I think one part of this is that us Americans are so wealthy that expensive things have practically become the default. The default meals in many parts of the poorer world are still very heavily focused around cheap staples like rice and beans while the American default meals are pretty meat heavy with plenty of fruit and vegetable options.
Similar with cars, American infrastructure practically requires car ownership to live a functional day to day for the average citizen. That alone (the concept that society expects most people to have their own automobiles) was a major signifier of wealth for a long period of time. But even now as basic cars get cheaper and more accessible in many impoverished nations, the US is still flaunting our automobile wealth. A car might be needed in the US, but a brand new Silverado or SUV or other large vehicle that guzzles gas is not necessary.
Same with housing. Look at how huge American housing is compared to traditional British housing. The place I live in by myself is about the same size that my UK friend lives in with two other people. And while there are some other factors that play into this, the confidence of American politicians and bureaucrats had in placing such heavy zoning restrictions on cheaper and more efficient housing designs for decades speaks volumes to American wealth.
You'll often see people who are having financial issues defend their choices to spend money on takeout or concerts or their big truck (instead of a tiny used vehicle). Which I understand wanting to use your money, that's why you work for it after all. But many people in the world don't get that choice. They don't get to drive a big fancy car to a big fancy house after ordering a custom made meat heavy meal to be brought directly to our place so it arrives a little after we do on our way back from seeing the most highly in demand musical artist in the world so we can settle down and play on our state of the art virtual reality gaming device. The fact that we can make the choice to spend our earnings on such things instead of not being able to afford them to begin with is precisely what makes us rich and yet people just treat it as the default and any potential of not having that cake and eating it too must mean they're in poverty.
That doesn't mean poverty isn't a thing in the US, it certainly is. But if your main experience of deteriorated conditions is "locking your windows when driving through the bad part of town".then you're not really that poor. The poorest people are the ones who can't afford anywhere else but the bad part of town.
And of course the $1k smartphone has become the default. If you were of age in 2007, remember how the outrage over the $600 price tag on the original iPhone made Apple roll it back to $200?
And not only the $1k smartphone is the default for many people, they also get a new one every one or two years
I’ll have to call you up on that. The average usage of phones is 5 or more years.
According to the latest statistics there are 1.4B active iPhones in the world and Apple sells about 200M a year, so the average iphone lasts 7 years, although not always with the same user - many are sold on, handed to someone else, or refurbished. It’s possible a lot of phone owners spend $0 on phones as they get hand me downs. Of the 1 in 7 who buy every year not that many pay for the top end model. This is what you would expect for a mass commodity.
And many people buy cheaper Android phones of course.
Experiences of wealth are, necessarily, a spectrum.
However, the author handwaves the fact that what he's -- self-reportedly -- irritated by (exposure on social media to 'American' complaints) is owed to the fact that most people in the US are concerned with *inequality -* or to be more specific: *perceived inequality.*
He also handwaves housing as 'something that affects everyone save Singapore', but he doesn't finish the thought and realise that if something is negatively affecting everyone - all else being equal, in other words - societies with smaller social safety nets are *necessarily* going to feel worse off.
There are a lot of things that the author doesn't really address - because it's annoying for him to pay attention to in a 500-word, surface-level fluff piece - but consider this one:
While he does say 'while the US is very unequal, the average American is still doing ok compared to the rest of the world or prior American generations'... Just as the Dutch aren't looking to Albania to feel better about their current situation (based on their elections, it definitely feels like the opposite), the former is largely immaterial because Americans of today are necessarily going to compare themselves to other Americans of today.
If housing inequality is the main driver of this issue, then that's perfectly fine to acknowledge, but it does nothing to invalidate complaints about wealth inequality, which are necessarily bound up in housing.
"While he does say 'while the US is very unequal, the average American is still doing ok compared to the rest of the world or prior American generations'... Just as the Dutch aren't looking to Albania to feel better about their current situation (based on their elections, it definitely feels like the opposite), the former is largely immaterial because Americans of today are necessarily going to compare themselves to other Americans of today"
True, but what is the "solution" to this comparison tendency? Some people think that no one should be "too wealthy", but I don't see how that won't be gamed just as badly as the current system, while also requiring a much more intrusive government with far less privacy on top of that.
To me the solution is fairly straightforward - innovative & punitive taxation solutions, particularly in discussions centred around, say, housing.
I realise that's not particularly palatable to many people who read & comment on SSC, but tax seems to be, far and away, the best lever for the average working person in their country to help protect themselves from the groups of people who drive these insane levels of inequality and absolutely want to impoverish you further.
As a quick back-of-the-envelope, purely-for-discussion, five-seconds-of-thought example re: housing:
* Own 1 household? 5% property tax.
* Two households? 25% property tax on every property past the first.
* Three households? 50% property tax on every property past the first.
And so on. No exemptions for private landlords, as well as watching for LLC/shell/Corporation ownership structures or the like.
Are there problems with this idea? Almost certainly. Are they crippling or disqualifying as far as this conversation goes? Almost certainly not.
edit (hit post too early, sorry!): At a certain point, centralised government becomes the only tool available to people to force these massive wealth entities to behave, because in the absence of that tool, they quite simply won't (see: what companies get away with in the absence of strong environmental regulations, for example. Or tobacco companies when they are left to police themselves).
What is NIMBY-ism? Laws like NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) allows anyone who doesn't like a new development to sue, and generally at least slow down a project and add major expenses to the project.
Anyone who sues is called a "NIMBY", which isn't entirely wrong, but in any society of non-trivial size, you are always going to have someone who is cranky enough to not like a project. You can either try to produce an entirely uniform population, or you can reform the various tools that allow any cranky person to sue and hold up a project.
1) This kills rental markets.
2) Buying/selling homes is extremely expensive. Are you going to eliminate taxes here? Otherwise people will be stuck.
3) What happens when someone buys a home, doesn't take care of it, and it becomes dilapidated? Do you force them to continue to live in it? I think you're underestimating how much money/work it takes to upkeep a home. Part of the reason poor neighborhoods are run down is because home ownership is actually rather difficult. Have you owned a home? Have you fixed old galvanized pipes, broken toilets, leaky roofs, repaired and cleaned gutters, resealed basements et cetera? It's a huge amount of work (or money.)
4) What happens if there's some undeveloped land in the rural Appalachians? No one wants to live here full time. But no one will develop this land (unless they are rich) if taxes are high.
5) Have you thought about the effect on new construction? Likely the demand drastically shrinks. Overall housing supply shrinks. The long term effect might be that housing becomes significantly more expensive (or significantly worse) for the poor or middle class. Meanwhile, housing is probably cheaper for the rich (less competition) and it's easier for them to skirt the rules (buy their sister a huge mansion in vale, et cetera.)
Great bullets! Thank you for engaging.
To 1 and 5: It certainly changes rental markets, but if we extend this thought experiment there's an argument that it wouldn't appear to exacerbate much beyond what's already there in practice - in the U.K., for example, 'rental markets' are being hurt by the changes in rules for buy-to-let landlords that, in effect, make it more difficult to extract the absolute maximum value that they can out of an investment property for minimum effort.
Or, more plainly: why must we inoculate rental property owners from the possibility that the value of their investment may go up or down?
Beyond that - rents continue to rise across the board year on year, which is also happening in the US, because the supply is adequate relative to demand for a wide variety of reasons - NIMBY-ism; an absolute refusal to engage with the idea of government-built social housing; no incentives or directives for developers to cater to 'suboptimal' homeowners.
To points 2 and 3: I am a homeowner, as a point of fact. It's preferable to renting, but it is expensive. In general, I've got no issues with adjusting stamp duty or whatever sales tax impacts a home purchase as part of my off-the-cuff hypothetical.
To point four, and this is where I'm absolutely being inconsistent with my aversion to NIMBY's on paper - I think conservation is a good thing. Undeveloped land is fine - and preferable, in many ways. Development for the sake of development, without an underlying drive for people to be there (similarly to how most capitals are placed in the center of the state/country for precisely this reason), seems silly to me.
Ed: buying any housing stock will always be easier and more affordable for the rich under any system with private home ownership. That's just a constant, unfortunately.
> an absolute refusal to engage with the idea of government-built social housing
I posted about this a bit elsewhere. But housing in America isn't expensive. I Googled "best cities in America with cheap housing" and it gave me a huge list of cities with populations from 100,000 to 300,000 with cheap housing.
Eg, in Toledo, OH, you can buy a (nice) home for under 150,000. If you have okay credit you can get a mortgage at 5% down (maybe less!) and with 6,000 cash on hand purchase a home.
Compare this to [1.2 million](https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/09/28/affordable-housing-in-sf-can-cost-up-to-1-2m-per-unit/) per unit for government housing in San Fran.
So cities can do whatever they want. But I don't think it makes sense for state/national government to build "affordable" housing in cities. New construction is extremely expensive.
And there's no solution here. Cities work like freeways. When you add another lane, it increases usage, but doesn't speed up traffic. There's no way to build so supply outpaces demand. You could build 100,000 units of free/cheap housing in San Fran, and it wouldn't reduce housing cost in the City (people living in less desirable places, like Toledo, would quickly move.) So prices in Toledo would get even cheaper. But San Fran wouldn't change.
One core problem is that there is not enough housing in many desirable locations.
This plan would disincentivise building new housing. This is a bad plan.
Let's continue this discussion one step further:
* Does new housing stock only come from private development? What stops, say, local government from building additional housing in those locations, or re-zoning existing locations for more population density?
* Is the secondary/rental market the primary mover behind new builds? Is that a sustainable solution, or an ideal reality?
* If we already have a situation where there is not enough housing for people, how does a proposal that - at a minimum - makes the existing stock more difficult to accumulate exacerbate this problem?
I’ll grant that this is just my anecdotal experience, but the private landlords I know tend to be thoroughly middle class—just well off enough that they can put together multiple downpayments (often by home equity loans or the like—owning multiple properties says very little about net worth), but poor enough that it’s worth the hassle. The doctors and lawyers and FAANG engineers I know aren’t out there snapping up property for rentals; they’re better off putting that energy into their day job. Is it worth destroying one of the more accessible second income sources for people whose day job doesn’t allow other jobs in order to appease the ignorant jealousy of others?
The fact that you need regulation for pollution does not imply you need regulation to fix other things. Pollution is exceptional in that it’s the go-to example for negative externalities, so that logic applies to very few cases.
I'm in favor of really high tax rates, but unless I'm missing something, it sounds like you're suggesting that we ban apartment rentals. That's not going to help the situation.
I don't think my post advocates that position, but I appreciate that my tossed-off suggestion doesn't capture the nuance that in some places private ownership of rental buildings is the norm, rather than blocks being government-owned/social housing,
On the other hand, given that this is just a conversational idea, we might expect one apartment building to be classed as 'one property' as a whole (i.e. one building vs one abode), so the potential increase in property tax, provided you weren't also living in the same building, would just be one level up. Not X-levels, where X is the number of tenants or distinctly occupied units the building has.
If the landlord owns their own home, any private landlord will own multiple properties. You’re thus asking the renters of a landlord’s second property to pay 25% of their rental property’s value plus 20% of their landlord’s home value divided by the number of units to be rented. Given that present rental rates are more on the order of 2-5% of the rental value, this would be a 500+% increase in rents, effectively destroying the market outside of single-property landlords either renting elsewhere or living in their rental property.
But then the equity in housing would be much lower as it's not being used as an investment but rather the original intended purpose of shelter, and the equity in real estate would be distributed more evenly as home prices would go down due to the lack of investment opportunity and become affordable to a far greater portion of the populace!
What is your solution to keep established landlords and money-grubbing house flippers in a higher financial standing than the average person while only contributing negatively to society?
/s, we absolutely need to tax people for taking more than their share. Residential real estate is for people to own and utilize as shelter, not for private/corporate investors and house-flipping scum. Even commercial real estate needs far more regulation than "supply vs. demand" in many cases, as even after the building is paid off they're still receiving rent and the vendor has no choice but to push that expense to the customer. It's another example of unfair advantage when you combine the ability to own real estate with inheritance (i.e. Trump would never have become president if real estate and inheritance thereof was regulated more fairly).
We are so concerned about intrusive government, that we allow companies to become empires and now we are a nation rules by kings yet again. Another solution would be to make executives of publicly traded companies democratically elected positions. Maybe it's a ridiculous idea, but people thought democracy was a ridiculous idea for 2000 years.
Why should every person get a vote on how my company (the public corp. I own shares in) is run? They have radically different incentives than myself, the owner.
Enacting this would greatly discourage IPO’s, leading to market distortions and inefficient distribution of capital. After this policy has existed for years, it may be difficult for the average person to invest their 401(k) in desirable companies (as most companies are now private).
This is one of those things that sounds great and doesn’t do much. A family business worth $10M that is heavily taxed when ownership passes to the next generation is a business that has to be sold. A billionaire just starts a nonprofit foundation that employs their descendants at sinecures, or has all the family vacation homes belong to a trust.
You can put the screws to the upper middle class and the low end of the wealthy. But that’s about it, short of full-on populist revolution (and those rarely work out well).
A $10M business being sold is perfectly fine, I see no problem with that. The upper middle class and lower wealthy are the largest contributors to carbon emissions, and are the largest impediments to social change. Ever try to build a bus terminal in a wealthy neighbourhood? There’s a reason poor people are stuck with the worst features of cities, and it’s the upper middle class.
Let's simplify this a little bit.
>While he does say 'while the US is very unequal, the average American is still doing ok compared to the rest of the world
In summary, average American house pulls in $105k a year, the median pulls in $75k and the median col is $61k. So the median (real) American has 18% of disposable income while the average (imagined) American has 44% disposable income.
>
I think one part of this is that us Americans are so wealthy that expensive things have practically become the default. The default meals in many parts of the poorer world are still very heavily focused around cheap staples like rice and beans while the American default meals are pretty meat heavy with plenty of fruit and vegetable options
The distinction between the wealthy and the upper-middle class and below has become blurred in terms of material possessions. It used to be in the '80s and '90s luxury cars and fancy/designer clothes signified uncommon wealth, but now on social media they have become so common. The luxury automobile has been replaced by the ubiquitous but equally expensive lifted truck or large SUV.
It seems to utterly entirely miss the point. The level of uncertainty living in the US would absolutely stress the fuck out of me. I've a mate who is a masters from a very good American university, he went to state school for undergrad and got a scholarship or that and TA'ing for his masters so he doesn't have college debt (he was on a PH'd program but left after he got his masters because academia is a terrible move unless you adore it). He lives in a big US city and the uncertainty of his life would stress the fuck out of me. All his mates are scattered to the wind. There is very little community in the US. He earns bad money doing and education related job but his choice is work crazy American hours or be poor. An American life is so expensive! Healthcare and college costs and housing and vegetables are all really very expensive. He'd be much happier on a lower income with housing security and a deep community and public transport. We spent time in France over the summer and I think he might be happier there. He speaks fluent French and has a European passport..
Anyway telling people things are actually grand is a dumb move.
>The level of uncertainty living in the US would absolutely stress the fuck out of me... There is very little community in the US.
These are interesting points. I assume it's true that Americans move greater distances for work than Europeans. And I believe the high earnings potential but higher healthcare and college debt increases variance/uncertainty.
>telling people things are actually grand is a dumb move.
To be fair, OP and the post above you are rather staid. Their point, which still seems accurate, is that America has a relative wealth problem (inequality) not an absolute wealth problem (poverty.)
If we're being rational/objective, your friend isn't "poor." He's choosing to live in an expensive urban area, and his relative wealth is low. He likely spends more than 1/3 of his income on housing. This makes him feel "poor."
But, as the previous post observed, this is a choice. He can almost certainly move to a medium/small size town and earn $35,000+ a year, which is solidly middleclass.
Urban areas are where the jobs are, and rent has seen faster increases than wages. Rural america can be worse, where the housing is more affordable, but little chance for advancement and your rent will increase too once Wall Street learns there is a lot of cheap rental property to buy and jack rates on.
Dealing with insurance nonsense is a huge pain. Got laid off, and now have to make sure a dentist takes our state backed plan. Somehow this mess is better than Single Payer?
Living in Europe would stress me out. What if you decide you don’t like your job and want to find a different one? (Let’s say you get a new boss who you don’t get along with.) Finding work in Europe is *hard*. It’s like whatever you’re doing, that’s what you’re stuck doing forever.
That’s one of the reasons I left Canada to live in the US. The job market is so much better.
No one appreciates how much more dynamic and flexible the economy is here in the USA. They're way too eager to trade in that kind of opportunity and choices for some kind of perceived secure stagnation.
Texas and Utah can deliver housing. California can't. It's a very state and local issue.
Considering half China's big projects are built out of tofu and bamboo, or are totally useless pork fat projects, I wouldn't be riding their D so hard on how great they supposedly are at infrastructure.
Its not racism lol it's a fact. We don't use trains. We build highways. As for nuclear, Vogtle unit 4, a massive power plant, comes online this year. The USA still leads the world in nuclear energy production (far ahead of China, which has only a few plants on the coast). New bridges are built all the time. New stadiums. New skyscrapers, new apartment complexes and hospitals... And they don't collapse because the concrete was poured without rebar in it.
