Its been unreliable my entire life. Every year the economy gets better but life gets worse. You can't even recognize the country any more.
We need to use a metric that is closer to "total economic benefit for the median person", that would include income, as well as government services.
%Debt to GDP excluding military pay and allowances indicates how your grandchildren will live. Above >130% they will be poor, and remain poor indefinitely. You may disagree, but it is not like anyone wants this to happen.
The economic conservatives were compromised, and went insane =3
When I lived in California I was always weirded out by colleagues talking about how they never took vacations. It's like bragging about being poor.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
Have a glorious day =3
The ikigai chart helps some highlight better options:
https://hyperisland.com/en/blog/thought-leadership/feeling-d...
Transplanting to even just the 80s would be a culture shock for most people.
EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.
If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.
I think people have an overly rosy view of the past and an overly negative view of the present. What has changed more than anything is we all have the 24/7 instantaneous news cycle, and algorithmic propaganda delivery.
Every election year zillion of dollars get spent convincing you the country went to hell in a handbasket because of the other party.
Which is not to say there are not issues, or even some new ones, but I don’t think the present is significantly worse than the past in many ways, and it is significantly better in several
World wars happened when large numbers of countries had mutual aid agreements that were triggered. Those largely don’t exist anymore outside of NATO. See how literally nobody is putting troops on the ground to defend Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, etc. If world war war risk existed, the nukes would already be flying and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
The propaganda I’m talking about is very clear in your comment, you can’t just say some things suck, and there are things you don’t like, it has to be the most extreme version. We can’t just be involved in a couple wars we shouldn’t, it has to be World War III. Trump can’t just be a terrible president. He has to be Hitler. The DHS has killed three people, which is terrible, but it’s pretty far from the gestapo. That extremeism is exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m sorry your income has not increased in the last five years, but that is not the average Americans experience. The plural of anecdote is not data.
Further I think “the economy isn’t as bad as it could be so everything else that doesn’t directly affect me is propaganda and all the problems right now in the world are perfectly fine” is the ultimate propaganda. You’re essentially saying “shut up you’re still alive just be okay with the world state even if it’s not desireable”.
You are definitely a maroon. Especially in the way you are talking down and hand waving away my complaints and taking my brief list as the only things that I have an issue with.
"Further I think “the economy isn’t as bad as it could be so everything else that doesn’t directly affect me is propaganda and all the problems right now in the world are perfectly fine” is the ultimate propaganda. You’re essentially saying “shut up you’re still alive just be okay with the world state even if it’s not desireable”."
I didn't say any of that or anything vaguely similar. Merely the idea that the economy is getting better while the life of the average American is getting worse is mostly propaganda. (It's certainly true in some ways for many and many ways for some, propaganda works best when it's rooted in something true and obvious.)
You know I am sure that Russia and other adversarial nations have millions of people and bots trying to make you hate your country. If you were them, wouldn't that be your main message? Your country is going to hell in a handbasket. You'd have a hard time finding a country where a whole lot of people would disagree.
Great empires fall from the inside. The thing that scares me more about the future than anything is just how good our enemies have gotten at stuffing our heads with distrust and fear of our own country and the people in it. There's no way I could tell you that you're patient zero (or in this case, I guess patient 100 million) that you would be happy about, but there it is.
I hope you figure it out.
And Case-Shiller is based on price-per-square footage, so the argument that houses are bigger is moot.