[itsoktocry]

>The economy is rigged such that in the absence of any positive action, workers' purchasing power goes down over time by default. This obviously isn't a problem for the rich, whose money is stored almost entirely in assets which by definition rise in value with inflation.

Look, I'm sensitive to the struggles of the less well off, and that we are in a particularly rough part of a cycle. I don't believe the economy is at all optimal.

But your comment implies that people are getting poorer over time, and it flies in the face of reality, doesn't it? Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates.

[chipdart]

> But your comment implies that people are getting poorer over time, and it flies in the face of reality, doesn't it? Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates.

I think you are confusing two entirely different things. You can have a society that's getting wealthier and still people getting poorer. In fact, you have just that in the real world. It's as simple as seeing how the median salary and average salary compare and evolve. It's as simple as comparing how minimum wages evolved with inflation.

It's no coincidence that even in the US, humanity's apex in economic development and wealth, the average Joe cannot afford a house while a few decades back it could.

[throwawaymaths]

People are not getting poorer because productivity has been going up to compensate. As in, we're milking more and more out of the labor and middle classes. (Ok also technology papers over the problem as commerce becomes somewhat more efficient)

The family is not too much less wealthy but also we have families with two incomes, breadearners working overtime, stressed out family dynamics, and student going into deeper and deeper debt to be credentialed enough to participate in the sophisticated workforce.

If you look at the "wtf happened in 1970" chart, the y axes are productivity and real wages.

It turns out 2% inflation is enough to steal the productive increase of labor and middle classes and transfer it to the politically connected, wealthy, and financial sectors. At some point it's just going to be impossible to wring more gains out of labor and technology improvements. We're probably really close.

[may_mccheese]

I don't think we're "really close" insofar as I feel that's been side continuously since the 1600s say. Always another thing comes.

People say "everyone is richer" because the cost "nice things" generally drops with time due to efficiency. So nobody is in fact financially richer, just richness from a quality of life perspective versus someone living in a cave - it's kind of a cop-out and a twist on words.

Indeed the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of the US holds over 95% of the wealth, it's actually completely insane. most people are poor, relatively and comparatively. A common sense wealth / net worth tax, 5% per year for 5 years, 2% per year thereafter, would ameloriate this.

[Aerbil313]

This was so insightful, thanks.

[oblio]

Are you talking about a timescale of 100 years or 30? People are poorer than they were in 1990, especially the mid to lower classes.

[milesskorpen]

This is not true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA This is real GDP per capita

[Retric]

GDP says almost nothing about what individuals lives are like, just look at the various petroleum states. As to poor people’s lives in the US, it’s basically flat with wage growth or loss depending on how you calculate inflation over the last 40 years.

The median income earners in Q1 1990 made 408$/week, one inflation source puts that at 951.17$/week in Q1 2023, vs 1095$ so is what the actual dividing line was. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ So 0.3% annual growth over that timeframe with many ups and downs so numbers also look different depending on what exact dates are chosen.

The line between 1st and 2nd quartile is again basically flat, though the data doesn’t go before 2000. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252916100A

Though again there’s many ways of calculating inflation, and many of them show that hypothetical person worse off. And of course individuals aren’t going to stay at exactly the same income band so many many people really are significantly worse off.

[patmcc]

This doesn't address the claim oblio was making - 'People are poorer than they were in 1990, especially the mid to lower classes' - real GDP per capita could double but it all be captured by the top quartile, for example.

(I think the claim is still wrong, and that all quartiles are doing better in real terms, but that's a tougher thing to measure)

[lumost]

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Annual wages are about 15% higher today compared to 1971 in real terms. Real terms is a bit suspect in this case as wage earners are more likely to pay nominal rent then owner equivalent rent. It may well be accurate that the average wage earner is worse off today then they were in 1971.

I'd venture a speculation that this is reflected in media, sitcoms of the 70s rarely had roommates - and the 80s/90s poked fun of those who lived in their parents basements. Roommates are relatively common in shows today.

[fouc]

Shared living arrangements have been prevalent long before the 70s, boarding houses and the like. I wouldn't rely on film and television industry to be exactly that representative of the times.

[smackeyacky]

Well forget that facile analysis and go back to your parents generation. They afforded houses, current generation cannot afford houses. It’s obvious that the current generation got gypped.

