[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?

[philipallstar]

There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits.

If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating.

As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the productive white farmers in 2000-2001. One of the key issues charitable foreign people trying to help Zimbabwe addressed was in re-educating the local population in why it matters that all the planting work is done by a certain time of year. The white farmers had all that knowledge, and cultural experience of hard work, and had made Zimbabwe the breadbasket of Africa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time

[moduspol]

The alternative view would be that differences of culture and values do not materially impact one's chances of becoming financially successful, right?

[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.

[nradov]

What's your point? I didn't make any claims about averages. We could do a lot more to improve opportunities and social mobility for people caught in the permanent underclass.

[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.

[bonsai_spool]

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

First, where is your data?

Second, this discussion is clearly about post-secondary education ("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.")

[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.

[jitix]

> How were they supposed to predict things would change and agitate for something different without the hindsight you enjoy?

By comparing themselves to their counterparts in other countries. By 1955 there should have been alarm bells ringing as Europe re-industrialized. Same with 70s oil crisis but the best that US could do was to cripple Japan with Plaza Accords.

Americans even now have a mindset that nothing exists beyond their borders, one could assume it was worse back then.

> Exactly why do you think it is it unnatural?

Because only two industrialized countries were left standing after WW2 and those two countries enjoyed unnatural growth until others caught up - first the historical powers in Europe then Asia.

[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.