IMO a substantial (not 100%) root cause of all this is that many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible. This leads to all kinds of medical issues down the road, which then is handled by emergency medical services, or very severe health problems that are very difficult to treat.
Perhaps, and we should continue to work on that, but exploitative and exhausting labor has been an issue for ten millenia or so at least. We may well not see it fixed in our lives.
But the particular failings of the modern western diet are relatively new and might still be remedied or reversed without waiting for the whole labor and exploitation issue to be sorted.
While there exists a lot of sedentary work in the US and that has consequences, there's still a great deal of physical work done in the US as well, and a very high number of non-working people with plenty of time for personal exercise if they wanted to pursue it. Yet the profound wellness problems we're talking about apply to all of those groups.
Some of us grew up with childhood friends who cleaned the meat plants at night. A practice that continues to this day. You can always tell - they stink of bleach in the morning.
Before the industrial age sustained exhausting labor was still a temporary thing reserved for planting and harvest times, and even then you were still deciding your own hours, it was just obviously the most profitable time to put in the most work so people did it.
I'm with you that things suck now and don't need to be this way, having carefully not said otherwise.
But I also think you might be underestimating how many people's ancestors were slaves, serfs, miners, and laborers during hose prior several millenia of settled, urbanizing civilization. We don't all come from aristocratic or even subsistence farming stock.
It can be less bad than it is, we might want to strive to make it less bad than it is, but it's been pretty darn bad for a long while. For pressing modern problems we also need to commit to more immediate tactics.
I'm not saying everyone had it better. Chattle slavery is definitely worse. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think we needed to have slaves to make progress. I want to push back against this idea that it's inevitable to have to work as much as we do. A worker today is significantly more productive. We could probably make life a lot easier for everyone by finding a more equitable way to distribute resources and by breaking up and regulating all the rent-seeking monopolists who makes things more expensive than they need to be.
Yes, someone responded to me saying just that and it's also a position I've seen frequently on HN. I think plenty of people have that as a gut reaction to any proposed change in the status quo.
Your first sentence is a false factoid repeated online [0][1]. And anyway, there is always more work to be done, so I don't understand why people think working hours would ever decrease; as soon as we build one thing, another problem crops up. We would only stop working until all problems in the world would have been solved, which is never.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to die of now-curable diseases that were only able to be cured due to the hard work of many, many humans over generations. To think that that human progress is akin to a personal hedonic treadmill is misguided.
Most people I know spend a lot of time doing unnecessary things for their job. I don't have a magic solution to fix all the bureaucratic bullshit people are subject to but acknowledging it's a problem is a start.
Stock buybacks. They serve nothing but short term driving up of profits purely to increase the value of management's stock options. They have no place in the functions/purpose of a healthy stock market.
It's because the people who say things like the above have no real alternative solution in place and simply say things that sound good in theory (or are even wholly unrelated, as you explained) but fundamentally don't change anything about the world.
It's not really a personal attack, it's an observation. You haven't actually elaborated on the parent's question but for some reason replied to me instead, which proves my point.
Not a personal attack, sure. I responded to the personal attack first my dude and responded to his post literally within one minute of your reply here.
Stock buybacks are stock manipulation by management and a means of tax evasion (raises the stock value in order for the big holders to borrow against held stock so benefiting from gains without paying taxes, something average holders don't benefit from) and add ZERO to the economy or the market. Companies using the funds as intended by a functioning market, either re-investing in the company, strengthening the company by holding in reserve, or rewarding investors with taxable income that then circulates in the economy and provides the expected tax funds.
Also your response to my was was again a personal attack in the form of 'observation'.
My point is that that can all be true about stock buybacks (which I disagree with your interpretation of, but anyway), but that is completely orthogonal to what was asked, which is, why would stock buybacks allow more time and less work for workers? That is what I meant when I said that people respond to such questions with something unrelated because they have no real alternate solution.
See my reply above regarding SouthWest, it's poor scheduling software that had huge impacts on flight crew up to and including reaching catastrophe in December 2022 that cost SouthWest a $1 billion expense, and the billions of dollars in stock buybacks SouthWest did in the run up to the totally preventable with investment in the company billion dollar failure (that had already been seriously impacting workers previously). This real world over a billion dollar loss example took me literally 2 minutes to come up with because your weak 'poster is dumb and their position literally is empty echochamber' annoyed me enough to hunt you a random real world example for my 'just an empty echochamber mentally weak take'.
Food for thought: I have never had a productive conversation with someone who thinks buybacks are market manipulation and see it as cue to disengage. IMO it is like debating with a sovereign citizen. They invoke a ton of technical concepts and jargon, but all with their bespoke personal definitions. Up means down and 2+2=5. We simply dont share enough common reality to communicate.
Indeed, it is tiring to talk to these folks and simply not worth reiterating the same point over and over when they bring up wholly orthogonal topics to the point at hand. It seems like their other comment threads are similar in nature.
Those funds would either be re-invested in the company (providing a better work environment and a stronger financial position for the company) or distributed to the shareholders and circulated into the economy and generating tax revenue for society. Instead they are stuck in 'paper' stock value that does nothing but allow the rich to borrow against the 'gains' denying society even benefiting from the taxes those funds should generate if not re-invested in the company in an actual, non 'paper' valuation way.
