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Unless you produce evidence and a cogent argument to support your beliefs, then I'll have to assume that you are like most people here. Let's say, not interested in the truth at any rate.
This thread is about income inequality, not per-capita GDP.
The reality of 2018 is that unskilled and low skill labor isn't worth doodly-squat for compensation. We're flooded with it. This isn't 1950 when we had a huge labor shortage and unskilled workers could get factory jobs and command middle class wages. Employers can pay near-minimum wage for that kind of labor since if somebody quits, there are 50 people lined up to take the job.
Obviously, the solution is to turn unskilled labor into skilled labor. The German model works pretty well for that. They don't have K-12 public education geared towards "everybody goes to college". They have all kinds of apprenticeship programs. They have all kinds of adult education and employers provide employee training instead of hiring cheap H-1B contractors from India. About 20% of the country is smart enough to benefit from university education. We're sending half of our 20-somethings to college and easily half of those are getting little better than a certificate of attendance from our Educational Cartel. It's totally broken. K-12 isn't providing most people with 21st century job skills. Employers largely don't train anyone these days. People who probably shouldn't be in college are running up big debt to get a nearly useless degree because a degree is now required for jobs that in no way require a real college degree from a challenging school with good grades.
Obviously, the solution is to turn unskilled labor into skilled labor. The German model works pretty well for that. They don't have K-12 public education geared towards "everybody goes to college". They have all kinds of apprenticeship programs. They have all kinds of adult education and employers provide employee training instead of hiring cheap H-1B contractors from India. About 20% of the country is smart enough to benefit from university education. We're sending half of our 20-somethings to college and easily half of those are getting little better than a certificate of attendance from our Educational Cartel. It's totally broken. K-12 isn't providing most people with 21st century job skills. Employers largely don't train anyone these days. People who probably shouldn't be in college are running up big debt to get a nearly useless degree because a degree is now required for jobs that in no way require a real college degree from a challenging school with good grades.
All excellent points, but I think your overall argument goes off the rails at "Obviously."
Yes, I think secondary education needs to be completely restructured around a respected, capable "skilled trade" tier - leaving low-end colleges to the traditional role of community colleges, and universities to their traditional role of advanced education (for a vastly smaller pool of students). But that's a right-now, blue-sky kind of idea that may never come to pass. We're too enmeshed in the student-worker-college-jobticket(-PROFIT!) cycle, and I don't think any gentle restructuring in going to happen. I think the whole system is going to crash and burn... if not this year or decade, within most of our lifetimes.
That's because the real, deep, core and nearly insoluble problem is that the national (and global) job pool is shrinking and nothing short of another massive widespread war is going to change that curve. The really heavy industries were hit first; manufacturing and production was hit later; we're now seeing the first inroads of AI into desk and intellectual jobs, and that transformation is going to happen unbelievably fast when it's ready. (When? Well, I wouldn't counsel anyone to start the road to a Masters in IT/CS right now.)
So all the talk of training and retraining and turning unskilled workers into higher-waged skilled ones and so forth is, in a phrase my mother loved, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We can pump out millions of workers a year... but there aren't going to be jobs for them, not by some multiple. We can't all go into service jobs - we can only sell each other so many hamburgers and back rubs. IT/tech? Will be hit harder and faster by AI than any other segment. There won't be a fraction of the jobs for programmers, analysts and techs who oversee networks and such.
And what will drive all this is the massive reduction of labor costs and consequently soaring profits of nearly every market segment. Oh, there will be much pious promising and assurances... which can be lifted intact from those given the steel, coal and auto industries in the 1970s.
There's only one fix, one many more socio-politically advanced nations are already deeply considering and even implementing, but it's going to be an impossible sale here in the US. Us self-reliant, self-made superior types would rather go down in flames than give money to lazy, unworthy people.
Are you disputing that 1946-1960, more or less, was a unique time in US and global economics, with extraordinary individual prosperity and extraordinary global economic dominance by the US?
It was ~1932-1975. And the US was not globally economically dominant. We had very little foreign trade. We were self sufficient, like most countries during that time. WW2 just meant that we wasted a lot of resources building war machines. Unlike a bunch of other countries that did the same, *we* did not end up with large amounts of our infrastructure destroyed. So we were able to have a robust economy when the war was over, like we did before it. If what you mean by "dominance" was that the US had a better economy than other countries, then that is true. But we did not profit economically from the misfortune of others.
