All around the world, labour is losing out to capital

While the "other worker" sat around and had her nails done? No. There's a reason women joined the work force en masse, and it was because the money they could make and the satisfaction they could attain in the work force was worth more to them than whatever value they produced scrubbing floors and steaming vegetables. Was that a mistake? I don't think any of the working women I know would say so. Why leave money and fulfilling work on the table?

This nostalgia is absurd. Look around. Go ahead and even ignore whatever revolutionary device you're using to browse HN. Ignore whether you're black or Hispanic or Asian. Ignore your extra eight years or so of life expectancy. How much of the modern world simply disappears if you remove what wasn't available in 1963? And if debt is the catastrophe waiting to happen that you seem to believe that it is, you will be comforted by the fact that Americans have decreased their indebtedness by over a trillion dollars since 2008.

Everything that isn't housing, healthcare, or higher education is vastly cheaper today than it was before. Food especially.

The 1960s was also the same time that rivers were so polluted they were catching fire. That would never happen today- and that has a cost associated with it. Your food is significantly safer. So is your water. So is your air. So is the building you're reading this in.

There is vastly less crime. This has been expensive- we've locked a lot of people up to get there, and paid lots of money to police. The mafia is basically gone, and modern criminal organizations are pretty limited in scope north of the border. There are still bad places in the US, but there are awfully few no-go zones.

Media is better now. It's cheaper, it's broader, it's better, it's more democratic. This is true both for news and entertainment.

The national debt is a bullshit non-problem.

People forget this, mainly because they want to, but also because their TVs say we're living in the golden age.

Life now ain't perfect, but it sure as shit is better overall than it was in the 60s.

No. Real GDP/capita was about $20k back then - the average person produced about half of what you claim was the minimum wage.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USARGDPC

In the 1960s, America had roughly half of all global manufacturing to itself. A lot of that was due to our manufacturing base surviving WW2 fully intact. However, we saw the benefit of that, and it showed up in the form of jobs and wages.

And today we produce 2.5x more than we did back then. Manufacturing has not declined, it's merely become more efficient.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/IPMAN

Not to mention, much of the prosperity of the '50's was a "fringe benefit" of most of the rest of the industrialized world blowing itself up for the second time in 30 years.

And of course there's survivorship bias: No one remembers all the terrible inventions of the '50's. (Had they come up with Smell-O-Vision yet?) All we remember is the transistor radio and the hydrogen bomb. Look back on the 2010's in 60 years and you'll see all sorts of amazing stuff that made its mark on the future, I'm sure.

Complete horseshit.

- Due to better modern reporting (and the 24h news cycle), despite generally lower rates of crimes and various other bad stuff, we feel like their rates are higher now, so we get all nostalgic for the 1950s.

- More importantly, 1950 was a good time for certain kinds of people and not so much for others. Within the US, internet or no, 1950 is not a great time to travel to if you are LGBT, disabled, female, non-Christian, or ill with any of a variety of chronic conditions, and it's especially shitty if you are black (or, to a lesser extent, of another minority). Outside the US, Europe and Japan were still basically starving from post-war deprivation, the Soviet bloc was hitting the worst parts of Stalinism, China was approaching something like a thousand-year low in terms of civilisation, and most of the rest of the world were moribund colonies of the dying European empires.

If you're a middle-class able-bodied white straight Christian (preferably Protestant) man in the US, though, sure, 1950 sounds super.

For (1) to make sense we would have to look at the ration of rents to incomes. Otherwise, the relation is obscured by the huge impact of falling real interest rates. (Falling real interest rates is probably a good thing!)

2 and 3 don't have a direct bearing on standard of living. Lower real interest rates play a role as well.

For 4 you have to differentiate between the average among all Americans and the average fate of each individual American. They are different because of an influx of new Americans.

I agree about 5.

For 6, education was never as cheap as today, thanks to the internet. What went up is the price of the piece of paper that certifies you went to a specific university.

For 7, we have much better cars. You can buy a used car that's much better than what was available in the 60s for a similar fraction of income as back then. (And again, lower real interest rates play some role.)

Another is that the term 'unemployed' can be readily redefined - here in Australia, one government managed to make good unemployment figures by redefining under-employed people so that they were out of the picture. They now counted towards the 'employed' numbers, even if they were literally only working a couple of hours a week.

Plenty of UK bands from the 60s to the 90s have mentioned unemployment benefits as being an important factor in allowing them to exist before they got famous.

Noone is to my knowledge saying she did not also have a substantial impact on it herself - after all, we're not swimming in people who have achieved the same. But there can very well be more than one contributing factor.

To grasp onto your last statement: Try writing a book when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum if she did not have a working welfare system to "break my fall" as she herself put it.

It was her effort, but the welfare system made it possible for her to put in that effort.

EDIT: Though just for the record, as rich people go she is definitively one of the most sympathetic, not least for the way she has made it exceedingly clear that she believes it is fair for her to pay her taxes in the UK without complaint, given what she believes she owes to the system in the first place - and to the extent that she explicitly hit out at the conservatives for wanting to cut taxes for the rich.

And they're up so far, because many areas of the world such as the BRIC nations, have seen a boom the last decade while America has not seen a real improvement in its situation. We're taking on water, while nations like Brazil, India, Russia, Canada, Australia and China have seen impressive gains (some of the gains are immense, as in China).