"paper" value does not simply translate to material value, and when it does, it is simply inflationary.
Imagine every company cut buybacks and raised salary 50%. There would still be the same number of hamburgers and houses, and the same number of labor hours would be required to produce them. As a result, you would simply have an inflation on the order of 50%.
There would only be more tax and circulation in a nominal sense, not in real currency.
December 2022 SouthWest canceled all flights for multiple days costing a billion dollars because of poor scheduling software. Running poor quality/inefficient scheduling software most likely incurred other additional expenses/stresses for workers and flight crews during a larger period than December 2022 but there is not a way for me to quickly to put a cumulative value on that for a response here. That 1 billion dollar loss and incurred stress for workers can be attributed to the stock buybacks listed above.
It can't be attributed to stock buybacks though, you just assume it can be. Lots of companies that didn't buy back stocks also have poor internal software and may generally not reinvest that money internally, or invest it incorrectly instead of blowing it on some other thing than buybacks. There is no causal relationship at all, and not even a strong correlative one between buybacking companies and business failures.
Why did you move the goalposts from employee stress, what we were talking about, to business failure? That's a ridiculous level goal move.
I gave an example where the stress from lack of reinvestment in core company infrastructure (the scheduling system is KEY to a successful airline, and the airline knew it was an issue of stress/deficient because it was an important talking point in union/company talks because of the stress it was causing way in advance of it escalating to causing a billion dollar expense). That it didn't shut the company down completely (just for a few days, during one of the business travel seasons) is not relevant to causing employee stress.
Southwest spent billions in the immediate run up on stock buybacks.
Southwest did not upgrade a known deficient scheduling system vital to their core business.
This poor scheduling software had major impact on flight crews during the same period as stock options (to the point their union complained) proving my initial point.
Not only that, Southwest's neglect in order to feed stock buybacks resulted in a cost of a billion dollars to the company itself, let alone my original point of needless stress on employees sacrificed for stock buybacks instead of business re-investment.
Business failures, not business failure, as in failure to upgrade systems as you mentioned, not wholesale business bankruptcy. The point is that there is no causal relationship between stock buybacks and not reinvesting into systems, as many companies who don't buy back stocks also don't necessarily reinvest and may still cause employee stress. That is specifically my point, that people talk about unrelated things that don't relate to the main point. Correlation does not equal causation.
You win. There is zero way to PROVE my exact specific was caused by the over 3 billion dollars of stock buybacks SouthWest did during that period. I can't go back in time, prevent those buybacks, and see where SouthWest would have used that over 3 billion dollars. But I can know that with it going to useless stock buybacks when the company was unstable and have failing core systems the market provided a perverse incentive (stock buybacks) over sound business decisions (making sure core business systems were up to requirements and not needless placing stress on employees specifically flight crews). The market should have pressured the company to ensure it had a sound business. Instead it sucked up over 3 billions dollars. Is that the invisible hand at work?
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it is objectively true that people in the past were less productive than today, not necessarily because they were lazier, but because technology has gotten better. It has been the case since civilization started, as we were 99% farmers until we became productive enough to stratify our division of labor, something that every world history student learns.
>> IMO a substantial (not 100%) root cause of all this is that many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible.
I'm sure there are many truths and probably different realities for different cohorts of individuals. I will share a personal story which might seem almost shocking for GenZ+ as they enter the workforce:
- My dad had a normal degree from a normal university in Accounting
- My had had a normal 9-5 job. No family connection/etc, he was an immigrant
- My dad was able to afford a home for us -- in the city -- on his salary alone (not a dual income). The homeprice:annualsalary ratio was 2:1. If he God-forbid lost his salary both my mom and dad would have tried to look for a job to help finances, most normal jobs would cover the mortgage/taxes
Not to say there werent laborers in the 1970s, etc, but this was a very common scenario. It allowed you to work to meet needs and spend the rest of your time with family. You didnt have 5 espressos to try and crank more pull-requests at night after the kids fall asleep.
People always quote the 1950s to 80s as some golden age, and surely it was for some, not all who lived it, like your father, but it was due to the very specific circumstances of World War 2 and how only the US was not destroyed while much of Europe and Asia was. We were able to lend a lot of money to these countries and rise our standard of living significantly, but that is the exception that proves the rule. Recency bias especially is prevalent for this sort of thinking. Unless you want another world war, that time period is simply irreplicable.
You raise good points, and I certainly do not hope for another world war. I do hope a different thing though -- normal interest rates (normal being something different than what we've seen in the past 30yrs).
One thing you'll see in the mid-90s and beyond is artificially lowered rates, which cheapen money. Low rates boost asset prices, so they are great for asset owners (and there are very few asset owners in the US on a % basis.)
This doest really help normal people, because while borrowing becomes cheaper, prices go up commensurately. Debt:income ratios inflate. Costs inflate overall. Overall it hurts normal people because you end up with the same outcome but more leverage and hence more risk.
Worse, because rates are low, income-seekers (e.g., insurance companies, foundations) steer away from traditional means of income (bonds) towards buying up homes, infra, assets, as they "reach for yield". Again, this just worsens the problem for everyone.
With rates lowered and debt volumes ballooning, we've given a one-time boost to asset owners and in the process, spread stress and risk to all working class individuals.
