How much of inflation during Biden years was from Trump? For instance, Trump agreements to restrict oil production after covid lasted deep into Biden's term. The US still did better on inflation than most comparable peers in the aftermath of covid.
We let Trump print $4T in an election year and Biden print $2T in four years. Trump was going 40mph in the parking lot, Biden slowed down to 5mph, and while there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether or not the latter was too fast when someone is spazzing out about the 5mph and ignoring the 40mph, it's because they have an agenda.
A big part of it was like $5T in covid stimulus, most of which happened under Trump. Biden piled some more on, probably unnecessarily. It felt like we were balancing on a razor's edge and maybe starting to come out of it by the end of 2024. A lot of inflationary policies since then.
The biggest problems were various supply shocks associated with the pandemic and its aftermath and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden admin brought down inflation much faster than even optimistic economists predicted, while maintaining full employment and avoiding a recession. The US economy during that period significantly outperformed most other wealthy countries. (As one indicative example, the cover story of The Economist from October 2024 was titled The American economy: The envy of the world.)
Since then we've had a wide range of completely self-inflicted policy faceplants, including notably several rounds of illegal tariffs and a war with Iran.
Biden's ARP independently caused inflation according to multiple central bank analyses.
However, you are also correct that Trump pressuring OPEC to cut oil production at the end of his first term did cause additional inflation in Biden's term.
Why was that bound to happen? Inflation also raises nominal wages. It's not clear what impact inflation has on the relative price of labour vs goods and services.
Maybe it's very bad. Or maybe it's negligible. And which third of americans is it, the poor the middle or the rich or a mix of everyone? These factors are important before we can draw more than the most shallow of conclusions.
There's a chart of the average that looks pretty bad. But also I don't have time to read 78 pages right now.
I don't think the "average" is a good metric for the social impact of this. Everyone (or almost everyone) being at a standstill would be the minimum that governments should worry about. When even a sizable minority loses ground, that could create unrest.
Its interesting, I thought it was pretty well established that COVID era stimulus helped lower earners make real gains, even adjusted for inflation, while higher earners who did not get stimulus checks lost ground?
From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.
One could make the point that in a society that is primarily driven by capital, it is wise to keep an eye on the health of it from those that are within said system.
This thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary.
So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.
I read it as 3% retire, 3% enter the workforce, and everyone else is slightly better / more senior than the year before. So the average wage could be flat.
> The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career.
> and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
This is an extremely unrealistic expectation. There are a multitude of reasons for people's incomes to fluctuate other than retirement. People make career changes that result in lower income for many reasons, like taking a better job, changing careers, transitioning to a lower demand job when they have children, or moving to a new city with lower wages for personal preference.
For many jobs the earnings are also dependent on the company's earnings. Incentive structures, bonuses, RSUs. Even low paying companies scale their staff up and down based on demand. They can't hold a monotonically growing set of staff and also monotonically increase their wages when the incoming demand for their product is not monotonically growing.
The only way to come close to an "idealized society" like you're proposing is a totally self-sustaining, command and control economy where a central authority determines not only everyone's income, but their expenditures too. It's not possible to keep the entire economy and everyone in it moving in the same direction unless you're dictating where all of the money goes in society to a fine degree. Variations of this have been tried. The members of that society do not find themselves more well off.
> This compression accelerated in 2021: real wage growth in the bottom two deciles remained positive and close to its pre-period pace, while all other deciles experienced declines of about 2 percent, roughly four percentage points below their pre-period growth
That’s true, and you could even use any measure you’d like. Perhaps the Gini coefficient. I should specify that I’m not trying to make direct claim about inequality.
Only that, for anyone against the ails of inequality, the bottom wage earners getting more (and even outpacing other deciles) is a win.
I'm not sure averages are that interesting, because the people at the high end have an extra-ordinary amount of influence on the average. You might want to look at the shape of the distribution?
The other interesting finding here is that only 57% of these "job stayers" beat or matched inflation, while 43% suffered a real wage cut. A huge chunk of the people who's wages beat inflation only did so due to job hopping
Saw a theory somewhere that, instead of raising the minimum wage, a policy that enables and incentivizes job hopping is what actually works for increasing the median wage level. The inverse implication of the theory is also interesting: any policy that makes job hopping harder than staying would suppress the wage level.
I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side
Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then
I dunno, the Ute and Navajo folks I live near don't agree. A lot of the indigenous folks I know think we are living in a literal apocalypse.
Historically the way white folks have squared that circle has been to say that those folks aren't really people and simply don't know the joys of Christian city dwelling.
But greater turnover only occurs when people don’t want to stay.
It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.
Yeah. Itd be ideal if companies could adjust their existing employees wages fairly. This alternative of people moving frequently creates a high turnover org which isnt efficient. But if employers dont compensate their existing employees fairly then high turnover is unfortunately the only way to go
And yet that has terrible implications. Job hopping is both extremely unsatisfying on an individual level (no place to belong; you're just an interchangeable cog in the machine being swapped around, giving you no sense of purpose in your work) and on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).
Competitive labor markets are FAR more efficient in terms of labor productivity, allocation, skill development, and spreading ideas around. One of the reasons the Industrial Revolution happened in England was because labor was more mobile than on the continent.
If your mindset is "The economy is an incredibly dynamic, living thing whose purpose is to satisfy the consumer desires of the moment", then job-hopping can be all of very satisfying, very lucrative, and very purposeful. Your purpose is to do whatever is most needed. You don't get attached to any one task, but treat yourself as malleable and adaptable, and think of your past roles as a portfolio of skills and experiences that you can draw on to meet new challenges. You could describe your approach to work as "Work is something I do, not what I am."
If your mindset is "The economy is the society that I grew up in, and I'm seeking my place in it, and then I want a role where I can grow and build expertise", this is extremely unsettling. You view your job as an identity, a part of yourself. To leave that job is to leave a part of your identity behind, and to be fired or laid off is to have a part of your identity ripped away. And so you'll fight hard (and take many poor bargains) to avoid being put in that situation. It's not simply a matter of economics; it's a matter of being and belonging. Work is not just what you do, it is who you are.
Commerce vs. Guardian syndrome [1], or growth vs. fixed mindset [2]. There isn't really a right answer, but American culture, society, and business favors commerce syndrome over guardian syndrome, while many other cultures (really, most of the rest of the world) is the opposite.
> [...] on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).
A certain amount of churn is good on the national or even global level, because it moves knowledge between companies. Probably not great for the company you depart, but great for the company you arrive at.
This is the standard in the Scandinavian social democracies. They have no minimum wage laws (though unions supplement that greatly) and a competitive labor market pushes wages up.
Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.
They also have a much better safety net. Healthcare not being tied to employment is already massive.
I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
Flat tax is only ever flat when you hold down deductions. That’s way harder than it seems.
The corporate veil is extraordinarily valuable to the point where a minimum 10% tax on any money passing through options makes a lot of sense. However, the idea you can pass liability off for free is so pervasive you’d never get something like that to pass.
Yes to a stronger welfare state, including untying healthcare and employment, and a UBI (more specifically a negative income tax).
But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.
To clarify, that's the demand for labour in farming has shrunk while crop yields per acre have increased.
Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
And yet, within the last couple years, the unemployment rate has remained stable within its usual 3-5% healthy band, and the total amount of people employed has increased overall.
Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
That metric is so gamed it doesn’t even make sense. If you’ve been out of work for 6 months (or is it 12) you just fall off the metric. So the entire homeless population of the US is not counted as unemployed. That’s been baked into the metric for decades and they have only gotten more discriminatory as to who counts as unemployed since.
Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.
As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term.
In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
There’s no duration for when you’re counted out of the labor force; only when you stop looking for work. Your incentivized to report your looking for working (and provide proof) to get unemployment benefits, and those who opt out of such benefits for more than 4 weeks are not counted as part of the labor force.
I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic.
And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—-if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help.
Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports?
It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.
The unemployment problem is about people looking for a job and not being able to find one. If someone doesn’t even want a job though, that’s not something you can “fix” anymore.
To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try find jobs for people who don’t want them?
It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just don’t want jobs—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need to work and thus isn’t looking for a job. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.)
The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful.
To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste.
The point being that there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you frame them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.
They headline U3 because it's best at answering the question "who is looking for work but can't find it", but of course they use U6. It's literally one of the main metrics in the monthly unemployment report by the Buerau of Labor Statistics. The BLS created the U-# system, and was in fact the first to report a separate U6 metric.
Eurostat, the Internation Labor Organization, OECD--what incentive do all these organizations have to globally misrepresent unemployment? Of course they measure and consider U6, but they choose to headline U3 instead not because it's prettier and they want to serve national propaganda interests, but because it's just more useful.
Healthcare being tired to employment and related lacks of safety net are the only reason the most abusive companies (call centers, common retail experiences) have employees.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
I feel like both extremes - strong safety net, and no safety net - only work in small countries. For any other case, a cheap, market-based insurance is best with a limited safety net that covers extreme edge cases. Switzerland really nails this, with practically no public healthcare cover, but cheap and compulsory insurance (compared to local earnings).
I don't think I'll ever understand this perspective. To my ears, all the AI hype and profoundly ignorant economic fantasies sound exactly like the bidet hype of the 2010s.
You can't have a revolution based entirely on not having to wipe your ass (except when you still do because bidets are garbage).
Unless you are fresh out of college and working at some lame startup or coding sweatshop, mature white collar work has always been pretty damn close to "not having to work".
To be clear, I meant that there are no threats to what has always kept white collar workers employed. The past few years have been nothing but the most asinine arguments by truly pitiable people.
You're easily replaceable early on when your only value is doing, but with more experience come more meetings and responsibilities. You become valuable for knowing, and knowing is not mere knowledge.
Assuming that the years of experience have shaken out the chaff, the only source of stress for those who remain employed is what is already inseparable from life itself. Personal growth without work doesn't even make sense.
That's why it doesn't feel like work. That's why the concept of "not having to work" is pathological and ridiculous. Anyone feeling this way about "work" needs to get help. I'm totally serious when I say that.
When everyone is the same (genetics, background, culture, etc) there is very little structural inequality in a competitive market. In an empire like the US, so many groups exist in a hierarchy that government support is required. In such an environment bare competition simply reveals and highlights fundamental difference, which is not conducive to social cohesion or harmony.
Because America is the innovation capital of the world.
I know that sounds like corny and biased American exceptionalism, but I think it’s just objectively true.
Other countries can have vastly superior government policy, and that shows up in significant ways (like Denmark having an even higher productivity than the U.S.), but nobody has played the productivity game at as big a scale as the U.S. has, and that’s sort of just an insurmountable advantage for the time being.
NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google—-I could go on for a very, very long time. Those companies alone are going to create heavy competition within the tech sphere, and add on top of that Baumol’s cost disease from every other big U.S. industry, and you get the current situation.
No other country has the behemoth of capital and opportunity like the U.S. has. This will naturally have a big influence on things.
Dane here. Europeans have a different appetite for risk. Venture funding is 100x harder to get in Europe, meaning far less dynamism in start-ups and far less innovation. Sweden and Denmark buck the trend a little, but it's still a different league.
Why is funding harder? Culture and laws we created as a result. We're far less accepting of things like leverage M&As, options, flexible employee remuneration and conditions (especially for start-ups), etc. VCs therefore need to clear a far higher bar to mitigate risk, meaning only the very best proven ideas receive funding.
Further, investors tend to prefer lower, but more stable returns. There is much less appetite for moon-shots. I could speculate that this is partly driven by the tax structures. Why risk $50M if you know that 60% of the rewards would be taxed? You would use a much more conversative risk ratio, preferring 5% returns but very low risk. This extends to individuals, too. Why start a business when most of the rewards from the considerable risk will be taxed? Especially given the onerous business laws.
Denmark and Sweden are notable standouts. Our laws make it easy to start businesses, operate, and fire workers as needs change. However we still have very high taxes.
There is one final thought: most people I know do not aspire to become Ferrari owners with five mansions. We aspire to happy and healthy families with good friends, good wine, and cozy holidays. If this is one's aspiration, risking their financial stability for something they don't care about would not be very common. Danes who do aspire for the Ferrari lifestyle leave for the US.
This is a great summation, and I agree with everything you mentioned here.
One additional thing to mention though is that Americans are also just richer. Even if you include government benefits (social transfers), Americans rank extremely high on measures of disposable income per household. As far I’m aware that is the most complete measure of income, and despite being a massive country of almost 400 million, the median American is comparable to someone living in Luxembourg.
As you’d expect, this effect only grows when you go up the ladder, and American millionaires are on average richer than say, Danish millionaires.
(Note, I’m not saying that this is good or bad, just that it is. For what it’s worth I think we could learn a lot from the Danish model, but that’s my own distinct, normative option.)
Thus, since there is just generally more capital to go around, capital is easier to raise.
(And as an American, there’s plenty of us here too who enjoy the good life, free of Ferraris and mansions.)
It's a good point, and I think it's self-reinforcing. Americans are richer because they invest more because they're richer. This is why productivity declines are so pernicious. They lead to a negatively reinforcing cycle of poorer -> less investment -> poorer.
Great point. So many people I know who have worked in Silicon Valley have spoken about a different mindset there. Culture matters a great deal, but because it's intangible and hard to measure, we don't often see it in productivity and prosperity metrics and research. I think it's true that culture is contagious, but we also see that people who share values like to hang out together. The largest expression of this is a nation.
You mention unions, but what you're leaving out is they have a huge advantage in those countries compared to the US. One big one is that, Union A can boycott a Company B over a dispute with Union C. That is illegal in the US, and it's a very powerful thumbscrew against the powerful.
It's one thing to fight your baristas, it's another to fight your baristas, bean supplier, mail delivery, and freight movers all at once.
I always wonder if minimum wage does more harm than good.
This conversation usually derails, so to be clear no, I don’t think people should work for poverty wages, a viable business should include happy non-subsidized employees.
My question is whether a global price floor psychologically depresses wages by establishing a global price anchor. Price anchoring is well known to influence the price people will accept.
For jobs like cashier that are fungible just blanket get minimum wage, would they pay more without one when the employer can’t just point to the anchor price and say take it or leave it? Would they be faster to localize wages to local costs?
This was fun to entertain but I don't think we live in that world.
You think it's possible that the true wage the grocery store wants to pay its employees is actually higher than the price floor? But for some reason they can't think of any other numbers to write down on the paycheck? And without the price floor they'd be forced to think for themselves and reconsider their morals and the market conditions and their balance sheet and pay $20 an hour instead of $15?
I think it's much more likely the minimum wage can be interpreted as "we would pay you even less than this if it weren't illegal." See the tipped wage. They would pay you $0 if they could.
