Story time : from my boss his son is specialized in factory logistics for production lines. He helps plan to build streets transportation plans how much when where how etc.
He looked into jobs in us and Japan / China.
When he looked at the US it was basically : planning canceled, canceled, stopped, pushed back for later etc etc. So he moved now to China.
So, from a data point of one. It does not look so great...
To be precise, for "production" and "nonsupervisory" workers. Doesn't say anything about the size of this population, and how representative it is of the general earnings potential of the US as a whole.
Well, I was assuming that people like engineers and programmers weren't "production". There are more of them now than there were in 1973, and fewer factory workers.
This pool of workers includes those in manufacturing and construction jobs, as well as all “nonsupervisory” workers in service industries such health care or fast food. The group accounts for about four-fifths of the privately employed workers in America, according to BLS.
What is your point? That because TV production has largely become automated and those reduced labor costs have brought prices down significantly, that the cost of living has also magically come down?
Yeah but the comments you are replying to don't talk about wages. They only offer counterpoints that disprove your original assertion: prices didn't go down in every sector.
It's inflation adjusted wages. As in adjusted for changes in average costs of living. Most people don't spend all their money on TVs. they spend it on food, housing, transportation, clothing and other things that existed in 1973. Furthermore, they adjust the inflation figure to account for changes in the technological utility of things
Life is not fundamentally different. Little details are different, but people still buy houses or pay rent, buy cars, buy food, pay for education, pay for entertainment, etc.
TVs are definitely more affordable, but Hospital Services and College is really not. Somewhat surprisingly it looks like Housing is more affordable (rising, but less than average earnings).
I think these longitudinal studies of the wage/cost relationships are really valuable as they provide a lot of insight into what people feel about the economy and where things are going.
Income, potential to increase income, and income security is so location dependent, that I don't think one can easily compare housing costs throughout the years. The places that are expected to grow in the future have rapidly increasing housing costs, whereas the places that are expected to decline have shrinking housing costs.
I'd like to see that same graph but going back to 1980.
Back in the early 80s you could buy a house in an expensive state (NY) for about 50-60k but today a similar house goes for around 400k.
But a lot of people in the 80s and early 90s made equal or more money than they do today, like a legit dollar for dollar amount more. Certain industries paid 35k-40k a year back then but pay 30-35k today, which is a massive difference considering how much more things are today than back in the 80s.
Yeah, they take that into account when calculating inflation, which is why CPI is quoted at 1% when the cost of housing, food, gas, health care, college tuition (i.e. everything you actually need) is more like 10%.
Using that logic, a homeless person with a casio watch is better off than Charlemagne.
We should be comparing now with now. And most importantly, we should be comparing wealth inequality because wealth translates directly to power and wealth inequality means power inequality.
Nobody is competing against anyone from 1973 or 1873. We are competing against people today. And the accumulation of wealth and power by a small group of elites should concern everyone regardless of the price of insignificant trinkets.
Considering that the homeless person likely does not have food security or a place to live, which I would consider to be significantly more important than being able to tell the time, I would have to disagree with your claim that the homeless person is “better off”.
Plenty of folks in power are drug addicts or mentally ill. The bigger difference between the well-to-do and the homeless person is that the person with money can get drug addiction treatment from a nice place instead of going to forced AA or NA classes the shelter offers. (forced if they want shelter at times). They can also afford proper medications and caretakers.
I'd also like to note that there are lots of folks that are homeless simply because they cannot afford housing. I've not had that fate, but I did live some time without proper heat nor hot water because I couldn't afford the natural gas deposit. Lots of other folks are living with friends or relatives.
Okay, I don't think you should be downvoted to oblivion, but this is a hard point to get right.
Yes, we should account for technological improvements in the quality of our lives. In fact, it's the only way to have long-term improvement in real, appropriately measured consumption. And yes, there are creature comforts you can buy today that were darn near impossible back then.
But ... you need to weight these improvements by relative impact. Yes, TVs are better. But how much utility they can really add to your life is limited. They're little comfort when the important things -- like not being bankrupted by health care costs -- eat up all the rest.
