[chadAnon69]

Their seems to be a concerted effort to propagandize the population into believing that lowered living standards is a GOOD thing

Not being able to get a full time job with benefits isn't bad, it's the Gig Economy!

Not being able to afford a house or car isn't bad, it's the future!

Not being able to afford to have kids isn't bad, it's more freedom to do what you want!

Not being able to afford to retire isn't bad, it's empowering!

All the while the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. Globalism is neo-feudalism, offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for the rich and the result is death of the middle class and the creation of a global equilibrium for wages.

Riots like the Yellow Vests in France are going to become common if nothing changes, people aren't going to just sit back for much longer

[rhexs]

It seems like a middle-class existence should still be quite trivial to provide for most Americans.

We can afford universal healthcare, but we can't afford a system of for-profit insurers, unconstrained pricing, non-negotiated drug pricing, emergency room doctors being "contractors" to some shady out of state/out of network racket etc.

We can easily afford to send a large majority of our "top" students to colleges for free, but we insist that everyone needs to go to college, no matter the academic ability. We also allow universities to use this "free money" to create degree programs with no job prospects in order to grow universities for no other reason than to make more money, at the expense of the younger generations. There is a shortage of skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen due to this, and of course the "solution" is yet another cry for more immigration.

We already have a large amount of struggling poor Americans we don't take care of, but we insist on programs that do nothing except subsidize very specific connected and powerful lobbies (tech, farming, etc.) Both republicans and democrats support this. Republicans have always supported the black hole of funding that is the farm lobby, and Democrats have recently given up the blue-collar unions to focus on immigration. I'm unclear why, but this campaign has been extraordinarily successful.

At the end of the day, all of the above causes the market to go up, until it doeesn't anymore. Any change in policy would most likely crush the market in the short-term but would potentially be a start at trying to fix endemic issues.

I guess we can't have the market go down though. That'd make the boomers mad.

[anticensor]

Those are all bad, however, if you turn them around to read "being able to not ...", they become good things. Being able to not retire or being able to not have kids are good things.

[xg15]

Yes, remember back when we were forced by penalty of jail to get a well-paying fulltime job and raise a family? I'm so glad those dark times are over! /s

[chadAnon69]

But the difference here is there's not choice. There's plenty of people who want kids or want to retire, but can't because the job market is garbage due to artificially increased labor supply and thus they are forced to live hand to mouth

[anticensor]

We need to switch from bond-backed money to UBI-backed money or cryptocurrency (or both). Hereby I explain how UBI-backed money would work:

  How money flows
  - UBI is no-strings attached and provided from both fresh* and recycled money
  - Taxes continue as usual
  - Monetary supply is controlled by amount of government wages and UBI. Demand is controlled by amount of taxes.
  Assumptions
  - Everyone except civil servants get equal amount of BI
  - civil servants get a wage which is greater than or equal to BI instead
  * as in, UBI itself is an instrument to print money, this also applies to civil servant wages

No interest needed in this scheme. Just three variables: number of citizens, amount of UBI and civil servant wages, amount of taxes. UBI is provided from both fresh and recycled money, if we otherwise provided it only from fresh money, inflation would arise. Or the opposite, only recycled money would still require bond-backed money as civil servant wages are not enough of monetary supply for all the citizens.

[GarrisonPrime]

What artificially increased labor supply?

If anything, I see companies bemoaning the absence of sufficient labor.

The only place I see too many people for too few jobs is in low-skilled manual labor and service. The ratio of people to jobs falls in these areas as a consequence of technological advancements. Not to say that isn't a problem, but it's hardly a nefarious conspiracy.

[chank]

> If anything, I see companies bemoaning the absence of sufficient labor.

this should be qualified with "for the compensation they want to pay".

[sokoloff]

What's artificial about the labor supply?

[anticensor]

Unneeded worker spots and/or burocratic procedures are created to create an illusion of extra labour. This hampers technological advancement.

