Historically, because the alternative is worse -- literally starving. For most of modern capitalism, most men had such jobs, because they had no choice.
I haven't listened to/read the piece, does he go into how these people survive? Are they doing black/grey-market semi-legal or illegal stuff (which I'd actually consider "working", even if they don't get counted in the visible labor force), or getting government benefits, or living off savings, or what?
Here's the section that I think answers your question:
> Who’s paying for this? Well, again, if we look at government numbers, it looks like it’s friends and family, meaning girlfriends, other family members, and Uncle Sam. Disability insurance programs pay some benefits for more than half of these unworking men, it seems. Disability benefits do not provide a princely income, let’s be clear about that, but they do allow for an alternative to life in the working world, which is exactly the opposite of the original, and I think quite noble, intention of disability programs, which is to provide for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, couldn’t work.
In fact you might expect there to be more people on disability in 1960, seeing as WWII ended only 15 years before that (PTSD, etc). I suppose that those people simply couldn't get onto disability back then though.
It's like lot of people have simply lost hope.
The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it. No pay, no discretion to make decisions, and your entire management chain feels like they're in the same boat.
Working for a small company where you're treated with respect and given a chance to grow or flexibility or whatever is one thing.
Working for a soulless corporate chain that consistently underschedules so that you're overworked and then writes you up if you want to go see your sick/dying relative is soul draining.
Working for a corporation that refuses to give you a consistent schedule but expects you to come in on your day off to cover someone else is soul draining.
Working for a corporation who will schedule you for 36 hours even though they're short workers because otherwise they might have to actually give you some garbage-tier healthcare is soul draining.
>The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it.
For all of these people complaining about "jobs these days" I would love to hear what period of history they think had it easier.
That does sound like a problem. If this really is a dire problem, then let's start by forcibly disappropriating multi-generational landlords and people with trust funds of their inherited wealth, thereby forcing them to work. If that doesn't free up enough laborers to keep the machine humming, then we can start thinking about carrots and sticks for the ppors.
(I'm not justifying or excusing disability fraud, just explaining what's been happening.)
https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
> There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.
A portion of it is government benefits, but he attributes the majority of it to being taken care of by girlfriends, family members, etc.
I have a lot of sympathy but at some point you have the draw the line between someone needing help and a leech.
Overall this is a very sad state. The author describes it as a train class for a death of despair, which feels accurate. This is far more than an economic issue.
"But the 1984 change “substantially liberalized the disability screening program,” according to economists David Autor of MIT and Duggan in their extensive review of the program. The reforms shifted screening rules from a list of specific impairments to a process that put more weight on an applicant’s reported pain or discomfort, even in the absence of a clear medical diagnosis. In addition, workers could qualify if they had multiple conditions that affected their ability to work, even if none of the conditions was disabling on its own.
Not surprisingly, more and more workers were awarded disability benefits based on ailments that relied more on patient self-reporting and that often were not easily diagnosed independently. For example, “musculoskeletal and connective tissue” problems, which includes back pain, accounted for just 17 percent of new enrollees in 1981, but 33 percent in 2010. The share of awarded benefits based on mental disorders — ranging from schizophrenia to mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder — climbed from 10 percent in 1981 to 21 percent in 2010. Mood disorders alone now account for 15 percent of all workers currently on disability.
Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found, is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s, because of the way initial benefits are calculated. That’s particularly true at the lower end of the income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of income replaced by the disability program climbed from 68 percent in 1984 to 86 percent in 2002 among lowerincome men aged 50-61. A possible indicator of the effect this has had, Autor and Duggan note, is that “the increase in [SSDI] enrollment during the last two decades was largest for those without a high school degree.”
https://www.lexissecuritiesmosaic.com/gateway/FEDRES/SPEECHE...
Yes throughout all of human history you had to do some sort of labor to not die, I'm not disputing that. However until very, very recently you weren't forced to sell your labor to survive.
The current state of needing to sell your labor to survive is unprecedented even in relatively modern time. During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did. During the great depression not nearly as much of our individual survival had been commodified: nearly every family could hunt, farm, create clothing they needed, maintain their home, and cook their food (something surprisingly many people cannot do any more).
