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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

What the next generation really needs is an economy where everyone can make a decent living with a modest effort, without having to desperately "outcompete" other job seekers. The US had that kind of economy at some point. Since we haven't lost any arcane secrets since then, it must be still achievable today.

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The "decent living" of past generations is still available today, but past generations were poorer than you think they were, particularly for those who don't come from white and privileged backgrounds.

Exactly. My father was dirt poor. Grew up sharing his bedroom with his 4 brothers. Never had a new piece of clothing except underwear. And that was just normal for everyone he knew. Being a farmer in the 50s and 60s meant you were frequently very poor.

Although almost everyone is better off in material terms than they were two generations ago, I fear that the level of wealth required to live a "comfortable" life may have outpaced that increase. How many hours does a blue collar worker have to put in to live close to a grocery store and good schools? How much time do the working poor spend commuting? If you break your arm, what percentage of your income will be consumed by medical costs?

I don't have any data on this, but it's my hunch about why there's so much economic resentment these days.

"How many hours does a blue collar worker have to put in to live close to a grocery store and good schools?"

Depends if they work in a unionized industry.

"If you break your arm, what percentage of your income will be consumed by medical costs?"

In most industrial countries, including the US after the ACA, very little, because of health insurance.

"there's so much economic resentment these days."

That's inequality. When everyone around you is poor, except for a few rich folks you don't see often, it's not as big a deal. When you're constantly exposed to the things you don't/can't have, that can lead to resentment.

This goes back to your first sentence: "Although almost everyone is better off in material terms than they were two generations ago, I fear that the level of wealth required to live a "comfortable" life may have outpaced that increase."

In the US, Median Income peaked in the 1970's and has been flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

The poor (in the U.S. anyway) are relatively worse off than they were 2 generations ago - the bottom 50% have seen very little growth in income in 50 years, while the top 50% have grown a lot more. http://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/chartbook/Income%...

Not all countries are as bad as the US, particularly Canada or Europe, because they have strong redistribution systems (health and social insurance, etc.). But the trends aren't great.

I am self-employed and pay $6000 a year for high deductible health insurance for my family that has a $5000 deductible. So if my child breaks their arm and that is my only expense that year, then I paid $11,000 for their broken arm. Not cheap by any means. I'm sure lots of people on this forum work for companies that cover their whole cost of insurance and are out of touch with costs, but the "Affordable" Care Act has not made health insurance more affordable.

Insurance doesn't work that way. If you had a heart condition which required operation (so maybe 100k) you would also have paid 11k. You need to average over all expected outcomes to calculate whether it was affordable or expensive. In other countries (Europe and Canada) that 11k comes out as taxes instead of direct and indirect insurance costs.

> The "decent living" of past generations is still available today,

Not if all your resources are sucked by insane rent / housing prices.

Multiple generations used to share a dwelling, it's still an option.

What's a "modest effort"? And when did we have an economy based on a "modest effort"?

Work has never been easier in the US than it currently is. Record number of office workers, minimal number of farmers, factory workers, and manual labor in general.

Easier in terms of lack of manual labor perhaps, but white collar work has its own unique challenges. I don't think it's fair to rate difficulty of work on a linear spectrum.

Several years ago I worked on a farm for a few months helping out a relative. It was exhausting work, but I found it much easier than some of the programming work I do as a living.

Take a look at the Beat Generation books. For these folks it was not just possible, but normal, to travel across the US and find a job in every town they stopped.

Did they make much money?

If you're ok getting about the minimal wage for some gardening, or house cleaning, or trash removal, you probably have good chances (e.g. you'll outcompete an illegal Mexican immigrant by just knowing the language well).

Machines increasingly obviate jobs that don't require qualification. On one hand it is nice because humans need to do less and less dirty, mind-numbing jobs. OTOH being a traveling beatnik sucks more and more.

Your comment is why I mentioned financial literacy and financial independence. The economy is a huge system with many moving parts, so while I do agree with your statement, I think you'd get a better ROI by teaching people how to manage money.

I'm a huge fan of "Your Money or Your Life" and by extension the Financial Integrity program, which advocates for people to rethink their relationship with money as well teaches people how to make income regardless of employment status.

Money management only really works when you make more than enough to afford the basics...half the population struggles just for housing, food, healthcare, and transportation.

Money management works at all levels. It is just a lot easier when you have more to manage because your tolerance for error is higher, and you can thus be much sloppier and spend less time on it.

What I don't think works so well is teaching everyone to be good at money management. Ignoring the other possible contributors to being very poor (culture, prejudice, whatever), there is undeniably a component due to intelligence. We should thus expect some portion of these very poor to be incapable of managing money, no matter how much they have, and a better policy would be to manage their money for them. This already happens for some mental hospital patients that are out in the real world but need support for medication and housing and food, and if you give them too much unrestricted money instead they'll just buy a PS4 or something else that's shiny and the money will be gone, they'll have to sell their PS4 in a few months to keep paying the rent, and then a while later they'll be evicted due to non-payment. Better to give them a smaller amount of unrestricted money on top of the other aid, but in my experience the same spending patterns emerge (that is, spending it all), very few save, or save beyond what is necessary for a particular shiny toy. There is also a disincentive from getting a job that pays too much income, because their benefits are based on income-received and can be taken away very quickly, but that's another issue. My point is that such individuality-invading money-management could probably be beneficial for more than just the mentally ill, but it will be immediately dismissed by people intelligent enough to manage their own money and who wouldn't be affected by this as nanny-statism.

Many of whom are burning piles of money on $75/month smartphones and television subscriptions (with HBO so they can keep up with the Jones' who are also underwater).

Yes, the luxury lifestyle of the dirt poor. Good thing states like Kansas have made it illegal to use food stamps for cruises. Nip that one right in the bud.

Due to the tremendous population growth, and higher standards of living of human population, I think it will be extremely difficult to achieve the kind of dream your talking about. Nevertheless, this dream would have to go through better education at all levels.

This is only possible if you take from those who work the hardest and redistribute among the lazy. Been there. Luckily, Soviet Union is gone now.

Taking the wealth produced by the hardest working people in poor countries and redistributing it to lazy rich people sounds exactly like the current state of global capitalism.

I do not care about capitalists. They somehow manage to exclude themselves from this unfair redistribution anyway, so the most of the tax burden is on the hard working middle class.

As for the people in the poor countries, they're getting richer because of this process, to an extent that the capitalists have to move their cheap labour manufacturing further and further - just see the trends in textile, for example. So it's all levelling, I would not worry about this particular aspect.

There's definitely progress being made, but I'm sure we could do better. Soviet-style central control of wealth distribution is at an all-time high with banks and corporations colluding in place of a political dictatorship. I'm looking forward to new types of software-enabled currency and exchange that aren't so easy to manipulate by just a few people.

> but I'm sure we could do better

It will happen over time. Levelling is an unavoidable consequence of the globalisation.

> new types of software-enabled currency and exchange

Yes, this can be quite a game changer, may even remove the banks from the picture entirely, but, again, it all will need time.

You twisted the 'We' from the whole humanity to just 'USA'.

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