Right. For sure if you look at the data I think the biggest increases have been the .1% and the .01%.
The drop in poverty is really good, and something our negativity biased news organizations are happy to skip. There have been some great human improvements over the past 50 years.
alternative title: Number of dual income families in the US with both parents forced to work to survive increased since 1967, while also working longer hours
don't piss on my boot and tell me it's raining, almost every observable metric shows living standards have dropped significantly in the US over the past few decades
I’d be interested in seeing these metrics and how they quantify living standards. Does living standard mean “keeps pace with the average <standard> at a given time” or does it mean “given a specific objective <standard>“? For example, when I was a kid having cable television went from not standard when I was in elementary school to standard by the time I entered high school. Similarly: internet access, cell phones, having a computer, having a laptop, etc. This was true even outside of tech: having more than one car, having central air AC, having your own bedroom, taking the bus to school or being driven, and even having a bike evolved as I grew up.
They don't though.
Real GDP per Capita is almost 2x what it was in 2000, and 3x what it was in 1980. Hdi has also increased over those periods, though not as much as in European countries.
I'm actually not sure if there are any metrics that show us living standards dropping, much less "significantly" from the late 20th century to 2020.
> Real GDP per Capita is almost 2x what it was in 2000, and 3x what it was in 1980
I guess that means real wages have increased almost 3x since 1980, with hours down since people have to work less to survive due to increased productivity.
Actually US real wages have been basically flat for half a century.
GDP per capita increasing is bad for the people working and creating wealth, as the workers creating the wealth see none of the increase in wages, and it gives the heirs parasitically expropriating surplus labor time from workers more power.
Yeah you're gonna need to back this one up chief. Not sure about you but I'd rather be living in a 1 bedroom apartment with modern appliances, internet, smartphone, and a laptop than I would in a 8000sqft that had none of these things.
We have a lot more expenses today in large part because standard of living has increased. Certain components, like home affordability and medical, have become much worse than they were. Many other components have improved.
> Yeah you're gonna need to back this one up chief. Not sure about you but I'd rather be living in a 1 bedroom apartment with modern appliances, internet, smartphone, and a laptop than I would in a 8000sqft that had none of these things.
I know it is, it's just as subjective as OP's generic "drop in living standards "statement. And while subjective, I can't imagine it's uncommon. A lot people really have a difficult time conceptualizing life before the internet. It's become almost an extension of reality that we take for granted as an absolute, when in actuality it's a luxury afforded to us.
It's raining. The reason you're not more well off is that due to cultural and technological progressions you are overall less valuable to other human beings in general than a smaller group of human beings 80 year ago. This is not a deliberate scheme to disenfranchise you or others. Trying to compare the modern economy with the economy of the late 1960's is childishly naive.
Wonder how many of these households are in the Silicon Valley area? Feels like wages at large tech companies have skyrocketed in the last few years, and could reach this number quite easily.
No. The entire Bay Area is home to about 8M people, of which approximately 10% are tech workers [0]. This is a drop in the bucket across all 23.8M high earning American households.
Back in the 60's, many full time jobs came with a defined benefit pension. Health care was not nearly as expensive, even without insurance. Last, houses were cheap, college was almost free, and there were many more good public schools, so living in the very best school districts wasn't as important. In other words, many of the things that today's households making > $150k spend money on were vastly cheaper.
I call this sort of reasoning the "Wonder Years" fallacy. People forget that the “middle class family” in "The Wonder Years" show--headed by a man who graduated college and a woman who completed some college--would have been a solidly top 10% family in 1970.
Since 1970, the poverty rate among seniors has dropped from almost 25% to just above 10%: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45791.pdf. Although more people had pension plans (though never a majority), they were not portable, and most workers never stayed at a job long enough to earn their pension. Pension benefits were also low compared to what they are now. See: https://retirementlc.com/golden-age-pensions-another-fairy-t...
