The title is a little out of date.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".
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
The article cites income increase but doesn't talk about the necessary factors even if you're only talking numbers:
1) real inflation (ie, cost of living has skyrocketed due to rent/medical) outweighs any income increases.
2) overall wealth was not accounted for - in fact many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, probably far more than at any corresponding postwar period in the US.
In short "prosperity" != income. Ignoring things like cost of living and the high possibility of surprise bankruptcy due to medical emergencies lead to a very inaccurate picture.
Well said, and the easiest metric you could look at w/r/t cost-of-living is the average income : house price ratio. What was once withing reach for most educated workers is now often a fantasy for the rich. Unfortunately it is also what the lion's share of paychecks is often spent on.
It would be weird for happiness to increase with prosperity. Think how much more stuff we have than people in the stone age. We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth.
Any description of happiness that makes sense would have to say that it's some sort of local comparison, across various axes: how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?
This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a working lawnmower was already priced in.
This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.
This is why happiness can only be reached by learning to appreciate what you have. You're much better off pondering how lucky you are to have, and how miserable you'd be without, the things you already have, rather than how happy you'd be with things you don't. The latter is an illusion.
> We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth.
I actually do think it's plausible for happiness to increase with material wealth, but not because we're delirious with joy now, but rather because life was really, really, _really_ fucking horrible for the vast majority of human history (by our standards today).
Significantly, we can't actually measure happiness, and have to rely on "reported happiness", which is pretty much by definition anchored to expectations and thus not appropriate for long-term comparisons. Your point applies here: you wouldn't expect reported happiness to change directionally, on average.
> how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?
This is a twisted way to view happiness. Wouldn't you be happier if you helped others succeed? Feel connected, part of something you really believe in?
Happiness is so much more than prosperity. Money helps you avoid death. Happiness exists on an entirely different foundation.
In 100 years, people will look back and say things like, "How did they survive 100 years ago? Some countries didn't even have decent governments, let alone proper healthcare for everyone. Some people lived on the streets. People could just walk up to you and kill you! Bang! You're dead.
Now that we've got personal electron shields and everyone is guaranteed food and medical care, people should be a lot happier than back then."
But in the end, it's all relative. We look at what we have and what we didn't have, we're thankful for it, and we go on. People in third-world countries are happy, too, despite not having all the modern conveniences.
And there are plenty of miserable people because people are people, in the end.
> Think how much more stuff we have than people in the stone age. We should all be delirious with joy, all the time, if we expected happiness to increase with material wealth.
I don’t see how the second sentence follows from the first. Can you explain? What rate of increase are you assuming?
This also ignores increases in costs of living, such as housing, and the destruction of concepts like 'career paths' where someone would be with a company for a long time and build economic and social value within a given area.
One usually-not-mentioned premise is that even though goods’ costs have typically been going down over time as physical product technology improves, many services (the majority of developed economies) are relatively unaffected by improvements in technology because they rely almost exclusively on labor. Rising inequality will make services more expensive to those on the poorer end. Poor people don’t struggle to get smart phones or food, they struggle to get daycare, medical care, education, etc.
People feel happier when they feel secure. We have nicer gadgets now but life is also more stressful because finding a stable long-term career is more difficult.
Indeed, thinking about my own life, I hoard wealth because of the risk of an event such as a medical emergency, unemployment, or my kids not being able to launch their own careers.
Exactly right! Prosperity doesn't mean anything without security. It does't mean anything if you know that you can lose it all the moment you exhale, or you could lose it all by getting sick. DH Lawrence wrote about this the last time inequality was this high (1928).
It's easy to understand why people may not believe that prosperity has increased across the board. I also used to believe this, but after looking at the data I'm not entirely sure what it is that drives our perception. This [1] paper from the urban institute is something I found precisely when looking to put specific numbers to the hollowing out of the middle class and the overall decline, or at least stagnation, of prosperity.
The paper does describe that hollowing out in clear detail. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% and the middle class's share of society has been reduced to 26%. There's even been a chiseling out in the size of the middle class declining from 38.8% to 32%. And that's pretty much where most articles tend to leave off the state of economic change. It's all true and it sounds pretty grim.
But context, as always is, is everything. This is the change in the size of each economic group from 1979 to 2014 as a percent of the total population:
- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
The reason the top's share of income has increased is because people are moving, at an incredibly rapid pace, from the lower classes the upper classes. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging' - though I think the paper is extremely transparent in their methodology. But if one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. I found this all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. Economically we are doing something very right.
I wouldn't define $100k for a family of 3 as upper middle class. And a big part of what defined class is how much control you have in your life. If you have to work 80 hours a week and get $100k that's far different than working 40 hours a week and getting $100k. Another thing is how secure your position is. Are you at risk of being outsourced? Is your job going to be automated? Are you in construction with temporary employment that can disappear at any time? Do you live in an area where you have other employment prospects and your children have the opportunity to have a good education and make good friends?
