Things feel off,but you have (mostly well-off) people talking about how great things are going to be and are. I suspect a lot of this correlates to the stock market.
For the median millenial atleast, whatever you were taught growing up is just the wrong guide to understanding the world today.
I think social media by its very nature, has to be understood inverted. A high number of posts about how great things are suggests otherwise. Comparisons with Europe have gone exponential that tells you more about how the posters feel than anything else...
So whatever you feel - it’s all relative
I'm not from the US but I saw some video of of how some homeless people live in the US, and it's a lifestyle most of the developing world would kill for: dumpster dive for freshly made pizza or quality supermarket produce that's still good just not legal to be sold anymore, all free of charge. If you have a medical issue, go to the ER and get top quality healthcare. Dumpster dive for perfectly usable clothes, computers, etc. That's a luxury life for 80% of the planet.
Not anymore, maybe 20 years ago but many nations developed a lot since then.
Using the second largest economy which has many mega cities you can tour on Google earth and plenty of millionaires and billionaires isn’t really the right comparison. Like using Japan or Germany.
So yeah he said that.
Do you have a source for this ?
It's far more likely to be that teensy-weensy COVID-19 pandemic, both in terms of direct damage and also reduced care for everything else.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/21/cdc-us-life-expecta...
The particular article found opioid deaths lowered life expectancy by 0.67 years, which is a crazy number.
Drug overdose deaths finally seem to be trending down in 2024, but they are still elevated and awful.
Years of life aren't the most important thing. Opiods might reduce life expectancy but increase the averge quality of life of those living in a given year.
If it "costs" $1000 but that's just to get $100 from insurers who only pay 10% and I only have to pay 10% too? Still $1000 to GDP - I think.
That's why bubbles are a problem because they represent a misallocation of real resources. (Especially when they're debt fueled. And crucially so when it's private debt like the typical mortgage.)
But that's why the fiscal multiplier is above one, because public debt is usually cough spent on things that increase productivity, growth, or at least has a positive ROI (eg. regularly screening the mythical token at-risk individuals likely prevents enough very expensive private+public spending, and people will spend that money on things like education or mayhaps even just allows them to have more productive years), etc.
In Germany a life saving brain surgery creates 5K USD of economic activity and the same surgery creates 500K USD of economic activity in the USA.
True story, a YouTuber I'm following recently had her mother operated in Germany and then again in the USA and she made a video about the experience and the numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-p1nP6hH6U
This obsession with GDP isn't healthy, among other obsessions like the "Number of gigantic companies" which is supposed to show that you are falling back in technology if you don't have extremely large companies by market capitalization metric.
It worries me because it's BS and BS can last just till a point. What happens if at one point in the future people start demanding benefiting from all that riches and success? I'm worried because I don't believe in(goodness of?) revolutions and the situation makes me anxious that the west with the US in particular is headed to some kind of revolution. They had one with the last election I guess but the revolutionaries appear to be pushing for the extreme version of the same thing which eventually might collapse with another revolution with the opposite thing like what UK ended up getting Labour landslide after Libertarian landslide.
With any luck, what will happen is that future people will benefit from all those riches and success.
It's like the property market, if everyone has so much money the number of people who can live in Malibu doesn't actually go up. Just the prices of homes in Malibu go up.
Only if you define "the good stuff" as "the best stuff." If you define "the good stuff" relative to a subsistence farming or hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the median person today in a developed country is arguably richer than the richest person in town 50 years ago, the richest person in the country 100 years ago, and the richest person on the planet 500 years ago.
That's strange, revolutions have been the some of the most acute moments that improved things for the world population and brought rights to the common people. I'd definitely not want to live through one because it sucks for those during it, but it's great for those that come after.
Well, sometimes… Sometimes it ends up in a brutal dictatorship until the next revolution, which may or may not end up improving things.
Any benefit, IMHO, comes purely from starting over. Any revolution benefit can be achieved through debt purge, elevating those in precarious state and break any fast feedback loops that led us to that point.
Breaking things is very difficult. The status quo would not be the status quo unless a significant part of the people in power wanted it. This means that there is always a significant resistance to overcome, which requires very strong incentives, which historically tends to be despair or starvation. In other words, revolutions.
> Any benefit, IMHO, comes purely from starting over
So you do see how it improves something :)
As for examples, read a bit of history, they are not hard to find.
I should read some history books of that, surely.
Here, I'll leave you one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
I don't even think you're wrong in your dislike of revolutions, like I said, I was clear in saying I don't want to live through one, but the extreme view that nothing good every happened is simply, blind.
Saying "fucking" isn't throwing a tantrum. Nor is pointing out something as an example of historical illiteracy calling somebody names.
Now that we are on the same page can you present your arguments on how what happened on January 6th is a revolution and how Magna Carta was not brought about by a revolution?
That's a common misconception, but the first three (original, 1830, 1848) French revolutions were failures. They paved the way for future improvements, and established important precedents like human rights and equality... but materially for the average person little changes because of the revolutions. The revolution with the biggest impact in France was undoubtedly the Industrial one, which brought social and economic mobility on a large scale.
When actual peasants revolted, as in the Vendee, the result was what some call a genocide. Against the peasants. By the French Republic.
France continued to see revolutions, "reactions", and Napoleon because the Revolution did not make things better. It was quite some time before that happened for most people.
So I think in general, revolutions are high risk high reward gambles. The rare ones that work out and align with the needs of the population make important strides for humanity, but most revolutions fail or are corrupted and end up a net negative for the society.
It's what you do after that matters. If you keep on repeating the same mistake and never change the systems that led to the political instability in the first place, then you are bound to have the same results.
It doesn’t because the insurer doesn’t pay $500k.
Not to mention that if something costs $10k in the US that costs $5k in Europe, that $5k that doesn’t get spent on something else (which would also increase GDP)
US in-patient costs are about double that of the European average.
An ICU bed that is $1,000 per day in Europe, is around $2,000 in the US.
But the hospital will have a charge master price of $10,000 per day.
Insurance company negotiate agreed charges that are often 80-90% lower.
That’s the number that contributes to GDP.
Anyway, that's another topic and you are right that for the GDP purposes the spent per capita is a good metric. Which is still on the point, the same service costs at least twice as much resulting in useless numbers if you are trying to use GDP as a productivity metric(or anything humane, in fact).
