Confessions of the Working Poor
macleans.ca
macleans.ca
This is the part that always gets me mad (and jealous!). How the previous generation was able to just casually cruise along and live comfortably, where the same employment situation (1/2 of the adults in the household working, as a schoolteacher no less) results in crippling poverty today. I wonder if it's possible to make it even worse for Gen-Z and the next generations. Sadly, I'm sure we'll find out.
This is a very skewed perception of reality, one that we'd all do better to moderate. There was indeed a relatively small population that were the beneficiaries of a confluence of factors (technology, geopolitics, demographics, etc), that let them live as you describe. But it was an anomalous miracle that was confined to a select few Westerners, for a very short time span. And MOST of the previous generation were living in pre-industrial subsistence farming communities spread around the world, like countless generations that went before.
That concentrated wealth has now been spread to other people around the world, and means that we don't get to live like kings, while the rest of the world lives in squalor. There will always be wealth inequality, and it's easy to see those who are living like near-gods around us, but in general, the world is much more fair today, and the wealth is spread to a much higher percentage of the world's population, than ever before.
For one thing you are arguing that living standards have fallen in rich countries because the wealth is more spread out. The numbers say that both rich countries and the world as a whole have better off.
It is more about the cost of things that are in limited supply (land, for example) and the distribution of wealth within those countries.
Prices are higher because of high demand - i.e. inflation.
> There are certain fixed or constrained resources (land, etc) that more people are competing for today than ever before
That has been true for all of human history. Population has been growing.
What has also been true is that technological advances have easily kept ahead of this for all of human history.
> The world population has doubled (or more) since the glory days of the USA, if nothing else.
The world population is also a lot more productive.
You say that, but the US per capita GDP, adjusted for inflation and PPP and anything else you care to throw at it, has only increased since then, and not by a small amount.
When I look at median income over time versus per capita GDP over time, adjusting both for inflation, they're both increasing, but they're also diverging because the bulk of the gains are concentrated at the top.
That is as big a reason people are having a hard time making ends meat nowadays as anything. Unfortunately, fixing that trend will require reversing most of the tax code changes made in the last half century and a lot of aggressive anti trust action - i.e., breaking up markets allowed to consolidate too much.
I don't see any of that happening without a clean sweep of DC, though.
Oh I completely agree that GDP is a terrible measure of prosperity (and even median income is lacking, as you noticed). But I was not using it to measure individual/median prosperity, but the overall material wealth of the country, to debunk the assertion that a single teacher's salary could comfortably sustain a family then only because of a unique, brief set of circumstances that materially enriched the US.
This is untrue because the rest of the world also produced wealth that the West has a share of - due to being early investors. The West became wealthier when the rest of the world became wealthier.
But, WHO in the West became wealthier? This is the main question. The wealth clearly did not trickle down to the middle class or poors.
From the numbers, is it evident that shareholders became wealthier - especially large shareholders in the West - even when productivity and profits increased, the earnings of workers did not increase proportionately.
To me it seems futile to try to keep coming up with theories when the solution is as simple as higher taxes on the rich and zero taxes for the poor.
The world over, the ultra-rich are fleecing the rest of the planet. The wealth of the 0.5% has soared astronomically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
I do agree America had a magic moment after WWII, and that we have an amazing run, and that yes some of this is just a rebalancing. But we are getting absolutely hosed, decade after decade, by half the US Government intent on helping milk every ounce of value & hope they can from the land & it's people. We are getting absolutely hosed the the 0.1%. There's endless political distractions & nonsense spamming the air, and very little attention to where the wealth is really going: yes some of it is going to rising middle classes in other countries. But the wealth of all nations is being captured by a vicious Global Elite E1 Barbarian class, who is engaged in war against everyone else, and who have purchased a huge number of media outlet & have their hands in many government policy-makings to insure their share of the pie only ever goes up.
Sorry, if every single place you ever work is “toxic”, it’s not likely the workplaces. It’s a serious personal issue. If you don’t want to deal with that, that’s fine, but you’re going to end up on the fringes, whether you think that’s right/wrong/fair/unfair.
At some point, it seems like you should face the fact that this is your life because you chose it.