[Demiurge]

> In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children.

Every kind of a man, or woman?

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite.

Well, this probably why statistics exist.

[jitix]

Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America.

The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else. We can see the economic crisis' in the US first in the 70s/80s with Europe and Japan rebounding, then again in 90s/00s with China and East Asia growing, and now again with the rest of the world growing (esp Latin America, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines, etc). Unless US physically invades and devastates China, India or Brazil the competition will keep getting exponentially higher. It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

[f1shy]

> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

Are you aware of the plan Marshall?

[philipallstar]

Or of Silicon Valley, or Hollywood.

[xnx]

> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

Don't give them any ideas.

[jimbokun]

> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

What does this sentence mean?

[redhed]

I assume the idea is more money could've been invested into bringing the bottom rungs of American society up and created a more skilled and educated workforce in the process.

[jimbokun]

So "social capital" == "education"?

The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.

[nradov]

Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted but they forget that there are a large number of fellow citizens in the economically disconnected underclass who never had a good opportunity to learn those basics. As a society we've never done a good job of lifting those people up.

[rightbyte]

> On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes take for granted

I don't see your point.

Those rules does not apply to the upper class and middle class workers have way more leeway regarding that than the lower class.

[jimbokun]

That comes from growing up in a two parent family where both parents are responsible and hard working and willing to discipline their children.

Government can’t really do much to help with that.

[tbrownaw]

This seems to be saying that a large fraction of poor people are poor only because of bad habits, which they have only because nobody taught them any better?

[jrjeksjd8d]

The existence of an upper class necessitates the existence of a lower class. You can't just pull everyone up to be above average.

[bonsai_spool]

> I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.

This is wrong.

The increase in administrator pay began well after the crises cited in OP.

You could cite spending on the sciences (and thus Silicon Valley), but the spending by the US did not accrue to administrators; and further, federal money primarily goes to grants and loans, but GP is citing a time over which there were relatively low increases in tuition.

Edit: Not at home, but even a cursory serious search will turn up reports like this one that indicate the lack of clarity in the popular uprising against money "[going] to administrators"

https://www.investigativeeconomics.org/p/who-to-believe-on-u...

[malcolmgreaves]

For universities, yes. But not for primary education. Administrative bloat is the worst in K-12.

[jitix]

Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Things that let workers focus on innovation. IT workers in cheaper countries have it much easier while we have to juggle rising cost of living and cyclical layoffs here. And ever since companies started hiring workers directly and paying 30-50% (compared to 10-15% during the GCC era) the quality is almost at par with US.

[palmotea]

>>> It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs.

>> What does this sentence mean?

> Cheaper education, free/subsidized healthcare, free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support, etc.

Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

Cheaper education? Public K-12 schools, the GI bill, generous state subsidies of higher education (such that you could pay for college with the money you made working a summer job).

Free/subsidized childcare, cultural norms around family support? Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.

[jitix]

> Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels. I work in edutech and our goal is to cut costs faster than revenue. Enrolments are down, students are over burdened with student loans, and new grads can't compete in the market.

Also, do you think kids going to K-12 in the US can compete with kids who go to international schools in China and India? High end schools in those countries combine the Asian grind mindset with western education standards.

> Wages high enough to raise a family on a single income, allowing for stay-at-home moms to provide childcare.

This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs. "It takes a village to raise a child" is a common western idiom based on centuries of observations. Just because there was 20-30 years of unnatural economic growth doesn't make it the global or historical norm.

[nradov]

Education is a tough one. Like healthcare, it's highly subject to Baumol's Cost Disease. Technology holds some potential but fundamentally we still need a certain ratio of teachers to students, and those teachers get more expensive every year.

https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/baumols-cost-disease-long...

Education should be well funded. But at the same time, taxpayers are skeptical because increasing funding doesn't necessarily improve student outcomes. Students from stable homes with aspirational parents in safe neighborhoods will tend to do well even with meager education funding, and conversely students living in shitholes will tend to do badly regardless of how good the education system is. If we want to improve their lot then we need to fix broader social issues that go beyond just education. Anyone who has gotten involved with a large school district has seen the enormous waste that goes to paying multiple levels of administrators, and education "consultants" chasing the latest ineffective fad. Much of it is just a grift.

[palmotea]

>> Except for free/subsidized healthcare, didn't the US already have those things during the post-war boom?

> Yes, but education system is being dismantled piece by piece at all levels.

So? That's not really relevant to the historical period you were referring to when you said: "It's a shame that US didn't invest all that prosperity into social capital that could have helped create high value jobs."

At the time, Americans already had many of the things you're saying they should've invested in to get. How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?

> This was a special period of post war prosperity that I mentioned. It was unnatural and the world has reset back to the norm where a nuclear family needs societal/governmental support to raise kids, or need to have two 6 figure jobs.

Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?