We see a similar thing in Turkey for example when you use PPP(which is supposed to be an improvement). Turkey's PPP is quite high now, meaning that the Turkish lira is strong and on average Turks are supposed to be slightly richer than neighboring EU country Bulgaria. In reality, Turks are miserable because some basic stuff is taxed to extremes and the market is captured by a few groups and to achieve a Bulgarian lifestyle in Turkey you actually have to pay 2X or 3X.
Maybe we just should stop looking and these stats for a proxy to other stuff altogether. They don't work, just use whatever you are looking directly.
What doesn't show up in GDP numbers are cultures where people take their elderly relatives into their own homes and care for them themselves. Same as hiring someone to look after your kids, or taking them to day care, shows up in GDP; while having their grandparents or other family care for the kids while you're off to work does not.
One person's elderly parents never have to worry about being assisted, while the other can only do so if they can afford it. And you're arguing GDP semantics? There is something seriously wrong and sick with this.
There's a reason why healthcare expenditure per capita in the US is multiple times higher than any other OECD country, and why health insurance companies are some of the biggest public ones.
And on a side note because US dollars are the reserve currency and only created in one country they can go shopping around hovering up every asset and resource.
The narrative that we all have peace because of the US is well and truly broken, the propoganda can't cover the smell, it stinks to bad.
The US is so effective that it can force a country that it embargoes (Iran) to sell oil in USD to a country with its own currency (India).
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/10/17/i...
And the US allows articles to be written about China and Saudi Arabia considering buying and selling oil in Yuan, ostensibly to provide cover for the fact that the US is actually forcing both China to buy in USD and Saudi Arabia to sell in USD.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-acceptin...
It couldn’t possibly be that Iran trusts USD to have a more reliable purchasing power than an Indian Rupee, or that Saudi Arabia would rather bet on stability from USD rather than the Yuan.
Changes in currency exchange rates are the best way I know of to get a pulse on what the collective population of the world thinks about what the US offers.
Things like choosing to do business in the US because they overall trust the courts, or investing in US companies because they overall trust the management and SEC oversight. Or even just investing in US land because they trust the internal stability and lack of external threats.
No it isn't, many non-American companies trades in US dollars without anything ever having to do with the USA. The world doesn't change what currency it trades in that easily, people will stick with the dollar until USA screws up majorly, like every previous world currency did.
The continued strength of the USD is just a vote of confidence in the buying power of the USD in the future.
Right, but that buying power comes from buying Chinese goods, so a European likes USD since China accepts it and you can buy stuff from them with it. Nobody buys American so that isn't a factor.
If China stopped accepting USD the demand for the currency would drop like a rock, since it is the main exporter in the world.
China has yuan, Europe has Euro, why can’t they trade that? Clearly, they don’t want each other’s currency, and the best option for both appears to be USD.
(Assuming the premise is true, I don’t know how eurozone countries pay China).
China isn't a free market, the government does strange things for reasons other than maximizing their own wealth. That completely screws over your analysis, companies go to where there is the most profits but undemocratic governments do not.
It is perfectly possible that China does this to weaken the US production industry making it more dependent on Chinese exports since it lets US buy Chinese goods with printed dollars instead of having to deliver anything in return. Then by suddenly ending this agreement it would devastate the US who is now unable to get those goods while China is left with the whole production pie.
> I don’t know how eurozone countries pay China
Europe exports to US and buy China, they are on average trade neutral since USA buys their stuff and they buy Chinese stuff. USA is the source of money and China is the source of goods.
When Will De-Dollarization Happen? Explained by Kishore Mahbubani
Saying the US is preventing other countries from rising in the same thread where people are complaining about US industrial decline is paradoxical, it's precisely those industries were given to developing countries to foster their rise, what the neoliberals underestimated was how that convergence would lead to resurgence of palingentic ultranationalism that is why the world is so unstable today.
There is nothing largesse about US in this "those industries were given to developing countries to foster their rise". If it wanted to help others, it would have helped Africa the most. I can't believe the amount of brainwashing people have undergone.
How the U.S. Uses Wars to Fuel Perpetual Consumption｜Yanis Varoufakis
We've had 40 years of learning hard mistakes, if you believe the Western System is exploitative then the logical conclusion would be that isolation from that system would provide better outcomes, when in reality those that did stagnated. Domestic consumption markets are far too weak initially to drive growth, it's only through the focus on export surplus capacity to sell to open foreign markets that one can provide the impetus for growth.
But that's only possible so in as far the West or really the USA willingly chooses to open it's markets and let it's industries and blue-collar workers decline. From a global perspective, with the assumption that these developing markets would open their markets eventually would have been optimal in providing a path for everyone to develop. Except in reality, many of these countries especially now in the 2020s never intended to open their markets, they're perpetuating the massive trade imbalance with their neomercantalism. Which Varoufakis himself btw points out in The Global Minotaur as unsustainable.
Can you really say the USA is the oppressor in this instance or the victim in maintaining that massive trade deficit? If America decides to go protectionist (which is happening with Trump), the entire damn system collapses and the pathways for development will be closed for future nations.
It's not a question of whether China is building infrastructure or cheap cars for developing nations, it's whether they will be willing to let their industries be gouged by future upstarts. And with economic nationalism, the answer will always be no. And that goes for most of the "global south" for that matter. A zero-sum world for a zero-sum worldview. Compared to that, I would argue that America's attempt at positive-sum world was alot more charitable.
Here’s How America Really Runs Britain | Aaron Bastani meets Angus Hanton
> FED prints dollar. It gives them to BlackRocks of the world.
Sure that create jobs, especially lower-skilled jobs which are important for society. But at the same time they didn't really need to exist. It feels like much like defense spending, it create jobs, but it doesn't create value.
This is the safest period in human history by a huge margin. It may not feel that way given the ultra connected, headline consuming nature of most people these days. But it is true.
Global trade has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else, and that was first enabled by maritime trade which was implicitly secured by the US Navy post WW2. The Internet is the second coming of that, the invention of which was a result of US military spending.
You may think that US defense spending is too high, or take other faults with the US military industrial complex. But to say that it provides no value is uninformed.
There has been almost ten times more victims of conflict in 2023 as in 2005. [1]
And, as you said, we are now a bit more aware of those deaths (although I suspect a large amount occurred in conflicts that don't make western news headlines.)
