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Most Americans just don't matter to the economy like they once did
- aucisson_masque 2y agoWhat is the difference between forced slavery and economical slavery ? In both case you spend all your time working and someone else benefit from it while you're left eating the leftover.
- croes 2y agoOnly one of them is called free market
- bell-cot 2y agoThus glossing over the fact that most slave societies offer the freedom to market your slaves.
- fc417fc802 2y agoFree market refers to market participants being free to pick and choose transaction terms for themselves. It is entirely unrelated to the presence or absence of slavery.
- t-3 2y agoThe whip on your back, the ability to choose your work to some degree, the part where you get paid, the part where you don't get food housing and medical care from the owner but from your own money, the expectation of basic social respect... Pretty much everything except the part where you don't really have shit at the end.
- ysofunny 2y agothe whip got optimized most people have it internalized this was found to be much more efficient that actual whipping
- nthingtohide 2y agoPetition to change "invisible hand" of Adam Smith to "invisible whip".
- slt2021 2y agoin the US the whip has morphed, because health insurance is provided by the employer - it forces you to seek employment. if you want to live - you will have to work to have access to healthcare
- numa7numa7 2y agoNo longer can you just go get 40 acres and a mule survive independantly, so job loss skyrockets your risk of death. The new whip is starvation, homelessness, no health care, being out on the street amongst dangerous people, etc.
- Jensson 2y ago> What is the difference between forced slavery and economical slavery ? Carrot or stick. People like to work for carrots, people don't like to be worked under threat of a stick. A horse that doesn't work dies either way, but one is much happier than the other.
- roenxi 2y agoThe key question is something like "am I getting the best deal on offer?" for workers and "are these workers having the biggest impact possible?" for managers. The economy provides structures for the two parties to negotiate the best answers they can find. Slavery puts the decisions to the slave owners, economic slavery retains the decision with the worker. If workers are in a terrible situation then at least they can reorganise if they see a better. With slaves they probably could think of better ways to organise, but the owners blocked them from acting. In practice it means workers have and can act on strong incentives to upskill and find more effective working habits.
- demaga 2y agoHonest question about first story: how come they need $1000/week if they spend on groceries $100/week? I am sure rent eats a large chunk of that thousand but it still doesn't add up.
- mkmk3 2y agoCar, insurance, medical bills, student debt, at a guess?
- jaggederest 2y agoIt's a very high cost of living area. I live here. In this area (Portland metro) you should expect they spend about half their money on rent, if not even a bit more. $2500-$3000 a month would not be surprising for a family of 6. The cost of healthcare is also extremely high, 22% on average in the metro area. This is probably skewed by the elderly. Add in a phone bill, electricity ($150 average), internet, garbage, water & sewer and $1000 a week for a family of 6 seems low to me, actually. They're doing a very good job making do with their relatively modest income ($77k/yr), only 55% of the area median income for a family of 6.
- demaga 2y agoWow I wouldn't think that a small town an hour away from Portland would be so expensive. By the way, for a family of 6 they spend way less on groceries than I would expect.
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- jokoon 2y agoOne thing I learned during a 6 month class of entrepreneurship, is that a company and product have much higher odds of success if it targets people with higher income. * Those people have more money to spend so they are more likely to buy since it doesn't hurt their wallet * There are fewer of them so it's easier to advertise and communicate to them * You don't have to make a lot of product, you just have to increase quality, so you don't even have to scale production or think about economies of scale I thought business did not involve income inequality, but it absolutely does. That means it's utterly impossible to make a product for lower income people unless it's really really good.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoWouldn't a more narrow specific audience you need to target and market be more expensive than a broad campaign? If you use a broad campaign that's targeting more people overall due to a larger pool of potential users...you should see more customers. And a more generic less targeted ad should be cheaper per click or whatever KPI.
- t-3 2y agoLow-margin, high volume products for low income people don't sell on advertisement, they sell on price. You need the economies of scale, and that requires tons of upfront capital investment.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoThis is one of those things that really mystifies me. We always hear about startups, killer apps, etc. that generally target a fat margin, even the cloud providers with economies of scale are doing everything they can to avoid becoming a "dumb pipe", but at the same time in the background there are a bunch of companies which somehow make e.g. manufacturing matchsticks profitable. What is their secret?
