7 ms·

30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go?

58 points by rcardo11 11mo ago

PaulHoule 11mo ago
I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do so many people think that the economy sucks when the official statistics don't look too bad?"
- quantummagic 11mo ago
  Ignoring how easy it is for statistics to be misleading, let alone outright lies, the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution. It doesn't matter how well an economy is doing, if the majority of wealth is accruing to a small minority.
  - TylerE 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - meatmanek 11mo ago
      no, mute is the right word here, in the sense of "silent".
    - jfengel 11mo ago
      "Moot" wouldn't be correct here. It is applied to a question, one whose assumptions do not apply. There are definitely moot questions involved here, but the usage above isn't about that. It is about statistics, which are not themselves questions. So they can be mute but not moot.
  - ajross 11mo ago
    > the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution They actually aren't. Median income is measured as a median for a reason. Poverty line statistics are taken at the low end. Local CPI and price data is taken and reported. And all of those numbers are, indeed, getting better and not worse. I repeat this everywhere this subject comes up, but the real reason things look like they're getting worse is unsavory. More than two generations back, people were on balance poorer but they were black, so they didn't matter. Or they were immigrant, or single mothers, or institutionalized, or otherwise invisible to the white-picket-fence set who were all buying their family homes on one income. Well, all those other demographics have done super well in the last half century, reaching parity with white men at the low end of the spectrum. And those white men are the pissed off groypers detailed in the article. Not "Americans" in the abstract. I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
    - bigbadfeline 11mo ago
      > I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part. So you favor a race to the bottom, but you want a single race to go to the bottom faster than the others in order to become more like minorities in the sixties. That kind of morbid attitudes is why Pareto developed his notion of optimality and efficiency.
      - ajross 11mo ago
        To be clear: I don't "favor" anything. I was making a point about the demographic that is upset, and a connection as to why. Social policy is hard, but things don't get better by perpetuating inequality. Surely you agree with that part? Groypers (to continue to wave the label as a broad brush) aren't actually poorer than their compatriots. They're not even poorer than their ancestors, really. They're mad because everyone else is doing so much better than their ancestors. Again, when you see someone cite a statistic that "You used to be able to afford a home with one working class income", you're being fed a line. That wasn't ever possible (until the last two or three decades) unless that income was being paid to a white man.
    - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      There's some truth here, but it seems to be missin occum's razor. Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast. You can say two things are happening at once. The line for minorities is moving up and the housing market is moving up faster (much faster). White people, moving up not as fast as either of the two. I still blame housing the most here, though.
      - ajross 11mo ago
        > Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast. That's true, but not nearly so much so as people tend to believe. Median home price expressed as a fraction of household income is up about 38% since 1985: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NXLF https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NXLF That's significant, and worth talking about. But it's not justification for the ridiculous hyperbole people like to throw around on this. Note that median real income (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") is up by almost the same fraction over the same time period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Which is to say, impact on disposable income from housing costs is negligible, especially since so much other stuff is cheaper now. So basically no: "I still blame housing the most here" is just wrong per the numbers.
  - UncleMeat 11mo ago
    But we see this effect in other cases too. People report that crime is up but when asked about crime in their area they report very different things. And crime is down, even for kinds of crime that are universally reported.
    - quantummagic 11mo ago
      How sure are you about those statistics? When police stop responding to calls, when nobody expects stolen property to ever be recovered, when people are afraid they'll be deported if they call the police... crime stops being reported. Statistics are not worthless, but they can be worse than worthless if you are careless, or in the hands of the unscrupulous.
      - pants2 11mo ago
        Also two things can be true at the same time: 1. The neighborhood is so bad you'll be murdered for certain if you walk alone at night. 2. Murder rates are at record lows. This just means hardly anyone's walking alone at night - but "crime rates are down".
        quantummagic 11mo ago
        Good point. It's just frustrating how many people spout the "statistics", and are happy to avoid such nuance in order to take solace in a comfortable narrative.
      - UncleMeat 11mo ago
        Car thefts are reported to insurance companies. Murders tend to be reported. We also have the National Crime Survey, which simply asks people if they have been the victim of various crimes in the last year. No interaction with police whatsoever. This also tracks a huge drop in crime despite people insisting that "crime is up", especially when asked about the country broadly rather than their local region.
        quantummagic 11mo ago
- TylerE 11mo ago
