[discodonkey]

>economic growth hasn’t been occurring in real terms for most people for a long time

This is just not true.

At least in the U.S., people of all income tiers have seen their incomes grow[0] while their working hours shrunk[1].

Inequality is a problem in itself, but equating unequal gains with "transferring money from the poor" seems like bad faith.

[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/th...

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

[dleeftink]

Two things can be true at once; growing income per working hour has not resulted in less income inequality.[0]

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/inequality?tab=chart&Da...

[discodonkey]

True. Income inequality increased.

The person I responded to suggested that only the rich saw income growth, and that they were achieving this by taking from the poor, which is wrong.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

This was true until quite recently (within the last 5-6 years).

Income growth in real dollars had been stagnant since the late 1970s for most deciles.

[renewiltord]

There's no recipe for happiness that primarily involves looking in the other guy's bowl. Even if you have everything to eat, you will still need unhappy if he has more.

No wonder you guys constantly post about unhappiness. You are obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses.

Much more joy if you instead care only about absolute living standards. My life has improved a lot and if Jeff Bezos appears before me and will make me 10x as wealthy if he is 100x I will gladly choose that.

We live as long as kings, with greater variety of food and drink, greater variety of entertainment, and big comfortable houses. I'd take this trade 10/10 times.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Even if you have everything to eat, you will still need unhappy if he has more.

Yes if the demands on our personal resources (inc hours, energy, cognition) far outstrip our quality of life gains.

Me (gen x) vs my parents (silent gen): Parenting time went from a few hours per week to 24/7 adulting while kids growth resources (free range+adult free) was nearly eradicated.

My parents had tons of leisure time. I had none.

Mundane activities are unimaginably complicated now - needs that once had a couple of factors to consider now has dozens of compounding factors, each with their own subgroups to work through.

Consumer choices are flooded with bad options; long research is needed to avoid the never-ending line of traps.

> We live as long as kings, with greater variety of food and drink, greater variety of entertainment, and big comfortable houses.

What's left out of the "Live Better Than Kings" spiel is that gains turn into mandates (electricity, internet). They're required to meet basic needs like housing and not having kids taken away.

> I'd take this trade 10/10 times.

Draw up the entire list of factors that a poor American has to work through. Drop a king into that life for a month and have them report back.

[renewiltord]

It's not Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who are making it impossible for your kids to be free-range. That's your fellow man. In fact, in a world of much greater inequality where your peers are not consulted about how children should be parented, your kids could be as free-range as they wanted. Jeff Bezos, in particular, is famous for letting his children risk physical damage if it means they can grow up resourceful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CmyV5Ghxeg

You can also have lots of leisure time. That's a choice. I do.

You could drop me into the life of a poor American, and a month later I wouldn't be one. I know that's true because I came to San Francisco with nothing in my bank account and a $10/day bed-on-a-couch paid for for 2 weeks.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> You can also have lots of leisure time.

At first glance, this declaration seems ignorant. You plainly lack the details of my parenting years and they are fully required to make that judgment.

In context, it looks like hubris.

But then again you implicitly validated my claims (24/7 adulting due to free range loss); you reassigned the cause of kids adult-free time.

With acceptance of the demands on modern parents' time, your declaration appears to be self-contradictory.

> You could drop me into the life of a poor American, and a month later I wouldn't be one.

This bit seems to confirm my hubris suspicions and I'm a bit divided on which way to respond. I could be less judgy, given my own years of low-wisdom confidence or I could jump right into exampling ignorance that leads to poor assumptions about fortune and poverty.

In the interest of time, I'll roll it all together.

Below is what actual lives look like.

I'll presume you're above average at opportunity farming and pulling rabbits from hats. I'll further assume your desire to excel includes being a high quality parent and spouse.

You are now married and you have children in lower+upper grades. How many children you have is tied to your confidence in providing for them.

Your spouse is a few years into the medical condition that converted her from supportive parent to +3 children in time, +many children in expenses - which are eating thru your single-income-savings faster than you can add to them.

You keep switching employers because they unexpectedly go under (exec scandal), are bought out+resized or are moved overseas. Or you are self-employed and your product/service keeps not landing where it is clearly needed.

Nevertheless you are confident that your will+skill is enough to see you through. You know your efforts will eventually yield result. Those critical uncontrollable factors (~luck) will eventually turn in your favor!

