The title is a little out of date. Prosperity has been increasing in the 20th century, but has not increased for a few decades.
Sure, crap like gadgets is now cheaper, but buying a house, giving your kids an education, and so on have increased. In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy. And that's not even adding in the decline of working class jobs, and the instability of most modern careers (outside of IT which still has it good).
To further your analogy, it sometimes feels that the Maslow's hierarchy of needs is "hollowed out" at the bottom of the pyramid, and to keep the hollowing out disguised, companies and advertisers divert attention to the top of the pyramid i.e. "look how everything's awesome! Take your complimentary beer".
I see the confusion. Based on Maslow's hierarchy (pyramid) of needs, one needs to start at the bottom (physiological) and build up from there like a foundation. Because factors, both internal and external to ones lives, erode at access to basic needs, ones life loses stability, hence the "hollowing" out part. A better metaphor would be turning Maslow's hierarchy/pyramid instead into a tower.
(in retrospect this wasn't one of my best thoughts)
I think you're onto something, but it's that the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy are pretty much completely satisfied these days for all but the poorest people, so the meaning of those levels are eroded. Once upon a time, a good stew and a husk of bread were enough to make you feel genuinely satisfied with your life. These days a delicious greasy dinner with ice cream for dessert barely registers because you're chasing mates and self-actualisation and stuff.
You make a few substantial points, but any use of the "single income earner" argument is incomplete if it doesn't acknowledge that _women were also working at home_ while their husbands were doing income-earning work.
It's not only income-earning work that counts against prosperity: it's all work. Studies indicate that men and women gained 6-8 hours of leisure from 1965-2003. There are probably caveats and addenda to that, and you make other good points, but please also consider non-income work in your arguments.
There are fewer hours of work done at home now. The increase in leisure time reflects a decrease in total labor: income-earning labor, labor around the house, etc. Figures in [1] break it out a bit, although the years-reflected are a bit different than I used above. Search for "60.9" to find the relevant table.
That compares the 1960s to the 1980s. A lot has changed in 30 years. In particular Financialisation has increased dramatically. Are there any more recent figures?
Also, less work being done at home isn't necessarily a good thing. More people eating microwaved ready meals or takeaways probably means lower quality of life overall.
My comment was a rebuttal to the "single income earner" argument which suggests that in the post-war era we labored half as much as we do today.
I've got no other points to defend. But I'm happy to look at any of your points, and I understand and accept the argument that hours of leisure time is not a direct measurement of well-being. (:
Labor force participation of women in 1950 was 33.9 while males 86.4. So while males worked much more, the framing that makes it sound like women did not worked at all is false.
Upper and middle class women did not worked, poorer women (significant part of population) did and had to work.
That's probably one of the caveats and addenda. So, my counterargument doesn't prove that life has gotten better--maybe an additional kid is "better" than six hours of leisure time by some calculuses. But it does rebut any argument that we used to get by one 40 hours per week per household of labor but now we need 80.
Edit: Of course, as parent notes the drop in number of children represents at most _part_ of the increase in leisure hours. We can definitely attribute part of it to things that are definitely modern advantages, like labor-saving devices such as dish-washing machines. The year 1965 is kind of a poor year for my argument, in that by that point most households had the most labor-saving devices: refrigerators that allow you to shop and cook days at a time, washing machines that saved many hours of labor washing clothes, etc.
Person A says prosperity not increased for the middle-class since the 1970's, person B says it has.
Do they have to rely on historical data, or is there some experiment they could perform to determine who is right? For example, suppose I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's. I would subsidise their housing and education costs, but they would pay more for clothes and food and air travel and phone calls. They would not have the internet and would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player for entertainment. If nobody accepted such an offer, would that settle the argument?
I was in college in the 70s, so yeah, it was a fun time for me when I think back on it. Who wouldn’t want to hear Aerosmith live in a club with maybe 80 people there before their first album.
But I walked to class cold and wet on many days. Gortex hadn’t been invented and I couldn’t afford a car. When I got my first real job I bought a car, but I carried a toolbox in the trunk. Cars broke down frequently and with no cell phones you were on your own if the car stopped running. A car accident could kill you in a 35 mph crash. I also carried a state highway map and a city map of around 100 pages in a spiral bound book because there was no GPS.
The best medicine available seems primitive by comparison to today. I had classmates that wore leg braces due to childhood polio. People were still dying from rabies, TB, and even Smallpox. There were cholera pandemics. No MRI, no CAT scans.
I was studying programming. I had to walk to campus at night to punch cards. No internet, no terminal, just a place to drop off cards so that you could pick up your output in the morning.
I was middle class in the 70s so I had it much better than many others. Most of us grew up with a single wired phone in the house, only one full bathroom, one black and white TV that received three channels, no DVD, no CDs.
A VCR player in 1975 was big and heavy and cost over $5000 in today’s dollars so none of us owned one.
Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.
Even in the 1970s, life was still much much better for me than my parents that had grew up on small farms during the dustbowl days of the Great Depression.
Ubiquitous discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice made it harder for many to be middle class like I was.
When I hear my parents talk about growing up in the segregated south in the 50s, there is nothing about it that makes me think - "wow life was so much better back then".
The South in the 50s was definitely segregated, although the degree of prejudice varied. Whether white or black, life was likely not better than it is now.
But the OP was talking about the 70s and there is a world of difference. Once you get to the 70s the statement "wow life was so much better back then." becomes debatable for whites, at least.
Sorry, your narrative timeline is simply incorrect. Perhaps b/c you did not live in the USA?
Gore-tex was invented in 1969 but was hardly necessary. Wool has always worked extremely well and still does: polyester was pretty good except in northern USA. I lived in the south and wore predominantly cotton: Levi jeans and cotton t-shirts were our uniform in the summer; winter we bought a jacket and lived with it.
In 1971 I bought a used American car with everything on it for $300. My East Indian college roommate loved to ride in it and very quickly got a license and car of his own. I later drove my $300 car from Texas to New York via the Midwest and DC to graduate school. I later drove that car to work and school around DC. I had tools but rarely needed them except for maintenance. The car was extremely reliable and needed only tuneups and tires. I gave it to a friend when I bought another car.
You didn't (and still don't) need a cell phone. It was (and is) easy to get help from strangers.
A car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and usually don't). Cars are safer now and I appreciate that, but they weren't _that_ unsafe: people would not have driven them otherwise.
You complain about carrying a map and a zip code book - you should still (I do), since your phone or network could fail at any time. But you don't b/c in your heart you believe that you can rely on the kindness of strangers!