[sokoloff]

> Unneeded worker spots and/or burocratic procedures are created to create an illusion of extra labour.

Aren't both of those serving to increase the demand for labor, not the supply?

[anticensor]

No, demand can only be controlled indirectly in free market, no-UBI economies. You are creating a supply to fill already existing demand in this case.

[chadAnon69]

Offshoring with free trade means the whole global population is effectively in competition for jobs. Pay and benefits is reduced to the country willing to provide the cheapest labor with least protections and benefits.

[GarrisonPrime]

Perhaps they are trying to sway public mentality to be more accepting of a more modest lifestyle, but...

Most of what is viewed as "The American Dream" was indeed an unsustainable and overinflated dream, built on debt and fraud.

But yeah, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. (At least, relative to each other.) That's kind of the point of technology. But all the while, the baseline the poor live at does rise quite a bit above what had come before.

Our parents and grandparents may have been able to buy a house, but it was half the size (or less) of what most people would consider to be a resonably sized house today. And their houses weren't packed with appliances and gizmos for every need.

They may have been able to buy a car, but it would have lacked so many features and required so much maintenance, for a company to produce such a car today would be considered negligent to the point of being worthless.

They may have had pensions, but those pensions were built on debt and lies, and today we're seeing the pensions have very little to actually back them up. (In other words, they really didn't really have legit pensions.)

They may have been able to afford kids, but they didn't spend hardly anything on them compared to what people today seem to think they "have to" spend on their kids.

They may have been able to retire, but part of that was larger communities and several generations living very near each other or even in the same house. There was no expensive health care because the healthcare industry had very little to offer anyone. There was no huge retirement community expenses because granny lived with the family and everyone chipped in to take care of her.

They may have been able to get a job, but only half the population was able to get a job. And no, most of the jobs didn't have benefits.

Overall, my point is many people have an overblown perspective of how good the past is or what normal is supposed to be. Today's standards of living may be seing stagnation - or even a bit of a backslide - but I don't think it's all that worrisome or oppressive in the grand scheme of things. Rather, our expectations what standards of living "should" be are a bit unrealistic.

You may see this and claim that I've drunked thE Kool-Aid or something and been brainwashed by this article and simialr media. I would counter that I think you've been brainwashed by movies, TV, and Facebook into thinking everyone is supposed to have respectable homes, solid jobs with bennies, and financial security. Very few people ever actually have that kind of life.

[ABCLAW]

I think you do yourself a tremendous disservice by ignoring the actual numbers associated with the generational wealth disparity on display here.

We aren't talking a small backslide. Who gives a fuck if your fridge can make ice if you can't afford to buy a place to keep your fridge.

>I think you've been brainwashed by movies, TV, and Facebook into thinking everyone is supposed to have respectable homes, solid jobs with bennies, and financial security. Very few people ever actually have that kind of life.

No, the middle class most assuredly did have that kind of life. That's what made them middle class.

[solatic]

> Globalism is neo-feudalism, offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for the rich and the result is death of the middle class and the creation of a global equilibrium for wages.

And why, pray tell, do you have a right to a high-paying-with-benefits job? Certainly, it was more likely for your parents to get such a job. Certainly, the pay and benefits were well fought for. Certainly it's better to have such a job than to have a job with less pay and benefits. But why do you feel like you have been wronged when such jobs are lost? Why do people deserve such jobs?

I think that if you delve into this line of thought, you end up either with the labor theory of value (we deserve it because we worked hard for it), or nativism (we deserve it because we were here first). The first is economically indefensible, and the second is morally indefensible.

Yes, you may (in theory) tax the rich to prop up your economically unsustainable lifestyle. Go empty the bank accounts of people like Hollywood A-listers and Wall Street financial executives and put the money into getting another couple weeks of vacation, a $10/hour raise, guaranteed six months of paternity and maternity leave, free healthcare, free daycare, and a fat pension besides. But if we're going to empty their bank accounts, then why do you deserve the cash?