All of these are more important for the class discussion than a snapshot of income, in my opinion. What is probably happening is that long term wealth is building in certain zip codes, where the chances of success are larger and larger compared to other zip codes, also why it costs so much more to live in a handful of urban areas than other places. The competition for these high performing places causes quite a bit of insecurity.
Prosperity is a proxy for consumption. We measure it and then we pursue it. We are so convinced that we've shortened financial wealth down to wealth, and have completely forgotten there are different type of wealth. For example, spiritual wealth.
Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. Western culture and power structure is wired to create financial wealth, not dismiss it.
> Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption.
This is true after a certain point. It's independent of consumption, but there's an amount of wealth we need to attain to meet a baseline of material needs that's are simply necessary.
As the grandkid of a woman who couldn't afford shoes, a living space or sometimes even food when she was young, I can attest that my grandma's (and my family's) life got much better and happier once they were able buy food, clothes and a house. My grandma is very happy now that she can travel and get to be marveled by the beauties of our home country with money she saves and my aunts/uncles give her.
As much as we shouldn't pursue material wealth for the sake luxury, superficiality and consumerism, we shouldn't dismiss it as completely unliked from happiness because up to a point it is the source of lots stability and security.
Humans are social animals. One of the primary drives of most social animals is to get as high up in the status/dominance hierarchy as possible, since this improves an organism's access to mates. Status and dominance are relative to other members of the species and, thus, unrelated to the absolute level of an organism's access to food and other resources.
I find the idea of prosperity==happiness a bit silly. Being satisfied with the quality of life you have does not equate happiness.
The list is quite long but to name a few: horrible personality disorders,childhood trauma,relationship issues(opposite sex,parent,society,coworkers,etc...),physhical health ailments and so on... All these can become obstacles to happiness and throwing money at them to the most part does not help overcome these issues.
Here is my question: 1) isn't happiness a bit overrated? 2) is happiness really all that important? 3) if prosperity is happiness then why are there so many happy poor people in 3rd world countries?
I am not onboard with the idea that humans need to be happy 100% of the time.
I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is required for evolution/human-advancement.
In a poor country with low inequality, rising national income should make people happier, and of course reducing poverty is a good in and of itself. But in a wealthy, unequal country like today’s America, gains in national income can decouple from well-being.
The problem is the individual cannot perceive this. The typical person cannot perceive unemployment falling a few tenths of a percent or personal income rising a quarter of a percent. if income is rising as fast an inflation, then it may be impossible to notice. You can buy a bigger Iphone and Netflix, but healthcare, rent, and tuition keeps going up.
Prosperity may have increased a lot for those at the top, but there's never been so many people living on freeway on-ramps until now. For the low end, it keeps getting worse-and-worse in the real world while academic happy-clappy about how "great" everything is. UBI or French Revolution 2.0, so far the majority of rich have chosen social upheaval, Holocene exinction and climate obliteration.
What is your view based on? I'd have assumed that absolute number of homeless would increase over time, but the rate of homelessness would be declining. I was surprised to see that, at least from this [1] research, that we are progressing fast enough that even the absolute number of homeless are also declining! Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from those data is that though absolute homelessness is decreasing, the number of homeless people moving to shelters is increasing. This means data that uses shelters alone as a metric could easily be quite misleading.
You also have to keep in mind that areas such as California have some of the highest homeless rates in the entire nation, so if your perception happens to be based on areas such as this - it's going to be skewed. It'd be like gauging prosperity by looking at what's happening in Monaco.
Everything I know and read gives me the impression that while the world's poor are better off today than they ever have been, their overall share of the wealth and bargaining power is ever decreasing since the post-WWII years.
People now have smartphones and expensive TV's and financed cars but all the important things in life are consolidating in fewer and fewer hands.
GDP increases higher and higher, and the actual economic gains go to fewer and fewer people in ever larger amounts.
Education and healthcare has become prohibitively expensive, the financial services industry concocts ever more complicated financial instruments to disguise their greedy quarterly-focused predatory profiteering.
House prices and rent in places where the jobs can be found are skyrocketing, made worse by a free-for-all of foreign property purchases.
The products we used to buy and own and now being leased out to us and our control over devices we have in our own homes has been slowly and quietly taken away from us. We are not even allowed to fucking legally repair shit we've paid for a lot of the time.
Bribery and corruption have even been legalised in the US and the group that can reverse that obscene series of decision are the ones benefiting from it.
The copyright industry is basically a cartel of middle-men at this point, doing nothing other than causing the stagnation and loss of our cultural history.
And to top it all off every 'free' western nation is spying on its own citizens and arming its police all in the name of 'terrorists', despite terrorist attacks being rare occurrence.
