Is anyone really surprised? All of American society was based on the mythos that if you worked hard, you can succeed. We can debate to what degree this was ever true, but it's been obvious for decades that it's not true and that it's getting worse.
With housing becoming an investment increasingly dominated by cynical corporations with no empathy, only greed, even hard workers have to spend every cent they have with no source of significant savings (other than the death of a relative, not available to most) and not even the illusion that they will ever afford a home or be able to raise a family in a middle class lifecycle.
Massive corporations have been built off American workers and American infrastructure - the regulations and taxes that provide us roads, utilities, clean water, safe food, safety, and more. Since at least the 1980s these corporations have abandoned the belief that they need to give back to or invest in these communities and have gone to great measure to slash worker pay, fight regulations, and tear down the educational systems and social safety nets that enabled America's growth in the twentieth century.
Even safety is far from guaranteed - minorities have known forever that the police are not there to protect them, but it's increasingly apparent to everyone that they're an organized crime protection racket, refusing to discipline or remove abusive cops, refusing to do their jobs and throwing hissy fits at the slightest suggestion that they be subject to any accountability. In cities across the country, the mere suggestion that officers not be allowed to physically abuse people leads to a refusal to go on patrol and no consequences.
Meanwhile, at the very top billionaires accumulate more and more wealth and face no consequences for their actions. Whether it's manipulating financial markets (and being fined far less than you profited) or blatantly stealing and mishandling classified documents and not even being charged, the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident.
Hard work isn't rewarded and is often punished with higher expectations (whether that's an increased quota or a 'manager' title) with no increase in pay. Long gone are the days of joining a company as a janitor with the dream of working your way up; upper and even middle management is an incestuous club who would rather hire someone externally than train someone internal.
Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
It largely hasn't been true for anyone coming of age in the Reagan era and beyond. I hail from a blue collar family. My extended family is all blue collar. They fully believe in the adage of work hard and live well. Most of my cousins aren't living as well as their parents did and yet they're working even harder.
Here's the kicker - they adamantly believe the Republican talking point that providing massive tax cuts to the 1% will somehow improve the quality of life for the remaining 99%, i.e. them. They've bought into it hook, line, and sinker. I used to argue with them but now I don't bother. I reckon if they haven't been able to work out cause and effect during the past four decades then they likely never will. The sad thing is not a single one of them will be able to retire, they're all going to have to work until the day they die. They pray they don't get sick because then they have no income and they would have even more bills to pay.
This is the reality of a huge swath (majority?) of Americans and Americans refuse to look this problem in the eye and acknowledge its existence. Much less do anything about it. It seems as though if you're not in this boat then you're taking everything not nailed down before this ship goes down.
I just figure things are going to get worse before they get better. You don't even want to know how bad I think things will get before we have a national Come to Jesus moment and turn this ship around. It's the stuff of my nightmares.
idk, to provide a counterpoint i was born in '76 and all my older extended family are either truck drivers, oil field hands, nurses, or work on ranches out in West Texas. I'm the only one that went into tech. All of my cousins are doing at least as well as their parents, one is even an ER doctor. They all have families and homes of their own and seem pretty happy with their lives.
You blame them for taking the Republican message hook, line and sinker - but the alternative party does nothing but demonize them for their gender and skin color and tells them they have some magical privilege and that they're to blame for everything bad in the world.
Hard to win them over while demonizing them non-stop.
> Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
Historically, because the alternative is worse -- literally starving. For most of modern capitalism, most men had such jobs, because they had no choice.
I haven't listened to/read the piece, does he go into how these people survive? Are they doing black/grey-market semi-legal or illegal stuff (which I'd actually consider "working", even if they don't get counted in the visible labor force), or getting government benefits, or living off savings, or being taken care of by family, or what?
He does. It's an interesting read and contained lots of surprises for me.
Here's the section that I think answers your question:
> Who’s paying for this? Well, again, if we look at government numbers, it looks like it’s friends and family, meaning girlfriends, other family members, and Uncle Sam. Disability insurance programs pay some benefits for more than half of these unworking men, it seems. Disability benefits do not provide a princely income, let’s be clear about that, but they do allow for an alternative to life in the working world, which is exactly the opposite of the original, and I think quite noble, intention of disability programs, which is to provide for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, couldn’t work.