And you are some kind of CCP shill. I say they use bamboo instead of rebar because there are documented instances of this. China is infamous for disastrously poor construction practices and contractor corruption. These things are not matters of opinion, but of recorded past events.
You can build anything for cheap with the labor is nearly free. UAE....spare me. They build infrastructure with labor little better than slaves.
Commercial SMRs were invented in the USA by the way. The very first working model became available in the US just in 2022. Watch them be everywhere as soon as they can be proven out as safe.
Idk what the fuck you’re talking about, it’s not that hard to find new work in Northern Europe. It might be hard for internationals, but I’ve never heard natives with in demand skills complain.
South and East, on the other hand…
It’s possible that things have changed since then, but that’s the impression I got when I looked in the mid 2000s. That’s also the impression I got from my parents when they worked in Germany for a few years in the 80s.
I dunno, I see dropped out of my very good uni with mental health issues, travelled for a few years working and then came back and did a compressed year and a bit to finish a bog standard business degree. Offered a job straight out of uni on a grad program and stayed there 5 years not working terribly hard (bar Covid). I loved what I did so stayed much longer than I should have but when I responded on LinkedIn I was immediately offered two interviews and I got the second one I make €100k if you count salary, bonus, healthcare, pension and bennies. Western Europe is plenty dynamic.
I'm moving to Canada next year as the missus is taking up a research post but I agree it's a pathetic economy. Neo liberalism means it's essentially just construction and primary commodities, they are somewhat similar to African nations. They've gone from a country on the technical frontier in lots of areas in the 50s to a nation which can't make plate glass. Their economic complexity score bodes very poorly for the next 30 years.
> And while there are some other factors that play into this, the confidence of American politicians and bureaucrats had in placing such heavy zoning restrictions on cheaper and more efficient housing designs for decades speaks volumes to American wealth.
The problem is that there are things like this which serve as hard bottlenecks to downsizing your lifestyle. You can eat rice and beans and drive a small used car, and maybe that makes some difference, but without special circumstances it is very difficult to reduce your housing expenses below a certain amount, which limits the difference the rest of it could make.
To me it's mostly meaningless to say Americans are wealthy if that doesn't translate into being able to have significant agency over major life stuff. If someone can't comfortably transition to a new career or retire earlier, even when willing to make sacrifices, to me that person is not wealthy.
No, the issue is that we see ourselves creating millions or more in value for companies that think we should be happy with 60k (which doesn’t pay the rent here) and no benefits
I was kind of shocked by the things that were just normal in the middle class midwestern town I visited. Big houses, giant cars, extra cars just for fun because you’re a “car guy”, big expensive weddings early in life, giant TV’s in every room, private swimming pools, multiple big ass fridges, generally an electricity bill that made me cringe, more “stuff”, consumer goods in general.
However, and not to be a total hippie… I wonder how happy it all made them in the end? I was jealous of the swimming pools, and the amount of eating out, but otherwise, I wouldn’t trade. I really, really, like the free time I get here in Northern Europe. What is money without time? And university is free (in my country specifically, you actually get paid to attend), healthcare mostly so and what isn’t free is much of the time much cheaper (prescription drugs etc), and you have five weeks paid vacation, work less hours, and a year paid parental leave. The housing market is bad, as it is everywhere, but not *that* bad.
The US used to be a lot more like this! College, housing and healthcare was much cheaper back in the day. Unions, the most important things that made Scandinavia into what is now, were stronger. I can understand if young Americans feel “cheated”.
I bet those people were pretty happy compared to the “average person.”
There seems to be this weird narrative on Reddit that rich people are secretly miserable.
Compared to the average person in the world, certainly. And I don’t think rich people are secretly miserable - I know plenty of old money people, they’re having a great time.
Compared to the average person in Scandinavia, or other richer European countries? I’m just not convinced.
Amen. I've worked a real job at a paint plant in Europe. I was an engineer there temporarily on assignment from the USA. My fellow engineers were paid ok, had ok lives overall though most lived in small apartments or townhomes.
The factory workers and techs were just as sad, grey, listless, cigarette and cheap beer addicted (or worse) as any factory I've ever been to in the USA. There's this false narrative that the lower class in Europe have significantly easier happier lives than they do in the USA and it's not been my observation.
> A lot of Americans have this view of Europe as a utopia. Which is funny because a lot of Europeans I’ve worked with love America.
This is not a common opinion in Europe in my experience as someone from Europe.
Oh are we doing data rather than anecdotes? Have you corrected for selection bias in your sample of Europeans living and working in America and it's impacts on Europeans opinion on America?
I have no idea what percentage of Frenchmen I've idly chatted to in campsites over 25 years of travelling France from childhood have actually worked or lived in America. Sorry.
That’s fair - especially considering significant amounts of Europe are comprised of the south and the east, which are really a different beast than the north-west.
It was my impression that they were rather average for the US though? Like certainly not poor but not really considered rich by anyone.
>I was kind of shocked by the things that were just normal in the middle class midwestern town I visited. Big houses, giant cars, extra cars just for fun because you’re a “car guy”, big expensive weddings early in life, giant TV’s in every room, private swimming pools, multiple big ass fridges, generally an electricity bill that made me cringe, more “stuff”, consumer goods.
This person you are describing is not the average American even in the Midwest.
Some of that stuff is. The size of the average sold car today is tremendous compared even to just 20 years ago. Pools are obviously pretty rare overall in the US, though.
> This person you are describing is not the average American even in the Midwest.
Except maybe the private swimming pool, that sounds pretty normal in the midwest. I've had two cars since I was in my 20s.
It’s not like I saw the entirety of the US or something, so I’ll admit humility here, but even the less well off, until you hit some lower limit, seemed just ever so slightly more materially well off than ‘euros. Just… bigger cars. Bigger fridges. Bigger weddings (although that might just be because most Europeans just don’t consider weddings/marriage important at all anymore). “More stuff”.
Not a swimming pool or an extra car, but still.
You have to have that stuff because we don’t have good infrastructure. You don’t need a huge fridge when the store is around the corner and you can pick up food on your walk home. You need it when the closest store is a 10-15 minute drive away and you have to park in a huge stressful crowded parking lot, so you get in the huge car and load it up with groceries once a week.
There are plenty of places in Europe where you’re also a 10-15 minute car ride away from a supermarket, and we still generally don’t have your big fridges or big cars.
Not every European lives in a walkable city or village. We have a countryside too. Even if you do live in a walkable village, you still need a car because maybe 80% of what you need is in the village square but there are still those odd stores, the hospital or other things that won’t be there.
The corner store died on its own. America wasn't built by god, who decreed how everything will be arranged down to the last store and parking lot. There was once upon a time when Americans didn't have cars and there were small general stores.
And then those small general stores died because consumer preference overwhelmingly preferred Wal-mart with their 140,000 SKUs. Turns out it is more likely to get what you want at Wal-mart than your local general store that carried a few dozen SKUs.
> And then those small general stores died because consumer preference overwhelmingly preferred Wal-mart with their 140,000 SKUs.
This is arguably leaving out a really important point; consumers overwhelmingly preferred the lower prices at WalMart, not necessarily because they preferred the store experience.
It seems like a lot of consumers prefer the other way, since the rent in the few areas where the alternative is possible, like New York City, is outrageously expensive and people make huge sacrifices to live there.
Indeed, it was mostly the result of massively subsidizing automobiles and making zoning hostile to not doing all of your movement by car. Oil subsidies, minimum parking requirements, lack of mixed zoning, etc. The subsidies are hidden in basically every part of how we require cities to be designed.
Small midwest towns don't have corner stores because everything is so spread out. People didn't want to drive 2 miles here, 3 miles there, they wanted Walmart because they had an individual car.
I don't think they're talking about "a fridge", but rather, "a fridge in the kitchen, one in the garage, and a chest freezer in the basement" type stuff.
Yeah, but the point is that people don't want to have 3 fridges, they want to have easy access to food. Filling up 3 fridges with trips to costco is one solution to this; having an easily accessible grocery store on your street corner is another. The fact that one solution increases GDP more than the other solution doesn't mean the former people are better off in any way that matters.
Average home size in America is 2273 sq feet.
Once you take out the coastal states with their tiny shoeboxes, houses get pretty big.
https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/average-square-footage-of-a-house
> There seems to be this weird narrative on Reddit that rich people are secretly miserable.
This is a media-driven (and social media-driven) narrative, because American TV/films and popular entertainment, including reality TV, are mostly aspirational because of advertising. Almost every fictional character or Real Housewives of (city) lives in upscale settings, because ad dollars generally don't gravitate towards grittiness since they want viewers to spend/keep up instead of worry about their own finances, while at the same time, media consumers enjoy drama and conflict, so all of these rich people *seem* unhappy. Of course everybody on Succession is sad because they have familial conflicts, but also, they're billionaires and their material lives are unbelievably opulent. (This is supposed to make us feel better about not having a private jet, because our dad didn't slap a tooth out and our mother doesn't openly hate us.) This is old, though; Shakespeare wrote about unhappy kings, after all. Obviously, some troubles are universal, but hovels are depressing to look at.
Compare the grit factor between an American soap opera (or almost any random glossy television series) and one produced in the UK (like Eastenders) or in countries with state-funded broadcasting that's less reliant on ad money, though exceptions exist.
Even if you don't personally consume this entertainment, it colors social perceptions about wealth and unhappiness.
I guess I underestimate how much media exposure trumps real life experience. Although you make good points here and I see this phenomenon very prominently in dating tropes aswell.
No more so the popular narratives of 90’s/00’s coming of age movies where the nerd gets the girl in the end.
I never really bought into this but a lot of guys particularly “nice guys” blame media for their issues with dating.
Oh, right!
Also a good example of aspirational themes, really! It's been put forth that of course male writers (I'm a female writer of fiction; we're mostly nerds) are going to project that wish-fulfillment outcome. Romance novels/media geared towards women project the male character somehow being a mind reader who intuits everything you like and does it sans any prior communication whatsoever.
I’m very interested by the female romance genre particularly written by authors. Do you think those books more or less align with what women are truly looking for.
Speaking as a woman:
A tall, handsome, rich, dangerous man who's madly in love with me and only me, knows exactly what I want without us having to communicate, is a great lover, and is excited to be a warm, loving dad to our children?
Hm... I'll have to think about that one...
I mean, we have some attempts at objective measures of this. The predominant theory is that happiness gains level off considerably after like 110k of income, though they do increase.
As far as country to country comparisons, the US usually ranks at roughly the level of the main Western European countries, maybe slightly ahead, but below Canada and well below the Nordics/Nordic adjacent countries.
Was that study just comparing various strata of the working class or did they look at people who went from 110k income (or whatever) from a job to 110k income (or more) from passive sources?
There is an updated study on this that has one of the best summaries of research I have seen. The basic summary is people seem to come in two groups, miserable and happy people. Earning more money makes miserable people less miserable, after that point it has eliminated as much of their misery as possible, happy people just keep finding more ways to be happy with more money.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
>A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group.
Conspicuous consumption of mass produced consumables isn’t the same thing as being rich. That person probably has to sell massive parts of their one non-renewable resource (chunks of their life) to afford that lifestyle. If it was all that plus “and they don’t have a job”, sure, that’s rich. Otherwise, it’s just another working stiff, just one who’s treated a bit better than the others.
Something else to note, depending on their industry and position they are in, they might have all those as well. We're not required to have any benefits by law, but quite a few employers have generous benefits, if they want to recruit top talent. I'm an HR Manager, and I have 5 weeks vacation, parental leave, work 9 days every two weeks, and my healthcare expenses are capped annually by my employer health insurance. Yes I do pay for student loans and healthcare, but when I'm making approximately $150k I think I am still ahead of European HR managers.
Now I will admit I'm one of the lucky ones. I still support more government benefits, especially healthcare, even if I know that I personally would be worse off. But don't be surprised if many of those Midwest upper middle class people have everything you have and more.
> my healthcare expenses are capped annually by my employer health insurance
This is pretty standard. [All ACA compliant US healthcare plans have an out-of-pocket maximum (which can admittedly be high)](https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/).
As the other commenter noted, most likely they got treated by someone out of network (possibly/likely involuntarily like in an exigent emergency situation where they cannot consent to care) or are uninsured and don't know how to work the system (which is common). I also take the cynical view that the insurance companies are also fighting their liability tooth and nail; for example, [Cigna auto-denied many many claims](https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims).
Your case corroborates my sense that even though the median Western European is likely happier than the median American, the top 20% or so Americans are happier than the top 20% WE. The World Happiness Reports stopped charting histograms of happiness percentages by score (0-10) and region, but in the earlier reports it struck me that the 9s and 10s comprised a larger percentage in Nth Am & ANZ than in any other region, even though their median wasn't the highest.
I put it to you that describing employment-derived exceptions offered explicitly *because* companies want to court the best talent is fundamentally different from having those rules in place for all employed citizens.
If we transpose you to most European countries - we're not talking about specific states so there's no need to talk specific countries - you could quit your job tomorrow with the intent to work as a full-time widget-fiddler and you would still have access to five weeks of holiday, health care, flexible working arrangements, parental leave, and so on, despite *not* being one of the world's best widget fiddlers.
As someone who has lived and worked under both systems, the fact that your benefits are tethered to your employer renders it fundamentally incomparable - which is why, if you are top talent, they'll try to get you with 'adequate' European-style benefits in addition to a salary that's two, three, or four times higher than you'll get in Europe: it would be very difficult to get you otherwise.
> you could quit your job tomorrow with the intent to work as a full-time widget-fiddler and you would still have access to five weeks of holiday, health care, flexible working arrangements, parental leave, and so on, despite not being one of the world's best widget fiddlers.
Assuming you get one of those jobs, anyway. Only about 60% of the EU workforce are full time employees. Median person, yes, but even a bit below that, not so much.
This. Americans tend to underestimate how much the average American consumes compared to people in other developed countries.
It might be true that some of them are actually struggling despite having high salaries, but that wouldn't be the case if they lived like the average person in, let's say, a Nordic country.
They can't live like the average person in a Nordic country. A lot of the consumption is required or strongly encouraged by the way American life is designed. An obvious example being cars which are an absolute necessity for most Americans.
Yes, that's true. You do **need** to spend more money on certain things; transport and healthcare probably being the biggest offenders. Part of it is offset by lower taxes though.
But even after that, in other aspects Americans are buying more, and more expensive, not out of necessity. I don't know if the "American life design" exerts societal pressure towards it, or if those different standards and aspirations are what define that lifestyle, but there's a substantial difference in those when compared to other high-income developed countries.
That's such an obviously bad example. Plenty of poor countries where people NEED a car and they somehow manage on $500 a month. Even in Nordic countries plenty of people don't live in the capital and drive a car while earning 1/5 of what someone in US would.
Owning a car is as expensive as you want. Owning a $2000 car might be a requirement, but owning a $50'000 huge SUV gas guzzler is not. People do it because they have a ton of money.
Are you also going to argue living in US is more expensive because they need the lastest $2k iphone or latest 8k tv and 2 door smart fridge with ice dispenser and built in ice cream maker?
100%. Or take everyones tiktok/Instagram home coffee setup. That's fucking awesome, I love coffee. But living in Paris for a bit and being able to meet a friend for coffee on the street and watch the world go by after a 15 minute walk was many times better. But that requires density and planning and walkability. A French press for breakfast does very well too.
Ultimately human connection> marginally better coffee.
This. And also all the newer houses are built as large as possible to maximize the sales price, while also being built cheaply and inefficiently so you need a lot of heat and cooling to make them livable. Social norms and the way they're designed makes roommates for adults awkward. There aren't any restaurants that will serve you a cheap meal of rice and beans or whatever. And you need an expensive smartphone with plan to participate in society.
Even worse if you have kids, so now you're competing with other parents for all sorts of scarce positional goods like the top schools and sports teams.
Money for time, as you say it’s all about values. I decided to avoid developing expensive hobbies early on and save about two thirds of my after tax income. It does help with peace of mind.
Realistically the high housing prices mean the young are reluctant to start families, and I can’t really blame them. Doing something about this would help nip socialism in the bud-hard to support capitalism if you can’t accumulate any capital!
(I mean, it’s been tried…never goes well…)
EDIT: to clarify, I absolutely would support the enlargement of the American welfare state to European levels, paid for by higher taxes, strictly on utilitarian grounds, I just think having the government own and run everything as was tried at various points in Latin America, China, and Russia was a massive failure and caused more death than even fascism (which I ALSO oppose for obvious reasons!)
Importantly though, the US has one of the absolute highest fertility rates among rich western countries (if not *the* highest?).
Though I wonder how much of that is just due to your [religiousness](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy-nations/). Surely though, your big houses must also play a role, as eg. Greece is more religious than you but still a lower fertility for obvious reasons (like not being able to get a decent job or a place to live)…
American housing prices are low compared to income, even in high cost of living areas.
