[Pfhreak]

Sorry, it seems axiomatic to me. There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker.

Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well. One graph does not tell the whole story.

[vorpalhex]

Ah, well I take it to be true that generally complex systems do not have intents, that complex systems do not select against subsets, and that complex systems with no single controller are in fact complex and made up of a multitude of push and pull pressures. That's just my take though.

> Also, the very next graph shows that real household income is virtually unchanged. And rent as a percentage of income is rising as well.

There is not a single graph on this page which mentions rent as a percentage of income. You may see Taxes as a percentage of income[^2], but this does not touch in rent. One graph does not tell the whole story, but you must offer evidence for your argument. You can't simply shrug and say "well I disagree with the evidence!"

> There are pressures on the working class that make it very difficult to "skill up" through no fault of the worker.

That's true for all of humanity. You haven't established that there's a special kind of pressure on low wage earners due to or related to capitalism. Whether you're a capitalist, socialist, or an 11th century peasant, you need to eat, work, pay your taxes, watch your kids and generally live life.

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

[Pfhreak]

> well I take it to be true that generally complex systems do not have intents, that complex systems do not select against subsets

I'm not suggesting the system has an intent. But they absolutely do select against subsets. For years we had systemic discrimination in this country, from redlining policies to voting laws, that absolutely selected against subsets. You don't just remove the bad policies and declare the playing field is equal.

Heck, natural selection and evolution are clearly complex systems that obviously select against subsets.

> you must offer evidence for your argument

Here's a source for rent vs. income: https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rent-growth-since-...

It's especially impactful to lower class folks. There are plenty of other examples available via your favorite search engine.

[vorpalhex]

I'm going to pick on the particular case of redlining, because I'm a bit more up to date on it than some others. The others are important too.

Redlining is abhorrent behavior. It's also caused by people. We can look at a specific city where Redlining is a major problem, and pull the rezoning documents and contracts and actually point to specific people who acted with bad intent. We can say "Bob over there is a jerk and engaging in this prohibited behavior" (and hopefully do something about it like punish Bob).

That's not some particular case against capitalism. Redlining occurs in non-capitalist and less-capitalist (mixed capitalist/socialist societies), it doesn't occur in all capitalist societies or areas, and it's not directly capitalist driven (instead having heavy racial and religious discriminatory elements). That doesn't mean redlining isn't bad, it means that it has nothing to do with capitalism being good or bad.

> Here's a source for rent vs. income...There are plenty of other examples available via your favorite search engine.

There's also plenty of examples for my points which I've been carefully citing as we go, and in general it's poor form to leave finding evidence as an exercise up to the reader. I realize it may be inconvenient to you to have to cite evidence for your arguments, but that's the nature of trying to have an argument about a real world thing and not just a partisan talking point.

You'll notice your source stops at 2014 (which, it was written in 2016, that's reasonable) and it doesn't take into account the significant median income increase behavior from 2014-2020 per [^1] above. Yes, rents do rise, that part isn't very surprising in and of itself. Also note that comparing the increases as percentages of each other is misleading - a 130% rent increase compared to a 110% income increase is not 1:1 given the original 1960s figures are dramatically different [^3]. This also doesn't account for the decrease of family size [^4]. In general family units have shrunk, and we've gone from multiple generations sharing a house to people moving out sooner (which would result in median rent increase).

[^3]: https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/gros...

[^4]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...

[bkberry352]

I don't think the argument was that redlining was an example of why capitalism was bad. I think the argument was that discrimination and redlining is an emergent behavior/intent of the complex system that is our society. Clearly the complex social system doesn't have a single controlling entity and is instead driven entirely by the actions of individual participants. Just like redlining is an emergent behavior of our society caused by the aggregate total of individuals acting in the society (the "bad actors" in your terms), so too can aggregate behavior emerge that puts pressure against workers upskilling.

[vorpalhex]

I realize we're both forecasting about someone elses intent now, and the original comment was very brief. In general I agree that a complex system can give rise to emergent behaviors. I had taken the original comment to suggest a particular system was at fault and given the spread of options (capitalism, human labor, democracy, etc) picked what felt the most likely - capitalism.

But even if we back away from that,

> aggregate behavior emerge that puts pressure against workers upskilling.

That seems the tough point to prove and it doesn't seem a priori true except in such a vague sense (time being finite, life being busy, etc) as to be meaningless. There doesn't appear to be any particular pressure against workers upskilling in general. Learning comes at a cost (time, effort, availability) but those costs are generally constant. When we point to that as the main causative factor then we're dramatically over-simplifying the case.

When I talk to my family and friends who are low wage earners (and obviously this is anecdotal and not necessarily a representative data sample) usually the issues that arise are not knowing that options exist outside of college, not realizing what career paths actually are available, and frequently being discouraged from whatever experience with school they had historically.

This doesn't seem like an emergent behavior problem, it seems like a communication issue at it's root.