Totally irrelevant. The fact that more money ended up in the bank accounts of the wealthy didn’t help the ordinary person, who either didn’t benefit or who ended up with less. And as demonstrated by the following collapse, most of that “wealth” was only on paper anyway.
Oh, please. It rather shows how pathetic America is that to make it look good you have to compare it to Victorian England. Somehow it’s always some historical or Third World hellhole that America gets compared to. Not, say, Canada or Europe.
And you are wrong anyway; the government feeding the poor is ancient.
Look up PPP. It’s clearly a concept you are unfamiliar with.
Victorian England in turn was better than Medieval England. The United States of America over the past twenty years minus the past three was wealthier than contemporary Canada and Europe. But the differences were pretty minor.
God you’ll hate America even if you have to say something that’s easily proven false.
Heh in the Western world actually the church feeding the poor is ancient but that doesn’t fit your anti-narrative. And even so in the past it wasn’t a guaranteed income.
But most of it didn’t end up in the bank accounts of the wealthy. The wealthy used it to buy shares in companies, which employ people. People like you and me. Or they buy things. And in buying things, they used agents, delivery people, salesmen, and more. People making bucks all down the line.
It’s absolutely true that the median wage has stagnated for decades. Median household wealth kept increasing (until 2000) because of more women going to work, but labor force participation for women is as high as it’s going to go so that avenue to increased family wealth has exhausted itself. The coming decades will see US living standards, wages slipping in relation to some other countries as US labor rates are arbitraged downwards by mainly Asian competition.
And trickle down manifestly hasn’t worked. We got worse than average economic growth following tax cuts coupled with huge drops in tax revenue, leading to massive deficits.
They used their extra income to bid up the prices of existing assets leading to speculative bubbles, economic instability. The last time the top 1% made as big a share of national income as they did in 2008 was in 1928. Go figure.
That’s a nice fantasy, but why then was there 0 job creation over the period from December 1999 to December 2009? Please refer to the link in my previous post in this thread if you have any questions about that.
This is mostly bleating and has nothing to do with reality. Basically what we’re getting here are appeals to emotions. “I don’t perceive myself as wealthy enough waaaaah!!!”, and we ignore the historical perspective where we recognize that the twentieth century in the West was historically anomalous in that we just recently ceased to be mud dwellers. In the twentieth century we started to develop statistics and analytics. We turned into a culture who measured everything, but largely didn’t accept that many of our incongruities have come from a lack of measurable data from prior times. The steps leading up to the information age actually tell us more about striving to keep accurate data than they do about what that data represents. The lives of individual humans in the West is demonstrably better than it has been in all of history. We could compare our lot to that of Luxembourg where the PPP dwarfs ours but it’s stupid. If you took the PPP of Manhattan it would dwarf that of the United States too. Looking at a small sample that has a concentration of wealthy bankers is stupid. In the West there have been fluctuations in terms of how the wealth moves around. We seem to think that because Norway’s PPP increased for ten years that this is somehow meaningfullly comparable to that of the United States, and we ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS ignore the fact that we are comparing a highly sophisticated polity to a much less sophisticated polity. Norway having about 1.5% of the population of the United States and having the good fortune to be one of the world’s top oil producing states.
Economics is not unlike Climate Science, in that the study of Economics is akin to predicting the weather. Looking at the PPP of one country over a short period of time and comparing it to our own is like saying, “It’s sunnier in Italy than it is in New York, therefore Italy is demonstrably better!”, in otherwords, it’s facile and shallow criteria. The notion that we can maintain unsustainable growth levels forever is ridiculous. The United States of America is a very comfortable nation to live in. Trying to argue that it’s not by finding extreme anecdotes of poverty is the same as trying to argue that it’s ok to kill newborns because they might become serial killers or drug addicts. If you are willing to work hard you can do well in America. I don’t know if you remember those T-Shirts that had a lithograph of Bush’s face with a cross-out circle over it. A friend of mine made those. He setup street teams and kept ordering new batches of the shirt. He made 150,000 in revenue from that. He was 18 years old at the time. If you cannot find a niche in America to make some money then it is fair to say it is due to some personal problem. I have always found myself lacking the commitment to my financial situation to stick it out for the money but opportunities have been ever present. People arguing that my friend was an anomaly are just not getting it, they're missing the point. He found a market and he exploited it. He was able to get 15-20 off of thousands of leftists at rallies and protests around the east coast.
What I see is a whole lot of entitlement. This idea that we DESERVE to be wealthier than our Fathers. This is ingrained in our consciousness. But the fact of globalization is that we are competing with a much broader labor pool. Economics is like the tides, the currency flows rise and recede, they move around.
It seems to me that what people desperately want is a guarantee. They want to know that they are safe and secure. They don’t want to have to strive. They don’t want to have to look down the barrel of mortality and use that as an impetus to climb up out of the muck. They think that not living in the mud is a basic human right. It’s not. Life is what you make of it. You have more power to help those around you, if you are powerful enough to help yourself. If you are not striving for yourself, if you are not fighting to build up your piece of the action then you’re a parasite. And hopefully I won’t have to listen to idiotic straw men about measuring a man’s value against his income, as anyone who has paid attention to anything I’ve said here over the past ten years should know I am emphatically against measuring a man by the value of his income. Which is essentially what you guys are calling upon me to do. America has a great deal of fungible wealth that is not measured very well, an aftermarket of social currency and barter that maintains a great amount of wealth in this nation. There are so many tools available to you to make your life better. I do not believe that one cannot support themselves in America unless they have some kind of debilitating illness.