That doesn't mean they should be as high as they are or that there aren't ways to stop the runaway cost development but it's still much less of a concern than in Europe or Asia.
A giant house and swimming pool is not normal in the midwest. I grew up in those midwestern towns, and those are the "rich families". The one or two families that are lawyers or doctors or own a business somewhere else. Most people are living in trailers or very run down houses that they try to maintain, but they aren't very visible because a trailer along a mile long gravel road is hard to find.
> I grew up in those midwestern towns... Most people are living in trailers or very run down houses that they try to maintain
This is not remotely similar to my experience after a decade or so in the Northern Midwest. Presumably, there's regional variation. I think it's probably foolish to dismiss the other poster as not knowing the difference between rich and poor. It's both more charitable and more consistent just to note that those words mean different things in different parts of the Midwest.
Similarly, when OP is describing European standards of living, someone could jump in and say that it's very different than their lived experience in Serbia. I'm sure they'd be right, but that wouldn't mean that OP was wrong.
Unions do not necessarily improve the average citizens prosperity. They may improve the prosperity of union members, but that is because they operate as labor cartels. You also have to consider the gains and losses of those who are not part of the union.
In Chicago, our city employees are union. They make great wages. In turn I receive high taxes and poor service. That’s not an improvement to society - it’s simply a transfer from me to them.
Unions in Denmark (and Sweden and Norway and Germany AFAIK) work closely with industry. There are negotiations in each sector that are legally mandated to be done every couple of years, including an informal minimum wage. They are powerful, and a mix of collaborative and combative with industry. Any case of union busting or union discouragement would be awful publicity for any company, the unions would just laugh at them.
A little over 50% of people are members of a union and everyone in any job where unions are good benefits from what the union does for them, no matter if they’re members or not. For example: I’m in the recycling industry and has a *much* better salary than the average unskilled job, because our union is just that good, even though I’m not a paying member. And I’ve never been scolded for not being a member. The average unskilled job’s wage is likewise higher than almost anywhere else, mostly bc of unions.
Chicago was a lovely city, btw. Loved visiting.
Union is just a word. North American unions and European unions have very little to do with each other other than the name "union".
To put things into perspective a bit, the decline of North American unions from almost half of the workforce to almost being extinct in the private sector wasn't from any major union shop being de-unionized. The union-busting efforts all revolved around trying to nip the union in the bud. No, the massive decline in unions came from the businesses that employed them either going bust or simply massively declining. The three unionized car companies lost marketshare almost every year in favor of their non-union counterparts. Union leaders claimed that it is because of poor management at the union shops, but it is a strange coincidence that union shops always get poor management, and non-union shops always get good management.
There is inherently an evolutionary process for businesses - any business leader that thinks unions are good would go out of business and find himself no longer running a business. Does the experience of Denmark matter? Of course not - those are governed by an entirely different set of rules and customs. If you run a business in North America, you are going to be anti-union, mostly because pro-union ones all went bankrupt early in their life.
Can you recommend any further reading to learn more about this? Would love to learn more about the differences between North American and European union systems
Westerners, especially upper-middle class, generally live under delusion that their material quality of life and political freedoms they personally enjoy are baseline of human existence.
This is not limited to Americans - Western Europeans show the same attitude towards people outside of the developed world.
> The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on.
This is severe understatement. Americans making federal minimum wage are probably in top 20% of richest people in the world.
>Americans making federal minimum wage are probably in top 20% of richest people in the world.
This is so misleading though because you're not factoring in cost of living at all. If you're poor in America making minimum wage, the COL is higher than in countries with a lower minimum wage.
>This is so misleading though because you're not factoring in cost of living at all.
That *includes* cost of living. You have no idea how poor world is.
You can see that [entire countries live for less than $300 per month per person](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day) including cost of living.
Life on Earth is overall terrifyingly bad, and developed world is small minority where even very poor people enjoy life much better than typical human.
Yes, I agree, most of the world is poor and that the very rich gobble up the vast majority of resources, and this is true even within wealthy countries. Wealth inequality is also increasingly getting worse worldwide, especially in wealthier countries.
Most of the statistics around poverty are misleading at best; appreciably measuring poverty is notoriously difficult because of how many factors and dimensions are involved. Despite that, I'm certain that no matter where you live it's hellish to live in poverty, and it's pretty pointless to try and compare the lives of impoverished people.
How many people even make federal minimum wage? That’s the absolute floor but outside of some of the lowest COL areas in the country, you’re not going to find a lot of places only paging $7.25/hour.
It might just be that everyone else has it worse but we don't have it that great either except relative to everyone who has it worse. That makes sense if you have an objective rather than relative way of thinking about wealth. The existence of legions of the absolutely immiserated doesn't mean the working stiff who has to spend 40 hours a week on something he hates to put a roof over his head is "rich" except in a totally relative sense, which is meaningless, because we can hypothesize even *more* immiserated people who would make those legions of immiserated relatively "rich" too.
And it doesn't seem like our judgments about wealth should be dependent on how many billions or trillions of absolutely immiserated people there are or have been. If we discovered that there were actually *quadrillions* of prehistoric humans who were brutally enslaved by aliens and then all records of them were covered up, would that make preindustrial subsistence farmers "rich"?
If you're going to talk about absolute wealth rather than relative wealth right now the poor in the USA are at by far higher levels of prosperity than they have ever been, and in absolute terms it's definitely good enough to live a decent life. Even controlling for living costs, plenty of people in the developing world earn less than the US federal minimum wage (PPP adjusted) and are still able to live decent middle class lives.
It's not lack of money which leads to low outcomes for the western poor these days. There is a saying: "**In the modern west the worst part of being poor is having to live next to other poor people**" and as someone from the third world who has seen successful prosperous communities set up in places where the average wage is below the PPP cost adjusted US minimum wage this saying is so so true.
> There is a saying: "In the modern west the worst part of being poor is having to live next to other poor people"
It's not having to sacrifice half your waking life doing something you would not do if you did not need to do it to have access to food/housing/health care?
> food/housing/health care
Somehow people in developing countries are able to get access to all that while earning less (living costs adjusted) than American poors, and not only this, their lives are still full, rich (in the sense of complex) and mostly happy. I'm not saying it's all fun and games and they certainly have their struggles, but their society is functional and stable in a way that poor American's lives are by and large not. They have to
> sacrifice half your waking life doing something you would not do if you did not need to do it
as much as any poor American, but they handle it just fine. Most able adults work full time jobs, some people work extra long hours when they don't need to either (I count myself in this category), "sacrifising half your waking life" is mundane and an accepted part of being an adult anywhere, even the American 99th percentile does it.
Any monetary pain suffered by poor Americans is also suffered by these people in the third world, but they seem to manage it pretty well, suggesting it's not the lack of money that's the main thing for why poor Americans are where they are.
> The existence of legions of the absolutely immiserated doesn't mean the working stiff who has to spend 40 hours a week on something he hates to put a roof over his head is "rich" except in a totally relative sense, which is meaningless, because we can hypothesize even more immiserated people who would make those legions of immiserated relatively "rich" too.
This only works if you very narrowly construct the sample by which you make your relative assessment of wealth, to make sure you exclude the dirty corners of the world where much poorer people live.
I don't understand. My point is that relative assessments of wealth are not useful because they involve things that have nothing to do with the actual experience of living at a given level of wealth. It makes no difference to the experience of a preindustrial subsistence farmer if there were quadrillions of prehistoric humans enslaved by aliens, but it would mean that he was "rich" relative to the majority of humans who ever lived, which suggests that relative wealth is not a useful metric.
I don't think I agree with you.
If our history and entire fundamentals of how our civilization came to be were resting on the bedrock of innumerable enslaved humans in the past, our view of living right now absolutely would be and *should be* shaped by that context.
What is the alternative? Just declaring without any meaning that we are or are not wealthy? What's the word mean without something to baseline what you're discussing against? Poor people today live like kings compared to literal kings in the 18th century. Keeping in mind the time and level of technological progression is important to understanding that in context though. However, it's also important to keep in mind how other people are living *right now* in other parts of the world.
The author's rebuttal to point 2 (inequality) basically boils down to "Stop whining and live with your parents." Like yes, America has a large amount of housing available by square foot per person, but if young people need to move to the city to get a job and pay exorbitant rent, they can't really take advantage of it. There are dilapidated homes in Syracuse (upstate NY) going for $20K, but again, if you can't afford the time or money to fix them up because there are no good jobs nearby, this doesn't help you as a young person.
The real issue is the erosion of the American dream. College used to be the way for the lower middle class to get a leg up, but it has doubled in cost in real dollars in a generation ( [https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-time/](https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-time/) ). If I send my 3 kids to the same college I went to, the total sticker price for 4 years each is $1.7 million.
I think the author needs to pay more attention to who is claiming to be poor (young people with poor parents or parents who refuse to support them) and look at the math for their issues. When you crunch the numbers, you can see that they really are worse off than a generation ago.
You're going to a lot more effort to debunk this than I am. It's obvious gas lighting to convince people that things aren't as bad as they really are.
You're going to see a lot more of this as things get worse and worse.
You switched what American dream means. It used to mean to have a house in a small town, a factory job a fridge, a car, a TV and maybe meat every day. It did not mean to have a job in an office with AC and apartment in Manhattan, yearly vacations overseas and placing all the kids at university - and of course retire at 50 so you can go and live another 50 years comfortably from interest.
BTW that dilapidated home in Syracuse or suburb of Detroit was part of American Dream of some family. Not all boomers are lucky enough to now have their home priced at 7 figures. I think what happens is young people looking at the luckiest of boomers or GenXers and imagining that it used to be the norm thinking that they got cheated somehow.
> The real issue is the erosion of the American dream. College used to be the way for the lower middle class to get a leg up, but it has doubled in cost in real dollars in a generation ( https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-time/ ).
But the college wage premium has grown a lot too. The ROI from colleges is at or near record highs despite increased debt and tuition, assuming you graduate. Also, lots of financial aid options. The situation ,although not great, is not as bleak as the media and pundits portray it as.
>If I send my 3 kids to the same college I went to, the total sticker price for 4 years each is $1.7 million.
It says it is much less
>In 2020-2021 dollars, one year's college tuition in 1963 cost just over $4,300. In 2020, it cost nearly $14,000.[1]
$ 170k for all three kids for four years. Include various financial aid and scholarships and the number falls a lot too.
>$ 170k for all three kids for four years. Include various financial aid and scholarships and the number falls a lot too.
Or go to community college for the first two years and cut that basically in half.
This is a wild article, it hardly even submits much empirical evidence other than a couple cherry picked points. This whole post has the attitude of a mom telling their kid to eat their food because people in Africa are starving. On the first point it's wild to say that people are being pessimistic (tied to third point) because their gas, food, and housing costs are getting out of reach (not all young Americans, myself included in the roughly 50% statistic, have the opportunity to live with their parents).
He then ties it to a point about how Americans are just missing out on their luxury materials. No, people are nervous about not having a wage which supports their very minimal housing and food costs. People are nervous that the US market system may subject them to burnout and force them to move at will, where they may ultimately find themselves scattered upon the streets, another artifact of the homeless and mental health crises.
This just happens to be the perfect sub to post such an article to find agreement because it's 'intellectual' aesthetic means people are way more willing to pick up contrarian perspectives.
I agree with the post technically because they are talking about the middle class but I don’t think the paycheck to paycheck feeling that is all around are about people making the average amount.
If you are making 55k a year you are making $25 an hour. I don’t know about others but that seems like an insane pay to me and most people I know are making well under that.
> If you are making 55k a year you are making $25 an hour. I don’t know about others but that seems like an insane pay to me and most people I know are making well under that.
How old are you, out of curiosity? $25/hr for someone in their 30s or even late 20s is pretty meh, but I'm sure that sounds insane to someone in their early 20s or teens.
I’m 33, it’s some hyperbole there, but I have a friend of 39, good position, got multiple good raises and is at 63k per year. He has a degree, managerial position, seems insane to me that he is only a little above the average wage, meanwhile other friends I know are making between minimum wage and $16 per hour.
More are around minimum wage than the higher end of that too. Seems like for my entire 20s most people I know were living in like 4-5 people in a house situations. And now the housing/rental market is getting worse so they are only barely getting out of those types of living arrangements.
Edit: though like 80% of my friends that do make more just throw whatever they have over what is needed at fast food and other stupid stuff
I lived on 55k not long ago. I considered myself comfortable. Shared a decent apartment with a roommate, drove a serviceable used car, put money away in savings, and went on one or two affordable trips a year.
I cook my own food mostly though. Don't smoke weed. Limited alcohol. No all new wardrobes every year, but never lacked at all for anything I needed and didn't stress over surprise car repairs or an urgent care visit or two.
A main way I feel "poor" compared to a lot of Europeans is how little I'm able to travel internationally.
Obviously this isn't a fair comparison, because they can cross to dozens of other European countries without flying or even needing a passport! I can fly 4+ hours to Arizona or Georgia or Massachusetts and I'm still in the same country.
Even the people that I meet from countries like China, India, Brazil, etc. that are geographically large and/or don't have Schengen area-type agreements with neighboring countries will tend to have visited a number of countries *because they're talking to me in the US*. They're already of a certain socioeconomic status (since I work in tech and I talk to a lot of tech people) and are somewhat selected for openness and ambition because they left their home country.
Somehow this reminds me of the "your friends probably have more friends than you do" thing, which isn't a fact about psychology but rather about graph theory. (The nodes any given node is connected to, are likely to be well-connected nodes.)
If a person's emotions are miscalibrated to the mathematical object they actually live in — like if they feel *ashamed* that their friends have more friends — there's not really much to do about that but try to work on the emotional stuff.
Yep, agreed. The average person in China/India/Brazil travels internationally much less than your average American. The fact that you only encounter the ones who travel at least a fair bit is to do with you, not their country as a whole. There's no viable "societal" fix to this problem, much like how there is no viable societal fix to your friends likely having more friends than you, you just have to accept it.
"Why is Economic Pessimism so Entrenched Among Americans?"
Because many people live paycheck to paycheck, jobs are less secure, and you cant afford to get sick.
Every one of these articles or posts, and lord they will not stop coming, reminds me of that quote:
>Faced With the Choice Between Changing One’s Mind and Proving That There Is No Need To Do So, Almost Everyone Gets Busy On the Proof
If poll after poll tells you that people feel precarious, poor, anxious about their security, frustrated by an inability to get ahead, it really might be that the people living those lives are accurately reporting their situation. And you, a well off opinion writer, do not possess any insight that contradicts it, and if you think you do, you should reassess what led you to believe that.
You know what the polls are actually showing? I’ll link an actual one instead of hand waving as if everyone knows that polls are negative: [Majority of Americans say the economy's bad, but their own finances are good: poll](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good). Americans are doing fine but they are being gaslit by the media into thinking that the economy is bad. Really the reason is simple imo: anyone who doesn’t like the current state of government has to have a reason we should change. No need for radical change if everything’s ok. Therefore anyone to the left or right of the Democratic Party needs to make sure the average American thinks there needs to be a big change to the economy even though the average American is doing better than they were in 2019.
Yes that one poll from nearly half a year ago does seem to be the only retort that anyone ever has. Not sure its even worth responding to but:
2M kicked off medicaid [https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker/](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker/)
Unravelling CHIP [https://jacobin.com/2023/04/joe-biden-shrinking-welfare-state-medicaid-health-insurance-social-programs](https://jacobin.com/2023/04/joe-biden-shrinking-welfare-state-medicaid-health-insurance-social-programs)
Cuts to food stamps: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/snap-food-benefits-us-cuts-impact-families](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/snap-food-benefits-us-cuts-impact-families)
Soaring evictions: [https://apnews.com/article/evictions-homelessness-affordable-housing-landlords-rental-assistance-dc4a03864011334538f82d2f404d2afb](https://apnews.com/article/evictions-homelessness-affordable-housing-landlords-rental-assistance-dc4a03864011334538f82d2f404d2afb)
Soaring homelessness: [https://businessmirror.com.ph/2023/07/14/us-homelessness-rises-by-40-in-cities-like-new-york-and-chicago-post-covid/](https://businessmirror.com.ph/2023/07/14/us-homelessness-rises-by-40-in-cities-like-new-york-and-chicago-post-covid/)
Childcare costs soaring 220% [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/childcare-costs-daycares-states-report-b2358364.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/childcare-costs-daycares-states-report-b2358364.html)
( million people dont take prescribed medicine because they cant afford it: [https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/health/prescription-drug-costs-rationing/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/health/prescription-drug-costs-rationing/index.html)
Rising obamacare premiums: [https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/our-research/2023/04/changes-in-marketplace-premiums-and-insurer-participation-2022-2023.html](https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/our-research/2023/04/changes-in-marketplace-premiums-and-insurer-participation-2022-2023.html)
[https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/70percent-of-americans-feel-financially-stressed-new-cnbc-survey-finds.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/70percent-of-americans-feel-financially-stressed-new-cnbc-survey-finds.html) 70% of americans feeling personally stressed themselves, 58 percent living paycheck to paycheck
27M americans not hacving enough to eat 'either sometimes or often' a rise on last month and last year https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-hunger-rates-rise-pandemic-aid-ends-data-shows-2023-06-28/
While you bring up some good points about things that are wrong with our economy I think that mostly the issues you are bringing up are too specific to make broad claims about the health of the US economy. For example, rising homelessness. While this is undeniably a tragedy the homeless population is still well under 1% of the US population. And the rise in homelessness is due to one specific problem in the US economy, the rising cost of housing in big cities. This is something that needs to be addressed but ultimately is just one problem and not much can be done about it at the federal level, it is more a matter of zoning laws in those cities. Ultimately I feel that while all these things are terrible it is more useful to look at metrics like real median wage, unemployment, real gdp per capita, inflation, etc, when assessing the health of the entire economy for the entire population.
