The bottom several deciles of income are doing very poorly, and unemployment is up.
I think the "visibility" problem actually mostly goes one way though. As one of the people WFH with simply reduced expenses, all I ever hear on the news are about the people who have been adversely affected, other than obvious winners like Zoom. Of course, "average savings rate is up" may not even be newsworthy, but I had no idea until recently this was the case.
Also having talked to a few people adversely affected by the pandemic, I think a lot of people don't understand how not everybody is hurting. Everybody lives in their own bubble.
Contrary to the author, I don't think the internet really demonstrates the vast swathes of white collar careers (nor blue collar, really) in a remotely representative way. So to a server, with lots of other young friends in the service industry, this is Armageddon itself, except for random ecelebs on instagram. To a tech worker, friends with mostly other techies or graduates of "good" colleges, this is a great opportunity to Work From Hawaii for everybody except the guy at the grocery store. Mai Tais anyone?
I'm not sure why people assume that social networks improve exposure to people from different bubbles. People follow either people with similar life experiences or public/popular figures. If you don't drive by the line to the food bank every morning you would be less knowledgeable about turmoil of others than before the total WFH era.
Savings rate going up is actually another 'invisible indicators' of problems with the bottom 50%. The average goes way up when the low hourly wages disappear.
Fruther, regarding visibility, as I understood the article, it's talking about people seeing individuals with more wealth than themselves, but I don't think this is the only factor. They may also consciously or intuitively understand that the gap between wages and productivity is still growing [1]. Crises like this only emphasize the difference.
Since large numbers of people (bottom several deciles) are doing very poorly, it means that if mean indicators would be stable, then someone else must be doing very good; and even more so if average indicators up.
It's not even that good, because the indicators the article is using don't take into account that all of this new money that came with the stimulus, for example, was newly printed money. No actual wealth was created.
It is true that the way the stimulus payments were made amounted to a wealth transfer to people less well off, so that (plus the fact that much of it was used to pay off debt) does represent an actual reduction in wealth inequality. But I think it's hardly the rosy picture the article paints, all things considered.
> As one of the people WFH with simply reduced expenses, all I ever hear on the news are about the people who have been adversely affected, other than obvious winners like Zoom. Of course, "average savings rate is up" may not even be newsworthy, but I had no idea until recently this was the case.
One thing I'd like to make it clear is that although I am one of the lucky ones to hold a job in this pandemic economy and work from home, I'm actually spending more now than before on monthly expenses (for food, for example).
Where major savings come from are from lack of travel expenses but I wouldn't consider not being able to spend money on travel as being a net positive, it's a tradeoff between unique life experience and some extra money, not really a great tradeoff for many people I imagine (and a tradeoff that would have been possible even before the pandemic, the pandemic just removed the choice now which is not great). And it's not like most people that can save some travel money now will invest it well, I would imagine most simply end up spending on stuff they wouldn't have bought otherwise (see the super high demand for latest PC hardware, high Amazon sales, etc).
Would it be so hard to use Gini coefficient, standard deviations, or... anything other than "average"?
Typical bad faith response to simple observation of growing inequity is "Well, ya, but average income hasn't budged!!" As though 99/10 is morally and quantitatively equivalent to 50/50.
Is innumeracy the kryptonite to rational discourse?
If there's a more effective rebuttal, a better phrase, someone please share it.
The question is, can this capitalistic economy function without mass consumption?
The development of the middle class was the best thing to happen for American capitalism. A billionaire won’t buy 5,000 pairs of jeans, but 500 middle class households would. Capitalism, as we know it doesn’t exist without a middle class buying goods and services at scale.
What happens when the purchasing power of these households is curtailed and the middle class shrinks? What are the long-term effects on the sustainability of a vibrant economy?
Consider the outsourcing of American manufacturing. Instead of 500 American middle class households buying 5000 jeans, we have 5000 global lower class households buying 50000 jeans, each pair cheaper than before due to economies of scale.
The American middle class has slid down to the level of the global middle class, and the American upper class harvests profits from the entire world outside of America's borders.
