Forget the government figures and look at the market. Sure you might make a buck more an hour but the price of meat has doubled (roughly) in the past five years.

But the curious thing is we live in an era where being poor isn't as fucking horrible as it was in the past. While homeless I was able to have a smartphone, a laptop, and a couple of things of liquid nicotine. That's a sanity keeping pack right there.

I don't care if the rich guy can order custom-made marbelized sculpted horse anuses, my quality of life as a homeless man was increased precisely because rich men were assholes enough to create products general and well-built enough for many environments.

The problem of course is the almost never-ending stream of propoganda which tells people to eat sub-standard food and adopt sub-standard lifestyles. You stuff a population full of terrible diets, little personal physicality, and constant dopaminergic stimulation...

Well I suppose if I were a rich man I'd be chuckling at the peons who are literally segregating themselves physically as a separate species. It'd make breeding and consolidation a bit easier if you could tell a peon visually by their body fat ratio.

Mitigating the anxiety, fear, and lonliness by using nicotine? That's far far higher up. That's the bigger priority in the timeframe of "being fucking homeless".

Same public sector could have provided you a home. You could have had a smartphone, a laptop, AND a roof.

But those smug rich assholes don't make money off that, so therefore you don't have it. You only have the droppings of gov research after it was privatized.

being poor in a developed country has rarely been bad and its hard for many to realize that is true. as for the price of meat the government intervention in grain pricing with regards to pushing ethanol and similar didn't help that.

the rich can weather a bad storm better than the poor but only if they are properly diversified and not relying on the boom to keep them there

Have you ever been poor? I understand that absolute poverty in an undeveloped country is worse, but to make a statement like you have shows that you apparently have very little understanding of the reality of poverty in a developed country.

As I said before, if you eat substandard food, don't give your body stress in manageable amounts (exercise), and are constantly bombarded by a level of stimuli unthinkable to someone from 1800...

Being "poor" or even "homeless" doesn't have to suck as bad. From experience, the whole homeless shelter (particularly within Veteran Affairs) system is ripe for disruption. You wouldn't believe how much money is wasted on absolute bullshit (coughAnyoneWithASocialWorkDegreecough) as opposed to simple procedures and steps which actually help a person to not be homeless.

Two things which persisently keep a lot of homeless people down are a lack of employable skills and a lack of supportive social networks that keep a person "in the game" so that they're not bored and smoking crack.

This process will be over soon when urbanization hits Western levels (about 10-15 years from now), then the growth rate will moderate.

It's heavily skewed towards the richest in society, and yet people keep harping on about GDP increases in all of these questionable free-trade agreements we keep hearing about.

Increased GDP should not be a reason for adopting anything.

Also... You don't "trust" that chart? You can probably calculate it yourself if you want. That chart is data. If you have any reasonable arguments against the accuracy of that data Id love to hear it.

A refutation would be explaining why GDP and income don't necessarily correlate, which is more a matter of accounting identities. Specifically, GDP != income, income is merely one component of it.

It's quite easy to see that even if GDP grew 12% as someone else mentioned, the change from 64% to 57% would keep incomes at approximately the same level (and perhaps even slightly lower).

Wage share is an economically accepted term, with data from BLS behind it.

You literally made up some number and said "it doesn't change much over time".

You're going to need to provide a source for that 80%.

http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/2016/pdf/pi0716....

and GDP in current dollars was 18036.6 billion - http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls, so 87.5% of GDP was income, and that figure has been pretty much constant over last 50 years, at never out of 75-90% range for sure. In fact, it is higher than average in the last 10 years or so - while difference is really small.

Disposable income after all taxes and including all social transfers (excluding non-monetary ones like food stamps and assisted housing) was 69.5% of the GDP, also quite typical figure which shows to tendency to fall over time, more likely to rise.

Surely that includes dividends, rents, and realized capital gains. And yet, it must have been reflected in the chart in question, if only in the top decile - while chart somehow shows incomes of all deciles falling from 2000, which is hard to believe.

Since personal income includes capital income, that's a useless figure when "wage" is being used as an (admittedly, imperfect) proxy for labor income as opposed to capital income, as the context upthread makes clear it was.

This is a main point in Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty. He explains the capital/income ratio and its effects on the economy. Decent write up here: http://www.robertdkirkby.com/blog/2015/summary-of-piketty-i/

No chart is ever data. A chart, like the result of an SQL query, is a projection via analysis. The analysis may be trivial, or it may not. You can hide a lot in non-trivial analysis if you want to. I don't say that the NYT did so here (and I don't say that it didn't), but it's hard to have any kind of productive discussion when something this basic is overlooked.

The middle class in America shrank considerably following 2009.

There must be something distorting that chart, like: it is a chart of household income dynamics, and the average size of household has decreased.

Where did you get that number? No way that's right. Here are the numbers from the Fed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A191RP1Q027SBEA

Annual per capita GDP growth never exceeded 7% from 2000-2014.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

Real GDP/capita = $43,935 in Q1 2000, $50,549 in Q4 2014. That's 15% growth.

Your own numbers don't disagree with this if you integrate them and divide by population.