Medicine today is not much better than it was back then. Trauma care _is_ improved (the lessons of Vietnam were absorbed). But antibiotics worked better back then than today and other than antivirals and statins, the use of drugs hasn't improved much. As someone once said, doctors got no respect until antibiotics came along and, were they taken away, doctors would not get much respect now.
The remnants of the polio epidemics was still present in students of the 1950s (Salk developed his vaccine in 1952 and I was vaccinated ~1957). I too had classmates with polio braces, but polio in the USA was stopped by the vaccination campaigns before the 1970s.
People didn't die of rabies in the 1970s unless it was untreated.
People didn't die of TB in the 1970s unless it was unattended and/or advanced before treatment.
Smallpox was wiped out and routine immunization halted in 1970. The only cholera pandemics were offshore USA (e.g., the El Tor pandemic in Indonesia->Pakistan in the '70's).
I too carried punch cards (I started in the 60's) and was glad to do so: programming turned into a career. 4 years later in the mid-70's I had a terminal and multiple computers available in a network.
3 TV channels was plenty: I got the news and entertainment too, although after awhile I began to notice TV was turning into something akin to the "Bullshit Web" of today:
VCRs were about $1000 in 1975 but they were available used for only hundreds of dollars. I have a used one that runs still today! In comparison my first CD player died after 3 years.
Neither discrimination nor bigotry nor prejudice were ubiquitous but they _were_ still present. Your description of prejudice fits the southern USA of the '50's, NOT the '70's.
Indeed my grandparents were small farmers (sharecroppers) and their and their children's (my parents') lives were hard. But the opportunities my parents had during their time were enormous and their lives were rich and memorable.
It probably remains true even today that antibiotics are man's most significant improvement of the last century.
But in summary I find your description of the 70s is off by fully 20 years.
> A car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and usually don't). Cars are safer now and I appreciate that, but they weren't _that_ unsafe: people would not have driven them otherwise.
Cars were a lot less safe in 1971, that is a fact. No air bags, no anti-lock brakes, no traction control. Older cars didn't have seat belts, shoulder belts were rare, cars weren't built to crumple, steering columns would impale you, etc.
Fact, not anecdote:
In 1971 there were 4.46 fatalities per million vehicle miles traveled (MVMT).
In 2015 it was 1.18 fatalities per MVMT.
So yes, in fact cars were three times as dangerous as today.
1) What I stated was not anecdote: a car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and don't).
2) I simply don't agree with your use of relative statistics, which reeks of alarmism. My doctors use such arguments in attempts to convince me to take statin drugs, which would at best extend my life for only a few days if I took them for 30 years. He always tells me that I'm "X times as likely to die from a heart attack" unless I take statins. I always remind him of the nature of his statistics, the side-effects of statins, and the non-present longevity payoff of taking them.
Once the number of fatalities per MVMT is below a certain value it ceases to be likely in the overall scheme of things and becomes unimportant.
Relative statistics ignore the prior probabilities - the fact that I'm unlikely to die driving in the first place. Yes, 4.46 deaths per MVMT is about 3 X 1.18, but both are low deaths per MVMT.
I may die from falling off a ladder or get eaten by a shark but neither is likely, nor am I now nor was I likely in the 70s to die in a car accident. Some other damn thing will most likely get me (that isn't anecdotal either).
Perhaps the deficit of happiness can be better explained by one of Peter Thiel's most excellent reductionist observations:
The countercultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we
landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three
weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when
progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. [1][2]
Perhaps, for too long, the left has engulfed and held hostage our cultural ideas of progress and advancement. And perhaps that has imbued us with a certain stripe of ideological stagnation not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also the debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself and its relevance to the overall happiness of our society.
Perhaps our dominant leftist culture's 'ideological stagnation index' is the unmeasured metric that could explain why we feel the way we feel despite
technological progress.
Thiel on the same topic:
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction
movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar,
Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to
be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world
where actually believing that a better future is possible that
you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is
actually radically countercultural.[1]
[1]
Glenn Beck and Peter Thiel On How To Change What's Politically Cool
He's talking about the cultural left not the political one deployed to ensure voter turnout.
Perhaps this will add more context:
Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there
is a difference between the election of a black
president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in
their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights
parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these
ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s
Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually
might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless
fake cultural wars around identity politics are the
main reason we have been able to ignore the tech
slowdown for so long.[1]
You're not reading Thiel's full argument, it takes a while to appreciate it, you won't get it from a couple of sound bites. I've read a slew of his essays and watched his talks - it takes a while to absorb how different this interpretation of reality is.
I believe Thiel is correct in what he is saying and that is terrifying. It is going to take Westerners a long time to finally wake up and when it finally does it'll be jarring and immensely depressing.
Is there any way you could go into more detail on this or refer to some sources? In all honesty, your comment sounds vague and a bit esoteric, still interesting enough that I want to know if there some hidden truth to it. It can’t be that difficult
Peter Thiel is really a kind of philosopher - the venture capitalism is more of an outgrowth of something else than his primary focus. This is a person who reads widely, has big ideas and is consistently ahead of everybody else - his reputation is wholly deserved.
I've been following, causally at first, his ideas through books written about or by him, many hours of youtube videos and essays in and around the topics he talks about. It is difficult to distill this into a synopsis because although I can provide a TLDR it doesn't mean you'd get any predictive power of it.
I suggest doing your own homework and coming to your own conclusions. I think I'd give a lot for a photo of his bookshelves.
A common theme in Thiel's thought is that 'reality is often very different from the mainstream conception of it'. Ron Unz wrote this essay which gives body to this belief.
Another theme is that humankind is highly mimetic - meaning they have a desire to be copying each other. This comes out of the philosophy of René Girard and you'll have to read something of his to fully understand where we're going with this.
Peter Thiel is at the intersection of an unusually large number of obscure and strange topics, that's the reason why he's ahead of the curve over and over. Things like Seasteading, Urbit, if you ferret away at the peripheral you start to see interesting stuff, some of which gets ferried back to the mainstream sooner or later he's not the only talent scout for weird ideas like this but there's surprisingly few people out there in these strange circles - I've found that I keep running into the same people over and over, only a few hundred of them I'd guess. I'm tired now, it's near GMT midnight but good luck on your quest!
A lot of Tyler Cowen's ideas intersect with Thiel, that's another good line of enquiry.