In the mean time your owned home has succumbed to an event (radon/extreme weather/sinkhole/whatever) and isn't habitable so you are forced to take on a 2nd housing expense while the insurance begins an ordeal that will take a decade to resolve.

Once you+wife+kids are relocated, your wife's medical insurance company pulls out of the market, mid-treatment. You are left scrambling to match a new provider to the full suite of options she needs.

This is when you develop Menieres disease. The tinnitus is annoying but the recurring vertigo takes you out of play for a day at a time. It's a permanent addition to your life. Your employer is understanding - at first.

Parenting during vertigo attacks is tough. Doubly so, given that your own parents died before you married. And since your job took you away from your one functional sibling, you don't have a lot of support.

Your kids still need to be transported to their before-school private classes, to their schools, home from schools, to their after school activities and to the other events that are a poor (but best available) substitute for their eradicated free range/time. They need help with homework. They need routine medical visits and not so routine visits for your oldest who has an ongoing condition of their own.

FF to 20y later and your luck hasn't turned yet. At least not nearly enough for you to get a real footing. You are poor. You're over 50 in tech so good luck finding employment even without all the baggage.

Throughout the 20ys you had a daily choice to care for your family at the level they need or invest time in trying to craft opportunities that would fit your medically-adjusted lifestyle.

Over that 20ys, you more+more opted to not neglect your family's needs. You reduced your opportunity-gardening to being opportunity-aware. You saw some but they required an amount of time that was impossible to budget properly. Or at least that became clear after you jumped into them for a while.

> You can also have lots of leisure time. That's a choice. I do.

Life can and does take that choice away. It's a pure spin of the wheel whether your number is the one that comes up.

[renewiltord]

You have created for yourself a prison and you think it inevitable that everyone else will do the same. None of what you're describing is normative. And yes, some people will have outlier bad luck. That's life and it sucks for them, but diseases that have an 0.2% prevalence are rare. There's no reason to reroute all of society to cover Meniere's.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Given that I worked with Jeff Bezos at the beginning of amzn, and made roughly $1M before I was 33 as a result, I'm hardly in the "obsessed about keeping up with the Joneses" group: I was the Joneses.

That doesn't stop me from saying that the distribution of wealth within the US economy is immoral, and detrimental to our politics, our health, our environment and more. And it doesn't stop other people from saying so either:

https://www.responsiblewealth.org/

Those folks are hardly obsessed with keeping up with anyone.

I'm glad that your life has "improved a lot". But that's not a reason to give up on fairness, decency and even just plain old self-interest. It's a better society for everyone if there's less inequality, even those at the top.

[renewiltord]

Keeping up with the Joneses isn't about the sum of money, which by that age is trivial in the Bay Area. It's about the constant attitude of one's unhappiness stemming deeply from a sense that others are doing better than oneself. Fairness is a concept with diverse meanings: for some it means equality and for others it means proportionality. The fact that you have not equalized your wealth to the global median by transferring fractions to those lower than you proves that you do not believe in equality and retain some concept of proportionality.

It's unsurprising that one conveniently draws the line at one's own wealth as decent and fair but it should also be unsurprising when others do the same with their own larger amounts.

The average Indian (the modal nationality in the world), as an example, must work 200 years to gain the wealth you did at the age of 33. Show us your commitment to fairness and decency. I am curious to see you achieve parity with him.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Show us your commitment to fairness and decency.

25+ years writing open source software. Will that do?

[renewiltord]

Of course, I like that you did that. But it's not near fair enough considering people are starving. Bezos has given billions to charity. Will that do? Clearly not. So what you have done cannot suffice either.

[Apocryphon]

> We live as long as kings, with greater variety of food and drink, greater variety of entertainment, and big comfortable houses.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

> During the most recent 22.5-year period from January 2000 to June 2022, the CPI for All Items increased by 74.4% and the chart displays the relative price increases over that time period for 14 selected consumer goods and services, and for average hourly wages. Seven of those goods and services have increased more than the average inflation rate of 74.4%, led by huge increases in hospital services (+220%), college tuition (+178%), and college textbooks (+162%), followed by increases in medical care services (+130%), child care (+115%), food and beverages (82%) and housing (80%). Average hourly earnings have also increased more than average inflation since January 2000 — by nearly 100% — indicating that hourly wages have increased 25% more over the last two decades that the average increase in consumer prices.