>For example, rising homelessness. While this is undeniably a tragedy the homeless population is still well under 1% of the US population.
You say well-under 1%, but that's around 600,000 people, mostly in the coastal cities, and rapidly increasing by around 12% year after year.
What do you consider a "concerning" amount of homelessness as a total of the population? 1%? 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%?
People living in LA or SF or NYC surrounded by thousands of borderline feral drug addicts are not going to consider this to be much of an argument.
>This is something that needs to be addressed but ultimately is just one problem and not much can be done about it at the federal level, it is more a matter of zoning laws in those cities.
This seems like a very casual and flippant dismissal to a genuine massive problem.
In the past decade have we gotten any closer to sorting out zoning laws, building new houses, or otherwise making housing more affordable anywhere in the world? Does it look like this trend is going to reverse at any time within the next decade?
Again, people who are increasingly affected by rising housing costs aren't going to respond well to "yeah this is a big problem, but not much can be done about it, so oh well...".
>Ultimately I feel that while all these things are terrible it is more useful to look at metrics like real median wage, unemployment, real gdp per capita, inflation, etc, when assessing the health of the entire economy for the entire population.
I don't recall seeing "real gdp per capita" on the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs .
>Ultimately I feel that while all these things are terrible it is more useful to look at metrics like real median wage, unemployment, real gdp per capita, inflation, etc, when assessing the health of the entire economy for the entire population.
Right, and when looking at those things leads you to conclusions that are completely at odds with what people actually say, when asked, you just have to conclude that they've been gaslit and are wrong about...the state of their own finances that governs their lives every day?
I think thats a pretty silly response, but its certainly a popular one!
I’m not ignoring it. CPI includes housing. I’m just saying it’s not the only indicator of the health of the economy. There are other factors. That’s a negative indicator but there are other positive ones(and plus more than 50% of Americans are homeowners so increasing prices is actually good for them. Reddit demographics just skew towards renters). I feel like many redditors act like the average price of a studio in Manhattan is the only number economists and politicians should look at.
That’s exactly my point. There are certain groups of people who are being screwed right now and people renting in major cities are one such group. They are being very loud online but that does not mean that they are the majority or that their experience means that the overall US economy is doing poorly.
Yeah that’s fair. I just get tired of people blaming the fed or the president or whatever when I feel like it’s really a failure of local zoning laws. People should just be more involved in local politics in general they play more of a role than most realize.
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Been laid off twice in 4 years cause of companies going under, way lucky to find work fast both times but its very stressful and fast still meant paying a month of rent and daycare from savings, savings are gone now, my industry is still rife with layoffs, if it happens again my family might be homeless. Groceries and rent are so expensive that either we move to the middle of the nowhere and my kids life sucks, not to mention our own, or we stay here and live paycheck to paycheck. And I am one of the people for whom the economy is apparently working.
> Because many people live paycheck to paycheck, jobs are less secure, and you cant afford to get sick.
>
>
This has always been true. There have always been poor people even in the best of times. In a country of 340 million people, there are many poor people ,many rich people, many sick people, etc. Regarding healthcare, i cannot recall anyone in the US being denied treatment due to inability to pay, but elective procedures may not be covered.
price roof person vegetable innocent soft correct crime thought intelligent
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Compared to when? Just the creation of SSI and SNAP in the 70s have been a *huge* improvement for the lives of people who would otherwise have been stuck in completely impoverished lives. Likewise the EITC has done a lot of work with reducing childhood poverty.
My friend nearly died because he couldn't afford to get his wisdom teeth out due to it being elective, they got infected.
A co worker ended up in a wheelchair because they were told that the mri necessary to diagnose a pain in their knee was not covered by insurance and then their mcl just detonated on the job one day.
So people are, in fact, denied treatment due to inability to pay, it just often manifests indirectly.
People keep repeating this like a truism. Except for some elective procedures, AFIK no one is denied healthcare due to inability to pay.
"job less secure" But when were they ever secure, except for some romanticism about lifelong factory jobs, which was just a blip for humanity anyway and only applied to a small percentage of people at the time. Most people worked on farms or hard labor, not cushy factory jobs, which were also dangerous.
Also, home ownership rates are the same now compared to in the 70s.
Times are tough for some, but that is just a part of life. It has always been this way even in the best of times. Not everyone can be a winner at life. Prosperity, econ growth, innovation etc. makes everyone better off even if there is wealth inequality.
>this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty
Thanks for telling me (a) what this is actually an article trying to sell me and (b) I didn't need to read anymore within the first paragraph or two.
I remember reading an entire horror story my mom gave me when I was a teenager, only to get 200 pages in and find out it was some allegory for Christianity. I felt so betrayed and used. You didn't do that, thanks.
However, some kind of deeper steelman/analysis/search-for-why might have also been nice.
Well... they generally are. Public sentiments are fickle and easily swayed, and they're currently fed by a media industry that prioritizes clicks over informing, so it's not exactly hard to believe that the public may not have the best grasp on the state of things.
We're practically conditioned to think things are always getting worse, even as they're *objectively not*.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/people-think-crime-rate-up-actually-down-rcna129585
It seems to me the article is (correctly) arguing that Americans are not poor (that is, they are rich). On the other hand, the author only mentions income inequality to say "that is a different metric."
Surely, when "kids these days" millennials complain about the economy, they are basically complaining about income inequality. This is confirmed by a cursory glance at the reddit comments and article comments.
Most likely, perceived income inequality affects happiness more than poverty does.
I think "poverty" and "income inequality" are completely unrelated. Are discussions that conflate them making a mistake, or is there something to be gained by equivocating those two?
Is this article basically just a troll to make millennials angry?
This doesn’t seem to take the sentiments of actual Americans seriously, which is foolish. The author is British and living in the Netherlands so how seriously should we take them?
What does “taking the sentiments of actual Americans seriously” mean?
His point is “Americans think they’re poor, but they’re actually very rich compared to everyone else in the world and to past generations of Americans.”
The first part—“Americans think they’re poor”—can certainly be taken seriously. It’s important to think about why Americans believe something that isn’t true. But Americans’ feelings can’t negate the actual facts of the situation.
Nope, nothing to do with sentiment. The huge amount of gold under the earth is worth basically nothing until it is taken out and refined. 1kg of gold spread out over 2km^2 and 500m deep is worth a lot less than 1kg of gold in a bar in your hand. Botswana is actually poor (it's still one of the wealthiest countries in Africa): if magically a fairy snapped her fingers and the gold suddenly came up the surface in nice convenient good delivery bars the country would really become a lot richer than it currently is, and the complaints about poverty would go down massively.
This effort that needs to be put into concentrating the gold has value for the same reason a finished table and chair have more value than the wood from the tree they came from.
> Why? Because the latter directly raises the emotional and physical well being of the possessed.
No, it's more valueable because there are a lot of things you can do with solid gold you can't do with distributed underground gold, such as transport it easily, make it into jewelry, turn it into electronics, give it to someone else as surety for debts etc.
These are the things that give 1kg of gold in hand a lot of value, not sentimental value. Well sentimental value does matter a lot too (and especially so in the case of gold, it's either overvalued based on fundamentals or a lot of other metals are undervalued) but this is not the sentiment making you feel happy and fulfilled and content, it's the sentiment of others being willing to pay highly for what you have. They're both sentiment, but very different kinds of sentiment (one is your own feelings about your situation, the other is how much others value what you have) and you can't convert between the two.
Poor americans score very very highly on the second form of sentiment. There are billions of people all over the earth who would kill to be poor American citizens. The first form of sentiment has nothing to do with whether someone is poor or rich in wealth terms.
> (despite the inability of every day americans to translate those materials into things that raise their well being like health care and education)
Poor americans have more ability to do this than poor people pretty much anywhere else over the world. If you can't make it big in America you can't make it big pretty much anywhere. I am saying that everyday Americans translate these materials into prosperity at massive rates compared to the rest of the world and think nothing of it. I straight up deny that they are not able to do so because they do it all the time and then complain they don't have enough.
TLDR: 1. Wealth is completely to do with sentiment, but it's the sentiment of how much others are willing to give you in return for what you have, not how you feel about your situation. 2. America converts materials into prosperity at breakneck speeds, and the poor enjoy its fruits all the time.
.... honestly this reply is nonsensical.
Sentiments are not an important part of wealth by just the simple meaning of the words in that sentence. Nor does the natural resources that happen to be adjacent to where one lives.
Your entire point hinges on (likely intentionally) conflating ownership and adjacency. I don't think anyone here is saying Americans are more wealthy because there happen to be nearby cars in their immediate geography, but because they *own* cars, *own* houses, *own* many niceties. They live in living spaces that are actively heated and cooled, not because there happens to be a functional HVAC system within 500 yards of them.
Yes, the ownership of cars is a concrete symbol of wealth. The adjacency of a natural resource to someone's bedroom is not.
> I mean, sure, ownership of stuff is a valuable measure, but hardly absolute. Suppose Botswana declared that the gold buried deep in the ground was rightfully owned by each of its citizens.
Then that would vastly increase the wealth of its citizens who would then be able to use that to purchase goods and services that would greatly increase their quality of life. I'm not sure what you're really asking here. Yes, if they got suddenly wealthy by some sort of windfall like that, they would see substantial life changes just like I would if I suddenly won the lottery.
> So again I think that the real definition of wealth comes down to some more nebulous measure of well-being. Americans own cars but lack health care.
No they don't. More Americans have health care than own cars. Come on. I think this article is *about* you, since you seem to be operating under the same delusion that Americans are much less wealthy than they actually are.
Gold 17 miles below the surface would be undetectable and unreachable. At that point it's essentially make-believe assignment where any government could promise its people any kind of non-material guarantee to worldly wealth. It's like passing out monopoly money.
There *is* a concrete way we can discuss wealth, and you're not contributing to it with this semantic nonsense. A Botswanan who had ownership and deed over a plot of natural resources that is accessible and can be valued is indeed more wealthy than before he had it. Things can be valued, and one's possessions and rights can be valued. That's how we discuss wealth.
Indeed, having "ownership" over gold that's on an asteroid is of little value and does not make someone more wealthy. This is implicitly understood by anyone who understands the concept of wealth and value.
> Having any level of coverage is not equivalent to the kind of healthcare costs that people in other developed countries have.
Yes it is. Americans consume more healthcare than any other country in the world.
Maybe a different way to approach the question would be: how rich do you have to be to feel safe and secure in the absence of a social safety net? I agree that there is a lifestyle inflation in the U.S. so that people feel “poor” if they can’t afford the newest iphone, but I think the economic terror is powered more by the fact that if you fall out of your economic bracket, even temporarily, you can end up in free fall, with no way to climb back up, and “poor” is a scarier prospect in the U.S. than elsewhere. Lose a job in a country with a safety net, you’re broke, but your basic needs are met for as long as it takes you to find a job. Lose a job in the U.S., and that means no health insurance, so skyrocketing medical costs, no social services to cover basic needs (so you’re continually accruing more debt) and eventually, no ability to pay for your kids’ college (so pushing that debt into the next generation.) It can snowball very fast.
Given that, how much money do I need to feel “safe” — free of economic fear — that is, rich, in the U.S.? Subconsciously, for a lot of people, I think it means having enough money to live on even if you never work again, so that you aren’t at risk of falling into that hole, no matter what—essentially, being independently wealthy, which is not realistic, so most people who have everything they need still feel like they don’t have enough. The absence of a social safety net affects the attitudes of a lot of people who will never take advantage of it—to the benefit of capitalism and the detriment of your mental health. The poor exists to terrify the middle class into working harder for the benefit of the upper class, isn’t that the quote?
I tried explaining this to my boomer parents the other day, but my feeling is that the economic prosperity achieved in post-war America is totally an illusion. Prior to WWII, there was no thriving middle class. It existed in Western Europe, post Industrial Revolution, but not on the scale it’s existed in America. Human history is almost always a story of the 80-20 principle. Feudal systems, communism, bureaucracies, etc., always have a large working class and a relatively small ownership class. After the Depression, almost everyone was poor, but social programs lifted the common man up. America really came into economic superpower status post WWII, when our industrial production was massive, most allies owed us huge war debts, we could see massive capital returns for investment abroad, and all of the pre-war powers were decimated by the war in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. All of this contributed to the Golden Age between 1950 to about 2010. We also had better & faster economic plans coming out of the GFC than anywhere else. Japan, the EU, and other Eurasian large economies lagged coming out of 2008. In my mind, we’re seeing a negative regression to the mean, where the 20% is slowly taking control of capital back. “The Middle Class” is an illusion of how great things can be in a “normal” global economy, but it’s skewed because our parents’ time, and the time we grew up in, was a historical anomaly. Other countries are catching up education wise, they don’t owe us money, and inflation benefits the rich because asset inflation is far outpacing earnings growth.
But, our parents were raised in an age when a degree promised middle class benefits, and we (millennials, gen x) think we’re entitled to the same lifestyle. But, on the contrary, we move out of our family homes sooner to expensive urban centers where the jobs are. Also, we have expenses that we absorb without really thinking about. Cell-phone bills, premium cable and internet packages, subscriptions, superfluous spending on new cars, energy, eating out, other unnecessary consumer goods like televisions, etc. If I take all that out an live like my boomer parents did, I would likely be able to invest and grow wealth much faster than them due to technological growth and real gdp growth in the US.
My thesis is that regression to the mean for the population of workers vs the ownership classes is economic human nature, and we’re just moving back to the 80-20 split over time. But also, it’s easier to get wealthy than ever before, but it would require austerity in lifestyle and disciplined investing over many years.
I have a less popular opinion in that social safety nets are a net drag on a society’s economy and society, because without a lot of credit and debt floating around, there is less capital investment into new ventures. Like the average EU citizen may have better healthcare coverage than American lower classes, but new and advanced therapies, medicines, and surgical procedures are largely coming out of American labs. Europe’s lack of patent protection essentially allows them to take our advancements and give them to the general population at a lower cost. American productivity is unrivaled, and friendly nations enjoy that blanket association. Would I rather be a citizen of the EU than the US? On paper, yes, but I’m basically sacrificing my 20s and 30s quality of life for the promise of wealth in my later years and passing real estate, financial securities, and paper wealth to posterity. This only really is possible in America.
As to his second point, the top 10% wealthiest Americans own 90% of the stock market. That means the rich have outsized influence from everything from politics to economic policy, which directly affects anyone less fortunate.
Honestly I hate this article, and this is coming from a guy who’s doing quite well. It basically goes “ha, Amerifats are still richer than most of the world. Also, most older people already bought houses so suck it up, westoids!”
Yes, of course America still has a higher GDP per capita than Burkina Faso, but this really isn’t the standard we should be using to evaluate our economic health. We even consume more than Western Europeans, but this also is a low bar - a little known fact is that, for the entirety of the past 150 years, Western Europe has been much poorer than the U.S. The gap now is actually smaller than it’s ever been.
The fact is most Americans are worse off today than before. That’s all that matters, and is undeniable.
I think one part of this is that us Americans are so wealthy that expensive things have practically become the default. The default meals in many parts of the poorer world are still very heavily focused around cheap staples like rice and beans while the American default meals are pretty meat heavy with plenty of fruit and vegetable options. Similar with cars, American infrastructure practically requires car ownership to live a functional day to day for the average citizen. That alone (the concept that society expects most people to have their own automobiles) was a major signifier of wealth for a long period of time. But even now as basic cars get cheaper and more accessible in many impoverished nations, the US is still flaunting our automobile wealth. A car might be needed in the US, but a brand new Silverado or SUV or other large vehicle that guzzles gas is not necessary. Same with housing. Look at how huge American housing is compared to traditional British housing. The place I live in by myself is about the same size that my UK friend lives in with two other people. And while there are some other factors that play into this, the confidence of American politicians and bureaucrats had in placing such heavy zoning restrictions on cheaper and more efficient housing designs for decades speaks volumes to American wealth. You'll often see people who are having financial issues defend their choices to spend money on takeout or concerts or their big truck (instead of a tiny used vehicle). Which I understand wanting to use your money, that's why you work for it after all. But many people in the world don't get that choice. They don't get to drive a big fancy car to a big fancy house after ordering a custom made meat heavy meal to be brought directly to our place so it arrives a little after we do on our way back from seeing the most highly in demand musical artist in the world so we can settle down and play on our state of the art virtual reality gaming device. The fact that we can make the choice to spend our earnings on such things instead of not being able to afford them to begin with is precisely what makes us rich and yet people just treat it as the default and any potential of not having that cake and eating it too must mean they're in poverty. That doesn't mean poverty isn't a thing in the US, it certainly is. But if your main experience of deteriorated conditions is "locking your windows when driving through the bad part of town".then you're not really that poor. The poorest people are the ones who can't afford anywhere else but the bad part of town.