I'm very far to the left, but the military made almost all the major inventions that silicon valley has packaged up for consumer use. The iPhone is nothing but a collection of technologies designed for war. GPS, small cameras, the internet, ect were all designed by the military not by Silicon Valley.
The point though is that some people in SV think that a monoculture of liberals were/are behind everything and that is just not true. Technology is a full spectrum ideological bloodsport.
I would absolutely consider that offer. I get cheap housing, healthcare, and education and as an added bonus I get rid of social media and my nagging smartphone?
(Btw, TV was in color by the 70s and literal gramophones were long gone)
Exactly, failing to keep up with the Jones has real impact on happiness. Absolute vs relative prosperity is like buying a top of the line new computer in 1995 or a used computer today built in 2010 that is vastly more powerful yet can’t run a lot of current software well.
One issue is we are constantly bombarded with things we don’t have. Basic cable has far more channels than existed in 1960 but the menu constantly shows every channel you don’t have while making menus harder to use.
Exactly, failing to keep up with the Jones has real impact on happiness. Absolute vs relative prosperity is like buying a to of the line new computer in 1995 or a used computer today built in 2010 that is vastly more powerful yet can’t run a lot of current software well.
A computer you bought in 2010 would be more than capable of running most modern non game software well.
In fact, I was using a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz Dell (circa 2009) running Windows 10 as my Plex Server until last week. It was only slow when trying to do something interactively while Plex was transcoding. It also ran PlexConnect to serve a Plex client to my 3rd gen AppleTV.
The 1st gen iPad was also released that year. I still have one (not my main iPad). I reset it last year. It can still be used for most of the streaming services - Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Bingo. I have a 2009 Thinkpad that's still kicking; both it refurb'd. Does everything just fine for day-to-day purposes, and runs Alpha Centauri in WINE/DosBox like a boss.
For a couple years it was a dedicated seedbox. It's mostly by BTC-trade-only box these days, but if my desktop died I could re-image it and use it for 95% of my life without issue.
I am mostly talking about games. Still, a good PC from 2010 holds up well, but low end PC’s from 2010 could have as little as 2GB of RAM which would have issues with a modern OS and a wide range of applications. Other issues where anemic SSD storage space, a HDD from 2010 holds up ok, but SSD’s tended to just barely work.
Pretty sure you couldn't convince a teenager to give up Snapstagram or Instabook or whatever is the next thing. Must be that these bring prosperity to their lives :).
I think we have to go to even more basic questions: what do people think about when they say prosperity? Having more money? But is it having more money than today's average or having more money than they used to have?
One thing's for sure, I wouldn't say more tech = more prosperity. By this definition alone almost every person is the world lives a more prosperous life by virtue of having a $20 burner phone that they didn't have in the '80s.
No, prosperity is "financial success" and that's related to the people around you and to some basic standard, a baseline of the times you're living in.
> No, prosperity is "financial success" and that's related to the people around you and to some basic standard
If that's the case, then prosperity is purely relative term (as I suspect the "basic standard" will be redefined every decade or so) and hence can never improve. To me, what you're describing sounds more like inequality than prosperity.
Really you would need people to live each of the lives and get them to judge afterwards rather than just ask what they would prefer when they only really have experience of teh current version.
> I offered 10 people the opportunity to live like people lived in the 1970's
Do I also get a dozen brothers and sisters? Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic?
> would only have a black-and-white TV with 4 stations and a gramophone record player..
Sure. I would rather have a gramaphone record player or cassete player (which is more like 70s i think) that played ABBA or BoneyM than a 4k lcd tv that plays Lady gaga or Justine beiber or what ever crap that is "trending" today.
> Eat food, drink water and breath air without having to constantly worry about being them polluted or toxic?
Sorry but you have a very rosy view of the 1970s. Would you drink this water [0]? Or fill your car with leaded Gas [1]? Use asbestos in your building [2]? DDT on your fresh food? [3] Air quality around the world is vastly superior to the 70s (people are still suffering because of it [4]).
> than a 4k lcd tv that plays Lady gaga or Justine beiber or what ever crap that is "trending" today.
It's your choice. Your 4k TV today can still play Abba or boney M, and many other bands you couldn't afford. A record cost $3 in 1970, which adjusted for inflation is about $19. For the same (adjusted) cost as an album a month in 1970 you can have access to basically every artist from the 70s (Spotify) along with most TV shows (nrtflix/) and still have enough change for a beer to go with it. Nobody is forcing you to leave your TV tuned into listen to Bieber. There was also a deluge of crap in the 1970s that you just weren't exposed to. There is also plenty of great music being produced now that can easily be found.
> Sorry but you have a very rosy view of the 1970s.
Who said pollution did not exist back in 1970. Just that it was more feasible to get stuff that you know that is not polluted. From local produce or farmed yourself.
> Air quality around the world is vastly superior to the 70s (people are still suffering because of it?
Oh yea? Can you provide some citations. By what factor have the number of automobiles multiplied?
> Your 4k TV today can still play Abba or boney M.
You are missing the point. The point is that the technology to consume art is irrelavant if the art produced is low quality in itself. I mean, where is M-tv today?
>There is also plenty of great music being produced now that can easily be found.
Oh yea? Again, where is M-Tv then? It's been ages since a new song have really captured my attention.
There are plenty of ways to get locally farmed meat and vegetables. The fact that battery farmed chickens and industrially grown tomatoes are now easily accessible all year around in your local Walmart/Asda doesn't change the fact that I can go to my greengrocer and get fresh fruit and veg from 30 miles away.
> Can you provide some citations.
Yes, I did for everything I said in the previous post at the bottom. I even numbered them.
>art is irrelavant if the art produced is low quality...
> where is M-tv today
You don't have to judge by the lowest common denominator.
Just because the most popular music right now doesn't capture your imagination doesn't mean that 1) all popular music is bad, or 2) the older forms which you enjoy have been taken from you.
> I can go to my greengrocer and get fresh fruit and veg from 30 miles away.
And you think that is free of toxins?
>Yes, I did for everything I said in the previous post at the bottom. I even numbered them.
No. You said air pollution around the world is vastly superior now. The link you provided said "People are dying from pollution sustain during the 70s". If you don't see the difference, then I wish you a good day and let us drop this conversation.
The 70s had a fair amount of pollution and crime above what we experience now. I'm guessing the OP didn't graduate with decades of student loans though. Or a five year loan for that car of theirs.
Unfortunately you’re right. Nowadays, many people here in Germany can afford a house or an apartment in the big cities only if they get some money from their (grand)parents. I think one major reason for this is the free flow of capital globally.