Healthcare was cheaper in 1970, but because doctors could not do much for you if you got heart disease or cancer or other chronic illnesses. In 1970, 40% of heart attack patients who were hospitalized died. Today, it is well under 10%. Living longer doesn’t happen automatically, it costs money. Not just to develop heart medication or cardiac stents, but for the decades of additional care that is required when a heart attack patient survives to old age instead of dying at age 55. It’s not just old people either. The infant mortality rate has dropped from 26 per 1,000 in 1960 to under 6 per 1,000 in 2020. That wasn’t from cheap interventions like vaccination, which happened a generation before that. It was from expensive interventions like giving birth in hospitals, extensive pre-natal care, surgical interventions for sick infants, etc.
The costs per square foot of new houses has stayed pretty much the same from 1970 to 2015: https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa.... What people overlook is that (1) as the population grows, the "frontier" of where the typical new house is being sold moves; and (2) people are using their growing income to buy much bigger houses. For example, Silicon Valley was an underpopulated, undesirable suburban and rural area in the 1960s—that’s why they built semiconductor facilities there!
It’s important to account for both price increases (paying more for the same thing) and consumption increases (paying more to get more). A good example of both of those things happening is college. The cost of college has undoubtedly gone up faster than inflation. But it’s also a very different product than it was in 1970, with fancy housing and recreational facilities and tons of handholding from support staff.
By contrast, housing is a good example of something where it’s been mainly consumption increases. People are taking all their extra income and using it to buy bigger houses in more desirable areas.
True, but its capabilities have grown since then, too. Things like monoclonal antibodies can now cure very serious conditions, but they are very expensive to produce.
In the 1960s, cancer was an almost certain death sentence, nowadays, it is often manageable - but that increase in survival comes with a price tag.
I think that when people complain about the cost of health care, they're not talking about things which cost a lot to produce. They're taking about things that cost almost nothing to produce, but are priced outrageously because of some wonky market dynamics
Drugs cost money to produce. Pharma R&D spending has gone up by a factor of 10 since 1980, to almost $90 billion/year. And manufacturing, sales, distribution, etc., aren’t free. EBITDA margins in the industry are typically under 30%. And drugs are just 10% of health care spending. When a cancer or heart attack patient survives instead of dying immediately, they need decades of doctors visits, nursing care, etc.
I think that when people complain about the cost of health care, they're not talking about things which cost a lot to produce. They're taking about things that cost almost nothing to produce, but are priced outrageously because of some wonky market dynamics
The second pill costs almost nothing to produce. The first pill costs billions, plural, and the successful minority of new drugs have to foot the bill for all the unsuccessful first pills.
A cartoon villain, to be sure, and a legitimate target for public policy interventions, but pretty clearly not an indication of why US health care costs so much; he managed to price those drugs specifically because they were a corner-case for the pharma industry.
The crunch at the bottom causes people to try to get their children into the elite. This causes high competition among the elites (you can see that with college tuition going up and people with degrees working as baristas) which causes a crunch at the top which is starting to cause political instability. I think a lot of this is cyclical although I'd argue that (in the US anyway) the crunch at the bottom came before it really needed to due to some poor policy decisions.
Are we just quoting people who make stuff up now? I tried reading his source and that's not what the numbers there say. His '67 numbers are too low, his current numbers too high.
Although maybe I misread the original data he links to. If so, please let me know.
For whatever reason positive news tends not to play well on HN, even if it’s factual.
But on another point, I recall that the entry of women into the workforce was almost complete by the 70’s so moving from one to two earner household isn’t likely the main driver.
>For whatever reason positive news tends not to play well on HN, even if it’s factual.
People on HN are very good and detecting when someone is trying to blow sunshine up their ass.
Take, for example, the second part of this tweet:
>Very poor households (< $25K) shrunk from 24.7% to 18.1% (number rose slightly)
That is an abject failure of an economy if I even saw one. 18.1% of households in the most embarrassingly rich country in the history of the planet are living in abject poverty? Even with what you can do with poverty wages nowadays, that fucking sucks.
By no means are 18.1% of the population living in "abject" poverty. They're living in what the US government classifies as poverty, but in the majority of these cases they still have a home, have food, have electricity, etc.
I'm not saying that they're living comfy lives, but when you throw around terms like "abject povery" you're really discrediting people who are actually living in abject poverty.