This is true, and the collective agreements set lower bounds for almost all jobs. On the flip side, employers often treat collective agreements as the only salary option they're willing to offer for blue-collar positions, and the only wage increases may be the percentage bumps negotiated by the unions. In this case the only way to meaningfully increase your salary is to advance in your career. Doing the same work with double the efficiency will not be reflected in the pay.
Mind you, this does not apply to white-collar positions like IT in the same manner. The salary bands are still quite strict -- 6 figures is still a rarity -- but you do negotiate them and can get meaningful raises.
I was thinking the time it takes to find a job is good indicator of how hard it is to switch jobs, if that was tracked and reduced that would be good for workers.
Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).
Ok, good luck with that. When dems had both houses and Obama in the WH, the best they could do was the ACA which was a HUGE compromise (no public option, and in many ways a huge handout to the entrenched insurer lobby). But by all means, go for it.
Anyway, the reason for employer-based care isn't to be evil, it was to create risk pools. Insurance being purchased only individually has big problems: the insurers can't price the risk for a new individual subscriber in any sensible way without going back to the "pre-existing conditions exclusion" BS that all of us hate, or penalizing people with high premiums based on the conditions they've had. Employer groups fix that because they can look at a company as a whole and understand that say a gym chain disproportionally employs young and fit people, whereas, say, Walmart, employs a more health-diverse and age-diverse set of people, so maybe they need to pay more per person. So they can price risk efficiently without punishing individuals.
Of course I personally think the insurance idea itself is the wrong way to model paying for healthcare, but it's what we have, and distorting the market even further will only make things worse.
Bottom line, if you want major changes, work on convincing more than 49% of the public to vote for your party.
shrug I’m rooting for a public option. It’s a democratic republic though. Only way to get a change like that done is to convince more voters that your party actually represents their interests in order to get the power to push something like that through. Yet the Democrats have been losing support for years, because they now expend most of their political capital on unpopular policies, and appeal only to college-educated elites, showing disdain toward everyone that doesn’t already support them.
Yeah no thanks, I rather have the government regulate some actual floors rather than hoping that the better angels of American corporations eventually do the right thing.
Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.
You're not simply hoping that corporations do the right thing though. Rather, you're making it more economically unfeasible for them to pay workers less.
That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it.
And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies.
Gotcha, pure fantasy that seems to rely on many assumptions that don't hold up in other countries. Do appreciate the criticism section on wiki: "a purely linguistic combination of opposites that can be applied to virtually any policy mix."
Everything we try will rely on some assumption, but I think it’s unfair to call that fantastical. What assumptions do you think are uncalled for?
Norway, Sweden, Denmark—these are countries where this model has been proven to work in practice, not theory.
If you still call bullshit though, I’d cordially invite you to show me similar evidence for price controls working as well as flexicurity does in the Scandinavian states.
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
It's not about being uneasy. I've had six jobs in my career that are all over the lot with respect to software engineering. How to work with specific influential personalities like the C-suite, picking up and gaining some expertise with the company's stack, establishing the proper processes and engineering discipline for mentoring and growth. Over time I see the decisions that the company has made and what has worked and what hasn't, and also the reasoning behind those decisions, and I can bring that knowledge forward when the company tries to iterate on their current processes. That is immensely valuable in maintaining continuity in the business and making good decisions that don't repeat past mistakes.
I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
well yeah - unfamilliarity, to a certain degree. But its more than that. It's the slow process of gaining expertise. There are of course many transferable skills from one company to another. and there are some that are not. Knowing the relationships between all the bosses, who got passed over for promotion, who needs a certain type of project on their plate etc. Also knowing all the history of various prior initiatives, failed and successful, really helps you get stuff done. Most work in non-small enterprises needs building yes but also buy-in from others, which needs them to respect you, and for you to know what hoops to jump through and what to say to keep tham all happy.
I think it's bimodal for me, lots in the first six months bringing fresh eyes and outside ideas followed by a lull of a couple years before the benefits of realy knowing the company sets in.
4 years seems like a long time, but I'd easily say that's true for a year. I suppose it's relative to your definition of good.
In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.
I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.
The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
For sure there is a downside. To develop real expertise in a domain takes time. We have people hopping between jobs before they've even learnt how to do one job right.
In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.
I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...
A policy that requires job hopping to get good wages discriminates against people who are less mobile: workers with families, elderly parents, older workers with more ties to their neighborhood, people who don’t have enough savings to move, people who can't afford transportation...
I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.
As a tangent, poverty line definitions vary by country, in Australia, for example, earning less than half the median wage is considered below the Australian poverty line.
Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty.
As I understand it, that's a fairly common definition for relative poverty (either that or 60%) though of course you're still right that it's best to confirm both the threshold the methodology is the same (or use an explicitly international comparison that covers both/all compared countries in the same work, such as those produced by the OECD or similar bodies).
Why does it have to be a choice? Raise the median, raise the minimum, use wealth created through higher productivity and a healthier labour market to redistribute to some degree, everyone wins?
The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.
Higher productivity and other such benefits are a leap. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that people who work at a company longer end up more capable of contributing to that company.
In some ways this could even be an argument for the cause of enshittification of everything. When everything is liminal, it somewhat directly leads to a 'get mine and go' type mindset, which in turn leads directly to enshittification, no longer term than next quarter thinking, and so on. I've always assumed the cause of this all was MBAs, and I still think it's the primary cause, but perhaps we're creating this certain from multiple directions all at once.
Dane here. We don't have a minimum wage. We rely on structural remedies for improving working conditions and wages, and they work far better than a minimum wage. The UK, on the other hand, favours direct intervention. They've been increasing their minimum wage considerably over the years. The result appears to be aggressive wage compression. Meaning very little benefit to people who get degrees and accrue experience relative to someone doing an unskilled, minimum wage job. It also appears to have created a very unfavourable job market for the young. Why hire a young and inexperienced worker for £12.71 per hour when you can hire an experienced worker for £14? Young people with degrees appear to be particularly impacted, since they "wasted" so many years on degrees which yield very little benefit, and they cannot find a job. The UK also has very tough laws about firing employees, meaning companies are incentivised to not take a chance on a young worker.
To your point: yes, people who have a weaker bargaining position in Denmark earn less. However we also have generous social safety nets, so no one ends up destitute or hungry. Ultimately, I think wages should be between an employer and employee (with or without the assistance of unions - we like our unions). If an employee has fewer skills, less experience, is unwilling or unable to move for a job, etc, they should expect to be paid less. This represents materially different value to the employer.
Britain has a few structural issues too, so someone who happens to live in a big city, especially London, will have more opportunities without having to move.
You should live in France, having to pay 15% of the value of your home to be allowed to move, being cash poor (which means having low flexibility) because 50% of what your company pays for you goes to mandatory social things, taxes and insurances and most of the rest goes to fixed expenses.
In France the minimum wage is roughly indexed on inflation (especially if inflation isn't too high) but getting a raise when your salary is higher than this is very difficult, especially without job hopping. Your employer knows that he can risk not giving you a raise and you can't as easily risk being upset about it.
The US isn't so different. Federal capital gains taxes will eat a minimum of 10% of the appreciated portion of your home value, and more if you're in a higher tax bracket. Many states also tax proceeds on a home sale. I've got a property that I'll be selling soon in California and I expect to pay about $400k in total taxes.
You can sell your primary residence and be exempt from capital gains taxes on the first $250,000 if you're single and $500,000 if married filing jointly.
In addition to the $250,000 (or $500,000 for a couple) exemption, you can also subtract your full cost basis in the property from the sales price. Your cost basis is calculated by starting with the price you paid for the home, and then adding purchase expenses, such as closing costs, title insurance, and any settlement fees.