  Trump has literally shut down many of the agencies responbible for making the reports. We live in a banana republic. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bureau-of-labor-statistics-director-after-release-of-weak-jobs-report https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu... https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make-u-s-census-surveys-voluntary-alarms-statisticians https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make... https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal-data-are-disappearing-as-statistical-agencies-face-budget https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal... https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-expert-panels-on-economic-data-/7998249.html https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-ex... https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-purge-is-a-loss-for-policymaking-and-research/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-pu...
  - tarsinge 11mo ago
    This phenomenon has been happening already under Biden. But it has been very difficult to discuss because like you everybody wants a narrative to blame the other camp. The statistics are good but people complain under Biden? They are brainwashed, and you are a conspirationist for daring questioning that the economy is not the best ever. Same thing happening under Trump? This time yes things are bad in reality and the statistics can’t be trusted. What about a third explanation that both parties are trying to hide the issue and lie to their base?
reactordev 11mo ago
Two words: “subscription fees” It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.
- cmckn 11mo ago
  Not the lattes! The horror!
- SimianSci 11mo ago
  I call it Rent-seeking, of which, subscription fees are just a part. The biggest issue here is that the "meta" of capitalism has turned to toll booths and rent collection. This is why people say that American capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism, the people making the money are not the people producing things of value, its the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies that can continuously tax the peasantry.
  - runako 11mo ago
    > the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers). Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
- mlsu 11mo ago
  No. It's not the subscriptions or lattes. Those are markets that have real competition. It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation. Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.
jmclnx 11mo ago
To the billionairs via income inequality. When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail. I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question. We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- delichon 11mo ago
  I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.
  - SimianSci 11mo ago
    We have more companies that can be classified as monopolies in existence than ever before. In principal our market is not a zero sum game, but in practice we see it quickly collapsing to become one. How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
    - skybrian 11mo ago
      At least in the US, it wasn't better in the past. Railroads were often private monopolies on certain routes. The Interstate highway system is much more open in comparison (lots of competition in trucking), and so is the Internet.
  - doctorwho42 11mo ago
    Wait, your operating system was coded by one single individual? Holy shit that must have taken him 10 life times, if not more! Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??! Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?! Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess... But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.
chasd00 11mo ago
This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.
- andsoitis 11mo ago
  … and then compare to two cities in different European countries and think THEY are representative. There are many cities in Europe I can name that feel terribly dilapidated. I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
- Retric 11mo ago
  US didn’t have many large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America. https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html LA and New Orleans should have made the list, after that it’s more questionable.
  - accrual 11mo ago
    What is "very recently"? Atlanta for example is a central rail hub and was founded 188 years ago as Terminus.
    - Retric 11mo ago
      I was going back to 1940 as recent history, back in say 1840 the largest southern city was New Orleans followed by Charleston, SC at 29k people and Louisville, KY at 21k. To wonder where the wealth went you need to look at places that where at some point wealthy. Wealth however takes time to accumulate because waves of immigrants or kids from population booms don’t tend to have a lot of wealth.
  - christophilus 11mo ago
samdoesnothing 11mo ago
It's inflation. The hidden tax that's perpetually underreported by governments and acts as a massive transfer of wealth to the property class.
- BobbyTables2 11mo ago
  I wonder if it’s even a transfer of wealth or just all an illusion. It’s easier to downplay inflation so people think they’re doing better. In 12 years, my salary is up about 50%, most of the change since Covid. Sure, sounds amazing… However, home prices doubled. Consequently auto, home, and flood insurance has at least doubled. Prices on even raw food has gotten crazy, restaurants are also 50-100% increase in prices. Health insurance is about 4x what it used to be for me. Tax bracket is higher. So aside from the huge luck of low interest loan at a smaller principal, it doesn’t feel like anything amazing has happened. On the flip side, I feel the plight of those looking at a 30yr loan at 5-6% on $500k. I can’t stomach it today and certainly not 12 years ago either. By normal inflation rates, feels like I’ve seen maybe a 15% “raise” for over a decade extra of specialized experience —- before considering increased costs. Of course that was from changing jobs twice… And quite frankly, property ownership is somewhat a poor investment, just better than renting. The S&P 500 has nearly tripled over the same time period. Of course, taking a 15 or 30 year loan for stock market investment would be insane (aside from impossible).
treis 11mo ago