When I was in my 20s, partying was my goal. Exploring the universe and consciousness and all that hippy crap was my primary goal. I lived in a make-shift storage unit in a warehouse in the ghetto in order to avoid debt. I didn’t manage any consumer debt outside of trouble paying my phone bill on occasion or owing back-rent to friends which I eventually came back to them with and I found other non-monetary methods for benefitting people, connections to jobs, an extra set of arms to to carry sleeper sofas into 5th floor walk-ups, organized parties that provided a community to a whole lot of people, people who to this day I have a close relationship with. America is filled with opportunities and it’s not always about money.
This is a mindset that I absolutely cannot comprehend. The vast majority of Americans are wealthy by the standards of the world, and obscenely wealthy when compared to human history. On my graduate student’s salary I am well within the top 15% riches people on the planet, and probably inside the top 2-3% richest in human history. So when someone complains, what is so wrong with reminding them that their cushy life is NOT the norm? Honestly, what would you say to those who started and ended the decade in the top 2-3% of the US, if they were here complaining about how unbearable their life is?
Things suck for a great many people. However, things have been improving for quite some time now. One estimate for when lives that don’t suck will outnumber lives that do suck (for the first time in human history I might add) is 2048. In fact, the past decade has been quite good economically for more than 2.5 billion people. These people are not morally inferior to Americans. Their success more than makes up for the hardships of 300 million Americans. Let me be clear about that: for every one of us going through an economy in recession, there are more than 8 of them in an economy doing well.
But maybe you, Der Trihs and others that agree with you, are right. Perhaps Wesley Clark is right, and the improving lives of these billions of people is one of the great horrors currently besetting our nation. That certainly seems to be a common enough opinion. I just don’t understand it.
“By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.”
– Adam Smith
Put another way: If you have to worry whether your grad student’s salary is going to cover all your expenses, bills and rent this month, your life is not so “cushy,” even if “bills” includes cable TV or an Internet service provider.
Rather than real economic indicators, I’m guessing the OP is questioning when the general “zeitgeist” of the nation becomes more positive.
I would imagine soon. The last decade were pretty much defined by 9/11, the crash of the dot-com bubble, two wars and a President who came across as…well…stupid. We just started a new decade, the economy has started to pick up (jobs are a lagging indicator FYI) and I imagine that once the two wars wind down the general mood will improve.
Keep in mind that people also complained about something or another sucking in every decade.
Some would argue just being a grad student is cushy. College students complaining about their life not being cushy is like complaining to a homeless man about how the restaurant he’s squatting in front of serves a terrible steak.
Part of the problem is the cultural pride that assumes that being without a linen shirt is disgraceful poverty. The industrialization of the Victorian era changed the mores of consumption and made conspicuous consumption a necessity for social value. A Diogenes could not be possible in today’s age, and Ghandi probably wouldn’t have done so well in America. This brought the trends of upper-class fashions to the lower classes and created yet another class of bespoke and couture clothing that separated the upper-classes from the lowly plebes who were now expected to spend a certain amount of their income on things like corsets and other unecessary items. This sort of pride is rooted in the acts of conspicuous consumption which becomes a necessity by dint of social ostracization if you do not conform.
The problems start when the “custom” becomes more extravagant that what the average person can afford - when having a car and numerous bits of expensive electronica are necessary to avoid “disgraceful poverty”.
If meeting or exceeding ever-increasing expectations of this sort is what is meant by “not sucking”, our circumstances will, sadly, always “suck”.
OTOH, in my opinion things are “sucking” less now than they were when I was growing up; the threat of manichean conflict with the Soviets is gone, no more “duck and cover!” … true we just went through a vicious recession but it was less bad than feared and not I think as bad as the “stagflation” of the '70s on the ordinary person.
Do you believe that the 1930s were better than the 1920s merely because they occurred at a later date?
I am of the belief that our species is on an upward trajectory, but that there are going to be setbacks and problems. For many people in the US, life is worse in 2009 than it was in 1996. That doesn’t change the fact that the global middle class is growing by 80 million a year, or that alternative energy is cheaper now than then, or that we have better medical treatments for various diseases now.
But a jagged upward trajectory is still going to have down points where things are temporarily worse than they were in the past.
And for the middle class the economy has stagnated. Their gross income, adjusted for inflation, hasn’t changed for almost 40 years. Some expenses have gone down (electronics, food, transportation, clothing) but others have gone up (real estate, health care, education, taxes, child care). So arguably we have not only stagnated, but gone backwards economically.
No, because we aren’t talking about abstract numbers we are talking about what actually happened and because I know that the stock market crashed in 1929 and the worst war in human history followed the worldwide economic collapse in the 30s. So of course not. Because we are dealing with actuality and not vague hyperbole.
Yes, and much of what we consider a setback is still better than most of our ancestors had it. For many people in the US life is better in 2009 than in 1996 too.
Yes, but being worse off than 1996 ain’t too bad. 1996 was a fairly prosperous time in American history.
So what? You’re still stuck on the myth of the perpetual growth model. Being stuck at a middle-class level isn’t so bad. Your linear mindset regarding economics is a very limited way of looking at things.
And what makes you think the average American is that well off? Much less poor Americans? You are a member of a pampered group patting yourself on the back about how great America is, while other Americans root through garbage cans. Or work multiple jobs to get just enough to eat and a leaking roof over their head.
But then hunger’s good for kids, right? Helps them learn.