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by tancop 3mo ago
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- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- yoyohello13 3mo agoAre we not there yet?
- kbrisso 3mo agoI think we are pulling in the driveway.
- ch4s3 3mo agoUS real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years. Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years. Employment numbers are pretty good given the macro headwinds. The US forms ~5.9 million new businesses per year which vastly out paces the EU. The US isn't without problems, but we're doing OK. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It's incredible that not a single person replying negatively has included a single piece of data.
- Someone1234 3mo ago> US real median household income has been steadily rising[1] for the last 40+ years. Compare it to the Consumer Price Index: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SA0R
- ch4s3 3mo agoREAL income is adjusted for inflation. If real median income is increasing then it is outpacing inflation by definition.
- senordevnyc 3mo agoWhy is it that the cynics and doomers always have such a poor grasp of the data?
- ch4s3 3mo agoI think once you have a good command of data and broader trends its harder to be cynical or a doomer. You just see that things aren't perfect but are larger better than the past on most metrics.
- senordevnyc 3mo agoI completely agree, especially if you consider humanity as a whole. I have asked this question many times to the doomers, and honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good answer: if you had to be born as a random human somewhere on earth, and the only thing you get to choose is the year in which you’re born, what year would you choose? You can’t choose your race, intelligence level, physical abilities, parents, socioeconomic status, country, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Only the year. So doomers: if the world is completely fucked up and going down the tubes, when would you prefer to have been born? Huge bonus if you can actually give some data showing that the average human was better off during whatever time you choose.
- tsimionescu 3mo agoThe discussion here was about the USA, not the world.
- ch4s3 3mo agoThat's why I pointed out that US real income, employment, and inflation figures all beat the OECD average.
- senordevnyc 3mo agoOK, feel free to answer the same question for the USA.
- rustcleaner 3mo agoI think CPI is a poor measure, because it's a moving meter stick that understates inflation. When beef is overpriced, hamburger switches into the basket. When hamburger is a luxury, then chicken swaps into it instead. It understates inflation. M2 change is a much better measure in my opinion. Using M2 is literally comparing supply of item to supply of cash which could immediately buy it. When scaling SPX or GC1! by M2SL[0]/M2SL, you get a surprisingly flat time series over decades, which reads to me that the effects of the change in M2 are being filtered out of an otherwise exponential price curve.
- lowbloodsugar 3mo agoMore people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession. Inflation wiping out income growth. Family units replaced by multi-job slavery shows up as “improved GDP”. There’s the powerball lottery that one person wins every few weeks and then there’s the crippling medical debt lottery that many people are “winning” every day. Wake up.
- ch4s3 3mo ago> Inflation wiping out income growth Real income means inflation adjusted, so we actually see the median income outpacing inflation right now. > More people outside employment than COVID or Great Recession There's a lot going on here. One factor is that many people retired early during the pandemic and are going to skew this stat. It's also worth pointing out that the labor force participation rate is ~62% and peaked historically at 67%, so it's not that far off. > Are you ignorant or propaganda peddler This is needlessly inflammatory.
- lowbloodsugar 3mo ago“Inflation adjusted” is offset by the changes to what inflation measures. And again income has only gone up because people are working multiple jobs.
- ch4s3 3mo agoThe basket of goods is totally transparent and related to things people really buy. Would you want a 2026 inflation number to reference VCR prices? Only 5.3% of US workers have multiple jobs. The long term average is just above 5%. So it is false to claim more workers have multiple jobs according to BLS stats. This number was above 6% for most of the 1990s.
- lowbloodsugar 3mo agoYou are just outing yourself as someone who is a slave to meaningless numbers. Do you think side gigs are reported? You quote unemployment numbers without admitting that people who have given up or simple failed to land a job are not included in those numbers. The numbers are gamed. Feel free to keep showing us who you are.
- Lyngbakr 3mo agoBut I think there will be a lag. The US has (willingly) forfeited some of its soft power and we may not see the impact of that immediately.