The effect in its extreme form: people get evicted, buildings get built/renovated (“Luxusbeton”), int’l investors buy hoping for ever increasing prices, apts stay empty. Insane
This is a bad side effect of low interest rates. If the interest rates were high, e.g. 5%, investing into unoccupied real estate would not be a viable investment.
That’s one major reason, for sure. Another big factor seems to be that people are moving their money out of their unstable home countries into save havens
It looks like now that we've had our basic needs met, our desires are for human contact, and not just stuff. Along comes Baumol's cost disease and makes things involving physically present people (like traditional education) much more expensive than things that don't (like chinese smartphones).
Unfortunately without a change of economic system it doesn't seem like this trend will change course.
> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner.
Has that really changed?
A manufacturing business in my area is currently hiring everyone who shows up to an interview. They pay they are offering isn't wonderful (at least if you concept of money has been warped by the IT industry), but you should expect to make around $40,000 per year to start. Perusing the real estate listings, I see a three bed, two bath detached home near to that business listed at $139,000.
Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on housing, but many suggest you can go as high as five times income. We're at 3.4 times income. It's not ideal, but it seems doable, especially if you want to live like it is the 1940s. The cost of cell phone each month can easily apply $50-100 more to your mortgage payment each month instead.
I will point out that our example job is one that you can walk into and start today. If you take a little more care and look around and risk a few rejections before finding work, there are plenty of jobs that pay considerably more. In those cases, one person buying a home should not be an issue whatsoever. A $45,000 income would provide the necessary amount for the three times income rule of thumb to buy this home in question.
Households today spend more on cell phones and communication but also spend less on fine china, dress clothes and food. When you net out all the pluses and minuses households today spend much more on housing, healthcare, daycare, transportation (two cars, for two jobs) and education.
When you look closely the two bed, two bath detached home it’s likely in a school district that is underperforming and while the home may be slightly larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.
This is detailed elegantly in the Two Income Trap by Elizabeth Warren.
The thing that is crazy is that there is any debate in the subject. Real productivity growth has averaged 2% for the last 100 years in the US. Early in the last century they they were speculating that if productivity growth kept up at that rate their grandchildren would only need to work a couple of hours a week and what would they do with all their free time?
Actually, I think the housing price expectations discrepancy is probably a function of where you live vs where the GP lives. Inflation-adjusted housing prices haven't actually risen all that much outside top-tier cities.
Given that a relatively small percentage of people live in these places, I get the feeling the perception of a housing price crisis is larger than the reality. I don't mean to say that housing isn't unreasonably expensive in some places, but that the issue likely receives disproportionate attention because it most strongly affects those who tend to write and read about issues like a housing price crisis (i.e. journalists, software developers, economists, etc. who often live in these expensive cities). The people dictating and participating in these conversations are those who are living in expensive cities.
For the typical poor person, I suspect the costs of higher education and healthcare are usually a bigger obstacle than housing costs. Though this is probably not the case for a poor person in San Francisco.
Millions of people live in top tier cities and millions of people live in Nowhere, USA where housing is still ludicrously expensive in proportion to job prospects
This hits really close for me. I am a Seattle IT guy and looking at houses back near family in Michigan. Sure, houses are 2-4x more expensive here...but I will most certainly make 1/2 as much in the areas in Michigan that I would like to live...which is as far away from the Detroit metro as possible. And even if I can make that much I will be lucky to find a job. Here in Seattle people come to me to hire me!
Amen... but with Washington DC. Northern VA has literally the richest counties per capita in the US. Then I look at Eastern WA or Idaho and lose my shit. Montana, too, though the culture is terrible.
If only I could get a job there that didn't pay poor salaries...
You know, I've always heard that and thought it seemed reasonable, but when I actually started looking through the data I noticed that the top tier cities often have significantly lower median incomes.
The top tier cities also have higher mean incomes. The top tier cities tend to attract the outliers. If you are Mark Zuckerberg, you probably live in a top tier city. But almost nobody is able to say they are earning like Mark Zuckerberg. And if you are earning like Mark Zuckerberg, the cost of housing is the least of your concerns.
It seems for the normal every day average person, they actually make less money in a top tier city.
gp actually answered that with "especially if you want to live like it is the 1940s".
There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is. People just flat-out underestimate how much work it takes to keep the infrastructure of the modern world in place and humming - traditional infrastructure, IT grids, distribution of goods and services (particularly maintaining an enormous fleet of wheeled vehicles).
I know a lot of people who are poorer than I am but spend more, because they just don't clamp down on things like car usage, sending money to their children, pets and ordering a daily coffee. The only thing that will force them to live a simple lifestyle is literally having no money.
Sometimes people maneuver into a position where they have no choice, because they make bad long-term lifestyle choices early on, but so far the evidence is that human demand for stuff and services is infinite. People use their spare hours to gather and consume more.
> There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is.
Absolutely! I genuinely marvel every time I go into a supermarket. I can buy a huge variety of delicious foods from all the corners of the globe. 200 years ago a king couldn't eat this well.
Also, I have literal robots doing my housework! A robot cleans the floor. A robot cleans the dishes. A robot cleans my clothes. It's nice to take a step back and appreciate all this.
But they could eat very much better -- all free-range, well made, top quality cuts (not hastily made, lower tier BS, with all kinds of additives to increase self-life or make it appear more appealing in the shelves), made fresh on their own premises or bought from the best artisans.
And of course all prepared at their whim by their army of personal chefs, and served by an army of servers.
And they had all the time they liked to enjoy those things, with friends and family, not having to gulp them down between 60-hour work weeks...
>There is a quiet denial about how luxurious modern living is
There's also a big denial about how luxurious 1940s living was compared to 1840s or the palaeolithic ages...
...and that's just as well, because it's not really relevant. Living standards and necessities are determined socially, in comparison with what others of the same era have (and expect people to have), not with comparison to the past.
Someone that lives in nice large cave in Malibu with rocks for furniture and self-made pottery, and a stock of food he has hunted himself, would be considered well-off in the cavemen era, but homeless today.
Leaving aside how arguable it is, this definition of living standards is not relevant to this subthread, which is about the claim that prosperity has not been increasing for decades, followed by an unfavorable comparison to the 40s/50s. By such a useless definition, the claim is tautological: of course prosperity can't have increased of living standards are defined as being eternally static. Incidentally, it's a subthread you started and a claim you made, so it's a little bizarre to see the goalposts being moved so dramatically.
