> I just could not see anything in my memories that had to deal with collectivization, killings, political trials, endless bread lines, imprisoned free thinkers
The author’s memory is OK. There were little to no such things in communist Yugoslavia.
Unlike Warsaw bloc countries, Russian army did not occupy Yugoslavia. The country remained independent, and human rights situation was much better than in Russia.
> he had mainly good memories—of “long dinners discussing politics,” the “excitement of new books,” “languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in miniskirts.”
In soviet Russia, a long dinner discussing politics would cause the participants to be sent to Siberia, there were no whole-night concerts, and miniskirts only appeared on girls after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Should we interpret your comment as support that it doesn't necessarily matter what the leading political ideology of the country is, rather who is the one enforcing it?
I don’t know the answer to your question. The history is more complicated than that.
I think what matters most is the culture. It’s much deeper, and much harder to change, than ideology or politics.
Historically, people living here were free, and they were and still are willing to fight for their freedom. They accidentally started WW1 this way, but that’s another story. I think that’s the root cause why Yugoslavia refused to become a satellite state of USSR. And also why the regime here was way more relaxed: the borders were open, small businesses remained in private hands, it was OK to discuss politics, miniskirts were available, etc…
Another reason is west and international politics came in. It was politically beneficial for the west to maintain good relations with Yugoslavia despite the ideology.
Sure, culture matters, but it’s small fish once money gets involved. The above are all economic questions with economic answers. Communism is not a political structure, but an economic and social structure. You are both thinking far too American.
No! But it might mean that it doesn’t necessarily matter what the leading political ideology of the country is, rather the economic system enforcing it.
It's very clear you think money is the primary shaper of societies, but this simply isn't true. There are multiple forms of social capital which can be equally, if not more so, disruptive, than pure economics.
A political ideology is only as strong as the society that enforces it. That includes the economic framework and all its superstituous nuances defining
feedback loops of behavior being accepted dogmatically as the backbone of a society.
If it aligns with your values, literally, of course it's going to be something you see as true, because questioning it would be too challenging to manage. But there are plenty of intelligent people out there who can afford to question it, and it doesn't imply a breakdown in society. It can imply progress. But only if you want to see things that way.
That honestly depends on whether you can hit the middle understanding that your philosophy on societies and all the fears that are attached as a consequence of an economic loop you believe you have control over are actually true. Lots of people don't have control over it. They aren't stupid or lacking in skill. Assuming they are is flawed. Assuming you aren't being taken advantage of because you've been indoctrinated into believing the economy is the strongest principle defining a society is additionally, flawed.
These things actually matter when the economy is the only thing guiding a society and there is a literal breakdown of morality, ethics, values, belief systems coming from the head. They influence behavior, which influences beliefs, which influences awareness, which influences actions. All of this propagates across all the smaller 'heads' of a society when those are the rules that define and enforce ideologies. That is a breakdown in society and it happens because people have nothing besides finances to hold onto to tell them about their own self. Who wants to feel like a bag of money and then just die? Who actually wants that to be a life?
There is no problem with a hierarchy. Not every person has the experience to know how to lead and not every person has the desire to own that responsibility. There is a BIG BIG BIG problem with it when it sends the wrong message.
The memory is OK, but his reality was quite painted by state management of information. Many elements of totalitarian control were definitely present -- collectivism, single party, total control of media, education and international travel, Goli Otok, suppression of certain civil movements etc -- but overall it was definitely better than in Soviet Union at the time.
> but overall it was definitely better than in Soviet Union at the time.
Yes, dramatically better. I grew up in Soviet Union, but I’ve been living here in Montenegro for many years already, and I have friends who remember life in SFRJ. That’s how I can compare things.
>Many elements of totalitarian control were definitely present.
This is misleading. It was not a totalitarian state.
Benevolent dictatorship is even an exaggeration.
Yugoslavia had a very liberal socialist economy. Trade with the west was very common. International travel was allowed. Collectivism was common but it’s misleading to suggest this is an element of totalitarianism. Strikes were more legal in communist Yugoslavia than they are in present-day United States. Control over the media is accurate.
It’s off topic but citizens also had free access to healthcare.
It most definitely was, without any doubt. However, it was achieved not by physical force like in most other cases, but by management of ideological education and control of all aspects of life, carefully choosing what will be allowed and how. This control was very subtle and by necessity needed to be carefully adapted with time, but without it the country would have fallen apart much sooner than it actually did, with catastrophic consequences.