If you buy too much into the importance of better TVs, you end up like Fed banker William Dudley, and insist that living costs went down, even as every bill went up, because iPads are faster.
Yes, but if you look at the chart, most of the loss occurred in the decade of the 70s, before any talk of trickle down economics. From the end of the 82 recession until the mid nineties the erosion continues, but at a much slower pace, closer to being static until the trend starts a long slow ascent, close to 25 years to recover what was mostly lost in 10.
Another way of writing the same title that sounds completely different: "Inflation adjusted US wages reach highest level since 1973."
I'll never understand what compels journalists (or wannabe journalists) to insert words like "finally" into their headlines. It would have been just fine without that one word.
Because the GDP growth in that time is staggering, yet workers have shared in none of it. If the proportion of the country's earnings going up labor had been maintained, the average wage would be double.
Or "Inflation adjusted US Wages hit a new all time high, first since 1973". There really are not a lot of ways to spin this in a negative way, but somehow they did it. Why try to make people feel depressed about it? It's great!
Now that I’m a bit older (29) it’s fascinating to reflect back on my childhood and teenage years in the context of economic trends. I’ve been interviewing my grandpa to make a biography of his life and it’s mind-blowing to hear about how different the 50s were. A teacher (grandpa) and a part-time worker (grandma) supporting 2 babies and a senior (great grandma), yet still able to buy a home in Millbrae and a plot of land in Tahoe (which my family still has to this day). And then the decline of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and I put the histories of my mom and dad and their generation into that context. It brings a whole new dimension to my understanding of them.
For sure, there’s myriad factors. And the Bay Area has its own unique history. My main idea is that studying economic history has provided a rich layer of new understanding about the lives of my family.
As someone who is not from the Bay Area, lives currently in the Bay Area, is not wealthy, and from a family that is not wealthy: I spend a lot of time ( too much time ) trying to figure out how everyone around me is wealthy. There are a lot of paths to wealth. The most common elements are previous family wealth, hard work, frugality, but also really good long-term decision making ( keep the first house you buy forever ) and skills that can't be taught (sheer will and ambition).
My grandpa became a multi-millionaire even though he dropped out of middle school. Born into a working class German family where no one really valued education. Good luck doing that now.
Grammar edit, guess we still don't value education.
I don't think I understand your point. The majority of multi-millionaires aren't that way because they got a good education and worked a standard job. Most are because they made good investments, started a company, or were born into money. Dropping out of middle school is pretty unrelated to this if you're a smart, enterprising person.
The article is misleading in an important respect. While real wages haven't budged much (they certainly haven't declined), benefits, which are tax-advantaged relative to wages, have increased quite a bit. For example, while wages rose 3% since 2000, benefits rose 22%: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us....
The changes you're talking about regarding quality of life more have to do with increased costs for housing in developed coastal areas. A teacher and a part-time worker can still afford to raise a family today, they're just doing it in Texas or Iowa rather than the Bay Area. You can buy a beautiful 3BR house in a good school district in Des Moines (and frankly, tons of other places in America) for a bit over $200k.
If anything, including benefits, you have less than you did at the start of the millennium.
Though reading the article you linked, I'd be pretty surprised if insurance costs in the USA are not suppressing wages.
In other words, the health care industry in the USA is doubly stealing from those in it. It's flat out affordable, and may be why you didn't get a raise...
> The article is misleading in an important respect. While real wages haven't budged much (they certainly haven't declined), benefits, which are tax-advantaged relative to wages, have increased quite a bit. For example, while wages rose 3% since 2000, benefits rose 22%: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us....
Despite the article not mentioning benefits, the primary reason for the increase in benefit costs is the skyrocketing increase in cost of healthcare (which is mentioned in the article you provided), which we know has inflated faster than the CPI for decades:
The only other significant component of employer-provided benefits, retirement contributions, has if anything been cut back via defined contribution plans of today (i.e. 401ks), rather the generous defined-benefit (AKA pension) plans of the past.
And things like transportation subsidies, etc are marginal compared to healthcare expenditures.