[chipdart]

> Annual wages are about 15% higher today compared to 1971 in real terms.

Since 1971, the cumulative inflation rate was around 700%, with an average annual inflation being well over 3%.

So while wages increased 15%, the price of everything else around us increased over 700%.

[erko_]

The 15% increase in wages is in real terms, meaning it's already been adjusted with inflation. Think of it this way: in nominal terms, wage increase would be 715%.

[GeneralMayhem]

Mean GDP per capita, real or nominal, is a useless metric for almost all purposes. When we're talking about average people's lives, it's worse than useless.

[exmicrosoldier]

As someone alive 30 years ago, it isn't as clear cut as the biased graph.

Gasoline was roughly 1/3rd the price, but 4 years of state college was 20k, not 100k.

A house I grew up in, while 30 years newer, cost 80k compared to 300k now, even though it needs a lot more work.

Minimum wage there went from 4.25 an hour 30 years ago to 7.5.

Health care costs have gone up way more than double.

So maybe people make twice as much cash, but their costs for the things they actually need, without bullshit fake adjustments, cost 3 to 4 times more than they used to.

One could argue for better, lik how react is "better" than html forms. But it isn't really worth the cost to me.

Excite was about as good at getting me search results for what I am looking for as google has enshittified itself to now.

[treyd]

GDP per capita is a poor measure of general wellbeing since it doesn't account for changes in the cost of living and is skewed by funny business in stock markets.

[npoc]

Most importantly, it's measured using something that is halving in value every ten years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

[derangedHorse]

Real GDP is supposed to account for that with the GDP deflator. Whether it actually does or not is a different story since I'm not knowledgable to know the details of that calculation, but I agree with your sentiment. Per-capita GDP has nothing to do with wealth distribution and with a depreciating currency, those at the bottom get the short end of the stick.

[npoc]

As with most calculations in Keynesian economics, it doesn't take into account the devaluation of the monetary unit, at best it only looks at CPI which is extremely misleading. CPI is misleading because it doesn't consider the devaluation of the basket of goods - it assumes they've stayed the same value - and it completely ignores hard assets like housing even though that's something everyone wants to buy. Money supply expansion (total debt), or price increases of hard assets is a much better indicator of devaluation of the monetary unit, but that doesn't provide the figures they want the public to see.

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." Henry Ford

[HDThoreaun]

Real GPD...

[npoc]

Real GDP uses CPI as a correction factor making it highly misleading.

CPI is thoroughly flawed. It doesn't take into account that consumables are actually falling in value by 5%/year due to ever increasing efficiencies of production, and it only includes a carefully selected basket of goods which notably doesn't include hard assets like real estate. It's algorithm is even changed through years and if we use algorithms from previous decades, they produce much higher figures.

It completely ignores the fact that the fiat currencies are devalued through money supply inflation (the real inflation)

[solumunus]

GDP is a terrible metric to illustrate your point. People have less disposable income because living costs have increased far quicker than wages, it’s really that simple. The majority of adults know this through lived experience, it’s extremely obviously that people are poorer on average than in the 90’s. That you’re having to search for statistics to answer this question reveals something about your living situation.

[npoc]

You're measuring GDP in something that's being devalued by half every ten years through supply expansion.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

[qeternity]

What data are you drawing this conclusion from?

[harimau777]

While society has gotten wealthier, have average people, at least in America, gotten wealthier? Technology has advanced so there's things that people can own now that they couldn't before, but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer.

[randomdata]

> but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer.

If housing were constant then people would not be any poorer with respect to housing. They would be in the exact same position. But housing is not a constant. The average US house has have more than doubled in size over the past 50 years. The average US home also has one less person living in it as compared to 50 years ago. People today are way richer in housing.

[harimau777]

How can people be richer in housing if they can't own a house. That doesn't make sense to me.

[harryh]

Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

[chipdart]

> Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range.

I don't think your graph says what you think it says.

The graph shows a time series of the rate of homes which are owner-occupied to those that aren't. When the average Joe buys a house, they tend to stick with it for life. However, the graph you linked clearly shows this rate plummeting from 2004 to 2016, with the nosedive amounting to around 6%.

This means that in a short span of a decade, the amount of home owners living in their own home dropped 10%.

