7 ms·

Wages are rising. Jobs are plentiful. Nobody's happy

42 points by rustoo 3y ago

t-3 3y ago
There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. Labor-force participation is better than the depths of Covid, but it's not full employment by any means. Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation, the absolute number only tricks octogenarians who remember when $0.50/hr was big money that could pay their way through college and these damn lazy kids!
- voakbasda 3y ago
  I agree completely. Any talk about higher wages is pure propaganda by the media and political establishments.
  - boppo1 3y ago
    >pure propaganda I'm not sure if it's 'pure'. Lots of people who studied economics actually believe CPI and PCE are good measures.
    - stillwithit 3y ago
      Our feudal system demands we wrap ourselves in hallucinated expertise and LARP the validity of our professions outputs to earn food and shelter though Academia grooms students to propagate curriculum, not define new ideas
  - black_13 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Hammershaft 3y ago
    It sounds like you're starting from preconcieved beliefs and then working backwards to determine how you'll interpret the validity of new information based on how they conform to your beliefs.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  > but it's not full employment by any means. I could be wrong/this is probably ignorant to say but I'm pretty sure we don't want "full employment". The fuller employment, the more supply there is for jobs of all wage groups (low, medium, high, etc.) Employers were having a hard time finding people who wanted to work during COVID for a variety of reasons. This lead to a good think for workers who did want to work: $12/hr jobs became $17/hr (rough example) due to low supply, high demand. The fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages. Just a thought...
  - spacemanspiff01 3y ago
    Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) it does not mean employers filling all their open job requests.
    - gruez 3y ago
      > Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) If you did a 30 second search you'd find that's not correct. >Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.[1] Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. [...] >For the United States, economist William T. Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.[5] Recently, economists have emphasized the idea that full employment represents a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated unemployment rate at full employment, plus or minus the standard error of the estimate.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
    - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
      see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788
- gruez 3y ago
  >There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. [...] Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation BLS data begs to differ: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q Wages have been slowly creeping up for the last 2 years. Now, you might point to the giant spike during the pandemic and conclude that means wages are actually down, but that's an artifact of how the data is collected. Since the dataset only measures the wages of employed people, lockdowns hit the retail/hospitality sector disproportionately, and those sector also tend to have lower wages, eliminating those jobs bumped up the average. If you look at the last quarter before the pandemic (Q4 2019) wages are either very marginally higher or at least flat.
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    So what does their data say about the cost of a house in 2019 vs today? The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today? it could just be the BLS not fully capturing inflation
    - gruez 3y ago
      The CPI is composed of a basket of goods, and there's always going to be items in that basket that's rising higher than average, so there's always going to be things you can cherry pick and complain about "the BLS not fully capturing inflation". >The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today BLS data says it's 30% higher. Does that seem about right? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA >cost of a house in 2019 vs today Houses aren't directly in the CPI for complicated reasons, but the short version is that they're an investment. Americans buy 401ks too, but it would make little sense to factor in the S&P 500 into the CPI. Housing is factored in though, through imputed rents and rental prices.
      - Terr_ 3y ago
        Health Insurance is another fun/annoying one, because it's not like you can reliably standardize 1 standard unit of insurance and it's difficult to compare across plans. (Perhaps by design, the Confusopoly at work.) That said, BLS is starting to tweak how they measure health care costs. [0] [0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cpi-health-insurance-index.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cp...
- bdangubic 3y ago
  My favorite type of comment on HN... "there is no evidence" start of the comment followed by thousand comments with evidence :)
  - t-3 3y ago
    Right... thousands. I see one piece of "evidence", which is... government unemployment statistics, aka data from the very last people to trust on this, because they have every incentive to make the numbers look better than they are.
    - jibal 3y ago
      Actually, the very last people to trust on this are the ideologues in your mirrors.
      - t-3 3y ago
        Right. Don't trust your lying eyes and ears, only trust Uncle Sam. He knows what's best for you. Politicians never lie or pressure civil servants to lie or change the definitions to give them nice numbers for the soundbites or make the bad economy they inherited seem good. Only honest and virtuous people exist in the world, except for myself, because I'm an evil communist, and commies always lie.