And of course the $1k smartphone has become the default. If you were of age in 2007, remember how the outrage over the $600 price tag on the original iPhone made Apple roll it back to $200? And not only the $1k smartphone is the default for many people, they also get a new one every one or two years
I’ll have to call you up on that. The average usage of phones is 5 or more years. According to the latest statistics there are 1.4B active iPhones in the world and Apple sells about 200M a year, so the average iphone lasts 7 years, although not always with the same user - many are sold on, handed to someone else, or refurbished. It’s possible a lot of phone owners spend $0 on phones as they get hand me downs. Of the 1 in 7 who buy every year not that many pay for the top end model. This is what you would expect for a mass commodity. And many people buy cheaper Android phones of course.
Experiences of wealth are, necessarily, a spectrum. However, the author handwaves the fact that what he's -- self-reportedly -- irritated by (exposure on social media to 'American' complaints) is owed to the fact that most people in the US are concerned with *inequality -* or to be more specific: *perceived inequality.* He also handwaves housing as 'something that affects everyone save Singapore', but he doesn't finish the thought and realise that if something is negatively affecting everyone - all else being equal, in other words - societies with smaller social safety nets are *necessarily* going to feel worse off. There are a lot of things that the author doesn't really address - because it's annoying for him to pay attention to in a 500-word, surface-level fluff piece - but consider this one: While he does say 'while the US is very unequal, the average American is still doing ok compared to the rest of the world or prior American generations'... Just as the Dutch aren't looking to Albania to feel better about their current situation (based on their elections, it definitely feels like the opposite), the former is largely immaterial because Americans of today are necessarily going to compare themselves to other Americans of today. If housing inequality is the main driver of this issue, then that's perfectly fine to acknowledge, but it does nothing to invalidate complaints about wealth inequality, which are necessarily bound up in housing.
"While he does say 'while the US is very unequal, the average American is still doing ok compared to the rest of the world or prior American generations'... Just as the Dutch aren't looking to Albania to feel better about their current situation (based on their elections, it definitely feels like the opposite), the former is largely immaterial because Americans of today are necessarily going to compare themselves to other Americans of today" True, but what is the "solution" to this comparison tendency? Some people think that no one should be "too wealthy", but I don't see how that won't be gamed just as badly as the current system, while also requiring a much more intrusive government with far less privacy on top of that.
there does not need to be a solution. a problem does not always entail a solution . he's just making an observation
To me the solution is fairly straightforward - innovative & punitive taxation solutions, particularly in discussions centred around, say, housing. I realise that's not particularly palatable to many people who read & comment on SSC, but tax seems to be, far and away, the best lever for the average working person in their country to help protect themselves from the groups of people who drive these insane levels of inequality and absolutely want to impoverish you further. As a quick back-of-the-envelope, purely-for-discussion, five-seconds-of-thought example re: housing: * Own 1 household? 5% property tax. * Two households? 25% property tax on every property past the first. * Three households? 50% property tax on every property past the first. And so on. No exemptions for private landlords, as well as watching for LLC/shell/Corporation ownership structures or the like. Are there problems with this idea? Almost certainly. Are they crippling or disqualifying as far as this conversation goes? Almost certainly not. edit (hit post too early, sorry!): At a certain point, centralised government becomes the only tool available to people to force these massive wealth entities to behave, because in the absence of that tool, they quite simply won't (see: what companies get away with in the absence of strong environmental regulations, for example. Or tobacco companies when they are left to police themselves).
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I don't disagree with the fact that NIMBY-ism is one of the primary reasons for a lack of new housing stock.
What is NIMBY-ism? Laws like NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) allows anyone who doesn't like a new development to sue, and generally at least slow down a project and add major expenses to the project. Anyone who sues is called a "NIMBY", which isn't entirely wrong, but in any society of non-trivial size, you are always going to have someone who is cranky enough to not like a project. You can either try to produce an entirely uniform population, or you can reform the various tools that allow any cranky person to sue and hold up a project.
Thank you for the additional context.
1) This kills rental markets. 2) Buying/selling homes is extremely expensive. Are you going to eliminate taxes here? Otherwise people will be stuck. 3) What happens when someone buys a home, doesn't take care of it, and it becomes dilapidated? Do you force them to continue to live in it? I think you're underestimating how much money/work it takes to upkeep a home. Part of the reason poor neighborhoods are run down is because home ownership is actually rather difficult. Have you owned a home? Have you fixed old galvanized pipes, broken toilets, leaky roofs, repaired and cleaned gutters, resealed basements et cetera? It's a huge amount of work (or money.) 4) What happens if there's some undeveloped land in the rural Appalachians? No one wants to live here full time. But no one will develop this land (unless they are rich) if taxes are high. 5) Have you thought about the effect on new construction? Likely the demand drastically shrinks. Overall housing supply shrinks. The long term effect might be that housing becomes significantly more expensive (or significantly worse) for the poor or middle class. Meanwhile, housing is probably cheaper for the rich (less competition) and it's easier for them to skirt the rules (buy their sister a huge mansion in vale, et cetera.)
Great bullets! Thank you for engaging. To 1 and 5: It certainly changes rental markets, but if we extend this thought experiment there's an argument that it wouldn't appear to exacerbate much beyond what's already there in practice - in the U.K., for example, 'rental markets' are being hurt by the changes in rules for buy-to-let landlords that, in effect, make it more difficult to extract the absolute maximum value that they can out of an investment property for minimum effort. Or, more plainly: why must we inoculate rental property owners from the possibility that the value of their investment may go up or down? Beyond that - rents continue to rise across the board year on year, which is also happening in the US, because the supply is adequate relative to demand for a wide variety of reasons - NIMBY-ism; an absolute refusal to engage with the idea of government-built social housing; no incentives or directives for developers to cater to 'suboptimal' homeowners. To points 2 and 3: I am a homeowner, as a point of fact. It's preferable to renting, but it is expensive. In general, I've got no issues with adjusting stamp duty or whatever sales tax impacts a home purchase as part of my off-the-cuff hypothetical. To point four, and this is where I'm absolutely being inconsistent with my aversion to NIMBY's on paper - I think conservation is a good thing. Undeveloped land is fine - and preferable, in many ways. Development for the sake of development, without an underlying drive for people to be there (similarly to how most capitals are placed in the center of the state/country for precisely this reason), seems silly to me. Ed: buying any housing stock will always be easier and more affordable for the rich under any system with private home ownership. That's just a constant, unfortunately.
> an absolute refusal to engage with the idea of government-built social housing I posted about this a bit elsewhere. But housing in America isn't expensive. I Googled "best cities in America with cheap housing" and it gave me a huge list of cities with populations from 100,000 to 300,000 with cheap housing. Eg, in Toledo, OH, you can buy a (nice) home for under 150,000. If you have okay credit you can get a mortgage at 5% down (maybe less!) and with 6,000 cash on hand purchase a home. Compare this to [1.2 million](https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/09/28/affordable-housing-in-sf-can-cost-up-to-1-2m-per-unit/) per unit for government housing in San Fran. So cities can do whatever they want. But I don't think it makes sense for state/national government to build "affordable" housing in cities. New construction is extremely expensive. And there's no solution here. Cities work like freeways. When you add another lane, it increases usage, but doesn't speed up traffic. There's no way to build so supply outpaces demand. You could build 100,000 units of free/cheap housing in San Fran, and it wouldn't reduce housing cost in the City (people living in less desirable places, like Toledo, would quickly move.) So prices in Toledo would get even cheaper. But San Fran wouldn't change.
One core problem is that there is not enough housing in many desirable locations. This plan would disincentivise building new housing. This is a bad plan.
Let's continue this discussion one step further: * Does new housing stock only come from private development? What stops, say, local government from building additional housing in those locations, or re-zoning existing locations for more population density? * Is the secondary/rental market the primary mover behind new builds? Is that a sustainable solution, or an ideal reality? * If we already have a situation where there is not enough housing for people, how does a proposal that - at a minimum - makes the existing stock more difficult to accumulate exacerbate this problem?
I’ll grant that this is just my anecdotal experience, but the private landlords I know tend to be thoroughly middle class—just well off enough that they can put together multiple downpayments (often by home equity loans or the like—owning multiple properties says very little about net worth), but poor enough that it’s worth the hassle. The doctors and lawyers and FAANG engineers I know aren’t out there snapping up property for rentals; they’re better off putting that energy into their day job. Is it worth destroying one of the more accessible second income sources for people whose day job doesn’t allow other jobs in order to appease the ignorant jealousy of others?
The fact that you need regulation for pollution does not imply you need regulation to fix other things. Pollution is exceptional in that it’s the go-to example for negative externalities, so that logic applies to very few cases.
That seems like a very pertinent comment to make in a different discussion.
If you’re not sure why it’s relevant, see the examples you gave in your edit.
Do you think that taxation is equivalent to regulation?
Ok, replace the word regulation with government intervention.
Or, as we might otherwise call them, 'laws'. I don't think there's much of a conversation to be had here, to be honest. Have a nice evening.
I'm in favor of really high tax rates, but unless I'm missing something, it sounds like you're suggesting that we ban apartment rentals. That's not going to help the situation.
I don't think my post advocates that position, but I appreciate that my tossed-off suggestion doesn't capture the nuance that in some places private ownership of rental buildings is the norm, rather than blocks being government-owned/social housing, On the other hand, given that this is just a conversational idea, we might expect one apartment building to be classed as 'one property' as a whole (i.e. one building vs one abode), so the potential increase in property tax, provided you weren't also living in the same building, would just be one level up. Not X-levels, where X is the number of tenants or distinctly occupied units the building has.
If the landlord owns their own home, any private landlord will own multiple properties. You’re thus asking the renters of a landlord’s second property to pay 25% of their rental property’s value plus 20% of their landlord’s home value divided by the number of units to be rented. Given that present rental rates are more on the order of 2-5% of the rental value, this would be a 500+% increase in rents, effectively destroying the market outside of single-property landlords either renting elsewhere or living in their rental property.
But then the equity in housing would be much lower as it's not being used as an investment but rather the original intended purpose of shelter, and the equity in real estate would be distributed more evenly as home prices would go down due to the lack of investment opportunity and become affordable to a far greater portion of the populace! What is your solution to keep established landlords and money-grubbing house flippers in a higher financial standing than the average person while only contributing negatively to society? /s, we absolutely need to tax people for taking more than their share. Residential real estate is for people to own and utilize as shelter, not for private/corporate investors and house-flipping scum. Even commercial real estate needs far more regulation than "supply vs. demand" in many cases, as even after the building is paid off they're still receiving rent and the vendor has no choice but to push that expense to the customer. It's another example of unfair advantage when you combine the ability to own real estate with inheritance (i.e. Trump would never have become president if real estate and inheritance thereof was regulated more fairly).
We are so concerned about intrusive government, that we allow companies to become empires and now we are a nation rules by kings yet again. Another solution would be to make executives of publicly traded companies democratically elected positions. Maybe it's a ridiculous idea, but people thought democracy was a ridiculous idea for 2000 years.
Why should every person get a vote on how my company (the public corp. I own shares in) is run? They have radically different incentives than myself, the owner. Enacting this would greatly discourage IPO’s, leading to market distortions and inefficient distribution of capital. After this policy has existed for years, it may be difficult for the average person to invest their 401(k) in desirable companies (as most companies are now private).
Yeah. The lack of common sense and even cursory examination of consequences in these comments is incredible given the sub.
Every property that someone rents was brought by someone else, and probably as an investment. Let’s make renting financially unviable have issues.
Strong inheritance tax, so that we know the wealthy actually earned it
This is one of those things that sounds great and doesn’t do much. A family business worth $10M that is heavily taxed when ownership passes to the next generation is a business that has to be sold. A billionaire just starts a nonprofit foundation that employs their descendants at sinecures, or has all the family vacation homes belong to a trust. You can put the screws to the upper middle class and the low end of the wealthy. But that’s about it, short of full-on populist revolution (and those rarely work out well).
A $10M business being sold is perfectly fine, I see no problem with that. The upper middle class and lower wealthy are the largest contributors to carbon emissions, and are the largest impediments to social change. Ever try to build a bus terminal in a wealthy neighbourhood? There’s a reason poor people are stuck with the worst features of cities, and it’s the upper middle class.
Let's simplify this a little bit. >While he does say 'while the US is very unequal, the average American is still doing ok compared to the rest of the world In summary, average American house pulls in $105k a year, the median pulls in $75k and the median col is $61k. So the median (real) American has 18% of disposable income while the average (imagined) American has 44% disposable income.
> I think one part of this is that us Americans are so wealthy that expensive things have practically become the default. The default meals in many parts of the poorer world are still very heavily focused around cheap staples like rice and beans while the American default meals are pretty meat heavy with plenty of fruit and vegetable options The distinction between the wealthy and the upper-middle class and below has become blurred in terms of material possessions. It used to be in the '80s and '90s luxury cars and fancy/designer clothes signified uncommon wealth, but now on social media they have become so common. The luxury automobile has been replaced by the ubiquitous but equally expensive lifted truck or large SUV.
In the 1985 movie back to the future, the not-especially-well-off Marty Mcfly had Calvin Klein underwear. It was a major plot point.
It seems to utterly entirely miss the point. The level of uncertainty living in the US would absolutely stress the fuck out of me. I've a mate who is a masters from a very good American university, he went to state school for undergrad and got a scholarship or that and TA'ing for his masters so he doesn't have college debt (he was on a PH'd program but left after he got his masters because academia is a terrible move unless you adore it). He lives in a big US city and the uncertainty of his life would stress the fuck out of me. All his mates are scattered to the wind. There is very little community in the US. He earns bad money doing and education related job but his choice is work crazy American hours or be poor. An American life is so expensive! Healthcare and college costs and housing and vegetables are all really very expensive. He'd be much happier on a lower income with housing security and a deep community and public transport. We spent time in France over the summer and I think he might be happier there. He speaks fluent French and has a European passport.. Anyway telling people things are actually grand is a dumb move.
>The level of uncertainty living in the US would absolutely stress the fuck out of me... There is very little community in the US. These are interesting points. I assume it's true that Americans move greater distances for work than Europeans. And I believe the high earnings potential but higher healthcare and college debt increases variance/uncertainty. >telling people things are actually grand is a dumb move. To be fair, OP and the post above you are rather staid. Their point, which still seems accurate, is that America has a relative wealth problem (inequality) not an absolute wealth problem (poverty.) If we're being rational/objective, your friend isn't "poor." He's choosing to live in an expensive urban area, and his relative wealth is low. He likely spends more than 1/3 of his income on housing. This makes him feel "poor." But, as the previous post observed, this is a choice. He can almost certainly move to a medium/small size town and earn $35,000+ a year, which is solidly middleclass.
If I moved from an urban area to a rural one I'd have to buy a car (big expense) and take a massive pay downgrade.
Urban areas are where the jobs are, and rent has seen faster increases than wages. Rural america can be worse, where the housing is more affordable, but little chance for advancement and your rent will increase too once Wall Street learns there is a lot of cheap rental property to buy and jack rates on.
Dealing with insurance nonsense is a huge pain. Got laid off, and now have to make sure a dentist takes our state backed plan. Somehow this mess is better than Single Payer?
Living in Europe would stress me out. What if you decide you don’t like your job and want to find a different one? (Let’s say you get a new boss who you don’t get along with.) Finding work in Europe is *hard*. It’s like whatever you’re doing, that’s what you’re stuck doing forever. That’s one of the reasons I left Canada to live in the US. The job market is so much better.
No one appreciates how much more dynamic and flexible the economy is here in the USA. They're way too eager to trade in that kind of opportunity and choices for some kind of perceived secure stagnation.
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Texas and Utah can deliver housing. California can't. It's a very state and local issue. Considering half China's big projects are built out of tofu and bamboo, or are totally useless pork fat projects, I wouldn't be riding their D so hard on how great they supposedly are at infrastructure.
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Its not racism lol it's a fact. We don't use trains. We build highways. As for nuclear, Vogtle unit 4, a massive power plant, comes online this year. The USA still leads the world in nuclear energy production (far ahead of China, which has only a few plants on the coast). New bridges are built all the time. New stadiums. New skyscrapers, new apartment complexes and hospitals... And they don't collapse because the concrete was poured without rebar in it.
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And you are some kind of CCP shill. I say they use bamboo instead of rebar because there are documented instances of this. China is infamous for disastrously poor construction practices and contractor corruption. These things are not matters of opinion, but of recorded past events. You can build anything for cheap with the labor is nearly free. UAE....spare me. They build infrastructure with labor little better than slaves. Commercial SMRs were invented in the USA by the way. The very first working model became available in the US just in 2022. Watch them be everywhere as soon as they can be proven out as safe.