Everything you write is exactly the result of this information control, and is what things seemed like at the surface.
Yugoslavia massively propped itself up economically by allowing its citizens to work in Western countries and effectively siphoned wealth home. Some 700.000 worked in West Germany alone[0]. It would have collapsed much earlier without piggybacking post-WWII Western economies...
"By 1988 emigrant remittances to Yugoslavia totaled over $4.5 billion (USD), and by 1989 remittances were $6.2 billion (USD), which amounted to over 19% of the world's total. A large portion of those remittances came from Yugoslav professional and skilled workers employed by Yugoslav engineering and construction firms with contracts abroad, including large infrastructure projects in the Middle East, Africa and Europe."[1]
There is some truth in this article, but a critical point is being missed.
> per-capita income has more than doubled since 1972
Actually, per capita income has plummeted since 1972. To correctly assess income, you have to know the rate of inflation, and the official inflation figures are effectively lies because they focus on consumer goods, which have indeed become cheaper, while ignoring housing (and in America, college fees and health insurance), which has become drastically more expensive thanks to artificial scarcity created by zoning laws combined with the shortage of remote or rural jobs.
That sounds like only one factor of many, but I think it accounts for much of the rest. Real income falling every decade creates negative anticipation which has difficulty finding something to latch onto because we keep being told we are getting continually richer, hence the miasma of fear and hate constantly looking for targets. Nor is the fear unfounded. For centuries, we tried to figure out what destroyed the Roman Empire. Answer: the Romans were not destroyed by any external force. They were wiped out by their own ruling class, via abuse of land ownership law.
As for what to do about it, my first suggestion would be to start voting single-issue on repeal of zoning laws.
Because money is, among other things, a massively abstract commodity, determining well-being by monetary measurements is massively contingent, nearly useless, and entirely theoretical.
Money is a massively abstract commodity, and as such, monetary distribution is an abstract measure of potential commodities. In concrete terms, this has a highly contingent relationship to well-being.
Collective wealth is, of course, subject to the same limitations but respectively less precise.
For anyone interested in the facts of what goes into the cpi-u (or -w) basket rather than opinion, here is a breakdown of the weights going into the basket of goods and services. The date is a bit stale, from 2015-2016, but good nonetheless.
notably, top-level breakdowns are:
Food and beverages 14.359
Housing 41.772
Apparel 3.018
Recreation 5.737
Transportation 16.537
Medical care 8.673
Education and communication 6.707
Other goods and services 3.198
Interestingly, if you dig into the data, you can see some interesting patterns of consumer spending. For example, women's and girl's apparel spending is 66% larger than men's and boy's apparel! Also, motor vehicle maintenance and repair is only weighted as 1.123% of spending, which is a lot less than I would have guessed given people's horror stories.
Breaking down the housing category, the combined values of rent and owner's equivalent of rent make up more than 30% of the basket. This has risen by about 5% (of the whole basket) since 1987. I doubt that that category is being evaluated too low in a substantial way. Rent by itself is only 7.8% of the basket, which may mean that the basket is fairly insensitive to people being gouged by their landlords.
If you live in a fancy metro, your rent will be above average compared to the nation. This is to be expected.
I am surprised that medical is only 8-9%. This has risen from 5.8% in 1987. I expect that the reason it is so low is that the average person spends 80% of their life having tiny medical bills and 20% of their life having huge ones.
By looking at which categories have shrunk in their weightings over time, you can get a feel for what goods/services are cheaper now than in the past OR that people now choose substitute goods instead of. Certain categories have no substitute, i.e. medical. If you squint at the data real hard you can eke out where you personally are getting reamed more than past-you would have. Some actionable advice would be to consider which services have gotten more expensive due to Baumol's Cost Disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease) and do your best to DIY them.
> If you live in a fancy metro, your rent will be above average compared to the nation.
The problem with this view is that places that a few decades ago would have counted as 'fancy metros' are now more accurately described as 'the only places where there are any jobs (the wages of which are still often insufficient to pay for housing)'.
Which leads to another actionable suggestion: we should stop tolerating failure to hire remote workers. (Yes, I know the excuses. We should also stop tolerating those excuses.)
I'm suggesting that we treat discrimination against remote workers the way we treated some other forms of harmful discrimination in hiring: stop doing it, stop accepting or repeating excuses for doing it, stop tolerating companies doing it, and ultimately make it illegal.
