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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

No, something has changed and PG understands it while you don't.

As http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html explains, what you are missing is that what people really want is wealth, not money. And wealth is things of value created by people. As productivity improves, we can create more wealth. One form of that wealth is that we can make more efficient use of fundamentally scarce resources. Which admittedly does not increase them, but does decrease pressure on them.

The aggregate effect of these trends over time is truly remarkable. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo for a vivid demonstration of how remarkable it is.

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The price of really valuable goods (housing, education, health care) is steadily rising. Cheap trinkets in the form of silly websites, iPhones etc. are just a distraction from the fact that the majority of the population is worse off than 20 years ago.

According to http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N the median US income adjusted for inflation is up over the last 20 years.

The median worldwide income is up a lot more, but I do not have an easy graph for that.

That's household income, women started entering the workforce in the 70s so that many households started becoming two-income. Male median income is flat.

Didn't you just say that 'money' is not the same as 'wealth'?

Modulo a few not incontroversial assumptions, inflation adjusted monetary income is a proxy for real wealth.

The inflation adjustment is supposed to proxy for all the various utils your dollars (or shekels or yuan or rupees) can buy.

In practice, most people will accept this at least for a base point of argument as alternative measures tend to be even more controversial. Even those who have profound issues with money, price, value, inflation, wealth, and more. Such as myself.

The standard of living the US achieved circa 1968 / 1974, is unlikely to ever be matched again anywhere on earth by a large nation. The minimum wage at the time was equivalent to roughly $35-40,000 per year today.

A big part of the reason for that, was every US competitor got destroyed in WW2. The US inherited an open runway, and acquired over 50% of all global manufacturing at the peak accordingly.

As major countries, like Britain / France / Germany / Japan got their feet back under them, that competition drained the easy income and wealth off the top of the labor force in America. The rise of China, Brazil, India, etc and the opening up of the Soviet bloc has further stressed the US labor market, by increasing competition.

The peak that you're referring to that America has been coming down off of, was temporary and would not normally have existed had it not been for WW2. It was a fluke.

That massive concentration of income and wealth the US acquired due to WW2, has been gradually redistributed due to competition. People in Estonia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech, Slovakia, Brazil, China, Australia, Canada, etc. etc. have seen massive increases in their standards of living the last 40 years.

The highest (adjusted for inflation) minimum wage in the US was in 1968 and comes out to $10.71/hr in 2013 dollars [1]. That's about $21,500 per year.

Where did you get the $35-40K number?

[1]http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-...

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