        bdangubic 3y ago
        Not sure anyone accused you of being an evil communist here - not being able to find ample evidence of something surely doesn't make you a communist, just incompetent :)
        jibal 3y ago
        I specifically said not to trust people like you because you're an ideologue who responds with such inane strawmen. And I'm a socialist so you're not just barking up the wrong tree, you're in the wrong forest.
caekislove 3y ago
Who are you gonna believe? Vox or your lying eyes?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  What I see with my lying eyes isn't in opposition with what the article is saying.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  I blame my eyes for seeing hundreds of homeless people everyday who are let down by the consequences of a society lacking comprehensive, effective, integrated social services resulting in something of a socioeconomic-dignity apartheid. For-profit media corporations are incentivized to publish outrage, unpopular, and contrarian headlines over substance and truth to snipe engagement. Along those lines, Vox seems like the perfect employer for George Santos. ;@]
  - morkalork 3y ago
    I just visited a part of the city I used to live in and two things were shocking: The number of luxury condos being built, and, the nearby homeless encampment under an overpass. There didn't used to be either, it was just overall average part of town before.
k310 3y ago
Media thrive on negativity. Posted here recently: “All news is bad news” because “People like bad news” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336339. (Zero comments) https://www.slowboring.com/p/media-negativity https://www.slowboring.com/p/media-negativity When people are “Mad as Hell,” ratings surge. Network
- pauldenton 3y ago
  Media can thrive on negativity and the economy can be in rough shape with young people not being able to buy a home or start a family. Just look at American fertility, it's more dramatic if you exclude first and second generation immigrants out of the number and see how large the delta is between the number of kids people want to have and the number they actually do
  - k310 3y ago
    My current (purchased in 2015) home, with a view like Jackson Hole, cost a bit more than I paid for the first home in 1982 or so. Both in California. We were in our 30's so only one child, but that was location-independent. Both homes are/were three bedroom. WFH is pretty liberating for many. People raise families and work here, and the kids get lots and lots of outdoor activity. At 74, I hike tails I cut out of brush daily, with some 100ft. (10 flights of stairs) elevation gain or loss. Ignore the negative things I had to say on a different HN post. For better or worse, Walmart and such are 50 miles away. Many people like that.
vlod 3y ago
My thoughts is based on the number of annoying recruiters who ping me (daily) on linkedin starting with "I hope this finds you well... I have a great.. ...at a hourly rate that is previous X-40%" At the moment it's a ghost town.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  You know what, now you mention it, I haven't got my daily "your resume says C# so here's a full stack java job for $3/day" email in a long time
jiveturkey42 3y ago
There's a major resurgence in US manufacturing jobs now and for the foreseeable future. These are mostly in rural or small town areas, with low COL. Pay is anywhere from $18 - $40 an hour for high school graduates. Lots of investment is pouring into previously impoverished areas. If you are not a professional in a large city, life is pretty comfy right now.
windows2020 3y ago
Inflation is an unintuitive concept to grasp. "Wages are up — even accounting for inflation over the past several months..." Yeah, just disregard the past years and blame it on "Partisanship and negative media bias..."
tracerbulletx 3y ago
The average economy might look good by some metrics, but there are a lot of changes creating various groups of winners and losers, and depending on the people you know you might be in a group of people feeling hammered by the waves right now.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  K-shaped recovery applies to individuals. The media hypes their insular bubble near wealth and power while the reality is inflation is impoverishing the lower classes. The reality is the very rich are doing phenomenally well while dollar store clerks and Amazon delivery drivers make chickenfeed.
  - prewett 3y ago
    "The reality is the very rich are doing phenomenally well while dollar store clerks and Amazon delivery drivers make chickenfeed" is basically a tautology. If you compare the very rich and the near destitute, yea, it's a pretty big gulf, and it's always going to be that way, by the definition of the words. But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive. O'Henry stories have a vivid portrayal of NYC in 1900, and all the retail workers there were young, single women living in shared housing. Before that the unskilled work was factory work, and before that the closest comparison I can think of was apprentices. All of the stories I've read that include those people describe a standard of living no better than minimum wage work, and sometimes worse. (Note that the farther back you go, shopkeepers tended to be owners, not employees, which is obviously very different than modern minimum wage retail work. Some, but not all, of them are described as wealthy.)
    - lacrimacida 3y ago
      > But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive. The thing is that survival part has become a larger problem now even for people who have a full time jobs or two. Many live in their cars. When has that been the case historically to have such high housing costs? Has life been so hard for so many excluding during the great depression? Are we under one at the moment? It certainly looks like for more and more and I not only not see anything improving, I see things getting worse. Of course the winners don’t see it the same way and like to tell eachother stories