The commodification of nearly all aspects of our material lives means today we are much more dependent on Capitalists than ever before in history.
I think for the average person the tradeoff has been very positive - look at life expectancy and health outcomes from any point in history versus today. Just look at the incidence of famine in Europe historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Europe
For sure there are philosophical, etc. questions that come up - but they are decidedly higher on Maslow's hierarchy than basic survival. If the old state of things were so appealing - people have the option to go back and start their own farm. Almost nobody does.
The fact that people glorify (or wear rose colored glasses about) how things were in the past is just exemplary of the bubble we are all living in.
The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
This is healthier for a society, not because of any high moral vision, but simply because the collapse of the ruling class does not mean the fundamental destruction of everyone. Peasants know how to till the land with or without a king.
Today when have an unprecedented interdependence of the two classes. For example this is fundamentally incorrect:
> people have the option to go back and start their own farm.
A select few individuals do have this option, but all of society cannot return to an agrarian system because we do not have the resources for a population of our scale to live off the land without the massive industrial system required to maintain modern agriculture. Billions of people would die in this case.
This interdependence is particularly troubling due to the inherent nature of the ruling class to seek to exploit the labor class. Though it is to the short term advantage of the capitalist class, in the long run it threatens all of industrial civilization. We are quite literally seeing the consequences of this right now.
I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on.
Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.
But I get your point that initially there were still people -- in the USA -- surviving by owning their own farm not selling their labor, and that this number has continued to decrease. But yes, I think that's precisely the nature of modern capitalism, to decrease this number. (and the number was initially much higher in the USA than, say, Europe, largely because non-elite immigrant settlers were able to avail themselves of "available" land, something not available to the otherwise "working classes" in Europe...)
In any event, it would be suprising if today most of these non-working men were supporting themselves by subsistence farming and foraging/hunting, indeed.
> During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did
We need to be careful about being slippery with these categories though. Some of those people who "worked on farms" historically were, in fact, selling their labor -- and from GP, "working for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings" in pretty dire conditions. And prior to 1865, many of the people in the USA who "worked on farms" were enslaved in forced labor, which is not in fact "selling your labor", but it's of course worse in all respects.
According to the article, everything from government checks to money from spouses/friends. One would have to assume some criminals are included as well, but I'd guess there aren't too many statistics covering people's illegal side gigs.
Anyone know of large polls attempting to measure these sentiments over the course of at least a few decades?
The American dream isn’t dead, a decent chunk of people are just demoralized.
Otherwise? Poverty in the US gets intense real fast
The U.S. certainly has issues and disparities and everything else. But it has vast vast benefits that you can only understand if you've lived somewhere else for a while.
That said, Europe probably does a better job at creating a more liveable society, at least since WWII.
But even by objective standards. I actually feel it for working poor, especially immigrants - they don't get much help because US welfare state is completely out of whack. But non-working poor with free healthcare because hospitals have to treat them, food stamps and tons of private food charity, section 8 and other housing help, etc.? By world standards they live in luxury and they deserve none of it.
What a disgusting thing to say
What a disgusting thing to say
Also: but is it true?
Like, sure, it's a step up from "100% of serfs died a serf", but it's not good, either. It's certainly not "the American Dream". Maybe try "the Danish dream".
One person who puts in weeks or months of dedicated searching may find an apartment within an hour's commute of their job that they can afford or a good deal on a used car. Such opportunities do not exist for everyone even if everyone expended the same amount of work.
We all know the answer here, but it’s taboo for whatever reason
This may or may not be true within some circles, but it is absolutely not true for American society as a whole. The majority (~2/3) of households own their home.
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/home-ownership-ra...
Warning: Bad graph callout. The graph there is not 0 based for its Y-axis, and the fluxuations look a lot bigger than they actually are, but I haven't found any with better graphs.
If this is the case, then to me this data simply illustrates that up to 2/3 of American households were able to obtain bank loans. Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but recent history has shown us that being able to obtain credit doesn't necessarily mean you can afford the underlying thing.
It definitely does, but most people don't lose their homes. Even in 2008.