Also, most (if not all) states do not tax your primary residence unless you go past the federal exemptions.
That's good info, but unfortunately none of it applies to me because I moved out of California eight years ago and the property is not my primary residence.
I reckon California is increasingly democratic but at least you're talking about a tax on some good news. It's still quite taxing because you wouldn't gain any compensation if the home lost value and because a lot of the appreciated portion is probably just following inflation.
The 15% I talked about is on the total value of the home, although to be fair 33+% of people avoid agency fees (about 7%) by selling directly to an individual.
> It wasn’t inflation per se, but the fact that wages didn’t keep up — that’s been weighing down consumer sentiment, he said. His proof: Belgium.
> “It is the only European country that had consumer confidence that bounced back after the inflation period,” Hurst said.
> That’s because it also happens to be the only European country where wage increases are directly tied to inflation. If prices go up by 7%, then by law, so does your salary.
Item 2 seems like a circular argument. If your wages did keep pace with inflation then of course subjectively there is no inflation. On the other hand this does not hold in all situations. In galloping inflation you might as well spend because savings get eroded.
Jurisdictions that require wages increase with inflation maintain purchasing power, jurisdictions that don't are inflating away your purchasing power while empowering capital (unless you're willing to take on more risk to find higher wages, if at possible to find in the labor marketplace). It's that simple.
Your job hopping comment is interesting and is generalisable: reduce monopsony in the labour market, and you get more competition for labour that actually bites.
The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.
Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.
I'd like to see a world where the government provided a job for anybody who wanted one. If you're not enjoying your corporate job you can go back to planting trees to offset carbon emissions. Getting to old to plant trees? Go work in the library. Want to develop it skills? get a job helping the government transition to Libre Office
Scott Alexander uses a lot of words to argue his points, but I don't think he makes them very successfully. Almost every point in the linked essay can be easily refuted without thinking too much. Perhaps he is arguing for a spercific implementation, but if we are dreaming about utopia, why not be generous in our interpretation for how the jobs for all might work. We are comparing it to the dream of UBI after all.
1. We could provide jobs for disabled people that makes feel better about themselves. Also remember this is jobs for all who _want_ to work. There is still disability for those that need it.
2 & 3 Government provided jobs could help caretakers and parents because they could be more flexible with hours and shifts. Work while your kids are at school.
4. Jobs causing poverty because you have to drive somewhere and eat out because there is no break room is ridiculous. I laughed out loud when he argued that if you work you are too tired to drive to the shop where the cheap groceries are sold.
5. Yep, some people need to be fired. I'm not sure what he is trying to say here. I think these government jobs need to be run well, and employees need to be paid bonus if they do good work. (Compared to other teams that do the same work)
This doesn't work though. The government needs to pay you. Where does the money come from? People working for the government tend to not really work that hard because what's their incentive to work hard? Are you getting paid per tree?
If the government wants trees planed it's better for everyone that they hire a company that plants trees. Even that isn't always that great but it's less worse. The government doesn't want that and doesn't have the money for that. They could get that money by raising taxes which increases cost of living for everyone that works and that tends to be not popular.
Anyways- that's what the USSR looked like or maybe China before they switched to their version of a free market. Due to human nature and other factors it doesn't work.
Ah yes. A great example is how much cheaper and more efficiently our military support is since we fired all the military cooks and gave all the contracts to KBR and Haliburton.
People don’t work hard for crap wages unless you beat them with a stick. Government jobs are seen as cushy because there are actual rules and regulations being followed as to how much work should be done. Corporations just skirt that, do a worse job, and then spread your type of propaganda everywhere.
People wouldn’t be jealous of the government job holders if they could achieve a similar work life balance at Joes Tree planting service.
This is a beautiful fantasy and it sounds like what most college freshmen think the world should be like. When that was practiced IRL in the Soviet Union, the issue is that if you are owed a job, people figure out really quickly that they can just phone it in, so those trees don’t really get planted, etc. The managers of the tree planters also don’t do their job of making sure the work gets done - they just report to their managers that the tree planting project is going great. Everyone gets paid. But the jobs that actually need doing also don’t get done either, so you have shortages of everything constantly. What you’ve created is an economy that barely subsists at best, since everyone does the absolute minimum and just lines up for their paycheck.
Why would you assume you can't be fired for phoning it in. If you want to daydream about utopia you have to assume we can solve trivial problems. I mean, you could just pay per tree for example?
There is no rule that says you can't have performance bonuses as a government employee, nor are there any rules to say you can't have competition within government departments.
I'm no expert, but I think the problem with the Soviets were that you were not rewarded for effort, and I think we all understand why that's important.
I've read in the US there are teachers that can't be fired because of public school tenure laws and union contracts. So yeah, first thing you have to do is have a sane and functioning government. Then you can start dreaming about a better society.
I guess one good thing the Trump administration demonstrates is that you _can_ just ignore past norms and laws and do what you want. You can bring a wrecking ball, swing it around, and force change if you need to.
> Why would you assume you can't be fired for phoning it in. If you want to daydream about utopia you have to assume we can solve trivial problems. I mean, you could just pay per tree for example?
If you fire them, they're still entitled to a job, right? So some other agency has to hire them. The flunkies will progress from the most demanding jobs, on down to the ones where the assignment is like, "Just please collect at least one piece of trash per day, okay?" The net effect, I'd argue, is that jobs that are necessary but high-effort, like assembling important machines, constructing buildings, food production, IT support, are starved of workers because you can get paid decently for 1000% less stress to be on litter patrol, or the mailbox graffiti removal squad, or whatever.
If you pay piecework, the least motivated will just do terrible work (in many jobs a poorly-done thing can be a big problem), and if you don't pay the ones who don't manage to plant a single tree, then that's technically not a job (though it is daycare, and since you've still got to actually pay the overseers you're generating negative value on the whole operation).
A (big) decrease in employment would be sufficient to tank the minimum wage, but it ain't necessary. I'd say, concentrating on employment is a bit of a red herring.
A worker's compensation is a whole basket of pay, working conditions, career advancement opportunities, prestige etc. Similarly, what a worker does for the company is a whole basket of things.
Minimum wage outlaws baskets where pay per official hour is under some threshold.
For an illustration of different baskets, have a look at the hectic life and relatively higher pay you get working for Aldi with the more measured pace and lower wages at Walmart.
This is essentially how the job market is structured in Denmark, and it works very well. We provide strong safety nets, free healthcare, etc, but in return, employers are given wide latitude to fire employees. This allows them to remain unusually flexible in a European context - responding to market changes much faster than almost any other European nation. We don't even have a minimum wage. Despite this, people can and do leave when an employer treats them badly or pays them poorly. This forces employers to offer reasonable wages and working conditions, or they lose their employees. For example, in 2021, Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening measured that 38.4% of employees in their member companies changed jobs. This was during a period when inflation jumped but employers were too slow to increase wages. While this should not be extrapolated to the entire economy, it provides an anchor to understand just how dynamic our job market is.
Employees are (or should be) given more rights/protections than the employers because they have less individual bargaining power. The rights are there to counterbalance. For example it shouldn't be as easy to get fired as it is to quit.
The country's culture matters a lot. The same system that works perfectly in a healthy society will end up an abusive nightmare in an unhealthy one.
Low job switching is a sign of a stagnant economy and society. An environment where a worker feels confident to change jobs has all kinds of hidden benefits like business-process cross-pollination.
