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Prosperity of future generations depends on the economic pie growing at a rate to keep up with the population growth. Clearly, the pie has stopped growing a sufficiently fast rate. Every year it gets harder to enter every occupation. As no new types of jobs are appearing, all we have is a competion over existing job types. At the same time the cost of living is increasing. Decreased home ownership, fewer people getting married, more barriers of entry into professions ... This is all indicative of the fact that we've ceased to be a nation that can provide a decent standard of living for the average person. All we're doing at this point is divying up the pie. It's an unpleasant atmosphere that I sense.
Actually the global poverty rate has dropped from 43% in 1990 to 21% in 2010.
Growth per person per years is off and will be for the foreseeable future.
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Originally Posted by ncole1
Uh, no.
Huh? New jobs are coming into being all the time as technology improves.
Not necessarily a bad thing - single is better than trapped in a horrible marriage, and not owning a home is worse than owning one that drains all your money and makes you unable to afford anything else.
a comfortable life is harder to get. Not whining it is just the truth. Yes You can do better with hard work. But the same amount of hard work wont get you as far on average as it once did.
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Originally Posted by ncole1
How do you know whether the added singles are those that would otherwise be happily married, or those that wouldn't? Similarly, how do you know the non-homeowners are those that would otherwise benefit from owning, rather than those that would hurt from it?
If you can't afford to get married then that is no fun.
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Originally Posted by ncole1
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This is all indicative of the fact that we've ceased to be a nation that can provide a decent standard of living for the average person.
Unfounded assertion.
He didn't provide a source for this but it is largely true.
"While it's problematic to compare people who have jobs to those who don't, we think the data gives a useful insight into the national average. Most people are getting by without working full-time jobs. This is a benefit of living in a first-world welfare state." From this link.
If you check the stats on creation during the last ten years you'll see the pie is bigger than ever. that with so few producing anything now days. The problems is with skills to produce what is needed takes skills beyond using a screw driver since a Chinese peasant is able to do that now.!/4 the worlds population is in china and india and they are great coming to first world demands for services and goods.l
Actually the global poverty rate has dropped from 43% in 1990 to 21% in 2010.
I acknowledge that poverty is going down. What I'm concerned with is what we think of as the American middle class -- a house with a yard, 2-3 children, a full-time job with benefits, etc. That's becoming a luxury that is only available through intense competition. Isn't economic progress supposed to make that lifestyle more available? It seems we're making backwards progress.
You're saying that it isn't available to the majority by extrapolating your own situation though. According to MIT's living wage page for KC, I make a "living" wage for 2 adults and 3 kids on my own. Meaning I can have a wife and 3 kids without her working. That seems pretty middle class by your definition.
Most of the people I graduated from school also makes similar to what I do as well. We have 4 year degrees, and not beyond.
Though, I'm also extrapolating my job as being average and the pay isn't high to the point where it's impossible for anyone else to get either. Overall, I feel like the US is doing better than your "golden age fallacy" of the 1950s.
Yes, I know I make the medium household income of 50k, but that didn't mention if 1 or 2 parents were working. If I had a family, it would still be a 50k household if wife didn't work.
Well, we're back to the libs vs "them"argument not to mention the multitude of people thinking their own situation and that of friends constitutes a type of consensus, or worse conclusive evidence. The fact that the middle class of Americans are stuck in a new paradigm of business strategies that have yet to manifest their worst characteristics seems to have flown out the window of Joe Average's thinking. Some think that business titans are screwing things up while others acknowledge this but figure they are capable of simultaneously fixing them, ironically enough--- with the application of new technologies that in a lot of cases were part of the problems origins. This from Joel Kotkin a contributor to Forbes, hardly a lib publication:
"One would hope business would have a better option that would restart upward mobility. Lower taxes on the investor class, less regulation of Wall Street, and the mass immigration of cheap workers–all the rage among investment bankers, tech oligarchs and those with inherited wealth — does not constitute a compelling program of middle-class uplift. Nor does resistance, particularly among the Tea Party, to make the human and physical infrastructure investment that could help restore strong economic growth."
Kotkin in this recent article was referring to the reduction of real compensation for America's middle class, a shrinking element of our societal makeup. "Growing the pie" has been a favorite topic of both political parties and the business community of large corporations they represent. Bringing a significant measure of prosperity to America will not be a thing of party politics, nor will the left or right be instrumental in bringing anything to the table with the exception of their age old polarity.