Remote workers are not a protected class, and there is no reason to make them a pretected class, considering the reality that lots of jobs require a physical presence. Calling it discrimination implies that there is a permanent population of people who are capable of working, but can only possibly work if they do not have to commute, and that they are being oppressed because of this. It is not discrimination so much as it's a case of society having a different set of preferences than you.
GP is giving an economic rather than a social justice reason for making it a protected class.
I don’t think I agree with him, but that doesn’t make it “not a reason”.
Reason I disagree with him is that if workplaces rearrange themselves to not need physical presence, all the jobs suddenly get done by whichever genuinely third world nation can put high bandwidth internet connection into literal shantytown slums the fastest.
If this was a gradual and planned-for change, starting with boosting the salary expectations of the poorest in the world up to our level, that’s one thing. Doing it to solve housing cost differences between rural and urban areas in developed nations will just blow up in everyone’s faces with unhandled side-effects.
Sounds like a nice ideal. I'm an economist. The first thing that comes to mind is the technology infrastructure costs required to maintain a potentially all remote workforce. A central location is better for a number of different workstreams. The second thing that comes to mind is unintended consequences. Are all jobs remote? Bakers? Doctors? Nuclear firmware upgrades?
Disclosure: I've been a remote worker full-time for the last 5 years. I travel to the office a few days a month.
There are many natural reasons why being physically in an office is advantageous. I can have face-to-face meetings with multiple people without conference call issues, I'm available to go visit clients local to the office, interactions with colleagues are just easier due to proximity, I hear the office cross-talk that is unavailable when you're remote, I form closer personal relationships with my colleagues because of countless unplanned interactions, I can perform physical tasks like installing servers, etc.
Granted, there are disadvantages to working locally too - but the complex mix of advantages and disadvantages feed into the decisions that everyone makes in how they run their businesses, where they choose to be employed, etc.
Does it not concern you that you're advocating overriding all of that decision making with some one-size-fits-all government policy that would criminalize people simply working the way they wish to?
If you want to make this thread objective and actionable, keep it realistic.
There are thriving mid-size cities and towns across the U.S where rent doesn't eat your total paycheck. I live in one of them. The data above supports this. 41% of consumption on total housing category has only moved down slightly, from 42% in 1987.
Man, I understand your frustration, but you are pushing your own subjective opinions and situation here. When presented with some hard facts, no reaction to them, just another bland "we should" statement that would maybe work great for you.
You didn't convince me. Bring some cold hard facts, and I am happy to listen again.
For now, whenever I travel I can see millions of people being lifted from utter unimaginable poverty. That means to me more than somebody from 1st world whining on internet forums. And if this lift of the former is at the cost of the latter, so be it even if I am part of it. It's a good direction.
I think the parents’ point was that even though GDP per capita has increased, the cost of living has increased disproportionately. Because of the rise in housing and healthcare costs, net income in real dollars has gone down even as GDP continues to rise.
I've seen that claim made but have not seen evidence for it other than anecdotal or for subsets of the population. It does not seem to be true for the population as a whole.
Another argument might be made that income variability is now more significant, as any break or disruption is likely to be highly disruptive: loss of housing, family relocation, disruption of children's education and environment, etc.
I'm notaware of any specific study of same, offhand,but the notion has a name: The precariate.
It's what Yonatan Zunger (not an economist) describes as "your financial shock wealth":
I was quite astonished, reading a vintage car magazine recently. In an article about the 1972 For Mustang "Olympic" series, I've learnt that this high-end model cost then $3200 (basic Mustangs started at $2400). Average US worker salary was $800. Now compare with any brand, any model, and the average salary today...
No. Closest I've come across, though I can't find the link now, is one set of figures that just looked at housing, and found by that metric, real income in the U.S. peaked in 1959. Which, I will claim, was the main cause of the opening up of society in the sixties, with the subsequent drop in real income being the main cause of the end of this phenomenon.
We have to remove incentives for holding / renting property. I think it’s Germany that taxes the shit out of you if the owner doesn’t live in the residence. This would immediately rid the United States of all of these “investment property” owners and people buying up houses to rent with million dollar cash offers to diversify their portfolio. The stock of available homes would go up. This would also lead to the sale of any prop (?) houses being held onto indefinitely because of cheap taxes that are being rented out to fund their life actually living somewhere else. It would cut down on vacation property ownership, which again increases housing stock. It would cut down on career AirBnB-ing.
The downsides are a decrease in rental stock, and potentially less investment in any given property since a landlord is no longer maintaining it. I feel like we could find some easy fixes here with things like tax rebates for non-cosmetic home improvements.