Theoretically jobs reward loyalty and wish to maintain institutional knowledge.
For some reason right now everyone thinks they can get away without those. And I can't say they're precisely wrong. But as someone working on dumpster fire fighting, holy hell is a lot lost when you lose someone who's done nothing but X for 15 years. Now you've got someone with no experience with our processes, overworked, also underpaid, with nobody left with any experience of their own to train them. That can cost an awful lot of money.
Employers are optimizing for labor cost control. As long as the enterprise continues to function and is profitable, the behavior continues. We cannot say it doesn’t work as long as it continues to work.
Some have said job hop, I’d say unionizing can also work.
> My investigation points to a far more conventional explanation: Acrisure is shifting work once performed by American employees to lower-cost operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia.
NC teacher salaries are terrible on their own but they are also outpaced by inflation.
The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.
So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.
Sure, $62.5k for a 10 month contract is $75k over 12 (62.5/10 == 75/12) but my point about purchasing power remains.
As the other commenter called out it's low considering to get to this salary at 15 years of experience you also have to have a master's degree. Master degree holders have a median salary $95k in the US so this is off the mark by a considerable amount.
They're signals with low leverage since everyone has to have them in their field, so you end up with lower nominal pay from the institutions that buy most of that labor.
Consider acceptance rate as a metric - education has one of the highest by this report, up there with public service:
maybe they are easy but "everyone has to have them" doesn't change the amount of time and money invested in getting them. The real compensation under that is stagnating with inflation. NC is particularly bad because state law forbids collective bargaining and they are at the whim of the legislature (which stalled a budget for 1000 days).
The signal of supply and demand the cost (and debt) of an advanced degree is not reflected in the marginal salary bump over bachelors degree given the rising costs of tuition. From same site you used 46.7% of public university masters degree completions used debt so basically half.
Not necessarily. It could also be simply saying that industries where job hopping is common (e.g. tech) are more highly paid than industries where job hopping is really uncommon (e.g. teachers, utilities, etc)
Would love to see this calculated in high cost of living areas (NY, CA), pretty sure some people have seen 20% wage declines since covid (in terms of how far your income goes)
The working class doesn't hold that much in cash, do they? Competition in the labour market means nominal wages go up when inflation goes up. Many working class people have mortgages (though I'm not sure whether they have fixed rate mortgages?)
Working class typically rely solely on wages and have little to no wealth. So any purchasing power decrease is often referred to as a hidden tax on wages.
> Working class typically rely solely on wages and have little to no wealth. So any purchasing power decrease is often referred to as a hidden tax on wages.
That's only true if wages are fixed. They typically aren't, especially when people move jobs.
The paper only mentions total compensation as: "total compensation (base wages plus bonuses)"
Total compensation includes stock options, stock grants, health insurance premiums, 401k contributions, so-called "employer social security contributions", retirement contributions, time off with pay, etc. Total compensation averages 146% of wages.
This is not a triviality.
The paper doesn't cover this, and so the conclusions don't have merit.
There are also some fairly interesting trends in labor productivity.
Labor Productivity for Manufacturing: Household and Institutional Furniture and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturing: (has flattened out in the last decade-ish)
I thought Trump fixed that? Shouldn't caging/deporting 2000+ people a day have a dent at some point? What do you blame when the immigrants are all gone?
Personally I'm pretty sure it's more about the value of property and the limitations on construction that wealthy property owners put in place to block development (which would lower property values.) Property values go up -> costs rise (taxes, insurance) -> rent increases. That and the fact that the government and corporate america (same thing really) want all development to happen within existing major metro areas. There's plenty of cities and towns with cheap housing, but they lack employment opportunities.
I guess RSUs aren't really "real wages" but mine vested over four years to the extent that by the time I left they were worth barely 25% of what they had been when I signed the offer. Happened over time, too, so quarterly vests took a decent hit in that timeframe.
RSUs are great for workers because if the value dips 75% you can just leave and get a new job and get new RSUs at a reasonable price. Of course it's not trivial to switch jobs but at a 75% cut it's surely worth at least looking around. I don't think you can really consider it a fault of the economy if you didn't.
Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Workers have become ~90% more productive over the last forty years, and received very little of that value, while the US throws off $5T in profits per year to shareholders. There is a reason socialism has become palatable politically recently to the electorate, and will continue to be until the labor situation changes.
> The top 10% of households by wealth had $8.1 million on average. As a group, they held 67.2% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $60,000 on average. As a group, they held 2.5% of total household wealth.
> The top 20% of households by income had $4.3 million in wealth on average. As a group, they held 71.1% of total household wealth.
The bottom 20% of households by income had $180,000 in wealth on average. As a group, they held 3% of total household wealth.
Top 10% owns 93% of equities. Middle class wealth is primary residence real estate, representing roughly 60% to 80% of total household wealth.
> The latest data show that 42.0 percent of full-time working Americans do not have access to retirement plans, 44.1 percent do not participate, and 50.5 percent do not receive an employer match. (Note that these figures are for employed workers between the ages of 18 and 65, excluding government and self-employed workers.)
> Even for those who do have access, traditional defined benefit pensions have become much less common as defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, have become the primary type of retirement plan. This shift has increased the risks and responsibilities for individuals in planning and managing their retirement. Yet research shows that many households are ill-equipped for this task and have little or no retirement savings. As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
I guess the corollary to this is that the more money you have, the less efficient you can convert money to tangible wealth (there's an actual studied conversion 'factor' for different kinds of wealth).
Wealth, in financial theory, is the present value of all expected future cash flows an individual or asset can generate over time, discounted back to today's value using a specific rate of return. It measures accumulated economic potential rather than just cash in hand.
Are there limits to future economic potential? I argue yes, it is a function of demographics, which are in structural decline. Therefore, I would agree it only becomes harder over time to chase after the current amount of total potential wealth, which will decline into the future.
> "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth."
Why would universal economic growth imply everyone owning more of a resource with a limited supply?
There's only so much gold in the world (which is kind of the point) - if people in $INSERT_COUNTRY owned more of it per capita, that would mean global inequality has increased, and thankfully we've seen the opposite of that.
I'm sorry—vapid trappings of conspicuous consumption? You've just named three vacuous toys, whereas GPS and e-commerce deliver real value to working people.
Doomscrolling, I agree, is a devastatingly poor substitute for a real civic life.
The whole point is that it is not to the "working people" that the "real value" is "delivered". The real people got the crumbs and were told to appreciate it.
Almost all of the value went to those who one might call "unreal" people.
No big surprise- were making mess money and terrified of losing our jobs, afraid of losing healthcare and can’t afford our homes, less social because of doom scrolling
Welcome to the progress and “better world” that Tech Bros promised while they reaped billions of the VC/PE economy
Count me in the unlucky 37%. I job hopped for more stability in 2022. I got more comp but then proceeded to get 2% raises. I'm making less now adjusted for inflation than I did in 2022.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 78.8 ms ] threadSource: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL
The Biden admin brought down inflation much faster than even optimistic economists predicted, while maintaining full employment and avoiding a recession. The US economy during that period significantly outperformed most other wealthy countries. (As one indicative example, the cover story of The Economist from October 2024 was titled The American economy: The envy of the world.)
Since then we've had a wide range of completely self-inflicted policy faceplants, including notably several rounds of illegal tariffs and a war with Iran.
https://www.gasbuddy.com/charts
However, you are also correct that Trump pressuring OPEC to cut oil production at the end of his first term did cause additional inflation in Biden's term.