What are your plans to get the rate below 1%? What would you have done differently that wouldn't have wrecked the economy?
Ah, I love this game. It's the same one that the super-rich use to convince people barely scraping by -- or anyone who hasn't read Barbara Ehrenreich -- that you should zoom out far enough so that your situation is compared to literal kids with literal flies on their eyeballs. Your life ain't that bad, why you complainin'?
The fact is, this country could fund universal childcare, universal healthcare and universal education from K-16 and not 'wreck the economy.' All it would take is doing what every other industrialized first-world country has done... and done better, with less resources.
And don't worry, the people who you think are actually living in abject poverty aren't reading on HN on a Monday afternoon, so my discredit of their situation will go largely ignored.
I was just correcting your misusage of the term. Everything else you've said has come from you projecting your beliefs onto the discussion.
I also think your perception of social aid in some other countries is wildly distorted. These benefits often come with the side effects of significantly higher taxes and subpar offerings. There's a reason why the US harbors the majority of the worlds prestigious universities and has the best patient outcomes of any medical system in the world.
Of course I agree that things could be improved, they always could. But it's not as trivial as you'd like it to be.
The U.S. was by far the leading global agricultural exporter in 2020 with exports valued at $147.9 billion. [0]
And it's not like it's hard to get the food from where it's grown to where it's needed. The US has a navigable waterway system that is smack dab in the middle of both where the food is grown and where it is eaten by the most people. That's not a coincidence.[1]
I'm not playing semantic games about whether the households experiencing food insecurity are 'working poor' 'abject poor' or 'totally fucked poor'. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a problem that we can solve in this country.
It's literally not a problem that the government can solve, because the government classifies people to whom it provides food as 'food insecure'. If the government provided unlimited credit for all those people to spend on food, they would still be classified 'food insecure.'
Malnutrition death rate in the US is something like 1 per 100,000 per year. It's likely a large fraction of those are mentally ill people or neglected children.
While even in 1 in 100,000 is sad, the idea 10% of America is even close to starving is a fictional reality designed to deceive.
> Based on self-reported data from 12 states, one in three food insecure adults are also obese. Furthermore, food insecurity and obesity were found be associated in the general population and many population subgroups, especially women. These findings corroborate the relationship between food insecurity and obesity found in previous research. Although the association between obesity and food insecurity found in this study was cross-sectional, contributing factors to obesity and food insecurity suggest a need to address the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults.
The study you cite shows that "food insecurity" is associated with obesity. Not that it causes obesity.
Study uses questions like: “How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”
By design, this study causes obese people who eat up their food supplies to be more likely to be captured by the study than their less consumptive counterparts, even with equal amount of available food.
I would expect someone who shovels enough food in their mouth to be obese to be the kind of person to spend more than needed for meals (or to end the meal with less spare reserve food), causing them to stress about their overspending. It's not much surprise an obese person shoveling down food is more worried about overspending than the skinny person not shoveling down their hatch until they are the size of Oklahoma. Eating 4000 calories of even the cheapest food like rice and beans costs more than eating 2000 calories worth rice and beans; of course the blimp-sized person eating the 4000 calories of rice and beans is going to stress more about the cost than the person eating 2000 calories of rice and beans.
Put another way, it makes sense to me a food insecure person might say "I will buy 4000 calories worth of rice and beans instead of 2000 calories worth of rice and beans because I am food insecure, then I will save the difference in case food is inaccessible later." An obese person will then eat all 4000 calories and stress about being out of money, and become "food insecure" via this study by answering they're worried. Whereas the skinny person is not gonna stress as much, because they still have 2000 calories worth of rice and beans after their meal is done, and thus be less likely to be classified "food insecure" by the question of this study. That is, the study is designed to capture the obese person as being more food insecure even when they have same food availability of the less obese person.
Wow, that's a hot take. Not only are you blaming the fat people for being fat, you're also implying their preference for food is a causal factor in them being less financially stable?
People who are food insecure are poor. Poor people eat shitty food, binge eat more commonly when presented the opportunity, and likely suffer from more stress / malnutrition.