salamandersss 3y ago
What I really care about is healthcare, childcare, education, owning a home for my family, and good food. How are my wages doing against that? Everything but food -- downhill.
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
I want to know the following: How affordable is a house today vs 5 years ago vs now? How about rent? How affordable is college 5 years ago vs now? How affordable is healthcare? Daycare?
dopylitty 3y ago
The media criticism podcast Citations Needed did an interesting show[0] recently on the phrase 'the economy' that is frequently used by the media. Basically when the media is talking about 'the economy' they aren't looking at metrics that actually affect the majority of people. Rising wages only matter if corporations aren't turning around and charging higher prices for the same or worse goods/services. Plentiful jobs only matter if they are good jobs that can pay for a good quality of life. Good healthcare/housing are impossible to get in the most parts of the US unless you make an enormous amount of money. The metrics we hear about don't take into account the experiences of the majority of people. This Vox article seems to be falling into the same trap of citing metrics that don't matter but at least does address that "health care, child care, higher education, housing." are prohibitively expensive in the US' broken economic system. 0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-191-how-medias-use-of-the-economy-flattens-class-conflict https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-191-how-medias-use-of-...
trashface 3y ago
Jobs aren't plentiful if you are 45+
zlg_codes 3y ago
I'm not observing any of the allegations people are making about our economy doing well. I don't care how many jobs are out there if they're all garbage that you can't build a life on. Our country is scrambling to become solvent and they're afraid we're going to wake up and, rightfully, consider them as the cause of this economic fuckery. The PPP money should've been given to citizens as stimulus. Businesses just pocketed it.
wavemode 3y ago
This article reads to me like, "people are angry about the economy, but have run out of ways to explain their anger with numbers." In other words, when unemployment is good, and inflation-adjusted wages are good, and spending is good, and investments are good ... what else is there? Maybe there is some hidden variable we're missing in our economic models which can account for the discontent. But this article has not presented what exactly that's supposed to be.
- helij 3y ago
  People probably feel trapped.
- pllbnk 3y ago
  My take is that people want security. It doesn't matter if today you're earning what might be considered a good salary if you can't own a home by the time you're in your thirties. Usually that's the time when people stop feeling invincible, notice slightly degrading health and realize that they might lose everything if something serious happens with hardly any time to catch up later in life. Maslow's pyramid is the key.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
One of the issues I observe is that few Americans really have an understanding of the economy. Too often their feelings are dictated by gas prices, by their own personal income, or the stock market, IE: indicators, but not a holistic perspective. I know it is just a movie, but so often I have reflected on the end scene in Fight Club, where the Tyler Durden character is talking about the dichotomy of believing we'd all grow up to be rich and then discovering it's not reality. The American system is unforgiving. The past roughly 100 years saw us short rapidly from an agrarian economy to our current services-driven economy, where along the way we were told a college education was the path to wealth but the reality wasn't so simple. I don't have time to type a thesis here, but I can't blame people for feeling the way they feel even when the economic indicators are generally positive. While we're talking about it - a few days ago there was a thread about rural HNers. I would bet if you were to ask urban dwellers, especially in coastal cities, their perspective on the economy it might be very different than those of us in fly over country.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  Basically what you're getting at is that it doesn't matter if "The Economy" is booming if you as an individual are struggling. In theory "The Economy" being booming means it should be easier for individuals to find good work so they aren't struggling, but that's not really the reality we're seeing right now outside of some bubbles.
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
I look to my grandparents' generation and what they could do. My grandfather was an engineer for NASA from the 60's-80's. They were able to have a primary residence in Houston and 2 holiday homes around Texas and put 3 kids through college on a modest single income. Could I do the same today on a modest engineering salary from a government agency? No way.
nojvek 3y ago
Wages are not rising. Most people I speak to are making the same as pre-covid. Yes the Rich are definitely getting richer, anyone who owns a profit producing entity.
- notfish 3y ago
  If you make the same as you did pre-covid, you took a 16% pay cut since 2020. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.00&year1=202001&year2=202310 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.00&year1=202...
nojvek 3y ago
Food, house prices, healthcare, education, cost of raising kids - all significantly gone up. Doesn’t matter if you make a wee bit more, if everything you need to survive has shot up faster in price.

