A debate on where America was before Trump. Were we really in decline?

Great Debates
101

If you can find or come up with some sort of money-in-politics metric, that may be a shoe-in for the “decline” column along with life expectancy at birth. I do not have these numbers.

Speaking of wrong numbers, the existence of multiple jobholders or working minors tells us very little about the state of the nation or its direction, as I’m aware of no point where either of these was zero. And if you think smaller = better for both numbers (I’m not convinced that’s true, but let’s roll with it), multiple jobholders as a percent of employed held steady over the Obama years and was lower then than in the 200Xs and 90s. Same for teen labor force participation. So both of those would then go in the “not in decline” column.

I knew better than to think that my years earning seven-and-change an hour said much about the state of the nation then, and I hardly think it a “losing proposition” to expect dopers to understand that their personal anecdotes are similarly irrelevant.

102

That may be part of the problem here. Please allow me to recommend census.gov, bls.gov, pewresearch.org, and any number of academic studies that involve actual measurements and methodology as better sources of information.

But I do agree with some of what he says:

The standard of living has gone up since the beginning of time

But 8 million people recently falling into poverty (although I don’t think official numbers are out for 2020, but this is consistent with projections), while bad, has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here:
Were we in decline before Trump?
At that time, the poverty rate was falling. Not the lowest it had ever been (as I previously mentioned, it bounces around.) And no doubt higher than in other countries. But still trending downward. But due to the decades-long bouncing, I binned that in the “no real direction” column earlier.
And I agree make-the-stock-line-go-up says little about how everyone is doing, but I also never made that claim.

103

Here’s a far better analysis for the “decline” bin:

Obviously there’s some fuzziness here; spending can go up due to confidence or just feeling like spending more in some category. But there’s only so long you can have expenditures rise faster than pay.

104

In any nation you have a distribution of abilities and intellects. Wealthy or not, the bottom percentiles cannot do the highest skilled/knowledge jobs. Therefore, you either need a diverse economy, a very generous social program, or let Darwinism prevail.

We are in relative decline because politicians who know better pander to the populace instead of leading. You might think low skill manufacturing jobs aren’t vital to national security but they are. Should we be dependent on foreign manufacturers for steel, oil, ammunition, paper masks? No.

We are living on a planet divided into competing nations and too many of us have forgot the competition part. You ever look at the charts of militaries around the world? Those exist for what purpose again?

105

Sure the bottom percentiles cannot do the highest skilled jobs. However, most people have the potential to do most jobs IME.
Raise one twin in affluence and one in a trailer park and quelle surprise the former turns out smarter.

The issue though is that most of those jobs are heavily automated already, and that will continue in the future.

Damn straight, unfortunately the US prefers to compete internally as “our tribe” versus “their tribe”.

China’s state spending on R&D is increasing by 10% year on year. Which means they’ve caught up to the US’ spending at breathtaking speed and will soon overtake the US. Which is worse than it sounds, because a higher proportion of the US spending is on military technology.

If the US wants to be #1 on paying burger flippers starvation wages…congratulations, you got that title. No-one else was competing.

106

The issue is that when we price ourselves out of global competition we lose a lot of strategic capability and know how. Furthermore, the implication that there is some moral superiority we can claim because we are oh-so-compassionate with regards to paying people a so-called ‘living’ wage is completely hypocritical based upon our collective behavior of buying goods and services from literal slaves.

107

But the FED has increased the money supply alot over the last decade, and it hasn’t caused much inflation. Matter of fact, we’ve had very low core inflation since 2009, during a time of a huge increase in the monetary base. I wish the FED’s actions had created more inflation than it did, because it was trying early on to head off deflation.

108

So, if inflation is negligible why do wages need to rise so dramatically?

109

On a macro-basis, wages don’t need to go up dramatically. There are some at the very bottom (around minimum wages) that haven’t had a raise in years. You can have negligible inflation (2% and less for over a decade on average), but people stuck at minimum wage, which isn’t increased, still lose purchasing power.