Under the new rules, homes that are not occupied for at least six months of the year are subject to a tax of one per cent of the property's assessed value. The deadline to rent out empty dwellings was July 1.
Germany gives tax breaks to people buying real estate to rent it out. If you buy real estate to live in it, you are strictly worse off, when it comes to taxes.
The solution is to have zero tax on property of primary residence. This way when one does buy land and pays it off there is no need to have a substantial income to pay property tax and you can at least live rent free not paying "rent" to the tax authorities every year) and/or make the land work for you. Also remove the inheritance tax so wealth can be built over generations and not evaporate away. Getting rid of inflation as well would help as one could simply save money in a bank account and not worry about it losing value every year.
Also, tho per capita income may rise, that does not account for (re)distribution of income, in this case drastically upward. The portion of US GDP going to workers who earn a living (vs capital holders) has never been lower in modern times.
While I still haven't been able to find an actual time series graph, a Google search for 'Old Economy Steve' gives some indicators of what has been lost.
And remember, the new scarcity is all artificial. There was a time when most people had to be poor because our species did not have the technology to do better. Now, most people are poor in the middle of plenty, because those in power are deliberately making them that way.
Could it be caused by the fact that the middle class of the Western World seem to be shrinking all over the board, with job security and a smaller ration of home owners as the result?
When I grew up in the early 80's most kids would have expected to be home-owners at 25, have a steady job and a few kids with an optimistic look at the future.
Instead, most woke up into a reality where they would have to partake in an obvious real-estate bubble, or rent a smaller-than-expected apartment in a downtrodden neigborhood, and where jobs were hard to come by due to outsourcing and automation, or to the older generations simply not wanting to retire.
Most of those I grew up with now seem to be amongst the people with a very pessimistic world view.
Have the World become a better place for the majority of the World's population? Definitely! For the middle class in Europe and North America? I'm not so sure.
> Yet many people, like Milanović, have fond memories of bygone years, and wonder if reports of their awfulness have been exaggerated.
I was born in Romania in ‘82 and was 7 when communism fell. Yet I can remember vividly that ...
We were suffering of cold in winter, as the centralized heat was on and off, we had regular electricity blackouts and my parents, both with university degrees, had jobs and working their asses off on lower salaries than factory workers and couldn’t find or afford a babysitter so at 4 years old I was left alone at home, during blackouts so in the dark at around 19:00 o’clock too.
In those days people relied on families in such situations of course, grandparents making the best babysitters, however the communists forcibly moved a lot of people to the cities and distributed people where they were supposedly needed, so a lot of families were uprooted and split.
I also remember my parents listening to Radio Free Europe, with the volume barely audible, in order for the neighbors to not hear us. Paranoia of “informants” was at an all time high and any resistance and conflicting opinions were long since crushed.
You know, “1948” the book is actually boring me, compared to what actually happened in real life. Turns out that in order to do massive surveillance of the population you don’t need technology at all, as you can recruit a massive army of informants that can listen and send regular reports on their neighbors for free. And it doesn’t need to be efficient either, all that matters is for paranoia to set in, which will ensure compliance of the population.
My father was a party member of course, you had to be insane to not be one. But in private he hated communists with all his heart, just like his father before him; my grandfather who fought in WWII and then had his land confiscated.
The communists were responsible for raising the standards of living somewhat, compared with the period between the two world wars, plus there’s this myth around that everyone had a roof over his head back then; which is why some old people feel nostalgic. It was all in a global context of economic growth of course, progress being inevitable.
But people remembering miniskirts were in a position of privilege. Yes, we had happy moments and life went on, but at least during the eighties there was this constant tension and hunger that you could feel, so thick that you could almost cut it with a knife.
Then the revolution came and we killed our dictators. Unfortunately people are dumb sheep and power was grabbed by former communists. We are far better off today, we have a better quality of life, we are part of the EU, but unfortunately this wave of populism has hit us as well and the ruling administration seems determined to destroy all progress we’ve made in the last 28 years. And people being stupid, still vote for them, just like they were cheering during our former communist congresses. Sometimes my cynicism takes over and I’m thinking that we deserve whatever is coming.
>It’s very clear you think money is the primary shaper of societies.
Not OP but this doesn’t sound like what they are saying.
I think they are just saying that socialism/communism is a form of economy, not a form of leadership. A socialist society can theoretically have any structure of government. The socialist part is the design of the economy.