There seems to be a concerted plan to economically disenfranchise the poorest of us. Quantitative easing where the money goes to the rich does one thing and one thing only. It dilutes the value of the dollar which is fine if you wealth is in assets but if you minimal wealth is in cash or even non-existent it makes you poorer.
The capitalist economy can function as long as it can find new ways to expand profits. That's the core of capitalism - somebody owns the ability to decide what is produced, they use that ownership to choose production that is profitable. If some capital-holder chooses to direct production towards something other than maximizing profit, they end up with less capital than someone who does, and thus less of a say in future decisions, so in the long run production decisions are mostly owned by profit-maximizers.
It's mostly worked for us since there's plenty of profit to be had by satisfying human needs and charging for it. But, if people run out of needs or money, then the capitalist system will find some other way to grow, whether or not that involves doing anything helpful to anyone.
There is already a substantial inequality in consumption across different income bands. E.g., 2018 data shows that the "Bottom 40% of US income distribution account for no more than 22% of total consumption. Top 20% account for almost 40%." [0]
I could see the capitalistic economy continuing to function despite a shrinking middle class if this consumption inequality grows.
Going with the jeans example, the 500 middle class families buying 5,000 pairs of jeans at $40 each ($200,000 total) may be replaced by 50 upper middle class families buying 1,000 pairs of jeans at $200 a pair.
I'm certainly not endorsing nor condoning such growing inequalities.
>The question is, can this capitalistic economy function without mass consumption?
Well, it can and that is the fundamental problem. If you are a share holder in a public company you can earn more money from doing nothing productive than from actively doing productive work. The central bank stimulus enters the asset markets first.
It's like having an oil funded authoritarian government. It doesn't have to care about what the rest of the population thinks. It can exist in isolation and benefit from the suffering of it's population because it provides a cheap and desperate workforce.
“A $500,000 mortgage now has the same monthly payment that a $300,000 mortgage would have with 2007’s interest rates, and what a $210,000 mortgage had at mid-1990s interest rates.”
Isn’t this the elephant in the room?
I’m assuming that the cost of housing is the single largest outgoing for most people.
The low cost of debt (mortgage repayments) seems to continue to push the dollar value of homes exponentially higher so in real terms dollars are exponentially loosing value.
So even if we have more savings and our investments are in good shape the actual value in real terms is actually declining rapidly.
This a thousand times. This is one of the biggest issues in how we’ve set society up, yet no politician wants to bring it up because it’s harder to sell than “everyone should own a home”.
Young far left wingers really should know that it’s not Jeff bezos who is taking all your money or inequality that’s the issue, it’s the low interest rates set by government, subsidized loans, and banks pushing up home prices as a result.
Rising home prices are not a good thing, and are a symptom of a hugely distorted financial system. Which gets rescued whenever it fucks up. But again, it’s the government doing that, not “the rich”. With the exception of crooked bankers of course, who should rightly be in jail but aren’t.
When the government calculates inflation, they look at prices of common goods, but not housing. That's why inflation is artificially low, and even CPI-adjusted "real" monetary values don't really make sense.
That growth isn't exponential. Mortgage debt isn't a bad thing, the equity you build through it means you essentially come out ahead or even, once adjusting for inflation.
In other words, real estate is a great way to preserve wealth.
> so in real terms dollars are exponentially loosing value
Your premise does not justify this point. The "real value" of a home has very little to do with its building material but with the actual demand of the home, i.e. what people are willing to pay to live in this actual home in this actual location. The increasing purchasing power has increased what prices the market is willing to pay in aggregate. This is literal wealth creation for property owners or developers, and has absolutely zero devaluing impact on the dollar.
a common joke in December was that the proposed $600 check was just enough to buy a gun, but not enough to pay rent.
now look where we are.
meanwhile, some individual members of the wealthiest class have seen their fortune grow an order of magnitude over the last year. you can't convince me that any particular ceo or investor has done much work every month since the beginning of the pandemic as they did in their entire previous life. you have to understand we've simply allocated them that money.
at some point, everyone will realize we need to realign our economic priorities. i only wonder who is going to actually do that work, who will be dragged along, and who will be left behind.
