The average household also includes empty nesters and people who have moved out yet haven't started a family yet. The average number of children per family in the 60s was 2.3, which means quite a few families had 3 or 4 children.
It all comes down to the cost of housing, at least in the UK where housing has been ridiculous for over 20 years. That housing is driven up to soak all available income by artificially constrained supply.
All available income has increased on a household basis because of egalitarian reasons -- more women work now, which means that more women have to work now. The excess income is lost to housing costs.
It seems to me that the whole equality propaganda mostly comes from less desirable women who would have a much harder time finding a highly valuable man that would be able to bring a lot to the home (either in the way of money or skills, craftmanship, etc). They wrongly determined it would be better for them if they could be like a man. But reality doesn't care much about feelings and what happens is that those women still get the less desirable man and if they go at it solo, they find out the hard way that there are many things a man provide that are very costly if you have to pay for it in the market. One thing too often overlooked is the importance of a man in children upbringing and there are some nasty statistics about single women raising kids that pretty much depict that very painfully.
In the end it doesn't matter, everybody's got much poorer for it, the only winners are the bourgeois women who started it all, who already had a lot of power in the first place. But I guess it was the intended result even if it came at the expense of all the lower social class...
Truer words have never been spoken. Fiscal conservatism died with Reagan.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/e...
Their goal is simply to live their life as richly as they can at the expense of those they consider less than themselves. They are the wealthy and they act accordingly.
Why anyone sees Republicans as anything else boggles my mind.
Anyone who isn't a billionaire and is voting Republican may as well be a turkey voting for Thanksgiving.
Out here in the wider world, American elections are more terrifying every time they come around.
Democrats controlled the House the whole time, so how’d he manage that?
> while running on a hideously bigoted platform
What a remarkable assertion.
pretty wild to think that surplus was in part driven by the internet boom. now we have some kind of stock market boom while the federal deficit is 10% of total GDP and national debt is growing by a trillion dollars (a million times a million) every 100 days or so.
The first is a kind of economic engineering with trade-offs and conditions and acknowledged edge-cases, the second is a brand supported by some rather culty dogma.
Then you pulled in "libertarian" out of nowhere. Which is an obvious set up for another strawman, so lets lean into it. Whats a "libertarian"?
You can be wrong without being a strawman. When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.
No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.
> When every example you have of X is Y, it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y" — when you're wrong like that, it's a black swan.
Either way, I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth, I hope you don't go around proclaiming you're the arbiter of all that's right in the world.
The very thing you quoted demonstrates that mine allows for people to make errors without condemning them as deliberately weak setups.
> I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth
If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.
Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:
> No it doesn't, user exclaims their ignorance and your follow up emboldens their ignorance does not make a QED.
No.
> If you do not like how your words are perceived by others, you should consider choosing them more carefully.
Lets see, you deliberately trolling and being bad faith is somehow my issue. Interesting.
> Despite your lack of appreciation, this comment is one which I am still only able to read in a way which suggests that you are stuck with this false dichotomy:
No. You lack the fundamentals.
Sometimes yes, but not always.
> but if every example you have of X is Y
Is that actually true though? Are you not assuming perfect rationality on behalf of the poster, and that they have an adequate sample size, which tends to be subject to who the individual associates with.
> it's not a "strawman" to say "all X are Y"
That depends on the truth of the matter.
>when you're wrong, it's a black swan.
Only if the initial guess was correct.
You may be describing appearances. That which cannot be seen does in fact exist, it just doesn't seem like it because it exists in a different realm, and how our culture is trained to think about such problems spaces.
Which is why Italy and France have such strong economies, right? What’s really standing in the way of economic growth is that the government isn’t paying for people to get free degrees in left wing studies.
remember not to conflate a strong economy with an economy that is worth living in. you can possess minimum paid jobs in order to make profits for shareholders and never see a dime of that wealth yourself, but alas, you live in a strong economy.
It’s not true Scandinavian countries have more spending power. The OECD keeps very detailed economic data. The US has the highest PPP disposable income in the OECD: https://www.statista.com/statistics/725764/oecd-household-di.... It’s about 67% higher than Sweden and Denmark.
Now you might say, but Swedes and Danes live longer and are happier. That’s true! But as far as I can tell, Americans would rather live shorter lives and have more TVs and trinkets. My parents came back from traveling in Australia. My mom was ranting for weeks about how small and close together the houses are and nobody can get really rich. We are immigrants from a third world country. All of my family members that have come here think that “making it” means living in a McMansion and driving an SUV. I don’t know if it’s something in the water, or the people who come here are just that way, or maybe a bit of both. But it’s worth contemplating that Americans are making rational choices based on their particular utility functions.
Do they? PPP they all have lower disposable income than the US and they are not even at the top in Europe (including social transfers). Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands are above Norway and Sweden is even lower than France.