Has it always been this way? or am I just slow on the uptake
My theory is that we are simply too wealthy. For the average rich person (the top 20-30%), the first $70,000 goes to real companies who sell real things for money. Past that and it all is just kinda funny money. In our society there are actually a ton of people making this kind of money, so there's just this huge chunk of money that isn't really tied to anything real. If you lose $100k on cryptocurrency, or you spend $800 on some metaverse thing, it's fine, you can still buy food.
Of course this is also why people who don't make this kind of money are so baffled (and angry). Hearing that some no product company [1] was sold for billions of dollars feels insane when you're seriously considering the difference between a $5000 and a $6000 car.
Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.
income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs regularly...
the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky investors are stuck holding the bag
every category of daily life now has some optimized extraction mechanism
Funny money.
[1]: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...
1: All stats are 2022 tax year, and are AGI per tax return, so excluding things like 401(k), based on https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat... and defining household as "taxpaying unit"- e.g. married filing separately would count as two, at two separate levels of income
20 - 30% cannot spend $100k per year as funny money, that is more like the top 5% but probably more like the top 2%.
High earners in the 20 - 30% often also live in expensive areas, so their dollar doesn't go as far as some of the more affordable places to live (housing, food, etc).
If you make a yearly gross salary of 100K you're already in the top 11%. With 200K you're in the top 3%. Inequality also leads to social segregation, which means that we live in bubbles where most people are "like us" and it's very difficult to see how privileged we actually are.
Read Piketty's "Capital in the XXI century" to learn more about how crazy inequal the world, but specially the US, is becoming. Phenomena like Trump are easier to understand when taking this into account.
With the median income ~$50k and many households owning two cars... much of the country is actively living beyond their means just to get to work.
We have built some sort of pseudo-luxury economy that seemingly has to be upkept by mandatory good vibes.
Anyway, it's sorta always been this way. That AI is very much self-hyping might make this time worse, but otoh non-european economies have more ability now to make sure the fallout is mostly confined to the investors.