If by "realign our economic priorities" you are implying we forcibly reallocate asset ownership and/or the associated economic benefit from growth of owned assets - this is the cornerstone of a private industry based economy. Every single successful country in the modern world is based on fundamental protections for asset ownership and investment risk.
To throw this out would destroy an economy and have drastic impacts on actual quality of life.
What if, as an engineer, you were forced to work with a measuring tape whose graduations change all the time?
As a matter of fact, what if you were ask to build things using a measuring tape with graduations that are increasingly far apart over time?
I'd wager you would be a little upset and quickly ask for a proper measuring tape so you could do your job properly.
Sounds reasonable, right?
However, the exact same thing is happening in economics: everything is measured with a measuring stick whose length changes all the time.
And this does not seem to worry anyone: economists merrily keep on measuring things like household debt in USD and everyone seem to agree it's the right way to work.
A good and proper shared hallucination.
Worse, the length of the measuring stick is changed, not in a random fashion, but in a way that makes the power that be look good on TV.
Once in a while, people try to do the right thing and present inflation-corrected numbers, but that's far from being the norm.
This is a strange outlook, many of the metrics in the linked article actually use inflation-corrected numbers. There are obvious pitfalls about not adjusting for inflation which economists are aware of. It's also not difficult to find economic analyses critical of the "powers that be".
> A hard thing to wrap your head around in economics is the idea that two opposite things can be true at once.
> Consumers are in the best shape they’ve been in, ever.
> A huge portion of consumers think that’s bogus because they’re in the worst shape they’ve been in, ever.
> Both are true.
They're not. Workers, whether they've materially done well through the pandemic, or not, are sufficiently lucid to see that this all has to be paid for. And they're the ones who will pay for it.
Unlike the author, who is blindsighted by, and even marvels at, the "huge" numbers, unable to see more than a few months down the line.
A worker may be in a house that's booming in value with a tech salary and buying lots of nice things from Amazon and deliveroo but he can see the world outside.
Workers aren't atoms spread apart in a vacuum. They know people friends and family who aren't doing as well as themselves, or vice versa.
So there is no contradiction in terms. Things are bad full stop.
I'm not even sure what you are arguing. Things are not "bad full stop". The article pretty clearly points out that for large swaths of the economy things are absolutely just fine, that in aggregate things are just fine, that aggregate measures of debt and savings are both looking quite rosy.
A few months down the line literally all of the economic issues will be better off as quarantines are lightened, as things reopen and new businesses are created to replace the old. The actual issue is going to be what society does with our national debt one day including the 3T we assumed as part of our stimulus for this one pandemic. This is not a "few months away" problem but a few decades away problem.
War novels often involve the privileged finally meeting the poor for the first time in their lives, as commissioned officers. And finally respecting them. It's a trope I'm sure there was a lot of truth to. A lieutenant in WWI had it a bit better than a private, but not that much better (he might even have had a higher chance of death). He still had to live in the same hole in the ground. Classes which were entirely separated were brought together (as JFK must have been). Social media is not like that. There's nothing shared about it, nothing we go through together that could generate a fellow feeling.
For example the stimulus money was used to buy stocks or pay off debt. Wealthy people get richer. People with college degrees are doing well financially. Water is wet. The Fed has been pursuing this strategy for more than a decade. Drive treasury yields down, people are desperate for investments. Everyone joins the stock market. If the less wealthy (middle class with good jobs) are joining the stock market you should be skeptical because that means even they don't know what to spend the money on.
What we really wanted to see is people spend that money on consumer goods to drive underemployment down. Inflation is a very good indicator for underemployment. If it's slightly above 2% that means lots of people are employed and looking for even better employment opportunities. Inflation did recover from the crash to 0% but it's still only back at 1.2%.
The only good news is that the economy doesn't have to care about viruses. Inequality is unsolved and still rising or at least staying the same.
$100k household income puts you in the 9th decile in 2016 for NYC (about 85th percentile).
One definition of the middle class is the 30 percentiles around the median (i.e. 20th to 80th percentile, or start-of-3rd to end-of-8th decile). In NYC, that would be 10k-82k (2016). $100k in NYC would be upper middle class by this definition.
If these numbers are surprising to you, they should be! with a not-uncommon tech salary of 140k+ of nominal income, you are above the 90th percentile in NYC.