A concerted effort will be needed on the part of united Americans who do understand the fact that they will never change a damn thing without some fundamental change in the way our democracy works, specifically with regard to it's present control by a plutocracy of wealth and political power. If these changes do not happen I expect more of the real growth to be in that paradigm of power and wealth concentration it supports. Yes the fact of too many humans vs the ability of all to sustain themselves is a huge concern, but moreover, we will have to have an element of democratic control over things before we could ever expect to address these concerns.
The poster who characterizes these observations as a kind of "whining" is guilty of whining in the worst way, and that would be the whining that fails to see the problem, and instead sees that bright light at the tunnel's end not as a freight train of trouble but one illuminating the gleeful "opportunities". When you are sitting pretty on a retirement stipend that affords this Pollyanna view it's understandable, but the darker side to this economic meltdown of the past seven years has yet to be penciled out. Funny money, over rated stocks, wars, and still more criminals in our banks and government is a very real set of problems that defy the notion of a democracy.
The poster who characterizes these observations as a kind of "whining" is guilty of whining in the worst way, and that would be the whining that fails to see the problem, and instead sees that bright light at the tunnel's end not as a freight train of trouble but one illuminating the gleeful "opportunities". When you are sitting pretty on a retirement stipend that affords this Pollyanna view it's understandable, but the darker side to this economic meltdown of the past seven years has yet to be penciled out. Funny money, over rated stocks, wars, and still more criminals in our banks and government is a very real set of problems that defy the notion of a democracy.
Blame the victim.
It is your fault for not working hard enough to get out of your miserable life. Don't complain just work harder.
The economy is set up to grow the top. Not the middle. Growing the middle makes a country rich. Growing the top at the expense of the middle makes it poor.
One parameter to measure things by is debt to income. Total debt % GDP is over 350% Personal debt is at 100% of GDP. Government debt is closing in on being equal to GDP. and corporate debt is over 100% of GDP.
If we contract the economy suddenly then we get a default cascade failure. Shipping jobs over seas reduces the base that the debt is leveraged against. Wages going up expands the base that the debt is leveraged against.
If you want a fix then push the median hourly income 100% higher with the minimum wage law.
And make the minimum wage for the US apply to all export workers in the world.
How to get that done is a subject for a different forum.
Growth per person per years is off and will be for the foreseeable future.
Actually the graph supports my position - real per capita GDP is higher than at almost any time in history (or at least recent history).
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Originally Posted by ContrarianEcon
a comfortable life is harder to get. Not whining it is just the truth. Yes You can do better with hard work. But the same amount of hard work wont get you as far on average as it once did.
Nonsense. If real per capita GDP goes up, *by definition*, the individual's purchasing power has INCREASED.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ContrarianEcon
If you can't afford to get married then that is no fun. He didn't provide a source for this but it is largely true.
Agreed, but the way you determine the cost of being married is by comparing the finances the couple would have to the finances of the two individuals that would come to pass if they stayed unhitched. You thus must double all the financial figures for singles before comparing to couples.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ContrarianEcon
"While it's problematic to compare people who have jobs to those who don't, we think the data gives a useful insight into the national average. Most people are getting by without working full-time jobs. This is a benefit of living in a first-world welfare state." From this link.
Actually the graph supports my position - real per capita GDP is higher than at almost any time in history (or at least recent history).
If it wasn't then we would be really hurting bad. Now we are just kind of hurting.
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Originally Posted by ncole1
Nonsense. If real per capita GDP goes up, *by definition*, the individual's purchasing power has INCREASED.
And I didn't say that it hadn't. I said the amount of increase is less for the same amount of effort. I didn't say that you didn't get any increase.
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Originally Posted by ncole1
Agreed, but the way you determine the cost of being married is by comparing the finances the couple would have to the finances of the two individuals that would come to pass if they stayed unhitched. You thus must double all the financial figures for singles before comparing to couples.
But if both are still living with their parents because they can't afford a place of their own then they can't afford to get married.
We have substituted blowing a debt bubble for real economic growth. The effects of outsourcing plus having growth in the top end as the middle stay even means herder to get ahead.
We aren't growing the pie at a fast enough rate.
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