It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative. I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.
- joe_the_user 11mo ago
  I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile. Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that. But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
  - treis 11mo ago
    Unrelentingly negative
  - accrual 11mo ago
    > illustration of how self-insulating people are I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.
    - 11mo ago
dboreham 11mo ago
To vampire squids.
SimianSci 11mo ago
"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula." In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.
- kjkjadksj 11mo ago
  I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actually use at this income level. Or maybe their whole life is delivered to their door by this point.
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
    Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.
    - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
      I'm not sure when it started per say. I just think its really odd how you have this pocket of very high income people and no one is bothering trying to cater to that demographic, but instead to the demographic that cleans their house or mows their yard. E.g. the flats of beverly hills fill with taco trucks during the work day specifically for the housecleaners and landscapers to get their lunch. Maybe this high income class of people just puts on very low demand for goods and services relative to lower income classes of people.
nine_zeros 11mo ago
[dead]
starik36 11mo ago
The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one. I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was. Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.
- onlyrealcuzzo 11mo ago
  We were on the right side of the debt cycle, that's all there is. If the rate of TOTAL debt was accumulating at the same rate now as it was then, there would be jobs aplenty. Debts are still rising, but at slower rates.
- SimianSci 11mo ago
  I think Thiel's right, though I despise the man immensly for unrelated reasons. I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family. Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me. I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  Yeah. Anyone who still doubts how bad things are: "interview" for a month. Just a month. It will be very apparent but many people who are content in their careers would never otherwise notice. It's no wonder Gen Z is so cynical. People are talking about how good things are and they can't even get a human to respond to them for their first step in.
Mistletoe 11mo ago
I think it's pretty obvious where American prosperity went. https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/ https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/ The bottom 90% of Americans only have 32% of the wealth.
ef2k 11mo ago
At least Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had a rivalry to see who had better public works.
- SimianSci 11mo ago
  This goes to where our wealthiest people no longer invest in our society. We used to use a progressive tax system as the means of helping this process along, but I dont think anyone can argue that this has since been subverted.
blindriver 11mo ago
You can summarize it like this: People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x. People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked. The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well. The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths. And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.
- SimianSci 11mo ago
  The last time this happened in America it gave rise to Progressivism. Mandani is the first in a long line of corrective actions that American society needs to make in order to correct itself and not deteriorate into neo-feudalism.
- naijaboiler 11mo ago
  That’s exactly and inherently what capitalism is. Rate of return on capital is higher than rate of return on labor. The people with capital continue to pull ahead. And in America, we now decided to compound this by not taxing and undertaking capital. Which then allows those with capital to transfer some of their capital to political power that then accrues even more advantage to capital owners
  - Jensson 11mo ago
    When capital is vastly more valued than labor then its an asset bubble that will pop. Labor is the actual economy, capital is a make believe economy, when corrections happens its that capital loses all their bubble money not that labor catches up to that imaginary world.
cyberax 11mo ago
Well, your resident anti-urbanist is here. Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City. So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis". Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself. But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago
  >Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. In L.A.. Don't worry, you can't get ahead here anymore either. It's all coming unraveled. >This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself. Yeah, the infamous White Flight. It's always been an issue, but if we're being frank: it's affecting whites now too so now we're starting to seriously talk about it. Still, bad for everyone overall.
igravious 11mo ago
(pedantic nit-pick, sorry) Killkenny is only a city by charter, it has a population as of the last census of 27,184 – it is in no sense of the word an actual city. http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_Borough_Council/index.htm http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_...
oompydoompy74 11mo ago
Peter Thiel is not a person that anyone should listen to. That being said if you want to see real poverty come to the South East and drive an hour outside of any major metropolitan area. These are folks that would likely be unhoused if they lived in a city, but are scraping by and making it work in a 40 year old single wide that is falling apart. Capitalism in this country works as it has been designed to since the Reagan administration. Socialized losses, privatized gains, and a massive transfer of wealth straight to the top. Innovation means nothing if we kill our planet and subjugate the masses.