However, it does says that 58% of all workers failed to keep up with the real wage growth trend we saw in the years leading up to the pandemic.
>So 63% didn't.
But more than a third of Americans did. You can't "glass two-thirds full" tens of millions of people seeing their actual purchasing power decrease.
There's a chart of the average that looks pretty bad. But also I don't have time to read 78 pages right now.
From page 36 of the paper: All deciles during this earlier period experienced annual real wage growth, with the growth being the largest for the bottom two deciles of the wage distribution.
The only thing that surprised me about this article is that more people didn't see real wages decline. 2021-2024 was a period of peak inflation that the US hadn't seen in decades. And of course the primary cause of this inflation was governments flooding dollars into the market by literally paying people not to work, which while perhaps faulty was at least a reasonable response to Covid. The ironic thing is that, in the US at least, the inflation rate was coming down before we decided to install the guy who instituted massive tariffs, an unprecedented deportation program, and an unprovoked war in Iran, all of which are highly inflationary.
So it's completely unsurprising to me that wages, especially of people who stayed in the same job, didn't accelerate faster than inflation. This feels a bit like picking your dates to tell a narrative. I'd be much more interested in the percentage of folks whose wages fell in real terms by looking at multiple overlapping 5 year timespans.
I don't think this is a reasonable expectation at all. In the absence of economic growth I would expect the average individual's earnings to be flat.
The only way for wages to go up across the board is if productivity increases and the amount of wealth in the world goes up.
In that scenario, each individual worker sees increases over their lifetime, even though the average stays flat.
> and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.
This is an extremely unrealistic expectation. There are a multitude of reasons for people's incomes to fluctuate other than retirement. People make career changes that result in lower income for many reasons, like taking a better job, changing careers, transitioning to a lower demand job when they have children, or moving to a new city with lower wages for personal preference.
For many jobs the earnings are also dependent on the company's earnings. Incentive structures, bonuses, RSUs. Even low paying companies scale their staff up and down based on demand. They can't hold a monotonically growing set of staff and also monotonically increase their wages when the incoming demand for their product is not monotonically growing.
The only way to come close to an "idealized society" like you're proposing is a totally self-sustaining, command and control economy where a central authority determines not only everyone's income, but their expenditures too. It's not possible to keep the entire economy and everyone in it moving in the same direction unless you're dictating where all of the money goes in society to a fine degree. Variations of this have been tried. The members of that society do not find themselves more well off.
> This compression accelerated in 2021: real wage growth in the bottom two deciles remained positive and close to its pre-period pace, while all other deciles experienced declines of about 2 percent, roughly four percentage points below their pre-period growth
Only that, for anyone against the ails of inequality, the bottom wage earners getting more (and even outpacing other deciles) is a win.
Greater turnover is good for all employees and worse for employers
Since the early 1980s, start of the Millennial generation, inflation is 300%; takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in the 80s
Millennials and GenZ have only ever known austerity and oligarchy.
And that Exxon computed the min-max of the climate trend back in the 1970s just says they know, given all the data, they know.
GenX edge lords don't give shiiiit
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di...
I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side
Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then
*For long time periods, not cherry-picking small time periods.
Historically the way white folks have squared that circle has been to say that those folks aren't really people and simply don't know the joys of Christian city dwelling.
I can't make the math work, though.
There's the whole ignoring externalities of capitalism and reality itself for toxic positivity thing.
American freedom; off the hook assuring a social safety net exists for you is pretty great.
Will go my entire life never having to worry if you end up buried in medical debt living in your car.
It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.
They can.
Employee-owned companies do it all of the time.
Properly-ran privately-owned companies do it all of the time.
Who’s the odd one out?
If your mindset is "The economy is an incredibly dynamic, living thing whose purpose is to satisfy the consumer desires of the moment", then job-hopping can be all of very satisfying, very lucrative, and very purposeful. Your purpose is to do whatever is most needed. You don't get attached to any one task, but treat yourself as malleable and adaptable, and think of your past roles as a portfolio of skills and experiences that you can draw on to meet new challenges. You could describe your approach to work as "Work is something I do, not what I am."
If your mindset is "The economy is the society that I grew up in, and I'm seeking my place in it, and then I want a role where I can grow and build expertise", this is extremely unsettling. You view your job as an identity, a part of yourself. To leave that job is to leave a part of your identity behind, and to be fired or laid off is to have a part of your identity ripped away. And so you'll fight hard (and take many poor bargains) to avoid being put in that situation. It's not simply a matter of economics; it's a matter of being and belonging. Work is not just what you do, it is who you are.
Commerce vs. Guardian syndrome [1], or growth vs. fixed mindset [2]. There isn't really a right answer, but American culture, society, and business favors commerce syndrome over guardian syndrome, while many other cultures (really, most of the rest of the world) is the opposite.
[1] https://jebkinnison.com/2016/04/29/jane-jacobs-monstrous-hyb...
[2] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-min...
A certain amount of churn is good on the national or even global level, because it moves knowledge between companies. Probably not great for the company you depart, but great for the company you arrive at.
Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.
I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
Where do all jobs come from? Ultimately they’re created by people, so I wouldn’t worry about there being a demand but no supply.
The corporate veil is extraordinarily valuable to the point where a minimum 10% tax on any money passing through options makes a lot of sense. However, the idea you can pass liability off for free is so pervasive you’d never get something like that to pass.
But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.
Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic.
And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—-if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help.
Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.
To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try find jobs for people who don’t want them?
It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just don’t want jobs—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need to work and thus isn’t looking for a job. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.)
The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful.
To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste.
The point being that there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you frame them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.
Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.
Eurostat, the Internation Labor Organization, OECD--what incentive do all these organizations have to globally misrepresent unemployment? Of course they measure and consider U6, but they choose to headline U3 instead not because it's prettier and they want to serve national propaganda interests, but because it's just more useful.
C'mon man. I have to give up on this thread.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
You can't have a revolution based entirely on not having to wipe your ass (except when you still do because bidets are garbage).
Unless you are fresh out of college and working at some lame startup or coding sweatshop, mature white collar work has always been pretty damn close to "not having to work".
You're easily replaceable early on when your only value is doing, but with more experience come more meetings and responsibilities. You become valuable for knowing, and knowing is not mere knowledge.
Assuming that the years of experience have shaken out the chaff, the only source of stress for those who remain employed is what is already inseparable from life itself. Personal growth without work doesn't even make sense.
That's why it doesn't feel like work. That's why the concept of "not having to work" is pathological and ridiculous. Anyone feeling this way about "work" needs to get help. I'm totally serious when I say that.
For me they're a huge upgrade.
FYI in some places flat taxes are technically unconstitutional
I know that sounds like corny and biased American exceptionalism, but I think it’s just objectively true.
Other countries can have vastly superior government policy, and that shows up in significant ways (like Denmark having an even higher productivity than the U.S.), but nobody has played the productivity game at as big a scale as the U.S. has, and that’s sort of just an insurmountable advantage for the time being.
NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google—-I could go on for a very, very long time. Those companies alone are going to create heavy competition within the tech sphere, and add on top of that Baumol’s cost disease from every other big U.S. industry, and you get the current situation.
No other country has the behemoth of capital and opportunity like the U.S. has. This will naturally have a big influence on things.
Why is funding harder? Culture and laws we created as a result. We're far less accepting of things like leverage M&As, options, flexible employee remuneration and conditions (especially for start-ups), etc. VCs therefore need to clear a far higher bar to mitigate risk, meaning only the very best proven ideas receive funding.