Actually the swing from the absolute high of 2005 to the low of 2016 is only ~6% of the population owning their homes (never goes below 60%).
Longer term graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
Now, might some people have to downsize? Absolutely. Some people are absolutely living beyond their means. That being said, mortgages are pretty safe. If you get one, there's a real good chance you will end up owning your home at some point. The problem with mortgages in 2007/2008 were that people were taking higher risks and trying to chop up the numbers in a semi-fraudulent way (and in several cases, blatantly fraudulent).
Where did this 0 based graph fallacy originate? There is nothing magical about 0, and in many graphs it doesn't make sense to show at all.
Do you criticize atmospheric CO2 plots because they don't start at 0 CO2 which hasn't been the case for billions of years?
Do you think you should plot human body temperature reading with 0 in which the human body is more than frozen?
Should BRK-A stock movements always be plotted from 0?
The limits of a chart should be scaled to the meaningful realistic values, and it's okay to have the bottom and top of the chart be some epsilon smaller/lager than the highest magnitude observed extremes. This has the nice visual property of conveying "near the top or bottom means it's more extreme".
Home ownership has never realistically been close to 0, showing zero to hide the fluctuations is not "more honest", it's less so. Most meaningful data cannot be visualized and understood correctly if you assume that all charts should have zero.
be it a private business or a public one, it typically is owned by a (large) group of shareholders, who put their hard earned money including retirement savings into those evil companies and just trying to get a better return than CDs in the bank after they spent (lots of) time to study about the market, or spent money to hire specialists. And yes there are lots of risks associated with that move, many of them lost money in the end.
These evil corps are not Satan sitting somewhere in the darkness counting for the money they just stole, they're just a proxy for tens of millions of ordinary people to invest like you and me.
yes some individuals are earning way more than the rest, they're typically taxed half of that away in the end, maybe they should be taxed more. The fact is still, about 50% never pay federal tax, and the top 1% earner paid 26% of all the taxes, how far can that go?
I'm a regular worker and I lost investment in those evil big guns all the time, I just never understand why people blame the 'evil corps' for all the troubles while those people might have bought quite a lot stocks investing in those evil entities themselves, it looks me to you're cursing yourself.
Between a communist utopia and an unregulated greedy-driven capitalism nation, here is what we got, not optimal but works better than average. Neither big corps are evil nor poor people are lazy will be able to fix the problems. There is still hope if you keep working hard to fulfill your dreams in US, the worst is doing nothing and blaming all the faults to the system, the big companies, the rich, the COVID...it will make things worse.
Companies create exactly what we people need.
Well it certainly helps. IQ has always been the biggest predictor for future income though.
In fact, in my case, I accumulated capital in spite of my hard work, not because of it.
How do you get a high paying job? You identify the requirements and work hard towards them. Did you do that?
You can make $30k/yr making $14.42/hr @ 40 hours a week. Spend the extra 30 skilling up. When you make so little hourly, it doesn't even pay much to work more. Spend that time improving your skills instead.
Seattle: $2334 (almost 30K/year) Boston: $3774 (more than 30K/year) Des Moines, IA: $982 (a significant chunk)
Plus healthcare. Plus utilities. Plus food. On and on. Skilling up won't do much if you're not networking, and that costs time and money too. The bootstraps discussion doesn't work in the real world.
Oh, and don't forget to somehow go out and date, find a partner, and have tons of kids (and pay for them somehow) because as the bootstraps-evangelists point out, we need the labor force and our entire economy is based on an assumption of population growth.
The gist of it is that you have to put in effort. If you put in a lot of effort towards increasing your income over a long period of time, you're almost always going to see signficant results.
COL in Seattle and dating is irrelevant to whether or not putting in more effort tends to increase your income. You're demoralized, we get it.
Is that actually up for debate? Do you believe it's actually getting worse, or do you have data to back that up?
Last I saw economic mobility was alive and well in the US.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2021/10/2...
Young people should leave high cost of living cities. Housing is still affordable across most of the US.
The opportunities these cities once held have been destroyed by real estate hyperinflation.
That and I'm not just talking about rural areas. There are dozens of medium sized cities with fairly affordable housing, especially in the Midwest. Texas isn't bad either if you stay away from tech exodus hotspots and trendy/posh areas.
