29 ms·

It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a f

• red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > People want perspective. In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably. Maybe during the 1950s, when two (2) World Wars had blasted multiple empires to dust and essentially gutted a generation of workers aka males between the ages of 18-40. Sure enough the US, still standing after entering the wars late and not seeing huge casualties or direct combat in-country, was positioned to lead a post-war economic boom. Now it's back to pre-war conditions, which curiously enough, resemble the Guilded Age, and its associated strikes
• DropInIn 3y ago
  Was that for a particular "kind" ot man? Because I can't help but note that in North America that there were plenty of people who couldn't do so but were of the "undesirable classes".... And the reason those who could afford such were able was because they were effectively standing on the backs of those "less privileged". Afaict, even when it's not racial such things still existed in most places at the time.
• qaq 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • throw9away6 3y ago
    You just need to own a million dollar truck, have no life and be at risk of bankruptcy if the economy goes wrong. Also work 12-14 hrs and get paid for 8.
    • qaq 3y ago
      Median semi price is 150K
  • supertrope 3y ago
    Is that gross revenue before paying for diesel, the loan on the truck, the employer side of Social Security tax, health insurance? If it’s as simple as you say to earn $160K-$180K why isn’t everyone doing it? In an efficient market arbitrage opportunities usually close quickly.
    • randomdata 3y ago
      > why isn’t everyone doing it? Assuming the figures are accurate, perhaps because most everyone doesn't want to? Some love it, but sitting in a truck day in, day out, far from civilization while only infrequently coming back home to see your family is not for most. You could say the same about programming. Any five year old can program, but most people have absolutely no desire to do it, thus it takes a whole whack load of money to convince the general population into the industry. The HN crowd who see it as a fun hobby, who like to spend their evenings writing open source code for free, are outliers.
      • supertrope 3y ago
        >Assuming the figures are accurate I find those figures hard to believe. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/h...
• nine_zeros 3y ago
  This. I don't understand why this is up for debate. Working hard does not buy a house, a convenient apartment, a promotion to higher income, equity at low prices, a lifestyle where one can find partners and settle down, kids, kids education. We are talking about the basics, not avocado toast or international vacations. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze in America any longer.
  • rdudek 3y ago
    It's not up for debate. The ruling class is making it a valid point without offering a solution to the problem. It's a lot easier to whine and complain versus actually tackling the issues at hand.
  • BirAdam 3y ago
    I would make two observations here. First, costs are up. Not just housing and school, but also cars. Additionally, people are required to have smart phones. Most clothing is of poor quality and will need to be repurchased. Food is of poor quality if it’s cheap and therefore health costs get higher. Second, in a low interest rate environment, any crazy idea gets funding. This squanders time and resources as many bad ideas get funded which would otherwise be laughed away. The low interest rates also encourage monetary inflation which first pushes up asset class prices, and later filters into retail prices. Wages are always the last segment to see price rises as pressure must be put on businesses to raise the price of labor. Essentially, when a company cannot get employees they will begin raising pay for open positions or they will go out of business. This pressure takes time to build. We see it now in fast food and groceries, and we saw it some time ago in the blue collar trades. The major fix for this is higher interest rates… significantly higher. People would need to be willing to accept a slower growth rate in exchange for more predictable and more stable long term growth.
    • nine_zeros 3y ago
      > The major fix for this is higher interest rates… significantly higher. People would need to be willing to accept a slower growth rate in exchange for more predictable and more stable long term growth. And the upper rungs of corporations will have to accept lower compensation.
• m0rissette 3y ago
  I mean maybe I have work ethic or am lucky. But I don’t struggle to pay mortgage, buy cars, or go on vacations and I am the sole breadwinner for my family… but I also started programming in 3rd grade in the 90s, didn’t go to college so have no debt, and live a pretty non materialistic punk rock life.
  • mordae 3y ago
    Take care of yourself. One burnout because of an unreasonable boss compounded with illness and good luck.
    • pluijzer 3y ago
      ... In America
  • tomrod 3y ago
    That's part of it. But yeah, say you got massively unlucky, like a ministroke or a really bad car crash, affecting your ability to bring in cash and that took much of your savings. Safety nets are needed, and typically are underfunded. With one in place, most people can rebound to their most able.