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It's really quite simple: the Communist and Socialist movements were very powerful and influential and led to widespread formation of unions and other improved working conditions.
Absolutely. The oligarchs knew that they needed to lift the middle class for several reasons. The first is that the wealth/income imbalance that occurred prior to 1929 was not sustainable in a consumer-capitalist system. Also, the relative economic success of the USSR was a real threat. When the game you are playing is "control of the world", you take a threat like that very seriously, and do whatever is necessary to quell it. Satisfying the populous with social benefits and wage supports also resulted in very impressive economic growth. We pissed huge amounts of money away in WW2, Korea, and Vietnam, and supported our cold-war military machine, but still managed a 3x increase in real wages and acquired little debt in the process.
The only downside from the oligarch's perspective was that they had to settle for middling growth in their fortunes. But they've certainly made up for lost time since then.
This thread is about income inequality, not per-capita GDP.
The reality of 2018 is that unskilled and low skill labor isn't worth doodly-squat for compensation. We're flooded with it. This isn't 1950 when we had a huge labor shortage and unskilled workers could get factory jobs and command middle class wages. Employers can pay near-minimum wage for that kind of labor since if somebody quits, there are 50 people lined up to take the job.
Obviously, the solution is to turn unskilled labor into skilled labor. The German model works pretty well for that. They don't have K-12 public education geared towards "everybody goes to college". They have all kinds of apprenticeship programs. They have all kinds of adult education and employers provide employee training instead of hiring cheap H-1B contractors from India. About 20% of the country is smart enough to benefit from university education. We're sending half of our 20-somethings to college and easily half of those are getting little better than a certificate of attendance from our Educational Cartel. It's totally broken. K-12 isn't providing most people with 21st century job skills. Employers largely don't train anyone these days. People who probably shouldn't be in college are running up big debt to get a nearly useless degree because a degree is now required for jobs that in no way require a real college degree from a challenging school with good grades.
A specific incident from my freshman year of college will always stick out to me.
I went to a regular "regional state U." The school disbanded the football team the prior year, and most of the athletes had not yet transferred to another school with a football program. A former football player in one of my introductory political science classes was, essentially, illiterate. He admitted he was passed because he was an athlete. Fortunately, the professor was able to direct him to remedial resources that could help. He was not allowed to complete the original course.
People like that are the underclass. Even if he somehow got a degree, he's unemployable in most jobs due to his illiteracy.
Universities shouldn't have to be in the business of delivering or even having to arrange remedial help at that low of a level. It clogs the whole system. I was in high school shortly after Bush implemented NCLB. One of my generic classes had two people with Down syndrome. There were also people in there who were extremely intelligent. Neither group was served appropriately in such an environment.
This thread is about income inequality, not per-capita GDP.
The reality of 2018 is that unskilled and low skill labor isn't worth doodly-squat for compensation. We're flooded with it. This isn't 1950 when we had a huge labor shortage and unskilled workers could get factory jobs and command middle class wages. Employers can pay near-minimum wage for that kind of labor since if somebody quits, there are 50 people lined up to take the job.
Obviously, the solution is to turn unskilled labor into skilled labor. The German model works pretty well for that. They don't have K-12 public education geared towards "everybody goes to college". They have all kinds of apprenticeship programs. They have all kinds of adult education and employers provide employee training instead of hiring cheap H-1B contractors from India. About 20% of the country is smart enough to benefit from university education. We're sending half of our 20-somethings to college and easily half of those are getting little better than a certificate of attendance from our Educational Cartel. It's totally broken. K-12 isn't providing most people with 21st century job skills. Employers largely don't train anyone these days. People who probably shouldn't be in college are running up big debt to get a nearly useless degree because a degree is now required for jobs that in no way require a real college degree from a challenging school with good grades.
Analysis estimates show there were 650,000 to 900,000 H-1B workers in the US in 2017. In contrast there are 79.9 MILLION minimum wage workers aged 16 and over. If we eliminated all the H-1B workers and retrained unskilled workers (not sure how well this will go given that H-1B workers have at least a BA and many have a masters or PHD) to replace them, we would still have 79 MILLION unskilled workers to address. IMO your obvious solution is obviously not sufficient to solve the problem.
