life expectancy is ~5 years higher in those other countries compared to the US, a phenomenon that has only gotten worse since Reagan [2]. But we could also talk about work hours, parental leave, vacation and many other things that are much more favorable for the median worker in all of these other countries.
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/causes-of-wage-stagnation/ [2] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-lif...
How does parental leave or vacation time connect to financial regulations? This is what I mean by, populism is a Gish Gallop of disconnected emotional non-sequiturs. There's no central coherent point, just grievances and random observations
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Reaganomics was not restricted to financial deregulation, it was also one of the only periods in American history where the minimum wage was not increased. Reagan opposed unions and defunded worker protection agencies like OSHA. I don't think you have to dig really deep if you are truly interested in a legitimate understanding of what I'm trying to say here. Big if, I know.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-loc...
The graph uses different counts of inflation adjustment for the two lines. It introduces more unnecessary complications. That's how you lie with statistics.
Instead: just look at the labour share of GDP; that is the sum of all nominal wages divided by nominal GDP. Available for the US at eg https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
Because we are looking at a ratio of nominal values, we don't need to adjust for inflation: the influence of the price level naturally cancels.
For the US the labour share of GDP has stayed between 60 - 65% in the last 70 years.
For that ratio to stay so constant, productivity growth and wage increases must have approximately kept pace with each other.
I don't mind using median instead of averages, if it's clearly labelled. The version of the graph you linked first was almost not labelled at all. However, even in their apology / defense they are still not fixing the mixed-up deflators. They merely claim that we should ignore this problem.
However following links in the meek defense leads to https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ which has a bit more information than what you first linked. (I might go through it later. But on a first skimming, it's seems to be still pretty light on actual details about the numbers and where they came from.)
> If the fruits of economic growth are not going to workers, where are they going?
> [...] And it went into higher profits (i.e., toward returns to shareholders and other wealth owners).
That's wrong. The capital share of GDP hasn't really budged. (And in this case, distribution doesn't matter for our discussion. Since we only care that it's not going to workers, not which shareholders are getting what.)
However, the share of GDP going to land rent is disturbing. But EPI doesn't want to talk about NIMBYs, I guess.
What are the two different adjustments being uses? You're making some bold hand-wavey claims without showing your work.
"Because we are looking at a ratio of nominal values, we don't need to adjust for inflation: the influence of the price level naturally cancels."
Again you're missing distribution! There's a reason they use a standard basket of goods. You're also completely ignoring imports and exports.
"Because we are looking at a ratio of nominal values, we don't need to adjust for inflation: the influence of the price level naturally cancels."
"For that ratio to stay so constant, productivity growth and wage increases must have approximately kept pace with each other."
Only on the aggregate. You can very easily find that executive and other high earner pay has consistently increased at a higher rate than the median workers. So if that ratio remained the same and the increases mostly went to the upper class, then there is less for the middle and lower class.
See https://www.epi.org/blog/nothing-misleading-about-this-typic... for an admission by EPI themselves that they are mixing up deflators.
Real wages have stagnated or declined. Barriers to entry for good careers have increases. Entire industries have been outsourced, mainly effecting lower skilled workers. Workforce participation is extremely low. Multiple financial crises. A system built on consumerism that is dependent on almost free money not to crumble.
If the system doesn't look like a house of cards, then I don't know what does...
Wages as a proportion of GDP, ie the so called 'labour share' has been relatively steady. If you believe that real GDP has increased, then real wages have increased.
> Workforce participation is extremely low.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... says it's about 62.5%.
Distribution is important. The high earners are the ones eating up the GDP increase. The middle class and lower class are mostly flat or negative.
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
"says it's about 62.5%."
Which is relatively low over the past 20 years, and somewhat low compared to other countries with strong economies.
Maybe, but it's not 'extremely low'. See https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/labor_force_partic... for a global comparison.
Yes, the distribution is important. Alas, the article that you linked is mostly rubbish. Eg their figure 2 is that infamous misleading graph that I commented on in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586
They also seem to imply that minimum wage legislation is good for poor people. The evidence is mixed at best. (The original supporters for the introduction of minimum wage laws were more honest, and admitted that it was about cutting black people and cripples etc out of the workforce.)
Figure 9 seems to forget that correlation ain't causation.
If it's so infamous, do you care to point to something explaining what is wrong with it?
"They also seem to imply that minimum wage legislation is good for poor people."
I wasn't discussing this point, but agree that it's mixed.
"Figure 9 seems to forget that correlation ain't causation."
Figure 9 is just data. Sure, the explaination that goes with figure 9 talks of it as causative. I haven't read the journal article that data comes from, so I can't objectively say if there is a causative mechanism in that study that supports the text or not (can you?). That figure isn't really part of what I was discusing, although it does demonstrate the increase in top earners (not as well as charts comparing it to the changes for other labor groups).
See my own comment that I linked there. Duh. See also their own implicit admission that the graph has problems: https://www.epi.org/blog/nothing-misleading-about-this-typic...
Your 62.5% labor force participation rate only aligns with the past if you completely discount women's unpaid and unaccounted work in the home and elsewhere. The male labor force participation rate has declined from around 90% to around 68%.
Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die.
> Total real wages have gone up, while median real wages have stagnated.
