One is the old fashioned poverty you bring up. It exists, it sucks. A lot of people are struggling.
Another one is people that technically have all they need but spend money they don’t have on things that they don’t really need. This leads to being stuck “working hard” and for working longer than you would normally do (since you don’t really have a choice - you’ve gotta pay that loan)
Those people are, at the least, one layoff away from a reset that puts them in the former category.
Roughly half of US salary earners, per BLS:
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...
(Though that includes students with summer jobs; still a lot though.)
And there's a thousand books out there that prove that folks on the flip side aren't really any happier than those in poverty. Living a life devoid of purpose is just as soul-sucking as living a life of poverty. Perhaps more so.
Homelessness and making money to feed oneself is a significant problem in the world's wealthiest nation. Yet surely we produce more than enough food to feed all of North America. China has also shown the world it can drive construction along to the scale of building 20 to 30 Manhattans in a few decades. Yet the US can't? Why? Something smells rotten I think it's capitalism.
That's funny. I think it's government interference artificially supporting monopolies and bad incentive structures.
The 2008 bailouts as an example of propping up companies that deserved to fail and corn/wheat subsidies that generate junk food as an example of bad incentives.
I'd argue this with the context of macroeconomics. Our lives do nothing but fold back on themselves. Production becomes consumption. When production increases, consumption has to come along with it. Surplus production leads to joblessness. Surplus consumption creates a class of working poor. Society has many types of products, and we end up with joblessness and insufficient pay at the same time.
People have jobs, but society in general, doesn't seem to have a job. The purpose of our institutions is to serve people ("which" people is a question), not to organize those people for a goal.
This isn't just an existential statement. Our institutions don't have the mechanisms for this. Because of that, it lacks mechanisms to efficiently provide for its people too. By targeting zero excess economic production, we beg for inefficiencies wherever people are provided for. Housing, education, health care, even service work... all of these naturally WANT to be inefficient because balance has to be maintained. Within that system, inequality is a death sentence for the republic.
I know I'm going to leap back decades but maybe there's still a thing worth considering here: old recordings of Groucho Marx's "Your Bet Your Life" have been oozing into my YouTube feed lately.
(Fascinating all that is out there that can innocently scroll past your gaze. Click on it just once! and expect a tidal wave of the same.)
At first I was drawn in by the truly off-color sexual innuendo of the host — something I was not expecting from television of the 1950's. (I fully expected the 1950's sexism on parade however.)
But what started to fascinate me more and more were the ordinary occupations and the lives of many of the guests on "Your Bet Your Life". To be sure there were wanna-B-film stars and other minor celebrities, but Groucho appears to have also had plenty of men (and women) "off the street".
What menial working class work they performed in the suburbs of Los Angeles County. One guy's job is to milk cows (with an electric milker). Another woman's husband drives a fertilizer truck. A guy sells vacuum cleaners door to door.... Like sitting in the DMV, you saw a strange cross section of working class America from the 1950's.
But the men had wives, children, homes. I'm not so sure the there was a lot of upward mobility for these (primarily) men bread winners. But when home, car, family were within reach of a modest, blue-collar existence, maybe they didn't care as much.
"I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war... Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
What proportion of 'this' sentiment is echoed by that quote? "Tyler" seems to indicate that this is a marketing problem - expectations not aligning with reality. It's a mixture of hard work, consumption and advertising. The question I propose, what proportion of this sentiment can be attributed to falsely attributing financial success (aka 'things') to a better life? That's not to say money isn't important, it's just stripping out the consumption element. Never in our life has it been so apparent how little we have compared to others (thanks Instagram) - is it possible the crux here is that our 'internal expectations' have risen exponentially while reality moves linearly?