58 points by rcardo11 11mo ago

I like the idea of visible vs invisible here. It approaches what I think is one of the biggest issues of the day which is "Why do so many people think that the economy sucks when the official statistics don't look too bad?"

quantummagic 11mo ago
Ignoring how easy it is for statistics to be misleading, let alone outright lies, the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution. It doesn't matter how well an economy is doing, if the majority of wealth is accruing to a small minority.
- TylerE 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - meatmanek 11mo ago
    no, mute is the right word here, in the sense of "silent".
  - jfengel 11mo ago
    "Moot" wouldn't be correct here. It is applied to a question, one whose assumptions do not apply. There are definitely moot questions involved here, but the usage above isn't about that. It is about statistics, which are not themselves questions. So they can be mute but not moot.
- ajross 11mo ago
  > the official statistics are rather mute on the topic of economic distribution They actually aren't. Median income is measured as a median for a reason. Poverty line statistics are taken at the low end. Local CPI and price data is taken and reported. And all of those numbers are, indeed, getting better and not worse. I repeat this everywhere this subject comes up, but the real reason things look like they're getting worse is unsavory. More than two generations back, people were on balance poorer but they were black, so they didn't matter. Or they were immigrant, or single mothers, or institutionalized, or otherwise invisible to the white-picket-fence set who were all buying their family homes on one income. Well, all those other demographics have done super well in the last half century, reaching parity with white men at the low end of the spectrum. And those white men are the pissed off groypers detailed in the article. Not "Americans" in the abstract. I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part.
  - bigbadfeline 11mo ago
    > I mean, it's true they can't afford homes easily! Neither could minorities in the sixties, but we don't talk about that part. So you favor a race to the bottom, but you want a single race to go to the bottom faster than the others in order to become more like minorities in the sixties. That kind of morbid attitudes is why Pareto developed his notion of optimality and efficiency.
    - ajross 11mo ago
      To be clear: I don't "favor" anything. I was making a point about the demographic that is upset, and a connection as to why. Social policy is hard, but things don't get better by perpetuating inequality. Surely you agree with that part? Groypers (to continue to wave the label as a broad brush) aren't actually poorer than their compatriots. They're not even poorer than their ancestors, really. They're mad because everyone else is doing so much better than their ancestors. Again, when you see someone cite a statistic that "You used to be able to afford a home with one working class income", you're being fed a line. That wasn't ever possible (until the last two or three decades) unless that income was being paid to a white man.
  - johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    There's some truth here, but it seems to be missin occum's razor. Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast. You can say two things are happening at once. The line for minorities is moving up and the housing market is moving up faster (much faster). White people, moving up not as fast as either of the two. I still blame housing the most here, though.
    - ajross 11mo ago
      > Homes got more expensive, income did not increase as fast. That's true, but not nearly so much so as people tend to believe. Median home price expressed as a fraction of household income is up about 38% since 1985: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NXLF https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1NXLF That's significant, and worth talking about. But it's not justification for the ridiculous hyperbole people like to throw around on this. Note that median real income (where "real" means "inflation adjusted") is up by almost the same fraction over the same time period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N Which is to say, impact on disposable income from housing costs is negligible, especially since so much other stuff is cheaper now. So basically no: "I still blame housing the most here" is just wrong per the numbers.
- UncleMeat 11mo ago
  But we see this effect in other cases too. People report that crime is up but when asked about crime in their area they report very different things. And crime is down, even for kinds of crime that are universally reported.
  - quantummagic 11mo ago
    How sure are you about those statistics? When police stop responding to calls, when nobody expects stolen property to ever be recovered, when people are afraid they'll be deported if they call the police... crime stops being reported. Statistics are not worthless, but they can be worse than worthless if you are careless, or in the hands of the unscrupulous.
    - pants2 11mo ago
      Also two things can be true at the same time: 1. The neighborhood is so bad you'll be murdered for certain if you walk alone at night. 2. Murder rates are at record lows. This just means hardly anyone's walking alone at night - but "crime rates are down".
      - quantummagic 11mo ago
        Good point. It's just frustrating how many people spout the "statistics", and are happy to avoid such nuance in order to take solace in a comfortable narrative.
    - UncleMeat 11mo ago
      Car thefts are reported to insurance companies. Murders tend to be reported. We also have the National Crime Survey, which simply asks people if they have been the victim of various crimes in the last year. No interaction with police whatsoever. This also tracks a huge drop in crime despite people insisting that "crime is up", especially when asked about the country broadly rather than their local region.
      - quantummagic 11mo ago
TylerE 11mo ago
Trump has literally shut down many of the agencies responbible for making the reports. We live in a banana republic. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bureau-of-labor-statistics-director-after-release-of-weak-jobs-report https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu... https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make-u-s-census-surveys-voluntary-alarms-statisticians https://www.science.org/content/article/republican-push-make... https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal-data-are-disappearing-as-statistical-agencies-face-budget https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/federal... https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-expert-panels-on-economic-data-/7998249.html https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-administration-disbands-2-ex... https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-purge-is-a-loss-for-policymaking-and-research/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-government-data-pu...
- tarsinge 11mo ago
  This phenomenon has been happening already under Biden. But it has been very difficult to discuss because like you everybody wants a narrative to blame the other camp. The statistics are good but people complain under Biden? They are brainwashed, and you are a conspirationist for daring questioning that the economy is not the best ever. Same thing happening under Trump? This time yes things are bad in reality and the statistics can’t be trusted. What about a third explanation that both parties are trying to hide the issue and lie to their base?

