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Cicero posted:There are a lot of posters in D&D who seem to have trouble grasping the idea that things could be better than the past and yet still bad. Case in point: It's a right-wing rhetorical trick they're responding to, see the poor have X, and they didn't used to, therefore things can't be that bad. It's stupid and simplistic and you have to engage your critical thinking skills to avoid the argument altogether (because the proper response is "so what").
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Sep 25, 2018 08:48
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pseudanonymous posted:It's a right-wing rhetorical trick they're responding to, see the poor have X, and they didn't used to, therefore things can't be that bad. It's stupid and simplistic and you have to engage your critical thinking skills to avoid the argument altogether (because the proper response is "so what"). Yup. Do people have, objectively speaking, a higher average standard of living now than in the 1950's in the US? Sure, the numbers support that. Do people in the lower 99%, or even the lower 50%, have as significantly higher a standard of living as the growth of the economy of the US over those 60 years would indicate, had their share of the economy remained the same? Nope. Does that mean the current standard of living is good for all of the US? Absolutely not. Do we still have US citizens in the ConUS living in conditions that make them grateful for a toothbrush? Yup. Are there still over a million US residents without indoor plumbing in the 21st century? Yup.
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Sep 25, 2018 08:58
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pseudanonymous posted:It's a right-wing rhetorical trick they're responding to, see the poor have X, and they didn't used to, therefore things can't be that bad.
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Sep 25, 2018 09:11
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I’d also say that looking back 60 years is dumb when the current regime of median wage stagnation started around 30-40 years ago.
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Sep 25, 2018 09:32
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The original context for the topic that got necro'd was comparing now to Marx' times.
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Sep 25, 2018 09:35
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pseudanonymous posted:It's a right-wing rhetorical trick they're responding to, see the poor have X, and they didn't used to, therefore things can't be that bad. It's stupid and simplistic and you have to engage your critical thinking skills to avoid the argument altogether (because the proper response is "so what"). It's also a right-wing rhetorical trick to get everyone to start with the assumption the regressive past was better and that any social or economic progress made is minor optional "so what?" stuff. Make america great again.
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Sep 25, 2018 12:05
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:One of the big time phrases i see in Anglophone conservatives is they say "how can they be poor? they have color TV!" Going back to this for just one second. 65 years ago literally everyone in the U.K. (and Australia) had access to a television. They were rolled out in their hundreds of thousands for the coronation in 1953 which brought the prices way down. It’s the only thing I can think of that we had before the Americans. Boomers like to tell us how lucky we are because we can all afford fitted carpets
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Sep 25, 2018 14:14
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get this: 99% of “poor” households had enough oxygen to breathe last year
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Sep 25, 2018 14:25
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Liquid Communism posted:Yup. Kind of the point, really; the right wing rhetoric is "well the poor have it better than they did 70 years ago so let wages keep stagnating while all the gains go to the rich." There are two years in the entirety of American history where productivity hasn't gone up but wages have been stagnating for decades. The Reagan Administration was the biggest turning point and all we ever hear from the right is "cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes!" When you point out that actual, living, breathing American citizens are having trouble getting basic necessities like, you know, food and a warm place to sleep the right just goes "yeah well things were shittier in the past so don't complain." America could easily afford to feed and house every American comfortably but we as a nation have chosen not to. When there are more empty houses than homeless people something has gone hideously wrong. The message is "well basically everybody has a refrigerator so they don't deserve anything else. Let the rich have all the economic gains." The Trump Administration's response to Puerto Rico really tells you all you need to know about the right at this point. Puerto Rico, last I checked, is part of America so everybody there is, last I checked, an American citizen. The island gets flattened and Trump just goes "well, what you gonna do, you know?" ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 15:54
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Do you guys think a business major, scientist of some sort or a person with a law degree will be making $11 at walmart? One of my employees makes $14 with an english major. Waste of time degree if you want to make than 65k
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Sep 25, 2018 16:13
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This has been reiterated a dozen times, but things can be objectively better and still need fixing. Pretending that everyone is actually objectively worse off and ignoring the data not only makes you seem like you don't know what you're talking about to anyone who you are trying to convince, but it also prevents you from forming an effective plan to improve the standard of living. If you don't have the information to see where the biggest problems are, then you can't make concrete changes. Not only that, but it ignores the actual historical suffering and consequences of bad policy on groups and individuals who suffered from those conditions. If you want to make effective policy, then you need to be able to look at the situation objectively in order to actually help people. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 16:22
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LeoMarr posted:Do you guys think a business major, scientist of some sort or a person with a law degree will be making $11 at walmart? One of my employees makes $14 with an english major. Waste of time degree if you want to make than 65k Absolutely. Go read the law school thread in BFC, there's people in ther who would jump at 14 bucks an hour. It isn't 1998 anymore. A Degree doesn't automatically translate to a pile of money, even in the sciences.
