In the current world, where do you think a lot of the capital class is able to get their capital?
Technological progress, and especially the Internet, has made much bigger markets out of what were previously lots of little markets, and now th "winner take all/most" dynamics make it so that where you previously could have, for example, lots of "winners" in every city (e.g. local newspapers selling classified ads), where now Google, FB and Amazon gobble up most ad dollars - I think someone posted that Amazon's ad business alone is bigger than all US (maybe more than that?) newspaper ad businesses.
(Yes, they were printing bibles; radio and TV and the internet originally were going to be educational ...)
Yes, more of this money is going, instead of middle-class workers, straight to the capital class who own the "machines" that do the work people used to do. Except instead of it being a factory that makes industrial machines owned by some wealthy industrialist, the machines are things like Google and AWS and the owners are the small number of people with significant stock holdings.
It's really striking though that a person graduating high school in say, 1970, could easily pick from a number of career choices even without doing college or even learning an in-demand trade, like plumbing, welding, etc. Factory work still existed and had a natural career progression that wasn't basically minimum wage, and the same went for retail. Sure, McDonalds burger flippers didn't expect then to own the restaurant in 10 years, but you could take lots of retail or clerical jobs, advance through hard work and support a family on those wages. Those are the days that are super gone and I totally agree with you both that something has changed for the worse for everyone who's not already wealthy.
Only in certain places, and only mostly due to crazy policies that made housing ridiculously unaffordable. I'm in an area where my barber lives on 10 acres of land he didn't inherit and together with his wife raises two children. This type of relaxed life is possible to do in wide swathes of the country outside of the tier-one cities that have global competition trying to get in and live there, as long as you make prudent choices.
I think 20- to 30-something engineers who have spent their entire adult lives in major coastal cities have a huge blind spot to how middle America lives.
[0]: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...
In general, I'd argue minimum wage jobs aren't anymore a stepping stone to some sustainable good job; they're basically viewed like consumables by companies. Even someone with a decade of experience, say, at several retail stores or restaurants, can't expect to be offered a position making $50,000 a year plus benefits just for having done his job well every day. By contrast, a dedicated factory worker with a decade of experience 50 years ago could expect to have advanced somewhat, and would expect continued advancement. Today everyone working in retail, restaurants, etc. all know that if they're going to do any better it's going to be by leaving that sector, via learning a trade, going to college, or perhaps founding their own small business. All things which were good options in the past too, but advancement was once a realistic expectation too.
The only situation I can imagine would be if the wife has a government job with extremely generous health insurance subsidies.
There’s always another appointment lined up before and after mine, so I guess he’s pulling 6 figures without much sweat.
I live in the principal city of the local Metropolitan Statistical Area; it's by no means a big city, but it's representative of many small cities around the country. My barber lives out in the county, outside of city limits, where it is much more rural and one can indeed buy 10 acres for not a whole lot of money.
I believe his wife is a schoolteacher; I don't believe public employee benefits are especially generous in this state.
Ask them what their deductible/oop max, and how they get that insurance, and I bet you will have your answer for how your friend can afford to raise a family of 4 as a barber and buy and live on 10 acres of land. I doubt a 2 barber couple could pull it off. The security/benefits of one half of a couple being a government employee is pretty valuable.
Bet you can get the same for less than $20 within 3 miles (and possibly far less).
I paid $10 for my last haircut ($6 two months ago - thank you, Joe Biden). Luckily there's another shop nearby that still charges $5.
I’m not just paying for a haircut, it’s an experience that’s worth every penny.
This isn't specific to cities.
In fact, people in rural areas are worse impacted, because the rise of Walmart, Dollar General, and others funnel money out of their towns that would have otherwise enable many local families to capture the profits from local spending. Today a lot of that spending goes mostly to those companies, and only a fraction of the money stays, in the form of a few low-wage jobs.
I'm not saying it's impossible to not live in poverty. I'm just saying it's much much harder, because "advancement" is obsolete in a lot of occupations where it used to be a thing.
