Also the wealth of the average worker has been stagnant since the 70's - computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living.
I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.
I'd say that would depend on one's point of view in a couple of key respects:
- Are we just discussing the first-world middle class? Obviously if we extend our scope to all of humanity there have been remarkable jumps in standards of living.
- Does the idea of 'standard of living' include only access to goods, services, and information or also intangibles like access to safety and (more pertinently to this particular discussion) security? As a 34 year old American, I feel that my material standard of living is much better than it was in 1992, but my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive.
I agree with you, but a reasonable case could be made for viewing standard of living as material access so I think that's where a lot of us talk past one another.
Also American society is pretty disdainful of security, historically.
Isn’t housing part of that material access which has become harder to maintain and access by more and more? People living paycheck to paycheck to pay huge rents, people living in tents and so on seems to indicate some decrease in the standard of living.
The argument against this would be things like homes being larger now and housing standards having risen (even slum units have things like fridges and electricity). I don't think those are compelling arguments because often going without those things is not allowed/not an option, but that's what the other side's argument would be.
The people that live in tents generally used to live in state mandated mental institutions. Their standard of living decreased (well depending on how much you weigh autonomy), but that’s not really relevant to the standard of living for the middle class.
Eh. Depends on which part. I definitely have fallen into doomscrolling on occasion, but I have reasons to believe our society is less stable than it was. This has good and bad aspects - the 'stability' offered was in many ways the stability of a less rich way of living (think people without plumbing or with dirt floors), but at the same time the lack of security is a major stressor and that's not good for your mental health any more than material deprivation is.
There's also that I am a disabled American and we're generally not in great spots. As an American, your ability to have things like housing is directly tied to your ability to be economically productive, and as someone with MS, I have to roll the dice each morning on whether or not I will be able to work. I don't know how long my career can last which creates a lot of stress. But then that's also true for all Americans: How many of us could survive our main/only earner getting cancer? That's the sort of stability I mean: The ability to be wiped out by things outside of your control is higher (which is partially down to society deciding everything is an individual problem and if a tornado flattens your house that sounds like a you problem) and we're moving towards a lower-trust society and the community bonds that were existent but frayed in the 90s (see Bowling Alone) are pretty torched now. Who and what can you rely on?
Which is more relevant if you consider that a lot of Americans have medical conditions and that things like the move from a single-income to dual-income household as the standard means that losing one adult can cripple a household financially. I'm also basing this on things like my peers' ability to do things like pay for child care since mid-30s are prime 'give all your money to daycare' years.
I also was in school during 2008, so I entered college under the 'get a degree and you'll be fine' years and exited it into the bloodbath of the Great Recession. There are many realities and my personal one is less secure than it was and this is true for many Americans.
What's your opinion on the following assertion: countries (such as mine) with socialised medicine make sure everyone has a certain standard of care, but that standard only goes so far. The US lets people pay for any possible treatment, and so people who would be put on palliative care in, say, the UK, would be bankrupted in the US by trying to beat cancer with expensive drugs.
It's phrased as an assertion, but it's really just something I've been thinking about. What do you think?
It's probably accurate, and of course there are issues with socialized medicine as well. I have an interesting POV because I actually had my first relapse while I was living in Canada - I wasn't allowed to stay due to my disability but I have some experience with both systems. The waiting is definitely a problem - I didn't get into a neuro before I had to leave the country 9 months later, but at the same time I never worried about paying for treatment and I went to the ER when I couldn't feel half my body/couldn't walk without being concerned.
It isn't just socialized healthcare, though. It's also things like the US not mandating time off - for instance, I haven't had my Ocreveus infusion because I literally can't afford to take the time off to go to the infusion center. And the US is also very binary: Either you work full time or you get nothing benefits wise. For those of us who could comfortably work ~25-30 hours a week this results in either us overworking ourselves to the detriment of our health or not working at all. I'd love to work and just have a little bit of help for when I have a bad week or month, but that doesn't happen here.
The other problem with the American healthcare system is that it siphons off wealth from those in their end of life. Good luck planning a good life for your children: The government will take everything you own for your nursing home. That also has major impacts in term of stability.
But of course in socialized healthcare you do need to decide what is and isn't worth treating in some way and when cuts are needed you end up in dark places like Canada is with MAiD.
It's hard to say. I'm inclined to believe there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach.
Yeah, totally agree. The American system seems to have, despite its amazing innovations and advances, that we all benefit from sooner or later, the worst of both worlds: neither an efficient market-driven approach not a particularly socialised one either. And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare.
The ties between government, big pharma, insurance companies and hospital systems must be so entrenched that it's very difficult to see a way out.
