Eat The Rich!

but young people think things go horribly and things actually improved A LOT MORE for old people than for young people.

like being 65 today vs being 65 in 1960 , the gap is a lot bigger in quality of life vs being 20 today vs being 20 in 1960.

it's harder to get education (student loans and stuff), buy a house, find a decent partner you can trust for your future, yes. that weights in vs the improvements.

but for the 65y old literally everything is so much better than their grandparents had, it's incredible there is anyone among them complaining

Yes the US has a great PR department in its media and entertainment industry. The reality for those poor ****ers when they land is somewhat different to what they were sold.

Cubas generally happy to lose so many right wing tools.

We met one such fellow there about 20 years ago. He called himself Mikey Nike, and was a complete idiot as you might guess from his moniker. All he wanted to find out about life in the UK was what designer brands there were here. We told him the one to look out for was Marks and Spencer, hip with all the kids. He nodded his head slowly, as if committing it to memory.

It surely is the american PR deparment that takes the family of cuban doctors hostage when Cuba rents them to governments like they did with Brazil and others, taking 90% of the wages paid for Cuba (renting slave doctors is Cuba primary source of hard cash these days), because otherwise they would all defect if families weren't hostages.

That's how much Cubans like it at home

Exactly, productivity has increased massively due to technological advancement. We produce far more than ever with far lower human involvement. If you look at trends since the 80's, productivity has kept increasing massively while wages have not followed that trend for the majority. That doesn't make sense unless you look at where the money goes along with understanding that the money printer going burrrrr needs to paid for somehow.

[URL="https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2023/09/13/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective"]U.S. Household Incomes: A 50+ Year Perspective
[/URL]

To add, a huge percentage of people lifted out of poverty, when we start from looking at when meaningful measuring of the data started is from the bastion of capitalist utopia, China.

Wages in the USA followed productivity gains, the reason a lot of graphs telling the opposite circulate is a combination of bad faith (using different deflators for gdp and incomes for example) and not accounting for health benefits.

Now recently 30-40% of households have lower real income than pre covid because of unequal impact of inflation sure, but that has nothing to do with productivity gains (which didn't happen in the last 3-4 years)

Good post.

There is certainly very real anger by a lot of people regarding their current lot in life, but that can be said about any time in human history.

Regarding the curve of where we should be compared to where we actually are, is an interesting argument. If that is one of the reasons that people feel so disaffected these days, then I think the issue is more that there are some seriously unrealistic expectations regarding where we should be. Does that advancement curve imply that we should already be in a post-work society? Should robots be doing everything for us already? Would that actually be an improvement?

I work in a law office with a good amount of young people in support roles (secretaries and administrative staff). Just like everybody else felt when they were 20 years old, they are confused about a lot of things and have trouble finding direction regarding where they should be going. Some of these kids are angry that they cannot move out of their parents' home to live by themselves in a major city when they are in their early 20s, and resort to justifying that situation by calling America a "fascist society." These are hardworking and smart young people, but their expectations of where things should be versus where they actually are (and have always been) are very different. The Trumps, Bernies, and Jalfrezis of the world don't help when they feed into this narrative that things are somehow so much worse today than they were in the past.

Content with sharing a world view with Bernie, on the whole, though I don’t agree with his centrist politics.

Would have made an ok President I think, or at least markedly better than the other options.

Complete nonsense. You are approaching Victor levels of absurdity here. In fact, I am not convinced that you aren't Victor.

I can promise you that not one person in my extended Cuban immigrant family has ever said that they should have stayed in Cuba.

I think they want a lot more yes, like if it took X effort to have a hous in 1960 they require it takes a lot LESS effort for a much BETTER house today, given that's not the case, they see this as an abject failure.

Basically they have big improvements in some things, and generalize that it should be like that for everything

Its like the fake FB pics of some coal miner in the 50s with his face covered in **** and the responses are...ahh, thr simple times...back when people actually talked as opposed to texting!

That’s a really stupid and self selecting thing to say lol.

Say hi to Mikey Nike for me. Happy for him he’s in the right place.

Dude, do you even Bill Brandt?

Whether he would be a good president is not the point. The point was that he feeds into the populist sentiment that America is an irredeemable hellhole. It is the same exact argument that Trump and the far-right consistently make. They are the same exact arguments that power-hungry dip-shits like Mussolini made in the 20th century. "Things were better in the old days" is rarely correct, but still an effective tool to rile up the ignorant masses.

Bernie Sanders, famous for his regressive, backwards-looking politics.

Irredeemable hellhole might be as close to a perfect two word description as it’s possible to make.

Given your embarrassing efforts in this thread, I am more than content with not sharing any common ground with you.

That graph is from census.gov, The U.S. Census Bureau. Those agenda pushing socialist.

Likewise. I don’t know your exact politics but I’d guess you’re some sort of establishment shilly Dem or GOP, Donk, ie exactly the same people who’ve increased inequality and done nothing to suppress climate change, among a myriad of other failures over the last 40 years..

yes, like Trump he thinks manufacturing jobs are fundamental for society like in "the old days".

And free college is what existed decades ago in the USA.

Public housing was a big FDR policy.

Tariffs are very reactionary in a literal sense, an attempt to go back to the pre WTO days right?

as i said the graph i was commenting are others: yours correctly indicates that the peak is very recent (meaning wages went up till then). It's only democrat caused inflation which broke that last 2-3 years.

Your graph had no productivity data

I am not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse or just arguing in bad faith. The whole point of the graph is to show the disparity in the rate of increases between the different sectors. This is the inflation adjusted.

You aren't showing disparity actually, starting point wasn't the same for all, it's all compressed but there were huge differences at the start as well.

And it isn't the same households through time do you understand that part yes?

It's every year those quintiles.

So, every time an actual household changed quintile it isn't in the previous bracket.

And household change in size and composition as well through time, like a 20y old moves away that's a new household, a couple divorces, 2 households with lower income instead of 1 , and so on.

That graph isn't telling you what you think it is.

You should be a data analysis with this level of insight. I hope this lays bare to everyone in the thread that this is who you are arguing with, thanks for your insights Luciom. Thats me done in this thread.

This is a good point and obviously correct when you take a second and think about it. What exactlyis the purpose of that graph and what useful info can actually be gleaned from it?

Yeah wow I also thought that graph was tracking the exact same people over 50 years, had no idea people could move in and out of income brackets! Lucio really embarrassed us on this one; he got our asses.