> We were able to lend a lot of money to these countries
I always thought this was true, but it's not. The entire Marshall Plan gave out about $80B over a decade in today's money, which is peanuts by our modern financial aid standards.
The main value the US provided to Europe after WWII was security, a stable common currency (almost all European ones were pegged to the dollar), and private investment.
Yes, by lending money I should have clarified that I meant private investment along with the Marshall Plan. $80 billion does however go much farther when your cities have been razed to the ground than to for example incrementally improve a new rail line.
The repetitiveness of modern labor has moved full body physical labour to single point of failure on your body tasks with the likelier end result being you will end up crippled in some way (and having to just work with it) or have other overuse injuries which then leads to constant chronic pain.
It may not be physically as hard but I think the work is more precarious, and the cost of living is much higher for basics like housing, so the stress may be higher.
I imagine this is a substantial cause. And, sugar is also a physical addiction, and many children are given it in varying degrees of excessive amounts from childhood even if they're not particularly subjected to stress. There is a spectrum of kinds of sugars but I imagine they could be weighted by something like glycemic index for measuring the degree of impact.
It has more to do with the food industrial complex in the US. A lot of the "sugar" in US foods is corn syrup, which has been subsidized ~$48B in the last 25 years. Most low fat foods are just replaced with double the sugar to make them more palatable.
Although it as gotten slightly better, the food pyramid is somehow still the responsibility of the USDA; whose job it is to great food surplus. It should always been part of HHS because of the massive cost consequences, especially by the time people are on Medicare.
What matters is that the most conveniently accessible food isn't the damn dear worst thing you should be regularly eating large quantities of.
Our food environment is the opposite of that.
The stress only exacerbates the impulsive/comfort eating side of things, but it wouldn't be such a big deal if everyone were om nomming tasty organic carrots all day every day. Orange skin, sure, but not obesity and heart disease.
These are the same kind of vague, hand wavy distractions that would have been used to excuse or muddy the waters around tobacco 30 years ago. "Probably just stress" is not an excuse that explains the systemic health problems that come from excess sugar.
Has bigSugar been tweaking the formula of the additives used to make the product more addicting? Let’s not forget how heinous bigTobacco behaved.
Refining corn into high fructose corn syrup still isn’t the same to me, but their lobbying campaigning is the same. If it comes out that they have knowledge of adverse effects of their product and still pushed that hard, then they should be dealt with in the harshest of punishment.
Otherwise, comparison to bigTobacco isn’t quite right
Additives have nothing to do with it and are a complete distraction. Sugar has detrimental health effects and excessive sugar has more extreme health effects. The important thing now is that this is accepted and understood instead of people casting doubt like "maybe it's just stress".
Of course they have knowledge of the adverse effects of sugar and are lobbying to prevent any legislation trying to curtail putting it into literally everything
"toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible."
I've basically succumb to everything you list to survive working in a maddeningly dysfunctional school. And it's precisely "function as long as possible ". I have to disassociate somehow from the incompetence and corruption around me. Ativan and diet Coke help.
I assume billions globally are doing the same thing to cope. The best metaphor I've come up with is that it feels like I play for a sub 60 win baseball team.
> many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort
That seems spun. I don't think any of that is substantiated in any kind of rigorous way. Median americans today are wealthier than any population in human history, are working more than their compatriots elsewhere in the world but less than their parents, have more leisure time, travel more, etc...
There's lots of things to complaint about, and there always will be. But really this kind of "Everything is Awful" rhetoric is just vibes. Yes, life sucks. It sucked worse for your ancestors.
We may be wealthier materially overall, but we're poorer mentally and socially. TANSTAAFL. And as others have pointed out, a higher aggregate level of wealth hides immense disparities.
Do you actually think that there was less mental illness in the past? Because I find that extremely unlikely. My parents' (gen X) generation is LOUSY with depressed, anxious people who don't believe in medication, therapy, or really even the existence of many forms of mental illness.
They had more serious problems to contend with - political instability, unemployment, etc., etc. and so they bottled their feelings up and did the needful.
Human beings are evolved to survive on the edge, in situations where our performance is the difference between their families' survival or starvation. Even 50 years ago, food was more expensive and work was harder on our bodies and minds - people getting depressed about writing code, frequently at less than 40hr weeks, have nothing on office workers of the 70s.
Calories and entertainment keep getting cheaper, which means anxiety and depression keep getting more maladaptive.
When there's an epidemic of attempted/successful suicides amongst teenagers, much of it driven by social media, we are absolutely sicker mentally than in times past.
It's always so strange to see this kind of "rigorous" posturing as a reply to people pointing out the obvious declination in their own living standards in the current moment. The vague notion of "national wealth" obscures the staggering wealth inequality that also is unique with respect to the current moment in human history, as does many of the theoretical parameters or models invoked by many economists or journalists in arguments like these.
I'm not going to comment on that sweeping over-generalization of the totality of human history because it is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
Piketty is all about wealth inequality. I'm asking for numbers substantiating the contention about "obvious declination in [American] living standards" upthread, which isn't something Piketty speaks to.
I'm all for discussing other issues in their own space and with clarity, but if people come to a discussion about income and start citing things that are not about income, I'll be honest I don't tend to want to engage. It's vibes, like I said.