So it's not as if the increase in employers' benefit spending is being experienced by most workers as in increase in utility. Therefore, the spirit of the article, which is that workers have received little real[1] value from the GDP increases of the last 40 years, is still correct.
What the article doesn't address, but your article does, is the fact that wages are recovering unequally, with most of the gains going to the highest earners.
1. I'm not counting ever cheaper electronics and entertainment in my definition of "real".
"Increases in labor compensation are being eaten up by increases in benefits costs" is a different statement than "labor compensation isn't increasing." From the employer's point of view, whether they're spending 22% more because of higher salaries or more expensive benefits doesn't make a difference.
And the implications are different for policy. If labor compensation isn't going up, that suggests a structural problem in the economy. If labor compensation is going up, but it's being eaten up by increasing healthcare, education, and housing costs, then that suggests targeted reforms are necessary in those sectors.
> If labor compensation isn't going up, that suggests a structural problem in the economy. If labor compensation is going up, but it's being eaten up by increasing healthcare, education, and housing costs, then that suggests targeted reforms are necessary in those sectors.
Both are true, simultaneously.
For the majority of workers, wages are historically static despite rising GDP, and that requires reconsidering the structure of the economy (in particular how it has changed in recent decades).
And indeed we need targeted reforms of the highly inflationary sectors.
That is not necessarily true. There is data showing that total compensation is rising at the same level as labor productivity, and the percentage of national income going to labor, when accounting for benefits, has been extremely consistent since 1970: https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/w13953.html.
If we assume the status quo in 1970 was acceptable, then the data shows no need for "reconsidering the structure fo the economy." Rather, labor compensation grew just as fast as it was "supposed to" but that growth was eaten up by a handful of sectors.
That paper switches out the CPI for a statistic of its own invention, "implicit price deflator for the output of the
nonfarm business", which is far more charitable to its conclusion that workers have taken home a consistent percentage of economic growth since the 1970s.
But the paper completely avoids the problem of how those gains are distributed across workers in the economy, that is, it doesn't address income inequality trends at all (the author was an economist for Reagan, so that's not terribly surprising).
Even if the paper's statistics are taken at face value (that labor share of GDP has been consistent since the 1970s) it's simultaneously true that the majority of GDP growth has gone to those at the high end of the income distribution in the time period it covers. You might not call that an economic structure problem, or even consider it a problem at all, but many would reasonably disagree.
A teacher (grandpa) and a part-time worker (grandma) supporting 2 babies and a senior (great grandma), yet still able to buy a home in Millbrae and a plot of land in Tahoe (which my family still has to this day)
I can guarantee you right now, you could buy a home and a plot of land that will be out of reach for most people 40 years from now.
The question is - where will that be? Your grandparents probably had no idea Millbrae and Lake Tahoe would be as popular as they are today.
Hell, in the 1970's, people were leaving SF in droves as people wanted to get out of big cities.
> Hell, in the 1970's, people were leaving SF in droves as people wanted to get out of big cities.
Yeah but they were moving to the peninsula and the south bay, e.g. Millbrae, San Mateo, and San Jose. That's what my family did in the post-WWII period along with many others.
Lake Tahoe has been popular way longer than you are giving it credit for. It's had tourists for over a hundred years, and Squaw Valley hosted the Olympics in 1960.
For sure. Millbrae was farmland back then. My grandpa grew up in SF and had never heard of it. And it took 8 hours to get to Tahoe from SF.
One difference is they didn’t have to think about whether it would pan out in the long run. They needed a bigger house. They could get one 15 minutes away from SF, where my grandpa was stationed at the time.
I guess I find the shock that this worked out rather strange. My parents immigrated to this country 30 something years ago. My dad was a salesman and my mother a teacher and they managed to raise two children, send us to private school (catholic, so cheaper than others), pay for music lessons, support my grandparents and aunt who lived with us for a while, and sponsor my entire family. And they owned their home and bought land.
The fact is that americans are not very frugal people and waste their money. If immigrants who came to this country in the 80s managed to do this, there is no excuse for a native born American. My mother even went to college again because her degree wasnt accepted and she wanted to be a teacher. Thrift and sacrifice go a long way
Immigrants' racial makeup would, on average, predispose them to more systematic racism (in the negative direction) than native-born Americans, no? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say.