I think you should be more explicit about how you think things should be for families. Because going on an on about how the times when things were easier was "unnatural" may create the wrong impression.

Also keep in mind where talking about human society here, the concept of "natural" has very little to do with any of it. What were really talking about is the consequence of the internal logic of this or that set of artificial cultural practices.

[sparrc]

The US is not perfect by any measure, but your argument that the US doesn't have innovative nor "high-value" jobs is absurd beyond belief.

[judahmeek]

Right, because Europe is so innovative.

The mother of invention is idiomatically necessity, not comfort.

Ultimately, increased levels of competition should lead to higher levels of innovation.

Btw, what is "the GCC era" a reference to?

[jitix]

Europe is quite innovative on per-capita basis. Not like US but the workers there have much happier lives and their societies don't have extreme inequality and resulting violence like the US.

China is arguably more innovative than all and has terrible work life balance, but their society is stable and you won't go from millionaire to homeless just because you had to get cancer treatment.

GCC = global consulting companies, the bane of innovation. Outsourcing of all kinds (even domestic C2C) should be banned.

[judahmeek]

If you accept patent applications as a proxy for innovation, then https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/patent-applications-per-m... suggests that Europe lags behind both China & the U.S.

Also, China is 3rd, behind South Korea & Japan

That & the differing levels of patent application per capita across Europe suggests that patent applications are directly related to work/life balance & perhaps some sort of infonomic aggregation & doesn't seem to support any correlation with quality of life.

[toomanyrichies]

Is GCC an acronym you just now came up with, or is does it commonly mean “global consulting company” in your part of the world?

I ask because, when I do a Google search, the two most common meanings for that term are “Global Capacity Center” and “Gulf Cooperation Council”.

[nradov]

You don't understand what's happening in China. Advanced cancer treatments are generally not even available to poor people. Instead of becoming homeless due to medical expenses they just die. The US healthcare system has serious problems with access and efficiency but it's at or near the top worldwide in terms of cancer survival rates.

Chinese society is more "metastable" than really stable. The Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre weren't that long ago. Chinese history going back millennia is full of violent revolutions and civil wars. Xi Jinping has been able to keep a lid on things lately through brutal purges of all other potential power centers but times may get "interesting" again when he leaves power.

[pfannkuchen]

Were there a lot of imports at that time in terms of materials or labor or food? If not, I don’t really see how money flowing in from abroad actually changes the economy in this area. If the wood is harvested in America and the workers are in America and the wood and workers are available, then any amount of money value generated by everyone else will be sufficient to pay them, unless there is a significant stream of imports that need to be paid for (which I’m not aware of in this time period).

What could have made a big difference is if foreign competition arose for American materials and land, which it did. But that is under our control, we collectively can choose whether to allow them to buy it or not, and whether to let people in at a rate that outpaces materials discovery and harvesting capabilities.

We also restricted materials harvesting quite a bit during this time period, for example I believe a lot of forestry protections were not in place yet.

[eli_gottlieb]

So you're saying that working-class living standards are a zero-sum competition across capitalist countries, even negative-sum as competing national economies grow their total output and hourly productivity?

That sounds like a really shitty system.

[leptons]

>The short period of boom in 50s/60s US and Canada was driven by WW2 devastation everywhere else.

The US just renamed "Department of Defense" to "Department of War" and they seem willing to go to any extreme to "Make America Great Again". Threatening to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama already in the first few months of the current administration. Using US military on US soil. There's no line they won't cross. WW3 isn't off the table at all, unfortunately.

[palmotea]

> Thanks for pointing out this skewed view of economic history common in North America....

> In short, its easier to have high standards of living in your secure isolated island when the rest of the world (including historical industrial powers) are completely decimated by war.

So, what's your point? That the plebs shouldn't expect that much comfort?

[jitix]

A common maxim across all cultures is to "manage expectations" for happiness.

And while comparing societal standards expand the time horizon to 100 years, not nitpick one specific unnatural era of history.

An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.

The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.

Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.

[palmotea]

> An automotive engineer in Detroit in 1960 was a globally competitive worker because most of his counterparts in other countries were either dead, disabled or their companies bankrupt.

> The equivalent in today's world would be aerospace engineers, AI researchers, quantum engineers, robotics engineers, etc who arguably have the same standard of living as the automotive engineer in 1960s Detroit.

You know were not really talking about top-end positions like automotive engineers in Detroit in 1960. I think we're talking more about automotive factory workers in Detroit in 1960.

> Economic and technological standards evolve - societies should invest in human capital to evolve with them or risk stagnation.

You need to be more explicit about how you think things should be for the common man.

[jitix]

I hope you understand the concept of relative prosperity - The current equivalent would be a factory worker at Boeing. In 60s cars were innovative in US, now Nigeria can outcompete China in cars.