The number of victims might pale against WWII, of course - but we're slowly arriving at time where WWII is not only "last century", but a "century ago".
I don't think anyone compared the figures of the Vietnam War of the 1960s to the US civil war of 1860s. Or did they ?
Anyway, in the average life span of an average human being with a normal memory, this is more likely to be one of the _worst_ period.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts...
You're talking about an 18 year period...do you know how long human history is?
> average life span of an average human being with a normal memory
I think you entirely missed the point of my comment, which is this: it feels more dangerous. But it isn't.
You're absolutely right that 18-20 years is a small period compared to human history, and that the average person has a lower risk of dying in a conflict than, say a century ago.
However, I argue that 20 years is _huge_ in terms of human _life_. Consider that the median age of the world population is 30 years old ! To most of the people, the way the world was 50 years ago or 100 years ago is as much "abstract" as what the world was 1000 years ago.
However, they remember the 2000s or 2010s. They were there ! And they saw more people fleeing wars or coming back in bodybags recently when they did in their youth. You might consider that only a "feeling" ; but I would think twice before dismissing it as irrelevant, because "it's only a feeling".
I argue that "local" inflexions in the long stream of history still matter. They can ripple in the long run.
The "value" is for the citizens that prefer suburbs style living.
People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.
But don't suburbs have the dependency on cars, and those ugly "stroads", and the "parking lot deserts", and "soulless cookie-cutter housing", etc, etc?!? Yes, all of that is true and detractors can keep piling on more derogatory labels but it still doesn't change the fact that many people really like the suburbs. A lot of USA college kids living in dorms in the middle of a "walkable city" have aspirations of buying a nice house out in the suburbs and hope they can land a high-paying job so they can afford that dream. Why do so many of these young people who have actual experience of living in the city want to get away from that and live in the suburbs?
When housing units are close together (town-homes, multi-unit buildings) the cost of infrastructure (sewer, water, roads, sidewalks, etc.) are shared by more units, and thus by more taxpayers. If the houses are farther apart, the cost per unit goes up.
So its fine if you want to live in the suburbs, be we should have an honest accounting of the costs so suburban households are paying the full price of their spacious lifestyle.
See this StrongTowns post about this issue: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizin...
With regard to the United States, you’re not even close. 80% of the US population live in cities. [0]
[0] https://pac.org/impact/rural-americans-vs-urban-americans#:~....
For purposes of this discussion thread, we're just using "living in the cities" as shorthand for "high-density living with convenient mass-transit and walkable amenities". E.g. downtowns or multi-family housing near the city center where people can walk to the grocery store.
The majority of USA citizens do not live in that arrangement. Instead, most Americans live in areas that depend on cars.
The web page you're citing is using "cities" as shorthand for "downtowns + suburbs i.e. metroplexes" - vs - "rural farms".
Sounds like the suburbs are counted as urban wrt the census.
The simple answer relates to raising kids - both in terms of safety/enrichment and in terms of basic things like school catchment areas, distance to young peoples amenities, and distance to the average friends house based on school catchment.
Suburbs aren't for standard of living, but affordability. You take the most available labour, the most available construction, and connect it with the most available transportation and you get suburbs. All without the need for much effective planning, organization or innovation.
But eventually someone else does those things. And then suburbs are expensive in comparison.
I want more space, both in my home and in my yard, than I can get in the city. I want a 2+ car garage where I can build and drive a go-kart with my kids, fix my own car and have a little workshop to do woodworking.
I want a garden that isn't blanketed by city air, and room for some fruit trees. I want room for a fire pit, and enough trees that I don't have line of sight into my neighbors windows.
I don't want a farm. I don't need country living. Somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 acres is about right for what I want to do, and that means the suburbs.
I live in a Cologne, Germany right now. I have lived in Sao Paulo in the past. Big cities with lots to offer. I know big cities and their conveniences, and they're fine. But for the life I want to live, suburbs offer a better standard of living.
I don't want to rant to much, but most people don't like woodworking. They even less like doing woodworking on their own. It is something they conclude they should do because they can and don't have many alternatives. I'm sure it is covered somewhere online.
Your second point is invalid, as you're arguing against his assumptions. It's only possible to argue againt someone's logic, arguing someones assuptions is the same as calling names. I like woodwork and have alternatives.
I'm not arguing against their assumption. I said most, that isn't them. This is exactly why I didn't want to elaborate, so I won't.
But there's also a difference between surburbs in Germany vs US: In Germany, there's usually some form of public transport in the suburbs. It might be a little inconvenient at times, but you can live without a car. In many US suburbs, it's flat out impossible to live without a car.
I live in an ideal mixed-use walkable neighborhood with a 2.5 car garage (that only holds one electric car). Not every house has that nor should it, but we can certainly build those features for those who want them and maintain walkability and good transit practices alongside mixed use.
The problem with the suburbs isn’t the existence of the single family home, the problem is the zoning and design of the homes.
> Man, this almost made me throw up because your post reaks of selfishness and privilege. Anyways, I hope you're at least aware of your extreme privilege.
This doesn’t convince anyone of anything and it doesn’t help us with building better transit and walkable neighborhoods. When you tell someone that what they want is “extreme privilege” and “selfish” you turn them away from the conversation. Instead we should focus on showing them how their lifestyle isn’t actually incompatible with good urban planning and good transit, because it’s not.
The future of American cities isn’t NYC, which I love and adore. We won’t have the density for that and skyscrapers and that level of density have their own problems too. Instead, we should look at mid-sized European cities and towns as a better model. We may have more single family homes and cars, but we can still build at the appropriate level of density and build different types of dwellings to meet people where they are in their life. Today it’s illegal to build an apartment building, coffee shop, restaurant, or small grocery store in the suburban neighborhood and we can’t build small, affordable units for folks either. This creates pricing imbalances and other issues.
Your close-mindedness of the opinions that others are allowed to have makes me almost want to throw up.
The person you are responding to isn’t displaying a lack of empathy for people that can’t afford to live in the suburbs. They are explaining the very real and understandable reasoning behind a behind their preference.
That’s not selfish and privileged. That’s a preference.