Further, investors tend to prefer lower, but more stable returns. There is much less appetite for moon-shots. I could speculate that this is partly driven by the tax structures. Why risk $50M if you know that 60% of the rewards would be taxed? You would use a much more conversative risk ratio, preferring 5% returns but very low risk. This extends to individuals, too. Why start a business when most of the rewards from the considerable risk will be taxed? Especially given the onerous business laws.
Denmark and Sweden are notable standouts. Our laws make it easy to start businesses, operate, and fire workers as needs change. However we still have very high taxes.
There is one final thought: most people I know do not aspire to become Ferrari owners with five mansions. We aspire to happy and healthy families with good friends, good wine, and cozy holidays. If this is one's aspiration, risking their financial stability for something they don't care about would not be very common. Danes who do aspire for the Ferrari lifestyle leave for the US.
One additional thing to mention though is that Americans are also just richer. Even if you include government benefits (social transfers), Americans rank extremely high on measures of disposable income per household. As far I’m aware that is the most complete measure of income, and despite being a massive country of almost 400 million, the median American is comparable to someone living in Luxembourg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
As you’d expect, this effect only grows when you go up the ladder, and American millionaires are on average richer than say, Danish millionaires.
(Note, I’m not saying that this is good or bad, just that it is. For what it’s worth I think we could learn a lot from the Danish model, but that’s my own distinct, normative option.)
Thus, since there is just generally more capital to go around, capital is easier to raise.
(And as an American, there’s plenty of us here too who enjoy the good life, free of Ferraris and mansions.)
The people who risked their (and families) lives going west were taking very large risks for large rewards. And it's never stopped.
It's one thing to fight your baristas, it's another to fight your baristas, bean supplier, mail delivery, and freight movers all at once.
This conversation usually derails, so to be clear no, I don’t think people should work for poverty wages, a viable business should include happy non-subsidized employees.
My question is whether a global price floor psychologically depresses wages by establishing a global price anchor. Price anchoring is well known to influence the price people will accept.
For jobs like cashier that are fungible just blanket get minimum wage, would they pay more without one when the employer can’t just point to the anchor price and say take it or leave it? Would they be faster to localize wages to local costs?
You think it's possible that the true wage the grocery store wants to pay its employees is actually higher than the price floor? But for some reason they can't think of any other numbers to write down on the paycheck? And without the price floor they'd be forced to think for themselves and reconsider their morals and the market conditions and their balance sheet and pay $20 an hour instead of $15?
I think it's much more likely the minimum wage can be interpreted as "we would pay you even less than this if it weren't illegal." See the tipped wage. They would pay you $0 if they could.
Mind you, this does not apply to white-collar positions like IT in the same manner. The salary bands are still quite strict -- 6 figures is still a rarity -- but you do negotiate them and can get meaningful raises.
Like healthcare being tied to employment?
Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).
Anyway, the reason for employer-based care isn't to be evil, it was to create risk pools. Insurance being purchased only individually has big problems: the insurers can't price the risk for a new individual subscriber in any sensible way without going back to the "pre-existing conditions exclusion" BS that all of us hate, or penalizing people with high premiums based on the conditions they've had. Employer groups fix that because they can look at a company as a whole and understand that say a gym chain disproportionally employs young and fit people, whereas, say, Walmart, employs a more health-diverse and age-diverse set of people, so maybe they need to pay more per person. So they can price risk efficiently without punishing individuals.
Of course I personally think the insurance idea itself is the wrong way to model paying for healthcare, but it's what we have, and distorting the market even further will only make things worse.
Bottom line, if you want major changes, work on convincing more than 49% of the public to vote for your party.
Imagine if the risk pool was the entire country’s population. Just like it is for the cost of police and elementary school.
Now imagine you don’t even think of it as “risk”, but a human right that everyone gets. It saves everyone money AND you get better outcomes.
This idea is so well understood hundreds of millions of people in every developed country on earth - except one - use it everyday.
Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.
That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it.
And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
Norway, Sweden, Denmark—these are countries where this model has been proven to work in practice, not theory.
If you still call bullshit though, I’d cordially invite you to show me similar evidence for price controls working as well as flexicurity does in the Scandinavian states.
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.
I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
well yeah - unfamilliarity, to a certain degree. But its more than that. It's the slow process of gaining expertise. There are of course many transferable skills from one company to another. and there are some that are not. Knowing the relationships between all the bosses, who got passed over for promotion, who needs a certain type of project on their plate etc. Also knowing all the history of various prior initiatives, failed and successful, really helps you get stuff done. Most work in non-small enterprises needs building yes but also buy-in from others, which needs them to respect you, and for you to know what hoops to jump through and what to say to keep tham all happy.
In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.
I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.
I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...
I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.
Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty.
* AU: https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/
* UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom
* US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_Sta...
The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.
In some ways this could even be an argument for the cause of enshittification of everything. When everything is liminal, it somewhat directly leads to a 'get mine and go' type mindset, which in turn leads directly to enshittification, no longer term than next quarter thinking, and so on. I've always assumed the cause of this all was MBAs, and I still think it's the primary cause, but perhaps we're creating this certain from multiple directions all at once.
Here's a source, although it isn't that detailed and is more of a descriptive literature review: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103581...
This too: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/07/oecd-employment... - but I didn't have time to read it in detail.
I don't think anyone believes labor mobility reduces productivity.
To your point: yes, people who have a weaker bargaining position in Denmark earn less. However we also have generous social safety nets, so no one ends up destitute or hungry. Ultimately, I think wages should be between an employer and employee (with or without the assistance of unions - we like our unions). If an employee has fewer skills, less experience, is unwilling or unable to move for a job, etc, they should expect to be paid less. This represents materially different value to the employer.
In France the minimum wage is roughly indexed on inflation (especially if inflation isn't too high) but getting a raise when your salary is higher than this is very difficult, especially without job hopping. Your employer knows that he can risk not giving you a raise and you can't as easily risk being upset about it.
In addition to the $250,000 (or $500,000 for a couple) exemption, you can also subtract your full cost basis in the property from the sales price. Your cost basis is calculated by starting with the price you paid for the home, and then adding purchase expenses, such as closing costs, title insurance, and any settlement fees.
Also, most (if not all) states do not tax your primary residence unless you go past the federal exemptions.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/capitalgainhomes...
The 15% I talked about is on the total value of the home, although to be fair 33+% of people avoid agency fees (about 7%) by selling directly to an individual.
> It wasn’t inflation per se, but the fact that wages didn’t keep up — that’s been weighing down consumer sentiment, he said. His proof: Belgium.
> “It is the only European country that had consumer confidence that bounced back after the inflation period,” Hurst said.
> That’s because it also happens to be the only European country where wage increases are directly tied to inflation. If prices go up by 7%, then by law, so does your salary.
The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.
Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.
1. We could provide jobs for disabled people that makes feel better about themselves. Also remember this is jobs for all who _want_ to work. There is still disability for those that need it.
2 & 3 Government provided jobs could help caretakers and parents because they could be more flexible with hours and shifts. Work while your kids are at school.
4. Jobs causing poverty because you have to drive somewhere and eat out because there is no break room is ridiculous. I laughed out loud when he argued that if you work you are too tired to drive to the shop where the cheap groceries are sold.
5. Yep, some people need to be fired. I'm not sure what he is trying to say here. I think these government jobs need to be run well, and employees need to be paid bonus if they do good work. (Compared to other teams that do the same work)
I could go on.. but seems a little pointless.