> The communists were responsible for raising the standards of living somewhat, compared with the period between the two world wars
In many ways it was a far more progressive society despite the shortages of consumer goods and services, and partly thanks to the totalitarian control from the state. What was once a largely agrarian and rural country like Bulgaria was transformed into a modern industrial society for a few decades. The newly-born social class of "scientific-technical intelligentsia" was, although not rich in terms of wealth and property, hugely respected in society. You had electrical and computer engineers whose fathers were farmers. Cultural life was also raised to a new level, as ordinary working-class people started attending operas and theaters. Small children were encouraged to play classical instruments.
The whole system collapsed under its feet because politically, it was unable to represent the interests of these newly-born classes and that led to its erosion.
Yes, that was awful, but how is this relevant here? Care to mention Guantanamo too? Also the Pitesti experiment was right after the war when the communism had a Soviet flavor. Im not arguing that communism was a good thing, though some things were more progressive back then as the Bluetomcat states above.
If you are Bulgarian, your country was more privileged during communism.
What happened in Romania is that we ended up pretty isolated from the other Warsaw Pact countries due to Ceausescu’s flirting with the US. We never liked the Soviets for various reasons, most notably for their occupation of Basarabia and for the harsh war reparations that followed WWII, we didn’t like them during Gheorghiu Dej, or during Ceausescu and we suffered for it.
Also Ceausescu decided to repay all the foreign debt we had so extreme austerity measures were implemented.
So in the 80s we didn’t suffer from a mere shortage of products or services, oh no, the population was actually freezing in the winter and starving.
Interestingly it turned out the US’s CIA saw the uprising coming a few years before it happened. We found out about it from some declassified documents (can’t find the link). That our leaders could not see it coming, but the CIA did, shows how broken our leadership was (a phenomenon of communism is that nobody wants to report bad news so everyone in the chain of command ends up lying).
Also implied but not explicitly mentioned above is that we had a secret police agency that was among the most brutal in the world.
Communism as implemented in Eastern Europe was progressive only on paper.
In Romania we had churches and monasteries demolished and priests accused of being legionaries (former fascist / fat-right movement) and taken to political camps. After beaten into submission, the Orthodox Church was then used for controlling the population.
And minorities were treated pretty badly. Being a homosexual under Ceausescu was a crime for example and handicapped children were locked away in special homes under inhuman conditions, out of the public’s eye.
Truth is freedom of speech is a basic human right that should be absolute. Without it communists have been progressive only on paper, but not in fact. You cannot have a progressive society without freedom of speech. And there’s no communist state that can claim otherwise, not China, not any other communist state that’s still standing.
N.B. these days I am left-leaning on social issues, however freedom of speech is where I always draw the line, as all censorship is evil and a slippery slope, even when done for righteous reasons; although I do tolerate censorship on private property, but that’s another discussion.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] threadThe author’s memory is OK. There were little to no such things in communist Yugoslavia.
Unlike Warsaw bloc countries, Russian army did not occupy Yugoslavia. The country remained independent, and human rights situation was much better than in Russia.
> he had mainly good memories—of “long dinners discussing politics,” the “excitement of new books,” “languid sunsets, whole-night concerts, epic soccer games, girls in miniskirts.”
In soviet Russia, a long dinner discussing politics would cause the participants to be sent to Siberia, there were no whole-night concerts, and miniskirts only appeared on girls after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
I think what matters most is the culture. It’s much deeper, and much harder to change, than ideology or politics.
Historically, people living here were free, and they were and still are willing to fight for their freedom. They accidentally started WW1 this way, but that’s another story. I think that’s the root cause why Yugoslavia refused to become a satellite state of USSR. And also why the regime here was way more relaxed: the borders were open, small businesses remained in private hands, it was OK to discuss politics, miniskirts were available, etc…
Another reason is west and international politics came in. It was politically beneficial for the west to maintain good relations with Yugoslavia despite the ideology.
A political ideology is only as strong as the society that enforces it. That includes the economic framework and all its superstituous nuances defining feedback loops of behavior being accepted dogmatically as the backbone of a society.
If it aligns with your values, literally, of course it's going to be something you see as true, because questioning it would be too challenging to manage. But there are plenty of intelligent people out there who can afford to question it, and it doesn't imply a breakdown in society. It can imply progress. But only if you want to see things that way.