- zensavona 2y agoTheir secret is volume
- hhh 2y agoHaving stock tickers next to mentions of the brand is very tone deaf, but on par with what i expect.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoIt's sponsored article promoting notion that frugal life is eating at fast food "restaurants" but using various apps, coupons, and tactics. Frugal eating is simply buying fruits and vegetables then cooking, frying, boiling them, and it's also infinitely healthier.
- moomin 2y agoAn absolutely bonkers way of saying “our metrics are outdated and wrong”.
- taurath 2y agoThere’s a completely separate economy for property owners and people with capital than those without. The gap between the two is harder and harder to shoot. The middle doesn’t exist in a lot of places, and it’s mostly legacy/inheritance that keeps people in the same economic class. As the article says, the top 10% of income earners account for 50% of the spending. I’d bet the top 1% accounts for over 35%. The rich rule, for now.
- TuringNYC 2y agoEconomist Thomas Piketty writes about this in great detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago>the top 10% of income earners account for 50% of the spending And hence climate change and environmental degradation. Something to remember every time someone says think of the poor as an excuse for not dealing our emissions.
- baq 2y agoFeudalism is the limit of capitalism without systematic pushback from the regulator.
- bm3719 2y agoThey don't matter because we've finally created a world where the modern peasant is as economically irrelevant as any other outdated farm or industrial equipment. If you opened a printing press staffed by scribes with fountain pens, you'd just lose money. Same goes with hiring your modern peasant; they're simply incapable of producing net economic value thanks to centuries of engineered optimization. If you have kids, even if your partner and you are both high IQ, you're statistically more likely than not to add to this mass of economically unviable peasants unable to be top-tier in the global economy of tomorrow. Maybe that's partly why birthrates in the first and second world have plummeted, as we all kind of know this, if only tacitly.
- bojan 2y agoThat at the end is a really strange take, providing a complex reason for what has a very simple explanation. The birthrates are plummeting because: * the process of pregnancy, giving birth and everything postpartum is incredibly taxing to a woman's body, and it's not surprising that women choose not to go through it now that they have a choice. * our economic system actively punishes people who do choose to have kids. * our more and more individualistic societies make the upbringing more of a chore than it used to be. It takes a village, but the village is gone.
- mjburgess 2y agoYou've missed the main reason: children were always a pension mechanism, and today we have socialized (, and private) pensions. There's no need to have children if you think, in the end, the state (, or you bank account) will look after you.
- kelnos 2y agoBirthrates are declining in places (like the US) that do not have socialized pensions. (Social Security is not that... secure. And regardless, it's existed much longer than the recent birthrate decline here.)
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- StefanBatory 2y agoAnd it raises a very scary question - at which point will we be seen as useless to the ruling caste? And useless resources are to be disposed of... I remember how once CEO of a company my dad worked at has called them. Cattle. Not humans. That is what we are to the rich.
- ahoka 2y agoIt’s happening right now in the US.
- TuringNYC 2y agoSimilar discussion in the UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43245235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43245235
- StefanBatory 2y agoI looked at first post and yeah. Same in Poland. Do try to guess how many of our MPs are landlords. Rhetoric question, of course.
- ReptileMan 2y agoI would suggest a revolution before the mass scale killer robots become available. Afterwards the only reason to keep the underclasses alive is purely sentimental. Which is not too thick a thread.
- fc417fc802 2y agoHow stable will the new government be after this hypothetical revolution? Will the technology for mass scale killer robots still be accessible? Isn't this tactic likely to just make the situation even worse than it already is?
- RGamma 2y agoAs relevant as ever https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...
- xg15 2y ago> On occasion, there’s money left over to go out to a fast-food restaurant for a treat. The four kids usually split three $5.99 meals at Taco Bell (YUM +2.05%) or two $5 meals at McDonald’s (MCD +3.52%), for which Burns accumulates rewards points for future discounts. The auto-inserted stock ticker symbols in this article really drive the point home...