  • arlcode 3y ago
    And you happen to be in a field that boomed (several times) during your career and was (and to some degree still is) a quite dynamic environment. I'm glad it worked out for you (and me) but we must acknowledge that luck is indeed a significant contributor. Let's imagine that instead of getting into programming you began working odd jobs in a field that is generally low income. Some would make it to the top but most will not move forward despite working hard. From a personal anecdote I have a close relative who is an incredible hard worker in a job adjecant to elder care. As far as I can tell their work ethic is higher than my own (no time for water cooler talks or "code is compiling") but unless things change drastically they will never make more than minimum wage. It's fair to say that natural skill plays a big role. Despite best effort they wouldn't be abel to get a programming or othe office job because just finishing their apprenticeship took increadible effort and diligence. In their mid twenties their parents still support them (a little bit) and being anything close to a sole bread winner is highly unrealistic. There are economic reasons why some people are paid better but I'd say "pure luck" is a larger portion then most of us would like to admit. Some people get a yacht and a nice holiday home for their 12 hours shifts and some get to pay their rent.
• tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  What is freedom if you are working for a top down authoritarian hierarchy ? Be it legal person or a real one. Do we get to enjoy any democracy at work ?
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  I recall a Twitter thread where a lawyer mentions she couldn’t afford the apartment she rented as a law student now that she was an actual lawyer 10-15 years later.
• momirlan 3y ago
  i agree 100% , but what is the solution to that ? just raising wages en masse erodes the power of money and leads to inflation.
  • pstuart 3y ago
    I thought it was the influx of new money printed, which we've done in the form of Quantitative Easing, multiple bail outs, etc.
    • almost_usual 3y ago
      Which mostly trickles up.
      • mtsr 3y ago
        It didn’t even need to trickle up, it was exclusively handed out to the top on the assumption of “trickle down economy” being a real thing.
    • syockit 3y ago
      You print more money because you have to give out more money, whether if it's in the form of handouts or in the form of extra wages.
      • pstuart 3y ago
        Employers aren't printing up more money. Yes, labor costs going up impact profits but what about labor costs of management? That has gone up significantly: "From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,460%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (1,063%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 385% between 1978 and 2020, according to the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.1% from 1978 to 2021" Source: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/#:~:text=From%201978%20to%202021%2C%20CEO,18.1%25%20from%201978%20to%202021 https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/#:~:text=Fro....
  • 3y ago
• bbarn 3y ago
  I have heard the argument that a negative effect of the post WW2 "feminist" movement (by that I mean women in the work force) has had the long term effect of causing prices to simply adjust to the dual income household, to the point that now it is a necessity. It is a privileged family today that can afford to live comfortably on only one salary.
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    Theres another level to this going on in certain places too. Its not enough to have both partners working. Now in places like the bay area if you want to be competitive in the housing market, both partners have to be working high income jobs not just working at all. Even if you have a great title, if your partner doesnt, you will be lapped by people who have vastly more buying power than either of you can ever muster together. I wonder if this creates some serious perverse incentives in the dating scene in these parts of the country. Like people who understand this economic situation and unfortunately write off what might have been great partners because their line of work will never afford the standards of living their dual high income peers are able to achieve.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • vsareto 3y ago
      People have been choosing partners for money since forever, that's certainly not a new thing
    • bluGill 3y ago
      Rust belt cities are actually pretty nice, and you can escape that rat race. Maybe you don't want to live there, but they are nice places.
      • paulmd 3y ago
        Move to East Palestine or Pontiac MI and wait for this month’s chemical spill to find you?
• brazzy 3y ago
  >And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have made that clear by now. History has also made it clear that people can be made to endure living conditions they don't like or a very long time. I submit that, historically, life for the common people was far, far more often barely tolerable or even intolerable, than agreeable. We like to hear about peasant and slave revolts in history classes, but overall those were few and far between.
  • afpx 3y ago
    A lot of people echoing each other online isn’t much of a revolt, either.
• SoftTalker 3y ago
  > In the past, a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably. I think this is a bit of a rose-colored rear-view mirror, and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. Most people in most times had to work pretty hard. If you were a farmer, you worked pretty much all the daylight hours every day. Immigrants in the early part of the 20th century worked very hard, often the man running a small business or doing factory work and the woman cleaning, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, etc. for hire. And all of that is when the men weren't off fighting a war as a conscripted soldier. The "working man" who could support a family on his income alone was a product of the post-WWII economy. And he didn't really have to save for retirement, he had a defined-benefit pension (the kind that bankrupted many of their employers in subsequent years). The fact that today, people can feel pretty picky about the terms of the work they do is a sign that times are pretty good, despite what people may think and say.