Try just doing a nationwide job search with salaries adjusted for housing cost.
It also limits your mobility dramatically. By working in a HCOL city, even if I'm struggling to save, I'm maxing out my 401(k) plus match and more every year. If I want, I can do that for a while and then move to somewhere cheaper. My family in the midwest, despite saving enough for an incredibly comfortable retirement there, couldn't purchase a home anywhere within 1.5 hours of Seattle if they wanted to move there now.
Medium sized would be places like Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Phoenix, etc. Austin used to be high on that list before it got inflated.
You also have to be a specific kind of person (like me) that wants to do outdoorsy things to live outside the major cities.
As for starting your own business, why not? There's plenty of demand for welding services right now.
No, hard work does result in success, but you just have to do the actual hard work part. I have never, ever met somebody who works really hard who isn’t rapidly seeing their life improve.
Some other lessons to take from first generation immigrants:
1) Focus on your family.
2) Traditional values are traditional because they work.
Don’t get caught into the contrarians trap of believing that conventional wisdom is wrong.
“Ackshually working hard doesn’t work” is demonstrably wrong. You may just have to do some work that isn’t very fun.
I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.
You're right that working yourself to the bone will improve your quality of life if you start from the very bottom.
You're wrong in that many people are in an lower to middle class life cycle and no amount of working hard will improve their situation.
I wish people just spent more time around these communities they want to talk about. If you’re honestly going to tell me that you’re spending time around working class first generation immigrants, (my experience is working specifically with Mexicans) and not seeing a very strong obvious positive correlation between hard work and success, then I just frankly don’t believe you.
What do you think this signals to people? That he may be conservative.
> I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.
Yeah and you could work really hard for free and not scrape by at all. It's not that all hard work results in higher income, it's that working hard __to raise your income__ tends to raise your income.
This is the same crowd that told all food service workers to "get a real job" and then go out and complain that Starbucks is having trouble retaining workers.
that's a ridiculous statement and doesn't belong here. Hard work is required for success but not all hard work will lead you there. You have to know where to work hard and that comes from identifying and fighting for opportunities. Lots of first gen immigrants do this very well. If didn't work hard to leverage opportunities presented to them then they wouldn't be first-gen immigrants to begin with.
Obvious to who? The unemployment rate is really low, and certainly the average person who has a high-paying job is someone who had a lower-paying job before and worked their way up (either via hard work on the job, at education, at networking, at entrepreneurship, or some combination of those).
This sounds like weird dystopian ideological stuff.
> Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
What are "starvation wages" in your view? The bureau of labor statistics says that the median wage for a 35 to 64-year-old man in the US is around $1300 per week, or $67,600 per year. My family of six spends about $250-$350/wk on groceries, even at a higher-end store. Those seem pretty far from "starvation" wages.
What's the old saying? Figures don't lie but liars figure? Like I said, the liars have been working on these figures literally for decades now. I think we've been covering up the damage brought about by Nixon's unilateral dismantling of the Bretton Woods Agreement.
The second change I believe was made during the first Bush administration and that was to include in the U.S. GDP those goods manufactured abroad so long as they were manufactured by American corporations or American-owned corporations. Suddenly the manufacturing GM was doing in Mexico and Ford was doing in Canada counted as U.S. GDP. The reason given for this change was the manufacture of goods that contributed to the bottom line of American corporations listed on American markets improve the health of American markets and thus the American economy. Critics pointed out this hid the amount of American manufacturing being moved overseas.
We can debate back and forth whether these changes are reasonable but one thing is clear - when comparing historical GDP numbers you're necessarily comparing apples to apples.
"The average monthly expenses among all households totaled $5,253, or $63,036 annually. That's up 3% from 2018."
That's not much of a margin for error or opportunity for savings. If you're dual-income, child care will eat up the entire second income. Most couples I know having children these days have one parent quit their job and stay home, even if they were in an otherwise lucrative field such as software and especially if they're in anything else such as teaching, retail, warehouse, etc.