> Living standards and necessities are determined socially, in comparison with what others of the same era have (and expect people to have), not with comparison to the past.
By this definition aggregate living standards can never improve (nor decline) over time.
Ah yes. The poor are poor because of poor morals, instead of you, who is of good moral standing.
The poor are poor due to lack of money. This is caused by increasing costs of healthcare, education and houses, you know those basic things needed to live. And by a capitalistic class taking about 95% of all gains from productivity increases. Saying millions of people are poor because because of bad morals is disgusting and completely false.
Ugh, poor money management skills have nothing to do with morals. It's fine to say someone has poor money management skills just like it's fine to say someone has poor C++ coding skills.
Creating a budget and sticking to it requires behavioral changes that take time to sink in.
It's extremely unlikely that you make the perfect amount of money to cover your exact needs that result in you being broke. It's much more likely that people adapt to a system of spending all money that comes in on whatever 'priority item' pops into their mind because they lack the skill and/or discipline of budgeting. This is evident in higher income people as well that suffer from lifestyle creep.
Again, this has nothing to do with morals. It's just a statement about the appalling lack of financial education in the vast majority of the US population.
I agree with your core thesis, but it could probably have been expressed better. In the USA there's a moral system that some people have that equates wealth to virtue. In my experience, it leads to conclusions that are generally dehumanizing and unempathetic of others, which is definitely not a long term sustainable foundation for a free society.
Thing is, it doesn't make sense to want that lifestyle. It's not an option anymore, the same way living in a cave is not an option.
It would place you in pariah status, for one -- and a lifestyle is not just to putting food in the table or a roof above your head, it also includes making you eligible for a partner, able to raise kids to do OK in society, and so on.
> while the home may be slightly larger than those in the past it’s 30+ years old.
Pardon my naiveté, but is this a common bar? I didn't grow up poor and I'm _definitely_ not poor now, but I don't think I've ever lived in a house that was less than 30 years old. I didn't even realize that was desirable; my impression was that the stereotype of new construction is "classless, soulless cookie-cutter Levittown" (not saying that I agree with this notion, just that it was my understanding of how the property market treats housing).
Am I mistaken here? Or is this perhaps different between cities vs more rural areas, or suburbs? I've only ever lived in big cities.
Suburbs built in the 1970s have the same problems as houses built today - rapid, low-quality construction, cheap materials, etc. They're temporary buildings. (Levittown, in fact, was built in the 50s!) At the very least, a new house is further from it's expiry date than an older house. You'll probably find better construction where land costs more (downtown cities) or pre-1950s buildings, but these are quite rare.
EDIT: As a reminder of the endless progression of time, a 30-year-old house would have been built in 1988.
Depends. Suppose you take those new-fangled school districts just built in the fifties. Are they better than the global average? Likely. Are they better than the average school district in America? Possibly. Are they better than the average school in your state? Maybe. Are they better than all those new school districts? Definitely not.
If we are to compare eras and discover what's different I would suggest we ought to compare broad numbers not anecdotes. Even your example is suspect.
The real median income at present in the US is 31k meaning half make less. 45k puts you at the 59th percentile better than almost 2/3 of people. Clearly not everyone who wants to is earning 45k.
A median earner with a spouse and 2 kids is liable to take home less than 1100 every 2 weeks after taxes but your 45k earner will have more like 1400. They will get 3 paychecks in 2 billing cycles but will have to live on 2 most cycles.
Median rent is almost 900 a month. Health insurance for a family is going to run 500 usd says that their food will be 150 a week 2 crappy cars maybe 400 a month. Utilities at least 200. Communications at least another 100.
We are already at 2700/2800 without including clothing or detergent to wash them.
The real question is where is the person supposed to save the money to move from the apartment to the house in the first place. At 45k you are too well off to qualify for a lot of benefits except in areas that are very expensive to live in, but still too poor to support a household.
Incidentally areas where you can buy a three bedroom house outside of the crime ridden hood tend not to have a huge number of jobs so everyone go and move to Ohio isn't a tenable solution for the present economic situation.
> The real median income at present in the US is 31k meaning half make less.
You will find that the full-time median income is much closer to $50,000 though.
> Clearly not everyone who wants to is earning 45k.
But, in fact, as this is a full-time job, you are actually below the median. When you add in high school students working part time, then you're right, but that's not particularly meaningful.
> Median rent is almost 900 a month.
Seems high for the area in question, but regardless, since you are buying a home, I'm not sure why you would also pay rent to someone else?
> 2 crappy cars maybe 400 a month.
Maybe the person paying for the house needs one car to get to work. Why do you need two cars?
> Communications at least another 100.
A landline phone where the house is located is $23.50/month. Another $35/month if you want internet service. That's a long way from $100 and already way more than someone in 1940 would have. If you really want the 1940s house-buying experience, you don't need internet service.
> Incidentally areas where you can buy a three bedroom house outside of the crime ridden hood tend not to have a huge number of jobs so everyone go and move to Ohio isn't a tenable solution for the present economic situation.
I don't know about the economic situation in Ohio, but the place in question has exceptionally low unemployment and substantial job growth. That's why businesses like the one I mentioned have to hire everyone who shows up. If they didn't, they wouldn't have any employees.
I don't think anyone expects that you should be able to throw at dart at a map and be able to afford a home anywhere it lands. Not even people in the 40s and 50s could do that. They had to be quite discerning about where they settled in order to do so. That much remains true today.
I'm talking about full-time personal income. You are right that household income, which includes households that only have part-time income (and other sources of income, like pensions), comes in at around the same amount.
>Maybe the person paying for the house needs one car to get to work. Why do you need two cars?
Sure, assuming the family doesn't have kids, the other person will never need to leave the house for errands, etc. (Or, you know, they don't want to be cooped up in the house all day.)
During the 40s and 50s the use of a car, even in rural areas, was normally reserved for a special trip once a week to run errands and get out of the house, if you were able to afford a car at all. The average family at the time wouldn't dream of wasting money on a second car, let alone the first one, to 'frivolously' get out of the house on a daily basis for pleasure. That money was needed to pay for the house.
It is entirely understandable that expectations have changed. I certainly don't think twice about hopping in my car any day of the week, and own two of them at that. But if expectations have changed, why would we want to even try to to apply 40s and 50s housing logic to modern times?
The house was already affordable without the spouse needing a job, albeit with some possible unpleasantness like not being able to drive around for fun every day of the week. But if the spouse chooses to take a job, affording that house becomes really comfortable. Which only goes to show just how affordable housing really is.