I feel like all we have done with our progress is create a new aristocracy and pave the way for a new type of feudalism.
Taking breaks from social media, particularly Twitter, has increased my happiness. Social media platforms are blackholes of negativity. They're also addictive and very empty because of lack of real interaction. Sometimes I feel like I'm living life vicariously through other people's photos, videos, and memes. It's uncanny.
So happiness and poverty are relative. Isn't that obvious to anyone who has ever traveled, studied other cultures, or even our own culture? I know that's not the norm, but it's a fairly obvious observation. Many of the people in America's ghettos have, in absolute terms, much more wealth than much of the developed and developing world, yet they are much less happy than many of the latter people. Each cohort is comparing themselves with the people around them, not with people in far away countries. In America, poor people are surrounded by hate and cruelty, constantly in fear for their lives and livelihood. This is usually not the case in places where people are happy yet make much less in absolute terms (although sometimes it is even there). There's much more to life than money, especially when money is tight.
Where is the explanation, let alone the data, to support the claim that happiness has not increased? There’s a compelling data driven chapter in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now that makes the opposite argument. It also makes a compelling argument that people aren’t bothered by inequality in itself. It’s an amazing book that everyone should read and has genuinely changed my world view for the better.
Aspirational marketing works. We have stuff, we just all want more stuff a notch above the stuff we have. The glamour advertising for watches feeds belief were entitled to a $20,000 Chopard.
It doesn't help that the disparity in pay board to shop floor is wider than back in the day of servants.
Redirecting mental effort to no material life is hard. Plus the economy tanks when we don't spend.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] technobabble|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JASchilz|7 years ago|reply
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.
Ref: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/55560/1/508634636.pd...
[+] [-] MarkMc|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] baxtr|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Y_Y|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately without a change of economic system it doesn't seem like this trend will change course.
[+] [-] randomdata|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ams6110|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igol|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nasrudith|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] barrow-rider|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wsy|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] fulafel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icc97|7 years ago|reply
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/JVjIQ8r
[+] [-] greenhatman|7 years ago|reply
Only if you insist on universities. You can get an education almost for free on the internet.
[+] [-] eanzenberg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piterdevries|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|7 years ago|reply
1) real inflation (ie, cost of living has skyrocketed due to rent/medical) outweighs any income increases.
2) overall wealth was not accounted for - in fact many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, probably far more than at any corresponding postwar period in the US.
In short "prosperity" != income. Ignoring things like cost of living and the high possibility of surprise bankruptcy due to medical emergencies lead to a very inaccurate picture.
[+] [-] TuringNYC|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
Any description of happiness that makes sense would have to say that it's some sort of local comparison, across various axes: how am I doing compared to previously/expectations/other people?
This is why when you acquire some new gadget, you say you're happy. You can now mow your lawn, which you couldn't before. Going forward, you expect to be able to mow your lawn. If your lawnmower breaks, you're sad. If it doesn't, a working lawnmower was already priced in.
This is why billionaires like Elon can be unhappy, too. Otherwise they would be bouncing off the walls giddy with joy all the time.
[+] [-] lutorm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wutbrodo|7 years ago|reply
I actually do think it's plausible for happiness to increase with material wealth, but not because we're delirious with joy now, but rather because life was really, really, _really_ fucking horrible for the vast majority of human history (by our standards today).
Significantly, we can't actually measure happiness, and have to rely on "reported happiness", which is pretty much by definition anchored to expectations and thus not appropriate for long-term comparisons. Your point applies here: you wouldn't expect reported happiness to change directionally, on average.
[+] [-] s-shellfish|7 years ago|reply
This is a twisted way to view happiness. Wouldn't you be happier if you helped others succeed? Feel connected, part of something you really believe in?
Happiness is so much more than prosperity. Money helps you avoid death. Happiness exists on an entirely different foundation.
[+] [-] wccrawford|7 years ago|reply
In 100 years, people will look back and say things like, "How did they survive 100 years ago? Some countries didn't even have decent governments, let alone proper healthcare for everyone. Some people lived on the streets. People could just walk up to you and kill you! Bang! You're dead.
Now that we've got personal electron shields and everyone is guaranteed food and medical care, people should be a lot happier than back then."
But in the end, it's all relative. We look at what we have and what we didn't have, we're thankful for it, and we go on. People in third-world countries are happy, too, despite not having all the modern conveniences.
And there are plenty of miserable people because people are people, in the end.
[+] [-] antidesitter|7 years ago|reply
I don’t see how the second sentence follows from the first. Can you explain? What rate of increase are you assuming?
[+] [-] mjevans|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|7 years ago|reply
Headline: Most Americans are one paycheck away from the street
Subheading: Some 63% of people can’t deal with a $500 emergency
The website is CBS Market, fairly respectable, draws on several plausible studies.
