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Is there any source to back up this claim that life is getting more difficult for Americans? Inequality has risen, but that does not mean that things are gettin

Is there any source to back up this claim that life is getting more difficult for Americans? Inequality has risen, but that does not mean that things are getting worse for those at the bottom ends of the wealth distribution. By most metrics (really, all of them other than home ownership and healthcare costs - both of which are primarily causes by an undersupply of housing and a growing cohort of old people, rather then inequality) life has continued to get better, even for the poor. Objective metrics like infant mortality, access to infrastructure like electricity and plumbing, educational attainment, all indicate positive trends. Measures of poverty based on post tax income and purchasing power indicate a drop in poverty by factors of two and five respecticely over the past 40 years [1]. The fact that many feel this way is an interesting perspective in and of itself. But perhaps more interesting is the fact that this is directly at odds with most objective metrics. 1. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/03/01/poverty-in-america https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/03/01/po...

fwip 8y ago
How about employment stability? Used to be more common that you'd work at the same job your whole career, be rewarded for your dedication and seniority. Now they don't give out promotions or raises, and lay you off at the first sign of trouble. Is it safe to buy a home if BigCo will lay you off in a year through no fault of your own? With so many things tied to employment (health insurance especially), no wonder that people are worried about their futures. I think things like "access to electricity" cause much less anxiety than the threat of instability. A lot of people are just a few missed paychecks away from literally losing their home (whether that is a house or an apartment).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway218649 8y ago
  > How about employment stability? Used to be more common that you'd work at the same job your whole career, be rewarded for your dedication and seniority. Employment stability like that did not exist in the 19th century (in the US because of lack of industrialization - most people were engaged in agriculture; in industrial Britain factory workers would literally starve to death because of regular layoffs). It did not seem to exist in the US in 1900-1920 (at least that's the impression I got from reading _The Jungle_) or in the 1930s (Great Depression), and kind of disappeared with Reaganomics and the start of offshoring in the 1980s. So job stability seems like a brief state of things that lasted from the end of WWII to the end of the 1970s.
maxsilver 8y ago
> Inequality has risen, but that does not mean that things are getting worse for those at the bottom ends of the wealth distribution. Wages are flat while Cost of Living and/or inflation is skyrocketing (Real world inflation, not the CPI index). This, generally, is the strongest evidence that the bottom end of the wealth distribution is getting worse. > By most metrics (ignoring housing and healthcare) Wait, you can't just ignore housing and healthcare, that's like the biggest chunk of every American's budget. The four things America has regressed on the most (in quality and/or cost), is housing, healthcare, education/child-care, and transportation. Those four things combined are roughly 75-99% of a typical American families spending. Yeah, you can still buy a cheap hamburgers and cheap gas and cheap flat screen TVs. That's useful. But that's not useful enough to counteract all the losses elsewhere. > both of which are primarily causes by an undersupply of housing and a growing cohort of old people, rather then inequality That's a popular misconception. Housing problems are primarily caused by private equity and deregulation -- undersupply is a tiny portion of the problem in a few key metros (especially SF), but is not the widespread cause of it. In Michigan, for example, we have a rampant urban housing crisis too -- and zero percent of that is caused by any undersupply of housing. Similarly, Healthcare costs rising is largely because of private equity and price fixing / fraud between health insurers and hospitals. "People growing old" is only a tiny portion of that problem, as evidenced by the many other nations who also have large aging populations putting strains on their healthcare systems, but not having the same astronomically high healthcare costs. > Objective metrics like infant mortality, access to infrastructure like electricity and plumbing, educational attainment, all indicate positive trends Suicide is rising sharply. Opiate abuse is rising, and so are the deaths from it. Access to infrastructure is falling (see Flint Water Crisis, or deferred infrastructure maintenance in NYC, or the routine underinvestment in roads and schools). The US personal savings rate is declining rapidly -- people who have "good incomes" (by your metrics) don't have any money left over to save, and so are on-paper good but actually financially insecure. ---- I think seeing the problem is a "perception-only" issue is Ivory Tower thinking. People don't just "feel" that things have gotten worse, things have objectively gotten worse, and pretending otherwise will only make the situation harder to fix.