You have a small spike around 2020 which I bet was caused by WFO allowing people to live in places cheap enough that they could finally afford their home, but that stagnated already.

Also, it's interesting how such a meteoric drop happens in an indicator that tracks home ownership, which is something people do for life. You need a very radical change in the people's ability to afford a house to see so many people stop affording them in such a quick timespan.

[randomdata]

You can't own social interaction, but some people are rich socially. Rich is not defined by ownership.

[throwawaymaths]

> have average people

You mean median person. If society gets wealthier the average nearly definitionally gets better (modulo population increase)

[schrodinger]

FYI average is actually an ambiguous term that can mean mode, median, or mean.

[okr]

I can agree with that. It is like the frog in slowly boiling water, just the other way around, people don't realize and appreciate, in what wealth they live and that we all make it constantly better for everyone, consciously or unconsciously.

But people look at other people who are visibly better off, compare themselves against those and get tricked into believing, that it is no just. How he can have more? Must be evil! Stolen from the people! Typical divide and conquer, to play with ego and greed, that causes misery and anger among our fellows. It makes me sad to see the same scheme being played out everytime.

[carlosjobim]

If you mean what you say, I'll trade you all my modern conveniences in return for a small patch of land with a house in 1970s standard or 1960s standard. Deal? If offered this, a large majority of young people and people without real estate would gladly accept and happily live without iphones or AC.

[tasuki]

I believe that's what they'd say but they actually wouldn't want to do that.

Do you know the size of houses in 1960s and how many people lived in how much space? Today people are priced out of the housing market because everyone expects opulent luxury.

[carlosjobim]

No, that's not true. And I don't think you really believe that yourself either. It's just an easy cop out to not have to think about a very serious issue that is crushing your fellow man right now.

It is the home sellers who put "opulent luxury" prices on worn down homes in need of repair. It is the sellers who renovate homes for 100 000 to increase the asking price with 500 000.

Imagine if this was the market for cars or any other goods.

[tasuki]

I guess it all depends on where/when and other specifics.

The reality is that in the fifties large families used to live packed quite tightly in a small space, and now, they... don't?

[xnx]

This seems extremely unlikely. I'd rather give up indoor plumbing than my phone.

[PretzelPirate]

> Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates.

Are you two talking about different time scales? Individuals in the workforce get poorer as their buying power drops, but each generation lives in a wealthier society as more innovation improves life.

[plaguuuuuu]

People are demonstrably poorer, medical bankruptcies, the homeless pile up in fetid camps, but everyone has access to multiple lifetimes worth of social media content and fake AI waifus.

[Yiin]

Your comment ignores that "richer" in this context mean basically breadcrumbs in comparison to all the other assets poor people can't realistically invest in. If economy in general goes up 20x and your own wealth increases 1.5x, yeah you got wealthier compared to before, but poorer compared to everything else.

[dgoldstein0]

This sounds fine to me if "your own wealth increases 1.5x" means an increase in purchasing power as opposed to the 1.5x being wiped by inflation. E.g. if housing costs quadruple you can't use that extra cash to buy a nicer house/rent a nicer apartment than before, and probably you want to save the extra money as a result of the higher housing costs rather than buying better food (assuming it didn't also rise significantly in price)

We like to hand wave and approximate costs via a single "inflation" number but smart phones are infinitely more cheap than 20 years ago - they didn't exist back then - whereas they don't solve basic needs like food & shelter. So we need better metrics.

So I have to hand wave a bit but if the economy grows such that everyone has better purchasing power, but the top 5% or 1% benefit 100x more than everyone else, I think that's a win; it'd of course be better if the new wealth was spread closer to equally, but the main thing is to make sure as much as practical that everyone is better off.

I'm not actually sure we know what the right economic policies to promote this sort of goal are.

[rmbyrro]

Considering how difficult it has become (even pre-COVID) for young people to buy a home, your argument flies in the face of reality, doesn't it?

[okr]

Buy a home where? In the area of a thriving city? Where everyone wants to live?

[carlosjobim]

Anywhere. Young people have to move to thriving cities to get better paying jobs and education for better paying jobs, because they cannot afford homes where they were born with the salaries and opportunities there.

[kbelder]

Because there is no absence of any positive action. That's one of the main benefits of the free market.