reactordev 11mo ago

Two words: “subscription fees” It’s the silent suck on the wallets that get you. Everyone budgets for food, shelter, but very little attention is paid to the dailies, the subs, the fees, the lattes.

cmckn 11mo ago
Not the lattes! The horror!
SimianSci 11mo ago
I call it Rent-seeking, of which, subscription fees are just a part. The biggest issue here is that the "meta" of capitalism has turned to toll booths and rent collection. This is why people say that American capitalism is turning into neo-feudalism, the people making the money are not the people producing things of value, its the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies that can continuously tax the peasantry.
- runako 11mo ago
  > the landlords, asset holders, and tech companies Largest household expense after housing is usually (sometimes indirect) health insurance premiums. For a family of 4, this is running on the order of $30k annually now. That's creeping up on half the median household income (which often requires two workers). Hiding this very real expense in tax deductions for employers obscures the fact of just how large it is.
mlsu 11mo ago
No. It's not the subscriptions or lattes. Those are markets that have real competition. It's the sectors of the economy that have become consolidated. Food, insurance, banking, healthcare. There is very little competition in those markets and prices are artificially high because huge conglomerates manage to siphon off a larger and larger stake, while preventing small players from offering an alternative either through market power or regulation. Unlike subscriptions, it does not show up on your credit or debit card statement because the price of everything just goes up by a little percentage here and there.

jmclnx 11mo ago

To the billionairs via income inequality. When I was young, you could live off the wage you made in retail. I had uncles who worked in retail and where able to buy a nice house and raise a family. Now, you need snap to live if working retail. Buying a home, out of the question. We need to go back to the tax rate we had in tge 1950s and force companies to pay a living wage as they did back then

deleted 11mo ago
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delichon 11mo ago
I'm sending IP packets to you from a computer I bought from one billionaire, built by another billionaire, with an operating system made by another billionaire, over satellites built by yet another billionaire, through a web forum written by another billionaire. These people made billions by capturing a fraction of the value they created. The market is not a zero sum game.
- SimianSci 11mo ago
  We have more companies that can be classified as monopolies in existence than ever before. In principal our market is not a zero sum game, but in practice we see it quickly collapsing to become one. How many of the billionaires you mention are themselves the proginy of previously wealthy parents?
  - skybrian 11mo ago
    At least in the US, it wasn't better in the past. Railroads were often private monopolies on certain routes. The Interstate highway system is much more open in comparison (lots of competition in trucking), and so is the Internet.
- doctorwho42 11mo ago
  Wait, your operating system was coded by one single individual? Holy shit that must have taken him 10 life times, if not more! Wow, you know a person who can mine, smelt, and forge steel into a computer case... While still having time to mine, process, purify, reprocess, and design the whole die process not just for a CPU but GPU's and all matter of electronic components!?!!??! Holy shit, you know someone who can design, assemble, and launch not one comm sat...but dozen?!?! And he builds the rockets all by himself as well?!?!? And he built the ground stations and infrastructure required to power and connect to them?!!?! Oh you know a guy who can write a forum.... Yeah that's kind of neat I guess... But let's be real here. These single individuals did not produce Thousands upon thousands of life times worth of value by their lonesomes. It required standing upon the shoulders of countless individuals, not even taking into account the organizational structures of governments, their utilities, and people long dead who built the world they used to make their billions.