One reason labor in the US isn't do well, while corporate profits are booming, is because America's most successful corporations make most of their profits outside the US now. Companies like Apple and Microsoft hugely tilt the profit numbers, while earning very large portions of their profits from the global economy.

Some examples: Exxon gets 45% of its sales overseas; GE 54%; Ford 51%; IBM 64%; Boeing 41%; Intel 85%; McDonalds 66%; Nike 50%; Dow Chemical 67%

It is my hypothesis that the Scandinavian social welfare model is a prequel to the way things need to be in the even more automated future: High taxation of high incomes, and either a very strong welfare system or negative taxation for low incomes / citizen's wage paid out to everyone regardless of income.

On the other hand, if you look at "median household income", that's grown a fair bit since 1967. We have more dual-income families today where instead of one high-earning male and a housewife we have a couple who on average work maybe a little less and gets paid a little less as individuals than that single-earner male did, but their combined income is higher than the single-earner salary of old.

(We also have smaller households today than in the past due to higher divorce rates. And a lot more salary taken in the form of "benefits" which makes comparison of the raw dollar rate misleading.)

"The report provides a snapshot of a society in immense crisis. Poverty is at a near-generation high of 15 percent, close to the high point since the 1965 War on Poverty, the 15.2 percent rate reached in 1983. According to Tuesday’s report, 46.5 million Americans, including 9.5 million families, live in poverty.

Some 20.4 million people live on an income less than 50 percent of the official poverty line, 7.1 million of these being children under 18. More than 48 million remain without health insurance.

More than 31 percent of the population experienced some period of impoverishment during the years 2009-2011. Median household income, at $51,017, was slightly lower than in 2011, and down by 8.3 percent from 2007. The number of people 65 and older living in poverty increased from 3.6 million to 3.9 million between 2011 and 2012."

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/18/cens-s18.html

Also there's no reason at all menus and courses can't be automated as well. Everything from the design of the menus to the design of the building, to its construction, and staffing, everything but the eating can be automated somehow. I think people are going to come to a shocking, ego-blowing realization that, yes, creative work can and will be automated as well.

In a restaurant kitchen, generally only one or maybe two people are actually involved in designing the menu, out of a significantly larger number who do the preparation. And unless you're running a very unusual, top-end restaurant, that's a matter of a couple of months' work every year, at absolute maximum - closer to a couple of weeks a year for most normal restaurants, I believe.

Of course, some cooking tasks are going to be harder than others. I wouldn't want to bet on a top-flight pastry chef getting replaced any time soon, for example. But creeping automation in the kitchen is definitely a possibility: sous-vide techniques can already make things like preparing a hollandaise considerably quicker and simpler, for example. And baristas are staring down the barrel of robot barista workers right now.

So it's capitalism where all the money goes to the state, which is the government, which is the people... which is exactly what "communism" is. If you think of a "commune" as a "corporation", then it's almost identical.

I'd be happy to see the arguement, that they are a pretty bad communist state, and they don't allocate their money too well, and they (like every other country) have problems with corruption. But "they are not communist" is just as valid as "the US is not a democracy" (Technically it's kind of true, but it isn't useful as a discussion point).

My point is, Communism is pretty much just as popular as democracy... so saying it's died, is just being ignorant.

However to say people should be payed based on the percent yield. Most people consider only physical value in looking at labor. I imagine you would believe that someone working for a corporation carving blocks into a statue should be payed a percentage of that sale of the statue.

Yet it's obvious that that line of thinking (physical value only) is incorrect. How much would you pay doctors? Doctors don't create anything, but they generate value by instructing surgeons, nurses, etc on what they should do. By physical value only, coal miners would make hundreds, doctors 0.

Okay, so we concede that intellectual value should be also considered in the percentage yield owed to an individual.

Then that brings us a really good CEO. Per product, a good CEO might only cost a fraction of a cent. You can calculate finding a number of sales of a product and dividing into it the CEOs billion $ salery. A bad CEO might make an OK on a failed product that costs the company 5 cents a product. This costs him billions of dollars of his own money. A really good CEO might one day decide to test a method of production, or a new mass production strategy that decreases cost of making each good by 10 cents. He is payed hundreds of Billions. You might agree that based on this, it would make sense to pay CEOs based on output, but once you realize that the good CEO and bad CEO are the often same person, and once you charge a person hundreds of billion of dollars for their 5 cent mistake, they would have make the risk needed to gain the the 10c discovery, you might begin to understand that CEOs simply cannot be payed based on this method of value.

Okay so we try the opposite approach. It's based on luck so we should pay everyone the same. No one would want to take on the stress for a low-power, high risk, boring job like supervising a reactor core. Especially since that job pays the same as a fun job like stopping crime, or something more interesting and easy to get into. There would be a constant problem of not enough people in some jobs and too many in others. Redistributing people would be completely random and people would be placed in to jobs they hate, and paid the same amount as people doing jobs they would love. So here, much more people are unhappy, and incompetence is all around. (Then some guy says he's going to fix it and everyone rallies around him and soon dictatorship).

The full answer is a bit more complex than that: it's also true that Smith says contradictory things. I'm not enough of a Smith scholar to give a definitive answer, but it seems that Smith mostly purposed it for rhetorical effect, since it is so compelling on a folk level. Other classical economists like Ricardo bought into it much more heavily as an analytic tool.