- averageRoyalty 2y ago> For decades, the American consumer has powered not only the world’s biggest economy but the entire global economy. Sorry, what? America makes up 5% of the worlds population, the US cosumer is not running at a 20x rate. This is nonsense.
- inductive_magic 2y agoYeah, but the US has >25% of the global GDP. Go to India or China and look at the average persons buying power, then go to Texas or California. Singapore and Switzerland are in a comparable income bracket, but have a combined population of <15M.
- anovikov 2y agoNot really, US has barely 16% or so. Trick about USA is that it is really open for business and private ownership and investment into anything. Unlike almost any other sizeable country. Entire world can't avoid the US if they want to say, save for retirement (because stock market everywhere else is an absolute joke because their governments want it so). Entire world can't avoid the US if they, on the other hand, want VC funding (just because in some countries a "startup" in the American sense is literally illegal, and in almost all countries, in practice impossible because no one will invest without a tangible collateral). And the list goes on. That's why the world is whole lot frightened now with what Trump is doing because all of us - from Europe to China - know that without America, we are simply not. It's safe to say that if not the American market, my life and life of literally everyone with any cash who i know, even those not realising it, will simply never happen in any positive way.
- dataflow 2y ago> Entire world can't avoid the US if they, on the other hand, want VC funding (just because in some countries a "startup" in the American sense is literally illegal, and in almost all countries, in practice impossible because no one will invest without a tangible collateral). I'm a bit confused by the sentiment here. Do I understand correctly that you're saying the rest of the world has made "startups" in the American sense illegal, but is also terrified of losing in America what they've deliberately outlawed domestically?
- hooverd 2y agoIt's all housing.
- lifestyleguru 2y agoAmericans need too fully support their richest and their real estate owners, because they'll become rich like them just in any moment. Everyone will receive one beautiful real estate and a small plastic bag with minerals. It's the last mile, you'll make it!
- Akasazh 2y agoAny moment now....
- docdeek 2y agoThe second example is surprising and doesn't seem to fit with the first story. > As a result, her family is spending thousands of dollars less per month than they did before, Harley said. Fortunately, despite these big changes to their budget, “I really don’t feel like we have gone without” so far, she said. This family is on $140K and cut their spend by thousands a month without feeling they are going without. A big difference to the first family with a bunch of kids making ends meet thanks to side gigs next to a single $65K income.
- specialp 2y agoOne thing missing in the inflation discussion is asset inflation. Yes government measured inflation went down while stocks and every other asset kept going up. This is a massive transfer of wealth and spending power to those who have assets. When COVID hit and stimulus started hitting the working class, it drove up all prices because they for a brief period of time had spending power and therefore labor negotiating power. Now things have returned more to status quo where the wealthy asset owners keep getting most of the gains from technology driven increases in efficiency while the people working in meat packing plants have been put back in their role.
- anovikov 2y agoIn fact, the most frustrating parts of living in Europe where this is not the case, is that too many things here are targeted at the poor because they make the majority of purchasing power due to forced equality of outcomes we have here in EU. Start with airlines. Nowhere in the world are the airlines so terrible as in the EU - not even in the very poor countries like India, or most African ones. Yes they are cheap, and affordable for everyone, but virtually all of the premium segment has been eaten alive and ceased to exist altogether, or became a joke (google "euro business class"). Seriously, forced equality of outcomes have been tried in the Soviet Union. Have the results been forgotten?
- hermitcrab 2y agoThere is a general process where people with money use that money to make themselves more powerful (by controlling the media, buying politicians etc) and richer (by investing that wealth and using the power they bought) in a self reinforcing cycle. The two world wars came along and reversed this process for a while, but it is back with a vengeance. I guess modern tech is only going to accelerate the process. I see it ending in one two ways: Elysium: A tiny group of super rich live in fabulous luxury, while the rest of humanity live in economic slavery and squalor. (Like the film, 'Elysium'). The French Revolution: The bulk of humanity finally have enough of the greed of the oligarch class and do something about it.
- istjohn 2y agoAI weapons will soon make successful revolution quite unlikely.