If they qualify for government disability payments, doesn't that by definition make them unable to be counted as 100% available for employment? The author implies they are unemployed by choice but disability payments suggest that at least some of them have medical reasons to not be considered fully employable.
In some areas, disability has become kind of a hidden early retirement program. If you ask around in economically depressed areas you can find doctors who will sign disability paperwork even for people who are still at least partially capable of working. And many of them would go back to work if there were better opportunities available.
(I'm not justifying or excusing disability fraud, just explaining what's been happening.)
A couple of NPR shows have covered this. Disability is a federal program and states (especially poor states) are motivated to get their unemployed people off of state benefits (like unemployment) and onto disability. For one, it saves the state money and it also removes those people from the state’s unemployment number.
> There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.
The basic premise of the article is an actual problem, though; a sizeable chunk of the population is simply unavailable as labour. This isn't just a US problem either; the situation is similar in Europe as well, including the Nordic countries despite our ever-progressive welfare systems.
> a sizeable chunk of the population is simply unavailable as labour.
That does sound like a problem. If this really is a dire problem, then let's start by forcibly disappropriating multi-generational landlords and people with trust funds of their inherited wealth, thereby forcing them to work. If that doesn't free up enough laborers to keep the machine humming, then we can start thinking about carrots and sticks for the ppors.
It is not. Plenty of people go to jobs for extra income or for satisfaction. Plenty of people who retire get bored and pick something up to pass the time.
The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it. No pay, no discretion to make decisions, and your entire management chain feels like they're in the same boat.
Working for a small company where you're treated with respect and given a chance to grow or flexibility or whatever is one thing.
Working for a soulless corporate chain that consistently underschedules so that you're overworked and then writes you up if you want to go see your sick/dying relative is soul draining.
Working for a corporation that refuses to give you a consistent schedule but expects you to come in on your day off to cover someone else is soul draining.
Working for a corporation who will schedule you for 36 hours even though they're short workers because otherwise they might have to actually give you some garbage-tier healthcare is soul draining.
>The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it.
Modern jobs are so much easier than the factory/mine/construction jobs of years past. Even the ones that still require physical labor, have huge restrictions and regulations that prevent the sort of working conditions in years past.
For all of these people complaining about "jobs these days" I would love to hear what period of history they think had it easier.
It's unclear though. Is the data set consistent in its reporting of data since 1960? In that case, the question becomes - why are so many more people on disability now (if that is the bulk of the difference) than there were in 1960?
In fact you might expect there to be more people on disability in 1960, seeing as WWII ended only 15 years before that (PTSD, etc). I suppose that those people simply couldn't get onto disability back then though.
You might expect more. The US has had several more recent wars. Medical technology keeps a lot of people alive that would have died in the WWII era, leading to higher percentages of disabled civilians and soldiers.
From the article: they're native born and male, may have some college or (10%) college graduates, don't work, aren't in school or training, aren't married, don't really engage in society, watch "screens" 6" hours a day and live off familes, friends and Uncle Sam. 1/2 take some form of pain killer daily.
Overall this is a very sad state. The author describes it as a train class for a death of despair, which feels accurate. This is far more than an economic issue.
This is a misunderstanding of the history and development of capitalism.
Yes throughout all of human history you had to do some sort of labor to not die, I'm not disputing that. However until very, very recently you weren't forced to sell your labor to survive.
The current state of needing to sell your labor to survive is unprecedented even in relatively modern time. During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did. During the great depression not nearly as much of our individual survival had been commodified: nearly every family could hunt, farm, create clothing they needed, maintain their home, and cook their food (something surprisingly many people cannot do any more).
The commodification of nearly all aspects of our material lives means today we are much more dependent on Capitalists than ever before in history.
Pretty sure doing labor to not die and selling your labor to survive are pretty similar.
I think for the average person the tradeoff has been very positive - look at life expectancy and health outcomes from any point in history versus today. Just look at the incidence of famine in Europe historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Europe
For sure there are philosophical, etc. questions that come up - but they are decidedly higher on Maslow's hierarchy than basic survival. If the old state of things were so appealing - people have the option to go back and start their own farm. Almost nobody does.
The fact that people glorify (or wear rose colored glasses about) how things were in the past is just exemplary of the bubble we are all living in.
I'm not making any claims about glorifying subsistence farming, that's a straw man.
The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
This is healthier for a society, not because of any high moral vision, but simply because the collapse of the ruling class does not mean the fundamental destruction of everyone. Peasants know how to till the land with or without a king.