Isn't this rather a strong argument for the claim that what high school as of today teaches is a strong mismatch with what the labour market demands? In other words: the pupils are taught skills for many years of their life that are rather worthless for the job market.
Why won't tradesman cut their prices?
But high school and college both got dumbed down, and now an education at a state university is comparable to high school in the first half of the twentieth century.
School teaches everybody to read, write and reason about things in general to a decent level. You can't teach high school kids the basics of all the careers out there beyond stuff that's generally applicable - you wouldn't have the time or the equipment. And schools do often have elective shop, cooking, electronics etc classes for those who want to do them.
Ha, those were cut from school before I was in high school decades ago.
I don't think UBI is the solution. Nor is squeezing people more than they are being squeezed. Efficiency and productivity are good things. What is wasteful are things like make-work programs like the DMV or other govt office. That crap needs to be automated away. Hospitals need more funding. Schools are unclear. I think schools would benefit from privatization. I don't think the same of hospitals. Not sure why.
Today, that's close to impossible unless you take student loans, go through the gauntlet of getting a higher paying job, and then have to grapple with home prices assuming you don't live in a place with reasonably affordable home ownership.
If you think the DMV and government offices are "make-work" then we need to start with cutting military spending because it's the biggest "make-work" government program we have that the vast majority of U.S. spending goes to.
[0] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
We can't change mandatory spending or we have millions of elderly people dying because social security vanishes into thin air.
Some people call it a Ponzi scheme, but it’s a pool, as designed.
The military is a big jobs program and all the industrial support generates a lot of economic activity. Better if they just dropped it in the ocean, though. Too much temptation to test it.
And outside of electronics a lot of physical-goods/land stuff is less attainable in many places in the country anyway.
The problem with non-redistributive approaches is that generational wealth rarely goes away. So if you don't have it, the number of people who don't have to try to out-spend you for whatever you want only goes up as time passes.
I'm pretty sure the latter 3 are more important to standard of living than the former.
Ergo, I believe your claim that standard of living is superior to 1970 is false. Having a shiny iPhone to distract you from the fact that you're homeless, sick and starving is not a step up.
[0] https://mpost.io/wp-content/uploads/975d2151-7def-45a4-8c52-...
Well, we (in the US), have slowly been privatizing them and it’s bad! If you look at test results though, it’s great! Because private charter schools can drop underperforming students before the end of the term and artificially inflate their numbers. There are many more reasons that education with a profit motive isn’t better than without. I suggest maybe reading up on this before casually suggesting how you think we should radically erode our institution.
Consider the elephant in the room:
https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...
Where does that money come from?
The government spent it.
I submit that it is not hyperbole to say that probably 95% of all global human problems can have their root cause traced to poverty. That is not a scientific number, so don't ask for a citation (it ain't happening).
Anyone who only has the skills to affect the lives and/or environments of the people in their immediate surrounding are going to find themselves on the 'have nots' end of the spectrum in the coming decades.
But looking back further - ohhhhhh yeah dude. Oh yeah. Totally. For a brief period my mom worked at a BofA facility that _processed paper checks_. Like they had a whole big office for it. That's completely 100% gone now. The checks get scanned at the point of entry (cash registers, teller counters, etc) and then shredded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942
In short the Federal government broke the individual laborers and labor unions to make sure they could afford to win World War 2.
Yes this tech may not eliminate jobs, but the jobs remaining will be indefinite less skilled easier to replace, or outsource
I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality?
Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared shared profits more widely due to benevolence (it happens), government edict (e.g.; ww2 era), or social/political pressure (e.g., post-war boom).
Fwiw, I think that the mid-20th century build up of the middle class was an anomaly (sadly), and perhaps we are just reverting to the norm in terms of capital class and worker class extremes.
I see tons of super skilled folks still getting financially fucked by the capital class simply because there is no real option other than to try to attempt to become part of the capital class.