- ch4s3 3mo agoNo argument there. The US has been hit hard by the global populist political wave in recent years.
- barbazoo 3mo agoMaybe break down those numbers by income and you'll see that rich people are doing fine, everyone else not so much.
- ch4s3 3mo agoIncomes at the lowest quintile rose 47% from 2021 to 2024. That growth slowed in 2025, but outpaced the growth of higher income quintiles in the first few years post pandemic. Real median household income in 2024 was $83,730 which is the highest it has ever been, and that is the middle quintile.
- arjie 3mo agoThis one has always made sense to me. If you think about circumstances which improve the bottom quintiles’ relative income so that they’re now making as much as the median (I.e. the curve flattens out through unprecedented prosperity for the poorest) then the middle and upper middle incomes will rightly conclude that they’re not relatively high income anymore. Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right place will show their relative position on this. There’s a reason a large amount of the complaints are things like “my DoorDash is so much more expensive” and “my insta cart bill is so much higher”. In the ideal state for the text writing middle and upper middle class, the mostly video consuming lower classes make very little money and provide services for cheap. One should expect that enriching the poor upsets those whose relative wealth/income is no longer as high as it used to be. I imagine we could test this by comparing p75, p90 to p10 and p50 For my part I am optimistic. So many things today are so much cheaper and better than they used to be. Looking forward to the future - with the one caveat that AI is the precipitous ridge we must walk.
- Balinares 3mo agoSo many of my people in the US can't even make ends meet anymore that I opened a dedicated line of budget to provide help where I can. It's never been that bad before and it's nowhere near as bad for my people in the EU (not that everything is all rosy there, mind you). You might argue that Americans are just less capable of supporting themselves but I reject that argument firmly. The situation really reads like systemic causes. And I think cherry picking numbers to convince ourselves otherwise does more harm than good.
- tokai 3mo ago>Life expectancy is rising again after dipping and plateauing for a few years Life expectancy dipping for any develop country, even if temporary, is an embarrassing catastrophe.
- ch4s3 3mo agoWell there was a global pandemic the prematurely killed a lot of elderly people, and the dip happened in a lot of countries.
- rustcleaner 3mo agoM2 outstrips it. My favorite way to gauge historical prices/data is to scale it with M2: (TradingView): M2SL[0]/M2SL*TICKER Replace M2SL[0] with the latest M2 value. 23.05 T should be 23.05*10^12. Compare SPX, GC1!, SI1!, CL1!, or any other TICKER you can think of! Another cool little model I like to look at which starkly shows the loss of power for us little guys: (TradingView): 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100) Basically in 1960 the average worker earned 3x the purchasing power from their wages compared to today. TL;DR: Ron Paul was right!
- realusername 3mo agoIt's been pretty clear to me since the first Trump election that it's the end of an era.
- hnfong 3mo agoThere's a popular Chinese internet saying: "If you/I are/am not embarrassed, then it's the other person who is embarrassed." (只要我不尴尬，尴尬的就是别人)
- tantalor 3mo agoIn English, that is roughly translated to "I've already depicted you as the Soyjak and me as the Chad" https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/depicted-as-a-soyjak https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/depicted-as-a-soyjak
- SecretDreams 3mo agoWe're maybe only the first half decade into it. Hopefully it doesn't last a century.
- scotty79 3mo agoI think we are already quarter of century in. It started with reaction to 9/11 and only got worse since then. Damage was pretty much self-inflicted.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo agoI think it started when the Soviet Union fell apart because we had no global peer or competition and became unserious.
- scotty79 3mo agoUSA lives only through its enemies. Attempt at supplanting Soviet Union with terrorists failed spectacularly. Recent stunt of portraying China as the enemy won't probably go well either. It might go even worse since China, unlike any previous US picked enemies, is not only believable but also truly capable.
- ausbah 3mo agoi feel like we’ve been doing that since 1999
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dang 3mo agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.