It's kind of hard for our bubble to imagine that people survive on minimum wage (30k/year in NYC 2021), and yet literally 1.9 million did in 2016.
I like the brighter future. It does seem kind of weird to count increased income, lower debt, and higher savings as separate wins. Higher income makes sense, but the other two are caused by the first. People couldn’t really increase discretionary spending, so debt and savings would have to improve.
I’d expect all of these metrics to not improve post covid. No more help from the government to increase income, no extra money to decrease debt (lower income, higher ability to spend discretionary), and same for savings.
This analysis seems to be restricted to the USA, which becomes apparent when the charts appear.
I wish there was an established way on HN to mark titles which sound like they are general but actually only care about USA, at least for social and economic analyses.
As a layman, I am seeing coming inflation. We are seeing lowest credit card debt, lowest mortgage and more savings. Once economy will be reasonably open, people will try to go on vacation, have more parties, more flights, more clothes (fancy as well as official etc). Till now, people were putting money in stack, bitcoin and online shopping (whcih is replacement). I am saying this for some times. But in few months, people will try to use their co called created wealth.
[+] [-] opportune|5 years ago|reply
Some average (mean) economic indicators are up.
The bottom several deciles of income are doing very poorly, and unemployment is up.
I think the "visibility" problem actually mostly goes one way though. As one of the people WFH with simply reduced expenses, all I ever hear on the news are about the people who have been adversely affected, other than obvious winners like Zoom. Of course, "average savings rate is up" may not even be newsworthy, but I had no idea until recently this was the case.
Also having talked to a few people adversely affected by the pandemic, I think a lot of people don't understand how not everybody is hurting. Everybody lives in their own bubble.
Contrary to the author, I don't think the internet really demonstrates the vast swathes of white collar careers (nor blue collar, really) in a remotely representative way. So to a server, with lots of other young friends in the service industry, this is Armageddon itself, except for random ecelebs on instagram. To a tech worker, friends with mostly other techies or graduates of "good" colleges, this is a great opportunity to Work From Hawaii for everybody except the guy at the grocery store. Mai Tais anyone?
[+] [-] failuser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dillondoyle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guerrilla|5 years ago|reply
[1]. https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/1280x868/https%3A%2F%2Fbl...
[+] [-] PeterisP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdonis|5 years ago|reply
It's not even that good, because the indicators the article is using don't take into account that all of this new money that came with the stimulus, for example, was newly printed money. No actual wealth was created.
It is true that the way the stimulus payments were made amounted to a wealth transfer to people less well off, so that (plus the fact that much of it was used to pay off debt) does represent an actual reduction in wealth inequality. But I think it's hardly the rosy picture the article paints, all things considered.
[+] [-] d1zzy|5 years ago|reply
One thing I'd like to make it clear is that although I am one of the lucky ones to hold a job in this pandemic economy and work from home, I'm actually spending more now than before on monthly expenses (for food, for example).
Where major savings come from are from lack of travel expenses but I wouldn't consider not being able to spend money on travel as being a net positive, it's a tradeoff between unique life experience and some extra money, not really a great tradeoff for many people I imagine (and a tradeoff that would have been possible even before the pandemic, the pandemic just removed the choice now which is not great). And it's not like most people that can save some travel money now will invest it well, I would imagine most simply end up spending on stuff they wouldn't have bought otherwise (see the super high demand for latest PC hardware, high Amazon sales, etc).
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
Would it be so hard to use Gini coefficient, standard deviations, or... anything other than "average"?
Typical bad faith response to simple observation of growing inequity is "Well, ya, but average income hasn't budged!!" As though 99/10 is morally and quantitatively equivalent to 50/50.
Is innumeracy the kryptonite to rational discourse?
If there's a more effective rebuttal, a better phrase, someone please share it.
[+] [-] areoform|5 years ago|reply
The development of the middle class was the best thing to happen for American capitalism. A billionaire won’t buy 5,000 pairs of jeans, but 500 middle class households would. Capitalism, as we know it doesn’t exist without a middle class buying goods and services at scale.
What happens when the purchasing power of these households is curtailed and the middle class shrinks? What are the long-term effects on the sustainability of a vibrant economy?