110

My guess is that it’s because the fed created money, but not wealth. In many cases people spent that money in ways which did not generate wealth for them, and the money flowed up into the pockets of the billionaires. Being that they are already wealthy, and because even a billionaire can only consume so much, the wealth that was generated was in essence lost. Just my guess, but this seems to me to be a reasonable explanation of what happened.

In other words, solving the inequality in wealth is not going to be solved solely by redistribution of money.

111

In the first place, ISTM that the immorality of buying slave-labor-produced goods and services from foreign countries is not in any way mitigated by our lack of “hypocrisy” in our immoral refusal to pay workers a living wage in our own country.

In the second place, there are quite a few developed countries that pay workers a living wage, including an ample social safety net, and yet are not “priced out of” global competition.

The US can’t realistically race to the bottom of the low-wage-and-slave-labor market to compete with China price-wise, any more than other developed countries such as Germany and the Netherlands can. But AFAICT, only in the US is anybody seriously suggesting that we ought to try. Or that we are simply forced to doom our working class to permanent inefficient penury and insecurity because otherwise China will outcompete us.

It’s the people who are saying that we can’t afford living wages and universal healthcare, while they take it for granted that we can afford massive tax breaks and subsidies for the wealthiest Americans, who are shutting their eyes to the real world.

It is possible to have a higher baseline level of security, prosperity, educational attainment, and physical and environmental health than the US currently has. Other countries have achieved it, and we can too. But achieving it will almost certainly result in the US having somewhat fewer multibillionaires than it already has. Other countries get along with fewer multibillionaires, and we can too.

112

Yeah, while I don’t know whether or not this is actually true, I’ve seen a lot of reason to think that the knee-jerk “common-sense” rebuttal of it, along the lines of “what does it matter if somebody else is getting rich faster than you as long as your own situation is improving? class warfare!!!11!! :rage:”, is superficial and naive.

There are a lot of potential problems with wealth and income getting very disproportionately concentrated at the top. The resulting concentration of power and “de-democratization” effects have already been mentioned, but there’s also the issue of whether high inequality makes economies inherently more unstable, as discussed here:

113

So, what is it about the West that makes the citizenry of those nations more deserving than the citizens of Asia?

Concerning the number of billionaires, money on paper and held by person A in no way prevents a nation from developing it’s infrastructure. What’s required is labor, raw materials, and organizational skills. A nation that has it’s workforce in relatively overpaid work such as greeting someone at Wal-Mart instead of building high speed rail or or steel factories is going to fall behind nations that realize that production trumps redistribution.

114

Nobody’s saying that the citizenry of “western” nations (i.e., developed democracies, more of a historical/economic than strictly geographical term at this point) are innately more “deserving” than the citizenry of Asian (or developing) nations.

What we’re saying is that it’s our government’s job to consider the economic security and prosperity of its own citizenry as a high priority, rather than demanding that we embrace developing-nation levels of penury and instability because we aren’t any more innately “deserving” of prosperity than Asian workers are.

Christ on a pogo stick, octopus, are you seriously arguing that American workers aren’t entitled to demand the same sort of economic and social safety nets that, say, German and Dutch workers get, merely because none of us are intrinsically more morally “deserving” than Chinese workers? :roll_eyes:

What a gobsmackingly dumb argument. Is this the sort of fuzzy-minded kumbaya internationalism that conservatives are espousing these days? Do you likewise believe that our military should throw away nine-tenths of its weaponry in armed conflicts because our soldiers aren’t innately more “deserving” than enemy soldiers of winning wars?

I’m as pro-global-development and wise-aid-and-fair-trade as the next liberal, but even I don’t buy this bizarre notion that American workers ought to be content with being as poor and disadvantaged on average as Asian workers because we’re not inherently more “deserving” than Asian workers. FFS.

As has been pointed out to you already in this thread, assembling and utilizing labor, raw materials, and organizational skills for large-scale production projects such as high speed rail or steel factories requires capital, and lots of it. And getting sufficient capital for such projects will require us as a nation to sack up and expect the Walton family and their ilk to pay a fair share of tax revenue by developed-nation standards, rather than merely continuing to swell their moneybags by selling cheap slave-labor-produced Chinese merchandise to the families of their food-stamp-dependent store greeters, who can’t afford anything better than cheap slave-labor-produced merchandise on the crappy wage that Wal-Mart pays them.