  • usrbinbash 3y ago
    > and to the extent it's true it's a pretty brief period of time historically. That is true, but understandably, people are not thrilled about the prospect of their conditions being worse than those their predecessors experienced. Especially not if, at the same time, they experience an uninterrupted period of economic growth and ever growing profit margins for the corporations they work for.
    • treis 3y ago
      It's not worse than their predecessors. That belief is a combination of looking at the past with rose colored glasses and extrapolating the issues of a handful of cities to the entire country.
      • CuriouslyC 3y ago
        By objective standards, it isn't worse. Unfortunately, people don't care about objective standards, once they're not hungry cold and in pain they mostly derive their happiness from how well off they are compared to other people they encounter. By that metric more are worse off now.
• welshwelsh 3y ago
  A working man can still support a family of five, buy a house, a car and a vacation once or twice a year. He just needs to be realistic. House: you can still find houses with plenty of room for ~$100k. It just needs to be in an affordable area: think McKeesport, not San Francisco. Car: for $5k you can get a 2005 Ford Focus or Honda Civic. They're reliable cars that will get you from A to B perfectly fine, easy to repair and fuel efficient. Education: a Computer Science degree from WGU costs $18k for the average student, and can be as low as $4k if you accelerate. Career: plenty of remote software jobs paying above $100k, which can fund a good life in most of the US. I get it though, the average person wants a nice house in a wealthy area with good schools and low crime and two new cars and gets a degree from a school they can't afford in a field without high paying jobs, and they cannot even code. That's completely their fault, no sympathy from me. For those people, there's an easy solution: just don't have kids. Kids are crazy expensive, and not required for a good life. I hope what you say is true- mass retirements followed by a plummeting birthrate. We surely do not need so many people, when the overwhelming majority are useless. Robots will be here soon anyway to replace most of the workforce
  • monsieurbanana 3y ago
    You forgot those damn avocado toasts
  • pram 3y ago
    Now this is some “folksy wisdom”
  • nradov 3y ago
    Progress on robotics has been extremely slow. I doubt that we will see a robot that can repair a broken air conditioner in our lifetimes. But I agree that a lot of the whining is due to expectations that are decoupled from reality. A recent survey of college students showed that they expected to earn an average starting salary of $103K. Most are in for a rude awakening. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2022/05/05/college-grads-salary-expectations/9656696002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2022/05...
  • mstipetic 3y ago
• alisonatwork 3y ago
  I think it's important to note that the good old days of a working man being able to support a family of five was only true for a brief period of history in a handful of elite countries. In most of the world, and for most of human history, it hasn't been the case that any single person working 40 hours a week could provide a luxurious lifestyle for a large family. While some lament the loss of this golden age their grandparents experienced, a much greater number of people around the world have seen their living conditions improve markedly since the time of their grandparents. That doesn't take away from the point that ideally no one should have to work themselves to the bone just to afford a humble lifestyle, but if middle class people in developed countries are really asking for perspective, I think it's worth bearing their relative privilege in mind.
  • muro 3y ago
    First it was "support a family of five", then "luxurious lifestyle" then "humble lifestyle". Except for the "luxurious" one, it was possible pretty much at any time in human history, including now.
    • alisonatwork 3y ago
      The post I am responding to mentioned providing a family of five with a self-owned house, a car, a couple of vacations per year and a comfortable retirement. To many people around the world - still today - that would be considered a luxurious lifestyle. You are right that it's possible for one person to support a family. For most people working in the tech industry here on HN they could probably figure out a way to do it. But is it realistic for all families everywhere to be able to support themselves with just a single worker? If it were so simple to achieve, we would not see child labor. We would not see any poverty at all. Clearly we are not yet at the point as a species where we can enjoy a post-scarcity or job-free utopia. We could certainly be doing a lot more to work towards that than we are, though, and I think that's a more interesting point of discussion than looking back through rose-tinted glasses on a few decades of post-WW2 America.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
• cool_dude85 3y ago
  >plus save enough to retire comfortably Individual saving for retirement was cooked up in the 80s. You used to get your pension and be set.
  • bluGill 3y ago
    If you were lucky. Many did not get a pension at all though. And many others had a pension that went bankrupt so they go nothing. The 1980s (starting before then) were reforms on a system that wasn't working well for many.
    • cool_dude85 3y ago
      Time will tell whether the individual solution works better. I suspect 401k saving will not provide many people a stable retirement.
      • SirMaster 3y ago
        Why not? At 35 i’ve already got ~500K in my 401K. I guess it won’t work for people not saving enough into it and not actively managing their fund allocations over the years.