- JimboOmega 8y ago
  > In Michigan, for example, we have a rampant urban housing crisis too -- and zero percent of that is caused by any undersupply of housing. Wait, what? What is the crisis and what is the cause?
mnm1 8y ago
By most metrics? Are you kidding? People are making way less now than fifty or sixty years ago and basic necessities cost way more (adjusted for inflation). They have no hope for a raise or promotion even at high paying white collar jobs like software development. Childcare costs more a month than most bring home before taxes. Many people still cannot afford or do not have access to proper healthcare. And finding an affordable place to live is impossible in some areas, extremely hard almost everywhere that's desirable to live. And of course, poverty is relative so seeing the rich get healthcare while you and your own family get sick and die has a huge effect on people that probably isn't captured by any metric I know of. Being able to afford a big flat screen television is in no way indicative of a better quality of life when that is in lieu of basic necessities like proper nutrition, healthcare, and shelter.
- manfredo 8y ago
  > By most metrics? Are you kidding? People are making way less now than fifty or sixty years ago and basic necessities cost way more (adjusted for inflation The Economist article to which I linked gave multiple metrics that contradict this claim. > And finding an affordable place to live is impossible in some areas, extremely hard almost everywhere that's desirable to live. True, and I mentioned that there are exceptions to the overall positive tend and specifically noted housing costs. But the solution to this problem is well known: increased the supply of housing. > And of course, poverty is relative so seeing the rich get healthcare while you and your own family get sick and die has a huge effect on people that probably isn't captured by any metric I know of. But that's the thing: the data indicates that the poor aren't becoming worse off. Yet we have the perceptions that it is. I think understanding why this contradictory perceptions exists lies at the heart of a lot of social chsllenges today. Like why people in the US become so strongly against immigration and free trade despite the strong evidence that these things have a positive effect on the country.
darpa_escapee 8y ago
The vast majority of workers in America (78%) are living paycheck-to-paycheck[1]. Cost of living is rising, and so are health care costs. Inflation ensures that a dollar is worth less every year. While inflation inevitably marches on, wages have neither kept up with productivity for over 40 years[2], nor cost of living, nor inflation. People are working multiple jobs, but their employers purposely schedule them such that they don't accrue enough hours to be considered full-time employees who are legally entitled to buy health insurance through their employer. As an aside, while engineer pay is relatively high, it has not kept up with rising cost of living expenses over the last decade, either. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-in-5-us-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i... [2] https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/1280x868/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Ftimworstall%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F10%2Fwagescompensation-1200x1093.png https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/1280x868/https%3A%2F%2Fbl...
jazzyk 8y ago
Where do I begin? 1. Life expectancy - getting lower for the first time in generations 2. Suicide rate - at an all-time high 3. Opioid crisis - need I say more 4. Labor participation 63% - the lowest since 1978 5. Stagnant (falling for some) real wages since the Internet bubble crisis (2001) I could go on for much longer.... https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...
- burfog 8y ago