42 points by rustoo 3y ago

t-3 3y ago

There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. Labor-force participation is better than the depths of Covid, but it's not full employment by any means. Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation, the absolute number only tricks octogenarians who remember when $0.50/hr was big money that could pay their way through college and these damn lazy kids!

voakbasda 3y ago
I agree completely. Any talk about higher wages is pure propaganda by the media and political establishments.
- boppo1 3y ago
  >pure propaganda I'm not sure if it's 'pure'. Lots of people who studied economics actually believe CPI and PCE are good measures.
  - stillwithit 3y ago
    Our feudal system demands we wrap ourselves in hallucinated expertise and LARP the validity of our professions outputs to earn food and shelter though Academia grooms students to propagate curriculum, not define new ideas
- black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
- Hammershaft 3y ago
  It sounds like you're starting from preconcieved beliefs and then working backwards to determine how you'll interpret the validity of new information based on how they conform to your beliefs.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> but it's not full employment by any means. I could be wrong/this is probably ignorant to say but I'm pretty sure we don't want "full employment". The fuller employment, the more supply there is for jobs of all wage groups (low, medium, high, etc.) Employers were having a hard time finding people who wanted to work during COVID for a variety of reasons. This lead to a good think for workers who did want to work: $12/hr jobs became $17/hr (rough example) due to low supply, high demand. The fuller employment, the less need employers have to compete for workers on wages. Just a thought...
- spacemanspiff01 3y ago
  Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) it does not mean employers filling all their open job requests.
  - gruez 3y ago
    > Full employment means 100% of people eligible to work are working. (0% unemployment rate) If you did a 30 second search you'd find that's not correct. >Full employment is a situation in which there is no cyclical or deficient-demand unemployment.[1] Full employment does not entail the disappearance of all unemployment, as other kinds of unemployment, namely structural and frictional, may remain. [...] >For the United States, economist William T. Dickens found that full-employment unemployment rate varied a lot over time but equaled about 5.5 percent of the civilian labor force during the 2000s.[5] Recently, economists have emphasized the idea that full employment represents a "range" of possible unemployment rates. For example, in 1999, in the United States, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives an estimate of the "full-employment unemployment rate" of 4 to 6.4%. This is the estimated unemployment rate at full employment, plus or minus the standard error of the estimate.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38356788
gruez 3y ago
>There's no evidence that wages or employment are rising. [...] Wages haven't even come close to keeping up with inflation BLS data begs to differ: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q Wages have been slowly creeping up for the last 2 years. Now, you might point to the giant spike during the pandemic and conclude that means wages are actually down, but that's an artifact of how the data is collected. Since the dataset only measures the wages of employed people, lockdowns hit the retail/hospitality sector disproportionately, and those sector also tend to have lower wages, eliminating those jobs bumped up the average. If you look at the last quarter before the pandemic (Q4 2019) wages are either very marginally higher or at least flat.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  So what does their data say about the cost of a house in 2019 vs today? The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today? it could just be the BLS not fully capturing inflation
  - gruez 3y ago
    The CPI is composed of a basket of goods, and there's always going to be items in that basket that's rising higher than average, so there's always going to be things you can cherry pick and complain about "the BLS not fully capturing inflation". >The cost of a vehicle in 2019 vs today BLS data says it's 30% higher. Does that seem about right? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA >cost of a house in 2019 vs today Houses aren't directly in the CPI for complicated reasons, but the short version is that they're an investment. Americans buy 401ks too, but it would make little sense to factor in the S&P 500 into the CPI. Housing is factored in though, through imputed rents and rental prices.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      Health Insurance is another fun/annoying one, because it's not like you can reliably standardize 1 standard unit of insurance and it's difficult to compare across plans. (Perhaps by design, the Confusopoly at work.) That said, BLS is starting to tweak how they measure health care costs. [0] [0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cpi-health-insurance-index.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/improvements-cp...
bdangubic 3y ago
My favorite type of comment on HN... "there is no evidence" start of the comment followed by thousand comments with evidence :)
- t-3 3y ago
  Right... thousands. I see one piece of "evidence", which is... government unemployment statistics, aka data from the very last people to trust on this, because they have every incentive to make the numbers look better than they are.
  - jibal 3y ago
    Actually, the very last people to trust on this are the ideologues in your mirrors.
    - t-3 3y ago
      Right. Don't trust your lying eyes and ears, only trust Uncle Sam. He knows what's best for you. Politicians never lie or pressure civil servants to lie or change the definitions to give them nice numbers for the soundbites or make the bad economy they inherited seem good. Only honest and virtuous people exist in the world, except for myself, because I'm an evil communist, and commies always lie.
      - bdangubic 3y ago
        Not sure anyone accused you of being an evil communist here - not being able to find ample evidence of something surely doesn't make you a communist, just incompetent :)
      - jibal 3y ago
        I specifically said not to trust people like you because you're an ideologue who responds with such inane strawmen. And I'm a socialist so you're not just barking up the wrong tree, you're in the wrong forest.

caekislove 3y ago

Who are you gonna believe? Vox or your lying eyes?