An investigation of median wages can be interesting. The comment only talked about wages in general.
> Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die.
The US doesn't build enough housing, yes. Though renting by itself isn't a problem, but that housing (whether rented or owned) has become less affordable.
That's mostly because of various regulations (especially zoning) that limit how much developers can build. See eg https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-Universit...
> An investigation of median wages can be interesting. The comment only talked about wages in general
Looking at it I find my claim is false.
Median real wages have gone up (excluding the last 5 years or so). I could make an argument from inflation being wrongly calculated (due to stuff missing from the basket, or housing excluded, or shrinkflation, pick your poison) but I'm too stupid for that.
Comparing CPI (which includes housing) to median nominal wages over the past 5 years, it shows cost growth has exceeded wage growth. This though doesn't hold further into the past.
That's a massive leap to tie marriage rates and fertility rates to some unsupported claim that men do nothing. I suppose all the single men out there are starving and living in filth. This is a very damaging stereotype that has nothing to really do with declining marriage and fertility rates. Many other factors are at play.
It isn't to say taking care of yourself has no value to you, but it is to say that no exchange of value happens.
I'm highly skeptical of how this might be calculated. For example, if you are cooking or doing laundry, it typically includes your own clothes or eating the food. If a kid is involved, they're at least half your responsibility. And whst is the quality of that work? In many cases it's not professional level. Ostensibly, the other spouse has duties to more or less balance it out too, so which tasks are valued higher?
It seems odd to think that all these single people who are doing chores just completely stop when they get married. Sure one party might be doing 2x the cooking, but the other might be doing 2x the maintenance or financial planning. I mean, getting married is supposed to be about taking care of each other and the balance of work is never going to be 1-to-1 as it fluctuates and has different needs at different times. As long as each are contributing reasonably well, they shouldn't be counting pennies against each other. But I guess that's exactly what economists and lawyers are interested in.
I've basically always cooked for myself. You're not really multiplying it by 4. You might be multiplying the recipe by 4, but that's generally trivial. And, yes I still do it.
"Doing laundry takes also 4x more time and children make a lot of mess."
Sure, but it's not that much time to start with when the machines do the majority of the work. Then it's just folding and putting away. This is typically a chore that older children should be doing for themselves, and the younger ones have smaller clothes sizes, so it's not really 4x, but maybe 3x since they take up less of a load. There are also differences in how people choose to deal with the mess. Most kids do not need multiple changes every day except for the vanity of the parent wanting them to look really clean. They will get some food or dirt stains, and that should be expected for little kids. This is also the part where we need to acknowledge that the responsibility for the kids is also half of the doers responsibility anyways. So their added responsibility isn't that high.
"But we are discussing about historical differences here where families were even larger and there were no household appliances."
I completely understand that from a historical perspective, just as it was historically the man's sole responsibility to provide financially. I'm saying it shouldn't be a major factor today as long as one person isn't a complete freeloader. I'm also pointing out the differences of opinion, such as quadrupling a recipe vs cooking actually being 4x as long.
That's only a very small section of history for a specific section of the population.
Poor people always had the women doing lots of work. They had to.
Women were only 'property' in some societies sometimes.
And I'm not sure there were (m)any instances where women were both considered property, but were also working a paid job where the money went to the husband? I'm afraid you might be mixing up your 'bad old times'?
(I agree that the present is by and large much more pleasant, but not everything bad happened all at once in the same place.)
You don't seem to realize that I am one, and do way more than 50%. If anything, it would be to my benefit to talk it up, but I still think that's not the way it should work.
Btw, many economist argue that CPI overstates inflation. Mostly because CPI has a relatively fixed basked, but people adjust what they are buying if relative prices shift. (Eg if bread becomes relatively more expensive than pasta, people buy less bread and more pasta. The CPI basket does not reflect that.)
A modern alternative is to use the GDP deflator. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDP_deflator Basically, it means to use everything that got produced / consumed as the basket for your inflation measurement.
That makes sense. But say bread at $1(2023) is objectively worse than pasta at $1(2023); is there any way to account for that? It seems like a generic form of shrinkflation: without holding the basket constant, how do we know we are getting the same value?
To be fair, it could work the other way and the pasta at $1(2023) is better than the bread at $1(2023).
See https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/ and https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans... for how the CPI attempts to control for quality. How well they succeed is another question.
Quality adjustments in inflation data are always something that requires judgement. (Even though they try to minimise that.)
A recent example that was not reflected in the CPI:
During the pandemic choice and quality dwindled. Instead of buying your favourite toilet paper, you just got whatever wasn't sold out. Eating out got a lot worse, when it was possible at all. But if a burger still sold for 2 dollars before or during the pandemic, the CPI did not budge. So official inflation was understated.
Conversely, as we came out of the pandemic quality recovered without that being fully reflected in the CPI. So official inflation was overstated.
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Because inflation requires judgement, I try to avoid having to rely on it in any analysis.
The discussion we had could mostly be re-formulated in terms of
> How has nominal median pay developed over time relative to nominal per capita GDP?
That framing leaves out inflation completely.
Of course, it ignores absolute advances. And deliberately so!
But those are better left to a separate discussion.
can something that happens over a 50 years span be correctly described as a "collapse"?
go figure