If the government wants trees planed it's better for everyone that they hire a company that plants trees. Even that isn't always that great but it's less worse. The government doesn't want that and doesn't have the money for that. They could get that money by raising taxes which increases cost of living for everyone that works and that tends to be not popular.
Anyways- that's what the USSR looked like or maybe China before they switched to their version of a free market. Due to human nature and other factors it doesn't work.
People don’t work hard for crap wages unless you beat them with a stick. Government jobs are seen as cushy because there are actual rules and regulations being followed as to how much work should be done. Corporations just skirt that, do a worse job, and then spread your type of propaganda everywhere.
People wouldn’t be jealous of the government job holders if they could achieve a similar work life balance at Joes Tree planting service.
There is no rule that says you can't have performance bonuses as a government employee, nor are there any rules to say you can't have competition within government departments.
I'm no expert, but I think the problem with the Soviets were that you were not rewarded for effort, and I think we all understand why that's important.
I've read in the US there are teachers that can't be fired because of public school tenure laws and union contracts. So yeah, first thing you have to do is have a sane and functioning government. Then you can start dreaming about a better society.
Bad societies are a reflection of their people.
If you fire them, they're still entitled to a job, right? So some other agency has to hire them. The flunkies will progress from the most demanding jobs, on down to the ones where the assignment is like, "Just please collect at least one piece of trash per day, okay?" The net effect, I'd argue, is that jobs that are necessary but high-effort, like assembling important machines, constructing buildings, food production, IT support, are starved of workers because you can get paid decently for 1000% less stress to be on litter patrol, or the mailbox graffiti removal squad, or whatever.
If you pay piecework, the least motivated will just do terrible work (in many jobs a poorly-done thing can be a big problem), and if you don't pay the ones who don't manage to plant a single tree, then that's technically not a job (though it is daycare, and since you've still got to actually pay the overseers you're generating negative value on the whole operation).
[citation needed]
By measures such as own-wage elasticity [DUBE & ZIPPERER] increases to the minimum wage evidently increase wages more than they decrease employment.
[DUBE & ZIPPERER]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925
A worker's compensation is a whole basket of pay, working conditions, career advancement opportunities, prestige etc. Similarly, what a worker does for the company is a whole basket of things.
Minimum wage outlaws baskets where pay per official hour is under some threshold.
For an illustration of different baskets, have a look at the hectic life and relatively higher pay you get working for Aldi with the more measured pace and lower wages at Walmart.
The country's culture matters a lot. The same system that works perfectly in a healthy society will end up an abusive nightmare in an unhealthy one.
For some reason right now everyone thinks they can get away without those. And I can't say they're precisely wrong. But as someone working on dumpster fire fighting, holy hell is a lot lost when you lose someone who's done nothing but X for 15 years. Now you've got someone with no experience with our processes, overworked, also underpaid, with nobody left with any experience of their own to train them. That can cost an awful lot of money.
Some have said job hop, I’d say unionizing can also work.
Michigan Insurance Giant Blames "AI" for Layoffs–But Evidence Points Overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365161 - August 2026
> My investigation points to a far more conventional explanation: Acrisure is shifting work once performed by American employees to lower-cost operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia.
The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.
So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.
As the other commenter called out it's low considering to get to this salary at 15 years of experience you also have to have a master's degree. Master degree holders have a median salary $95k in the US so this is off the mark by a considerable amount.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/ctb/graduate-degr...
They're signals with low leverage since everyone has to have them in their field, so you end up with lower nominal pay from the institutions that buy most of that labor.
Consider acceptance rate as a metric - education has one of the highest by this report, up there with public service:
https://cgsnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/CGS_GED-2025_R...
The signal of supply and demand the cost (and debt) of an advanced degree is not reflected in the marginal salary bump over bachelors degree given the rising costs of tuition. From same site you used 46.7% of public university masters degree completions used debt so basically half.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_332.45.a...
so job hop
the market is trying to tell you something
These youngsters talking about 2020s have no idea!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Competition as a sellers’ market drives wages up, like anything AI connected today. Buyers’ markets drive wages down - GFC, H1Bs.
Working class mortgages got obliterated after the GFC and never recovered.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSB50210
Mortgages are about 92% fixed rate (vs ARM).
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/which-hou...
That's only true if wages are fixed. They typically aren't, especially when people move jobs.
LOL
Interactive brief: https://bfidatastudio.org/project/sticky-wage-norms-and-the-...
Total compensation includes stock options, stock grants, health insurance premiums, 401k contributions, so-called "employer social security contributions", retirement contributions, time off with pay, etc. Total compensation averages 146% of wages.
This is not a triviality.
The paper doesn't cover this, and so the conclusions don't have merit.
Labor Productivity for Manufacturing: Household and Institutional Furniture and Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturing: (has flattened out in the last decade-ish)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN3371L000000000
Construction has been DOWN for decades (and is 7 percent of the labor force).
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...
Food Manufacturing is in decline as well:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN311L000000000
Fairly weak criticism. These benefits you're mentioning don't help people pay for groceries, pay their mortgage/rent, pay for gas, etc.
Personally I'm pretty sure it's more about the value of property and the limitations on construction that wealthy property owners put in place to block development (which would lower property values.) Property values go up -> costs rise (taxes, insurance) -> rent increases. That and the fact that the government and corporate america (same thing really) want all development to happen within existing major metro areas. There's plenty of cities and towns with cheap housing, but they lack employment opportunities.
Check the prices of the flagship 1975 Ferrari, the flagship 1975 Hasselblad camera, or, I don't know, a 1975 Cessna 182 in reference to median 1975 household income.
Then check it again for 2026.
Oh, but we have GPS, Amazon Prime, and doomscrolling now.
Thanks, I'd rather take the Cessna.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
> The top 10% of households by wealth had $8.1 million on average. As a group, they held 67.2% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $60,000 on average. As a group, they held 2.5% of total household wealth.
> The top 20% of households by income had $4.3 million in wealth on average. As a group, they held 71.1% of total household wealth. The bottom 20% of households by income had $180,000 in wealth on average. As a group, they held 3% of total household wealth.
Top 10% owns 93% of equities. Middle class wealth is primary residence real estate, representing roughly 60% to 80% of total household wealth.
https://eig.org/whos-left-out-of-americas-retirement-savings...
> The latest data show that 42.0 percent of full-time working Americans do not have access to retirement plans, 44.1 percent do not participate, and 50.5 percent do not receive an employer match. (Note that these figures are for employed workers between the ages of 18 and 65, excluding government and self-employed workers.)
https://www.gao.gov/financial-security-older-americans
> Even for those who do have access, traditional defined benefit pensions have become much less common as defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, have become the primary type of retirement plan. This shift has increased the risks and responsibilities for individuals in planning and managing their retirement. Yet research shows that many households are ill-equipped for this task and have little or no retirement savings. As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
Are there limits to future economic potential? I argue yes, it is a function of demographics, which are in structural decline. Therefore, I would agree it only becomes harder over time to chase after the current amount of total potential wealth, which will decline into the future.
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
> "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth."
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments) (start at slide 31 of the pdf)
There's only so much gold in the world (which is kind of the point) - if people in $INSERT_COUNTRY owned more of it per capita, that would mean global inequality has increased, and thankfully we've seen the opposite of that.
Doomscrolling, I agree, is a devastatingly poor substitute for a real civic life.
Almost all of the value went to those who one might call "unreal" people.
Welcome to the progress and “better world” that Tech Bros promised while they reaped billions of the VC/PE economy