But that's simply not true. It may be true in certain places. Two people probably can't realistically afford to buy in San Francisco, but it's big world out there. You don't have to live in San Francisco.
Not even in the 40s and 50s could you live anywhere you wanted, while owning a house on a sole income. Like today, the houses affordable to one income were only found in certain places and only those who were willing to move (or were lucky enough to have been born) where housing was affordable were able to own them.
From what I recall, the homeownership rate in the 1940s was only around 45%. Owning your home wasn't anywhere near as common as it is today. To say that people with one income could afford their home back then is simply cherry-picking those who could, ignoring everyone else.
Many earners are part-time earners nowadays. If you want to make that point, you may want to look at the median income for full-time jobs ($50k for men).
I think folks are spending quite a bit more on things they need which used to be much cheaper. Healthcare and higher education come to mind as expenses which have started to eat the average family's budget much more than in the past. The medicine is much better today than in the 50's of course.
We ought to include a full picture of required spending in relation to housing costs.
On the other hand, essential costs like food and clothing have dropped substantially over time. In the 40s and 50s food and clothing accounted for approximately 50% of one's disposable income. Now it is closer to 30%.
But your comment does raise an interesting question: If I were to hypothetically spend $100,000 for an optional status symbol like a Ferrari or higher education and can no longer afford to own a home due to that purchase, does that indicate a problem with the housing market?
People that can't afford housing don't buy Ferraris and they spend money on higher education because that is sold to the entire populace at large as the way to get ahead.
Further good jobs use it to distinguish between those who are worth looking at and those that aren't even where the education isn't truly required to do the job.
Also we really don't want to admit to ourselves that the biggest step up would be to go back in time and drop out of the right uterus.
Huh. I'd always considered the definition of disposable income as the income that I would literally consider to be disposable, e.g. the money left over after I've covered everything I need (including housing, clothing, food and taxes) that I could set on fire and not change my current condition.
Per the wikipedia article of disposable income, I could afford a Ferrari (on a payment plan), but I would generally say I don't have the disposable income to afford a Ferrari because I still have to pay rent and feed myself.
Obviously the article defines that as discretionary income, I've always considered them to be equivalent terms.
> after I've covered everything I need (including housing, clothing, food and taxes) that I could set on fire and not change my current condition.
Housing and taxes make sense because they're generally inflexible costs, but how does clothing fit into this? Unless you're sewing smocks out of burlap, the majority of most people's clothing expenses is fully discretionary in every sense of the word (even including work clothes, for those unfortunate enough to have their employer force them to dress a certain way). That isn't to say it's a waste of money, but it's discretionary in the same way that eating at nice restaurants or going to concerts is: something you spend not to survive, but to improve your quality of life in some way.
These are standard economic terminology, not definitions made up by the article writer or wikipedia.. They're can be found in probably every introductory economics textbook from the past half century.
That alone cuts out nearly half the country. The skilled labor economy has been hollowed out and is nearly extinct in most places. You and I live in similar places and the dream remains alive here, but it is long dead in the corner of the country in which I was raised.
It is true that you may have to move to find places where a single income can buy a house, but that has always been true. The necessity of having to move to find better economic conditions has been true since the dawn of humankind. It's why we left Africa, and eventually covered the globe.
It is not like in the 40s and 50s you could live anywhere you wanted either. In fact, the 40s and 50s is right in the heart of the urbanization movement that happened precisely because capital concentrated, exactly like what is happening in many major cities today, and regular people could no longer afford to live where they grew up and had friends and family, and were left with little choice but to leave their existing life and head for the city to start a new one.
It wasn't particularly pleasant. Most people don't crave that kind of adventure. Most people would rather stay near to friends and family and the life they know, but sometimes you don't get that option. That remains true today.
> Rule of thumb says you shouldn't spend more than three times your income on housing
Is this a rural rule of thumb? Looking around me, I see people routinely paying 5-10 times their annual income to get a crappy city apartment and spending the majority of their income making mortgage payments. The alternatives, spending the majority of their income on rent or moving to an area where the majority of the income would vanish, do not seem better.
A conforming loan usually requires you to have a debt to income ratio of 43%. I'm definitely not in a rural area and you can buy a decent house in a slightly above average school system for $200K - if you live in the burbs.
I don't see why? The three times income rule already carries the assumption that you have children. When you get out to the five times income rule you are probably right that children are out of the question, but we're only sitting at 3.4 times income. With the potential to earn more with a little effort, bringing us closer to the ideal three times income.
Not even in the 1940s or 1950s could you buy a house with a week's pay. Housing has always been a substantial cost.
Living in Sydney Australia spending three times my income or less would be impossible. Didn't think it would be possible within decent travel of any city hub.
I'm sure there are places where housing is unaffordable, but that was also true in the 40s and 50s. The people in that time couldn't just live anywhere they felt like. They did have to move to specific places to find that housing that was affordable, just as is true today.
It's interesting how we are so quick to ignore the uncomfortable details about what home ownership in the 40s and 50s entailed, only focusing on the fact that it was possible, then thinking we can apply that to our ideal living situation in 2018.
Ever compare a 1940s middle-class house to a middle-class house of today? They're tiny. They probably have one bathroom. The bedrooms will be small. The garage, if there is one, is probably not attached to the house. The household probably had one car. Maybe had a phone, maybe not. Such a lifestyle could still be afforded buy a single income earner if they would really live the way a 1940s family lived.
My father's house was built in the 1940's and is as you described.
It's now going for over $225k in a flyover state. He bought the place in the 80's for $72k on a $40k/yr salary - and the job he held to pay for it pays $44k/yr today. The exact same house is out of each for the exact same job today.
Housing has skyrocketed by all available metrics. The one that matters most of course is % of after tax income spent, and it's never been higher.
Unless you've already accounted for inflation, that $72k house (assuming it was bought in 1985) actually cost about $172,000 in 2018 dollars.
That means the house's value increased by about 30% over the past 33 years. I don't know the specifics of the situation, but some of that 30% is probably from increased economic development in the area it's in. Some may also be from improvements made to the house.
Regardless, phrasing it as "house used to cost $72K and now costs three times that" is inaccurate and misleading.
The other part of the problem is that the income for the same job has only increased by $4,000/year in the past thirty years, while it should have increased by about $50,000 over the same time to keep pace with inflation.
That's a much more serious problem than increased housing costs.