Look, I understand that the fringe groups you might associate yourself with throw around the word “privilege” as an insult at anyone that does something not inline with the group’s thinking, but it’s just not the insult that you think it is outside of those fringe groups.
I've lived in both and prefer the suburb. Inner city has all sorts of issues, from very little space, smokers puffing away as you try to enter/exit buildings, endless harmful noise & smells.
Actually I prefer rural over either of these..So many of the things people love about cities are the things I want to get away from, and would sacrifice a huge amount of income to do so.
The suburbs offer people a little taste of that magic and it's no suprise people want that.
I live in Brussels and every time I welcome new American friends here and show them around, their mind is blown that it’s even possible to live in a city center at an affordable rate within walking distance to groceries, restaurants and activities.
Even in the very heart of the city centre you have full sized German discount supermarkets like Aldi/Lidl, or Asian/E.European foodmarekts. A far cry from the food deserts and bodega pricing endemic in American cities.
Even in the midst of a generational defining housing crisis, in what most people in Ireland would deem unfathomable HCOL, you can buy a 2 bed apartment around 70-80m2 in the CBD for less than €500,000.
https://www.daft.ie/property-for-sale/ireland/apartments?loc...
This is in the middle of the Silicon Docks for example, @ 90m2 with dedicated parking space underground, and a concierge service open 7 days a week. 10 minutes walk to Meta/Google/AirBnB/LinkedIn HQ.
https://www.daft.ie/for-sale/apartment-13-hill-of-down-spenc...
I have friends who left Brussels city and moved out to avoid the high housing CoL, crime and drunk/homeless/junkies.
I feel like you're overselling it.
Mostly 4-6 story tall buildings clustered around a major transportation hub like a metro or train station (which also hosts shops, restaurants and groceries), with row-homes or single-home detached houses farther away.
You happen to have a source for this? This is definitely not the case in many place I lived.
And living in the suburbs here doesn’t mean you have to use your car to buy milk, unlike the US. Stuff is still walking distance there.
Cost of life is average. Belgium is actually pretty great for that. It’s just the weather that’s shit.
Current market price or grandfathered contract?
My kids like to play in our yard. I do woodwork as a hobby. My neighbors spend summer by their pool. I like my privacy. I like quiet and space. I like strong community.
I spent 15 years apartment living all over the world, and couldn’t be happier moving to the suburbs.
It is just apartments are much cheaper and you can often not have a car if you live in an apartment.
Where? Appartements in downtown Munich cost as much as in San Jose but salaries are one third of that.
My ex originally is from there and I used to work there and my colleagues from the Texas office had more purchasing power at local real-estate than their counterparts from the Munich office.
Or just come visit a bit and be another name on the list of Americans who had their mind blown.
I’m not American (but live here), and have lived in Europe and traveled most of it.
This HN hivemind if believing there is one type of person and one type of lifestyle is absolute lazy nonsense. I’m guessing you already know why I don’t need to drive a large pickup truck too?
Just like in America, living in a proper house in Europe does usually mean moving further away from city center into suburbs. The main difference is that those suburbs do have better public transportation.
Not everyone who lives in a city is in a highrise downtown, most aren't. Not everyone that lives in a city is in an apartment. You wouldn't know that by reading this thread. The two options seem to be a large house in the suburbs or a highrise downtown.
It would cost double what I pay for me to live with 1/4 of the space in a city.
I made a pretty intentional decision about what I wanted, and actually have far more space than where I grew up. I was actually taught to live on less, but have gone in the far opposite direction.
Now, can suburban homes offer you MORE space? Absolutely! And if I had the kind of hobbies that merited that additional space I'd probably want to live there. However, as someone who grew up in the suburbs, has friends in the suburbs, etc - the number of friends I have who actually use that space for enjoyment and not junk storage is literally just 1 guy who has a sweet CNC and metal working space in his garage and basement. Everyone else has a garage used for cars + storage and a basement rumpus room with maybe a tiny 8x8 workshop somewhere near the mechanicals (HVAC and Water heater)
I do tend to be the one neighbor out in the yard the most by an order of magnitude.
I also have a 60 acre rural property because even a quarter acre in the suburbs doesn’t give me enough space to play.
No, I haven't built a cedar strip canoe (nice flex), but I do have the room in my 2.5 car garage if I wanted to. Partly because we only need one car in the city for a 4-person family (which is also part of the "cost" calculation). I could also use my basement, if I was inclined.
==It would cost double what I pay for me to live with 1/4 of the space in a city.==
This is impossible to say without knowing how much you pay and how much space you have.
I moved from Brooklyn NYC to NJ suburbs and my 15 year mortgage on 4 bed 2 bath decent yard was about the same as a 1 bed 1 bath 3rd floor walk up that was pretty snug once you had two people and two cats.
Americans like space. They like big houses. They like not hearing their neighbors. They like to live on a street that is quiet.
Even the ones that don’t like driving are willing to do it as a trade off for all those things.
Most of the young people I knew in SF who lived there in their 20’s - about 90% moved to the suburbs when they got older. Being close to bars or restaurants doesn’t matter much for most older people. What matters is low crime, space and good schools. They can drive to the city if they need to.
> Look at the most expensive places to live in the Bay Area - it’s not the urban centers, it’s the suburbs.
Sure the mansions in Pacific Heights are more, but they are mansions.
Compare like for like.
> A small plot of land in a desirable location is $4M in Palo Alto.
Also, my comparison spoke of price per sq.m. Is there a better way to compare housing costs in different locations?
Are you talking about land only? Or land and house?
If you look at the most expensive sales in SF or the Peninsula, they aren't all that different - just shy of $50M.
Regardless, my comment was more directed to middle to upper-middle class housing, not the $20M mansions in SF or 1,000 acres estates in the Peninsula.
Compare a large single family home in SF to a large, single family home in Peninsula.
Family homes in city centers (in the US) are either very expensive or bad neighborhoods
I am going off of the study described here [0]. I'm happy to view anything you have to provide which proves it is a lie.
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizin...
You pay taxes were you work instead of were you live? That is very unusual, typically you pay income taxes where you live. I don't see how paying taxes were you work could even work, what pays for your school or roads if all the money goes to another area?
Some bigger US cities have a city income tax which is applied regardless of where you live.
I had family living in NJ and working in NYC. They paid NYC income taxes, NY income taxes, NJ income taxes, and federal income taxes.
