1. Humans are humans, and they pretty much always judge their success by comparing themselves to others. Or, rather, humans are primates. Take a look at the famous study of the monkey that got cucumber while the other monkey got tastier grapes.
2. Income inequality in and of itself can be a problem because the mega wealthy can essentially buy laws that benefit themselves. There have been many studies that show that politicians are much more responsive to the desires of the rich than the desires of the average person.
3. In any economy, limited resources always go to those on the top of the wealth graph, regardless of cost to produce. So while you may be able to say everyone's standard of living is better, that's cold comfort to someone who won't be able to buy a house in their lifetime because limited land supply goes to the richest.
Yes but that doesn't mean this comparison has moral standing. Also this behaviour is pretty low-level, neurologically, and we can train our higher executive functions to override and disregard it. I would argue that should be the expectation.
> can essentially buy laws that benefit themselves
Again - so what? As long as everyone's lives are improving on every metric, who cares that the wealthy mess with the tax laws or enact regulatory capture.
> that's cold comfort to someone who won't be able to buy a house in their lifetime because limited land supply goes to the richest.
No, the person (and all other people) should derive their comfort from the gratitude for being able to live in a modern, extremely comfortable world.
Edit: to rephrase, isn't the problem here the expectation/belief that you should have/are entitled to a detached house?
1. Housing has become much more unaffordable.
2. Higher education has become much more unaffordable.
3. Retirement income has become much less guaranteed.
4. Employment is much less stable than it used to be.
Just look at the coming eviction tidal wave that will happen after the eviction moratoriums in the US end. Telling people "But look at all the other modern comforts you have now!" will smack as "Let them eat cake" when someone gets kicked out of their house, while the rich got much richer over the past year.
That's hardly surprising though is it? The number of people in the US has almost doubled since 1960, and urban population density has increased much more than that. Any expecation that everyone will be able to afford a detached house in any proximity to a metropolis is clearly unreasonable.
> Higher education has become much more unaffordable.
Again, the admissions rate hasn't really kept up with the population has it? Also there's a labour shortage in lots of skilled trades, construction and agricultural labour; and a labour surplus in finance and law. Do you think it's reasonable that everyone expects to attend higher education?
> Retirement income has become much less guaranteed.
I'm not sure how you'd measure retirement income "guaranteedness". Also see "Pension Timebomb" for how actually guaranteed those pensions are.
> Employment is much less stable than it used to be
Do you have a source for this? Ideally one that controls for people changing employment to advance their careers? This is much more common these days for the reasons outlined in the article.
Yes, after being evicted from a place you cannot afford, or after any other trying circumstance, telling people to focus on what they can be grateful for instead of what to be angry about is exactly the right thing to do. What business is it of yours or anyone elses how much money someone else has? Who cares if they have more or less than last year? How is that related to you personally being unable to affort rent due to being unemployed during a pandemic?
If people are feeling more volatility, and that it can all slip out from under them at any time, then all that baseline quality improvement is not worth much. Also, just like many other animals, we are playing a game rooted in the mechanics of mating involving social hierarchy and various tribal mechanics that are key to securing desired resources and reducing the aforementioned volatility. I do not imagine vast gaps in income/wealth/security help the tribe as a whole in this game.
Do you think this feeling is reflected in actual risk though? If so, how would you quantify it? If not, shouldn't we expect/teach people not to feel so volatile and be more grateful and content?
Edit: Another example is health insurance is tied to your employer in the US. It costs anywhere from $400 per child per month to $1k per month per adult, with a $17k out of pocket annual maximum. Imagine you've scraped together some savings for a house or a business or kids' education, and a wage earner becomes ill or injured, and can't work. Now you have giant expenses coming your way at your most vulnerable, and government help from Medicaid (for subpar quality healthcare) doesn't kick in until after you've exhausted all your assets, so you are at risk of getting sent back to square 1.
I know that people from the 50s to the 80s didn't have internet, healthcare technology, medicines, smartphones, etc like today. But obviously there is something to be said for the stability or utility of knowing that your children will most likely have a better future than you did, and the demise of this fact (or belief) is causing friction in society.
Depends on how you qualify "better". By the listed measures, this is still the case. By available land/population this is clearly not. Do we have any reason to believe our children will not have better healthcare, nutrition, access to information, etc than we do?
If we don't, then what justification is there for agitation?
What measures? The ones in your original comment?
>healthcare, education, sanitation, nutrition, shelter, comfort, convenience, etc.
In the US, you can trace all of these back to wages, especially since healthcare is tied to your employer in the US, and you can look up any a variety of data to show that wages stagnated decades ago, length of tenure at employers decreased, increased participation in "gig" economy and service industry which don't offer benefits (i.e. loss in wages), consolidation of growing economies in fewer areas of US resulting in cost of land rising disproportionally to income, etc.
> Do we have any reason to believe our children will not have better healthcare, nutrition, access to information, etc than we do?
I don't know who "we" is here, but it's reality for people who spent 20 to 30 years at a manufacturing facility that was then outsourced and who now live in a town with no significant business, whose kids' only hope is to use college to boost themselves into an in demand career, but that involves moving to a HCOL area where they now have to sink a significant amount of money into their land purchase (house) to establish themselves, away from the rest of their family.
>If we don't, then what justification is there for agitation?
I don't know what other sources of information you want, but I know pretty much everyone in my parents' generation got married, had kids, raised families, and now the number of people that are coupled up is around half in my family and friends, and those with kids by mid 30s is even lower, maybe a third.
There's shortages of healthcare providers in rural areas because no one wants to live there, there's more and more competition for in demand areas as everyone tries to get in before they can't afford it.
This is all volatility. This didn't happen when everywhere was growing, but this happens when you have a divergence, and you're either on the upswing or the downswing.
This seems to disregard the trememdous advances in all the fields of healthcare made in the last 40 years. Treatments are readily available for diseases which were previously death sentences. Treatments that were prohibitively expensive in 1980 are cheaply available today. Once we factor this into our analysis I don't think anything has stagnated.
> whose kids' only hope is to use college to boost themselves into an in demand career
What about trade school? There's a shortage of construction labour and skilled trades throught the country.
> have to sink a significant amount of money into their land purchase (house) to establish themselves, away from the rest of their family
I don't recally anyone being forced to buy houses. Plenty of folks raise families in apartments. I myself was raised in one. Yes when you live in a metropolis you can't afford as much space. And?
> and now the number of people that are coupled up is around half in my family and friends, and those with kids by mid 30s is even lower, maybe a third.
And how much of this would you attribute to people making different choices and having different priorities? How would you control for people's willingness to be poorer and still have children?