The comment is vague, but I interpreted systemic racism as a function of slavery > failed reconstruction > black codes > sharecropping > 100-year effort to legislate the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments > Civil Rights Act of 1965 > manipulating property titles/deeds to circumvent legal protections around right to own property > mass incarceration... small points debatable, but clear historical and empirical through line since late 18th century.
EDIT: All of these things affect immigrants of color (who may come from worst circumstance) but they have a “blank slate”, not fighting a legacy.
A friend of mine's grandparents retired quite comfortably after selling the Chinese food restaurant they ran for many years. They were farmers in China but after the second time an invading army took everything they decided not to stick around for the third strike. They showed up in a dying rust belt city without the ability to read and write English, say nothing of cultural differences and they did just fine.
The point of this anecdote is to point out what we often take for granted. Even if a sizable minority of Americans are subject to systemic racism native born Americans at least have the ability to transact business in English which gives them a pretty good head start and I think that on average that more than make up for a systemic disadvantage applied to a fraction of the population.
Perhaps that's true, but given my parents immigrated here at 30 with no money, and managed to do it, I don't feel that is really an excuse for me, since I have an 8 year head start.
Like I said, thrift. We were certainly poorer than our friends and had less stuff. Americans do not like that idea.
My grandfather supported nine kids on a single government salary and he took them on a vacation to Cape Cod every year. He was a compliance auditor for a federal agency. He wasn't the only person like this. His experience is totally unremarkable. It's just amazing how well off everyone was back then.
A teacher in 1950 is not the same as a teacher in 2019. There were less teacher's then, the value was more. We will be saying the same for programmer's too. In 2019 a programmer made a lot of money, but in 2089 a programmer can't afford a roof over their head...
US economy is at an amazing position currently. Even though it has a smaller share of the global economy than 1960s (40% then vs 22% now), the 60s was an anomaly as most of Europe and Asia's economies were decimated from the war - the jump in worldwide prosperity is a lot better for the human species. US economy is the biggest in the world, twice as big as the next country, and 5 times bigger than Japan, and 6 times bigger than Germany. It has survived stagflation and oil crisis in the 70s, and globalization in the 80s and 90s. The US economy is much diversified - from tech in Silicon Valley, entertainment in Hollywood, oil and gas in Texas, tourism in Florida, finance and fashion in NY, agriculture, manufacturing, services, etc - and safer from systemic shocks from a loss of one particular industry. Capital is freely flowing into US - and away from emerging countries. US growth is in the 3%, while Japan/Germany is close to recession, and China is experiencing its own great depression.
> US economy is the biggest in the world, twice as big as the next country, and 5 times bigger than Japan
Nominally yes, but PPP is generally more apt.
> GDP comparisons using PPP are arguably more useful than those using nominal GDP when assessing a nation's domestic market because PPP takes into account the relative cost of local goods, services and inflation rates of the country, rather than using international market exchange rates which may distort the real differences in per capita income.
Inflation adjustment is weird across time and geographies. I'm not saying the article is wrong, but just something to keep in mind. In 1973 the internet was nascent, we didn't have smartphones, insulin was still hard to produce, and so on. Even making the same amount "inflation adjusted" as 1973, our lives are much richer in part to all these advances.
As an example - it's likely in adjusted terms someone in the top 1% a 100 years ago would be close to the top percentiles today, and yet it's pretty easy to argue that the average person today is still doing much better in almost any measure than a 1%-er from a century ago.
>Inflation adjustment is weird across time and geographies. I'm not saying the article is wrong, but just something to keep in mind. In 1973 the internet was nascent, we didn't have smartphones, insulin was still hard to produce, and so on. Even making the same amount "inflation adjusted" as 1973, our lives are much richer in part to all these advances.
Or much poorer. Smartphone means FOMO, constantly accessible to bosses, less interaction and more wasted hours with BS apps (people are starting to treat it as addiction), and the "easier to produce insulin" is balanced by skyrocketing healthcare costs, much more stressful lives (including being worked to the bone, and with no "company loyalty" anymore), and loss of quality of life in many important ways...