  1. life expectancy is going to be affected by the suicide rate and opioid crisis. On the bright side, we've practically cured cancer, with about 70% actually surviving. 2,3. The improving economy should help. We are at historically low levels of unemployment for many subgroups, including hispanics and blacks. Factory employment has recovered to levels not seen in decades. 4. Labor participation should continue to drop as the baby boomers retire. It will rise again as they die. The normal unemployment numbers, which don't include the retired, are showing a situation that is wonderful for American workers. The numbers would look even better if not for the fact that large numbers of "discouraged workers" are reentering the workforce; these people had not been counted because they had given up looking for work. 5. Wages are starting to rise. Of course, businesses are demanding immigration to "fix" the "problem" of rising wages.
AlexandrB 8y ago
> But perhaps more interesting is the fact that this is directly at odds with most objective metrics. It's really not. Even the expected lifespan of Americans is declining. The only objective metrics that look good are GDP - and growth in this area is increasingly distributed upwards while the middle class doesn't really see a benefit. A reduction in poverty is good (assuming it's real and not a statistical sleight of hand), but the kids this article is talking about are the middle class - which is in decline[1]. [1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...
- rip_netrunner 8y ago
  William Petty, the person who first proposed the measure of GDP, even warned against using GDP as a measure of prosperity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History
- manfredo 8y ago
  > The only objective metrics that look good are GDP The link I provided gave several objective metrics that indicate positive trends. More people have access to goods and services that used to be more exclusive. People without access to basic infrastructure (e.g. plumbing, electricity)s are drastically fewer. Upper, middle, and lower class are artificial labels. They don't correspond to quality of life. A decline or increase in one does not indicate a change in hardship. The question I seek to answer is, "has life gotten better or worse for the average person?" or "how has life changed for the Americans in the X to Y income percentile?". Overall the trends are positive. Even life expectancy has a overall upwards trend. It has gone from about 70 to close to 80 over the past 40 years, which was the time frame that the previous commenter referred to.
  - leggomylibro 8y ago
    It's comparing today to the '60s and '70s, of course it looks good by material standards: >These measures better reflect changes in household welfare. Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth College notes the poorest quarter of households in America had 0.75 vehicles per household in 1970 compared to 1.4 per household in 2015. In 1960, more than one third of households in the bottom quarter of the income distribution lacked indoor plumbing; by 2015 virtually all households had indoor water and sewer systems. Microwave ovens have spread from luxury to ubiquity alongside mobile phones—microwaves are now owned by 97% of households. Sure, it's great that we aren't dealing with Cholera outbreaks anymore, but that's not what people are talking about here and it might come across as a bit insulting and disingenuous to point to the fact that indoor plumbing is now available to people living in poverty as a counterpoint to skyrocketing wealth inequality.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
> Is there any source to back up this claim that life is getting more difficult for Americans? I'd posit that life hasn't been getting more difficult, but that it feels like it has become more difficult, largely because it's harder to advance your current socioeconomic status than it used to be (ie, "the hill is getting steeper"). This is also what makes the analogy particularly strong. When you're used to accelerating growth, no growth or even constant growth feels like a downgrade.
- manfredo 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by saying it's harder to"advance your current socioeconomic status". The Economist article I linked to gave evidence that people's purchasing power has been and continues to be increasing. In other words, stuff that was expensive for average people not so long ago is affordable for them now. If "socioeconomic status" is defined as income or asset percentile, then that is inherently a zero sum goal. For someone to go from the middle third of Americans by income into the top third means that someone in the top third has to go into the middle third (or bottom third).
  - michaelchisari 8y ago