> Some bigger US cities have a city income tax
> If you are a New York State nonresident you must file Form IT-203, Nonresident and Part-Year Resident Income Tax Return, if you meet any of the following conditions:
> . You are a nonresident with New York source income and your New York adjusted gross income Federal amount column (Form IT-203, line 31) exceeds your New York standard deduction.
IANAL, this isn't tax advice, I'm going by what I'm reading and what I was told by people who lived and worked there, but looking at this if you have an income made from working a job in the state of NY and ended up with more than $21k of income you need to file for NY state income taxes.
There are a number of cities with income taxes. Detroit, Baltimore, Columbus, Cleveland, Louisville, Toledo, and many more. Of those I bothered looking in to, they apply if you work in that city regardless of wherever you live.
The vast majority do not.
Of course. There are also people who enjoy walkable pedestrian and bike friendly places with lots of small local businesses to patronize.
That doesn't require living in a "big dirty city", it really just means making actual towns with dense downtown centers where people can work, live, shop, and dine.
Based on my experience with real estate prices, where townhomes near such thriving downtown developments can cost easily double of one in a suburban neighborhood a 15 minute drive away, the demand for that kind of living currently exceeds supply in many places.
The answer isn't to remove all suburbia and replace it with dense walkability, the answer is to stop preventing the dense walkable development with strict single-family-detached zoning laws, parking minimums, etc. and let the supply of such places increase to meet demand. Nobody will come take your suburban house away from you, they just want to have as much freedom in choosing what they want as you get to choose what you want.
And those that do prefer to live in big cities are just advocating for making those places better. The US has a lot of places that are definitely "city" but are still also car-dependent or at least not as friendly to walking, cycling, and mass transit as they should be. We can improve those without changing your suburban life one bit.
we really can have our cake and eat it, nice cities for the people who prefer them, suburbs for the others, so much room.
As a New Yorker, I'm totally fine with people choosing a suburban life. Do you, I don't care. But don't kill congestion pricing and think you're entitled to drive into the densest part of the United States and park for free in my neighborhood just because. Don't block funding for public transit for 40 years and then complain you need your car because the train is scary to you the two times a year you use it.
Gross stuff.
You can see at the voting district maps the city of Ottawa for example will 100% vote for a different candidate that all the distant suburbs attached to their municipality and the suburb candidate wins.
seattle is always a poster child for this stuff but it really isn't that bad for the upper middle class (anyone with a software job).
it's probably tougher now. but i started my career in seattle proper 10y ago and 2020 was a giant boon. low interest rates, 3k sqft house outside seattle (but still easily drivable to it thanks to reverse commute) for sub-$600k (went under asking) and sub-3% (-> inflation proof)..what a way to spend that salary the 2010s gave me to save up and enjoy the remote career I'd long established.
preparation meets opportunity isn't gonna stop being true even in a "bad" economy.
Having kids is a pivotal moment. Suddenly that rich urban life looks like danger for your little ones.
I was an urban kid and we stayed in the city when we had kids, so my kids got to go to a school where the janitor had to arrive early and remove the needles and broken beer bottles from the playground.
That's not the fault of the suburbs.
I grew up in my city when it was smaller, safer, and more economically varied. Now the middle has hollowed out and we're headed toward Manhattan, where hedge fund managers step over the homeless to get to their penthouse.
It pains me to think that this is inevitable. I don't begrudge anyone moving out of the city. I personally cannot stand the thought of getting in a car to do absolutely anything, but I know lots of people who live that way and are happy.
College kids hope to make it big, or at least big enough to afford a pampered expensive living among other such people. It's not an unreasonable hope to have. Some of course dream to live in a penthouse on top of a skyscraper, but that's much less realistic.
(Of course there are poor suburban areas with rundown houses and clunker cars, but it's not where the college kids aspire to go.)
Dense walkable cities are few in the US; they predate the advent of the car, and accepted a lot of immigrants when Ellis Island was still open for "the wretched refuse" [1]. After WWII, a lot of better-off families moved to suburbs, but the worse-off had to stay.
It does not help that some cities, in a misguided attempt to not trample on the rights of the destitute, or maybe out of incompetence, don't keep their streets clean, and even don't enforce the law. The authorities of San Francisco are, of course, way ahead of the pack; what they have done to their once-beautiful city tarnishes the reputation of cities as the form of living.
(Disclaimer: I live in NYC, take subway and/or buses every day, walk for my grocery shopping, don't own a car, etc, and love it. Politically not left-wing though.)
It’s been mentioned many times on HN in regards to Palo Alto, Atherton, Cupertino, etc… and often times not for altruistic motives either.
In the big picture, if you want single-family suburbs to continue to exist and be affordable it makes sense to allow at least some places to become dense. The more people who want density and can choose it, the less competition there will be for farther-out suburban houses.
And predict the actual ulterior motives of anyone advocating for such a change before it occurs?
They’re not automatons that can be fooled so easily.
I don't know the specific situation there, and I'm not saying that shouldn't ever exist, but it's worth considering why we are using zoning to preserve artificial anti-density in a place that has grown to demand higher housing density, and what the effects are of doing so on a widespread basis.
The immediate first order consequence would be higher housing prices, which seems to be the case across the US, with the cost of housing increasing much more rapidly than overall inflation or wages.
I'm not doing that. I really can't tell. Who are these people who want to ‘come take your suburban house away’, and how do they attempt to do so?
You seem to be referring to specific people in the Bay Area. I'm not in the Bay Area, and I don't really know the politics there as it relates to real estate. So, who specifically wants this, and what are they doing?
So this seems like a non sequitor…?
If you believe I, or anyone else, is making false pretenses one way or the other, on any subject, then list out the arguments for the case directly.
I will ask one more time: What, specifically, are you talking about?
That’s because American cities do their best to make themselves as car-dependent and unpleasant in downtown areas as possible. Of course American college kids want to move out to the suburbs, because American downtowns are not nice places to live. Offer people the choice to live in nice central walkable neighbourhoods like in Europe and they tend to take it.
Everybody rushed to join NATO and decided since the US was there as a backstop, they no longer needed to invest in their own defense.
It's a little bit like what happened in 2008 with the too big too fail banks and the bailout. If someone else is always there to pick up the slack, then what is the point of changing the status quo.