chasd00 11mo ago

This US is a big place, I don’t think it’s accurate to start an article with “traveling accross America” when you only drove around the DC area, one part of Maryland, NYC, and small part of South FL.

andsoitis 11mo ago
… and then compare to two cities in different European countries and think THEY are representative. There are many cities in Europe I can name that feel terribly dilapidated. I think the article has the nugget of some good ideas and would love to hear them explored a little more rigorously and with more critical thinking.
Retric 11mo ago
US didn’t have many large prosperous cities in the west or most of the south until very recently. Railroads and AC really changed where people lived in America. https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg https://1940census.com/Img/1940_census_map_usa.jpg vs zoom in a little here: https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html https://maps.geo.census.gov/ddmv/map.html LA and New Orleans should have made the list, after that it’s more questionable.
- accrual 11mo ago
  What is "very recently"? Atlanta for example is a central rail hub and was founded 188 years ago as Terminus.
  - Retric 11mo ago
    I was going back to 1940 as recent history, back in say 1840 the largest southern city was New Orleans followed by Charleston, SC at 29k people and Louisville, KY at 21k. To wonder where the wealth went you need to look at places that where at some point wealthy. Wealth however takes time to accumulate because waves of immigrants or kids from population booms don’t tend to have a lot of wealth.
- christophilus 11mo ago

samdoesnothing 11mo ago

It's inflation. The hidden tax that's perpetually underreported by governments and acts as a massive transfer of wealth to the property class.

BobbyTables2 11mo ago
I wonder if it’s even a transfer of wealth or just all an illusion. It’s easier to downplay inflation so people think they’re doing better. In 12 years, my salary is up about 50%, most of the change since Covid. Sure, sounds amazing… However, home prices doubled. Consequently auto, home, and flood insurance has at least doubled. Prices on even raw food has gotten crazy, restaurants are also 50-100% increase in prices. Health insurance is about 4x what it used to be for me. Tax bracket is higher. So aside from the huge luck of low interest loan at a smaller principal, it doesn’t feel like anything amazing has happened. On the flip side, I feel the plight of those looking at a 30yr loan at 5-6% on $500k. I can’t stomach it today and certainly not 12 years ago either. By normal inflation rates, feels like I’ve seen maybe a 15% “raise” for over a decade extra of specialized experience —- before considering increased costs. Of course that was from changing jobs twice… And quite frankly, property ownership is somewhat a poor investment, just better than renting. The S&P 500 has nearly tripled over the same time period. Of course, taking a 15 or 30 year loan for stock market investment would be insane (aside from impossible).

treis 11mo ago

It's hard to put thoughts into the right words but the world she wants exists. They're not writing for substack or flying around to conferences. They're out there living their lives without being so unrelentingly negative. I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile.

joe_the_user 11mo ago
I dunno I just see so much cool shit in the world today. I see Waymo cars driving themselves around. LLMs are still wildly revolutionary. My TV is the tits. There's so much good happening but there's this massive undercurrent of negativity that's hard to reconcile. Personally I'm doing something that brings me more happiness than most of my activities for the last twenty years - I'm providing direct aid for the unhoused and the impoverished. And I'm know there are people who are doing things that are their passion unrelated to that. But I have to say, your list for is remarkable for being about things, not people. You amazed by the cool stuff available for some people for a lot of money and some things that are pretty cheap. But X percent of the population can't pay their rent with their income, cool stuff for sale is hardly going to help them. And indeed that statement itself is a strong illustration of how self-insulating people are from the conditions people live with.
- treis 11mo ago
  Unrelentingly negative
- accrual 11mo ago
  > illustration of how self-insulating people are I feel like it's such a cultural thing here in the US. There is a pervasive culture of individualism and operating wholly within ones own means. Need help? Don't ask your neighbor for help, ask Our LLM (tm) for only $9.99 a month! I'm being hyperbolic of course.
  - 11mo ago

dboreham 11mo ago

To vampire squids.