    In other words, stuff that was expensive for average people not so long ago is affordable for them now. For consumer goods, absolutely. For other things, it's gotten much worse. Healthcare and education obviously being one of the biggest concerns. When I graduated high school in 1997, the local community college's tuition was $17 a credit hour ($26 in today's dollars). That small community college in the middle of nowhere is now $128 a credit hour for in-district students. That's almost a 5x increase. For the same local community college amongst corn fields two hours from anything. There's so many examples of this (rent, for instance) that I almost wonder what the point of pointing out the low cost of consumer goods would be. The price of a life well lived has little to do with the price of smartphones.
    - manfredo 8y ago
      Sure, some things have gotten more expensive while others have gotten cheaper. But the quantitative analysis seems to indicate that in aggregate things are getting cheaper. I'm not sure how listing a handful of personal examples is a good response to a statement grounded in data.
Aeolun 8y ago
Maybe it’s just that the difference is more pronounced now because the balance is shifting towards a world where everyone has it good instead of bad. If 90% of the people are at the same socioeconomic level as you, even if living in poverty, you don’t feel particularly left out. If that balance shifts to the 20% we have now, then suddenly it starts to be a bit disturbing.
m_fayer 8y ago
Are there any metrics that measure the difficulty of achieving a given station in life, or maintaining that station once it's achieved? Difficulty in terms of hours worked as well as more ephemeral difficulties, like organizational complexity or emotional stress. Do we even know how to measure these things? It would be nice to have an "average stress per social strata" metric. I wouldn't be surprised if the average American's material conditions have been steady or even creeping upwards over the last 50 years, but I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the personal cost of maintaining these conditions has been growing significantly.
- manfredo 8y ago
  Average hours worked is going down overall: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/520f835b6bb3f7730d00002f-480-360.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/520f835b6bb3f7730d000... Down about 100 hours per year from 1970. I like the idea of quantifying stress but that is probably too subjective to quantitatively measure. I don't necessarily dispute the notion that stress has increased over the past few decades - just that whatever pressure people are feeling is due to declining quality of life or economic opportunity.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    Leisure time has increased for less educated men but decreased for more educated ones. Leisure time generally has increased. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13837 https://www.nber.org/papers/w13837 The Increase in Leisure Inequality This paper examines the changing allocation of time within the United States that has occurred between 1965 and 2003-2005. We find that the time individuals have allocated to leisure has increased in the U.S. for both men and women during this period, with almost the entire gain occurring prior to 1985. We also find that post 1985 there has been a substantial increase in leisure inequality, particularly for men. Over the last 20 years, less educated men increased the time they allocated to leisure while more educated men recorded a decrease in leisure time. While the relative decline in the employment rate of less educated men is important, trends in employment status explain less than half of the increase in the leisure gap.
rland 8y ago
Many tremendously important things are non-quantifiable by think-tanks and economists. How people make friends. How many friends people have. How much people feel they're a part of their community. How much people touch each other in general. How much people feel about their neighbors. How people dispense care to those closest to them. How large families are (extended/adopted family, etc) How close people feel to their families. etc. All, I think, are rapidly changing. You can see it in another comment in this thread. One person says, basically, my childhood was horrible. The discussion is entirely about what this person, in their self-contained world, can do to alleviate their stresses and pains. Eat more veggies! I'm not knocking those sorts of comments at all--you can't exactly turn back time and change the structure of society to give that commenter a community who cares about him. I'm not sure about all this. It just comes from my observation. I think, though, that the feeling of life is changing and has changed in a big way. And it flys completely under the radar, because it's so hard to discuss, reason through, and quantify.