Food insecurity doesn't mean you're constantly underfed. It just means you can't generally know where your next meal is going to come from. Hunger sucks. It's not tough to see how that could cause you to eat more.
Veggies are not cheap. Rice and beans aren't particularly healthy. People in poverty lack money, but they also lack time, cooking equipment, and food storage equipment. You tend to get a lot of food with high carbs and salt and sugar and nothing else. Perhaps you don't really know what your poor contacts eat, or they're just not representative. This is well studied.
Veggies are not cheap. Rice and beans aren't particularly healthy.
Veggies are dirt cheap. Sure, pre-sliced baby carrots in star shapes aren't cheap, but the poor shouldn't buy those.
You should tell the 80% of the world population that lives off beans and rice as staple foods. They tend to have a lot less obesity and live longer than Americans. And we're comparing it to unhealthy food - how on earth is rice and beans "not particularly healthy" compared to potato chips and fast food?
Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
Sounds more like a lack of life skills and poor choices more than anything.
It is well studied that healthy foods tend to cost more. Vegetables are not dirt cheap. And are especially not dirt cheap per calorie. Worth nothing that rice and beans are not a vegetable as that seems to be a weird fork in your argument
The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
> Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
It is rent, wealth inequality, spread out urban planning leading to single dollar trees being the only available grocer, commute times, social support structures, corn subsidies, and a myriad of other factors that make this a very complicated issue.
But sure, let's just blame the poor for being stupid. I'm sure you'd be just fine making $7.25 an hour.
>The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
Is it possible the kind of self-discipline needed to prevent yourself from over-eating is more heartily rewarded economically in the US than in some of the particularly impoverished nations where only a tiny fraction escape poverty? I don't know, but it's worth noting the causative direction could influence going from obesity to poverty, poverty to obesity, neither, or even merely correlative dependent variables caused by some other 3rd stimulus.
No. And again, not uniquely american but rather common to pretty much all developed countries. Rural poor individuals are typically doing hard labor all day. Urban poor individuals are typically sitting in a chair.
Aside from grossly misdefining poverty by the U.S definition as "abject poverty" (it isn't even close and most certainly abject poverty doesn't apply to 18% of the U.S. population), your argument here boils down to. This factual accounting of a reduction in poverty doesn't fit with my completely arbitrary ideal of how much reduction I want to see by now, so it's "blowing sunshine up my ass". Huh?
As another reply here said, By all means, explain how you'd make poverty stand at 1%. Also explain what system you'd have that's so much better if you like.
Basic point. It's easy but disingenuous to compare the real world's changes with those of our limitless notions of the ideal. The valid thing is to compare something now to how it was previously for genuine perspective.
Good point. It's really hard to adjust for inflation. On one extreme you can use the official inflation numbers, which are lies and damned lies to make the economic progress since the 1960s look better than it is. On the other extreme you can use housing prices. The truth (inflation as felt by the average household) is probably somewhere in-between.
I think these studies failed to take into account the labor value of the individual (typically wife) who would have been home. And even better, that labor isn't taxed.
Here's a more useful source of data, including both raw and CPUI-inflation-adjusted numbers:
> "On this page is the United States average household income by year and median household income by year between 1968 and 2021. You'll also find the top 1% household income by year between 1996 and 2021, plus the top 5% and 10% for the full range. It's the newest data to this point in 2022."
(1) the median (half above/ half below) is mostly flat over the whole period, with a slight increase about 55K - 65K; anyone near or below this is almost surely a renter with little if any savings working paycheck-to-paycheck if that, and no retirement other than Social Security and maybe a small pension.
(2) the top 5% has gone from 150K to 275K, this is probably mostly the white-collar professional sector who own their own homes (the top 10% mirrors this only from 125K to 200K). This probably encompasses well-sized 401K retirement accounts.
(3) the top 1% bounces around 500K, although that data is only tracked since the mid 1990s, and seems to track things like 2001 dot com bust, 2008 subprime crash, indicating this is the sector closely tied to Wall Street revenue. (This sector tends to have net assets near 10M, multiple homes, portfolios, etc.)