That honestly depends on whether you can hit the middle understanding that your philosophy on societies and all the fears that are attached as a consequence of an economic loop you believe you have control over are actually true. Lots of people don't have control over it. They aren't stupid or lacking in skill. Assuming they are is flawed. Assuming you aren't being taken advantage of because you've been indoctrinated into believing the economy is the strongest principle defining a society is additionally, flawed.
These things actually matter when the economy is the only thing guiding a society and there is a literal breakdown of morality, ethics, values, belief systems coming from the head. They influence behavior, which influences beliefs, which influences awareness, which influences actions. All of this propagates across all the smaller 'heads' of a society when those are the rules that define and enforce ideologies. That is a breakdown in society and it happens because people have nothing besides finances to hold onto to tell them about their own self. Who wants to feel like a bag of money and then just die? Who actually wants that to be a life?
There is no problem with a hierarchy. Not every person has the experience to know how to lead and not every person has the desire to own that responsibility. There is a BIG BIG BIG problem with it when it sends the wrong message.
Yes, dramatically better. I grew up in Soviet Union, but I’ve been living here in Montenegro for many years already, and I have friends who remember life in SFRJ. That’s how I can compare things.
This is misleading. It was not a totalitarian state.
Benevolent dictatorship is even an exaggeration.
Yugoslavia had a very liberal socialist economy. Trade with the west was very common. International travel was allowed. Collectivism was common but it’s misleading to suggest this is an element of totalitarianism. Strikes were more legal in communist Yugoslavia than they are in present-day United States. Control over the media is accurate.
It’s off topic but citizens also had free access to healthcare.
It most definitely was, without any doubt. However, it was achieved not by physical force like in most other cases, but by management of ideological education and control of all aspects of life, carefully choosing what will be allowed and how. This control was very subtle and by necessity needed to be carefully adapted with time, but without it the country would have fallen apart much sooner than it actually did, with catastrophic consequences.
Everything you write is exactly the result of this information control, and is what things seemed like at the surface.
"By 1988 emigrant remittances to Yugoslavia totaled over $4.5 billion (USD), and by 1989 remittances were $6.2 billion (USD), which amounted to over 19% of the world's total. A large portion of those remittances came from Yugoslav professional and skilled workers employed by Yugoslav engineering and construction firms with contracts abroad, including large infrastructure projects in the Middle East, Africa and Europe."[1]
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/yugoslav-guest-workers-torn-between-ge...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...
> per-capita income has more than doubled since 1972
Actually, per capita income has plummeted since 1972. To correctly assess income, you have to know the rate of inflation, and the official inflation figures are effectively lies because they focus on consumer goods, which have indeed become cheaper, while ignoring housing (and in America, college fees and health insurance), which has become drastically more expensive thanks to artificial scarcity created by zoning laws combined with the shortage of remote or rural jobs.
That sounds like only one factor of many, but I think it accounts for much of the rest. Real income falling every decade creates negative anticipation which has difficulty finding something to latch onto because we keep being told we are getting continually richer, hence the miasma of fear and hate constantly looking for targets. Nor is the fear unfounded. For centuries, we tried to figure out what destroyed the Roman Empire. Answer: the Romans were not destroyed by any external force. They were wiped out by their own ruling class, via abuse of land ownership law.
As for what to do about it, my first suggestion would be to start voting single-issue on repeal of zoning laws.
Collective wealth is, of course, subject to the same limitations but respectively less precise.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2017.txt
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/home.htm#...
notably, top-level breakdowns are: Food and beverages 14.359
Housing 41.772
Apparel 3.018
Recreation 5.737
Transportation 16.537
Medical care 8.673
Education and communication 6.707
Other goods and services 3.198
Interestingly, if you dig into the data, you can see some interesting patterns of consumer spending. For example, women's and girl's apparel spending is 66% larger than men's and boy's apparel! Also, motor vehicle maintenance and repair is only weighted as 1.123% of spending, which is a lot less than I would have guessed given people's horror stories.
Breaking down the housing category, the combined values of rent and owner's equivalent of rent make up more than 30% of the basket. This has risen by about 5% (of the whole basket) since 1987. I doubt that that category is being evaluated too low in a substantial way. Rent by itself is only 7.8% of the basket, which may mean that the basket is fairly insensitive to people being gouged by their landlords.
If you live in a fancy metro, your rent will be above average compared to the nation. This is to be expected.
I am surprised that medical is only 8-9%. This has risen from 5.8% in 1987. I expect that the reason it is so low is that the average person spends 80% of their life having tiny medical bills and 20% of their life having huge ones.