JohnFen 3y ago
What I see with my lying eyes isn't in opposition with what the article is saying.
1letterunixname 3y ago
I blame my eyes for seeing hundreds of homeless people everyday who are let down by the consequences of a society lacking comprehensive, effective, integrated social services resulting in something of a socioeconomic-dignity apartheid. For-profit media corporations are incentivized to publish outrage, unpopular, and contrarian headlines over substance and truth to snipe engagement. Along those lines, Vox seems like the perfect employer for George Santos. ;@]
- morkalork 3y ago
  I just visited a part of the city I used to live in and two things were shocking: The number of luxury condos being built, and, the nearby homeless encampment under an overpass. There didn't used to be either, it was just overall average part of town before.

k310 3y ago

Media thrive on negativity. Posted here recently: “All news is bad news” because “People like bad news” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336339. (Zero comments) https://www.slowboring.com/p/media-negativity https://www.slowboring.com/p/media-negativity When people are “Mad as Hell,” ratings surge. Network

pauldenton 3y ago
Media can thrive on negativity and the economy can be in rough shape with young people not being able to buy a home or start a family. Just look at American fertility, it's more dramatic if you exclude first and second generation immigrants out of the number and see how large the delta is between the number of kids people want to have and the number they actually do
- k310 3y ago
  My current (purchased in 2015) home, with a view like Jackson Hole, cost a bit more than I paid for the first home in 1982 or so. Both in California. We were in our 30's so only one child, but that was location-independent. Both homes are/were three bedroom. WFH is pretty liberating for many. People raise families and work here, and the kids get lots and lots of outdoor activity. At 74, I hike tails I cut out of brush daily, with some 100ft. (10 flights of stairs) elevation gain or loss. Ignore the negative things I had to say on a different HN post. For better or worse, Walmart and such are 50 miles away. Many people like that.

vlod 3y ago

My thoughts is based on the number of annoying recruiters who ping me (daily) on linkedin starting with "I hope this finds you well... I have a great.. ...at a hourly rate that is previous X-40%" At the moment it's a ghost town.

calamari4065 3y ago
You know what, now you mention it, I haven't got my daily "your resume says C# so here's a full stack java job for $3/day" email in a long time

jiveturkey42 3y ago

There's a major resurgence in US manufacturing jobs now and for the foreseeable future. These are mostly in rural or small town areas, with low COL. Pay is anywhere from $18 - $40 an hour for high school graduates. Lots of investment is pouring into previously impoverished areas. If you are not a professional in a large city, life is pretty comfy right now.

windows2020 3y ago

Inflation is an unintuitive concept to grasp. "Wages are up — even accounting for inflation over the past several months..." Yeah, just disregard the past years and blame it on "Partisanship and negative media bias..."

tracerbulletx 3y ago

The average economy might look good by some metrics, but there are a lot of changes creating various groups of winners and losers, and depending on the people you know you might be in a group of people feeling hammered by the waves right now.

1letterunixname 3y ago
K-shaped recovery applies to individuals. The media hypes their insular bubble near wealth and power while the reality is inflation is impoverishing the lower classes. The reality is the very rich are doing phenomenally well while dollar store clerks and Amazon delivery drivers make chickenfeed.
- prewett 3y ago
  "The reality is the very rich are doing phenomenally well while dollar store clerks and Amazon delivery drivers make chickenfeed" is basically a tautology. If you compare the very rich and the near destitute, yea, it's a pretty big gulf, and it's always going to be that way, by the definition of the words. But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive. O'Henry stories have a vivid portrayal of NYC in 1900, and all the retail workers there were young, single women living in shared housing. Before that the unskilled work was factory work, and before that the closest comparison I can think of was apprentices. All of the stories I've read that include those people describe a standard of living no better than minimum wage work, and sometimes worse. (Note that the farther back you go, shopkeepers tended to be owners, not employees, which is obviously very different than modern minimum wage retail work. Some, but not all, of them are described as wealthy.)
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    > But I don't think there was ever a time when unskilled retail workers and delivery men got paid well. Minimum wage jobs have always been basically survival level pay as long as I've been alive. The thing is that survival part has become a larger problem now even for people who have a full time jobs or two. Many live in their cars. When has that been the case historically to have such high housing costs? Has life been so hard for so many excluding during the great depression? Are we under one at the moment? It certainly looks like for more and more and I not only not see anything improving, I see things getting worse. Of course the winners don’t see it the same way and like to tell eachother stories

salamandersss 3y ago

What I really care about is healthcare, childcare, education, owning a home for my family, and good food. How are my wages doing against that? Everything but food -- downhill.

