Yeah, for a wg-10 or above it’s not bad. Probably at least in the top 10 percent of jobs you can do as just a HS grad.
I actually regretfully decided not to continue my schooling at the time simply because after four years of school it was going to likely take about six more years to break even. Assuming I was not a shop Cheif by then.
10 years to break even on the investment of school didn’t seem worth it.
I lost the job after my infant son passed. I just couldn’t function. Despite considerable effort on their part to work with me.
Now my marketable skills won’t bring me anywhere near that income so it’s back to school for me anyhow.
That’s the point of the example, the advice is completely correct, and almost completely useless. In all earnestness, it’s great that you managed to loose and keep off weight so easily. If it were that easy for everybody, there wouldn’t be fat people.
I think it’s even harder with the money example, because no matter how disciplined and frugal you are, one set back that is completely out of your control can blow up everything. The government shutdown, so there’s nobody in the federal office building next to your cafe, and you’re still working, but your tips are down to nothing for a month, and so you deplete the few hundred dollars you saved. A year later your car dies because the timing belt goes, and the money you’d been saving to do that maintenance was spent covering rent during the shutdown…
Good point, nevermind if you’re in a constant state of deficit. Then it becomes more akin to telling some starving kid in a famine ridden country he just has to eat more and he won’t be starving any longer.
The existence of a monetary heirarchy means someone has to be on bottom.
Without it there is no motivation for anyone to learn advanced trades.
The doctors hour is equal to the waiters hour.
In order for any one person to live like a king means there must be serfs.
So, it’s a competition , scramble not to be on bottom. Like any competition you’ll need a combination of luck, determination and talent in order to elevate your placement.
The point is that it wasn’t easy - I just did it anyway. Most failed weight-loss stories boil down to “it was hard, so I quit.” Actually, that covers failing at most things, from learning guitar or a new language to advanced math. The people that succeed at things simply didn’t quit, and the immediate claim from the quitters is that, for them, it was easier.
Absolutely. And then you start over, rather than quit. It’s a simple as that. Not easy, but simple.
As far as the 'completely out of your control" bit: around our house the saying was “you can’t control the weather, but you can watch the skies.” People that talk bitterly about hindsight often weren’t using its cousin foresight. Their car suddenly died - after the check engine light was on for months. The government unexpectedly shutdown, which typically happens when the President and the majority of Congress are from opposing parties.
Except that this is a pretty modern problem, and Trump’s two shutdowns are amazing for only being in office 2 years (there was a third funding gap, but it was only 9 hours or so and no one was furloughed).
Sweden has much lower levels of income inequality, and they have more doctors per capita.
Granted, a society where doctors earn the same as waiters is a screwed up society. But you don’t need a society where the wage gap is 12k vs 400k either.
True. Thing is nowadays we simply outsource our serfs where possible.
So does Sweden.
We live like Kings because we get the majority of our goods from cheap labor pools in other countries. So those at the bottom here aren’t even the true bottom. We keep them out of site.
The wage gap I think is just so much bigger largely because we still carry much of the cultural heritage of the old landlords and tenants… Hey we still even use those terms , just in a different way.
Thats somewhat true, but wages and standards of living are going up in those nations, which is good for everyone. China has become wealthy enough that their labor costs are becoming too much for them to be the world’s factory.
The global wage gas is shrinking I would assume (I don’t have a cite off hand). The gap between the average American or European vs the average Chinese citizen is going to be much smaller now than in 1980.
At least shrinking in some areas. Poor nations are growing at 6-10% a year while rich nations are growing at 1-3% a year.
I mean, the primary issue here is that I fail to see why “living” should be a question. People should have food, shelter, healthcare and access to basic amenities (arguably including things like transportation and communication since those drastically affect ability to labor). I don’t know why we delegate this concept to some extremely indirect concept like “money”.
Littleman is right that “The existence of a monetary heirarchy means someone has to be on bottom,” but the bottom doesn’t really need to be unlivably low, or even uncomfortable. I reject the hypothesis that the lowest standard we find acceptable as a society can’t be “relatively comfortable, even if not extravagant”.
To me, the question isn’t so much about the habits of people who live paycheck to paycheck, or how to break out of the cycle, or how to get people more money while acknowledging that even people with a lot of money can squander it. The acceptable amount of questions a person should need to have about whether they can live, from a pure resources perspective, is zero. We have plenty of food, and a shit ton of empty buildings from foreclosed homes and businesses. I don’t buy this “people need to be in danger of dying to produce useful labor” stuff.
Very true, at least within our own nation.
However, the modern standard of comfortable in the US requires far more labor hours to maintain then any one person can produce.
Therefore, if you wish to live comfortably, you must effectively employ several people below you.
Until automation can produce everything a household needs on an even 1:1 scale of human labor not everyone can possibly live comfortably.
Call me selfish,or brash, but for now I’d rather the true bottom be some people in some poor nation somewhere than have it be my neighbor or myself.
That nation will eventually be brought up by that also. Just as Japan was and China is currently.
Because growing food, building shelters, providing healthcare, running transportation and communication networks requires people’s labor. Or to put it another way, you want food, an apartment, medical care and a ride around town. Who do you expect to provide this for you?
It’s true that there must be differences in individual income based on differences in individual production (as a market judges production, not subjective opinions) or else there’s no reason to produce more (gain the education or skills, make the effort, etc). No human economy can function properly with equal economic outcomes for everyone, that seems empirically well enough proven.
But that clearly doesn’t mean that collective action, redistribution, can’t be used to partly even out those economic outcomes. That’s already done on a massive scale in the US, not quite as much as some other rich countries but the difference is often exaggerated. A suggestion that economic life in the US is a Dickensian struggle in pure capitalism would be quite ridiculous. It’s fair to argue that social welfare policies should be even more (or less) generous. There’s certainly room for debate they could be made more efficient. But even so that’s not directly relevant to each person’s responsibility to do the best they can for themselves under any given condition (again including learning about and seeking out maximum govt benefits where applicable) and the lack of some overarching authority that’s going to do that for each individual if they don’t do it for themselves. Probably everybody agrees on that last point.
The reference to trade and other countries is not even partially true though. The US could institute policies to be largely autarkic, only importing critical raw materials, and the poorest people in the US would still not be comparably poor to poor people in poor countries. The whole US would be poorer, and relatively poorer people in the US would suffer most from such policies (by being denied cheaper everyday goods from overseas they depend on more than rich people do). But poor countries would also be worse off, and especially their poorest people. The world as a whole could lose from such policies. People in poor countries are not poor and people in rich countries rich because of trade between poor and rich countries. That’s just a mistaken idea.
How then, can our poor maintain a lifestyle that consumes at least 10,000 labor hours per year when they only produce 2000 themselves?
Unless their labor hours are worth 5 times as much as someone elses.