Today when have an unprecedented interdependence of the two classes. For example this is fundamentally incorrect:
> people have the option to go back and start their own farm.
A select few individuals do have this option, but all of society cannot return to an agrarian system because we do not have the resources for a population of our scale to live off the land without the massive industrial system required to maintain modern agriculture. Billions of people would die in this case.
This interdependence is particularly troubling due to the inherent nature of the ruling class to seek to exploit the labor class. Though it is to the short term advantage of the capitalist class, in the long run it threatens all of industrial civilization. We are quite literally seeing the consequences of this right now.
> The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.
I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on.
Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.
Stable, yes, until it's not. The OP point was that in case of an extraordinary event of a big enough scale - which your definition of a stable society doesn't exclude - most(?) of the people won't make it because of the very different nature of these relationships. So, while a disturbance is less likely, its effects would be more dramatic.
It is still possible for most people to buy a small farm in a cheap area and grow enough food to survive. But if you want a new cell phone, well you're going to have to sell your labor to afford it.
I get what you're saying. I specifically said "modern capitalism" though, not "human history". I would say that the rise of modern capitalism is precisely the rise of the class of people who have to sell their labor to survive.
But I get your point that initially there were still people -- in the USA -- surviving by owning their own farm not selling their labor, and that this number has continued to decrease. But yes, I think that's precisely the nature of modern capitalism, to decrease this number. (and the number was initially much higher in the USA than, say, Europe, largely because non-elite immigrant settlers were able to avail themselves of "available" land, something not available to the otherwise "working classes" in Europe...)
In any event, it would be suprising if today most of these non-working men were supporting themselves by subsistence farming and foraging/hunting, indeed.
> During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did
We need to be careful about being slippery with these categories though. Some of those people who "worked on farms" historically were, in fact, selling their labor -- and from GP, "working for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings" in pretty dire conditions. And prior to 1865, many of the people in the USA who "worked on farms" were enslaved in forced labor, which is not in fact "selling your labor", but it's of course worse in all respects.
According to the article, everything from government checks to money from spouses/friends. One would have to assume some criminals are included as well, but I'd guess there aren't too many statistics covering people's illegal side gigs.
Of course, if we are talking about alternatives, although you describe "modern capitalism" incorrectly - before the time where supposed "most" would work to make others rich or starve, "almost everyone" would work and also starve :) And whenever they try to build a modern alternative too, the same thing happens.
Anecdotally most NEETs live off of disability that more often than not is for some subjective condition that cannot be verified by tests (back/leg pains, autism etc.)
Some supporting evidence (though notably the trend of increasing disability claims seemed to reverse around 2014)
"But the 1984 change “substantially liberalized the disability screening program,” according to economists David
Autor of MIT and Duggan in their extensive review of the
program. The reforms shifted screening rules from a list of
specific impairments to a process that put more weight on
an applicant’s reported pain or discomfort, even in the
absence of a clear medical diagnosis. In addition, workers
could qualify if they had multiple conditions that affected
their ability to work, even if none of the conditions was
disabling on its own.
Not surprisingly, more and more workers were awarded
disability benefits based on ailments that relied more on
patient self-reporting and that often were not easily
diagnosed independently. For example, “musculoskeletal
and connective tissue” problems, which includes back pain,
accounted for just 17 percent of new enrollees in 1981,
but 33 percent in 2010. The share of awarded benefits
based on mental disorders — ranging from schizophrenia to mood disorders such as depression and
bipolar disorder — climbed from 10 percent in 1981
to 21 percent in 2010. Mood disorders alone now
account for 15 percent of all workers currently on
disability.
Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found,
is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative
to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s,
because of the way initial benefits are calculated.
That’s particularly true at the lower end of the
income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits
and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI
enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of
income replaced by the disability program climbed
from 68 percent in 1984 to 86 percent in 2002 among lowerincome men aged 50-61. A possible indicator of the effect
this has had, Autor and Duggan note, is that “the increase in
[SSDI] enrollment during the last two decades was largest
for those without a high school degree.”
> All of American society was based on the mythos that if you worked hard, you can succeed. We can debate to what degree this was ever true, but it's been obvious for decades that it's not true and that it's getting worse.