[+] [-] magicsmoke|5 years ago|reply
The American middle class has slid down to the level of the global middle class, and the American upper class harvests profits from the entire world outside of America's borders.
[+] [-] rorykoehler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtolmar|5 years ago|reply
It's mostly worked for us since there's plenty of profit to be had by satisfying human needs and charging for it. But, if people run out of needs or money, then the capitalist system will find some other way to grow, whether or not that involves doing anything helpful to anyone.
[+] [-] hagy|5 years ago|reply
I could see the capitalistic economy continuing to function despite a shrinking middle class if this consumption inequality grows.
Going with the jeans example, the 500 middle class families buying 5,000 pairs of jeans at $40 each ($200,000 total) may be replaced by 50 upper middle class families buying 1,000 pairs of jeans at $200 a pair.
I'm certainly not endorsing nor condoning such growing inequalities.
[0] https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1308013103855087618
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
Well, it can and that is the fundamental problem. If you are a share holder in a public company you can earn more money from doing nothing productive than from actively doing productive work. The central bank stimulus enters the asset markets first.
It's like having an oil funded authoritarian government. It doesn't have to care about what the rest of the population thinks. It can exist in isolation and benefit from the suffering of it's population because it provides a cheap and desperate workforce.
[+] [-] xupybd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flower-giraffe|5 years ago|reply
Isn’t this the elephant in the room?
I’m assuming that the cost of housing is the single largest outgoing for most people.
The low cost of debt (mortgage repayments) seems to continue to push the dollar value of homes exponentially higher so in real terms dollars are exponentially loosing value.
So even if we have more savings and our investments are in good shape the actual value in real terms is actually declining rapidly.
[+] [-] zpeti|5 years ago|reply
Young far left wingers really should know that it’s not Jeff bezos who is taking all your money or inequality that’s the issue, it’s the low interest rates set by government, subsidized loans, and banks pushing up home prices as a result.
Rising home prices are not a good thing, and are a symptom of a hugely distorted financial system. Which gets rescued whenever it fucks up. But again, it’s the government doing that, not “the rich”. With the exception of crooked bankers of course, who should rightly be in jail but aren’t.
[+] [-] speby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kccqzy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
In other words, real estate is a great way to preserve wealth.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] r7r7yrddy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julienb_sea|5 years ago|reply
Your premise does not justify this point. The "real value" of a home has very little to do with its building material but with the actual demand of the home, i.e. what people are willing to pay to live in this actual home in this actual location. The increasing purchasing power has increased what prices the market is willing to pay in aggregate. This is literal wealth creation for property owners or developers, and has absolutely zero devaluing impact on the dollar.
[+] [-] ruined|5 years ago|reply
now look where we are.
meanwhile, some individual members of the wealthiest class have seen their fortune grow an order of magnitude over the last year. you can't convince me that any particular ceo or investor has done much work every month since the beginning of the pandemic as they did in their entire previous life. you have to understand we've simply allocated them that money.
at some point, everyone will realize we need to realign our economic priorities. i only wonder who is going to actually do that work, who will be dragged along, and who will be left behind.
[+] [-] donw|5 years ago|reply
Were that divided evenly among adults in the US, that would work out to something like a $12,000 check per person.
[+] [-] julienb_sea|5 years ago|reply
To throw this out would destroy an economy and have drastic impacts on actual quality of life.
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
As a matter of fact, what if you were ask to build things using a measuring tape with graduations that are increasingly far apart over time?
I'd wager you would be a little upset and quickly ask for a proper measuring tape so you could do your job properly.
Sounds reasonable, right?
However, the exact same thing is happening in economics: everything is measured with a measuring stick whose length changes all the time.
And this does not seem to worry anyone: economists merrily keep on measuring things like household debt in USD and everyone seem to agree it's the right way to work.
A good and proper shared hallucination.
Worse, the length of the measuring stick is changed, not in a random fashion, but in a way that makes the power that be look good on TV.
Once in a while, people try to do the right thing and present inflation-corrected numbers, but that's far from being the norm.
