People are not "effectively being paid the same as previous generations". Unlike wages, many primary necessities have grown in cost at rates much higher than inflation in the US (housing, education, health care).

Are you arguing against the above poster's link? Or against my summary of what it literally says?

Don't forget food.

IANAEconomist, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

My general impression is that people haven't changed much, and the American "can-do" spirit is alive and well. There are some problems with zoning laws, and many folks are financially clueless or even irresponsible (don't have savings accounts and such), but to me the limiting factor seems to be capital.

> Your complaint is that people are effectively being paid the same as those prior generations.

I think you might have gotten confused by how the article uses "the same purchasing power" in a few places. It's actually saying (and again, I Am Not An Economist) is that gains from increasing productivity have not gone to the middle class.

In any event, my point is that if people had more money they would build more.

I don't find the "cultural stagnation" thesis very compelling.

It's not a foregone conclusion that gains from increased productivity go to the worker. Suppose someone builds an extremely advanced machine where all the worker needs to do is push a button, where in the past they needed ten years of training to do the same work with hand tools and the skills to do it were rarer, even if they produced less. The gains would rationally go to the person selling the machine. In fact this is what has happened and why Wintel etc sucked up a lot of the gains, creating so many of those rich people these kinds of articles complain about.

Also this whole statistical view of people is flawed. For the kinds of jobs where increased productivity should go to the worker, perhaps it did, and we call them rich now and move the goalpost to exclude them.

As for cultural changes, if you compare to other countries there are clear differences today. I think of government participation broadly as a "theraputic" institution. You contribute to something larger to make yourself feel good. This could mean building things or cleaning up trash etc. In the US however, for the last few generations this disproportionately means vote/protest for social progress agendas (in the eyes of the citizen), such as to impose "fairness" or lifestyle change. People's civic energy is basically channeled into just drama as the fight goes back and forth producing nothing.