It's just that for many US people, "access to BS gadgets" (which nobody missed in the 70s because they didn't exist anyway) trumps other qualitative life factors that don't even register. I think e.g. Europeans would appreciate those much more...
>As an example - it's likely in adjusted terms someone in the top 1% a 100 years ago would be close to the top percentiles today, and yet it's pretty easy to argue that the average person today is still doing much better in almost any measure than a 1%-er from a century ago.
Regarding quality, meaning of life, friends, lifestyle, etc, or just based on access to stuff?
I really think these numbers are antiquated, and with modern data science, a more robust picture of wages and employee compensation will emerge.
The median salary only accounts for the top 30% of Americans, and almost every job that pays more than $23/hr requires a college degree, not to mention that training / education / certification is financed through families and individuals, increasing their debt burden, which brings down their real wages. And that's one parameter, individual debt has also been increasing, as well as the gradual decline of the interest rates since the 70s.
All-in-all the bigger picture is more complex, and with every metric of inequality increasing, globally, I think the numbers calculated for inflation adjusted average wages for production and non-supervisory workers are antiquated.
Wow the 1970s were not kind to inflation-adjusted wages.
It's interesting to look at this graph through the lens of demographics & generations. The post-war wage boom from 1949-1963 corresponds almost exactly to when the Silent Generation (those born during the baby-bust years of the Depression & WW2). The peak of the graph in 1973 corresponds to the initial entry of the peak of the Baby Boomers (1955) into the workforce. There's a rise from the 90s onwards corresponding to Gen-Xers entering the workforce (at 22 now, since college degrees have become more prevalent) and the G.I. Gen retiring, but it stalls out in 2005 just as the first Millenials start entering the workforce.
Maybe there's actually something to the Econ 101 models about factors of production and how a relative shortage of labor increases labor's share of national income relative to capital while a glut does the opposite.
HS-educated members of generation after Millenials (born 2001-onwards, and tiny - fertility has been dropping to record lows) start entering the workforce in 2019; college-educated ones in 2023, and the peak of the baby-boomers starts retiring in 2020. Perhaps we'll see another sharp rise in wages in the near future, assuming we don't destroy ourselves because of the coming stock market crash as all the baby boomers try to cash out their 401(k)s at once.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadAll sufficiently large economies should protect their domestic industries with tariffs. Otherwise its a race to the bottom for labor wages.
He looked into jobs in us and Japan / China.
When he looked at the US it was basically : planning canceled, canceled, stopped, pushed back for later etc etc. So he moved now to China.
So, from a data point of one. It does not look so great...
You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
http://www.littlehouseinthevalley.com/cost-of-living-compari...
What's your point?
2. What was the average wage?
https://cdn.howmuch.net/articles/price-changes-in-usa-in-pas...
TVs are definitely more affordable, but Hospital Services and College is really not. Somewhat surprisingly it looks like Housing is more affordable (rising, but less than average earnings).
I think these longitudinal studies of the wage/cost relationships are really valuable as they provide a lot of insight into what people feel about the economy and where things are going.
Back in the early 80s you could buy a house in an expensive state (NY) for about 50-60k but today a similar house goes for around 400k.
But a lot of people in the 80s and early 90s made equal or more money than they do today, like a legit dollar for dollar amount more. Certain industries paid 35k-40k a year back then but pay 30-35k today, which is a massive difference considering how much more things are today than back in the 80s.
We should be comparing now with now. And most importantly, we should be comparing wealth inequality because wealth translates directly to power and wealth inequality means power inequality.
Nobody is competing against anyone from 1973 or 1873. We are competing against people today. And the accumulation of wealth and power by a small group of elites should concern everyone regardless of the price of insignificant trinkets.
I'd also like to note that there are lots of folks that are homeless simply because they cannot afford housing. I've not had that fate, but I did live some time without proper heat nor hot water because I couldn't afford the natural gas deposit. Lots of other folks are living with friends or relatives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, we should account for technological improvements in the quality of our lives. In fact, it's the only way to have long-term improvement in real, appropriately measured consumption. And yes, there are creature comforts you can buy today that were darn near impossible back then.