I think income inequality is at least part of the story in overall standard of living along with other markers of material wealth, purchasing power, productivity, wage-stagnation, etc.
What numbers in particular do you think could be more useful?
> I think income inequality is at least part of the story in overall standard of living along
And I think that's bunk, because what other people are making or can afford says absolutely nothing about my financial situation. If your next door neighbor wins the lottery, does that make you poorer? If they lose their job, are you richer? No.
Income inequality is a different issue. I'm happy to discuss it, but not if I have to start by defending a (wildly incorrect!) assertion that standards of living are going down and not up.
Do you think a decades long trend of upward concentration of wealth is remotely equatable to my next door neighbor winning the lottery? Where do you think that money even comes from?
>because what other people are making or can afford says absolutely nothing about my financial situation
No offence but I don't care about your financial situation. I care about the financial situation of most people, and if they increasingly can't afford necessities like housing or food I also really couldn't care less that the numbers going into their bank account have gone up since last year.
My point is material goods and economic markers can increase on paper whilst people can increasingly be restricted from the housing market, career prospects, and other factors not easily reflected in said markers. If you are interested in defending the fact that those markers are indeed doing fine then you're in a debate with yourself. The relevance of those markers is not obvious, or trivial to justify in relation to the actual world people are living in
> Do you think a decades long trend of upward concentration of wealth is remotely equatable to my next door neighbor winning the lottery?
I think it's not about income or living standards, which is what you started talking about. So I'm not interested in discussing it with you in this thread because I don't trust you to treat the ideas with precision and good faith.
I never started talking about income, that was you, and if you can't see the relation between wealth and living standards than maybe it's for the best you don't discuss it at all.
> The vague notion of "national wealth" obscures the staggering wealth inequality that also is unique with respect to the current moment in human history, as does many of the theoretical parameters or models invoked by many economists or journalists in arguments like these.
I would like you to post numbers. "National wealth" is not a vague notion, it's the product of lots of government workers doing a lot of statistics. Some of those statistics are target specifically at the bottom quintile or decile of income or wealth (they are vastly different).
Income for the bottom 10% is rising. Wealth for the bottom 10% is rising. Gen Z is unprecedentedly rich at this point in their lives, relative to past generations. The reason why the American middle class has shrunk is mostly because the upper class has grown. The third link below has a graph that highlights why this is a GOOD THING.
I don't doubt that quality-of-life has declined for a lot of people - but those people are a minority and the data does not support anything else. Most of their pain is almost certainly housing prices, which have been the Great Sin of the Democratic party and notably have very little to do with federal policy.
If you want to talk about vague notions, let's talk about "wealth inequality." Most of these takes are bad because that's not how the stock market works. Elon Musk cannot go out tomorrow and buy $3XXB of stuff. He probably cannot even come CLOSE to realizing the full paper value of his net worth in cash. None of the world's rich can. Yet there is a daily, breathless headline about wealth inequality that waves those dollar figures around like they're real.
Stop disregarding on actual, economic data in favor of hyperbolic headlines about wealth inequality.
>"National wealth" is not a vague notion, it's the product of lots of government workers doing a lot of statistics
Wow what a convincing justification for the need to equate the measurement of rising capital within national jurisdictions over an analysis that acknowledges the distinction between revenue among fortune 500 shareholders and the average person who is not exposed to such returns.
>Income for the bottom 10% is rising. Wealth for the bottom 10% is rising.
If income for the bottom majority increases at a rate slower than the income of the top minority then "income" is being concentrated upward. Money determines the distribution of resources, it is not a resource itself. If the concentration of the ability to determine resources is increasingly concentrated upwards then people are getting poorer, regardless if overall production has increased.
Your idea that everyone is actually getting richer and upwardly mobile is not reflected in reality.
>I don't doubt that quality-of-life has declined for a lot of people - but those people are a minority and the data does not support anything else. Most of their pain is almost certainly housing prices, which have been the Great Sin of the Democratic party and notably have very little to do with federal policy.
How do skyrocketing housing prices not factor into your judgment that people's quality of life isn't declining?? I don't care who you want to blame it on (!?), not being able to afford a house makes people's lives worse and more people can't afford houses...
>Most of these takes are bad because that's not how the stock market works. Elon Musk cannot go out tomorrow and buy $3XXB of stuff. He probably cannot even come CLOSE to realizing the full paper value of his net worth in cash. None of the world's rich can. Yet there is a daily, breathless headline about wealth inequality that waves those dollar figures around like they're real.
Who's saying that Elon Musk is walking around with a trillion bank notes in his pockets like Scrooge McDuck? You're arguing with shadows, and if you think that wealth is not being upwardly concentrated in the top 1% - which is justified by any metric regardless of the stock market or unrealized assets - then I don't see what I'm going to get out of a discussion with someone so utterly removed from reality.
>Stop disregarding on actual, economic data in favor of hyperbolic headlines about wealth inequality.
It's always a pain talking to someone who is delusional enough to think that the hodge-podge of synthetic economic markers or data visualizations cobbled together by "visualcapitalist.com" is even close to being remotely objective or scientific.
> Wow what a convincing justification for the need to equate the measurement of rising capital within national jurisdictions over an analysis that acknowledges the distinction between revenue among fortune 500 shareholders and the average person who is not exposed to such returns.
