[galimaufry]

> Purchasing power has collapsed

But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed.

Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?

[krona]

> People are consuming more food

In the US, calorie consumption/person peaked around the year 2000 and has been falling since.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8805510/

[giantg2]

It's important to note that calories and food consumption aren't necessarily the same. We have seen a lot of no-calorie or low-calorie sweeteners and stuff. Diet sodas seemed to be a big deal around that timeframe, as did "low fat" foods (some of which were just lower fat than before or where heavily processed to remove fats).

[giantg2]

I mean, real wages have stagnated or declined over the past 50 years.

Sure, we're eating more food, but it's increasingly garbage. Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions. It does seem travel has increased and new houses are bigger, but these seemed to be aligned to a particular class of person. I doubt the middle class is doing much of that. Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics.

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

[eru]

The labour share of GDP has held more or less constant over the last 70 years. It bounced between 60 - 65%. See eg https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG

If you want to argue that real wages have stagnated, you need to argue that real GDP has stagnated.

> Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions.

Yes, that is a problem. See 'The Case against Education' by Bryan Caplan.

> I doubt the middle class is doing much of that.

What's your definition of the middle class in this context? Have you checked any statistics?

> Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics.

The first few decades after the second world war were really rough. But fortunately, global equality has massively improved in the last few decades.

Numerically, that's mostly due to China (but also India and recently Africa) first falling behind and then starting to catch up.

There was probably never a time since at least the Industrial Revolution when global consumption was as equal as today, and the situation is set to keep improving.