The EU countries were happy about this because they are broke. The US was happy to keep it's status as the global cop of the world making sure everybody stays in line. This line of thinking worked since the fall of the USSR but the rise of China, India and the global south is changing the world order as we speak.
that isn't really the issue
the issue is that, at least for a long time, they where too naive believing Russia never would go as far as attacking NATO member or economical partners
was that dump, yes, but that was a _very_ wide spread believe
and while I have seen that mindset a lot I haven't really seen any one not worrying because there are other countries in between. I mean maybe such people do exist, further west then I live.
Like in general until recently, even after the annexation of the Crimea, there commonly was the consensus that the time of offensive wars between European countries (including eastern EU and Russia) is over because it makes so little sense (economically, power wise) that none one would be dump enough to do that. But no one calculated in a autocrat with Napoleonic complex, or should be say soviet union complex. And if told the pleasant truth, with facts, people did what they always do with unpleasant truths: Try to ignore them.
Being by design means they weren't really "caught" with their pants down (in the classical "caught exactly at the wrong time") as much as they chose to always wear just underwear expecting the US to punch anyone who laughs in the face. The EU chose to "purchase" protection from the US, paid via various means. Mainly providing credibility for whatever US needs done, and make the difference between "righteous" and "callous".
What they discover now is that either the US can be said was caught with the pants down unable to properly project power and provide that purchased security, or maybe the EU was caught with the pants down because they were unable to pay (less likely). Regardless, this is like realizing your service provider is no longer reliable, you'll look inside or elsewhere. At the very least you no longer look at that provider as trustworthy, and stop building anything relying on their services.
The cost of this will be spread all around but effectively it gave China, who has no issues thrusting ahead even without someone to clean up their image, an even bigger boost. It even gave Russia a boost, if you could have believed anything in the world can still do that. But a couple of decades of weak leadership on both sides of the Atlantic conspired to achieve just that... a US desperately scrambling to stumble China after realizing that the go-to for all their problems (the "war for freedom") is hard to pull off this time, and an EU that realized that outsourcing critical safety and security aspects is a bad idea long term.
My pessimistic 2c are that the next rounds of leaders will make it worse, on one side by not understanding that the "war for freedom" is hard to pull off this time, on the other side by thinking that outsourcing to someone else will definitely make it better.
Corrupt politicians going against the interests of their own nation to appease USA?
Can you be clearer?
Furthermore, your assertion that the defense industry doesn’t provide value is questionable. Until you can convince the various state governments of the world to unite in a global superstate, defense spending is a necessary deterrent to invasion and exploitation by other states, so it is, in fact, valuable.
And while I agree that suburbs aren’t the ideal form of urban organization, they aren’t actually the cause of all the social ills that you imagine them to be. Depression and addiction are driven by loneliness, and loneliness is almost as high in urban societies as suburban ones. Obesity may be slightly aggravated by car dependence, but it is still historically high and a major problem in the walking/public transport countries of Europe.
So no, the demon of suburban car dependence does not provide the explanation for all ills.
Detached houses are not the main means of living for most people in Europe, but if you want one you can still get one, it just costs more than an apartment (especially in colder countries).
I’d like to learn more about this. That hasn’t been my personal experience at all. Looking at the national level is challenging, as urban and suburban and income levels must be a strong factor.
I don't think you realize what's going on in the EU (failing into a third world continent at an alarming rate) or in China (where "little" cities of 30 million inhabitants are all about tech and feeling like you live in the future: not that everything is rosy in China).
EU carmakers are all in big trouble while Chinese EVs and Tesla are soaring. The EU has nothing to answer the mag 7, let alone SpaceX (the ESA was already way behind NASA).
That the US is growing at a faster rate than most other nation and continents is a fact and it's got nothing to do whether you or a care assistant goes to visit your grandma.
Just as an example, Tesla’s 2024 Q1 deliveries where below 2023’s Q1 deliveries hardly a sign of rapid growth. https://www.statista.com/statistics/502208/tesla-quarterly-v...
SpaceX is facing the limits of how much people want to send into orbit. Plenty of growth in the next few years, but Starlink is only generating ~6 billion a year in revenue and not much else really wants to put that much stuff into orbit. Worse, Starlink is facing ever increasing competition from cheaper ground based providers especially cellular internet, so that business may start to shrink.
https://x.com/teslaxander/status/1864202319925035083
Is it any wonder that the German car industry is imploding?
I also don't share your pessimism about Starlink. Right now it's unclear what the killer application for Starlink will be, but it's awesome technology and even if it's only used in very remote areas it will still be worth it. When you only invest in technology that is immediately valuable you lose out on the technological revolutions that take a while to play out. Imagine having the capability of building something like Starlink but not doing it because the bean counters don't see the point.
VW saw a 12% increase in sales in 2023, the’re currently #2 globally behind Toyota.
But that’s not really the narrative people have about European car companies. (Ed: Not that the nominal nationality of a company with global manufacturing and significant international ownership is telling the whole story.)
> In October, the German automaker reported that its third-quarter sales in China had fallen by a third.
> Rival German automakers Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz are also struggling with falling sales in China caused by a weak economy and intense competition.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/bmw-re...
> "I don't like talking about the competition so much but I drive the Xiaomi – we flew one from Shanghai to Chicago and I've been driving it for six month now and I don't want to give it up", Ford CEO Jim Farley
Chinese cars are getting better every year and nobody can match them on price. That's the real story here. The narrative is shifting because more and more people realize that the EU doesn't have an answer except for tariffs and other protectionist measures.
It’s a little early to say they can’t compete rather than this being a brander situation as overall Chinese customer demand is down and they’re a luxury brand. So sure, profits are down significantly but it’s still a very profitable company.
You can't have an answer if you're competing with a labor force that's working 9-9-6 while your labor force is working 35h weeks on paper (much less in practice), gets 40 vacation days per year, get paid sick leave whenever they don't feel like coming to work, and highly paid underperformers are unable to be fired due to unions.
German workers could afford that cushy lifestyle when their auto industry was the most cutting edge and valuable in the world, but once it's not anymore, they'll have to accept a new reality of more work for less pay if they want to have jobs or an industry.
Fast food is filled with part time employees because those companies benefit from doing so, it’s one way to keep their costs down.