Can you try to make an actual argument against specific government numbers? This is hand-waving but you're making an absolutely gigantic claim.
> If income for the bottom majority increases at a rate slower than the income of the top minority then "income" is being concentrated upward.
The set of people in the bottom 10% is not constant and most of them will LEAVE that bottom 10% over their lives. I suppose people becoming wealthy is concentration, but this is a good thing. It means the system is delivering.
> Your idea that everyone is actually getting richer and upwardly mobile is not reflected in reality.
You have three links there. The first, from Piketty, has nothing to do with upward mobility and in fact gels very nicely with the data I linked. The second and third are again breathlessly considering net worth in illiquid assets as if it was cash.
Not a single one of these talks about social mobility or how individual's income changes. I'm not telling you wealth inequality isn't going up, just that its impact is greatly overstated and individual income is overwhelmingly the biggest driver of quality-of-life.
> How do skyrocketing housing prices not factor into your judgment that people's quality of life isn't declining?? I don't care who you want to blame it on (!?), not being able to afford a house makes people's lives worse and more people can't afford houses...
Because generally a hair under 70% of housing units in the US are occupied by their owner (more Fed data), so only a hair over 30% of people are subject to housing cost inflation. Not all of those people live in desirable cities where rents are insanely high.
Even among those who do, rents in those VHCOL cities have not inflated (Fed data again) and less than half of renters are considered burdened.
No matter how you slice it, only around 15% of households could possibly care about rent inflation. The inconvenient truth is that the majority of Americans are structurally protected from it.
> Who's saying that Elon Musk is walking around with a trillion bank notes in his pockets like Scrooge McDuck? You're arguing with shadows, and if you think that wealth is not being upwardly concentrated in the top 1% - which is justified by any metric regardless of the stock market or unrealized assets - then I don't see what I'm going to get out of a discussion with someone so utterly removed from reality.
He's not worth a trillion dollars, and IDGAF about him carrying physical currency. The point I'm making is that you are being ridiculous by complaining about government statistics from actual economists while breathlessly accepting every "wealth inequality" headline as gospel.
Yes, Elon Musk is absurdly wealthy. That's what happens when you have huge stakes in the leading aerospace and car company in the US. But once we talk about large amounts of stock, wealth is ONLY VAGUELY the same as cash in the bank.
> It's always a pain talking to someone who is delusional enough to think that the hodge-podge of synthetic economic markers or data visualizations cobbled together by "visualcapitalist.com" is even close to being remotely objective or scientific.
Attack the actual data. That "visualcapitalist.com" animation also uses Fed data.
If you are going to claim that the government numbers are trash, you need to do a lot better than calling me names.
How about you actually respond to my points (government data is not "vague numbers", the bottom 10% is a statistical artifact and individuals move in and out of it frequently) instead of ranting about how the government is untrustworthy?
I will reply to the rest with more links when I get time but I'd like to point out your fixation on the bottom 10%. The bottom majority that i specifically mentioned is not that 10%. Wealth inequality is not just a matter of homeless and destitute vs middle class or war-zones vs first world but the vast majority of normal working people vs an absurdly small concentrated minority.
>I suppose people becoming wealthy is concentration, but this is a good thing.
Would you apply the same logic for oligarchs in a failed state? Or robber barons in the oil rush? I suppose you wouldn't be the first. When the average person of this generation finds themselves in an increasingly more financially precarious situation than the one previous that analogy feels less hyperbolic. Especially when we actually try to consider the class of people with the most leverage and influence over political and economic decisions and their role in this process of wealth accumulation, instead of pretending economics is a natural phenomenon like the weather.
>It means the system is delivering
The truest thing you've said so far. Shame about who its delivering for.
So far your only criterion of a healthy economic system is if the most destitute in the world are worse off than before and insofar as it can be met you dismiss the more significant trend of wealth concentration as an insignificant happenstance rather than a fatal flaw.
> people pointing out the obvious declination in living standards and increase in societal problems
But it’s not like you’re not doing the same thing in the opposite direction.
The only thing really factual here on your list is wealth inequality, although as recently in history as the gilded age it was the same or worse. You barely have to go back more than 100 years to witness children working in factories with no safety standards in the USA.
And really we don’t have to involve the totality of human history to talk about major problems in the 1960s/1970s or even 1990s that we don’t have anymore.
- Lack of regulations that led to the EPA. Your parents probably grew up in a more polluted environment today breathing leaded gasoline.
- Extremely recent prevalence of easily immunized diseases. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980 which wasn’t all that long ago. Polio also comes to mind.
- Developing countries like China where living standards have very obviously shot up by magnitudes in living memory
- Crime in the US at generally declining levels since the 1990s, which has resumed its decline since the pandemic spike.
- Arguably a decent amount less societal friction than the mid-century in America and more recently like with the LA riots. You don’t have to go far back in time to have civil rights problems like gay people being excluded from marriage, women being disallowed from opening a bank account on their own, Black people being prohibited from getting mortgages.
- Just the last decade of cancer treatment technology improvements has been incredible for late life longevity, and America’s best universal healthcare program (Medicare) has better outcomes than other wealthy countries’ universal healthcare systems.