        • jlokier 3y ago
          > Why not? You are relatively well paid. Most people in the US received total less than $500k cumulative post-tax income by 35. Median incomes don't reach that level. Here are median personal income figures over the last 17 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Median_personal_income_after_taxes.webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... Those are aggregated across age, and younger people tend to earn less, so the median total income working 18 to 35 will be lower than if you add up the age-independent figures. But even if that weren't true, and if people could miraculously save 100% of everything for 17 years, live on nothing but air and get totally free housing, most people still wouldn't have seen 500k by 35. As well, necessary expenses (housing, food, transport etc) take up a higher proportion of their income than yours, because of lower income while necessary expenses don't decrease proportionately. So the proportion they can realistically save is lower than yours. For many it's a struggle to save anything, but even for those who can and are willing to sacrifice a lot, $500k by 35 is dream money. Active fund management are not enough to make up the difference. Most people if they want $500k in a 401k by 35, have to earn significantly more than they actually do. Of course if everyone did that, prices would rise to compensate and $500k in the 401k wouldn't be worth as much.
• paintman252 3y ago
  "If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets." What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?
• nradov 3y ago
  Here's some perspective. In lower cost areas of the country it's still totally possible for a single worker to support a family of five, buy a house, a car, and afford a vacation. But in that idealized version of the past that you're describing the normal standards of living were much lower. The typical worker's house was small with everyone sharing one bathroom. The car was unreliable and dangerous. The vacation was a road trip to go camping. Now it seems everyone's expectations have risen. I do agree that demographic changes are going to cause economic problems. That is basically unavoidable now.
  • pclmulqdq 3y ago
    A big part of this seems to be the idea that a highly-educated urban professional ought to have a better life than a journeyman plumber in a rural area. The reality is that there is a lot more supply of educated professionals and a lot more demand for city life, so it should not be surprising that wages in formerly-elite jobs are being depressed and cost of living is shooting up. In the meantime, the plumber's economic situation has largely improved with the booming economy and the dwindling supply of plumbers. If you want a high quality of life today and aren't worth $10+ million, the best way to get it is to get out of a city.
• throwaway33381 3y ago
  For most jobs real wages haven't gone up at all adjusted with inflation. Others have mostly gone down in wages, most specifically service type jobs which are critical for basic needs. When you can't afford to live why bother?
• WalterBright 3y ago
  Consider the share of the GDP sucked up and dissipated by the government. That inevitably results in a general lower standard of living. The government has grown enormously in my lifetime, sucking up much (most?) of the productivity increases.
  • lordnacho 3y ago
    Likely true. But there are plenty of large businesses that are effectively the same. Larger than a lot of government departments, holding a monopoly-like position in some good/service, can't be killed. These orgs are just as good as government at overpaying people. IMO the productivity loss is misidentified as a government issue, it's actually a large org issue.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• Nifty3929 3y ago
  "then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant" A common fallacy. There are light-years of difference. An indentured servant is bound to serve a particular master. A free worker, even earning only enough for necessities, is still free to decide how to meet those necessities, and who to work for under what terms. That's a lot of freedom. No, of course they will not have as many choices as a rich person. But they are very far from indentured servitude.
• benreesman 3y ago
  You’re going to get a bunch of static because of the objectivist leanings of all the “temporarily impoverished tech billionaires” on HN and pg’s rare miss of an essay about the scarce reagents of the United States manufacturing economy during the Cold War. But you’re fundamentally right. It’s really easy to manipulate indices like the CPI (and oh boy do they have some interesting ideas about what people need in life), and it’s really easy to exploit summary statistics like the arithmetic mean to drag “average standard of living” metrics around with a few categories of goods (mostly consumer electronics) to push the absurd notion that anyone outside the investor class is doing as well as they were 10, 20, 30, 40, … years ago. The United States burns 45% of its corn and smaller but still ridiculous percentages of its other big agricultural outputs as ethanol at a net disaster on carbon emissions. We let poor and homeless people interact with courts and ERs in vast numbers who need housing assistance, basic medical care, and sometimes substance abuse treatment at (people debate this exact number) somewhere in the hand-wave 10-100x range of a markup. Cops and judges and the amortized cost of lawsuits against police departments and ER doctors and ER nurses and ER equipment have a cost structure closer to a military than cheap, tax-subsidized housing and registered nurses. The United States has absurd surpluses of arable land, exploitable energy, deep-water harbor capacity, riverine transport capacity, exploitable mineral resources, highly desirable and massively under exploited coastal