Why don't college students deserve the cash? We could pay off all that student debt and bankroll free higher education for the future. Don't kids deserve to enter a bright future, unsaddled by debt? Or what about infrastructure projects? Don't we all deserve not to sit in traffic jams? Don't we all deserve Gigabit fiber Internet access to the home, bridges that won't collapse, smart energy grids that pay us for the excess energy from our houses' solar panels and batteries? Don't we deserve that?

Around the world, do you know who thinks that they deserve being well-off? Saudi princes think that they deserve their oil wealth. Russian oligarchs think that they deserve their gas wealth. Chinese politicians think that they deserve the wealth the Party has given to them. Why are you different? Why do you deserve more - because you ask for less?

The universe is a pretty unforgiving place. You only deserve what you can persuade people to give you, and most of the time you can only sustainably do that if you can make an honest, rational argument for why it should be given to you and not to somebody else. If you try to make economic arguments with emotional appeals, you may win some of the time, but the arc of the universe is going to bend towards undercutting you.

Nobody deserves to grow old in the same place they were born. Nobody deserves to have a guaranteed lifetime job with the same employer for forty years straight. And so nobody deserves to be able to say, "I have a right to stay here instead of moving far away for work."

[deogeo]

> ..you end up either with the labor theory of value (we deserve it because we worked hard for it), or nativism (we deserve it because we were here first). The first is economically indefensible, and the second is morally indefensible.

So a country looking to the well-being of its own people first, and only second to the well-being of others, is morally indefensible? Should governments be reduced to nothing more than the facilitators of the Free Market? And if anyone votes for a different kind of government, well, they voted wrong?

[solatic]

> Should governments be reduced to nothing more than the facilitators of the Free Market? And if anyone votes for a different kind of government, well, they voted wrong?

Governments should facilitate competition in markets, not free markets. "Free" markets are economic anarchy; like political anarchy, power is inevitably seized and exploited by strongmen. Competitive markets have high entrepreneurship, low barriers to entry, easy access to credit for new businesses, and increasingly stringent requirements for companies as they grow larger and larger.

And yes, competitive markets welcome foreign imports, which reduce the price of inputs and therefore make it easier to start new businesses. Yes, competitive markets welcome immigration, since so many immigrants become entrepreneurs and so many others fill key roles in companies which would not exist without them and provide plenty of jobs for native-born citizens.

If somebody votes for a different kind of government, then they either voted short-sightedly ("he's going to save jobs! ... but not in my town. And the jobs he did save, moved away a couple years later...") or they voted ignorantly ("They promised me the sun and the moon for free! Why didn't anybody do that before?"). Political budgeting is like NIMBYism, everyone wants to expand infrastructure/education/social-welfare/environmental spending, but nobody wants to cut the programs they personally benefit from to help pay for it.

[solatic]

> So a country looking to the well-being of its own people first, and only second to the well-being of others, is morally indefensible?

In the context of an argument arguing that there aren't enough jobs to go around because immigration is too high, your notion of a government's "own people" is nativist, because actually legal immigrants are also the government's "own people". Certainly this is the case for legal immigrant citizens. Legal immigrant non-citizens may not be full participants in a country's democracy, their right to live and work in the country may be revocable, and the government may not answer to legal immigrant non-citizens in a democratic sense, but they are otherwise full participants in society - they use the same infrastructure, buy the same goods and services, and can be communal forces for good or bad, just like anybody else in society. So yes, they are the government's "own people", and when the government acts on a societal-wide scale (taxes, infrastructure spending, etc.), it does so in a way which affects all of us.

Illegal/undocumented immigration is a black hole of a topic that more often than not devolves more into a discussion about the rule of law vs. realpolitik than it does about whether immigration quotas are good or bad. In any case, the government's de facto inability to enforce immigration quotas has absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether immigration affects the ability of legal residents and citizens to find high-paying work, since virtually no illegal/undocumented immigrants can find high-paying work.