Link: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-pay...
[+] [-] opportune|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grasshopperpurp|7 years ago|reply
https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061123
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
The paper does describe that hollowing out in clear detail. In 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% and the middle class's share of society has been reduced to 26%. There's even been a chiseling out in the size of the middle class declining from 38.8% to 32%. And that's pretty much where most articles tend to leave off the state of economic change. It's all true and it sounds pretty grim.
But context, as always is, is everything. This is the change in the size of each economic group from 1979 to 2014 as a percent of the total population:
- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
The reason the top's share of income has increased is because people are moving, at an incredibly rapid pace, from the lower classes the upper classes. Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging' - though I think the paper is extremely transparent in their methodology. But if one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. I found this all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview. Economically we are doing something very right.
[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|7 years ago|reply
All of these are more important for the class discussion than a snapshot of income, in my opinion. What is probably happening is that long term wealth is building in certain zip codes, where the chances of success are larger and larger compared to other zip codes, also why it costs so much more to live in a handful of urban areas than other places. The competition for these high performing places causes quite a bit of insecurity.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|7 years ago|reply
Happiness is subjective. And if the science is correct, it's independent of consumption. Western culture and power structure is wired to create financial wealth, not dismiss it.
[+] [-] aylmao|7 years ago|reply
This is true after a certain point. It's independent of consumption, but there's an amount of wealth we need to attain to meet a baseline of material needs that's are simply necessary.
As the grandkid of a woman who couldn't afford shoes, a living space or sometimes even food when she was young, I can attest that my grandma's (and my family's) life got much better and happier once they were able buy food, clothes and a house. My grandma is very happy now that she can travel and get to be marveled by the beauties of our home country with money she saves and my aunts/uncles give her.
As much as we shouldn't pursue material wealth for the sake luxury, superficiality and consumerism, we shouldn't dismiss it as completely unliked from happiness because up to a point it is the source of lots stability and security.
[+] [-] toasterlovin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|7 years ago|reply
The list is quite long but to name a few: horrible personality disorders,childhood trauma,relationship issues(opposite sex,parent,society,coworkers,etc...),physhical health ailments and so on... All these can become obstacles to happiness and throwing money at them to the most part does not help overcome these issues.
Here is my question: 1) isn't happiness a bit overrated? 2) is happiness really all that important? 3) if prosperity is happiness then why are there so many happy poor people in 3rd world countries?
[+] [-] hcnews|7 years ago|reply
I am going to be unhappy, even frustrated trying to improve things or create new things (as an artist or engineer). Healthy unhappiness, as I see it, is required for evolution/human-advancement.
[+] [-] paulpauper|7 years ago|reply
The problem is the individual cannot perceive this. The typical person cannot perceive unemployment falling a few tenths of a percent or personal income rising a quarter of a percent. if income is rising as fast an inflation, then it may be impossible to notice. You can buy a bigger Iphone and Netflix, but healthcare, rent, and tuition keeps going up.
[+] [-] axilmar|7 years ago|reply
Nowadays, we have a lot of stress, because the requirements an individual has to fulfil in order to survive have skyrocketed.
[+] [-] modells|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
You also have to keep in mind that areas such as California have some of the highest homeless rates in the entire nation, so if your perception happens to be based on areas such as this - it's going to be skewed. It'd be like gauging prosperity by looking at what's happening in Monaco.
[1] - https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/health-ca...
[+] [-] ionised|7 years ago|reply
People now have smartphones and expensive TV's and financed cars but all the important things in life are consolidating in fewer and fewer hands.
GDP increases higher and higher, and the actual economic gains go to fewer and fewer people in ever larger amounts.
Education and healthcare has become prohibitively expensive, the financial services industry concocts ever more complicated financial instruments to disguise their greedy quarterly-focused predatory profiteering.
House prices and rent in places where the jobs can be found are skyrocketing, made worse by a free-for-all of foreign property purchases.
The products we used to buy and own and now being leased out to us and our control over devices we have in our own homes has been slowly and quietly taken away from us. We are not even allowed to fucking legally repair shit we've paid for a lot of the time.
Bribery and corruption have even been legalised in the US and the group that can reverse that obscene series of decision are the ones benefiting from it.
The copyright industry is basically a cartel of middle-men at this point, doing nothing other than causing the stagnation and loss of our cultural history.
And to top it all off every 'free' western nation is spying on its own citizens and arming its police all in the name of 'terrorists', despite terrorist attacks being rare occurrence.
I feel like all we have done with our progress is create a new aristocracy and pave the way for a new type of feudalism.
[+] [-] ahallock|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnm1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermarks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chewz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
It doesn't help that the disparity in pay board to shop floor is wider than back in the day of servants.
Redirecting mental effort to no material life is hard. Plus the economy tanks when we don't spend.