[derangedHorse]

What do you mean "Society has become significantly wealthier"? When I think of wealth I think of an individual's assets to liabilities. If we look at the total value of an individual's assets with respect to the labor it can purchase, I don't think society has gotten all that wealthier. Maybe you're conflating quality of life with wealth?

Better quality and more abundant goods with decreasing marginalized labor costs is what we should expect since technology is naturally deflationary. If anything, the oddity is that food prices ever increase over time when quality is stagnant. The book "The Price of Tomorrow" does a good job giving a perspective on this.

There's also the problem of misguided/fraudulent capital investment which is when governments and corporations raise costs under the guise of technological improvements. This is when they say they add in extra processes for quality when they're really just lining their pockets. Think medical schools and doctors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6288618/), the FDA processes(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug...), etc.

[roenxi]

> Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates.

That is the issue with the absurdities of inflation and interest rates - how do you tell whether we're better off if the yardstick for measuring value is being purpose fully distorted? And the way we measure the distortion seems to be unreliable;I don't see how inflation is supposed to rise faster than wages but asset prices seem to be inflating substantially faster than the inflation rate making it harder to save. GDP also disassociated from energy use in the 1970s so I don't see why it going up means I'm better off either - I need cheap energy to be comfortable. All the stuff GDP measures is nice, but rising energy prices are a massive problem that we don't focus on as much as we did when they were driving GDP growth despite the fact that they are still a major part of existing.

Asia is better off in real terms. A friend of mine was talking about how he went home to his ancestral village and they had toilets now which is a massive QoL step change. So if "society" is global, yes.

If we're talking English speaking countries, you can tell me I'm better off, but I'm not sure what metrics you're using or why we believe they matter. I have access to much better electronic equipment than my parents, and our ability to cure ailments has improved markedly. But a bunch of people I know had to leave the city because they literally couldn't afford to live here. Debt seems to be out of control. We're seeing political discontent in the UK and US that seems to be linked to people who don't believe that they are becoming better off, and I tend to believe people when they say that.

TLDR; maybe. But you're making a claim that is vaguer than you might think. We're a much smarter society than we were 50 years ago, but it is less obvious who it is that is "significantly wealthier" and what that means.

[jrmg]

But a bunch of people I know had to leave the city because they literally couldn't afford to live here.

Haven’t people always done that though? America’a history is one of constant migration.

Searching for general stats on labor mobility, it seems that Americans are moving to find work (surely the same thing as moving because the place they are is unaffordable for the lifestyle they want?) _less_ now:

E.g. https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/regional-economi...

In recent decades, as land across the U.S. filled with development—particularly along the coasts—highly mobile cities became increasingly populated by people born there. As an example, in 1960, 20 percent of U.S.-born residents of Los Angeles were from California, while by 2010, 70 percent were. At the same time, population growth rates have converged and are now similar across all regions. Coate and Mangum theorize that these two trends are connected by home attachment, or “rootedness”—that is, people prefer to live near family and social connections.4 Despite individual differences in the intensity of home attachment, the authors find a preference for home among the young and the old, and for both college- and noncollege-educated workers.

[chii]

> We're seeing political discontent in the UK and US that seems to be linked to people who don't believe that they are becoming better off

I think there's a section of people in this demographic who have been seeing how much better off _others_ are (thru social media etc), and thus feel discontent. This is exacerbated by the fact that such type of discontent inducing content is clickbait and gets people emotional (therefore, engagement).

There's some truth, perhaps, to the idea that some people were better off in the seventies than today, but the majority of people are likely living a wealthier life today. They just dont feel it, because there exists an even wealthier class that is now very visible, and it has been ingrained into the youths that modern society has moved past feudalism and classism.

[ajkjk]

Their comment is about the math, which has to be true. There can still be countervailing effects, but the math still works out the way it works out.

[bsdpufferfish]

its really not. the math is a distant abstraction of a social subject

[datavirtue]

And inflation is a result of an increasing money supply, which if it were not the case the poor would be absolutely subjugated.

[djtango]

There was this great chart that I wish I could find which kind of explained it well for me.

Things we consume have gotten cheaper - flights, electronics.

Things related to wealth - assets but also things like education have all gotten more expensive.

So we all get to live a more "experiential" life but good luck passing anything on, if you care about those kinds of things...

EDIT here we go - similar (if not the same) chart:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-s...