Add that to America disintegrating into a low-trust society where one almost has to assume that any stranger one meets is out to scam you/get your money somehow and it results in a country where it's terrible to be vulnerable. Which is one of the ways we grow as people, thus leading to emotional stunting amongst the populace, which in turn makes us less resilient and willing to act (particularly since we can't cooperate anymore) and therefore in my opinion sow the seeds of our own destruction.
> And that's despite the US government spending more per head than I think any other country on healthcare.
Far more per head — part of which is higher cost of labor and that healthcare is extraordinarily labor intensive. But, its also fairly high as a GDP share, for which excuses like that don’t work. The US just genuinely has a healthcare system that is ludicrously inefficient unless your goal is maximizing the wealth-based quality differential, in which case Mission Accomplished.
I really think this cynical take on wealth needs to stop. This is far more likely explained by politics.
Or more precisely: efficiency is distorted by compassion. Which is then recovered by efficiency. Which is again modified by compassion. If your system is a bewildering mish-mash of cost increasing political interventions and cost reducing market innovations then it's never going to work. But lawmakers need something to do to stand out, and so do business people.
> I really think this cynical take on wealth needs to stop. This is far more likely explained by politics.
The only mention of wealth was describing the effect. Yes, politics is a key part of how that effect is acheived. (Of course, advocacy by those with wealth is a key part of how the politics happens, and... well, the politics/wealth interactions here are basically a near-infinite chain. They aren’t competing explanations.)
It depends on what you're look at. This [1] is a graph of real median wages, for full time workers, since 1979 (date the Fed data begins). They've only increased by about 10%, and that's misleadingly high since 1979 was a local low of the era. The figures they give are in ~1983 constant dollars, so it works out to about $54k real median earnings in 1979 and $58.5k real median earnings today.
And since 1979 people have far more basic 'necessities' like internet and electronic devices. And other necessities like housing, education, and healthcare have all increased in cost far beyond nominal inflation figures. So a person in this situation is most certainly going to have a substantially lower quality of life in modern times. You have to keep in mind that in the past most families were single bread-winner, so wages and life were organized around the vision of one working individual being able to support at least 3 others, in a nuclear household. It was a very different economic vision than what has emerged in more modern times.
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The one thing I'd say these numbers miss out on is opportunity. I think in modern times there is dramatically more opportunity, but if you're just going to live a normal, as expected, life without really aggressively going after the opportunities we all have available - then you'd almost certainly be better off living on the median in the 70s than today. And since most people should be expected to live these sort of perfectly average lives, as that's precisely what the average is, that's a real problem.
If you buy the bullshit about being able to afford a faster computer as increased standard of living, sure.
If you consider housing, food, medical insurance, car prices, education - all of these things are ridiculously expensive compared to what they used to be.
"But we have the Nintendo Switch!" does not alleviate what we're going through right now.
Depends on whether you mean access to giant TVs or stuff like education and healthcare and housing. It’s hard to usefully turn it into a single metric.
Wages have remained flat, cost of consumer electronics have gone down, cost of education, healthcare, and housing has gone way up.
This is true only if you look narrowly at developed countries. If you look more broadly, a tremendous number of people have had huge increases in income in places like China.
That might even be related (i.e., wages for workers are being depressed in developing world as workers see competition from other workers in developing nations). And capital owners benefiting from increased availability of labor.
TBC, agree that gini coefficient re: wealth in developing world is increasing.
In the 70s the top 1% couldn’t even conceive of the power they’d have in their pockets one day. Today both billionaires and the rest of the world can have access to that same power. We’re all carrying the same phones in our pockets after all.
You missed the point. In the 70s you didn’t have the ability to give someone the power of your phone. If you did, the ultra wealthy would have paid a billion for it (inflation adjusted).
The technology you take for granted is huge. Warren Buffet said he would rather give up flying on a private jet, than give up his smartphone.
No, you missed the point. Something that is a baseline today is being used to justify absolutely colossal disparity in how people live on the unimaginative base of "gee, you are not a caveman".
Your phone does not mean that you don't have to work three jobs to have a roof over your head and can't have a family. Having a phone does not make you rich.
You need to reread the thread. There are some things that are significantly better for common people today. So much better that the richest people would have given up significant chunks of their fortunes for them in the 70s.
This does not mean it’s still difficult to get housing. It’s just a point that one aspect of our lives is unfathomably better than before and now we take it for granted.
Haha, poor billionaires. Just can't improve your iPhone no matter how many $$$$ you throw at it. The most expensive smartphone to date is an iPhone6 with a huge diamond protruding from it.
I’m not a fan of wealth concentration but a lot of the wealth increase at the bottom was by increasing the technological power of their possessions. While this isn’t the same as political or financial power, it’s something.
I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.