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That the income distribution is shrinking in the middle distribution of the population of the U.S. is a critical data trend with a number of unpleasant implicat
by mancerayder 11y ago
That the income distribution is shrinking in the middle distribution of the population of the U.S. is a critical data trend with a number of unpleasant implications.
From an ideological perspective, it damages the traditional worship of hard work and the idealization of middle class life. Idealistic visions (as reflected from the movies, the shows, the social policy of the era around the middle of the 20th century pretty much up until the end of it) showed the suburban life, the housewife, the house, the two car garage. It's easy to be politically complacent, knowing you're in the country that's number one, when those things are what you can realistically strive for. Laissez-faire capitalism was always sold as being more fair than the evil 'socialist' Europe - and worse - that was further east. Because even when you were low, you could feel comfortable about bettering your lot ("my grandfather came here with nothing..."). Now the stats are pointing away from that reality.
Economically it's pretty iffy, given that 80+% of the American GDP is the services sector, which has a large component of dependency on spending power. Retail alone is what, 5-6% of GDP, and then you have entertainment, real estate, and much else that depends on money being spent by people not on the very top.
Real estate's an interesting one. Another piece of the Dream that made us the greatest country, as we were told. That's another trend that the current generation faces that was not faced in the 1950's: the ratio of median income to median housing costs.
A lot of us here are in IT (or Law or other professions that I have noticed), and in many ways we're very lucky, even if we did work hard to get to where we are, since we're further up the curve and don't face the same exposure. In the U.S. health care costs and educational costs have also gone up well above the income increases, adding further to the discontentment.
Meanwhile, the political world has gone mad. We're now back to identity politics, with demagogues on both sides of the spectrum. Any explanation about the economic underlying conditions? Nope, instead we talk about immigrants, or X racial privilege, or gender/racial identity in the boardrooms, or X foreign power.
New thread suggestion: "Ask HN: Which remote island can I escape to and live comfortably and cheaply?"
- zanny 11y ago> "Ask HN: Which remote island can I escape to and live comfortably and cheaply?" This is really the fundamental problem in the modern world. The interconnectedness and shrinking of the globe in terms of distance means there is absolutely no where to escape to. Anywhere you would consider going there will be some government trying to dictate how you live your life and take a portion of your livelihood, and anywhere that you might avoid that you are usually risking that in conjunction with a humvee full of armed militants storming your home and murdering you. Even a hundred years ago there were vast swathes of Australia, the central US, and South America generally uninhabited yet arable land, and the distances of the time made it infeasible for anyone to effectively police all of it. Today, not so much. About the only hope left is setting up floating colonies in the Venusian atmosphere, but the problem is well before despondent settlers can migrate on a colony ship there will be governments establishing absolute control and monitoring of any habitable space someone could try to flee to. It is like the "right to be forgotten" on Facebook - the right to be left alone was, fleetingly, a valuable thing that relatively few could enjoy, but in the same way the middle class shrinks the number of people capable of being in that state is also in dramatic decline.
- lgieron 11y ago> Even a hundred years ago there were vast swathes of Australia, the central US, and South America generally uninhabited yet arable land, and the distances of the time made it infeasible for anyone to effectively police all of it. You're ommiting the fact that "bandits in a humvee" were there as well - see for example Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight.
- xxpor 11y ago>Anywhere you would consider going there will be some government trying to dictate how you live your life and take a portion of your livelihood, and anywhere that you might avoid that you are usually risking that in conjunction with a humvee full of armed militants storming your home and murdering you. It's almost like the two are related!
- lliamander 11y ago> It's almost like the two are related! Lol, a fair bit of truth to this. However, I would say that in the past: - There were places you could go where you didn't have either of those problems because there just weren't enough people around. - Governments didn't take as much of your livelihood - There were a greater variety of societies, so you had more options in choosing one that you found least onerous in their expectations. Of course travel took longer, and life wasn't all sunshine and roses, but once you moved to a new place you could fairly effectively start over.
- zeveb 11y agoI can't find the exact quote, but there's one floating about how until about 1910 the most government that average Englishman (outside of London) would experience was the post office. 1890 rural England isn't particularly known for being a lawless hellhole.
- zanny 11y agoPlaces where nobody lives are usually not conducive to marauding bands of malcontents. Those almost always require some support structure behind them, because if you just pillage and burn you have no reliable source of food or prosperity. There is an explicit reason why the places people would "disappear to" like South / Central America, central Asia, or Africa, are all predominantly totalitarian states. You are just, in such places, hoping to fly under the radar and be the one mouse not to be pounced on by the lion destroying everything.