[deogeo]

You're arguing about who counts as a country's "own people", and in the sibling comment, whether limiting immigration is in the interest of those people.

In my comment, I raised neither point.

You are not addressing whether a country prioritizing it's own people is morally defensible - the core point of my comment.

[andrewmcwatters]

My question isn't how frequently will we see more Yellow Vestian movements in the future, but what will it take, and how long will it take before leaders die over this?

When will someone get killed over it?

[netcan]

This is kind of tangential but, I don't really understand the "death of the middle class" meme/claim. In what sense is the middle class not growing, decade over decade?

[Lkjhmnbv]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2015/12/10/congratu...

[bryanrasmussen]

also not having kids is good because if you have them now they will die in horrible ways in about 30 years from Global Warming!

[booleandilemma]

Would you give up having children to save the planet?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/give-up-having...

[deogeo]

A large part of the West has children at below the replacement rate, so in a very real sense we're already doing that.

[village-idiot]

Literally why I don’t have kids. I could afford them (with some sacrifices to my quality of life, of course), but I can’t stomach the ethical consequences of bringing a kid into what I think is a dying world.

[ksdale]

I’ve often thought that this is like someone living at the fall of the Roman Empire deciding not to have kids because the world was falling apart.

It wasn’t pleasant by any means for a lot of people and the population in Rome declined drastically, but if everyone decided to pack it in when the world felt like it was falling apart, Europe would never have become what it is (which I like to think would be a great loss).

[village-idiot]

There’s a big gap between “the empire I’ve known forever is going away” and “this world might not be habitable in a century”. You’re being incredibly disingenuous to draw a comparison between the two.

[greedo]

This type of fear-mongering hyperbole does true harm in the fight to combat climate change. The world will not become uninhabitable. It will change in dramatic, unexpected ways, but it's not like it will become radioactive rubble. Feeding FUD about it just enables the deniers.

[ksdale]

I don’t think there was as much of a difference to the person living in Rome at that time, what with disease and starvation and lack of geographic mobility and hostile invaders.

And I might be wrong, but the worst predictions I’ve seen seem to be things that would lower the population of the world by billions, but wouldn’t make it utterly uninhabitable for those who remain (other than something like all out nuclear war).

I don’t think the comparison is disingenuous at all.

I think that if sea level rises and forests turn to deserts and oceans acidify and the population of the world declines by 90%, we’ll hope that the people who are left still try to thrive. And hopefully do better the next time around.

[bryanrasmussen]

Are you sure from the viewpoint of a prosperous citizen of the empire that there was actually a big gap between these two comparisons? My readings have always suggested the two viewpoints would be thought synonymous.

[village-idiot]

One could absolutely make the argument that an American today could identify heavily with a late Roman Empire citizen.

[drak0n1c]

The same concerns could motivate the opposite view. Doesn't ethical responsibility compel those with the most educational resources to raise as many creative and productive members of society as they can?

Fears of Malthusian overpopulation were quelled by a series of agricultural revolutions. Fears of peak oil turned out to be based on outmoded projections and technologies. Fears of worsening global war and nuclear apocalypse did not take into account massive increases in prosperity and political changes.

In every case human ingenuity has surmounted existential threats. The world is not going to die, it is going through change within the bounds of many climate shifts that came before (albeit more rapidly). We need more minds working on problems, not less.

[village-idiot]

Every generation has predicted it will be the last. They’ve all been wrong, so far. One will be right.

What terrifies me is that for the first time in human history, inaction will kill us all. Previous credible apocalyptic scenarios either were local (e.g. deforesting Easter island killed the islanders, but not anyone else), or required active action by people to bring about Armageddon. Now continuing the current course unchanged will absolutely bring an end to most civilizations by the century end, and end humanity completely by 2300 or so. This is new, and something we are really not prepared to deal with.