- The continuation of life expectancy gains has only recently stalled and IMO this will likely tick up again as obesity becomes a treatable disease with simple pharmaceuticals.
- Safety standards and behavioral changes related to common causes of premature death. Factors like a more regulated tobacco industry and lower rates of smoking and motor vehicle safety improvements come to mind. A society that allowed cigarette companies to advertise with doctors as spokespeople is a society where you’re more likely to die early. A society where the youngest generation has lower usage of alcohol and drugs like Gen Z/Gen Alpha does is one that is going to have better life outcomes compared to one that has higher use rates, and that behavior is a result of improvements to the environment around them.
I could go on and on…yes things like housing and university have become very expensive, yes there are problems, but holistically you’d probably right rather be alive now than in 1970.
Cherry picking problems that have been solved in the last few decades are not relevant to a discussion focused on declining standards of living in relation to the economy and it's structure and how the average person experiences it - it's a specific problem related to wages, inflation, productivity, inequality, and how revenue has been chosen to be distributed etc.
For someone interested in "rigor" I'm not sure how useful it is to weigh an arbitrary collection of goods like the EPA, eradicating smallpox and polio, etc. to a time before them in order to encourage me to answer that "I would rather be alive now". Angels on a pinhead etc. Seems a lot more useful to actually acknowledge the problems people complain about and think carefully about the specific dynamics that generate them rather than try convince them that everything's fine actually and they should just think about how good the polio vaccine is compared to Victorian work-houses.
>But it’s not like you’re not doing the same thing in the opposite direction.
Let me shorten my point and maybe it’ll help you understand what I mean:
Increasing income inequality does not automatically mean that living standards are declining.
It can mean that the living standards of the wealthy is growing faster than the living standards of the less wealthy.
As an example, jump over to your LLM of choice and ask it to compare the rate of air conditioning in homes of people at the poverty line, comparing now to 1995. The numbers have jumped substantially since the cost including running cost (energy efficiency) of that technology has improved greatly.
You were confused at that statement of mine that you quoted. What I was trying to say is that you complained about posturing but then engaged in very similar posturing. You’ve made the baseline assumption that living standards are decreasing obviously without any substantiation.
And maybe you’re right, but you haven’t substantiated it, you’ve just engaged in the same style of posturing that you criticized.
To keep my reply brief, wealth can refer to many things including material goods but let's restrict ourselves to money, since both of the articles you've cited does the same. Money is not a resource. You cannot eat or build with it. Money is a tool used to determine the distribution of resources. If total wealth has increased but inequality has also increased, it means the majority of people are increasingly losing the ability to decide the distribution of resources. This is bad even if you ignore the fact that the majority of people are also responsible for the production of said resources.
Side-note but the articles you cited are funded by various non-profits including Bill Gates' foundation, departments of the british government and so on. It's a discussion for another day and I'm obviously not accusing it of outright fraud or anything but in my experience such "non-profits" and think tanks are tend to be most guilty of unhelpful or outright obscurest analysis of wealth inequality, unequal development and so on (as you one would probably expect of any institution funded by capital benefiting from such dynamics)
Not numerically. Median real income today is more than twice what it was in the 60's.
FWIW: there's a... sociological problem with arguments framed around that. When you measure US citizen wealth in the 1960's it looks unimpressive[1]. When you picture a "baby boomer", you see a working class family with no debt behind a white picket fence in a beautiful new subdivision living a great life on just the one income. And those families existed! So what gives?
You're looking at a family headed by a working class white man. Not everyone could get those "working class" jobs that supported a family in the suburbs. There was plenty of poverty in the 60's, it was just hidden along with the single moms and minority communities we didn't record.
Things today are a lot more even, which means that the "white picket fence" demographic perceives things going in the opposite direction from what's actually happening.
[1] Relative to today, anyway. The US in the 60's was obviously an extremely wealthy country!
Why do people do this? That's not just wrong, or even laughably wrong, it's completely made up nonsense. FRED doesn't have PPP median income, but here's GDP per capita PPP. A little more than double what it was in 1970: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RGDPCHUSA625NUPN
(You can recover PPP median income if you like by pulling in the nominal GDP and median and multiplying by the fraction, but I'm too lazy to do it for you.)
You are wrong. You are VERY wrong. Your intuition about the state of the world has been colored by a bunch of vibes you've been fed that don't have any basis in fact. At all.
It seems to me that you're believing cherry picked statistics that show what you want to believe, and you think that I'm doing the same, which is entirely fair.
It's clear we're not gonna agree, but thanks for the discussion regardless. It's always interesting to see the perspective of the people I disagree with. Cheers
It's cherry picking because you choose to reference GDP, which imo is not remotely relevant to the conversation, instead of referencing relevant metrics like Purchasing Power
I straight up told you how to recover it. And the graph you just posted is CPI! (Which, to be clear, even though you won't listen, is nothing remotely to do with PPP analysis) You're confusing inflation with value! I give up.
For the average white Baby Boomer with Anglo or Central/Northern European protestent ancestry and two resident parents, one of whom being unionized or a white collar professional, no question at all.
And while there were enough of those to write and televise a mythos about that America in counterpoint to the communist threat overseas, it actually represents a narrow slow that the "average" Baby Boomer did not get to enjoy and doesn't live in much benefit of today.