By looking at which categories have shrunk in their weightings over time, you can get a feel for what goods/services are cheaper now than in the past OR that people now choose substitute goods instead of. Certain categories have no substitute, i.e. medical. If you squint at the data real hard you can eke out where you personally are getting reamed more than past-you would have. Some actionable advice would be to consider which services have gotten more expensive due to Baumol's Cost Disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease) and do your best to DIY them.
The problem with this view is that places that a few decades ago would have counted as 'fancy metros' are now more accurately described as 'the only places where there are any jobs (the wages of which are still often insufficient to pay for housing)'.
Which leads to another actionable suggestion: we should stop tolerating failure to hire remote workers. (Yes, I know the excuses. We should also stop tolerating those excuses.)
What are you suggesting?
I don’t think I agree with him, but that doesn’t make it “not a reason”.
Reason I disagree with him is that if workplaces rearrange themselves to not need physical presence, all the jobs suddenly get done by whichever genuinely third world nation can put high bandwidth internet connection into literal shantytown slums the fastest.
If this was a gradual and planned-for change, starting with boosting the salary expectations of the poorest in the world up to our level, that’s one thing. Doing it to solve housing cost differences between rural and urban areas in developed nations will just blow up in everyone’s faces with unhandled side-effects.
There are many natural reasons why being physically in an office is advantageous. I can have face-to-face meetings with multiple people without conference call issues, I'm available to go visit clients local to the office, interactions with colleagues are just easier due to proximity, I hear the office cross-talk that is unavailable when you're remote, I form closer personal relationships with my colleagues because of countless unplanned interactions, I can perform physical tasks like installing servers, etc.
Granted, there are disadvantages to working locally too - but the complex mix of advantages and disadvantages feed into the decisions that everyone makes in how they run their businesses, where they choose to be employed, etc.
Does it not concern you that you're advocating overriding all of that decision making with some one-size-fits-all government policy that would criminalize people simply working the way they wish to?
There are thriving mid-size cities and towns across the U.S where rent doesn't eat your total paycheck. I live in one of them. The data above supports this. 41% of consumption on total housing category has only moved down slightly, from 42% in 1987.
Remote work should be more encouraged, I agree.
You didn't convince me. Bring some cold hard facts, and I am happy to listen again.
For now, whenever I travel I can see millions of people being lifted from utter unimaginable poverty. That means to me more than somebody from 1st world whining on internet forums. And if this lift of the former is at the cost of the latter, so be it even if I am part of it. It's a good direction.
I'd like to see that in a time series graph some day, rather than just an assertion.
https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
I'm notaware of any specific study of same, offhand,but the notion has a name: The precariate.
It's what Yonatan Zunger (not an economist) describes as "your financial shock wealth":
https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6dc1...
"All hollowed out" does reference several related studies:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/white-w...
The downsides are a decrease in rental stock, and potentially less investment in any given property since a landlord is no longer maintaining it. I feel like we could find some easy fixes here with things like tax rebates for non-cosmetic home improvements.
From a CBC article;
Under the new rules, homes that are not occupied for at least six months of the year are subject to a tax of one per cent of the property's assessed value. The deadline to rent out empty dwellings was July 1.
https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-h...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA
And remember, the new scarcity is all artificial. There was a time when most people had to be poor because our species did not have the technology to do better. Now, most people are poor in the middle of plenty, because those in power are deliberately making them that way.
When I grew up in the early 80's most kids would have expected to be home-owners at 25, have a steady job and a few kids with an optimistic look at the future.
Instead, most woke up into a reality where they would have to partake in an obvious real-estate bubble, or rent a smaller-than-expected apartment in a downtrodden neigborhood, and where jobs were hard to come by due to outsourcing and automation, or to the older generations simply not wanting to retire.
Most of those I grew up with now seem to be amongst the people with a very pessimistic world view.
Have the World become a better place for the majority of the World's population? Definitely! For the middle class in Europe and North America? I'm not so sure.
https://milescorak.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/branko-milano...
https://blog.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/the-western-middle-c...
I was born in Romania in ‘82 and was 7 when communism fell. Yet I can remember vividly that ...
We were suffering of cold in winter, as the centralized heat was on and off, we had regular electricity blackouts and my parents, both with university degrees, had jobs and working their asses off on lower salaries than factory workers and couldn’t find or afford a babysitter so at 4 years old I was left alone at home, during blackouts so in the dark at around 19:00 o’clock too.