fwip 8y ago

How about employment stability? Used to be more common that you'd work at the same job your whole career, be rewarded for your dedication and seniority. Now they don't give out promotions or raises, and lay you off at the first sign of trouble. Is it safe to buy a home if BigCo will lay you off in a year through no fault of your own? With so many things tied to employment (health insurance especially), no wonder that people are worried about their futures. I think things like "access to electricity" cause much less anxiety than the threat of instability. A lot of people are just a few missed paychecks away from literally losing their home (whether that is a house or an apartment).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throwaway218649 8y ago
> How about employment stability? Used to be more common that you'd work at the same job your whole career, be rewarded for your dedication and seniority. Employment stability like that did not exist in the 19th century (in the US because of lack of industrialization - most people were engaged in agriculture; in industrial Britain factory workers would literally starve to death because of regular layoffs). It did not seem to exist in the US in 1900-1920 (at least that's the impression I got from reading _The Jungle_) or in the 1930s (Great Depression), and kind of disappeared with Reaganomics and the start of offshoring in the 1980s. So job stability seems like a brief state of things that lasted from the end of WWII to the end of the 1970s.

maxsilver 8y ago

> Inequality has risen, but that does not mean that things are getting worse for those at the bottom ends of the wealth distribution. Wages are flat while Cost of Living and/or inflation is skyrocketing (Real world inflation, not the CPI index). This, generally, is the strongest evidence that the bottom end of the wealth distribution is getting worse. > By most metrics (ignoring housing and healthcare) Wait, you can't just ignore housing and healthcare, that's like the biggest chunk of every American's budget. The four things America has regressed on the most (in quality and/or cost), is housing, healthcare, education/child-care, and transportation. Those four things combined are roughly 75-99% of a typical American families spending. Yeah, you can still buy a cheap hamburgers and cheap gas and cheap flat screen TVs. That's useful. But that's not useful enough to counteract all the losses elsewhere. > both of which are primarily causes by an undersupply of housing and a growing cohort of old people, rather then inequality That's a popular misconception. Housing problems are primarily caused by private equity and deregulation -- undersupply is a tiny portion of the problem in a few key metros (especially SF), but is not the widespread cause of it. In Michigan, for example, we have a rampant urban housing crisis too -- and zero percent of that is caused by any undersupply of housing. Similarly, Healthcare costs rising is largely because of private equity and price fixing / fraud between health insurers and hospitals. "People growing old" is only a tiny portion of that problem, as evidenced by the many other nations who also have large aging populations putting strains on their healthcare systems, but not having the same astronomically high healthcare costs. > Objective metrics like infant mortality, access to infrastructure like electricity and plumbing, educational attainment, all indicate positive trends Suicide is rising sharply. Opiate abuse is rising, and so are the deaths from it. Access to infrastructure is falling (see Flint Water Crisis, or deferred infrastructure maintenance in NYC, or the routine underinvestment in roads and schools). The US personal savings rate is declining rapidly -- people who have "good incomes" (by your metrics) don't have any money left over to save, and so are on-paper good but actually financially insecure. ---- I think seeing the problem is a "perception-only" issue is Ivory Tower thinking. People don't just "feel" that things have gotten worse, things have objectively gotten worse, and pretending otherwise will only make the situation harder to fix.

JimboOmega 8y ago
> In Michigan, for example, we have a rampant urban housing crisis too -- and zero percent of that is caused by any undersupply of housing. Wait, what? What is the crisis and what is the cause?

mnm1 8y ago

By most metrics? Are you kidding? People are making way less now than fifty or sixty years ago and basic necessities cost way more (adjusted for inflation). They have no hope for a raise or promotion even at high paying white collar jobs like software development. Childcare costs more a month than most bring home before taxes. Many people still cannot afford or do not have access to proper healthcare. And finding an affordable place to live is impossible in some areas, extremely hard almost everywhere that's desirable to live. And of course, poverty is relative so seeing the rich get healthcare while you and your own family get sick and die has a huge effect on people that probably isn't captured by any metric I know of. Being able to afford a big flat screen television is in no way indicative of a better quality of life when that is in lieu of basic necessities like proper nutrition, healthcare, and shelter.

manfredo 8y ago
> By most metrics? Are you kidding? People are making way less now than fifty or sixty years ago and basic necessities cost way more (adjusted for inflation The Economist article to which I linked gave multiple metrics that contradict this claim. > And finding an affordable place to live is impossible in some areas, extremely hard almost everywhere that's desirable to live. True, and I mentioned that there are exceptions to the overall positive tend and specifically noted housing costs. But the solution to this problem is well known: increased the supply of housing. > And of course, poverty is relative so seeing the rich get healthcare while you and your own family get sick and die has a huge effect on people that probably isn't captured by any metric I know of. But that's the thing: the data indicates that the poor aren't becoming worse off. Yet we have the perceptions that it is. I think understanding why this contradictory perceptions exists lies at the heart of a lot of social chsllenges today. Like why people in the US become so strongly against immigration and free trade despite the strong evidence that these things have a positive effect on the country.

darpa_escapee 8y ago

The vast majority of workers in America (78%) are living paycheck-to-paycheck[1]. Cost of living is rising, and so are health care costs. Inflation ensures that a dollar is worth less every year. While inflation inevitably marches on, wages have neither kept up with productivity for over 40 years[2], nor cost of living, nor inflation. People are working multiple jobs, but their employers purposely schedule them such that they don't accrue enough hours to be considered full-time employees who are legally entitled to buy health insurance through their employer. As an aside, while engineer pay is relatively high, it has not kept up with rising cost of living expenses over the last decade, either. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-in-5-us-workers-live-paycheck-to-paycheck.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i... [2] https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/1280x868/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Ftimworstall%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F10%2Fwagescompensation-1200x1093.png https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/1280x868/https%3A%2F%2Fbl...

