I think there’s multiple buckets here.

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)

I suspect the latter is a minority.

Those people are, at the least, one layoff away from a reset that puts them in the former category.

> Many people live paycheck to paycheck

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.)

Oh my goodness! That's appalling. How is our system so broken?

People want to pretend that it is all about "financial skills". Mostly because they want to blame poorer people who are bad at something because they are good at it and thus get to show off their superiority. It's not about useful skills, it's about the relative difference in skill to support a mental model/world view.

No skill can turn $7.25 into a living wage.

Many less people live like this, however, than 50 years ago. It IS old-fashioned poverty, combined with exponentially increased expectations.

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.

As somebody who bought groceries and diapers on a credit card to survive and now makes ridiculous money at FAANG, I can assure you poverty with a child is a million times worse. A life free of economic anxiety is itself a massive privilege, “happiness” and “fulfillment” aren’t part of the equation if you don’t know if your kids will go hungry, that’s just abject terror.

Yeah influencers aren't the problem but seeing how total productivity improves year by year yet the average wealth of people hasn't just highlights that perhaps we all should be living like influencers. Perhaps that's partially a problem of expectation alignment but I think it's more a problem of distribution of productivity. Jeff bezos can afford a 500 million yacht cause he and his class of people are hoarding a lion share of the productivity gains that should be more fairly distributed amongst the people.

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.

> 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.