Rather than competition the larger story is companies trying to managing the EV transition. It’s inherently difficult when most buyers are still choosing ICE but EV’s need huge R&D investments and are generally unprofitable. We just entered the territory where sales aren’t small enough to simply absorb per unit losses as irrelevant.
I never said the dead weight is on the assembly line, because it's never there, it's in the offices and board rooms. VW for example is full of useless employee swinging their nutsacks (German expression for doing nothing) and cashing in near six figure wages and being unfireable. Meanwhile the workers on the assembly lines will have to loose their jobs.
As crazy as it sounds if you know anything about the industry, better management and increasing wages in China.
Chinese firms are generally extremely dysfunctional internally. That didn’t matter when they paid people a small fraction of western wages, but significant wage growth for years adds up. Continue ~9%/year wage growth and things would be at near parity in a little over a decade.
Obviously, that’s no guarantee but rapidly developing countries eventually develop. Things are about to get really interesting.
When we had our second kid, the hustle wasn't worth it. Two kids in daycare took 90% of her take home pay. It was costing us more for her to work than to stay home with the kids.
Also, kids need their parents. An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant
> An infant being away from their mom for that long is unhealthy for the infant
1. They are working from Monday to Saturday. They can't take Saturday off, so they hire a care assistant to take care of their grandma on Saturdays, they happen to hire each other.
2. They are working from Monday to Friday. They take care of their own grandma over the weekends.
Scenario 1 adds more to the national GDP.
In your example of elderly care, an extended family in Italy may care for their own grandmother (and they'd probably live longer). But the market in Italy isn't so bouyont so the younger generation can't get high paying jobs and move out even if they wanted to.
The high spending and marketisation in the US skews the game for everyone whether they like it or not.
(no moral judgements here, just observations)
These things are difficult to predict, but already for example we notice some problems with ultra-marketisation in the UK where house prices are now 10-12x average annual salary (it used to average 6-8x for the last two decades), and all the social strife this is causing in society. For example it can eventually lead to mass violent protests against migrants or electing extreme political parties.
Another example is that it has seriously degraded public services, since nurses can barely survive on their salary there is huge shortage of medical employees leading to huge waiting list for medical, even critical, operations.
Regional variations will make this far worse in many popular and coastal towns - but the average is 8.25 times in 2024.
Average London salary: £44,000 Average London House: £531,000
There are many other UK-wide statistics pointing out to the jump in housing unaffordability (including rent) over the last 5 years.
Even if house prices is slightly more sane outside metropolitan, one needs to factor in how difficult it is to find jobs outside metropolitan areas, so the quantity of jobs outside expensive metropolitan areas need to be factored in, not just the average salary.
London is wild - I was lucky to buy a flat (£142k) when I was still young (2006) - which would have been 4.7 time my salary (though I bought with my wife). Even then, and with two good salaries, staying on in London with 2 kids wasn't really an option for us.
And as you say, this is replicated up and down the country in other major cities - people are just priced out or trapped in renting. No idea what my kids will do.
If people can't afford a house then they can easily look to other markets, they just don't want to because they feel entitled to "their county". The largest culprit after mass immigration is the unwarranted fear of bodily harm from living "poor countries"
Your comment is seriously detached from reality. If your whole life, job etc is located in one area, then moving far away for cheaper housing often isn't easy. It's especially hard for someone with a family.
UK and most other Western countries have high housing prices mostly because houses have become speculative assets for rich investors.
The UK experienced this when Brexit caused many Eastern Europeans to go home, and even more not to come; there's now a big construction workforce shortage and housebuilding is being held up.
But most of the price increase (ie. actual demand, meaning potential buyers with enough money) is because over the last few decades houses got much better (triple glazed windows, heat and noise insulation, safety standards increased, HVAC for the whole house not just 1 sad split unit, oh and houses got bigger, so all in all we put in more material, more stuff and so on), and service costs got higher (in part due to the Baumol effect) and availability of credit increased with the price (banks love to give bigger loans when it's backed with a relatively safe liquid asset), so buyers can and do pay these enormous amounts.
And then there's the supply side. "Cities" are horribly mismanaged. Most development happens in suburbs. (Because it's easy.) Productivity of the construction industry is so ridiculously low that people are in complete and utter denial even about the prospect of building things. Housing? Rail? Nuclear power plants? (They have given up, they just want to preserve the status quo apparently.)
It's good that our cities are not burning down regularly anymore, but this forced stasis is still bad. It's good that we don't have monarchs or urban planners who randomly reshape half of our cities every generation without fair compensation.
At the same time it's still very bad that we ourselves don't reshape our cities to adapt to each generation!
(It's a tragedy that most housing constructions are basically suburb expansions or "terraced properties" or these few sad few storey things. There's no vision at all.)
It goes both ways though, when shit hits the fan if your economy is based on airbnb and food delivery you're fucked.
Look at Russia, half the GDP of Germany but twice the steel production, 4 times the wheat production, 1st producer of fertilizer, huge amount of gas, &c. They had roughly the same military budget as Germany in 2020, yet the german army virtually doesn't exist.
It depends if you think our current mass productivism/consumerism practices are a bubble or the end game of humanity, history seems to prove that it goes in cycle of good and bad times. Poor countries would probably even fare better than most in case of major events, the bigger they are the harder they fall.
Also, it is weird that you chose to comment about the German military. First, due to WW2 era agreements, they are severely limited in how they can deploy their military. Japan is similar. Also, Germany spent 50B EUR last year on their military, and that is set to rise by another 10-20B EUR this year with some extra, one-off spending. These are not small numbers!
> and they'd probably live longer
> skews the game
This example also cuts into personal efficiency going up. Not needing a car or burning gas because of a badly insulated house is negative for the gdp but good for the wealth of individuals.
I give you $10,000 to eat a pile of shit.
You give me $10,000 to eat a pile of shit.
What's the result?
Two shit-eating grins and $20,000 added to the GDP.
There are some good talks of Mariana Mazzucato about it (and questioning of what we consider value in economy) [1]
Yes they do. How do you visit her? What do you do while you're together? Eat some food? There's almost no way your visit doesn't register on GDP.
In reality, economic growth makes peoples lives better in simple, concrete ways. Ironically, we've started to question this only because we've become so rich due to so much growth that we're no longer dealing with "simple" problems (hunger, cold, etc).