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Sep 25, 2018 16:53
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whydirt posted:I’d also say that looking back 60 years is dumb when the current regime of median wage stagnation started around 30-40 years ago. That was one of the things that popped into my head when Leon started banging on about the 50s. I was also lamenting that people don't seem to understand relative vs. absolute poverty, among other woes. suck my woke dick posted:get this: 99% of “poor” households had enough oxygen to breathe last year Don't worry, the government will sell all oxygen to the highest bidder and that number will be dropping soon enough.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:28
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LeoMarr posted:Do you guys think a business major, scientist of some sort or a person with a law degree will be making $11 at walmart? One of my employees makes $14 with an english major. Waste of time degree if you want to make than 65k A friend of mine at Tufts had an Uber driver be a chemical engineering PhD. There are no degrees with a "good job" guarantee after graduation.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:35
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Everyone talks about degrees being worth less than before, I haven't seen any data to the end though. The only thing I've been able to find on new grads specifically (as opposed to college degree holders more generally) is this article showing them to be essentially stagnant: http://www.naceweb.org/job-market/c...lege-graduates/ The googling I did on college degrees more generally seems to indicate that the college "premium", at least, is slowly increasing.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:42
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:You know that the human development index is just per capita income, education, and life expectancy, right? Per capita income has been stagnant or declined over the past four decades, and life expectancy stopped increasing when the recession hit and has actually dropped over the past two years. High school graduation rates were more or less stable (for better or for worse) up until federal education edicts started giving high schools strong financial incentives to juke the books, and the increased rate of university education has been a double-edged sword that makes anything less than a master's degree less relatively valuable in the eyes of employers even as the cost of education at all levels is increasing geometrically. And some significant quality of life measures have been consistently declining for years or decades, even independent of the current recession; for example, the maternal mortality rate in the US has sharply increased over the past two decades, while internationally it's declined over that same time period. But for sure, things are getting better now instead of worse, if you fix your point of comparison for when things were worse specifically to a point in time well before just about everyone in this thread was born and then ignore the trends in the opposite direction that are actually relevant to anyone living in America today.
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Sep 25, 2018 17:50
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The Dipshit posted:A friend of mine at Tufts had an Uber driver be a chemical engineering PhD. There are no degrees with a "good job" guarantee after graduation. I did the "right thing" and got a CS degree with a math minor. It took me 9 months to find a programming job and I'm still hideously underpaid almost 3 years after graduating.
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Sep 25, 2018 18:01
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gtrmp posted:Per capita income has been stagnant or declined over the past four decades  https://united-states.reaproject.org/analysis/comparative-trends-analysis/per_capita_personal_income/tools/0/0/ Now, median personal income I think you're right (the gains all went to the affluent/wealthy), but that's not the same metric. ToxicSlurpee posted:I did the "right thing" and got a CS degree with a math minor. It took me 9 months to find a programming job and I'm still hideously underpaid almost 3 years after graduating. Cicero fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 18:32
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JustJeff88 posted:
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Sep 25, 2018 18:36
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gtrmp posted:Per capita income has been stagnant or declined over the past four decades, and life expectancy stopped increasing when the recession hit and has actually dropped over the past two years. High school graduation rates were more or less stable (for better or for worse) up until federal education edicts started giving high schools strong financial incentives to juke the books, and the increased rate of university education has been a double-edged sword that makes anything less than a master's degree less relatively valuable in the eyes of employers even as the cost of education at all levels is increasing geometrically. And some significant quality of life measures have been consistently declining for years or decades, even independent of the current recession; for example, the maternal mortality rate in the US has sharply increased over the past two decades, while internationally it's declined over that same time period. This is literally all wrong and the actual numbers have been posted multiple times in the thread. You can just assert that things are this way, but they aren't. Per capita income has not been decreasing for 40 years, high school and college graduation rates are higher than ever, literacy rates are higher than ever, and life expectancy is not lower now. Three of those have even been posted on this very page and one of them is literally 2 posts away from yours.