Disclaimer: I am not an economist so my understanding of the situation might be horribly flawed. Please correct me if that's the case.
Interest rates is mainly the issue. Money is insanely cheap right now (and has been for many years) making assets rise in value. Bump a mortgage to 14% like it was in the early 80’s and you’d see the home price cut in half.
I remember being a kid in the 80’s and getting 5.4% on a savings account!
Mortgage interest rates were about 12% in the 80's, and as high as 18%(!) in 1981. At 20% down, the 30yr fixed mortgage would have been $600/mo at 12% vs $900/mo today at 4.5%.
It was much easier to find places like that, though.
The rust belt was booming then. There were more options. Now for the best opportunity you have to take a risk and live in the major cities with astronomical housing prices or long commutes.
It never ceases to amaze me that people seem to be under the impression that there's no good jobs anywhere that isn't the coast. Oh well, I guess we silly flyovers can just keep this affordable and comfortable living situation to ourselves.
You've missed my point, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough, from parent:
> The other thing people were more willing to do in the 1940s was move to where they could afford to live.
Where can you move today that offers affordable living and a good, steady job? Lets say you were on the expensive east coast and wanted a cheaper, more affordable place to live, with work. You'd consider Pittsburgh or Detroit, maybe. Both tick the boxes - affordable, plenty of good, union jobs, enough to own a home and build a family.
Does Pittsburgh fit that bill today? The answer is unequivocally no. Sure, housing prices are down compared nationally - but the last 10 years have seen a boon in housing prices here. Flipping is happening like crazy. Rents have increased. But wages have not - because cost of living adjustments punish employees in places like Pittsburgh.
I assume you're coming from a tech perspective. It's easy for that to skew your PoV. Think of it as the lay person. It's a much riskier prospect today.
Pittsburgh is one of the worst cities in the country for retaining recent college graduates (Pitt, CMU, Duquesne, etc). Why? The job market simply isn't large enough.
Pittsburgh is a single city, though. There's a fair number of cities that do fit that bill - Des Moines, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Cincinnati, etc etc. Pittsburgh is in an awkward point where it's trying to become more of a tech hub, but the jobs haven't started popping up to actually fill that void quite yet.
I am coming from a tech perspective, but most of my friends and family are not. Their stories aren't wholly dissimilar - those of us who were in tech could afford homes faster than those who are not, but most everyone who is aiming to achieve that goal isn't having a problem doing so around here.
I think a lot of my age group would be happy to buy such houses if there were any available. Where I'm from there are none, and if there are, they still sell for over half a million.
Nobody is questioning the economic growth from 40s to 80s (Golden Era). Its the growth (and inequality) after that period that is in question. The concern now is the economic prospects for the millennial and future generations.
The first post in this thread explicitly compares the present to the 40s. It seems somewhat unreasonable to expect ams6110 to foresee you moving the goalposts.
The original post refers to the golden era as well and its decline.
"Prosperity has been increasing in the 20th century, but has not increased for a few decades."
No goalposts are changing.
> In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy.
I dunno, it feels like responding to that with a comparison of a household in the 40s to one today is fair.
I dont get the desire for huge houses - finding a nice 1500sqft home is hard - yes the extra space is great, but I gotta heat and cool that space.
Beyond that - in 1948, radio was something everyone hard, Television was a luxury, a home phone was pretty universal, owning a car less so, even electric coffee pots were seen less often - no smart phones, tablets or home computers - though many had a typewriter. People wrote letters frequently, as long distance phone calls were a luxury.
The thing is though the whole "kids these days with their fancy TV and cable and monthly bills!" is almost becoming outdated, and was only a "thing" for a few decades.
Now I can replace all of that with a single device and single monthly bill - a device I need to have professionally anyways to participate in most of the economy.
My slightly younger millenial friends probably have monthly recurring expenses not a whole lot more % of income wise than the 1940's. They pay for a cellular data package and have a relatively modern phone, and that's about it. A 52" flat-screen TV is less than the cost of a radio in the 1940's today - it's just not relevant.
I'd argue that the MRC that most people in the 20-35 range pay is probably about 25% more than it would have been in 1948 - in 1948, most people might take a couple magazines, the newspaper, and of course, their phone service.
There is a convincing argument however to me, that the poor of 2018, have a better existence and are better connected to the world that the poor of 1948.
My dad (born 1957) grew up in a tiny farmhouse, 6th of 8 kids, and had an outhouse until I believe 8th grade. Meaning my oldest couple aunts and uncles moved out before they had indoor plumbing.
Admittedly, they were pretty poor, but most people couldn't even imagine living in those conditions anymore. At the time it wasn't unusual.
If knowledge and intelligence keep progressing while nothing is done about housing, I can imagine the educated poor resorting to ever more extreme "out of the box" solutions:
Why do we live in houses? Partially to meet certain basic necessities:
- shelter from adverse temperature (too hot or too cold outside), adverse weather (rain, snow, wind): outside walls and roof
- a place to wash, a mirror to inspect yourself, a toilet: bathroom
- a place to sleep: bedroom
- a place to eat: a table and chairs
- a place for work: a desk and a chair
- privacy: a lock on the door to prevent theft, or violence
- a place for leisure or inviting guests: living room
Out of poverty leisure is likely to be sacrificed, but it may be possible to live a much cheaper life if these functionalities can be compactly (and probably inadequately) substituted. What features can be portably arranged into a suit? Imagine a kind of space suit -not intended for actual space- with smart temperature control say inspired on a rete mirabile [0] to exchange mass (say import oxygen and export carbon dioxide, while conserving heat), humidity etc, depending on outside and inside measurements. This would probably necessitate a cheap helmet to keep the conditioned air inside (during adverse outside conditionns). It should be weather proof too. It should require little clean-up, or alternatively the suit should be lightweight enough so an it can be carried or washed while the extra is worn. A big problem for homeless people is theft and violence. So the suit should have intelligent motion detectors, and possibly communicate to other high-tech low-lifes to share news of danger, in order to allow sleep. Sanitation will probably be commercialized cubicles of bathrooms. Similarily workspace will probably be measured in desks (with a selectable height limit for your stuff) and archives, and these will be stored as trays by an automated system, such that you can enter one of the vacant rooms, login, select one of your desks or boxes, after which your tray/desk is loaded in front of you, exactly as you left the contents on the desk the previous time. You rent the room at some price per hour, but also each desk or volume of boxes at their respective rates for storage.
Of course the plots generally seem to have been much larger. None of this sixteenth of an acre stuff.