jazzyk 8y ago

Where do I begin? 1. Life expectancy - getting lower for the first time in generations 2. Suicide rate - at an all-time high 3. Opioid crisis - need I say more 4. Labor participation 63% - the lowest since 1978 5. Stagnant (falling for some) real wages since the Internet bubble crisis (2001) I could go on for much longer.... https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

burfog 8y ago
1. life expectancy is going to be affected by the suicide rate and opioid crisis. On the bright side, we've practically cured cancer, with about 70% actually surviving. 2,3. The improving economy should help. We are at historically low levels of unemployment for many subgroups, including hispanics and blacks. Factory employment has recovered to levels not seen in decades. 4. Labor participation should continue to drop as the baby boomers retire. It will rise again as they die. The normal unemployment numbers, which don't include the retired, are showing a situation that is wonderful for American workers. The numbers would look even better if not for the fact that large numbers of "discouraged workers" are reentering the workforce; these people had not been counted because they had given up looking for work. 5. Wages are starting to rise. Of course, businesses are demanding immigration to "fix" the "problem" of rising wages.

AlexandrB 8y ago

> But perhaps more interesting is the fact that this is directly at odds with most objective metrics. It's really not. Even the expected lifespan of Americans is declining. The only objective metrics that look good are GDP - and growth in this area is increasingly distributed upwards while the middle class doesn't really see a benefit. A reduction in poverty is good (assuming it's real and not a statistical sleight of hand), but the kids this article is talking about are the middle class - which is in decline[1]. [1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking-middle-class-a-close-look-at-changes-within-metropolitan-areas/ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...

rip_netrunner 8y ago
William Petty, the person who first proposed the measure of GDP, even warned against using GDP as a measure of prosperity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History
manfredo 8y ago
> The only objective metrics that look good are GDP The link I provided gave several objective metrics that indicate positive trends. More people have access to goods and services that used to be more exclusive. People without access to basic infrastructure (e.g. plumbing, electricity)s are drastically fewer. Upper, middle, and lower class are artificial labels. They don't correspond to quality of life. A decline or increase in one does not indicate a change in hardship. The question I seek to answer is, "has life gotten better or worse for the average person?" or "how has life changed for the Americans in the X to Y income percentile?". Overall the trends are positive. Even life expectancy has a overall upwards trend. It has gone from about 70 to close to 80 over the past 40 years, which was the time frame that the previous commenter referred to.
- leggomylibro 8y ago
  It's comparing today to the '60s and '70s, of course it looks good by material standards: >These measures better reflect changes in household welfare. Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth College notes the poorest quarter of households in America had 0.75 vehicles per household in 1970 compared to 1.4 per household in 2015. In 1960, more than one third of households in the bottom quarter of the income distribution lacked indoor plumbing; by 2015 virtually all households had indoor water and sewer systems. Microwave ovens have spread from luxury to ubiquity alongside mobile phones—microwaves are now owned by 97% of households. Sure, it's great that we aren't dealing with Cholera outbreaks anymore, but that's not what people are talking about here and it might come across as a bit insulting and disingenuous to point to the fact that indoor plumbing is now available to people living in poverty as a counterpoint to skyrocketing wealth inequality.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

> Is there any source to back up this claim that life is getting more difficult for Americans? I'd posit that life hasn't been getting more difficult, but that it feels like it has become more difficult, largely because it's harder to advance your current socioeconomic status than it used to be (ie, "the hill is getting steeper"). This is also what makes the analogy particularly strong. When you're used to accelerating growth, no growth or even constant growth feels like a downgrade.

