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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Any time you read words like this:

"We’re a generation in which children were empowered by promises that they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be."

You should remember that, since 1973, wages have been declining for the majority of men in the USA:

http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Scree...

Women have seen some modest improvement in wages, but for the most part, the era since 1973 has been a very bad one for American workers.

For young men, the problems started as early as the recession of 1958. That was the year that the ratio of average wage to average rent hit its all time best, making it easy for a young couple to set themselves up with their own place. For that reason, this was also the peak of the Baby Boom.

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Wages being flat/declining is solely because compensation has shifted from wages to non-wage compensation.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB

Things have been fine for workers.

So workers are fine because they are partially shielded from the soaring cost of health-care?

It has nothing to do with that. It's simple a matter of converting the cost/value of the additional benefits in the form of employer health-care and other things, and adding that on top of the salary as if they are the same.

Seems pretty logical to me when I look at my paycheck and make that calculation. Am I happy that my employer has control over my medical expenses? Probably not. Am I happy that they get huge discounts from insurance companies on my behalf(and that of their other employees)? Probably am.

Employer health-care coverage has been widespread for most, if not all, of that time. So if my paycheck is slightly down from what it would have been 40 years ago, then 40 years ago I have both health insurance, plus more money (and possibly a defined benefit pension). How am I better off today?

I'm certainly better off today - 40 years ago a lot of activities would have been off limits to me. For example, walking, sitting, missionary position, sleeping on my side, basically everything besides lying on my back. Health insurance simply would not have paid $infinity for me to have treatments that were not yet invented.

As you might expect, these treatments have caused the price of health insurance to go up.

This is the problem with rolling up the human experience into a price index, and then using that index to judge changes in standard of living.

Purchasing power of electronics, appliances, etc, has gotten a lot better.

Purchasing power of food has somewhat stagnated, though variety has gotten better.

It is harder for a single earner to pay for a standard three bedroom house in a good school district that is close to jobs. It is also much more expensive to buy the education admission ticket to the job market, due to cost inflation of schools and credential inflation of job requirements.

A bunch of that non-wage compensation is just going directly into bigger healthcare bureaucracy that doesn't do anything the worker, it should be considered an increase in income that is offset by a bureaucracy tax. Healthcare has gotten better, but the things that have gotten better are generally related to where the money is going.

Please look at the chart that I posted. Wages have declined for the majority of men, since 1973. The chart you link to averages all workers, so the increase for women, and the big increase in income for the top 10% of workers, pulls up the average. But for the majority of men, things have gotten worse since 1973.

Do you have data showing that comp didn't go up for any specific subgroup? If not, all you've shown is that employers have shifted comp from the wages to benefits.

I.e., you haven't demonstrated any problem for workers.

Simply holding a ruler up to the graph you cited reveals your conclusion to be complete bullshit. If the straight-line trend that obtained up the early 1970s had continued then the indexed compensation would be closer to 130 than the 110 it currently is. What sort of idiots do you take us for?

Don't even get me started on all the rent-seeking and tax acrobatics surrounding non-wage compensation. I would much rather just get paid cash and pay a somewhat higher rate of income tax than waste time trying to optimize some endless menu of benefit packages that require the skills of a CPA to analyze properly.

I didn't claim a specific linear trend was followed, I claimed that comp went up.

How does your point follow from the quote you supplied? Nobody ever claimed that anyone would be RICH by being "anything they wanted to be". There are probably more career options today that are within reach for people, but that doesn't mean a person can shut off their brain and blindly jump at an idea for fun. Following dreams is great, as long as you keep an eye out for consequences. If you want to work as a museum curator, by all means go for it, as long as you don't expect to be able to buy the same car, same house, and take the same vacations as someone who goes into a higher paying vocation.

The problems arise when people realize too late that "hey, I took out $100k in loans to go to college for a job that pays $35k". Unfortunately, in that situation it's going to mean a lifetime of living in smaller apartments, having crappier cars, fewer vacations, etc than someone who chose differently. And that's not necessarily a bad thing! If following a dream means more to this person than these things, that's great! But let's not pretend that "grow up to be anything you want to be" necessarily means "...and you can afford to pay for everything you dream also".

"anything they wanted to be" might include options such as "be a parent" and, without question, falling wages is a difficulty if you want to be a parent.

>falling wages is a difficulty if you want to be a parent.

I would agree with that! I would also make the point that parents nowadays feel like they "need" to spend very lavishly on their children. Companies have gotten very good at convincing parents they "need" all this extra stuff for their kids and more space to store more stuff. I grew up in a family of 5 in 1,200 sq/ft apartment. Nowadays my friend (who also has a family of 5) is moving out of her 2,500 sq/ft house because her family "needs more space." Somehow my generation and my parent's generation grew up with a lot less and still made it to adulthood. You can't discount cultural influences.

(I also think the need to live in a "good" school district is very overrated and I was in a very, very bad school district my whole childhood.)

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