[embedding-shape]

> A vast majority of people aren’t happy about what’s going on.

What makes you say that? Granted, I'm just an outside observer trying to see what's going on, but since the majority isn't protesting as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like the majority doesn't care too much currently. Probably most people are in a dire enough situation that they cannot afford to protest, and are busy enough trying to figure out how to re-organize their living situation.

[rayiner]

> Probably most people are in a dire enough situation that they cannot afford to protest, and are busy enough trying to figure out how to re-organize their living situation.

What is your mental model of the median American citizen?

[embedding-shape]

Boiled down and greatly simplified; someone who struggles to afford food, housing, and child care.

Seems most independent analysts highlight the large swaths of people unable to get basic necessities, just one example of many: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/in-every-corner-of-the-co...

> The nation’s affordability crisis has not spared middle-class families, one-third of which struggle to afford basic necessities such as food, housing, and child care.

> Across the 160 U.S. metro areas studied, at least 20% of middle-class earners cannot afford to live in that place, after adjusting for local income ranges and price variations.

When you don't know how to afford food for the week or pay the next rent, you're hardly interested in going out on the street and protest. Been there and done that, and politics, no matter how aggressive or "against you" it can feel, is really the last thing on your mind in those situations.

[rayiner]

> Boiled down and greatly simplified; someone who struggles to afford food, housing, and child care.

This is not a good description of the median American. Your article is about the income required to afford a "comfortable life," which is a vague target. You can get a concrete idea of what this target seems to mean by looking at the calculator they use: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/.

For a 2 adult/2 child household in the Baltimore metro area, the calculator estimates you need a household income of $126,000 to meet this "comfortable life" benchmark. For a single person with no kids, the standard is $54,000 a year. It does not make sense to say that someone making $50,000 a year or a family making $100,000 a year in Baltimore (which is a cheap area) is "struggling." My sister-in-law's friend, a 20-something who works as a nanny, probably makes less than that and she has time and money to go out, travel, etc.

The basic error in this analysis is that it bakes in a number of assumptions about standard of living. It assumes that people with significantly below-median incomes (it defines middle class as the middle 60%, so someone at the 25th percentile is counted as middle class) can live alone in a median house, etc., send their kids to corporate daycares, etc. But people with below-median incomes live in below-median houses, they have roommates, they rely on family for childcare, etc. My sister-in-law's friend has roommates, which frees up a lot of money to go do stuff.

If you applied this standard to Europe, you would probably conclude that people are quite desperate there, though of course they are not. In Spain and Italy, half of adults 25-34 live with their parents. They probably couldn't afford to live by themselves in a median-priced apartment. But does that mean they're struggling and would have no time to protest?

[taylodl]

So they aren't happy with what's going on, no? They just don't have the means to do anything meaningful about it until the next election cycle. Hopefully the one thing this administration has done is decreased voter apathy.

[phantasmish]

> Probably most people are in a dire enough situation that they cannot afford to protest, and are busy enough trying to figure out how to re-organize their living situation.

A lot of it's that. Our GDP is inflated by bullshit like over-paying for healthcare to the tune of double-digit percentages of total GDP, among other things, so we're flat-out not as rich as we look on paper, as a country. Our social safety net is really bad, government retirement systems and disability are sub-par by OECD standards, and we may have as few as zero paid vacation days or ability to refuse a shift (without being fired for it).

Anyone under the top 20% or so in the US is struggling, or at least stressed out by knowing that one bad month can mess them up for years and years and ruin any long-term plans they had.

We're also a lot more spread out than most countries. It's a lot more expensive and time-consuming to go protest in DC when you live in, say, Colorado, than it is for someone in Marseilles to go attend a protest in Paris. So they go to some local protest with 50 people instead, or maybe to one in Denver with a couple thousand, and you never hear about it. And the protests don't get rowdy (they might get teargassed anyway, of course) because see above about the "one bad month" thing—an arrest without charges of a working adult can easily end up making their family homeless, because they lose their job and can't get another one fast enough (and it's much, much worse if even very low-level charges are filed, even if the charges don't stick or are dropped—our legal system is great at eating thousands of dollars for what ends up being nothing, besides further schedule disruption bringing further risk to employment)