[+] [-] julienb_sea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zefool|5 years ago|reply
The most used measuring stick is the CPI, which (1) does not include e.g. assets, and (2) whose definition also changes significantly over time.
So it arguably does not even measure total inflation, and on top of that is not really the same metric every year.
So not only does your measuring stick shrink and expand, it is not even possible to measure by how much.
[+] [-] leg100|5 years ago|reply
> Consumers are in the best shape they’ve been in, ever.
> A huge portion of consumers think that’s bogus because they’re in the worst shape they’ve been in, ever.
> Both are true.
They're not. Workers, whether they've materially done well through the pandemic, or not, are sufficiently lucid to see that this all has to be paid for. And they're the ones who will pay for it.
Unlike the author, who is blindsighted by, and even marvels at, the "huge" numbers, unable to see more than a few months down the line.
A worker may be in a house that's booming in value with a tech salary and buying lots of nice things from Amazon and deliveroo but he can see the world outside.
Workers aren't atoms spread apart in a vacuum. They know people friends and family who aren't doing as well as themselves, or vice versa.
So there is no contradiction in terms. Things are bad full stop.
[+] [-] julienb_sea|5 years ago|reply
A few months down the line literally all of the economic issues will be better off as quarantines are lightened, as things reopen and new businesses are created to replace the old. The actual issue is going to be what society does with our national debt one day including the 3T we assumed as part of our stimulus for this one pandemic. This is not a "few months away" problem but a few decades away problem.
[+] [-] almost_usual|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrwh|5 years ago|reply
War novels often involve the privileged finally meeting the poor for the first time in their lives, as commissioned officers. And finally respecting them. It's a trope I'm sure there was a lot of truth to. A lieutenant in WWI had it a bit better than a private, but not that much better (he might even have had a higher chance of death). He still had to live in the same hole in the ground. Classes which were entirely separated were brought together (as JFK must have been). Social media is not like that. There's nothing shared about it, nothing we go through together that could generate a fellow feeling.
[+] [-] josephkern|5 years ago|reply
Reference: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/the-warrior-cast...
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
For example the stimulus money was used to buy stocks or pay off debt. Wealthy people get richer. People with college degrees are doing well financially. Water is wet. The Fed has been pursuing this strategy for more than a decade. Drive treasury yields down, people are desperate for investments. Everyone joins the stock market. If the less wealthy (middle class with good jobs) are joining the stock market you should be skeptical because that means even they don't know what to spend the money on.
What we really wanted to see is people spend that money on consumer goods to drive underemployment down. Inflation is a very good indicator for underemployment. If it's slightly above 2% that means lots of people are employed and looking for even better employment opportunities. Inflation did recover from the crash to 0% but it's still only back at 1.2%.
The only good news is that the economy doesn't have to care about viruses. Inequality is unsolved and still rising or at least staying the same.
[+] [-] throwitaway1235|5 years ago|reply
I.e $100k a year in NYC = lower middle class. $100k a year in Kentucky = upper middle class.
I wonder if economic skepticism skews upward the closer you live to an urban area.
[+] [-] gen220|5 years ago|reply
One definition of the middle class is the 30 percentiles around the median (i.e. 20th to 80th percentile, or start-of-3rd to end-of-8th decile). In NYC, that would be 10k-82k (2016). $100k in NYC would be upper middle class by this definition.
If these numbers are surprising to you, they should be! with a not-uncommon tech salary of 140k+ of nominal income, you are above the 90th percentile in NYC.
It's kind of hard for our bubble to imagine that people survive on minimum wage (30k/year in NYC 2021), and yet literally 1.9 million did in 2016.
source for 2016 data: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/snapshot-...
[+] [-] zyang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] failuser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Reedx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombatmobile|5 years ago|reply
The opposite of anger is not calmness, it's empathy.
[+] [-] soared|5 years ago|reply
I’d expect all of these metrics to not improve post covid. No more help from the government to increase income, no extra money to decrease debt (lower income, higher ability to spend discretionary), and same for savings.
[+] [-] aj7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhn_mk1|5 years ago|reply
I wish there was an established way on HN to mark titles which sound like they are general but actually only care about USA, at least for social and economic analyses.
[+] [-] Ballu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]