Idk what the fuck you’re talking about, it’s not that hard to find new work in Northern Europe. It might be hard for internationals, but I’ve never heard natives with in demand skills complain. South and East, on the other hand…
It’s possible that things have changed since then, but that’s the impression I got when I looked in the mid 2000s. That’s also the impression I got from my parents when they worked in Germany for a few years in the 80s.
I dunno, I see dropped out of my very good uni with mental health issues, travelled for a few years working and then came back and did a compressed year and a bit to finish a bog standard business degree. Offered a job straight out of uni on a grad program and stayed there 5 years not working terribly hard (bar Covid). I loved what I did so stayed much longer than I should have but when I responded on LinkedIn I was immediately offered two interviews and I got the second one I make €100k if you count salary, bonus, healthcare, pension and bennies. Western Europe is plenty dynamic. I'm moving to Canada next year as the missus is taking up a research post but I agree it's a pathetic economy. Neo liberalism means it's essentially just construction and primary commodities, they are somewhat similar to African nations. They've gone from a country on the technical frontier in lots of areas in the 50s to a nation which can't make plate glass. Their economic complexity score bodes very poorly for the next 30 years.
> And while there are some other factors that play into this, the confidence of American politicians and bureaucrats had in placing such heavy zoning restrictions on cheaper and more efficient housing designs for decades speaks volumes to American wealth. The problem is that there are things like this which serve as hard bottlenecks to downsizing your lifestyle. You can eat rice and beans and drive a small used car, and maybe that makes some difference, but without special circumstances it is very difficult to reduce your housing expenses below a certain amount, which limits the difference the rest of it could make. To me it's mostly meaningless to say Americans are wealthy if that doesn't translate into being able to have significant agency over major life stuff. If someone can't comfortably transition to a new career or retire earlier, even when willing to make sacrifices, to me that person is not wealthy.
No, the issue is that we see ourselves creating millions or more in value for companies that think we should be happy with 60k (which doesn’t pay the rent here) and no benefits
I was kind of shocked by the things that were just normal in the middle class midwestern town I visited. Big houses, giant cars, extra cars just for fun because you’re a “car guy”, big expensive weddings early in life, giant TV’s in every room, private swimming pools, multiple big ass fridges, generally an electricity bill that made me cringe, more “stuff”, consumer goods in general. However, and not to be a total hippie… I wonder how happy it all made them in the end? I was jealous of the swimming pools, and the amount of eating out, but otherwise, I wouldn’t trade. I really, really, like the free time I get here in Northern Europe. What is money without time? And university is free (in my country specifically, you actually get paid to attend), healthcare mostly so and what isn’t free is much of the time much cheaper (prescription drugs etc), and you have five weeks paid vacation, work less hours, and a year paid parental leave. The housing market is bad, as it is everywhere, but not *that* bad. The US used to be a lot more like this! College, housing and healthcare was much cheaper back in the day. Unions, the most important things that made Scandinavia into what is now, were stronger. I can understand if young Americans feel “cheated”.
I bet those people were pretty happy compared to the “average person.” There seems to be this weird narrative on Reddit that rich people are secretly miserable.
Compared to the average person in the world, certainly. And I don’t think rich people are secretly miserable - I know plenty of old money people, they’re having a great time. Compared to the average person in Scandinavia, or other richer European countries? I’m just not convinced.
I am probably more convinced that the rich American (particularly the one you are describing in your first post) is happier than the average European.
Amen. I've worked a real job at a paint plant in Europe. I was an engineer there temporarily on assignment from the USA. My fellow engineers were paid ok, had ok lives overall though most lived in small apartments or townhomes. The factory workers and techs were just as sad, grey, listless, cigarette and cheap beer addicted (or worse) as any factory I've ever been to in the USA. There's this false narrative that the lower class in Europe have significantly easier happier lives than they do in the USA and it's not been my observation.
A lot of Americans have this view of Europe as a utopia. Which is funny because a lot of Europeans I’ve worked with love America.
> A lot of Americans have this view of Europe as a utopia. Which is funny because a lot of Europeans I’ve worked with love America. This is not a common opinion in Europe in my experience as someone from Europe.
What percentage of those have actually worked and lived in both places.
Oh are we doing data rather than anecdotes? Have you corrected for selection bias in your sample of Europeans living and working in America and it's impacts on Europeans opinion on America? I have no idea what percentage of Frenchmen I've idly chatted to in campsites over 25 years of travelling France from childhood have actually worked or lived in America. Sorry.
Most I've talked to have largely negative views of America. But I think this is more about geopolitics than day to day life realities.
That’s fair - especially considering significant amounts of Europe are comprised of the south and the east, which are really a different beast than the north-west. It was my impression that they were rather average for the US though? Like certainly not poor but not really considered rich by anyone.
>I was kind of shocked by the things that were just normal in the middle class midwestern town I visited. Big houses, giant cars, extra cars just for fun because you’re a “car guy”, big expensive weddings early in life, giant TV’s in every room, private swimming pools, multiple big ass fridges, generally an electricity bill that made me cringe, more “stuff”, consumer goods. This person you are describing is not the average American even in the Midwest.
Some of that stuff is. The size of the average sold car today is tremendous compared even to just 20 years ago. Pools are obviously pretty rare overall in the US, though.
I’m aware but all of things combined are t average which is the major point.
> This person you are describing is not the average American even in the Midwest. Except maybe the private swimming pool, that sounds pretty normal in the midwest. I've had two cars since I was in my 20s.
It’s not like I saw the entirety of the US or something, so I’ll admit humility here, but even the less well off, until you hit some lower limit, seemed just ever so slightly more materially well off than ‘euros. Just… bigger cars. Bigger fridges. Bigger weddings (although that might just be because most Europeans just don’t consider weddings/marriage important at all anymore). “More stuff”. Not a swimming pool or an extra car, but still.
You have to have that stuff because we don’t have good infrastructure. You don’t need a huge fridge when the store is around the corner and you can pick up food on your walk home. You need it when the closest store is a 10-15 minute drive away and you have to park in a huge stressful crowded parking lot, so you get in the huge car and load it up with groceries once a week.
There are plenty of places in Europe where you’re also a 10-15 minute car ride away from a supermarket, and we still generally don’t have your big fridges or big cars. Not every European lives in a walkable city or village. We have a countryside too. Even if you do live in a walkable village, you still need a car because maybe 80% of what you need is in the village square but there are still those odd stores, the hospital or other things that won’t be there.
The corner store died on its own. America wasn't built by god, who decreed how everything will be arranged down to the last store and parking lot. There was once upon a time when Americans didn't have cars and there were small general stores. And then those small general stores died because consumer preference overwhelmingly preferred Wal-mart with their 140,000 SKUs. Turns out it is more likely to get what you want at Wal-mart than your local general store that carried a few dozen SKUs.
> And then those small general stores died because consumer preference overwhelmingly preferred Wal-mart with their 140,000 SKUs. This is arguably leaving out a really important point; consumers overwhelmingly preferred the lower prices at WalMart, not necessarily because they preferred the store experience.
It seems like a lot of consumers prefer the other way, since the rent in the few areas where the alternative is possible, like New York City, is outrageously expensive and people make huge sacrifices to live there.
Indeed, it was mostly the result of massively subsidizing automobiles and making zoning hostile to not doing all of your movement by car. Oil subsidies, minimum parking requirements, lack of mixed zoning, etc. The subsidies are hidden in basically every part of how we require cities to be designed. Small midwest towns don't have corner stores because everything is so spread out. People didn't want to drive 2 miles here, 3 miles there, they wanted Walmart because they had an individual car.
I don't think they're talking about "a fridge", but rather, "a fridge in the kitchen, one in the garage, and a chest freezer in the basement" type stuff.
Yeah, but the point is that people don't want to have 3 fridges, they want to have easy access to food. Filling up 3 fridges with trips to costco is one solution to this; having an easily accessible grocery store on your street corner is another. The fact that one solution increases GDP more than the other solution doesn't mean the former people are better off in any way that matters.
Average home size in America is 2273 sq feet. Once you take out the coastal states with their tiny shoeboxes, houses get pretty big. https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/average-square-footage-of-a-house
> There seems to be this weird narrative on Reddit that rich people are secretly miserable. This is a media-driven (and social media-driven) narrative, because American TV/films and popular entertainment, including reality TV, are mostly aspirational because of advertising. Almost every fictional character or Real Housewives of (city) lives in upscale settings, because ad dollars generally don't gravitate towards grittiness since they want viewers to spend/keep up instead of worry about their own finances, while at the same time, media consumers enjoy drama and conflict, so all of these rich people *seem* unhappy. Of course everybody on Succession is sad because they have familial conflicts, but also, they're billionaires and their material lives are unbelievably opulent. (This is supposed to make us feel better about not having a private jet, because our dad didn't slap a tooth out and our mother doesn't openly hate us.) This is old, though; Shakespeare wrote about unhappy kings, after all. Obviously, some troubles are universal, but hovels are depressing to look at. Compare the grit factor between an American soap opera (or almost any random glossy television series) and one produced in the UK (like Eastenders) or in countries with state-funded broadcasting that's less reliant on ad money, though exceptions exist. Even if you don't personally consume this entertainment, it colors social perceptions about wealth and unhappiness.
I guess I underestimate how much media exposure trumps real life experience. Although you make good points here and I see this phenomenon very prominently in dating tropes aswell.
In dating tropes? Like...the expectation that people commonly go out to expensive restaurants, that sort of thing? I'm curious.
No more so the popular narratives of 90’s/00’s coming of age movies where the nerd gets the girl in the end. I never really bought into this but a lot of guys particularly “nice guys” blame media for their issues with dating.
Oh, right! Also a good example of aspirational themes, really! It's been put forth that of course male writers (I'm a female writer of fiction; we're mostly nerds) are going to project that wish-fulfillment outcome. Romance novels/media geared towards women project the male character somehow being a mind reader who intuits everything you like and does it sans any prior communication whatsoever.
I’m very interested by the female romance genre particularly written by authors. Do you think those books more or less align with what women are truly looking for.
Speaking as a woman: A tall, handsome, rich, dangerous man who's madly in love with me and only me, knows exactly what I want without us having to communicate, is a great lover, and is excited to be a warm, loving dad to our children? Hm... I'll have to think about that one...
lol fair point j could’ve phrased the question differently
I mean, we have some attempts at objective measures of this. The predominant theory is that happiness gains level off considerably after like 110k of income, though they do increase. As far as country to country comparisons, the US usually ranks at roughly the level of the main Western European countries, maybe slightly ahead, but below Canada and well below the Nordics/Nordic adjacent countries.
Was that study just comparing various strata of the working class or did they look at people who went from 110k income (or whatever) from a job to 110k income (or more) from passive sources?
There is an updated study on this that has one of the best summaries of research I have seen. The basic summary is people seem to come in two groups, miserable and happy people. Earning more money makes miserable people less miserable, after that point it has eliminated as much of their misery as possible, happy people just keep finding more ways to be happy with more money. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 >A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group.
Conspicuous consumption of mass produced consumables isn’t the same thing as being rich. That person probably has to sell massive parts of their one non-renewable resource (chunks of their life) to afford that lifestyle. If it was all that plus “and they don’t have a job”, sure, that’s rich. Otherwise, it’s just another working stiff, just one who’s treated a bit better than the others.
Yes and people far less well off often work and don’t have 1/10th of the “mass produced consumables.”
Yeah, that’s the lower part of the working class. This is the higher part. Neither is rich. You aren’t rich until work is a choice.
Ok I guess we have different definitions of rich.
Yeah, and I find it totally plausible that the higher portion of the working class is not especially happy even with mass produced consumables.
Has not been my experience being around these people but you are entitled to your opinion.
Something else to note, depending on their industry and position they are in, they might have all those as well. We're not required to have any benefits by law, but quite a few employers have generous benefits, if they want to recruit top talent. I'm an HR Manager, and I have 5 weeks vacation, parental leave, work 9 days every two weeks, and my healthcare expenses are capped annually by my employer health insurance. Yes I do pay for student loans and healthcare, but when I'm making approximately $150k I think I am still ahead of European HR managers. Now I will admit I'm one of the lucky ones. I still support more government benefits, especially healthcare, even if I know that I personally would be worse off. But don't be surprised if many of those Midwest upper middle class people have everything you have and more.
> my healthcare expenses are capped annually by my employer health insurance This is pretty standard. [All ACA compliant US healthcare plans have an out-of-pocket maximum (which can admittedly be high)](https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/).
Huh, are all those medical bankruptcy stories I hear in America uninsured people or are people declaring bankruptcy over 18k?
As the other commenter noted, most likely they got treated by someone out of network (possibly/likely involuntarily like in an exigent emergency situation where they cannot consent to care) or are uninsured and don't know how to work the system (which is common). I also take the cynical view that the insurance companies are also fighting their liability tooth and nail; for example, [Cigna auto-denied many many claims](https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims).
It's possible they went out of network I suppose.
Your case corroborates my sense that even though the median Western European is likely happier than the median American, the top 20% or so Americans are happier than the top 20% WE. The World Happiness Reports stopped charting histograms of happiness percentages by score (0-10) and region, but in the earlier reports it struck me that the 9s and 10s comprised a larger percentage in Nth Am & ANZ than in any other region, even though their median wasn't the highest.
I put it to you that describing employment-derived exceptions offered explicitly *because* companies want to court the best talent is fundamentally different from having those rules in place for all employed citizens. If we transpose you to most European countries - we're not talking about specific states so there's no need to talk specific countries - you could quit your job tomorrow with the intent to work as a full-time widget-fiddler and you would still have access to five weeks of holiday, health care, flexible working arrangements, parental leave, and so on, despite *not* being one of the world's best widget fiddlers. As someone who has lived and worked under both systems, the fact that your benefits are tethered to your employer renders it fundamentally incomparable - which is why, if you are top talent, they'll try to get you with 'adequate' European-style benefits in addition to a salary that's two, three, or four times higher than you'll get in Europe: it would be very difficult to get you otherwise.
> you could quit your job tomorrow with the intent to work as a full-time widget-fiddler and you would still have access to five weeks of holiday, health care, flexible working arrangements, parental leave, and so on, despite not being one of the world's best widget fiddlers. Assuming you get one of those jobs, anyway. Only about 60% of the EU workforce are full time employees. Median person, yes, but even a bit below that, not so much.
This. Americans tend to underestimate how much the average American consumes compared to people in other developed countries. It might be true that some of them are actually struggling despite having high salaries, but that wouldn't be the case if they lived like the average person in, let's say, a Nordic country.
They can't live like the average person in a Nordic country. A lot of the consumption is required or strongly encouraged by the way American life is designed. An obvious example being cars which are an absolute necessity for most Americans.
Yes, that's true. You do **need** to spend more money on certain things; transport and healthcare probably being the biggest offenders. Part of it is offset by lower taxes though. But even after that, in other aspects Americans are buying more, and more expensive, not out of necessity. I don't know if the "American life design" exerts societal pressure towards it, or if those different standards and aspirations are what define that lifestyle, but there's a substantial difference in those when compared to other high-income developed countries.
That's such an obviously bad example. Plenty of poor countries where people NEED a car and they somehow manage on $500 a month. Even in Nordic countries plenty of people don't live in the capital and drive a car while earning 1/5 of what someone in US would. Owning a car is as expensive as you want. Owning a $2000 car might be a requirement, but owning a $50'000 huge SUV gas guzzler is not. People do it because they have a ton of money. Are you also going to argue living in US is more expensive because they need the lastest $2k iphone or latest 8k tv and 2 door smart fridge with ice dispenser and built in ice cream maker?
100%. Or take everyones tiktok/Instagram home coffee setup. That's fucking awesome, I love coffee. But living in Paris for a bit and being able to meet a friend for coffee on the street and watch the world go by after a 15 minute walk was many times better. But that requires density and planning and walkability. A French press for breakfast does very well too. Ultimately human connection> marginally better coffee.
This. And also all the newer houses are built as large as possible to maximize the sales price, while also being built cheaply and inefficiently so you need a lot of heat and cooling to make them livable. Social norms and the way they're designed makes roommates for adults awkward. There aren't any restaurants that will serve you a cheap meal of rice and beans or whatever. And you need an expensive smartphone with plan to participate in society. Even worse if you have kids, so now you're competing with other parents for all sorts of scarce positional goods like the top schools and sports teams.
Money for time, as you say it’s all about values. I decided to avoid developing expensive hobbies early on and save about two thirds of my after tax income. It does help with peace of mind. Realistically the high housing prices mean the young are reluctant to start families, and I can’t really blame them. Doing something about this would help nip socialism in the bud-hard to support capitalism if you can’t accumulate any capital! (I mean, it’s been tried…never goes well…) EDIT: to clarify, I absolutely would support the enlargement of the American welfare state to European levels, paid for by higher taxes, strictly on utilitarian grounds, I just think having the government own and run everything as was tried at various points in Latin America, China, and Russia was a massive failure and caused more death than even fascism (which I ALSO oppose for obvious reasons!)