I confess I'm not clear what you are looking for the root cause of?
I would be interested in seeing the costs of, for example, emergency medical services laid out by demographics. My understanding was that emergency services are very localized to where they are used. With perverse incentives hitting their uses.
That said, in specific context of this article, this comment reads as a deflection away from the high levels of sugar being consumed in the US. Curious to hear why you'd think we are not high on those numbers.
Don't forget they are working multiple zero hour jobs. I.E. the job is at most part time so you need at least two, but the job also doesn't only not guaranty what days/shift hours you will work next week, it doesn't guarantee you will work any hours at all. Hence it is a zero hour job.
Personally I think having more than 10% zero hour jobs should be illegal, as well as having multiple 'part time' positions to take the place of having full time positions.
What does that have to do with eating more sugar which seems to have a direct causal effect on becoming fatter and getting diabetes? Lots of countries over millennia have worked hard and have been stressed, often much more than us today, yet they were by and large not obese (no pun intended), the only thing that changed in the last century was the rise of processed foods with high amounts of sugar.
There's always decent paying jobs for more beauracratized elements that require relatively little effort and pay at least enough to live off of! People enjoy working hard, and with a college degree there is often no need to work hard if you don't want to.
They have the same problems of overwork and stress as the US though- plus adding in western diet getting more and more popular.
Looking at numbers from 2021 Japan had about half the rate of diabetes compared to the US: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/diabetes-rates-by-countr...
We’ve already seen EU courts saying Subway bread couldn’t be called bread and listed it as cake because of the sugar. At some point one has to hope moments of clarity will break out on this side of the pond too
Actually, that's not correct. The controversy you might be thinking of was about Subway's bread in Ireland, where in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that Subway's bread couldn't be legally classified as "bread" for tax purposes because it contained about 5 times more sugar than allowed under Irish law - around 10% of the flour's weight, not 10% of the total bread composition.
The Irish law stated that for bread to be considered a "staple food" (and thus qualify for tax exemption), the sugar content couldn't exceed 2% of the flour's weight. This is different from saying the bread is 10% sugar overall.
The actual sugar content in Subway bread varies, but it's typically around 5-6 grams of sugar per half a bread. That’s higher than traditional bread but lower than many other commercial ones.
Yeah, well in typical ‘murican style, anything from that side of the pond is EU. The differences are too small for me to care to learn the details. All I know is that what ‘muricans call food is not what Europeans call food, and ‘muricans are wrong
Ireland is within the EU and uses the Euro as its currency (unlike when the UK was in the EU and stuck to the Pound Sterling), so you were never wrong.
I'm more than a little curious what buns you are eating. :D That or what cake?
It has surprised me how hard it has been to find a protein powder that isn't sweetened. Usually by stevia, nowadays.
By far the thing with the most sugar added that I was late to give up, is a standard yogurt. Tried making our own vanilla yogurt, once. I don't think we succeeded at making it as sweet as what we went in expecting. Despite an absurd amount of sugar added in.
FYI you can buy raw organic pea protein powder at your local sprouts grocery market. I used to use it religiously because whey would give me stomach problems and all the other pea proteins had stevia in them
I found this unflavored protein powder rated very highly on consumer labs. Haven't bought it yet since I'm still going through my current optimum nutrition whey, but it's next on my list
> By far the thing with the most sugar added that I was late to give up, is a standard yogurt.
The yogurt Nazi in me feels compelled to point out that standard yogurt has no added sugars, and is offended that someone conflates that with vanilla yogurt. :-)
Reminds me of twenty years ago where stores routinely sold yogurt makers. Except they didn't make yogurt. They made frozen yogurt. You needed yogurt as an ingredient. Face palm.
Plain yogurt - without gelarin, pectin and sugars - is really awesome food. People should try it! Really easy to make at home as well with an instant pot.
And yes. Plain yogurt is sour. It hasn't gone bad.
Kefir is a lot easier to make than yoghurt as it's not very temperature sensitive - cold temps just make it slow down a bit and room temp is fine for it to ferment. It's also cheaper as once you have some Kefir grains you just keep feeding them with milk and they'll continue growing so you end up throwing away unwanted grains.
I’m currently visiting the Americas and it’s insane how hard it is to find yogurt without sugar. Just yesterday I bought some by mistake that looked like plain yogurt- upon closer inspection it turned out it had sugar added to it (masquerading as honey but we all know that that’s just sugar in almost all cases)
Yeah, but some people don't like Greek yogurt. It is thicker, heavier, and has a stronger taste. If you've grown up with regular yogurt in other countries, something like Fage may be too strong.
For no sugar added, You can find Fage all over the place at least on the west coast. Many greek yogurts also have no sugar added. I also personally really like redwood hill farms goatgurt.
You are correct, other yogurts are all deserts in the us. I was sorely dissapointed in chobani. When I'm eating yogurt I'm usually doing fage or goatgurt and frozen berry mix.
> The quart size plain will generally not have added sugar, and is widely available (national brands package it like that).
May be the case right now, but when I lived in the Midwest 15+ years ago, the regular grocery stores (Meijer, etc) would carry only ones that had gelatin or pectin. I'd have to go to the fancier (e.g. organic/natural) stores to find brands like Nancy's or Mountain High - and they'd be very pricey.