I agree that K-12 should have paths for kids who choose not to go to college. And I agree that they need to refocus on providing job skills for those kids. However, we don't need 79 MILLION more plumbers or car mechanics or LPNs or HVAC technicians or any other skilled job I can think of. If we retrained all 79 MILLION to do skilled labor of this kind, the glut of workers in those areas and competition for jobs would have them quickly working for minimum wage yet again.
I'd narrow it from that for all the collateral reasons I've mentioned; I don't think the prewar and postwar situations connect all that closely no matter how linear the indicators are. But let's just lay that aside.
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If what you mean by "dominance" was that the US had a better economy than other countries, then that is true. But we did not profit economically from the misfortune of others.
I don't think that and don't quite think I said it, but I do think you are minimizing US exports in this era, perhaps because the numbers are relatively small compared to the last few decades of globalized trade. Offhand, I am not sure who was providing oil to the rebuilding nations - I thought we were a major player in that. Cars and trucks alone were exported all over the world because war-affected nations either had not rebuilt their industries (UK, France) or had never quite developed one (Japan). (I confess to being mostly familiar with the postwar era in England, where auto manufacturers sprouted like weeds but each turned out small numbers of hand-built cars - Rover et al. took a decade to ramp up.) (And, thanks to Halberstam, the postwar rise of the Japanese industry.)
I maintain that the postwar era was unique in a wide range of respects, no matter how linear the metrics across a wider timeline. The union-driven prosperity of the 1930s may equate to the GI Bill-driven prosperity of the 1950s... but only in a numeric sense. The postwar move from small towns to cities and from farm/small town jobs to college-educated corporate employment was a far bigger force.
That is, the factory workers could afford a home and family security, maybe the first in their line to do so. But the postwar crowd founded the economic era we now live in. Especially in their earning/consumption habits.
Nope. The prosperous period began in the early 30s, well before the war. Deficit spending for the war certainly stimulated the economy, but after the war the debt was paid down.
We did not profit from the aftermath of the war either. The US had very little international trade and we did not have a large trade surplus. We were pretty well self contained. If anything the higher demand for raw materials after the war would have been detrimental. If you have some evidence that the devastation in much of the world boosted the US economy, I'd love to see it.
Real median incomes during this 45 year period nearly tripled. Compare that to the subsequent ~0% increase.
you realize in the 1930s, most of Europe was still recovering from World War One right?
not having a trade surplus? the war effort taught the US how to export a lot of things to Europe, after the war, that infrastructure was still in place for businesses to use.
it's easy to increase trade once you have a supply route established and contact points on other side for distribution
stop ignoring history and acting like the world wars didnt cripple the competition. when the rest of Europe was crippled twice, there was no attacks on the US outside of Pearl Harbor, but no infrastructure damage, why wouldn't the US come out ahead?
let me break your legs twice before a race, I can win it by leisurely walking to finish line, I'm sure no one will complain about my "competitiveness"
not having a trade surplus? the war effort taught the US how to export a lot of things to Europe, after the war, that infrastructure was still in place for businesses to use. it's easy to increase trade once you have a supply route established and contact points on other side for distribution.
It didn't happen. I posted the data earlier. We had 1-2 year trade surplus blip right after the war, which was immediately followed by a few years of deficit, and then basically balanced trade til ~1980 when we started perpetual trade deficits.
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stop ignoring history and acting like the world wars didnt cripple the competition.
Competition for what? Our foreign trade was a small % of GDP, and trade was balanced. We weren't competing economically with other countries for anything.
This whole concept of the US "competing" with the world economically is a new invention. It was proferred in the 1980s as an excuse for why union wages and benefits needed to be slashed, and why we all needed to make sacrifices so we could "compete" with 3rd world labor. It's utter nonsense.
It didn't happen. I posted the data earlier. We had 1-2 year trade surplus blip right after the war, which was immediately followed by a few years of deficit, and then basically balanced trade til ~1980 when we started perpetual trade deficits.
Competition for what? Our foreign trade was a small % of GDP, and trade was balanced. We weren't competing economically with other countries for anything.
This whole concept of the US "competing" with the world economically is a new invention. It was proferred in the 1980s as an excuse for why union wages and benefits needed to be slashed, and why we all needed to make sacrifices so we could "compete" with 3rd world labor. It's utter nonsense.
you know the US can be based on things outside of "trade deficit" right? What the US traded back then wasn't nike shoes or Mcdonalds, it was trading global security and a police force...
not everything is in your little book of graphs and charts
it was trading global security and a police force...
What was being "traded"?
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