Times change, standards rise, competition increases. If America wants to remain competitive globally you need to work in the top 1% fields like you did back in 60s, not expecting $25 per hour for flipping burgers (which should have been automated with robots by now).

[palmotea]

You need to be more explicit about how you think things should be for the common man.

[philipallstar]

Everywhere else being destroyed doesn't raise your standards of living. The main difference is the difference between post-war East Germany and West Germany. One got socialism and the other capitalism.

[scythe]

A lot of the people who admire the caricatured midcentury economy are probably actually just nostalgic for the '90s. Case-Shiller was much lower, gas was cheap, college was still relatively affordable. The biggest economic complaints of the present day were not as serious then. (There were still affordable parts of the Bay Area!) The subjection of black people and women that existed in the 60s obviously wasn't necessary for those things to be possible.

But each decade's economy is the product of decades past. The policies of the 90s brought us to the present. So we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the 90s, and the 80s are associated with the iniquities of the Reagan administration. Thus you get this misplaced nostalgia for the 50s-70s without really understanding the problems or the progress that society made even as the highest levels of government seemed to drift off course.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah if you bar over 50% of your workforce from working at market clearing wages then naturally the other 50% are going to get paid at their expense. When you underpay minorities and often outright ban women from working formal employment, it's not hard to see how wages for the others remain high.

[jimbokun]

Well congratulations! We have succeeded in having stagnating wages and stagnating standard of living for everyone now!

[satvikpendem]

Will you volunteer to not work so that I can instead?

[Karrot_Kream]

Do you want to take a 20% pay cut so I can take the marginal benefit? Who wants to volunteer to be barred from working so I can negotiate better salary?

[johnnyanmac]

I have no full time job, so I already took the cut. You're welcome.

[doctorpangloss]

Lemme guess, we should bring back Bretton Woods?

[apsurd]

I originally upvoted the parent comment. But I changed it.

"The good ol' days" ... yeah, but good for who?

[crossbody]

The good old days... that never were!

Life has improved for nearly everyone on nearly every metric. But if one myopically focuses on house purchasing as the only thing that matters and takes anomalous post WW2 period, then sure, things are bad (ignoring the fact that housing space and quality + amenities improved dramatically, but hey, who cares about nuance, we just love to complain!)

[jimbokun]

> Every kind of a man, or woman?

Why do so many people miss the point on this?

Instead of making this dream true for all the people who were previously excluded, we have pursued equality by making this dream accessible to NO ONE.

> Well, this probably why statistics exist.

Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

[watwut]

I think there is something to be valued about historical accuracy.

> Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

In the 60ties, suicide rates went UP. Peaked around 1970 and we did not reached their levels.

Long terms statistics about alcoholism rates and drug use are also a real exiting thing. We know that cirrhosis death rate was going up in the 60ties up to 70ties, peaked and went down. It was the time when drinking and driving campaigns started.

Current drug use is nowhere near what it was a generation ago.

[apsurd]

You're both right. I take your point to mean similar to the disastrous outcome of "no child left behind" act. I do agree with you, but people didn't seriously _intend_ for the result to be everyone lowers to a shit position.

Or maybe you're saying that's always how these initiatives turn out? It can't be helped?

[atq2119]

It's important to remember that people are not some homogenous mass.

There were certainly some rich and powerful people who did intend to lower everyone (else) to a shit position.

That's what stuff like anti-union policies are about. Sure, they drape it up in nice rhetoric, but ultimately the intent is to reduce the power (and thereby the material outcomes) of the common the worker.

But of course there were also other developments that had the effect more unintentionally.

[p_v_doom]

> we have pursued equality by making this dream accessible to NO ONE.

Nah, that is not what has happened. Equality is more of an unrelated thing. Business owners and capital are by their very nature opposed to the dream. Even if in a given moment of time they may give concessions, the endless drive for returns and growths means that sooner or later it will always get to the point where we are.

The problem here is capitalism.

[johnnyanmac]

>Why do so many people miss the point on this?

Because one party wants to return to those times with the exact same social norms. So it's a dangerous line of thinking to forget that women were walled out of many jobs, or had a huge wage gap when they were let in. As well as minorities only barely starting to really get the same opportunities after a lot of struggle.

>Like the statistics on plummeting mental health and happiness, an obesity epidemic, increases in "deaths of despair", and plateauing or decreasing life expectancy?

Yes. When it affects the majority is only when we start to pay attention.

[lizknope]

> Every kind of a man, or woman?

Exactly.

What about black people or any other minority? Black people couldn't even vote until 1965. Housing discrimination and things like redlining would prevent people from living where they wanted even if they had the money.

[tharne]

> Well, this probably why statistics exist.

How are statistics going to answer this question? Statistics are used to measure things. They don't tell you what things you should be measuring.

[cedws]

I'm not going to engage with you on a debate because you aren't acting in good faith.