And that's where all your money is going, to buy that sixteenth of an acre. The house itself is only a very small part of the cost in many of the metro areas beset by housing crisis.
If we peg the 1970s as when things changed, that is about the time that Bretton Woods/the gold standard ended and growth in GDP growth stopped being a proxy for per capita growth of energy use.
Hard to know if that was cause or effect though, it seems unlikely that the monetary system changed because everything was going well. It does suggest the modern monetary system is a bit of a lemon.
EDIT scratch that, it is madness to say it is causal. But it does do a great job of hiding symptoms.
I'm hardly an expert so I'll welcome someone who is to correct my mistakes. However, the main problem with the gold standard was that it's too easy to corner the market in gold. As new economies gain traction, they have to purchase gold to back up their currencies. However, at the time the liquidity in gold was very, very low because everybody was hording it. This caused the price to spike. Occasionally large amounts of gold would be sold, causing huge dips in the price. Because the currencies were bound to the price of gold, this caused instability in the currencies.
Something like the gold standard works well if you have a zero sum game. As one economy does well, another suffers. Wealth is transferred from one economy to another. However, it doesn't work like that. Especially as Japan was starting to kick into high gear, overall wealth increased.
Lots more interesting reading if you care to dig into what both the US and the USSR were doing with gold reserves at that time. My own impression is that the gold standard was unsustainable and would have resulted in catastrophe if they had persisted. Others clearly disagree. ;-)
Bretton Woods comes with its own problems, though. Making capital available in order to bootstrap growth is kind of an obvious solution from an economic perspective, but I think that making capital too available allows bad actors to play a lot of funny games. (Bad actors being those who optimise for their own gain while intentionally or unintentionally screwing everybody else over). In the west there was a lot of deregulation in the late 90s and early 2000s as well, which has made the problem worse.
Even now, I think that the economic policies of most countries are positively loopy. You've got most of the western world hovering on a knife's edge of personal bankruptcy and most of the growth tied up in extracting even more money from the common people. In Japan (where I live), we've got Abenomics, which is just Reganomics in disguise -- we'll give rich people a lot of money and they will disperse it to the poor people (really, they will... I promise). There is a massive national debt, which isn't actually that bad because taxes are low, but now they've loosened the rules on personal debt and... will normal people actually be able to pay the bills?
So I wouldn't say that Bretton Woods is really at fault, but I'll agree that the subsequent economic policies that Bretton Woods enabled are making it pretty easy to ignore the underlying problems that appear to be getting worse. Whether it all blows up on us in the near future?... No idea.
Just an FYI, the Bretton Woods system was the gold tied system that lasted until the 70's and was discarded for a fully fiat system. From context it seems you're using the reference incorrectly to mean this post gold standard system.
Thanks for that! All this time I thought that Bretton Woods was the name of the meeting that stopped the gold tied system :-P Like I said, it's not my area of expertise. I appreciate the correction.
Indeed, though reading the article a bit more closely, it has a certain subtext of "look workers, money doesn't buy happiness, that's why we, the elites, stopped paying you any more. Learning the lesson!"
How long did it take after the industrial revolution to convince the power that be that they would have to pay for decent education and living conditions? A hundred year maybe? With the information age they just managed to convince us once again that they don't have to. So hopefully it won't take a hundred years this time, but I am not holding my breath.
Prosperity is shockingly hard to measure for something so quantifiable - nothing quantifiable alone works as a standard. If everyone has their weight in gold but are near starving that isn't prosperous. Similarly if food becomes cheap enough it utterly fails to be a meaningful indicator because everyone has enough. Even currency can fail - if Star Trek replicators and free energy were available it would certainly qualify as prosperous even if economic value chains break for many things due to sheer lack of things to trade for.
Thus we have weird and shapeable metrics of varying use even without pushing an agenda. What do you call a tiny supercomputer that were previously unavailable to even governments more expensive healthcare and housing? Using 1940s terms a homeless person with a cellphone would be the richest man in the world as it would be priceless given the ungodly expense and time to catch up to it.
Utility is technically the true way to measure but good luck unambiguously quantifying it, much less in a way everyone could agree with.
I don't know if I'd say IT has it good. IT just doesn't have it bad the way the rest of workforce does.
This assumes IT as a technical/business role, not just "tech" in general that includes software devs and hardware engineers. The python gurus and embedded systems analysts are doing okay, it's the cable monkeys and tier 1-2 support folks feeling the pinch.
To me it sounds like the American Dream, not so much like American reality of the 40s and 50s. Let me remind you that a) this was mainly about white middle class, and b) even among the white middle class this dream did not regularly come true ("Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller).
What a weird comment. There are a huge number of fields where you simply can't avoid "insisting" on universities. Try being a particle physicist outside a university lab. Try being any kind of medical professional without going to med school. Try being a lawyer with going to law school.
I'd be surprised if those careers represented more than 1% of the workforce combined. Do 100% of parents need to provide money to their adult offspring on the slim chance they decide that they are going to enter into a field that expects a degree but is not lucrative enough to justify paying for said degree by oneself?
You've found the outliers, but the vast majority of people will never find themselves in that kind of work to begin with.
Not to be confused with higher education leading to a higher income. As we have seen, incomes have not risen with increasing rates of attainment. People today are making almost the exact same amount of money (inflation adjusted) as people were 40 years ago, back when having a higher education was quite rare.
It is true that people who are born successful are successful in what they do, be it the workplace or academia, and as more people seek to attain a post-secondary education the share of those on the most successful end of the spectrum with higher education grows, but that's not particularly useful information to those who were not born successful.
If 100% of the population had higher education, 50% of the population would still be making less than $31k. I live in what the OECD calls the most education nation in the world, where well over half of the population have a higher education, and the median income is still almost exactly what you shared here ($33,600 to be precise).
Prosperity sure has increased all the way up to 2018 in the US, whether you like it or not. The median person today lives with luxuries that a Rockefeller was privy to 100 years ago.
God bless coldtea, I almost went batshit crazy when I read the article. Do not be fooled, we are in the worst growth period in recorded history. Just think about it, the WW1 and WW2 periods were better. Bullshit article.
Sure, crap like gadgets is now cheaper, but buying a house, giving your kids an education, and so on have increased. In the 40s and 50s a middle class household could get by just fine (and the house be bought) by a single income earner. Such a house now would be on the verge of bankruptcy. And that's not even adding in the decline of working class jobs, and the instability of most modern careers (outside of IT which still has it good).