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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

The myth of meritocracy has successfully propagandized to an incredible degree. No argument there.

Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).

And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.

The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.

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The current economic order is good.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Go look at the labor participation chart. It's bad enough people are giving up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

Minus the Covid blip, not lately!

That's a result of secular growth in female participation. If you remove that it's almost monotonically declining.

“If you remove the workers who are showing increasing participation, the labor force participation rate is declining.”

Sure.

Well that's one interpretation of those charts. Here's another:

Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.

You may look at that and say well that's good because it's real income but it isn't. There are substitution issues with CPI. The housing component is lagging, relies on "in-place" rent and doesn't really reflect quality or size or housing affordability (just rents).

Look at other measures, like homelessness increasing 18% in 2024, consumer confidence and how for the last 20 years people have flocked to any political candidate that promises meaningful change, from Obama to Bernie to Trump to Zohran.

HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience. We are profoundly privileged. But privilege convinces some that everything is meritocracy when each of us is profoundly fortunate to be where we are (eg being born in a Western country, having a relatively stable family life, having access to education, speaking English and so on).

It's why the ZIP code you were born in is possibly the biggest predictor of your success [1].

[1]: https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...

Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.

Real median household income is up over 36% since 1984 (the furthest back the linked chart goes: 1984 was in the middle of an economic expansion, so you’d expect a comparison with four years earlier to look even better).

And CPI has just as many potential substitution issues the other way: Hedonic adjustments are made, but it’s effectively impossible to quantify the value of decades worth of novel and improved goods that simply didn’t exist decades earlier.

HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience.

I linked decades of numbers about the median household, which you then numerically misrepresented. Bubble, pop thyself.

You're using inflation-adjusted metrics, but prices keep rising faster than inflation, and wages keep rising slower than inflation.

(Personally, my preferred measurement of inflation is "how much prices go up", but economists don't agree with me)

Prices cannot rise faster than inflation by the same metric. By definition the rise of prices—by whatever debatable metric—is inflation.

Wages have been rising faster than inflation, that’s link #2.

Well, I look at the inflation numbers, and then I look at the prices, and I notice that prices consistently rise faster than inflation. And I think that observed reality outweighs any vague theoretical justification. But I'm not an economist. I notice that economics seems to be the only "science" where if the theory and reality disagree, it means the reality is wrong.

"And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%."

Don't forget that it also had the highest level of tax dodging available through various mechanisms.

If you think the lengths people go to now are extreme to avoid taxes-- think about what they did were willing to do then.

As a non American I’d love to hear about this, any leads I can explore?

Well, for one, people who owned small/medium sized businesses would put effectively their entire family on payroll to cut the businesses’ earnings and lower their tax bill.

Offshore tax havens is the usual one. Panama papers put only a small dent in that. All sorts of stuff that's been cracked down on in recent years, like "take your salary through a one person company as dividends".

UK had a scheme where people would take out ""loans"" from their employer that would then be "forgiven". I believe this one blew up Rangers football club.

Fun UK example from the 70s: the tax on car parts was much lower than the luxury tax on cars, so people invented the "kit car" which you assembled yourself: the Caterham 7. Still niche popularity today.

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