[AnEro]

Knowing people that make under 60k a year, and how harder their lives got and how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position. Not to mention how alot of western nations have a large majority of people are pay check to pay check regardless of their tax bracket.

Working class is a good litmus of how the economy is doing vs S&P because speculation can ultimately make it look like everything is fine until it isn't

[dtdimond]

It's always been hard for people in those income buckets. But if the question is: are we in a massive economic downturn over the past half year, it's really hard for me to look at the data and answer with a yes.

One thing I'm looking at is:

https://realtimeinequality.org/

And that's showing that for the first time in over a decade, the bottom half is seeing real wage/wealth gains, even after recent inflation. Am I missing something? Because your sentiment is the more common one.

[kradeelav]

Charts can lie. Whether or not you can buy bacon* or gas is real.

*substitute with whatever staple you wish. I used bacon here since it's historically a working class' person's meat.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Bacons a funny commodity, I don’t track the futures of it but always look at the grocery store. Pre pandemic bacon was around 2-3/lb for the cheap stuff, 4/lb for quality, and 6/lb for the niche products. I’ve seen these prices double since January this year and some products are up more than 400%. If this isn’ta sure sign of a serious problem I don’t know what would be.

[Kon-Peki]

https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/APU000070411...

Government price data for bacon goes back to 1980.

PS - there are other price series about bacon, including regional prices:

https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?removeAll=1&q=Bacon

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Great contribution! Thank you!

That website is arcane but the data is fantastic.

[jimmygrapes]

Purely anecdotal but I remember buying 16pz packs of bacon for 1-2 dollars (in a large California city) for awhile, then this phenomenon called "Epic Meal Time" came about and Denny's was making bacon milkshakes and the Internet zeitgeist collectively went "lmao BACON!!" and soon after I was paying 4 dollars per pound. Supply and demand, maybe, sure. In my opinion, it was just demand and marketing.

NOW it's supply and demand, though.

[throwawaylinux]

Wages were rising at a similar rate before the covid hit. Remove that dip and continue the line and it would end up in about the same place it is now.

Wealth started growing since about 2019 too.

[rdtwo]

Yeah you are missing the fact that the bottom 50% of Americans don’t show up in economic charts or data. The wage disparity is so high that they basically become noise on most statistics. Basically if the top 10% do well then it looks like the entire country is doing great.

[dublin]

We shouldn't be quite so smug. Most of what developers and other tech people do is not really needed. Nice, yeah. Required? Hell, no.

Look at Facebook - they're currently the 8th most valuable company on the planet, but very few people really need what they provide, and most of their customers really don't like Facebook (and IG, etc.) and the way they know the company is manipulating them. Contrast that with a companies like Exxon or Amazon, which like them or not, produce products or services people need and want to buy. Ad markets would continue without them, and I'm already seeing companies shift marketing dollars away form digital given both poor results and waiting to see what happens. (And I'm in Austin, where things are relatively booming...)

My point is simply that 80% of what we as techies do could be eliminated tomorrow, and the world would go on. The 20% remaining could (painfully) keep things going through a downturn, especially if the alternative is unemployment.

If you think your company won't cut you loose if that 80% cost reduction becomes necessary due to depression-level forces, think again - you may not be so indispensable as you think, no matter your position - I've seen a couple of top-level thought leaders/innovators cut from local companies recently, something that didn't happen even in 2008! The reason is usually, "we're pulling back from investing in innovation and new product development." I've got a bad feeling about this...

[dionidium]

> how hard it is to pay back loans and other obligations they where ulitmately strong armed into taking to improve their position

It's been a while since I've been in that income bracket, but I don't remember ever being strong-armed into taking on unnecessary debt. What are you referring to here?

[Mezzie]

Well, the big one is college debt, obviously.

But another example that comes to mind (as someone who lives in that income bracket about half by choice and half not) are car repairs (you HAVE to pony up or you lose your job, so the question becomes 'borrow 1k or lose 100% of your income').

Oh, and any time childcare is fucked up for any reason. Kid can't go to daycare/school because they're sick for a week? Parents don't get PTO, so their only option is to eat a week's worth of wages, and since income in is close to or level with expenses out, that means making it up with debt.

The 'strong arming' comes in because society is set up to make those your only options. (versus having public transit to rely on, walkable cities, or cheap car rentals, for example).

[Sohcahtoa82]

It doesn't have to be strong-arming, but what about propaganda?

