So a real mix
In the US? Real Disposable Personal Income has been growing very consistently over time [1]. The rate of growth did stagnate between 2000 and 2013 but the trend has been remarkably consistent.
it claims that the average person has 50k usd in disposable yearly income - there's no way that's after housing and other non optional expenses have been accounted for.
using this measurement, if wages go up 5% but rent goes up 50%, it would still look as if people have more money to spend than before.
the rich are taking The Lion's share of productivity growth
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/#:~...
Which economy? In the US, healthcare, public schools in some states, and B2B sales come to mind as decent jobs. But I agree with the general sentiment - there do not seem to be great choices that support a nice life. Quite a few of my friend have to work multiple jobs or double shifts to make it work.
Things that aren’t improving outcomes are ultimately why healthcare is expensive in the US.
Granted I understand what you mean, but it’s kind of like saying managers make good money while ignoring all the shift managers at fast food joints.
As to inequality, we’ve made this much worse intentionally via things like a tax code that massively favors high income earners. It’s not even that this tradeoff has increased GDP growth or anything the country was growing faster with higher tax rates on corporations and dividends.
Even just theoretically it’s suboptimal because jobs catering to or trying to extract money from high income people don’t lend themselves to automation. Long term everyone rich or poor has been worse off.
I lived through it. We can talk a lot about, but the fact is equality doesn't work. Maximum it gets to is everyone equally poor. And as a result of it there are no startups. You need middle class for this and motivation. Government controlled and own monopolies is also the result of equality. Nobody else has the resources. So commies had to create the economy, few bigger things are easier to manage. Managers aren't interested in risk taking, it's not worth it. Finally everything stalled and fell far behind the rest of the world. There were bright spots, but that's it. Like North Korea today can build missiles and not much else.
Just look around. Probably only Cuba and North Korea are still in true socialism. In both there is a small super-rich class and the rest is, yes, equally poor. Super-rich are pretending to be poor too and invent theories to keep the rest under control. BTW, I'm not sure Cuba still has strong ideology today.
The USSR didn’t actually have economic equality.
The US has drastically lower tax rates for capital gains.
Finally, arguing for equal taxation isn’t arguing for equal pay.
More or less it had. Except for privileged commie bosses everyone poor. "Rich" had cars (!) Having noticeable business was prohibited. Selling own potatoes on flea market, or growing chicken and pigs was fine.
> The US has drastically lower tax rates for capital gains.
In Mass. it's 10% to begin with.
> I’m saying economic growth is slowed through the economic inefficiency resulting from unequal taxation.
Not sure about this. Do you have examples when equal taxation helps?
By modern standards sure, but they were much better off than medieval peasants who most of their recent ancestors where.
As to equality the economy isn’t just the legal economy. A cop accepts a bribe is making more than a clean cop and greasing the wheels of bureaucracy was really common as was a rather extensive black market fed by production being diverted etc.
It’s quite consistent how effectively people learn to leverage what they have to get what they want.
> Do you have examples where equal taxation helps.
You can look at tax rates vs long term GDP growth and see trends but economic growth isn’t clear cut. The best example is cases where tax breaks for the wealthy has been harmful is the UK which is still doing alright but had massive advantages from it’s early industrialization and colonies that it quite effectively squandered.
My point -- even being slightly lower middle class now would feel like a good jump over my parents. That's just pointing out that comparisons to parental income is very relative.
That phenomenon was not always apparent. Growing up, I was told specifically to avoid those sorts of jobs and go for white collar, informed by a generation where those sorts of jobs were a lot more dangerous and less compensated. In some companies over the last century we went from say building floors of modestly paid draftsmen and a few highly paid white collar classes managing them to floors of modestly paid white collar people fiddling with excel and a few highly paid certified engineers doing the actual technical work. The dynamic has changed.
I feel like software has been an outlier here for a decade; the only place where traditional economic intuitions still apply (semi-smart people can work hard, learn a technical skill, find a job in their field, pay off their loans, make more than their parents, afford a house, and have a comfortable personal life and relatively fulfilling work life)
Everything I've heard from the rest of the economy is that this model is dead