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Sep 25, 2018 18:44
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It's easy to look at statistics and not believe they are telling the full story when your life experiences don't match up. Everyone I know is far worse off than their parents were. They worked stable jobs that didn't require a degree and lasted them 30 years and they could afford a house on that single income. Now, couples need to work two university-degree requiring jobs (which can vanish at any moment) just to pay their rents, which are at least 40%+ of their combined income. If you're not a couple, you're paying 50%+ renting a 1 room poo poo box or living with roommates into your 30's. The idea of owning a home let alone being able to ever retire seems like a fantasy from a bygone era. I mean, some statistics say everything is getting better, capitalism is working eradicating poverty and and bringing smartphones and fridges to the poor masses, but it's really hard not to look around and compare your generation to the one that came before and not think things are getting much worse in your community.
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Sep 25, 2018 18:54
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Baronjutter posted:It's easy to look at statistics and not believe they are telling the full story when your life experiences don't match up. Everyone I know is far worse off than their parents were. They worked stable jobs that didn't require a degree and lasted them 30 years and they could afford a house on that single income. Now, couples need to work two university-degree requiring jobs (which can vanish at any moment) just to pay their rents, which are at least 40%+ of their combined income. If you're not a couple, you're paying 50%+ renting a 1 room poo poo box or living with roommates into your 30's. The idea of owning a home let alone being able to ever retire seems like a fantasy from a bygone era. If that is your metric, then every single generation since the invention of modern polling is worse off and all objective measures have been in a nosedive for 80 years. quote:Do you believe that your generation will be “much worse off” in employment and retirement than your parents’ generation?
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Sep 25, 2018 19:00
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:No. Once again, you are very bad at reading labels and statistics. As seen in this table https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=54&eid=155443&snid=155485 the definition of Disposable personal income is Personal income less Personal current taxes. Period. End of Calculation. Healthcare et al. are used in the deflator index calculation to get to real income from nominal values, but they are not part of the definition of disposable income. Also, as you surely know, when we have a situation where wealth inequality exists, per-capita income is a pretty crappy measure compared to something like median income. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=llPr Different bases for inflation calculations, but it gets across that as per-capita income has more than doubled (+120%), median income has remained comparatively flat (+35%). Same series indexed against 1974: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=llQ1
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Sep 25, 2018 19:36
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Jethro posted:While I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis (as I understand it: to improve the conditions of people we must examine the data instead of relying on the possibly false narrative of "things were better in the past"), you are acting really smug here for someone who doesn't understand what they are reading or posting. Unadjusted disposable Income and real adjusted disposable income are different measurements. The originally linked chart shows that it is indexed to price changes in: quote:Automotive It specifically notes the percentage weights for each category in there and has a seperate page for the unindexed, but inflation-adjusted counts. Using those measurements as the deflator will give you different results than just chaining it to inflation and show you a more accurate picture if one category is substantially higher than overall inflation. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 19:41
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Pretending that everyone is actually objectively worse off and ignoring the data not only makes you seem like you don't know what you're talking about to anyone who you are trying to convince, but it also prevents you from forming an effective plan to improve the standard of living. It's not about the objective criteria Leon. The metrics don't tell the whole story and more is nessisary than merely improved metrics. Failing to understand this is a failure to understand the experienced reality.
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Sep 25, 2018 19:52
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BrandorKP posted:The metrics don't tell the whole story and more is nessisary than merely improved metrics. Failing to understand this is a failure to understand the experienced reality. The experienced reality is a dogmatic belief in a glorious lost past (from one's childhood or from what they imagine life was like from before their time) that harms people's ability to support progressive movements to continue improvement in favor of regressive movements to try and take things back to how they were. Where "how they were" doesn't actually match what people want to believe they were.