115

I’ll say it once again: China is moving away from low cost, labor-intensive manufacturing as wages go up and more companies have money to invest in automation. Here’s a summary by the wall street journal.
Regarding healthcare, providing UHC to the rural areas of China is a huge challenge but social security coverage has steadily increased in recent years and UHC is the stated goal.

The point is, if the US wants to fight over unskilled, soon to be automated jobs, with a sick and uneducated workforce, go for it! China just vacated a spot.

116

It’s pointed out that it requires capital but that’s not entirely accurate. Beavers build dams without any currency at all. Ants build nests. Cave people built shit in caves. None of those folks or critters had a single dollar. What they did have is motivation and/or incentive to behave in a way that ensured or assisted their collective survival and prospertiy.

Now, I’ll admit money is definitely a lubricant for trade but what we are seeing in modern Western societies is counterproductive/destructive policy in order to buy votes. We have completely wrong behaviors being incentivized with a misallocation of currency.

We have the idle labor and the resources to build whatever we wish. What we lack is the political/social will to set up institutions properly in order to utilize that labor and those resources.

117

Very few nation’s populations are homogeneous. Having our lowest capability portion of the population actually employed instead of sitting idle, even if that employment is at true market value of $3.50/hr, is better for the nation.

118

This implies that there are many jobs out there that would exist at a $3.50 rate, but become unsustainable at a higher rate. Most analyses of low skilled work conclude that this isn’t actually the case, and my opinion would be the same: if you’re running a business where you can only afford to pay some of your staff $3.50, then pack up and go home: your business is about to die regardless.

OTOH If you’re talking about the US trying to compete for high labor intensive work globally…well, it’s just nonsense. The cost of living is much higher in the US than Vietnam, rents are higher. You can’t compete.

119

That’s absolutely not true. And why is it that rents and the cost of living are higher where folks are paid more? It’s not like any good or service has an intrinsic currency value.

It’s exceedingly odd that it is cheaper for society to pay people to be idle or engage in destructive behaviors instead of being employed at market value. We know that’s not true. It’s just politics.

120

Oh for pity’s sake, octopus, you can’t really be taking such silly arguments seriously. This is like debating with climate-science deniers who try to claim that sudden global temperature rise is no big deal because the earth was many degrees hotter 92 million years ago. :roll_eyes: again

But okay, if I really need to spell it out for you, among human beings in a developed industrial nation in modern times, assembling and utilizing labor, raw materials, and organizational skills for large-scale production projects such as high speed rail or steel factories requires capital, and lots of it.

The “completely wrong behaviors” we’re actually incentivizing, from the standpoint of a healthy society, are the hoarding and offshoring of wealth in ever more socioeconomically segregated hogging of power and resources by the richest Americans. The fact that many of the poorest Americans are stagnating in decaying communities with no prospects of decent jobs or education or reliable healthcare is largely a by-product of our society’s shameless coddling of all the worst greedy impulses of the extremely wealthy.

The problem is not with encouraging or expecting poor people to put in some time doing work for low (or even no) wages. The problem is with expecting or requiring those low-wage workers to depend on such work to provide them with basic necessities such as food, shelter, healthcare, communication, education and transportation, in an economy where the prices of such necessities are scaled to (and often far beyond) the earning power of the non-poor workers. That’s a surefire recipe for desperation, abuse, crime, ignorance, family breakdown, and a whole host of other evils.

Let’s get this society set up so that everybody has access to a reasonable minimum of the necessities of life, irrespective of their employment status and earning power. And then if you want to argue that somebody who wants a super-fancy smartphone or a skiing vacation or a restaurant dinner or a new rifle or whatever other personal extravagance they crave needs to earn the money for it, even if the only work they can find is low-paying, I’ll be right there with you.

But while we’re expecting people in general to depend on their or their family members’ earnings even for the most basic necessities of life, nope. Living-wage laws all the way.