The general trend of increasing wealth inequality is pretty clear, see also:
I'm shocked at how many people take inflation numbers seriously. To me, it's just obviously government propaganda.
Primitive society: priest-scribes working for the state pore over the movement of the stars, after much study pronounce that the gods are pleased, and all will be well after we sacrifice 100 goats. By the way, there is no better way to organize society, because the king is descended from the sun god
Modern society: priest-scribes working for the state pore over econometric numbers, after much study pronounce that the economy is strong, and all will be well after we print 4 trillion dollars for economic stimulus and then raise interest rates to tame inflation. By the way, there is no better way to organize society, because the government is democratically elected
> I'm shocked at how many people take inflation numbers seriously. To me, it's just obviously government propaganda.
I agree that the current way of dealing with monetary policy feels closer to rain dancing than actual science but people are taking it seriously because they're seeing it in their grocery and fuel bills every day.
78 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadWhat's the same chart look like for a random state in the Midwest?
also, how significant is income actually? how about total wealth? whats the debt level at each of these gradations etc?
The authors follow-up tweet about African-American earnings is also interesting, similar results.
The drop in poverty is really good, and something our negativity biased news organizations are happy to skip. There have been some great human improvements over the past 50 years.
don't piss on my boot and tell me it's raining, almost every observable metric shows living standards have dropped significantly in the US over the past few decades
I've got some really bad news for you, friend. The free trade era is already over and demographic collapse is coming for almost everyone.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/20/free-trade-dead-managed...
I'm actually not sure if there are any metrics that show us living standards dropping, much less "significantly" from the late 20th century to 2020.
I guess that means real wages have increased almost 3x since 1980, with hours down since people have to work less to survive due to increased productivity.
Actually US real wages have been basically flat for half a century.
GDP per capita increasing is bad for the people working and creating wealth, as the workers creating the wealth see none of the increase in wages, and it gives the heirs parasitically expropriating surplus labor time from workers more power.
We have a lot more expenses today in large part because standard of living has increased. Certain components, like home affordability and medical, have become much worse than they were. Many other components have improved.
That's a _very_ subjective viewpoint.
http://pricedingold.com/us-gdp/
As for medical, the US has a problem, especially compared to other countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...
What are some examples of the specific metrics you're referring to?
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/14/tech-employment-bay-a...
Since 1970, the poverty rate among seniors has dropped from almost 25% to just above 10%: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45791.pdf. Although more people had pension plans (though never a majority), they were not portable, and most workers never stayed at a job long enough to earn their pension. Pension benefits were also low compared to what they are now. See: https://retirementlc.com/golden-age-pensions-another-fairy-t...
Healthcare was cheaper in 1970, but because doctors could not do much for you if you got heart disease or cancer or other chronic illnesses. In 1970, 40% of heart attack patients who were hospitalized died. Today, it is well under 10%. Living longer doesn’t happen automatically, it costs money. Not just to develop heart medication or cardiac stents, but for the decades of additional care that is required when a heart attack patient survives to old age instead of dying at age 55. It’s not just old people either. The infant mortality rate has dropped from 26 per 1,000 in 1960 to under 6 per 1,000 in 2020. That wasn’t from cheap interventions like vaccination, which happened a generation before that. It was from expensive interventions like giving birth in hospitals, extensive pre-natal care, surgical interventions for sick infants, etc.
The costs per square foot of new houses has stayed pretty much the same from 1970 to 2015: https://fee.org/articles/new-homes-today-have-twice-the-squa.... What people overlook is that (1) as the population grows, the "frontier" of where the typical new house is being sold moves; and (2) people are using their growing income to buy much bigger houses. For example, Silicon Valley was an underpopulated, undesirable suburban and rural area in the 1960s—that’s why they built semiconductor facilities there!
It’s important to account for both price increases (paying more for the same thing) and consumption increases (paying more to get more). A good example of both of those things happening is college. The cost of college has undoubtedly gone up faster than inflation. But it’s also a very different product than it was in 1970, with fancy housing and recreational facilities and tons of handholding from support staff.