The West coast always had brands like Nancy's in regular stores (at normal prices).
Perhaps now one can easily find regular plain yogurt without additives in those places.
It is also a rat race for food producers. If other food starts adding sugar, you want to follow otherwise it doesn't taste as well.
Currently, a drink like Cola-Cola contains 10.6g of sugar per 100 ml. But I am pretty sure the beverage industry can drop that to 5g of sugar and it will still taste good.
For bread (or hamburger buns), pretty sure it can be limited to the bare minimum to taste well.
It would be good if governments starts limiting sugar amounts (and other sweeteners). This stops the rat race, and people might not even notice.
I stopped eating sugar and carbs completely and it changed my life. No brain fog, more energy, no anxiety, no depression. I cant communicate to people enough how much it improved my life. Nothing else worked, no therapy, no talking through things. It was a biological problem with my diet. I used to think I had ADHD, turns out I just needed to eat healthy. Prime steak and chicken, veggies, some dairy, lots of nuts. That's about it
You're going to destroy your kidneys. Our bodies are evolved to eat mostly carbs, not protein. It may make your head "clear," but just because you feel good doesn't mean its a genuine improvement to your physical health.
Ha, man, this link is basically a dialysis industry propaganda page.
Our bodies evolved to survive -- whether with or without glucose. And you liver makes whatever those your body needs, from far, if necessary. Also keep in mind, industrialized wheat products would've been hard to come by back in the stone age -- if you ate at all, depending on whether your hunt was successful.
Well the human body cannot survive without outside consumption of vitamin C because our ancestors consumed so many berries and leafy greens that we probably would poison ourselves otherwise.
Your analysis is off, the human body is not infinitely adaptable. There are limits; running 5 miles a day is not going to completely offset heavy alcohol and tobacco consumption, but those with BMIs in the range of obesity who run 30 miles a week are far healthier than those who have a normal one but practice no physical exercise.
We are perhaps experiencing, currently, a broad shift in the evolutionary history of humanity; I'm not an AI nut but one could argue that one reason why health is such a concern is because there are a number of adaptations at odds with one another at the social and biological levels. One could imagine that the completion of this arc would result in a new stasis of living patterns in the same way that hunter-gatherers persisted for almost 2 million years, and our current moment is just a brief one of upheaval.
potatoes are a carb. I don't get what your point is. we haven't been hunters only for a really long time, and even then the gatherers mostly got berries and sugars and fruits
Once started, your body will usually stay in ketosis even with a modest and non-trivial budget of carbs, on the order of maybe 10-20g, excluding fiber.
That allows for a wide variety of veggie choices, as well as a some wiggle room for modest servings of nuts, legumes, beans, etc
But basically there's no room at all for stuff like breads or rice or potatoes or sweetened drinks except as the finest accents. Never as the centerpiece of a meal.
It's a very different way of living and eating, but can feel extremely invigorating and seems to be broadly healthy for most people.
you may still have adhd. eating well, having good habits and receiving accountability from your environment are all factors that manage the negative effects of the disorder.
also would be interesting to know your time frame for how long you've done this - to rule out the honey-moon phase
I don't eat a lot of refined sugars but not eating any carbs feels extremely boring to me, and basically anathema to my Asian heritage where we eat rice daily. But yes, if it worked for you then that's great.
could eat rice and pasta, it's mostly the misunderstood artificial manufactured carbs like pizza and tortilla chips and Hostess donuts that could be underlying.
it's also extremely convenient cheap and measurable to eat rice at home
What is misunderstood about them, don't they also use wheat and other grains? Maybe you mean that they are calorically dense and/or greasy thus causing lethargy?
I've done similar in the last year and can anecdotally say I've seen a huge reduction in brain fog, I feel full for longer and enjoy a far more consistent energy release throughout the day. I'll never go back.
The number of companies peddling “0 sugar” drinks but the list of ingredients shows a shit ton of sugar substitutes is wild to me.
Have met people that think their “diet” drink is healthy because the stupid label says “zero sugar!!” Thus this gives them a reason to consume it many times in the day.
Yet a glance at the ingredients list shows synthetic sugar or “sugar substitute”.
Explain....
On long rides, I drink 500ml of water to 200g of sugar. Actual sugar.
My max-best is greater than 400km in 24hrs.
No sugar, no go.
Monday (tomorrow for me) I have an up-to-125k group ride planned. I added 25g of sugar, to get my body fueled, and ready, to my potatoe-based meal.
I try not to bonk (sugar crash), but gummi bears and Coke (ahem! [tm]) are your friends.
I was really excited to read this, but it's very shallow and barely presents any data at all.
It's main and mostly meaningless conclusion is that there are more skus in the Walmart catalog for sugar-dominated products than for any protein- or fat-dominated ones, and that online reviewers generally tend to leave better reviews for those.
Nothing about actual sales volume, promotional actions by Walmart, or monetary or nuyitional share of food consumed (or even purchased), etc -- any of which might say something more impactful.
It’s worth mentioning that artificial sweeteners and ultra-processed foods that are advertised as low-carb/low-sugar are probably worse for you than sugar water.
Minimally processed foods that don’t have all the fiber ripped out of them (like sugar and white flour do) seem to be the best bet these days.
