[saghm]

If you ignore everything that happened in between 1903 and today, it might seem like we've never made any progress on this, but at least in the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between. For a time in the 20th century, it was possible for someone solidly middle class in the US to be able to save up a bit of money and afford a down payment on a house within a decade of working. That's something we've lost to time now, and it's not because it's impossible to achieve or because of the bogeymen of DEI making the fruits of labor and technology too sparse to share with everyone, but because an increasingly large portion of the pie is going to an increasingly smaller set of people.

The delta between 1903 and today in this regard might be small, but the line between them isn't flat, and that makes it even more tragic and frustrating to have this questioned as if it's an impossible problem.

[oersted]

I do agree that the US handled the situation relatively well in the second half of the 20th century, plenty of such opportunities have been squantered badly.

But we cannot ignore that it was truly a unique opportunity:

- The US was the only intact industrial country left after WWII.

- With massive momentum from industrial deployment during the war.

- With a massive optimistic and hardened workforce coming home.

- With plenty of saved wartime income they didn't have a chance to spend due to rationing and shortages, a lot of it saved as wartime bonds just starting to deliver healthy yields.

- With the New Deal that resulted from the horrible Great Depression making sure they got to truly benefit from the fruits of their labour.

- And a wide-open global market to lend to and to sell to for rebuilding the world.

That is not something that can be replicated easily at any time, and if the US makes decisions expecting that that is the norm, there's a disaster coming (perhaps it's why it's a disaster now).

[elzbardico]

It was not only in the USA. Even in developing countries like Brasil, the post-war was an era of great material improvement for the worker class. Industrial employment was coveted, and blue collar work definitelly landed you in the middle class.

The biggest difference between the US and other countries was the scale. Proportionally more workers benefited, and they benefited more in the US in the post war, as the US was by far the more advanced industrial power.

But, removing the scaling factors, the history is the same. Home ownership was once in the realm of possbilities for most workers, at least industrial workers, and this is no longer the case, and now even most white-collar professions are having issues with that.

[saghm]

Thanks for that context! I didn't want to speak beyond what I was familiar with, and I genuinely wasn't sure how widespread this was.

[toasty228]

> the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between

But now we're back to pre ww1 level of inequalities

https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart...

[saghm]

Yeah, that's basically the point I was making. The fact that it was this way before and is again now might lead someone to think that there's nothing we can do about it, but clearly there was something we did about it, and now we've lost it again.