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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

Except we have thousands of competing Soviets keeping the system healthy.

As an American, I would not call our system healthy from a practical sense; certainly not for society, if this past decade of mounting instability, distrust, and profiteering is any indication.

It's easy to get discouraged by The News, which will always focus on things going badly. That generates clicks, but it's not a neutral sample of larger trends.

The last decade has increased US GDP per person by more than 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation), and launched many innovations making live better and safer.

> The last decade has increased US GDP per person by more than 50% (yes, adjusted for inflation), and launched many innovations making live better and safer.

I think what you're referring to is the calculation of US GDP per capita, which is an average. However, this doesn't mean that the typical individual has experienced a 50% improvement in their income or well-being. The distribution of economic gains matters, and GDP per capita doesn't capture that. This is a significant difference.

In theory, you could be right. In practice, it's hard to make the math come out that way.

Basic facts: GDP is how much value a country produces. It is also close to how much it consumes, aside from some marginal adjustments, which I doubt have changed much over this decade.

If income distribution had changed drastically, it could still be true that average people didn't see any of that 50% increase, but I don't see any signs of change on such dramatic scale.

So yes, I do think the typical individual has experienced a 50% improvement in their income.

For "well being", the change is probably much smaller. Happiness doesn't come from money...

Well this seems pretty easy to check, has inflation adjusted median household income also gone up by 50% during this period of 50% GDP growth?

It turns out it hasn't, it's only gone up by 25%. Which is clearly better than zero, but definitely not the expected amount.

But I'd add one more item, housing costs have skyrocketed during that time. And while overall inflation has gone up notably, I believe housing costs have gone up more - and I wouldn't be surprised if most of those gains in income have been eaten up by having to pay higher housing costs. So all in all possibly no net gain.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

I agree, but it's still better, and there's an unusually clear-cut natural experiment to prove it: East and West Germany after WWII.

Or South Korea vs. North Korea

Interestingly, North Korea had a higher GDP per capita than South Korea until the 1970s.

Do you consider the current state of things healthy? By what metric?

It produces steady progress on most any important metric.

Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior.

Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is.

> It produces steady progress on most any important metric

Some metrics I care about are income equality, homelessness, school shootings, level of education. What are the metrics you care about that you see improving?

> Compared with the Soviet system, that makes it vastly superior.

I'm sure it's also superior to the feudal system and hunter-gatherer systems. The Soviet system has been gone for three decades, I don't see why we would care to compare the current system to the effects of a system operating in a vastly different economic and political reality, more than 30 years ago.

> Compared to an imagined perfect system, it has many flaws, but that's how the real world is.

Well sure, that's a truism. That doesn't preclude the existence of realistic more effective or healthy systems.

Sure. But I was commenting on this:

> The corporate world generally resembles Soviet culture a lot to me.

Alrighty. I'm still really keen to find out what metrics you personally care about.

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