What? Not even remotely close. John D Rockefeller was shrouded in wealth about 100 years ago. If you think the poorest, homeless person now stuck on the streets lives better than Rockefeller did, you're confused.
Do not conflate general human progress of what's available with more knowledge, science, and basic technology with what a time period normalized standard of living looks like. You can't attribute economics directly with progress (it is a factor but not the only factor), otherwise you could very easily make a valid argument for an authoritarian government and economy like you see in China. China is arguably just as technologically advanced as the US.
Now your middle income American might be considered as living better than Rockefeller depending on how you define quality of life. They have all the essentials they need to survive and access to more progress than Rockefeller did during his time period. They also have significantly less free time and less resources to explore the current space of possibilities whereas in the early 1900s, someone like Rockefeller had access to anything they wanted to do during that time period.
>Do not conflate general human progress of what's available with more knowledge, science, and basic technology
You seem to imagine that these things magically just appeared. They were created because humans with money invested in them.
>China is arguably just as technologically advanced as the US.
China stole every single thing it had from the US. They have developed almost zero technology. (You could very nearly say the same for Europe, though they are less socialist than China and so have developed some things on their own - barely). This is always the way. Countries with authoritarian, dominating governments never develop anything - they can't. They can only steal and destroy, they can't create. Individuals develop new things and push humanity forward and only countries that empower individuals can create.
You need to ask the question about why humans have progressed so much, and why all that advancement happened in certain places only and not others.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you really saying all that R&D spending in other countries is going towards copy-pasting stuff made in the US?
Yes. I can barely think of any examples to the contrary. 90% of technology being used around the world today was developed in the US. More importantly, R&D money spent by governments usually amounts to absolutely nothing. R&D spent by private companies can be ground breaking, or it can just be a nonsense tax break, or it can be spent learning to reproduce what others have already invented.
So simply looking at R&D spending is pretty useless. Instead look at the results.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/11/politics/millennials-income-s...
As a side note, I personally know some former FEE writers, and they left because the editors wouldn't give a fair shake to facts that went against the world view they were trying to push. One of them actually went from being a FEE writer style libertarian to being a socialist over the whole thing.
Americans like to talk about how dirt poor Mexico is, but it is actually richer than plenty of Eastern European countries. Not to mention pretty much all of Africa, which sends refugees and illegals across the Mediterranean.
If you look at income mobility across different countries you will find that the US has quite bad income mobility. The US ranks below old class societies such as Britain.
I'm not sure if you're being hyperbolic or not but innovation is often cited as the thing that improves people's lives. You might say that innovation requires investment but there have been many examples of poor people, without outside investment, innovating to make people's lives better.
What examples?
Just to pick up on the income mobility. The US is one of the worst countries regarding income mobility while at the same time one of the ones implementing the most "trickle down" economic policies [1]. The contrast is particularly stark when comparing to the Scandinavian countries, which get often called "socialist" in the US. So by your own metric, trickle down does not work, because it leads to worse outcomes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...
What makes people’s lives better is services being rendered for mutual benefit.
Investment does play a role in facilitating this but mostly because our monetary system is set up in a way that investment is necessary to service outstanding debt. It could be different.
Whether or not is is, or ever was a a thing -- it absolutely was the unquestioned gospel among U.S. conservatives (and most definitely a staple in the rhetoric of the Reagan administration) in the 80s-90s, and continues to suffuse the current debate, albeit in other guises -- "income mobility" -- up through the current day.
First, income inequality doesn't measure income mobility. Places like the US that have a huge number of unskilled illegal and legal immigrants constantly entering at the bottom level will always have high income inequality. The question is, what happens to each individual over the course of their lives?
83% of Americans will earn more than their parents. 73% of Americans will spend at least 1 year in the top 20% of income earners in their lifetime.
https://fee.org/articles/income-mobility-data-show-america-s...
Also, there is no such thing as "trickle down economics", that is an insult leveled by critics of the idea you should let people spend and invest their own money rather than the government. The results speak for themselves and are astounding. The poorest person alive in a first world country today lives better than the richest 100 years ago. This was all because of investment. Clearly investment, or "trickling down" (as its critics like to call it) isn't just effective, it is the only thing that works to make people's lives better.