> The other seven price series have been flat or have declined since January 2000, led by TVs (-97%), toys (-72%), computer software (-70.5%), and cell phone service (-41%). The CPI series for new cars, household furnishings (furniture, appliances, window coverings, lamps, dishes, etc.), and clothing have remained relatively flat for the last 22 years while average consumer prices increased by 74.4% and wages by 99.6%, although all three series (TVs, toys, and software) have

[keybored]

> There's no recipe for happiness that primarily involves looking in the other guy's bowl. Even if you have everything to eat, you will still need unhappy if he has more.

What kind of happiness demands billions of dollars? These things go both ways.

> No wonder you guys constantly post about unhappiness. You are obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses.

As opposed to the ultrarich who have actively pursued this inequality? Curious, it consistently only goes one way in your mind.

> Much more joy if you instead care only about absolute living standards. My life has improved a lot and if Jeff Bezos appears before me and will make me 10x as wealthy if he is 100x I will gladly choose that.

Who said that Bezos could do that? Who said that wealth is created by the ultrarich? No one, but your mind seems to think so for some reason. Well, I’m sure you could find supposed evidence of it on X and the Washington Post, for whatever reason that might be.

> We live as long as kings, with greater variety of food and drink, greater variety of entertainment, and big comfortable houses. I'd take this trade 10/10 times.

So? This is a forum visited by high-earning US software engineers (that’s not me but a lot are). Not the kinds of people that the last four decades have hurt (the most). Which is why you get these surprise comments in these threads. “Woah guys, I’ve been reading these numbers lately and people are actually poor out there.”

No, I don’t think that it’s the Microsoft staff engineers that are personally mad about the state of things.

[dleeftink]

Quite the opposite, I've never yearned for more or even had a stable income. Yet I'm very happy.

Flat out concluding that everyone can make their own happiness by just being open to a system that constrains many others along the way, feels like regressing not progressing.

[Eric_WVGG]

That first link is not adjusted for inflation.

$1 in 1970 == $7.54 in 2022

That 1970 middle-classer would be making around $450k in 2022 dollars, which sounds insane, but I also know my parents had normal jobs and were able to buy a house shortly after getting out of college.

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

(yes we all have more luxuries than back then, toys got cheaper, necessities exploded in cost)

[PaulRobinson]

Consider how big the difference is between each segment identified here. Realise that the upper income bracket itself could be broken down into three segments that would show an ever starker difference.

Unequal gains is the problem, and your intuition can help inform why: the 2023 dollar index used is based on what rate of inflation? CPI? RPI? Something else? Why is it that in 1970 a median income household could buy a home on a single income and raise a family (including sending kids to college), on a 2023-dollar income of $66k, but that's mostly not possible on $106k in actual 2023 for most households.

When you adjust for real buying power using a less favourable means of assessing inflation and taking into account housing costs more fully, I sense you'll find that the bottom two brackets are behind their 1970-adjusted counterparts, and the upper income bracket is significantly better off, especially if you then break that upper segment up a little into more categories.

And, without something happening to adjust this, the effect is going to just get worse and worse, and everyone knows it.

[renewiltord]

Well, housing is obvious. It's because most Americans are eager to have community (by which they mean suburban homes) and a short commute and a separation between commercial and residential spaces. This is a process that clearly yields outcomes that are not time-invariant. In the same sense that asking "why did people back then get to put a house down near Golden Gate Park and I don't?" is meaningless. Because eventually all the places near GGP have houses.

As Adam Driver points out in Ferrari, "two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time". A view some might find counterintuitive.

[discodonkey]

It seems to be using the CPI. The basket of goods & services the CPI is referencing is determined by the extensive Consumer Expenditure Survey, and reflects to a fair degree the actual spending habits of Americans.

Obviously, if you give more weight to housing, you're going to get different results. But it would distort the actual change in expenditure.

[xracy]

Why wouldn't you include housing? It's often people's largest expense?

[renewiltord]

What makes you believe that housing is not included? Consider using a search engine (Google is pretty good) and using keywords like "cpi shelter weight" or "cpi housing weight". The BLS has a page on the subject.

[xracy]

Sorry, I read the 2nd sentence as removing housing entirely, for some reason. I see that's not what they're saying, they're just talking about the relative weight of the thing.

My apologies for not knowing offhand everything that goes into the CPI, and not googling it for more context, I was just asking questions on the internet instead. I should've known better than to hope for learning something from my fellow humans.

[oblio]

1. What are the growth rates per quartile?

2. How have living expenses grown?