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Sep 25, 2018 19:58
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OOCC if ya can't speak to the stories people construct of thier lives ya can't convince or motivate them. Regressive actors will definately and have definitely acted on that opportunity. The challenge is to tell a progressive story that speaks to thier experienced life.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:04
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I did the "right thing" and got a CS degree with a math minor. It took me 9 months to find a programming job and I'm still hideously underpaid almost 3 years after graduating. I have a CS degree myself, and the sad part is that I envy you.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:11
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BrandorKP posted:Regressive actors will definately and have definitely acted on that opportunity. The challenge is to tell a progressive story that speaks to thier experienced life. Regressives don't just grab on the neutral idea that everything used to be better and we just need to put things back to the correct way they used to be. That is the core of regressive thought.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:13
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Baronjutter posted:It's easy to look at statistics and not believe they are telling the full story when your life experiences don't match up. Everyone I know is far worse off than their parents were. They worked stable jobs that didn't require a degree and lasted them 30 years and they could afford a house on that single income. Now, couples need to work two university-degree requiring jobs (which can vanish at any moment) just to pay their rents, which are at least 40%+ of their combined income. If you're not a couple, you're paying 50%+ renting a 1 room poo poo box or living with roommates into your 30's. The idea of owning a home let alone being able to ever retire seems like a fantasy from a bygone era. To be honest, their parents have probably lied to them. They afforded a house on a single income - after their mother and father and 5 cousins chipped in significant sums. The parents say it was so easy to get their stable job, but almost certainly they went through many year of shaky employment beforehand they just ignore. And frankly the house and job they have, it is some garbage places in suburbs while the current generations say "it is not good to live out there and they do not sell house to me anyway". You are not going to rebuild parents house neighborhood all again in same place, and if you build it again farther out it is hard to get to job, yes? And really this is point of having statistics, because if you ask each person with no sourcing if their parents lives were so good before they are born, you do not get reality. You get 30-50 years of myth and rose-glass on top of reality when you look that way, when the information recorded back then tells other wise. Consider if you are adult today, your parents probably were adults or edge of teens during 70th right? How much will they tell you of how much things suck during 1973-1980 oil crises all over Western world, about the other economic crisis of it like high inflation and jobs not matching up your pay.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:45
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It's super regional too. My parents bought their house in the mid 80's for 100k on a single bus driver's salary with my mom's mom pitching in to help for the downpayment. That house today is worth over a million because we are in the middle of a horrific housing bubble. My rent went up from $1300 to $1700 in 4 years. It's brutal out there when it comes to shelter. There's also a problem that no one feels comfortable having kids because they're living in a cramped 2br apartment they don't know if they'll be renovicted from next year while their empty-nest retired parents rattle around in the old 5br family house.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:58
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Baronjutter posted:There's also a problem that no one feels comfortable having kids because they're living in a cramped 2br apartment they don't know if they'll be renovicted from next year while their empty-nest retired parents rattle around in the old 5br family house. our ideas of 'cramped" have changed though. People today expect hugely more room than was normal for their parents. http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/ With the average new house in the US getting larger in size at the same time that American households are getting smaller, the square footage of living space per person in a new US house has increased from 507 to 971 square feet using the median size house, and from 551 to 1,058 square feet using the average size house. In percentage terms, that’s a 92% increase for both the median or average house size per person. Amazingly, the average amount of living space per person in a new house has nearly doubled in just the last 42 years!
