russroberts613

The whole point of much of this analysis (and the videos shown) is that household income can be very misleading. But most if not all of the analyses I report on are for individuals over time. So changes in the number of earners are actually more of a problem for most of the gloomy studies that look at households by quintile. Incredibly, the proportion of households with two earners is LOWER in 2014 than in 1980 because of the large increase in households with one or no earners. Marriage is not nearly as common as it used to be. The data are here in Table H-12: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

I also would add as I did in the essay, that I am not claiming that everything is OK in the economy. I am trying to respond to the relentless claim that the rich got all the gains of the last few decades. It's simply not true. That doesn't mean everything is fine. But just figuring out what actually happened is surprisingly complicated. The people who claim that the economy is only helping the rich should be more nuanced.

I don't think it's commodification. In cities where the government doesn't artificially make it hard to build new houses, housing is much more affordable.

I appreciate all the comments. There is always a question of what is a "free" market. Government plays an important role in enforcing contracts and trying to preserve private property. And as some people have pointed out here, government subsidizes wheat, keeps out competition, and so on. Yet in many cities with very different roles for government, bread is still plentiful. What the poem tries to get at is the fundamental principal of emergence that makes bread plentiful across diverse political environments. The most important "free" part of those markets is allowing prices to adjust. Governments that play with prices (Venezuela is the tragic example today) can prevent the supply of bread from emerging.

For those who want to go deeper into these ideas there is an annotated version of the poem here: http://wonderfulloaf.org/poem and a long list of essays, talks, and interviews on the ideas in the poem, here: http://wonderfulloaf.org/resources