real estate, you name it, it’s easier to list things that are in any way intrinsically scarce here…Coltan maybe? The United States is in a position unique in history in which its sovereign debt is denominated in its own currency and that currency is the world’s reserve currency and that sovereign debt is the “risk-free return” r-nought embraced by modern global finance. This means that we can tailor the money supply exactly to the level of productivity that it’s used to represent, which means that being a politician or economic regulator is as easy of a job (if your goal is the public welfare) as it definitionally can be. The United States is basically the only developed nation with no intrinsic demographic challenges (the ones that are ravaging all the other developed nations) because there is a seeming boundless supply of (statistically) young, law-abiding, productive people who still have kids wanting to immigrate here across a porous land border. Scarcity or want of really any kind is a very, very, very expensive “luxury” (it’s not quite a Veblen good but it’s certainly conspicuous consumption) that we as a society seem prepared to spend whatever it takes to get. Once you strip the paint jobs off of either Foucault-style postmodernism or Randian objectivism (a challenge that Noam Chomsky describes as a real feat of linguistic manipulation) you’re left with effectively the same actionable value system of there being 2 kinds of people in this world: for the lefty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they are the product of constructed forces external to them (I mean, except for us of course), for the righty kleptocrats the individual is robbed of agency and identity because they aren’t smart or motivated enough to invent Reardon Metal and therefore insignificant (I mean, except for us, of course). The action item that falls out is the same in both cases: drive capture to keep the “right people” running things. The result is the same in both cases: if you do a halfway honest plot of productivity and genuine standard of living against the decades, you get divergent lines that seem to be training for an Olympic gymnastics qualification. The most dangerous man in the world isn’t a Navy SEAL or a Zeta, the most dangerous man in the world is a man with nothing to lose, which is why we’re up to 4 mass shootings a day (by Mother Jones’s definition but pick one), which is per-capita more than Syria. This little brochure is a bit hand-wavy on the math and takes a bit of poetic license, it’s not meant to be the book that someone needs to write about this. So it’ll be a trivial exercise to pick it apart in that god-awful “>”-prefixed bad-faith style, but it’s not going to be a fundamental intellectual or epistemological or ethical error that’s going to motivate people to do so, it’s that this is not a comfortable thing to see in the mirror.
• phpisthebest 3y ago
  >>a working man could support a family of five, buy a house, a car and afford vacation once or twice a year, plus save enough to retire comfortably. I would say my family history is that of a "working man" that closly fits that narraive.. My grandfather was a WWII vet, after military service was a factory worker that raised 4 kids, in their own home. Let me eliminate some of that illusory rose tint from your worldview. That home with 2 adults and 4 kids was a 950 square foot 1 bathroom box on .25 acres of land, with no garage, basement, or luxury of any type. my family still owns this property. In comparison me a single man, lives in a 1300 sqft home.. by myself, with 2 car garage, full basement, etc. My home is considered "basic" by modern standards, some would even consider it below minimum standards for a family of 4...(I bought this home from such a family because they felt it was too small for them) No builder would ever consider building either my home (which was built in the 60's, nor my grandparents home (built in the early 50's) as today home sizes need to be 1500-2000 square foot, each bedroom needs it own bath, kitchens need to be near professional quality, etc etc etc etc etc. In short home prices are sky high because buyers would never consider, and probally could not legally, raise 4 kids in a 1 bath 950 sqaure foot home. We often to not actualy compare apples to apple when we look at the conditions of the past. Sure a man could buy a home for his family in 1950... That home was about 1/2 the size of todays home, and had FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR less amenities and comforts of the modern home
  • grecy 3y ago
    Obviously this depends entirely on the country and region. My grandfather immigrated to Australia in 1948, got a job assembling cars at the Ford plant, and worked there until he retired. My Grandmother never worked. They bought a very nice house, had two boys, never really had any debt, plenty of money in retirement. A generation later my Dad was earning $10k/year as a teacher, and my mum and dad bought their first very nice home for $30k. So today how many people earning $100k/year can buy a home for $300k? (As reference, my partner earns $78k/year and bought a modest home for $480k the month before covid. Now there is not a single home in this small town for less than $600k.)
    • phpisthebest 3y ago
• tmnvix 3y ago
  > If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. Slave/indentured servant -> live-in servant -> servant -> service worker -> self-employed service worker (contractor) At each step along this 'evolution', the beneficiaries of the labour have freed themselves from the burden of supplying some of the resources needed by the worker (shelter, food, holidays, sick pay, health insurance, safety and other equipment, education/training, etc). In theory this has been balanced by increased monetary compensation. When that compensation isn't enough for the worker to meet these needs, what should we expect? That they become indebted?