But let's assume you weren't. $1300 per week adds up to $5,633 per month. If you're comparing that to average monthly expenses of $5,253, that means the average household has $400 left over per month. That's a savings rate of around 7%, which is actually higher than the measured U.S. average of about 3%.
Here's the kicker - they adamantly believe the Republican talking point that providing massive tax cuts to the 1% will somehow improve the quality of life for the remaining 99%, i.e. them. They've bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I used to argue with them but now I don't bother. I reckon if they haven't been able to work out cause and effect during the past four decades then they likely never will. The sad thing is not a single one of them will be able to retire, they're all going to have to work until the day they die. They pray they don't get sick because then they have no income and they would have even more bills to pay.
This is the reality of a huge swath (majority?) of Americans and Americans refuse to look this problem in the eye and acknowledge its existence. Much less do anything about it. It seems as though if you're not in this boat then you're taking everything not nailed down before this ship goes down.
I just figure things are going to get worse before they get better. You don't even want to know how bad I think things will get before we have a national Come to Jesus moment and turn this ship around. It's the stuff of my nightmares.
Hard to win them over while demonizing them non-stop.
1) Housing price-to-income ratio in the US is low by the developed world standard, and has not increased much faster than inflation over long term before the last 2-3 years, when it went noticeably up... not due to corporations.
2a) Massive corporations provided railroads, utilities, etc. well before the government started regulating them and taking over certain responsibilities. I can maybe grant you clean water.
2b) Education funding, even adjusted by inflation, has increased massively over time.
3) De-policing results in much more suffering, especially among minorities. While to an extent any police force is basically a gang currently in control, the alternative - as literally any collapsing society from Ethiopia to post-Soviet Russia to parts of current Mexico show - is a different gang, and as far as these things go US police at least generally do their job, and police brutality is a minor, statistically insignificant issue blown out of proportion by activists. Look up numbers.
4) " the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident" - except pretty much all of history, and most modern countries. While not a factual error, I like how accumulating wealth by a large number of people is conflated in the same sentence with a few criminals, to taint it. A typical trick of malicious propaganda.
5) Very strong and non-quantified statement comparing an improbable anecdote with another improbable anecdote. Don't know what data would disprove this, but basically a lie.
6) "Starvation" wages in the US are some of the highest in the world, and disposable income a median American enjoys makes many other developed countries look like "3rd world" countries compared to them in turn.
Of course, as this whole thing develops, US also starts as a ~sole industrial power in the world (with others either undeveloped or bombed into oblivion) with strong demographics, and ends as a much smaller percentage of the world economy (primarily because others develop), and with an aging population. Even in a perfect system you would expect decline in relative standards, so it's actually a marvel how well US is doing so far.
With housing becoming an investment increasingly dominated by cynical corporations with no empathy, only greed, even hard workers have to spend every cent they have with no source of significant savings (other than the death of a relative, not available to most) and not even the illusion that they will ever afford a home or be able to raise a family in a middle class lifecycle.
Massive corporations have been built off American workers and American infrastructure - the regulations and taxes that provide us roads, utilities, clean water, safe food, safety, and more. Since at least the 1980s these corporations have abandoned the belief that they need to give back to or invest in these communities and have gone to great measure to slash worker pay, fight regulations, and tear down the educational systems and social safety nets that enabled America's growth in the twentieth century.
Even safety is far from guaranteed - minorities have known forever that the police are not there to protect them, but it's increasingly apparent to everyone that they're an organized crime protection racket, refusing to discipline or remove abusive cops, refusing to do their jobs and throwing hissy fits at the slightest suggestion that they be subject to any accountability. In cities across the country, the mere suggestion that officers not be allowed to physically abuse people leads to a refusal to go on patrol and no consequences.
Meanwhile, at the very top billionaires accumulate more and more wealth and face no consequences for their actions. Whether it's manipulating financial markets (and being fined far less than you profited) or blatantly stealing and mishandling classified documents and not even being charged, the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident.
Hard work isn't rewarded and is often punished with higher expectations (whether that's an increased quota or a 'manager' title) with no increase in pay. Long gone are the days of joining a company as a janitor with the dream of working your way up; upper and even middle management is an incestuous club who would rather hire someone externally than train someone internal.
Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?