People typically eat food even when they don't visit someone as well, the total amount remains the same. It is really common to just cook food and eat together, your life doesn't get better if you go out to eat eating your parents home cooking doesn't register on the GDP.
In other words, if you assume non-GDP activity is constant, then GDP does genuinely and accurately reflect economic growth.
Indeed, this is one reason why economists recommend GDP as a useful measure of growth in a country year-over-year, but not for comparing different countries' GDP directly -- the ratio of activity not counted as GDP may be quite different between countries.
Now, if you think that a massive social transformation is underway of non-GDP-registering activities to GDP-registering activities -- e.g. people used to care for their grandmas, now all those people have gotten jobs to pay for care assistants to do it instead -- then yes GDP will show "false growth" in productivity.
But that really doesn't seem to be a major factor. We really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives. Economists don't just look at GDP -- they look at lots of measures that all tell the same story. Productivity really is going up. GDP growth may not be 100.00% accurate, but it is mostly.
But isn't that the issue?
Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all. She (it was usually a she) could get the kids off to school, pick them up after school, check in on grandma, do the shopping, cook a simple meal.
Now: the working-age person goes to work, perhaps because the family fell apart, perhaps because other rising costs (e.g. health care) forced it. Before and after school care is paid for. Someone is paid to check in on grandma. Walmart+ or Amazon occasionally delivers heat-and-eat meals.
GDP went way up! Amazon contractor has a job delivering boxes. Someone is paid to check in on Grandma, and someone else to watch the kids. Someone works in the factory making heat-and-eat meals.
But are we really better off? Is it better to staff out the kid- and Grandma-watching and to heat up a dinner in the microwave? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question, but I'm certainly not sure that "we really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives."
My wife is back to having a wage, and both kids are back to full-time daycare. They both really enjoy school. And comparing them to their peers who stay at home, they're usually way ahead when it comes to counting and numbers, vocabulary, spelling, reasoning, and social skills. Which I mean makes sense, they're around people who got degrees in education with professionally thought-out lesson plans every day.
But has this changed massively over the past 30 or 40 years? Not really.
Frozen dinners have been around since longer than most of us have been alive. Working couples in the 1980's were figuring out what they'd do with grandma. Nursing homes have been around for a looong time. Mail-order delivery of boxes has been a thing since the end of the 1800's -- there were Sears warehouses long before Amazon warehouses.
That's all I'm saying. However, employees genuinely are much more productive than they were in the 1980's, thanks to e-mail and cell phones and the Internet and collaborative online document editing and so much more. You can get things done in an hour that used to take you 2 weeks of back-and-forth.
The productivity growth is real. It's not an illusion based on what GDP doesn't capture.
> Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all.
And the whole reason it's a bad thing is that the human values that can't be converted to a measurable, tradeable commodity are often thrown away, because they're invisible to the commodification process.
One of the ways we seem to be absolutely destroying the social fabric for younger people is by eliminating ("privatizing") every last public space and time in which they're allowed to exist without driving there and paying a fee for a structured transactional recreation. We have privatized the commons in an analogous way to the Enclosure Movement in industrializing Great Britain.
Name some?
The issues people care most about atm seem to be getting worse (housing prices, cost of living, etc)
It is very common to focus on some large things that are bad and think that is the big picture without considering how much all the little things really add up to.
Like many of the other items on the list, it’s a change that few people actually asked for and it’s more in the name of surveillance capitalism than consumer preferences or consumer choice.
Sure, social media can con children into thinking they need this. And after it’s normalized then adults might point it out as an improvement, but in the end it’s part of why the “improved” phone takes more hours of labor to pay for and the consumer has fewer options than ever with an illusion of more choice.
And expensive that , at least in Europe, nobody is buying them anymore so the industry is going through layoffs.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13237-...
Add the backup camera to the improved restraints, the collision warning system, the blind-spot monitor . . . and soon you're talking about some real money.
One can argue about whether this is good or bad, but they're not really luxury toys.
No, humans are not cavemen, as cavemen lived thousands of years ago and had a different lifestyle than modern humans. The term "caveman" is a stock character that became popular in the early 20th century.
There are things that are better, but "batteries" is the only one from your list that I agree with.
it's a fact that the housing standard of living has gone down for the last 26 years. See this graph: Nominal gpd per capita / case shiller housing index. and you'll see it's down 34% over the last 26 years!
Especially not when both phone manufacturers and car manufacturers are engaging in more and more rent seeking behavior
However, change in GDP can tell you something broader about a society. It is a compounding value, which means only a trivial amount of GDP change can be explained by moving some of a society's value into or out of the GDP measure. Over a century, the compounding effect eclipses the non-measured component.
So if two societies, over the long term, have different GDP growth numbers, one of those societies will end up rich and the other end up poor.
Slow down GDP growth even a little and you will impoverish your grandchildren. They will have to choose between becoming doctors in their poor society, or emigrating and waiting tables in the rich society.
For example in the case of Ireland people might be misled if they looked only at nomial GDP growth…
Year-to-year, the difference between 2.5% and 5% doesn't matter, which is how people convince themselves to downplay growth. But they are two radically different worlds for your grandkids.
A 250 basis point difference in growth rate is enormous for pretty much every industry in the US.
That’s hundreds of billions of dollars extra circulating in tne economy.
Are you saying that you visiting your grandma one weekend is the same as someone washing, feeding and walking her every day?
How do you mean? There are travel expenses and you were also doing that instead of consuming. Saving shows up in the numbers so I'm really not following what you mean here.
Savings isn't part of GDP.
Using GDP to measure the health or rank of a company is like rating writers by the number of words they produce.
Housing accounts for easily half of people's spending these days, especially the younger generation.
So, here's how you calculate standard of living: Nominal GDP per capita / Case shiller housing index.
Chart this and you'll see that we peaked in 1998 and have been in decline ever since then. We're actually down about 34% since that peak.
If I go visit my grandma over the weekend, my activities do not register on GDP. If I hire a care assistant for $800 per day to do so, that's $800 to national GDP. The encroachment of the market into society correlates with record levels of mental and physical health crisis. US life expectancy has declined over the past three years, even as 'the economy' has surged ahead. The measures are wrong - and we all know it - apart from the financial press it seems