SimianSci 11mo ago

"America’s problem isn’t that we lack wealth - we have enormous wealth - it’s that we’ve made our wealth invisible while letting everything visible decay in a way. We’ve inverted the formula." In a way, I see this as our unwillingness to invest back into society. It very much is the fault of our wealthiest who have alienated themselves from anything resembling the everyday people and created themselves walled off enclaves where they no longer need to face the degredation. Wealth isnt visible anymore because its being hoarded, walled off, and turned into bits that can be easily moved from one place to another, allowing them to invest it only in the things they care about. I promise you, any time spent around the wealthy will show you their worlds are not decaying, its just that you dont get to live in it yourself.

kjkjadksj 11mo ago
I see this a lot in socal especially in the san fernando valley. Neighborhood like sherwood forest with 2-10 million homes or more. Nearby offerings comprised of a run down strip mall with a smoke shop, liqour store, coin laundry, nail bar. It is sort of bewildering. Like why isn’t there an upscale restaurant? Seems the people in these neighborhoods are content to drive 20+ mins away for the sort of stuff they actually use at this income level. Or maybe their whole life is delivered to their door by this point.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  Is that a new thing, though? Or could it go back decades to a time when Americans didn’t feel their country was decaying? Already in the 1960s Los Angeles was depicted as immense sprawl where people drove long distances for everything.
  - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
    I'm not sure when it started per say. I just think its really odd how you have this pocket of very high income people and no one is bothering trying to cater to that demographic, but instead to the demographic that cleans their house or mows their yard. E.g. the flats of beverly hills fill with taco trucks during the work day specifically for the housecleaners and landscapers to get their lunch. Maybe this high income class of people just puts on very low demand for goods and services relative to lower income classes of people.

nine_zeros 11mo ago

[dead]

starik36 11mo ago

The Peter Thiel's part about the current situation not working for young people is right on the money. I am of the age where my kids (and those of my friends) are graduating from college. Every single one of them is having trouble finding work within their profession. Every one. I've done reasonably well as a developer, having been an architect at several large enterprises. I consider myself a pretty good developer. My kid followed in my footsteps and also became a developer. He is objectively ridiculously good at it. And far faster than I ever was. But it took solid 9 months before he found a job. A one month contract. Which he then parlayed into a full time job, once they saw how good he was. Compare this with when I graduated. I had a full time job before I received a diploma. It never even occurred to me to worry about finding work.

onlyrealcuzzo 11mo ago
We were on the right side of the debt cycle, that's all there is. If the rate of TOTAL debt was accumulating at the same rate now as it was then, there would be jobs aplenty. Debts are still rising, but at slower rates.
SimianSci 11mo ago
I think Thiel's right, though I despise the man immensly for unrelated reasons. I grew up wildly excited about the capitalist world of promise and meritocracy in which I was going to grow to be a man. I never had grand ambitions of becoming wealthy, but wanted to work hard so that I coulod have a nice life and build a family. Now that im an adult, I cant think of a single reason to be proud of the current system. Ive worked incredibly hard for a life of 'getting by'. Im incredibly privileged where my friends and family are not, and cannot imagine the struggle and hardship of those with less prospects than me. I cannot in good conscience witness the world in which I am now an adult and say that this capitalism is a good thing. The people around me are suffering and I firmly believe that it is every man's duty to fight for their family and community. Nothing about fighting for community here involves supporting capitalism as it stands today.
johnnyanmac 11mo ago
Yeah. Anyone who still doubts how bad things are: "interview" for a month. Just a month. It will be very apparent but many people who are content in their careers would never otherwise notice. It's no wonder Gen Z is so cynical. People are talking about how good things are and they can't even get a human to respond to them for their first step in.

