Who's "we"? The world as a whole has experienced rapidly growing real earnings throughout the last 50 years. Real earnings worldwide have doubled since 2001 alone! [1] Of course, most of the growth has happened in developing countries (where, honestly, it's most needed) rather than in rich countries where you and I live. But even in rich countries real earnings are rising, just more slowly. [2]
> In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people
Only in the rich cities, not in poor rural areas. And that's because homelessness is a result almost solely of high housing prices due to political building restrictions, not low incomes (or mental illness or drug use). [3] Increasing incomes won't actually decrease homelessness significantly - higher income just means housing prices will have to rise higher before poor-er people are forced out. The same number of people will be forced out either way, because a fixed number of housing units can accommodate a roughly fixed number of people, meaning that everyone additional person has to leave.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...
Real dollars and wages have not increased a lot... for the average citizen, but has increased tremendously for those with more skills. Nevertheless, the average citizen does have more purchasing power compared to their rough equivalent ~50 years back. The main culprits of rising costs is healthcare, housing, and education. Housing has performed it's worst effect on the average American over the last 2 years, but before that was quite steady in relative cost to the average income. Food, entertainment, clothing, transportation, and communication are now much more affordable, inflation over the last 2 years has also put a dent into the relative cost to the average income, but nevertheless still better now than previous.
What solutions are there for the average American? Take advantage of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, learn new skills and drive forth competition. Stagnant industries will have to adapt or they will die.
I don't think reality is quite so dire. There's not a lot that can convince me, I'm well aware of wage stagnation, I'm well aware of inflation YoY, I'm well aware that the average American is hurting quite a bit over the last 2 years. But in the long run, the average American is doing OK, and will be doing OK. Hopefully, OK turns into GOOD and thriving. Happy to be proven wrong though.
Assuming you are US based, you will notice that the nationalized health services are slowly going bankrupt or worse, losing all their doctors. Even still, the per capita expenditure on health care in Western countries is an exponential. Giving credit to the nationalized systems, they managed to constrain it to perhaps n^1.6 instead of n^2, but it's still not a problem with "capitalism" directly, as it affects health systems with no meaningful concept of private business.
How does progressive thought deal with people wanting to spend enormous amounts of money on increasingly more advanced Healthcare as they age, and those costs being hidden such that nobody realizes how much money that is?
It appears that the American system has replicated the failures of communist planning - nobody know how much anything should cost!
Perhaps the nationalized systems were able to perform better, for a time due to having very smart people trying their best to work it out - but this even is starting to become unglued.
A proper progressive answer to this cannot be to nationalize more Healthcare, as that is failing the metric used to criticize the private system. More slowly, admittedly - but still failing.
If all talk about the way capital markets improve the world is the "neoliberal gospel", there needs to be an answer for these problems that don't rely on sovereign wealth funds or extremely creative central bank manipulation.
It's funny how this is so widely recognized, yet at the same time we like to claim that college, which also started gaining in popularity 50 years ago, will increase your earnings...
There's an expansive gulf of misery before you hit the Christian Children's Fund commercial, 5yo w/rickets starvation. I assure you that you have absolutely no clue what it looks like and what you've seen hasn't told you what you think it has.
Sure, drug addiction is a giant problem in the US, but you were correct to second guess your take. Reducing the most dire portion of the US's housing crisis to drug addiction is flabbergastingly reductive. You should start by trusting information from people who have meaningfully studied housing in the United States.
> Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the United States, most smuggling now takes place via Mexico.
> Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors — and increasingly pre-precursors — from China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.
it's hard to even get (direct) fentanyl precursors from China .. but those that have the knowledge in both India and Mexico can start further down the chain and get "pre - precursors" to produce fentanyl to smuggle into the US.
(2022) [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/china-and-synthetic-drugs...
(2020) [2] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...
We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years, despite massive increases in productivity. In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people, those individuals have not magically captured any of the productivity gains of the 21st century, in fact they're probably unemployed because the low skill job that would've existed now has been automated.
Trickle down economics is such a farcical scam made by those who benefit from it, it makes me unironically proud of my country's propaganda machine that people are drinking the neoliberal gospel so hard, it'll make the next few decades a lot funnier.