manfredo 8y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by saying it's harder to"advance your current socioeconomic status". The Economist article I linked to gave evidence that people's purchasing power has been and continues to be increasing. In other words, stuff that was expensive for average people not so long ago is affordable for them now. If "socioeconomic status" is defined as income or asset percentile, then that is inherently a zero sum goal. For someone to go from the middle third of Americans by income into the top third means that someone in the top third has to go into the middle third (or bottom third).
- michaelchisari 8y ago
  In other words, stuff that was expensive for average people not so long ago is affordable for them now. For consumer goods, absolutely. For other things, it's gotten much worse. Healthcare and education obviously being one of the biggest concerns. When I graduated high school in 1997, the local community college's tuition was $17 a credit hour ($26 in today's dollars). That small community college in the middle of nowhere is now $128 a credit hour for in-district students. That's almost a 5x increase. For the same local community college amongst corn fields two hours from anything. There's so many examples of this (rent, for instance) that I almost wonder what the point of pointing out the low cost of consumer goods would be. The price of a life well lived has little to do with the price of smartphones.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    Sure, some things have gotten more expensive while others have gotten cheaper. But the quantitative analysis seems to indicate that in aggregate things are getting cheaper. I'm not sure how listing a handful of personal examples is a good response to a statement grounded in data.

Aeolun 8y ago

Maybe it’s just that the difference is more pronounced now because the balance is shifting towards a world where everyone has it good instead of bad. If 90% of the people are at the same socioeconomic level as you, even if living in poverty, you don’t feel particularly left out. If that balance shifts to the 20% we have now, then suddenly it starts to be a bit disturbing.

m_fayer 8y ago

Are there any metrics that measure the difficulty of achieving a given station in life, or maintaining that station once it's achieved? Difficulty in terms of hours worked as well as more ephemeral difficulties, like organizational complexity or emotional stress. Do we even know how to measure these things? It would be nice to have an "average stress per social strata" metric. I wouldn't be surprised if the average American's material conditions have been steady or even creeping upwards over the last 50 years, but I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the personal cost of maintaining these conditions has been growing significantly.

manfredo 8y ago
Average hours worked is going down overall: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/520f835b6bb3f7730d00002f-480-360.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/520f835b6bb3f7730d000... Down about 100 hours per year from 1970. I like the idea of quantifying stress but that is probably too subjective to quantitatively measure. I don't necessarily dispute the notion that stress has increased over the past few decades - just that whatever pressure people are feeling is due to declining quality of life or economic opportunity.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Leisure time has increased for less educated men but decreased for more educated ones. Leisure time generally has increased. https://www.nber.org/papers/w13837 https://www.nber.org/papers/w13837 The Increase in Leisure Inequality This paper examines the changing allocation of time within the United States that has occurred between 1965 and 2003-2005. We find that the time individuals have allocated to leisure has increased in the U.S. for both men and women during this period, with almost the entire gain occurring prior to 1985. We also find that post 1985 there has been a substantial increase in leisure inequality, particularly for men. Over the last 20 years, less educated men increased the time they allocated to leisure while more educated men recorded a decrease in leisure time. While the relative decline in the employment rate of less educated men is important, trends in employment status explain less than half of the increase in the leisure gap.

rland 8y ago

Many tremendously important things are non-quantifiable by think-tanks and economists. How people make friends. How many friends people have. How much people feel they're a part of their community. How much people touch each other in general. How much people feel about their neighbors. How people dispense care to those closest to them. How large families are (extended/adopted family, etc) How close people feel to their families. etc. All, I think, are rapidly changing. You can see it in another comment in this thread. One person says, basically, my childhood was horrible. The discussion is entirely about what this person, in their self-contained world, can do to alleviate their stresses and pains. Eat more veggies! I'm not knocking those sorts of comments at all--you can't exactly turn back time and change the structure of society to give that commenter a community who cares about him. I'm not sure about all this. It just comes from my observation. I think, though, that the feeling of life is changing and has changed in a big way. And it flys completely under the radar, because it's so hard to discuss, reason through, and quantify.