But ... you need to weight these improvements by relative impact. Yes, TVs are better. But how much utility they can really add to your life is limited. They're little comfort when the important things -- like not being bankrupted by health care costs -- eat up all the rest.
If you buy too much into the importance of better TVs, you end up like Fed banker William Dudley, and insist that living costs went down, even as every bill went up, because iPads are faster.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUST...
Edit: nor were the jobs provided by that factory a proximate cause.
I'll never understand what compels journalists (or wannabe journalists) to insert words like "finally" into their headlines. It would have been just fine without that one word.
That and we figured out how to make really tiny transistors and the entirely new industry set up shop here.
Grammar edit, guess we still don't value education.
Quite doable now for the enterprising middle-schoolers making ASMR and unwrapping videos.
The changes you're talking about regarding quality of life more have to do with increased costs for housing in developed coastal areas. A teacher and a part-time worker can still afford to raise a family today, they're just doing it in Texas or Iowa rather than the Bay Area. You can buy a beautiful 3BR house in a good school district in Des Moines (and frankly, tons of other places in America) for a bit over $200k.
If anything, including benefits, you have less than you did at the start of the millennium.
Though reading the article you linked, I'd be pretty surprised if insurance costs in the USA are not suppressing wages.
In other words, the health care industry in the USA is doubly stealing from those in it. It's flat out affordable, and may be why you didn't get a raise...
Despite the article not mentioning benefits, the primary reason for the increase in benefit costs is the skyrocketing increase in cost of healthcare (which is mentioned in the article you provided), which we know has inflated faster than the CPI for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_prices_in_the_Unit...
The only other significant component of employer-provided benefits, retirement contributions, has if anything been cut back via defined contribution plans of today (i.e. 401ks), rather the generous defined-benefit (AKA pension) plans of the past.
And things like transportation subsidies, etc are marginal compared to healthcare expenditures.
So it's not as if the increase in employers' benefit spending is being experienced by most workers as in increase in utility. Therefore, the spirit of the article, which is that workers have received little real[1] value from the GDP increases of the last 40 years, is still correct.
What the article doesn't address, but your article does, is the fact that wages are recovering unequally, with most of the gains going to the highest earners.
1. I'm not counting ever cheaper electronics and entertainment in my definition of "real".
And the implications are different for policy. If labor compensation isn't going up, that suggests a structural problem in the economy. If labor compensation is going up, but it's being eaten up by increasing healthcare, education, and housing costs, then that suggests targeted reforms are necessary in those sectors.
Both are true, simultaneously.
For the majority of workers, wages are historically static despite rising GDP, and that requires reconsidering the structure of the economy (in particular how it has changed in recent decades).
And indeed we need targeted reforms of the highly inflationary sectors.
If we assume the status quo in 1970 was acceptable, then the data shows no need for "reconsidering the structure fo the economy." Rather, labor compensation grew just as fast as it was "supposed to" but that growth was eaten up by a handful of sectors.
But the paper completely avoids the problem of how those gains are distributed across workers in the economy, that is, it doesn't address income inequality trends at all (the author was an economist for Reagan, so that's not terribly surprising).
Even if the paper's statistics are taken at face value (that labor share of GDP has been consistent since the 1970s) it's simultaneously true that the majority of GDP growth has gone to those at the high end of the income distribution in the time period it covers. You might not call that an economic structure problem, or even consider it a problem at all, but many would reasonably disagree.
I can guarantee you right now, you could buy a home and a plot of land that will be out of reach for most people 40 years from now.
The question is - where will that be? Your grandparents probably had no idea Millbrae and Lake Tahoe would be as popular as they are today.
Hell, in the 1970's, people were leaving SF in droves as people wanted to get out of big cities.
Yeah but they were moving to the peninsula and the south bay, e.g. Millbrae, San Mateo, and San Jose. That's what my family did in the post-WWII period along with many others.
That probably took Lake Tahoe from “expensive” to “astronomical”.