High schoolers are still being told "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!", yet a high schooler certainly can't pay the $15K+ per year to get a degree, so they take out student loans.

And then, the same people who hounded them to get a degree then hound them when they beg for student loan forgiveness, telling them they shouldn't have taken out a loan they wouldn't be able to afford to pay back.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[dionidium]

> "If you don't want to make minimum wage for your whole life, you need a college degree!"

I started college in 1999. The day my freshmen year started, jokes about English majors asking if you want fries with that were already 60 years old.

This argument is revisionist bunk, in other words. Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others, that some degrees lead to higher pay and that some don't. Everybody knows this. They know it today and they knew it in 1999 and they knew it in 1979 and I categorically reject this weird, revisionist insistence that nobody could possibly have known it or that 18-year-olds are hapless dopes without any agency or even the most basic understanding of how the world works.

[glorified-html]

How many teenagers really understand the practical implications of what they're signing up for?

No one is saying teenagers lack agency, but there is definitely a problem when an outsized number are making decisions that are detrimental to their long-term future

[dionidium]

We're in kind of a weird transitionary period with respect to our societal-level view of teenagers. Very often the same exact people are arguing that student loans are illegitimate, on the grounds that teenagers are not sophisticated enough to sign contracts, but on the other hand that the voting and/or drinking ages should be lowered, because teenagers are clearly capable of handling those responsibilities.

I'm kind of happy to go either way on this, but I think we're probably going to have to pick one. If an 18-year-old can't sign a contract, then surely they shouldn't be allowed the vote.

[robcohen]

Furthermore, gun control is back in the spotlight after Uvalde. I just attended the TX Democratic convention and at least three speakers argued to raise the age for purchasing firearms to 21. I don’t actually have a problem with that, but we’ve gotta be consistent. There’s no way it’s justifiable to remove a constitutional right from an adult without due process.

[jdougan]

I think picking just one would be a bad plan. Looking back, a more principled phasing in of adult privileges and responsibilities would have been helpful. The current arrangements (at least in Canada and the US) appear pretty haphazard to me.

[bobkazamakis]

>I started college in 1999.

>Everybody knows there are some degrees that are more valuable than others

This has only been made more extreme, but you've been checked out for at least 20 years apparently.

[D13Fd]

Having debt is not the worst thing in an inflationary period. The inflation reduces the value of your debt.

[nickserv]

This is true for investment debt like real estate. If you're taking on debt to pay for basic necessities because salary rises don't match inflation it's an altogether different situation.

[D13Fd]

Yes, if you take on the debt after the inflation it does you no good.

But if you take loans in 2015 dollars and repay them in 2022 dollars, you are better off in terms of repayment by having a lot of inflation during that period. It doesn't matter what purpose you took the loan for.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

One has to maintain those debts in the interim, unless you’re suggesting banks are offering 7 year no payment loans or equally long deferrals. Being able to weather inflation in the rest of one’s life is the problem. I’d love 1000% inflation on the money I use to pay my mortgage, but 1000% inflation at the till would be devastating. For people even mildly leveraged high inflation is painful because everything but their debt gets more expensive. Low inflation helps ease large debt obligations, but even moderate inflation will see tens of thousands of people squeezed too hard causing defaults which creates more homeless people and deaths from treatable conditions. All this said, one can try to time the market by making foreseeable purchases before inflation takes root. It seems that this time has passed for most things, but those who bought houses and cars in 2019 likely saw significant free equity. Without incoming increasing at the pace of inflation people are being slowly forced into poverty by the machinations of the capital class and their stooges.

[P5fRxh5kUvp2th]

People don't take payday loans so they can let the relative value of that loan drop.

[rxhernandez]

ONLY if your wages keep up with inflation.

[__MatrixMan__]

Right. And the compensation changes associated with going to a different company are almost always better than letting your current company re-evaluate your pay. So if inflation causes people to jump ship to get market-adjusted pay, you now have formerly-productive people now in FNG-mode, which is a much more impactful phenomenon than inflation on its own.

[D13Fd]

Yes, that's true. But that's like saying "ONLY if you don't lose your job" or "ONLY if you don't get hit by a train."

[nickserv]

Exactly. Unless of course your income is so high that day to day expenditures are basically a rounding error. Then you can profit handsomely from other people's misery. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer is particularly true during times of high inflation (so long as not catastrophic).

[collegeburner]

depends if its fixed rate or not