Can you please not post like this here? We're looking for curious conversation, not denunciatory rhetoric.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But...wages have increased over the past 40 years...and at a greater rate than in Europe/Aus/other developed.

real wages for the bottom 80% have not budged much[1], and are pretty much non-existent for the bottom 40-60% of the distribution.

The US has higher wages but mostly as a function of some sort of Baumol's cost disease. Increases in healthcare and education spending drive wages but they also drive costs. It doesn't really reflect a net gain in standards of living as hard stats like life expectancy show. the US has a life expectancy comparable to Cuba.

Not to mention that averages obfuscate the huge degree of inequality. Life expectancy differences between the richest and poorest in the US are larger (almost ~20 years) than between the American average and Yemen.

[1] https://imgur.com/vsUt8rF

Most of these charts ignore non-wage income such as employer paid healthcare. https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-...

It seems like Russ is trying to make a fundamentally different point in that piece than people generally try to make.

His main point seems to be that, if you track people over the last 30 years, they have made economic progress individually. That to me seems extremely obvious though. Someone who is 50 or 60 is almost certainly going to be in a better financial position than the same person at 30, as many people tend to develop more skills or advance their career, it would be straight-up crazy if that wasn't the case.

However, it does not address the actual issue of the poorest as a demographic. What people are saying that if the nation as a whole gets richer, you would expect that 40 years later the floor has risen as well, not that the poor are simply different people.

No it also looks at income across generations within quartiles, e.g. "But [incomes of] 93% of the children in the poorest households — those in the bottom 20% — surpassed their parents...Julia Isaacs’s study for the Pew Charitable Trusts looking at the late 1960’s up to 2002 finds that children raised in the poorest families made the largest gains as adults relative to children born into richer families."

Total compensation (wages + benefits) has drastically increased over the past few decades, even for the low incomes levels.

And the cost of benefits compared to what they actually buy you have also drastically increased. Control for the inflation in the cost of those benefits as well as inflation in the cost of rent, education and so on and you will see that the situation is not good.

Well it seems like “real wages” have not increased in decades?

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

Comparing US wages to countries that have far greater social safety nets and healthcare is impossible. And volatility of wages and the insecurity of not knowing if you will have stable work (and hence healthcare) or not is a more important metric, although also impossible to measure. But not impossible to feel and see the results of.

> Comparing US wages to countries that have far greater social safety nets and healthcare is impossible.

No, it's not impossible. I'm from the US and live in Canada and it's essentially comparing the lower US tax rate + health care premiums and expected unemployment benefits.

For the record, the US is clearly cheaper for a slim 30 something with no kids and no medical issues -- like ~27,000 bucks or so per year, when I compared WA to AB. When you start adding kids and getting 60+ that changes, and long term it may be a better deal up north, but in the short term I'd rather do STEM in a state with no income tax.

Yes, for high earners in STEM in high demand of their labor it’s a no brainer.

But for others, the volatility of income is much higher and muddies the calculation. Losing your job is much less stressful when you don’t have to worry about your healthcare also.

Do you think a typical middle class American would rather be living in the world as it was 40 years ago though? Or today's world, full of technology and infrastructure that was funded by the rich?

Is this even a question? 40 years ago housing, healthcare and education were vastly more accessible than they are today. Middle class jobs paid wages that could produce a middle class standard of living. The only thing you'd miss out on would be a bunch of hollow digital toys.

Would I trade my iphone to be able to own a house and have my children go to college? Of course! Who wouldn't!?

In 1985, in-state tuition and fees at UC Berkeley cost $1,296/year[0] (inflation-adjusted that would be $3,052 in 2020 dollars) Today, it actually costs $14,000/year[1] (plus an extra $16k room and board, but let's compare apples to apples).

[0] https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since...

[1] https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/tuition-financi...

> 40 years ago housing, healthcare and education were vastly more accessible than they are today

More people go to college now than 40 years ago; the price is high because of the easy credit that makes it more accessible now, not less.

As for healthcare, I guess you had a higher chance of being able to see a doctor back then, but they wouldn't be able to treat your illness as effectively as today so it's a tossup depending on what ails you.

Housing is totally fucked now, I give you that.

> ... education were vastly more accessible than they are today.

Diplomas were more accessible. Education has never been cheaper.

This isn't an attack on your point, since what people really want are the diplomas (and the comfy middle-class jobs they led to), I'm just pointing out that everything that runs on information transfer[1] is incomparably cheaper in 2020 than in 1980. The college tuition problem isn't an economics of information transfer problem, it's an economics of status transfer problem.

[1] All of which you dismiss as "hollow digital toys" somewhat unfairly I feel, but I don't actually know enough to have an informed opinion on 1980 vs 2020, so I won't get into it.

If you leave many of the big wealthy states, middle class jobs pay wages to support middle class living. All my neighbors and family in Cleveland buy houses/housing and live comfortable, easy lives. Same in Texas.

In the states where the "elites" are, housing and participation in the economy is dramatically limited.

We’re healthcare and education more accessible? Cheaper, certainly. That’s different from accessible.

I was a child then, and I vaguely remember easy access to GPs, but specialists required travel. Long travel.

A smaller portion of the population went to college. Seems more accessible now.

what technology and infrastructure was funded by the rich? I think you mean funded by the tax payer, rich and poor alike, but the poor pay a higher percentage of income in tax.

> the poor pay a higher percentage of income in tax

They certainly don't pay a higher absolute dollar value of the total taxes received by the government though.

and your point is what? paying a higher percentage of their income makes life harder for them, than it does for the rich paying a higher dollar value but lower percentage of total income.

The point is that infrastructure was mainly paid by the rich, not that life is easier for the poor.

the infrastructure was paid for by tax, the rich didn't altruistically pay for it, they paid tax, tax was used to fund it..very different kettle of fish to the rich paying for infrastructure directly.

I never said they altruistically paid it. All I am saying is that without them, we couldn't have paid for it.

that's not necessarily true though is it. first off the government has no issue creating money to bailout corporations, thus the money could be created/borrowed to pay for infrastructure projects and repaid over the long term. Secondly 'without them' would mean without the multi-millionaires and billionaires. Well if we didn't have them it would be because of a more equal sharing of the wealth, thus the same tax revenue could be gained from a wider share of the population. The economy has the same value/size it is just currently concentrated in the hands of a few, there is no reason it could not be more equally spread out, except that those with money, get to buy those in power and lobby for rules that make them richer and make it harder for people to compete with them.

> I think you mean funded by the tax payer, rich and poor alike

The rich pay disproportionately a lot more. Most technology is funded by the rich either directly or through the majority of the taxes they pay.

97% of taxes are paid by the top 50%.

>The rich pay disproportionately a lot more.

And so they should.

the top 50% has a lower band of $41k annual income in the US. they are not rich, in many places they would struggle to support a family on that.

>The top 1 percent of American earners pay almost 40 percent of all federal income taxes. That’s more than the bottom 90 percent pay combined

that fact should not be celebrated as how generous the top 1% are but rather how unequal the system is that this can be the case.

I'm not arguing that they should or should not. I'm just pointing out that the people that are vilified are contributing a LOT more to keeping this ship we call a country afloat.

Id much rather live in a the world 40 years ago.

It was possible for a family of four to survive on a single income and own a home...