One difference is they didn’t have to think about whether it would pan out in the long run. They needed a bigger house. They could get one 15 minutes away from SF, where my grandpa was stationed at the time.
The fact is that americans are not very frugal people and waste their money. If immigrants who came to this country in the 80s managed to do this, there is no excuse for a native born American. My mother even went to college again because her degree wasnt accepted and she wanted to be a teacher. Thrift and sacrifice go a long way
Racial disparities along with systemic racism could provide an explanation. Attained education levels as well. Just some thoughts.
EDIT: All of these things affect immigrants of color (who may come from worst circumstance) but they have a “blank slate”, not fighting a legacy.
The point of this anecdote is to point out what we often take for granted. Even if a sizable minority of Americans are subject to systemic racism native born Americans at least have the ability to transact business in English which gives them a pretty good head start and I think that on average that more than make up for a systemic disadvantage applied to a fraction of the population.
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/valu...
Like I said, thrift. We were certainly poorer than our friends and had less stuff. Americans do not like that idea.
I suspect it was just a bubble though since his parent's generation were mostly farmers working 12 hour days.
Nominally yes, but PPP is generally more apt.
> GDP comparisons using PPP are arguably more useful than those using nominal GDP when assessing a nation's domestic market because PPP takes into account the relative cost of local goods, services and inflation rates of the country, rather than using international market exchange rates which may distort the real differences in per capita income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
As an example - it's likely in adjusted terms someone in the top 1% a 100 years ago would be close to the top percentiles today, and yet it's pretty easy to argue that the average person today is still doing much better in almost any measure than a 1%-er from a century ago.
Or much poorer. Smartphone means FOMO, constantly accessible to bosses, less interaction and more wasted hours with BS apps (people are starting to treat it as addiction), and the "easier to produce insulin" is balanced by skyrocketing healthcare costs, much more stressful lives (including being worked to the bone, and with no "company loyalty" anymore), and loss of quality of life in many important ways...
It's just that for many US people, "access to BS gadgets" (which nobody missed in the 70s because they didn't exist anyway) trumps other qualitative life factors that don't even register. I think e.g. Europeans would appreciate those much more...
>As an example - it's likely in adjusted terms someone in the top 1% a 100 years ago would be close to the top percentiles today, and yet it's pretty easy to argue that the average person today is still doing much better in almost any measure than a 1%-er from a century ago.
Regarding quality, meaning of life, friends, lifestyle, etc, or just based on access to stuff?
The median salary only accounts for the top 30% of Americans, and almost every job that pays more than $23/hr requires a college degree, not to mention that training / education / certification is financed through families and individuals, increasing their debt burden, which brings down their real wages. And that's one parameter, individual debt has also been increasing, as well as the gradual decline of the interest rates since the 70s.
All-in-all the bigger picture is more complex, and with every metric of inequality increasing, globally, I think the numbers calculated for inflation adjusted average wages for production and non-supervisory workers are antiquated.
I'm not a mathematician but this doesn't sound right to me.
It's interesting to look at this graph through the lens of demographics & generations. The post-war wage boom from 1949-1963 corresponds almost exactly to when the Silent Generation (those born during the baby-bust years of the Depression & WW2). The peak of the graph in 1973 corresponds to the initial entry of the peak of the Baby Boomers (1955) into the workforce. There's a rise from the 90s onwards corresponding to Gen-Xers entering the workforce (at 22 now, since college degrees have become more prevalent) and the G.I. Gen retiring, but it stalls out in 2005 just as the first Millenials start entering the workforce.
Maybe there's actually something to the Econ 101 models about factors of production and how a relative shortage of labor increases labor's share of national income relative to capital while a glut does the opposite.
HS-educated members of generation after Millenials (born 2001-onwards, and tiny - fertility has been dropping to record lows) start entering the workforce in 2019; college-educated ones in 2023, and the peak of the baby-boomers starts retiring in 2020. Perhaps we'll see another sharp rise in wages in the near future, assuming we don't destroy ourselves because of the coming stock market crash as all the baby boomers try to cash out their 401(k)s at once.