In those days people relied on families in such situations of course, grandparents making the best babysitters, however the communists forcibly moved a lot of people to the cities and distributed people where they were supposedly needed, so a lot of families were uprooted and split.
I also remember my parents listening to Radio Free Europe, with the volume barely audible, in order for the neighbors to not hear us. Paranoia of “informants” was at an all time high and any resistance and conflicting opinions were long since crushed.
You know, “1948” the book is actually boring me, compared to what actually happened in real life. Turns out that in order to do massive surveillance of the population you don’t need technology at all, as you can recruit a massive army of informants that can listen and send regular reports on their neighbors for free. And it doesn’t need to be efficient either, all that matters is for paranoia to set in, which will ensure compliance of the population.
My father was a party member of course, you had to be insane to not be one. But in private he hated communists with all his heart, just like his father before him; my grandfather who fought in WWII and then had his land confiscated.
The communists were responsible for raising the standards of living somewhat, compared with the period between the two world wars, plus there’s this myth around that everyone had a roof over his head back then; which is why some old people feel nostalgic. It was all in a global context of economic growth of course, progress being inevitable.
But people remembering miniskirts were in a position of privilege. Yes, we had happy moments and life went on, but at least during the eighties there was this constant tension and hunger that you could feel, so thick that you could almost cut it with a knife.
Then the revolution came and we killed our dictators. Unfortunately people are dumb sheep and power was grabbed by former communists. We are far better off today, we have a better quality of life, we are part of the EU, but unfortunately this wave of populism has hit us as well and the ruling administration seems determined to destroy all progress we’ve made in the last 28 years. And people being stupid, still vote for them, just like they were cheering during our former communist congresses. Sometimes my cynicism takes over and I’m thinking that we deserve whatever is coming.
Not OP but this doesn’t sound like what they are saying.
I think they are just saying that socialism/communism is a form of economy, not a form of leadership. A socialist society can theoretically have any structure of government. The socialist part is the design of the economy.
And I’m pretty sure they’re correct.
In many ways it was a far more progressive society despite the shortages of consumer goods and services, and partly thanks to the totalitarian control from the state. What was once a largely agrarian and rural country like Bulgaria was transformed into a modern industrial society for a few decades. The newly-born social class of "scientific-technical intelligentsia" was, although not rich in terms of wealth and property, hugely respected in society. You had electrical and computer engineers whose fathers were farmers. Cultural life was also raised to a new level, as ordinary working-class people started attending operas and theaters. Small children were encouraged to play classical instruments.
The whole system collapsed under its feet because politically, it was unable to represent the interests of these newly-born classes and that led to its erosion.
What happened in Romania is that we ended up pretty isolated from the other Warsaw Pact countries due to Ceausescu’s flirting with the US. We never liked the Soviets for various reasons, most notably for their occupation of Basarabia and for the harsh war reparations that followed WWII, we didn’t like them during Gheorghiu Dej, or during Ceausescu and we suffered for it.
Also Ceausescu decided to repay all the foreign debt we had so extreme austerity measures were implemented.
So in the 80s we didn’t suffer from a mere shortage of products or services, oh no, the population was actually freezing in the winter and starving.
Interestingly it turned out the US’s CIA saw the uprising coming a few years before it happened. We found out about it from some declassified documents (can’t find the link). That our leaders could not see it coming, but the CIA did, shows how broken our leadership was (a phenomenon of communism is that nobody wants to report bad news so everyone in the chain of command ends up lying).
Also implied but not explicitly mentioned above is that we had a secret police agency that was among the most brutal in the world.
Communism as implemented in Eastern Europe was progressive only on paper.
In Romania we had churches and monasteries demolished and priests accused of being legionaries (former fascist / fat-right movement) and taken to political camps. After beaten into submission, the Orthodox Church was then used for controlling the population.
And minorities were treated pretty badly. Being a homosexual under Ceausescu was a crime for example and handicapped children were locked away in special homes under inhuman conditions, out of the public’s eye.
Truth is freedom of speech is a basic human right that should be absolute. Without it communists have been progressive only on paper, but not in fact. You cannot have a progressive society without freedom of speech. And there’s no communist state that can claim otherwise, not China, not any other communist state that’s still standing.
N.B. these days I am left-leaning on social issues, however freedom of speech is where I always draw the line, as all censorship is evil and a slippery slope, even when done for righteous reasons; although I do tolerate censorship on private property, but that’s another discussion.