By contrast, housing is a good example of something where it’s been mainly consumption increases. People are taking all their extra income and using it to buy bigger houses in more desirable areas.
True, but its capabilities have grown since then, too. Things like monoclonal antibodies can now cure very serious conditions, but they are very expensive to produce.
In the 1960s, cancer was an almost certain death sentence, nowadays, it is often manageable - but that increase in survival comes with a price tag.
So in other words, "inflation adjusted" wasn't done right here?
https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/rent-growth-since-196...
That's a type of inflation. The share of cost burdened renters has increased by 1.3% per year relentlessly for 55 years.
Although maybe I misread the original data he links to. If so, please let me know.
But on another point, I recall that the entry of women into the workforce was almost complete by the 70’s so moving from one to two earner household isn’t likely the main driver.
People on HN are very good and detecting when someone is trying to blow sunshine up their ass.
Take, for example, the second part of this tweet:
>Very poor households (< $25K) shrunk from 24.7% to 18.1% (number rose slightly)
That is an abject failure of an economy if I even saw one. 18.1% of households in the most embarrassingly rich country in the history of the planet are living in abject poverty? Even with what you can do with poverty wages nowadays, that fucking sucks.
This rate should be <1%.
I'm not saying that they're living comfy lives, but when you throw around terms like "abject povery" you're really discrediting people who are actually living in abject poverty.
What are your plans to get the rate below 1%? What would you have done differently that wouldn't have wrecked the economy?
The fact is, this country could fund universal childcare, universal healthcare and universal education from K-16 and not 'wreck the economy.' All it would take is doing what every other industrialized first-world country has done... and done better, with less resources.
And don't worry, the people who you think are actually living in abject poverty aren't reading on HN on a Monday afternoon, so my discredit of their situation will go largely ignored.
I also think your perception of social aid in some other countries is wildly distorted. These benefits often come with the side effects of significantly higher taxes and subpar offerings. There's a reason why the US harbors the majority of the worlds prestigious universities and has the best patient outcomes of any medical system in the world.
Of course I agree that things could be improved, they always could. But it's not as trivial as you'd like it to be.
You’d be wrong then. Countries with universal healthcare and other social programs still have the very poor.
~10% of households experience food insecurity in the US. So assume that's a direct overlap, that would be most of the 18%
The U.S. was by far the leading global agricultural exporter in 2020 with exports valued at $147.9 billion. [0]
And it's not like it's hard to get the food from where it's grown to where it's needed. The US has a navigable waterway system that is smack dab in the middle of both where the food is grown and where it is eaten by the most people. That's not a coincidence.[1]
I'm not playing semantic games about whether the households experiencing food insecurity are 'working poor' 'abject poor' or 'totally fucked poor'. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's a problem that we can solve in this country.
[0]https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/100615/4-cou...
[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Inland_w...
While even in 1 in 100,000 is sad, the idea 10% of America is even close to starving is a fictional reality designed to deceive.
Hmmm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584410/
> Based on self-reported data from 12 states, one in three food insecure adults are also obese. Furthermore, food insecurity and obesity were found be associated in the general population and many population subgroups, especially women. These findings corroborate the relationship between food insecurity and obesity found in previous research. Although the association between obesity and food insecurity found in this study was cross-sectional, contributing factors to obesity and food insecurity suggest a need to address the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults.
Study uses questions like: “How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”
By design, this study causes obese people who eat up their food supplies to be more likely to be captured by the study than their less consumptive counterparts, even with equal amount of available food.
I would expect someone who shovels enough food in their mouth to be obese to be the kind of person to spend more than needed for meals (or to end the meal with less spare reserve food), causing them to stress about their overspending. It's not much surprise an obese person shoveling down food is more worried about overspending than the skinny person not shoveling down their hatch until they are the size of Oklahoma. Eating 4000 calories of even the cheapest food like rice and beans costs more than eating 2000 calories worth rice and beans; of course the blimp-sized person eating the 4000 calories of rice and beans is going to stress more about the cost than the person eating 2000 calories of rice and beans.