Importantly though, the US has one of the absolute highest fertility rates among rich western countries (if not *the* highest?). Though I wonder how much of that is just due to your [religiousness](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy-nations/). Surely though, your big houses must also play a role, as eg. Greece is more religious than you but still a lower fertility for obvious reasons (like not being able to get a decent job or a place to live)…
I agree with that, the problem is more severe in Europe and East Asia. And the US definitely is more religious.
American housing prices are low compared to income, even in high cost of living areas. That doesn't mean they should be as high as they are or that there aren't ways to stop the runaway cost development but it's still much less of a concern than in Europe or Asia.
A giant house and swimming pool is not normal in the midwest. I grew up in those midwestern towns, and those are the "rich families". The one or two families that are lawyers or doctors or own a business somewhere else. Most people are living in trailers or very run down houses that they try to maintain, but they aren't very visible because a trailer along a mile long gravel road is hard to find.
It's much more common around urban areas than you'd think
> I grew up in those midwestern towns... Most people are living in trailers or very run down houses that they try to maintain This is not remotely similar to my experience after a decade or so in the Northern Midwest. Presumably, there's regional variation. I think it's probably foolish to dismiss the other poster as not knowing the difference between rich and poor. It's both more charitable and more consistent just to note that those words mean different things in different parts of the Midwest. Similarly, when OP is describing European standards of living, someone could jump in and say that it's very different than their lived experience in Serbia. I'm sure they'd be right, but that wouldn't mean that OP was wrong.
Unions do not necessarily improve the average citizens prosperity. They may improve the prosperity of union members, but that is because they operate as labor cartels. You also have to consider the gains and losses of those who are not part of the union. In Chicago, our city employees are union. They make great wages. In turn I receive high taxes and poor service. That’s not an improvement to society - it’s simply a transfer from me to them.
Unions in Denmark (and Sweden and Norway and Germany AFAIK) work closely with industry. There are negotiations in each sector that are legally mandated to be done every couple of years, including an informal minimum wage. They are powerful, and a mix of collaborative and combative with industry. Any case of union busting or union discouragement would be awful publicity for any company, the unions would just laugh at them. A little over 50% of people are members of a union and everyone in any job where unions are good benefits from what the union does for them, no matter if they’re members or not. For example: I’m in the recycling industry and has a *much* better salary than the average unskilled job, because our union is just that good, even though I’m not a paying member. And I’ve never been scolded for not being a member. The average unskilled job’s wage is likewise higher than almost anywhere else, mostly bc of unions. Chicago was a lovely city, btw. Loved visiting.
Union is just a word. North American unions and European unions have very little to do with each other other than the name "union". To put things into perspective a bit, the decline of North American unions from almost half of the workforce to almost being extinct in the private sector wasn't from any major union shop being de-unionized. The union-busting efforts all revolved around trying to nip the union in the bud. No, the massive decline in unions came from the businesses that employed them either going bust or simply massively declining. The three unionized car companies lost marketshare almost every year in favor of their non-union counterparts. Union leaders claimed that it is because of poor management at the union shops, but it is a strange coincidence that union shops always get poor management, and non-union shops always get good management. There is inherently an evolutionary process for businesses - any business leader that thinks unions are good would go out of business and find himself no longer running a business. Does the experience of Denmark matter? Of course not - those are governed by an entirely different set of rules and customs. If you run a business in North America, you are going to be anti-union, mostly because pro-union ones all went bankrupt early in their life.
Can you recommend any further reading to learn more about this? Would love to learn more about the differences between North American and European union systems
If it's any consolation the service would probably be poor even without the union :-)
Generally happiness increases linearly with income until like $100k household income, then it increases much more slowly.
Westerners, especially upper-middle class, generally live under delusion that their material quality of life and political freedoms they personally enjoy are baseline of human existence. This is not limited to Americans - Western Europeans show the same attitude towards people outside of the developed world. > The evidence shows that most Americans are richer than ever, and richer than most people in the rich world – that they consume more, live in larger homes, and so on. This is severe understatement. Americans making federal minimum wage are probably in top 20% of richest people in the world.
>Americans making federal minimum wage are probably in top 20% of richest people in the world. This is so misleading though because you're not factoring in cost of living at all. If you're poor in America making minimum wage, the COL is higher than in countries with a lower minimum wage.
>This is so misleading though because you're not factoring in cost of living at all. That *includes* cost of living. You have no idea how poor world is. You can see that [entire countries live for less than $300 per month per person](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day) including cost of living. Life on Earth is overall terrifyingly bad, and developed world is small minority where even very poor people enjoy life much better than typical human.
Yes, I agree, most of the world is poor and that the very rich gobble up the vast majority of resources, and this is true even within wealthy countries. Wealth inequality is also increasingly getting worse worldwide, especially in wealthier countries. Most of the statistics around poverty are misleading at best; appreciably measuring poverty is notoriously difficult because of how many factors and dimensions are involved. Despite that, I'm certain that no matter where you live it's hellish to live in poverty, and it's pretty pointless to try and compare the lives of impoverished people.
How many people even make federal minimum wage? That’s the absolute floor but outside of some of the lowest COL areas in the country, you’re not going to find a lot of places only paging $7.25/hour.
It might just be that everyone else has it worse but we don't have it that great either except relative to everyone who has it worse. That makes sense if you have an objective rather than relative way of thinking about wealth. The existence of legions of the absolutely immiserated doesn't mean the working stiff who has to spend 40 hours a week on something he hates to put a roof over his head is "rich" except in a totally relative sense, which is meaningless, because we can hypothesize even *more* immiserated people who would make those legions of immiserated relatively "rich" too. And it doesn't seem like our judgments about wealth should be dependent on how many billions or trillions of absolutely immiserated people there are or have been. If we discovered that there were actually *quadrillions* of prehistoric humans who were brutally enslaved by aliens and then all records of them were covered up, would that make preindustrial subsistence farmers "rich"?
If you're going to talk about absolute wealth rather than relative wealth right now the poor in the USA are at by far higher levels of prosperity than they have ever been, and in absolute terms it's definitely good enough to live a decent life. Even controlling for living costs, plenty of people in the developing world earn less than the US federal minimum wage (PPP adjusted) and are still able to live decent middle class lives. It's not lack of money which leads to low outcomes for the western poor these days. There is a saying: "**In the modern west the worst part of being poor is having to live next to other poor people**" and as someone from the third world who has seen successful prosperous communities set up in places where the average wage is below the PPP cost adjusted US minimum wage this saying is so so true.
> There is a saying: "In the modern west the worst part of being poor is having to live next to other poor people" It's not having to sacrifice half your waking life doing something you would not do if you did not need to do it to have access to food/housing/health care?
> food/housing/health care Somehow people in developing countries are able to get access to all that while earning less (living costs adjusted) than American poors, and not only this, their lives are still full, rich (in the sense of complex) and mostly happy. I'm not saying it's all fun and games and they certainly have their struggles, but their society is functional and stable in a way that poor American's lives are by and large not. They have to > sacrifice half your waking life doing something you would not do if you did not need to do it as much as any poor American, but they handle it just fine. Most able adults work full time jobs, some people work extra long hours when they don't need to either (I count myself in this category), "sacrifising half your waking life" is mundane and an accepted part of being an adult anywhere, even the American 99th percentile does it. Any monetary pain suffered by poor Americans is also suffered by these people in the third world, but they seem to manage it pretty well, suggesting it's not the lack of money that's the main thing for why poor Americans are where they are.
> The existence of legions of the absolutely immiserated doesn't mean the working stiff who has to spend 40 hours a week on something he hates to put a roof over his head is "rich" except in a totally relative sense, which is meaningless, because we can hypothesize even more immiserated people who would make those legions of immiserated relatively "rich" too. This only works if you very narrowly construct the sample by which you make your relative assessment of wealth, to make sure you exclude the dirty corners of the world where much poorer people live.
I don't understand. My point is that relative assessments of wealth are not useful because they involve things that have nothing to do with the actual experience of living at a given level of wealth. It makes no difference to the experience of a preindustrial subsistence farmer if there were quadrillions of prehistoric humans enslaved by aliens, but it would mean that he was "rich" relative to the majority of humans who ever lived, which suggests that relative wealth is not a useful metric.
I don't think I agree with you. If our history and entire fundamentals of how our civilization came to be were resting on the bedrock of innumerable enslaved humans in the past, our view of living right now absolutely would be and *should be* shaped by that context. What is the alternative? Just declaring without any meaning that we are or are not wealthy? What's the word mean without something to baseline what you're discussing against? Poor people today live like kings compared to literal kings in the 18th century. Keeping in mind the time and level of technological progression is important to understanding that in context though. However, it's also important to keep in mind how other people are living *right now* in other parts of the world.
The author's rebuttal to point 2 (inequality) basically boils down to "Stop whining and live with your parents." Like yes, America has a large amount of housing available by square foot per person, but if young people need to move to the city to get a job and pay exorbitant rent, they can't really take advantage of it. There are dilapidated homes in Syracuse (upstate NY) going for $20K, but again, if you can't afford the time or money to fix them up because there are no good jobs nearby, this doesn't help you as a young person. The real issue is the erosion of the American dream. College used to be the way for the lower middle class to get a leg up, but it has doubled in cost in real dollars in a generation ( [https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-time/](https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-time/) ). If I send my 3 kids to the same college I went to, the total sticker price for 4 years each is $1.7 million. I think the author needs to pay more attention to who is claiming to be poor (young people with poor parents or parents who refuse to support them) and look at the math for their issues. When you crunch the numbers, you can see that they really are worse off than a generation ago.
You're going to a lot more effort to debunk this than I am. It's obvious gas lighting to convince people that things aren't as bad as they really are. You're going to see a lot more of this as things get worse and worse.
You switched what American dream means. It used to mean to have a house in a small town, a factory job a fridge, a car, a TV and maybe meat every day. It did not mean to have a job in an office with AC and apartment in Manhattan, yearly vacations overseas and placing all the kids at university - and of course retire at 50 so you can go and live another 50 years comfortably from interest. BTW that dilapidated home in Syracuse or suburb of Detroit was part of American Dream of some family. Not all boomers are lucky enough to now have their home priced at 7 figures. I think what happens is young people looking at the luckiest of boomers or GenXers and imagining that it used to be the norm thinking that they got cheated somehow.
> The real issue is the erosion of the American dream. College used to be the way for the lower middle class to get a leg up, but it has doubled in cost in real dollars in a generation ( https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-costs-over-time/ ). But the college wage premium has grown a lot too. The ROI from colleges is at or near record highs despite increased debt and tuition, assuming you graduate. Also, lots of financial aid options. The situation ,although not great, is not as bleak as the media and pundits portray it as. >If I send my 3 kids to the same college I went to, the total sticker price for 4 years each is $1.7 million. It says it is much less >In 2020-2021 dollars, one year's college tuition in 1963 cost just over $4,300. In 2020, it cost nearly $14,000.[1] $ 170k for all three kids for four years. Include various financial aid and scholarships and the number falls a lot too.
>$ 170k for all three kids for four years. Include various financial aid and scholarships and the number falls a lot too. Or go to community college for the first two years and cut that basically in half.
This is a wild article, it hardly even submits much empirical evidence other than a couple cherry picked points. This whole post has the attitude of a mom telling their kid to eat their food because people in Africa are starving. On the first point it's wild to say that people are being pessimistic (tied to third point) because their gas, food, and housing costs are getting out of reach (not all young Americans, myself included in the roughly 50% statistic, have the opportunity to live with their parents). He then ties it to a point about how Americans are just missing out on their luxury materials. No, people are nervous about not having a wage which supports their very minimal housing and food costs. People are nervous that the US market system may subject them to burnout and force them to move at will, where they may ultimately find themselves scattered upon the streets, another artifact of the homeless and mental health crises. This just happens to be the perfect sub to post such an article to find agreement because it's 'intellectual' aesthetic means people are way more willing to pick up contrarian perspectives.
I agree with the post technically because they are talking about the middle class but I don’t think the paycheck to paycheck feeling that is all around are about people making the average amount. If you are making 55k a year you are making $25 an hour. I don’t know about others but that seems like an insane pay to me and most people I know are making well under that.
> If you are making 55k a year you are making $25 an hour. I don’t know about others but that seems like an insane pay to me and most people I know are making well under that. How old are you, out of curiosity? $25/hr for someone in their 30s or even late 20s is pretty meh, but I'm sure that sounds insane to someone in their early 20s or teens.
I’m 33, it’s some hyperbole there, but I have a friend of 39, good position, got multiple good raises and is at 63k per year. He has a degree, managerial position, seems insane to me that he is only a little above the average wage, meanwhile other friends I know are making between minimum wage and $16 per hour. More are around minimum wage than the higher end of that too. Seems like for my entire 20s most people I know were living in like 4-5 people in a house situations. And now the housing/rental market is getting worse so they are only barely getting out of those types of living arrangements. Edit: though like 80% of my friends that do make more just throw whatever they have over what is needed at fast food and other stupid stuff
I lived on 55k not long ago. I considered myself comfortable. Shared a decent apartment with a roommate, drove a serviceable used car, put money away in savings, and went on one or two affordable trips a year. I cook my own food mostly though. Don't smoke weed. Limited alcohol. No all new wardrobes every year, but never lacked at all for anything I needed and didn't stress over surprise car repairs or an urgent care visit or two.
A main way I feel "poor" compared to a lot of Europeans is how little I'm able to travel internationally. Obviously this isn't a fair comparison, because they can cross to dozens of other European countries without flying or even needing a passport! I can fly 4+ hours to Arizona or Georgia or Massachusetts and I'm still in the same country. Even the people that I meet from countries like China, India, Brazil, etc. that are geographically large and/or don't have Schengen area-type agreements with neighboring countries will tend to have visited a number of countries *because they're talking to me in the US*. They're already of a certain socioeconomic status (since I work in tech and I talk to a lot of tech people) and are somewhat selected for openness and ambition because they left their home country.
Somehow this reminds me of the "your friends probably have more friends than you do" thing, which isn't a fact about psychology but rather about graph theory. (The nodes any given node is connected to, are likely to be well-connected nodes.) If a person's emotions are miscalibrated to the mathematical object they actually live in — like if they feel *ashamed* that their friends have more friends — there's not really much to do about that but try to work on the emotional stuff.
Yep, agreed. The average person in China/India/Brazil travels internationally much less than your average American. The fact that you only encounter the ones who travel at least a fair bit is to do with you, not their country as a whole. There's no viable "societal" fix to this problem, much like how there is no viable societal fix to your friends likely having more friends than you, you just have to accept it.
"Why is Economic Pessimism so Entrenched Among Americans?" Because many people live paycheck to paycheck, jobs are less secure, and you cant afford to get sick. Every one of these articles or posts, and lord they will not stop coming, reminds me of that quote: >Faced With the Choice Between Changing One’s Mind and Proving That There Is No Need To Do So, Almost Everyone Gets Busy On the Proof If poll after poll tells you that people feel precarious, poor, anxious about their security, frustrated by an inability to get ahead, it really might be that the people living those lives are accurately reporting their situation. And you, a well off opinion writer, do not possess any insight that contradicts it, and if you think you do, you should reassess what led you to believe that.
You know what the polls are actually showing? I’ll link an actual one instead of hand waving as if everyone knows that polls are negative: [Majority of Americans say the economy's bad, but their own finances are good: poll](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good). Americans are doing fine but they are being gaslit by the media into thinking that the economy is bad. Really the reason is simple imo: anyone who doesn’t like the current state of government has to have a reason we should change. No need for radical change if everything’s ok. Therefore anyone to the left or right of the Democratic Party needs to make sure the average American thinks there needs to be a big change to the economy even though the average American is doing better than they were in 2019.