Mistletoe 11mo ago

I think it's pretty obvious where American prosperity went. https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/ https://joshworth.com/dev/wealthgap/ The bottom 90% of Americans only have 32% of the wealth.

ef2k 11mo ago

At least Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller had a rivalry to see who had better public works.

SimianSci 11mo ago
This goes to where our wealthiest people no longer invest in our society. We used to use a progressive tax system as the means of helping this process along, but I dont think anyone can argue that this has since been subverted.

blindriver 11mo ago

You can summarize it like this: People WITH ASSETS (real estate, stocks, businesses, etc) have done incredibly well since Obama. Real estate has skyrocketed and mortgage rates dropped to 2%. The stock market has gone up 10x, but some stocks like nVidia has gone up 100x. People WITHOUT ASSETS have been fucked. The prices have all inflated, rents have skyrocketed and food has skyrocketed but they have nothing except their paychecks to help pay for living. They need 2 jobs just to stay afloat and there is no way they will ever afford a house. They are fucked. The people with assets have an inordinate amount of money such that they can do extremely sociopathic things that people shouldn't be able to do. Hedge funds are buying hundreds of thousands of the single family homes and turning the next generation into permanent renters. Mark Zuckerberg is so rich he bought an entire neighborhood in Palo Alto (guarded with a bunch of security guards) so that his family could have a fake semblance of normalcy, but then he buys an entire island in Hawaii as well. The rich are inordinately rich and doing sociopathic things, meanwhile the lower and middle income people with no assets can't participate in the upside and have no power to fight against these sociopaths. And you wonder why Mamdani was voted in? It's clear as day to me.

SimianSci 11mo ago
The last time this happened in America it gave rise to Progressivism. Mandani is the first in a long line of corrective actions that American society needs to make in order to correct itself and not deteriorate into neo-feudalism.
naijaboiler 11mo ago
That’s exactly and inherently what capitalism is. Rate of return on capital is higher than rate of return on labor. The people with capital continue to pull ahead. And in America, we now decided to compound this by not taxing and undertaking capital. Which then allows those with capital to transfer some of their capital to political power that then accrues even more advantage to capital owners
- Jensson 11mo ago
  When capital is vastly more valued than labor then its an asset bubble that will pop. Labor is the actual economy, capital is a make believe economy, when corrections happens its that capital loses all their bubble money not that labor catches up to that imaginary world.

cyberax 11mo ago

Well, your resident anti-urbanist is here. Where did the prosperity go? Into the pockets of property owners in large cities. Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. If you want to achieve something, you have to leave your nice spacious house in Ohio and go and live in a tiny closet in New York City. So we have a paradoxical picture. The number of housing units per capita, or per family is near the record high levels. Yet we're somehow in the middle of a "housing crisis". Moreover, this migration into large cities creates a whole slew of low-paying dead-end jobs. This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself. But it keeps getting worse. In the US not just the people, but the _land_ also votes. And all these dying smaller cities keep getting radicalized, pulling the entire country rightward. They are an easy target for populists, who always have an easy answer like "it's all the immigrants' fault".

johnnyanmac 11mo ago
>Runaway urbanism made large cities practically the _only_ place where people can get ahead. In L.A.. Don't worry, you can't get ahead here anymore either. It's all coming unraveled. >This is also how generational Black poverty in the inner cities keeps perpetuating itself. Yeah, the infamous White Flight. It's always been an issue, but if we're being frank: it's affecting whites now too so now we're starting to seriously talk about it. Still, bad for everyone overall.

igravious 11mo ago

(pedantic nit-pick, sorry) Killkenny is only a city by charter, it has a population as of the last census of 27,184 – it is in no sense of the word an actual city. http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_Borough_Council/index.htm http://kilkennycity.ie/Your_Council/The_History_of_Kilkenny_...

oompydoompy74 11mo ago

Peter Thiel is not a person that anyone should listen to. That being said if you want to see real poverty come to the South East and drive an hour outside of any major metropolitan area. These are folks that would likely be unhoused if they lived in a city, but are scraping by and making it work in a 40 year old single wide that is falling apart. Capitalism in this country works as it has been designed to since the Reagan administration. Socialized losses, privatized gains, and a massive transfer of wealth straight to the top. Innovation means nothing if we kill our planet and subjugate the masses.