Put another way, it makes sense to me a food insecure person might say "I will buy 4000 calories worth of rice and beans instead of 2000 calories worth of rice and beans because I am food insecure, then I will save the difference in case food is inaccessible later." An obese person will then eat all 4000 calories and stress about being out of money, and become "food insecure" via this study by answering they're worried. Whereas the skinny person is not gonna stress as much, because they still have 2000 calories worth of rice and beans after their meal is done, and thus be less likely to be classified "food insecure" by the question of this study. That is, the study is designed to capture the obese person as being more food insecure even when they have same food availability of the less obese person.
How does that work?
Food insecurity doesn't mean you're constantly underfed. It just means you can't generally know where your next meal is going to come from. Hunger sucks. It's not tough to see how that could cause you to eat more.
They aren't buying TV dinners at $5 per pop.
What do you mean they are forced to eat crappy food? It's usually more expensive than the healthier options.
Veggies are dirt cheap. Sure, pre-sliced baby carrots in star shapes aren't cheap, but the poor shouldn't buy those.
You should tell the 80% of the world population that lives off beans and rice as staple foods. They tend to have a lot less obesity and live longer than Americans. And we're comparing it to unhealthy food - how on earth is rice and beans "not particularly healthy" compared to potato chips and fast food?
Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
Sounds more like a lack of life skills and poor choices more than anything.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708033/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-...
The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25292135/
> Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
It is rent, wealth inequality, spread out urban planning leading to single dollar trees being the only available grocer, commute times, social support structures, corn subsidies, and a myriad of other factors that make this a very complicated issue.
But sure, let's just blame the poor for being stupid. I'm sure you'd be just fine making $7.25 an hour.
Is it possible the kind of self-discipline needed to prevent yourself from over-eating is more heartily rewarded economically in the US than in some of the particularly impoverished nations where only a tiny fraction escape poverty? I don't know, but it's worth noting the causative direction could influence going from obesity to poverty, poverty to obesity, neither, or even merely correlative dependent variables caused by some other 3rd stimulus.
That’s fantastic news.
As another reply here said, By all means, explain how you'd make poverty stand at 1%. Also explain what system you'd have that's so much better if you like.
Basic point. It's easy but disingenuous to compare the real world's changes with those of our limitless notions of the ideal. The valid thing is to compare something now to how it was previously for genuine perspective.
> "On this page is the United States average household income by year and median household income by year between 1968 and 2021. You'll also find the top 1% household income by year between 1996 and 2021, plus the top 5% and 10% for the full range. It's the newest data to this point in 2022."
https://dqydj.com/household-income-by-year/
Some takeaways (inflation-adjusted)
(1) the median (half above/ half below) is mostly flat over the whole period, with a slight increase about 55K - 65K; anyone near or below this is almost surely a renter with little if any savings working paycheck-to-paycheck if that, and no retirement other than Social Security and maybe a small pension.
(2) the top 5% has gone from 150K to 275K, this is probably mostly the white-collar professional sector who own their own homes (the top 10% mirrors this only from 125K to 200K). This probably encompasses well-sized 401K retirement accounts.
(3) the top 1% bounces around 500K, although that data is only tracked since the mid 1990s, and seems to track things like 2001 dot com bust, 2008 subprime crash, indicating this is the sector closely tied to Wall Street revenue. (This sector tends to have net assets near 10M, multiple homes, portfolios, etc.)
The general trend of increasing wealth inequality is pretty clear, see also:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/110215/brief...
Primitive society: priest-scribes working for the state pore over the movement of the stars, after much study pronounce that the gods are pleased, and all will be well after we sacrifice 100 goats. By the way, there is no better way to organize society, because the king is descended from the sun god
Modern society: priest-scribes working for the state pore over econometric numbers, after much study pronounce that the economy is strong, and all will be well after we print 4 trillion dollars for economic stimulus and then raise interest rates to tame inflation. By the way, there is no better way to organize society, because the government is democratically elected
I agree that the current way of dealing with monetary policy feels closer to rain dancing than actual science but people are taking it seriously because they're seeing it in their grocery and fuel bills every day.