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Sep 25, 2018 21:13
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Unadjusted disposable Income and real adjusted disposable income are different measurements. quote:3) Answer whether you believe Doing some poking around, it looks like it's possible to say that per-capita real personal savings is higher in the past 5-10 years than it was at pretty much any time in the prior 40 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=llTy, but once again per-capita is not a good indicator of what is happening with the median or the most vulnerable. Is the savings rate up because everyone is making more money, or because the 1% managed to suck that much more out of the economy after the great recession and their spending hasn't caught up? All that being said, I do mostly agree with you that it's important to look at actual data to see what's going on instead of relying on purely anecdotal information. The average person thinks violent crime keeps getting worse when rates peaked in the 90's and have been slowly and steadily decreasing for the past 25 years. That is clearly a case where (except maybe in specific "problem" locations) spending a lot of resources to fight crime isn't going to accomplish much, so efforts should probably focus on getting people caught up with the data. The state of the economy with respect to the median person is a bit trickier to suss out from data, I think. Healthcare, housing, and education costs have exploded in nominal terms, but inflation measures seem to indicate that income has mostly kept up (after the real price drop in many consumer goods is taken into account, and assuming the indexes are properly designed). However, comparing healthcare costs with other developed nations in both PPP per capita and % of GDP measures show we pay way too much for healthcare and we get worse outcomes. So that's at least one place where anecdata and real data seem to line up.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:46
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Regressives don't just grab on the neutral idea that everything used to be better and we just need to put things back to the correct way they used to be. That is the core of regressive thought. OOCC you have people in this thread telling you about this. Are they regressives? Are you being simplistic, yet again?
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Sep 25, 2018 22:15
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:To be honest, their parents have probably lied to them. They afforded a house on a single income - after their mother and father and 5 cousins chipped in significant sums. The parents say it was so easy to get their stable job, but almost certainly they went through many year of shaky employment beforehand they just ignore. And frankly the house and job they have, it is some garbage places in suburbs while the current generations say "it is not good to live out there and they do not sell house to me anyway". You are not going to rebuild parents house neighborhood all again in same place, and if you build it again farther out it is hard to get to job, yes? Unironically wish the oil crisis would have continued indefinitely until Americans decided that everyone having three cars and driving everywhere alone was just not going to be reality anymore.
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Sep 25, 2018 22:17
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DrNutt posted:Unironically wish the oil crisis would have continued indefinitely until Americans decided that everyone having three cars and driving everywhere alone was just not going to be reality anymore. I see your point, but having lived about half of my life in America/Canada (though mostly in one of its largest cities) and the other in various spots in Europe, America is so spread out and has such dodgy infrastructure everywhere but in large cities that I can barely imagine how they would improve the issue. Global fuel scarcity is going to crush most of the country.
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Sep 25, 2018 22:36
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JustJeff88 posted:I see your point, but having lived about half of my life in America/Canada (though mostly in one of its largest cities) and the other in various spots in Europe, America is so spread out and has such dodgy infrastructure everywhere but in large cities that I can barely imagine how they would improve the issue. Global fuel scarcity is going to crush most of the country. It's a band aid that needs ripping off at some point because suburban sprawl isn't sustainable. If it had happened back then at least it might have made a measurable difference with regard to climate change.
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Sep 25, 2018 22:43
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JustJeff88 posted:I see your point, but having lived about half of my life in America/Canada (though mostly in one of its largest cities) and the other in various spots in Europe, America is so spread out and has such dodgy infrastructure everywhere but in large cities that I can barely imagine how they would improve the issue. Global fuel scarcity is going to crush most of the country. In situation of global fuel scarcity it is not North America who will suffer. Canada, America, Mexico, all have massive oil resource and the will to extract it even at great cost to environment and in money. They will grumble when they have to pay the prices that are common in Europe for their fuel, but the UK and Norway wells will run dry very quick. And who's to say what terms Russia's big oil company will be able to demand for their massive reserve then. In that scenario, I hope I can book flight to Canada before no one in France is able to fill a jet plane tank anymore.
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Sep 25, 2018 22:45
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BrandorKP posted:OOCC you have people in this thread telling you about this. Are they regressives? Are you being simplistic, yet again? I mean, a person who is 20 something or 30 something now wishing things would go back to how they were are the exact people that will be 60 trying to take away other people's gains on the idea things used to be better.
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Sep 25, 2018 22:56
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JustJeff88 posted:I have a CS degree myself, and the sad part is that I envy you. Part of the issue is that new grads aren't just competing against each other for well paying jobs, they're also competing against all the people whose careers failed to launch during the last recession.
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Sep 25, 2018 23:18
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