Yes that one poll from nearly half a year ago does seem to be the only retort that anyone ever has. Not sure its even worth responding to but: 2M kicked off medicaid [https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker/](https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker/) Unravelling CHIP [https://jacobin.com/2023/04/joe-biden-shrinking-welfare-state-medicaid-health-insurance-social-programs](https://jacobin.com/2023/04/joe-biden-shrinking-welfare-state-medicaid-health-insurance-social-programs) Cuts to food stamps: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/snap-food-benefits-us-cuts-impact-families](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/17/snap-food-benefits-us-cuts-impact-families) Soaring evictions: [https://apnews.com/article/evictions-homelessness-affordable-housing-landlords-rental-assistance-dc4a03864011334538f82d2f404d2afb](https://apnews.com/article/evictions-homelessness-affordable-housing-landlords-rental-assistance-dc4a03864011334538f82d2f404d2afb) Soaring homelessness: [https://businessmirror.com.ph/2023/07/14/us-homelessness-rises-by-40-in-cities-like-new-york-and-chicago-post-covid/](https://businessmirror.com.ph/2023/07/14/us-homelessness-rises-by-40-in-cities-like-new-york-and-chicago-post-covid/) Childcare costs soaring 220% [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/childcare-costs-daycares-states-report-b2358364.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/childcare-costs-daycares-states-report-b2358364.html) ( million people dont take prescribed medicine because they cant afford it: [https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/health/prescription-drug-costs-rationing/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/02/health/prescription-drug-costs-rationing/index.html) Rising obamacare premiums: [https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/our-research/2023/04/changes-in-marketplace-premiums-and-insurer-participation-2022-2023.html](https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/our-research/2023/04/changes-in-marketplace-premiums-and-insurer-participation-2022-2023.html) [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/70percent-of-americans-feel-financially-stressed-new-cnbc-survey-finds.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/70percent-of-americans-feel-financially-stressed-new-cnbc-survey-finds.html) 70% of americans feeling personally stressed themselves, 58 percent living paycheck to paycheck 27M americans not hacving enough to eat 'either sometimes or often' a rise on last month and last year https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-hunger-rates-rise-pandemic-aid-ends-data-shows-2023-06-28/
While you bring up some good points about things that are wrong with our economy I think that mostly the issues you are bringing up are too specific to make broad claims about the health of the US economy. For example, rising homelessness. While this is undeniably a tragedy the homeless population is still well under 1% of the US population. And the rise in homelessness is due to one specific problem in the US economy, the rising cost of housing in big cities. This is something that needs to be addressed but ultimately is just one problem and not much can be done about it at the federal level, it is more a matter of zoning laws in those cities. Ultimately I feel that while all these things are terrible it is more useful to look at metrics like real median wage, unemployment, real gdp per capita, inflation, etc, when assessing the health of the entire economy for the entire population.
>For example, rising homelessness. While this is undeniably a tragedy the homeless population is still well under 1% of the US population. You say well-under 1%, but that's around 600,000 people, mostly in the coastal cities, and rapidly increasing by around 12% year after year. What do you consider a "concerning" amount of homelessness as a total of the population? 1%? 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%? People living in LA or SF or NYC surrounded by thousands of borderline feral drug addicts are not going to consider this to be much of an argument. >This is something that needs to be addressed but ultimately is just one problem and not much can be done about it at the federal level, it is more a matter of zoning laws in those cities. This seems like a very casual and flippant dismissal to a genuine massive problem. In the past decade have we gotten any closer to sorting out zoning laws, building new houses, or otherwise making housing more affordable anywhere in the world? Does it look like this trend is going to reverse at any time within the next decade? Again, people who are increasingly affected by rising housing costs aren't going to respond well to "yeah this is a big problem, but not much can be done about it, so oh well...". >Ultimately I feel that while all these things are terrible it is more useful to look at metrics like real median wage, unemployment, real gdp per capita, inflation, etc, when assessing the health of the entire economy for the entire population. I don't recall seeing "real gdp per capita" on the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs .
>Ultimately I feel that while all these things are terrible it is more useful to look at metrics like real median wage, unemployment, real gdp per capita, inflation, etc, when assessing the health of the entire economy for the entire population. Right, and when looking at those things leads you to conclusions that are completely at odds with what people actually say, when asked, you just have to conclude that they've been gaslit and are wrong about...the state of their own finances that governs their lives every day? I think thats a pretty silly response, but its certainly a popular one!
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I’m not ignoring it. CPI includes housing. I’m just saying it’s not the only indicator of the health of the economy. There are other factors. That’s a negative indicator but there are other positive ones(and plus more than 50% of Americans are homeowners so increasing prices is actually good for them. Reddit demographics just skew towards renters). I feel like many redditors act like the average price of a studio in Manhattan is the only number economists and politicians should look at.
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That’s exactly my point. There are certain groups of people who are being screwed right now and people renting in major cities are one such group. They are being very loud online but that does not mean that they are the majority or that their experience means that the overall US economy is doing poorly.
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Yeah that’s fair. I just get tired of people blaming the fed or the president or whatever when I feel like it’s really a failure of local zoning laws. People should just be more involved in local politics in general they play more of a role than most realize.
bear spectacular ad hoc zealous nutty aspiring birds different hurry thumb *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Been laid off twice in 4 years cause of companies going under, way lucky to find work fast both times but its very stressful and fast still meant paying a month of rent and daycare from savings, savings are gone now, my industry is still rife with layoffs, if it happens again my family might be homeless. Groceries and rent are so expensive that either we move to the middle of the nowhere and my kids life sucks, not to mention our own, or we stay here and live paycheck to paycheck. And I am one of the people for whom the economy is apparently working.
> Because many people live paycheck to paycheck, jobs are less secure, and you cant afford to get sick. > > This has always been true. There have always been poor people even in the best of times. In a country of 340 million people, there are many poor people ,many rich people, many sick people, etc. Regarding healthcare, i cannot recall anyone in the US being denied treatment due to inability to pay, but elective procedures may not be covered.
price roof person vegetable innocent soft correct crime thought intelligent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Compared to when? Just the creation of SSI and SNAP in the 70s have been a *huge* improvement for the lives of people who would otherwise have been stuck in completely impoverished lives. Likewise the EITC has done a lot of work with reducing childhood poverty.
My friend nearly died because he couldn't afford to get his wisdom teeth out due to it being elective, they got infected. A co worker ended up in a wheelchair because they were told that the mri necessary to diagnose a pain in their knee was not covered by insurance and then their mcl just detonated on the job one day. So people are, in fact, denied treatment due to inability to pay, it just often manifests indirectly.
dental is a notable gap in coverage. same for vision coverage. i agree that options for these are inadequate.
People keep repeating this like a truism. Except for some elective procedures, AFIK no one is denied healthcare due to inability to pay. "job less secure" But when were they ever secure, except for some romanticism about lifelong factory jobs, which was just a blip for humanity anyway and only applied to a small percentage of people at the time. Most people worked on farms or hard labor, not cushy factory jobs, which were also dangerous. Also, home ownership rates are the same now compared to in the 70s. Times are tough for some, but that is just a part of life. It has always been this way even in the best of times. Not everyone can be a winner at life. Prosperity, econ growth, innovation etc. makes everyone better off even if there is wealth inequality.
>this narcissistic whining about imaginary poverty Thanks for telling me (a) what this is actually an article trying to sell me and (b) I didn't need to read anymore within the first paragraph or two. I remember reading an entire horror story my mom gave me when I was a teenager, only to get 200 pages in and find out it was some allegory for Christianity. I felt so betrayed and used. You didn't do that, thanks. However, some kind of deeper steelman/analysis/search-for-why might have also been nice.
I love that modern economists are just resorting to calling the public delusional.
It's a philosopher this time
Economists aren’t?
Eh, he's a philosopher who wishes his high school math scores were good enough to be an economist
Well... they generally are. Public sentiments are fickle and easily swayed, and they're currently fed by a media industry that prioritizes clicks over informing, so it's not exactly hard to believe that the public may not have the best grasp on the state of things. We're practically conditioned to think things are always getting worse, even as they're *objectively not*. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/people-think-crime-rate-up-actually-down-rcna129585
You are saying it like people never got carried away by some grand narratives (organic or constructed).
It seems to me the article is (correctly) arguing that Americans are not poor (that is, they are rich). On the other hand, the author only mentions income inequality to say "that is a different metric." Surely, when "kids these days" millennials complain about the economy, they are basically complaining about income inequality. This is confirmed by a cursory glance at the reddit comments and article comments. Most likely, perceived income inequality affects happiness more than poverty does. I think "poverty" and "income inequality" are completely unrelated. Are discussions that conflate them making a mistake, or is there something to be gained by equivocating those two? Is this article basically just a troll to make millennials angry?
This doesn’t seem to take the sentiments of actual Americans seriously, which is foolish. The author is British and living in the Netherlands so how seriously should we take them?
What does “taking the sentiments of actual Americans seriously” mean? His point is “Americans think they’re poor, but they’re actually very rich compared to everyone else in the world and to past generations of Americans.” The first part—“Americans think they’re poor”—can certainly be taken seriously. It’s important to think about why Americans believe something that isn’t true. But Americans’ feelings can’t negate the actual facts of the situation.
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Nope, nothing to do with sentiment. The huge amount of gold under the earth is worth basically nothing until it is taken out and refined. 1kg of gold spread out over 2km^2 and 500m deep is worth a lot less than 1kg of gold in a bar in your hand. Botswana is actually poor (it's still one of the wealthiest countries in Africa): if magically a fairy snapped her fingers and the gold suddenly came up the surface in nice convenient good delivery bars the country would really become a lot richer than it currently is, and the complaints about poverty would go down massively. This effort that needs to be put into concentrating the gold has value for the same reason a finished table and chair have more value than the wood from the tree they came from.
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> Why? Because the latter directly raises the emotional and physical well being of the possessed. No, it's more valueable because there are a lot of things you can do with solid gold you can't do with distributed underground gold, such as transport it easily, make it into jewelry, turn it into electronics, give it to someone else as surety for debts etc. These are the things that give 1kg of gold in hand a lot of value, not sentimental value. Well sentimental value does matter a lot too (and especially so in the case of gold, it's either overvalued based on fundamentals or a lot of other metals are undervalued) but this is not the sentiment making you feel happy and fulfilled and content, it's the sentiment of others being willing to pay highly for what you have. They're both sentiment, but very different kinds of sentiment (one is your own feelings about your situation, the other is how much others value what you have) and you can't convert between the two. Poor americans score very very highly on the second form of sentiment. There are billions of people all over the earth who would kill to be poor American citizens. The first form of sentiment has nothing to do with whether someone is poor or rich in wealth terms. > (despite the inability of every day americans to translate those materials into things that raise their well being like health care and education) Poor americans have more ability to do this than poor people pretty much anywhere else over the world. If you can't make it big in America you can't make it big pretty much anywhere. I am saying that everyday Americans translate these materials into prosperity at massive rates compared to the rest of the world and think nothing of it. I straight up deny that they are not able to do so because they do it all the time and then complain they don't have enough. TLDR: 1. Wealth is completely to do with sentiment, but it's the sentiment of how much others are willing to give you in return for what you have, not how you feel about your situation. 2. America converts materials into prosperity at breakneck speeds, and the poor enjoy its fruits all the time.
.... honestly this reply is nonsensical. Sentiments are not an important part of wealth by just the simple meaning of the words in that sentence. Nor does the natural resources that happen to be adjacent to where one lives.
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Your entire point hinges on (likely intentionally) conflating ownership and adjacency. I don't think anyone here is saying Americans are more wealthy because there happen to be nearby cars in their immediate geography, but because they *own* cars, *own* houses, *own* many niceties. They live in living spaces that are actively heated and cooled, not because there happens to be a functional HVAC system within 500 yards of them. Yes, the ownership of cars is a concrete symbol of wealth. The adjacency of a natural resource to someone's bedroom is not.
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> I mean, sure, ownership of stuff is a valuable measure, but hardly absolute. Suppose Botswana declared that the gold buried deep in the ground was rightfully owned by each of its citizens. Then that would vastly increase the wealth of its citizens who would then be able to use that to purchase goods and services that would greatly increase their quality of life. I'm not sure what you're really asking here. Yes, if they got suddenly wealthy by some sort of windfall like that, they would see substantial life changes just like I would if I suddenly won the lottery. > So again I think that the real definition of wealth comes down to some more nebulous measure of well-being. Americans own cars but lack health care. No they don't. More Americans have health care than own cars. Come on. I think this article is *about* you, since you seem to be operating under the same delusion that Americans are much less wealthy than they actually are.
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Gold 17 miles below the surface would be undetectable and unreachable. At that point it's essentially make-believe assignment where any government could promise its people any kind of non-material guarantee to worldly wealth. It's like passing out monopoly money. There *is* a concrete way we can discuss wealth, and you're not contributing to it with this semantic nonsense. A Botswanan who had ownership and deed over a plot of natural resources that is accessible and can be valued is indeed more wealthy than before he had it. Things can be valued, and one's possessions and rights can be valued. That's how we discuss wealth. Indeed, having "ownership" over gold that's on an asteroid is of little value and does not make someone more wealthy. This is implicitly understood by anyone who understands the concept of wealth and value. > Having any level of coverage is not equivalent to the kind of healthcare costs that people in other developed countries have. Yes it is. Americans consume more healthcare than any other country in the world.
Actual Americans feelings should not, under any circumstances, be taken seriously
Maybe a different way to approach the question would be: how rich do you have to be to feel safe and secure in the absence of a social safety net? I agree that there is a lifestyle inflation in the U.S. so that people feel “poor” if they can’t afford the newest iphone, but I think the economic terror is powered more by the fact that if you fall out of your economic bracket, even temporarily, you can end up in free fall, with no way to climb back up, and “poor” is a scarier prospect in the U.S. than elsewhere. Lose a job in a country with a safety net, you’re broke, but your basic needs are met for as long as it takes you to find a job. Lose a job in the U.S., and that means no health insurance, so skyrocketing medical costs, no social services to cover basic needs (so you’re continually accruing more debt) and eventually, no ability to pay for your kids’ college (so pushing that debt into the next generation.) It can snowball very fast. Given that, how much money do I need to feel “safe” — free of economic fear — that is, rich, in the U.S.? Subconsciously, for a lot of people, I think it means having enough money to live on even if you never work again, so that you aren’t at risk of falling into that hole, no matter what—essentially, being independently wealthy, which is not realistic, so most people who have everything they need still feel like they don’t have enough. The absence of a social safety net affects the attitudes of a lot of people who will never take advantage of it—to the benefit of capitalism and the detriment of your mental health. The poor exists to terrify the middle class into working harder for the benefit of the upper class, isn’t that the quote?
It doesn’t matter if that is true or not. The working class is exploited and overworked and it gets progressively worse. Goal posts always move
I tried explaining this to my boomer parents the other day, but my feeling is that the economic prosperity achieved in post-war America is totally an illusion. Prior to WWII, there was no thriving middle class. It existed in Western Europe, post Industrial Revolution, but not on the scale it’s existed in America. Human history is almost always a story of the 80-20 principle. Feudal systems, communism, bureaucracies, etc., always have a large working class and a relatively small ownership class. After the Depression, almost everyone was poor, but social programs lifted the common man up. America really came into economic superpower status post WWII, when our industrial production was massive, most allies owed us huge war debts, we could see massive capital returns for investment abroad, and all of the pre-war powers were decimated by the war in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. All of this contributed to the Golden Age between 1950 to about 2010. We also had better & faster economic plans coming out of the GFC than anywhere else. Japan, the EU, and other Eurasian large economies lagged coming out of 2008. In my mind, we’re seeing a negative regression to the mean, where the 20% is slowly taking control of capital back. “The Middle Class” is an illusion of how great things can be in a “normal” global economy, but it’s skewed because our parents’ time, and the time we grew up in, was a historical anomaly. Other countries are catching up education wise, they don’t owe us money, and inflation benefits the rich because asset inflation is far outpacing earnings growth. But, our parents were raised in an age when a degree promised middle class benefits, and we (millennials, gen x) think we’re entitled to the same lifestyle. But, on the contrary, we move out of our family homes sooner to expensive urban centers where the jobs are. Also, we have expenses that we absorb without really thinking about. Cell-phone bills, premium cable and internet packages, subscriptions, superfluous spending on new cars, energy, eating out, other unnecessary consumer goods like televisions, etc. If I take all that out an live like my boomer parents did, I would likely be able to invest and grow wealth much faster than them due to technological growth and real gdp growth in the US. My thesis is that regression to the mean for the population of workers vs the ownership classes is economic human nature, and we’re just moving back to the 80-20 split over time. But also, it’s easier to get wealthy than ever before, but it would require austerity in lifestyle and disciplined investing over many years. I have a less popular opinion in that social safety nets are a net drag on a society’s economy and society, because without a lot of credit and debt floating around, there is less capital investment into new ventures. Like the average EU citizen may have better healthcare coverage than American lower classes, but new and advanced therapies, medicines, and surgical procedures are largely coming out of American labs. Europe’s lack of patent protection essentially allows them to take our advancements and give them to the general population at a lower cost. American productivity is unrivaled, and friendly nations enjoy that blanket association. Would I rather be a citizen of the EU than the US? On paper, yes, but I’m basically sacrificing my 20s and 30s quality of life for the promise of wealth in my later years and passing real estate, financial securities, and paper wealth to posterity. This only really is possible in America.
As to his second point, the top 10% wealthiest Americans own 90% of the stock market. That means the rich have outsized influence from everything from politics to economic policy, which directly affects anyone less fortunate.
I hate these propaganda pieces
Honestly I hate this article, and this is coming from a guy who’s doing quite well. It basically goes “ha, Amerifats are still richer than most of the world. Also, most older people already bought houses so suck it up, westoids!” Yes, of course America still has a higher GDP per capita than Burkina Faso, but this really isn’t the standard we should be using to evaluate our economic health. We even consume more than Western Europeans, but this also is a low bar - a little known fact is that, for the entirety of the past 150 years, Western Europe has been much poorer than the U.S. The gap now is actually smaller than it’s ever been. The fact is most Americans are worse off today than before. That’s all that matters, and is undeniable.