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago

I want to know the following: How affordable is a house today vs 5 years ago vs now? How about rent? How affordable is college 5 years ago vs now? How affordable is healthcare? Daycare?

dopylitty 3y ago

The media criticism podcast Citations Needed did an interesting show[0] recently on the phrase 'the economy' that is frequently used by the media. Basically when the media is talking about 'the economy' they aren't looking at metrics that actually affect the majority of people. Rising wages only matter if corporations aren't turning around and charging higher prices for the same or worse goods/services. Plentiful jobs only matter if they are good jobs that can pay for a good quality of life. Good healthcare/housing are impossible to get in the most parts of the US unless you make an enormous amount of money. The metrics we hear about don't take into account the experiences of the majority of people. This Vox article seems to be falling into the same trap of citing metrics that don't matter but at least does address that "health care, child care, higher education, housing." are prohibitively expensive in the US' broken economic system. 0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-191-how-medias-use-of-the-economy-flattens-class-conflict https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-191-how-medias-use-of-...

trashface 3y ago

Jobs aren't plentiful if you are 45+

zlg_codes 3y ago

I'm not observing any of the allegations people are making about our economy doing well. I don't care how many jobs are out there if they're all garbage that you can't build a life on. Our country is scrambling to become solvent and they're afraid we're going to wake up and, rightfully, consider them as the cause of this economic fuckery. The PPP money should've been given to citizens as stimulus. Businesses just pocketed it.

wavemode 3y ago

This article reads to me like, "people are angry about the economy, but have run out of ways to explain their anger with numbers." In other words, when unemployment is good, and inflation-adjusted wages are good, and spending is good, and investments are good ... what else is there? Maybe there is some hidden variable we're missing in our economic models which can account for the discontent. But this article has not presented what exactly that's supposed to be.

helij 3y ago
People probably feel trapped.
pllbnk 3y ago
My take is that people want security. It doesn't matter if today you're earning what might be considered a good salary if you can't own a home by the time you're in your thirties. Usually that's the time when people stop feeling invincible, notice slightly degrading health and realize that they might lose everything if something serious happens with hardly any time to catch up later in life. Maslow's pyramid is the key.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

One of the issues I observe is that few Americans really have an understanding of the economy. Too often their feelings are dictated by gas prices, by their own personal income, or the stock market, IE: indicators, but not a holistic perspective. I know it is just a movie, but so often I have reflected on the end scene in Fight Club, where the Tyler Durden character is talking about the dichotomy of believing we'd all grow up to be rich and then discovering it's not reality. The American system is unforgiving. The past roughly 100 years saw us short rapidly from an agrarian economy to our current services-driven economy, where along the way we were told a college education was the path to wealth but the reality wasn't so simple. I don't have time to type a thesis here, but I can't blame people for feeling the way they feel even when the economic indicators are generally positive. While we're talking about it - a few days ago there was a thread about rural HNers. I would bet if you were to ask urban dwellers, especially in coastal cities, their perspective on the economy it might be very different than those of us in fly over country.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
Basically what you're getting at is that it doesn't matter if "The Economy" is booming if you as an individual are struggling. In theory "The Economy" being booming means it should be easier for individuals to find good work so they aren't struggling, but that's not really the reality we're seeing right now outside of some bubbles.

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

I look to my grandparents' generation and what they could do. My grandfather was an engineer for NASA from the 60's-80's. They were able to have a primary residence in Houston and 2 holiday homes around Texas and put 3 kids through college on a modest single income. Could I do the same today on a modest engineering salary from a government agency? No way.

nojvek 3y ago

Wages are not rising. Most people I speak to are making the same as pre-covid. Yes the Rich are definitely getting richer, anyone who owns a profit producing entity.

notfish 3y ago
If you make the same as you did pre-covid, you took a 16% pay cut since 2020. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.00&year1=202001&year2=202310 https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.00&year1=202...

nojvek 3y ago

Food, house prices, healthcare, education, cost of raising kids - all significantly gone up. Doesn’t matter if you make a wee bit more, if everything you need to survive has shot up faster in price.