"We"? What is being counted here, the average income and wealth?

Of course people are better off with food and iPhones, but in many major European cities people with middle class incomes share apartments that were literally single family worker apartments around 1900.

In terms of living space, the quality of life for the middle class is worse than 100 years ago.

There are exponentially more people today. In 1850 there were 23 million people in America, today there are 330 million. There was a 15x increase in population, with more than that in the city centers.

Texas had a population of 212k in 1850 and 29 million today. How can you compare the size of a house or land ownership then to today?

> Texas had a population of 212k in 1850 and 29 million today. How can you compare the size of a house or land ownership then to today?

You are pinning your argument on houses in _TEXAS_ having gotten smaller? lol bc if anything they have gotten larger.

At that time land was given away via grants in Texas to anyone who would live there by the hundreds of acres. Comparing that situation to land (housing) prices in a major city today is nonsensical.

> In terms of living space, the quality of life for the middle class is worse than 100 years ago.

most urbanites of today don't own a chicken, let alone a cow, in 800's standard they're worse off than serfs.

In 1900, the average life expectancy for an American man was 48.3

Today, the average life expectancy for Americans is 78.7

That is mostly, but not completely, due to infant mortality rates.

Indeed, the marxist argument is that the productivity gains of the industrial revolution would allow unprecedented human freedom, if not for their capture by the small class of people who own the means of production. The labor movement has played an enormous role in ensuring the working class gets a fairer share, via the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, etc.

We may see another example of this if Andrew Yang and other folks bullish on automation are correct. The few people who own the AI systems that replace truck drivers will get fabulously wealthy, while the large mass of workers will get nothing.

In the past ~50 years in the US, labor has been on the back foot, and productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the wealthy, rather than the working class.

"In the past ~50 years in the US, labor has been on the back foot, and productivity gains have gone almost exclusively to the wealthy, rather than the working class. "

How so? The poorest working people in the US today are much much much better off than they were 50 years ago. It's not even close. A lot of people have recency bias, technology gains etc have given much more freedom to individuals, made work easier and less labor intensive, that is largely due to private industry. Globally, poverty has plunged.

What stats are you looking at?

Real wages have been stagnant for the vast majority of workers in the US.

And the "pulled people out of poverty" thing is such a BS stat. Converting subsistence farmers into sweat shop workers so that they they have $1.50/day instead of $0/day isn't a real metric of pulling people out of poverty. It's more a metric of how tied into the global system they are.

According to this real wages have been rising for the last 30 years: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/are-wages-rising-or-flat/

Average has, median has not.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

The FRED seems to disagree: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

Your ignoring total compensation as wages are only one part of it.

Total compensation at all income levels has vastly outstripped inflation over the past 50 years.

[citation needed]

Median is $60k household. People making $30k each aren't having side perks thrown at them.

That's average, not median.

$1.50/day has much more purchasing power in poorer countries. Any time someone makes such a statement, I can immediately tell they are ignorant on basic economics. The US also used to have low wages for entry level workers, as did every (no developed) country. That's how progress is made. You can't expect a poor farmer with minimal skills to start making $25 an hour. And what stats am I looking at? What stats are YOU looking at? Even if you believe the notion that real wages are flat (not true,) living standards have still risen drastically thanks to technology. Do you think technology gains just come out of thin air? No, they are driven by competition and the need to profit.

I'm not holding my breath on self-driving semi trucks anytime soon. They will be the last type of vehicle to be automated. It takes a lot of skill to drive an 18 wheeler from warehouse to distribution center to warehouse. They are extremely dangerous machines if not handled properly and can easily kill dozens of people if a miscalculation occurs.

In the meantime, you could make the same argument about farming equipment in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah 90% of the population used to be farmers, and yeah the equipment automated away most of that labor, but did the former farmers and laborers lose out or did they gain, by access to the same technology... either via personal automobiles or via cheaper, more reliable supply chains of abundant food.

Likewise, if and when transportation is automated, people will gain from their time saved in traffic. They will gain from cheaper costs of transportation overall which will reduce price of goods at retail. They will gain from the availability of 24/7 cheap, reliable, on-demand transportation.

And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.

They're testing self driving trucks on I-70 outside of Denver specifically to test them in the worst conditions. They're not coming, they're already here.

The issue though, isn't that a specific job is going away, but instead the whole class of "human as control theory implementation" is going away. That's way more disruptive. Like, people instead becoming control software for guillotines level disruptive.

> And no, real wages are at all time highs in the United States, with the median household income hitting $63K in 2018.

"Real wages" mean inflation and CPI adjusted so you can actually compare them in a meaningful way. They have indeed been stagnant for median wage earners since the seventies.

Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the test trials in Denver? They're not already here. Even if they're 95% of the way, if that last 5% is catastrophic failure that ends in death and destruction, it's not even close to ready for production.

I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.

"From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

> Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the test trials in Denver? They're not already here. Even if they're 95% of the way, if that last 5% is catastrophic failure that ends in death and destruction, it's not even close to ready for production.

I literally see Embark trucks going down the I-70 mountain in the snow. They are already here.

Here says they are already making deliveries (albeit test ones): https://www.wired.com/story/embark-self-driving-truck-delive...

> I'm well aware of what real wages means in terms of inflation.

> "From January 2019 to January 2020, real average hourly earnings increased 0.7 percent"

> https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

And meanwhile when you don't cherry pick a single year (and really 0.7% increase isn't something to be writing home about in the first place), they've been stagnant for decades.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...