Obvious to who? The unemployment rate is really low, and certainly the average person who has a high-paying job is someone who had a lower-paying job before and worked their way up (either via hard work on the job, at education, at networking, at entrepreneurship, or some combination of those).
This sounds like weird dystopian ideological stuff.
> Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?
What are "starvation wages" in your view? The bureau of labor statistics says that the median wage for a 35 to 64-year-old man in the US is around $1300 per week, or $67,600 per year. My family of six spends about $250-$350/wk on groceries, even at a higher-end store. Those seem pretty far from "starvation" wages.
That's the median, which means half are making below that. And let's look at the half above it. This is the median, so much of those people live in big cities. Big cities with high cost of living.
"The average monthly expenses among all households totaled $5,253, or $63,036 annually. That's up 3% from 2018."
That's not much of a margin for error or opportunity for savings. If you're dual-income, child care will eat up the entire second income. Most couples I know having children these days have one parent quit their job and stay home, even if they were in an otherwise lucrative field such as software and especially if they're in anything else such as teaching, retail, warehouse, etc.
You're comparing the average expenses to the median income, which isn't the right measure. You're also comparing average household expenses to individual income.
But let's assume you weren't. $1300 per week adds up to $5,633 per month. If you're comparing that to average monthly expenses of $5,253, that means the average household has $400 left over per month. That's a savings rate of around 7%, which is actually higher than the measured U.S. average of about 3%.
Please don't make the mistake of believing the unemployment rate is a good measure of, you know, actual employment. It's really a measure of employment change. Over the past several decades it's become more of a political tool than an economic indicator. GDP is another statistic that's been altered to serve a political narrative. People are becoming re-acquainted with the fact that core inflation doesn't capture the inflation you're experiencing in your actual bills.
What's the old saying? Figures don't lie but liars figure? Like I said, the liars have been working on these figures literally for decades now. I think we've been covering up the damage brought about by Nixon's unilateral dismantling of the Bretton Woods Agreement.
It used to be the production of durable goods produced in the United States. The first change during the Reagan administration was to include certain services. The hot topic of the day was whether a strong service economy was economically the same as a strong manufacturing economy.
The second change I believe was made during the first Bush administration and that was to include in the U.S. GDP those goods manufactured abroad so long as they were manufactured by American corporations or American-owned corporations. Suddenly the manufacturing GM was doing in Mexico and Ford was doing in Canada counted as U.S. GDP. The reason given for this change was the manufacture of goods that contributed to the bottom line of American corporations listed on American markets improve the health of American markets and thus the American economy. Critics pointed out this hid the amount of American manufacturing being moved overseas.
We can debate back and forth whether these changes are reasonable but one thing is clear - when comparing historical GDP numbers you're necessarily comparing apples to apples.
The people outside looking in has a clear vision of success that's why they will do everything to be able to migrate. It will still be an upgrade. The people inside have no other reference than their own so everything they lack the immigrant perspective.
That is not the only difference. The fact that you can save and have a stable currency and stable rule of law matter a lot too. The U.S. has not experienced an episode of hyperinflation in the last 150 years - that's quite notable.
The U.S. certainly has issues and disparities and everything else. But it has vast vast benefits that you can only understand if you've lived somewhere else for a while.
That said, Europe probably does a better job at creating a more liveable society, at least since WWII.
You clearly know absolutely nothing about poverty. You can just compare monetary numbers - median incomes in many countries are smaller than poverty line in the US.
But even by objective standards. I actually feel it for working poor, especially immigrants - they don't get much help because US welfare state is completely out of whack. But non-working poor with free healthcare because hospitals have to treat them, food stamps and tons of private food charity, section 8 and other housing help, etc.? By world standards they live in luxury and they deserve none of it.
This is a good point. And a lot of what these people inside are fed as a means to success are scams or lotteries. It's easy to become disillusioned pretty quickly when those don't work out.
Class mobility in the US is incredibly overstated. The number one predictor of what socioeconomic class you'll die in is the one you were born in. In fact, we're not even more mobile than other developed countries: On the contrary, at 43% of bottom quintile household-income individuals staying there their whole lives, we rank pretty damn poorly.
Like, sure, it's a step up from "100% of serfs died a serf", but it's not good, either. It's certainly not "the American Dream". Maybe try "the Danish dream".
I'd be suprised if those people clawing their way out of poverty are these people though. It feels like many of those advancing are new Americans, while the population described here are sinking further into despair.
Just because some people can succeed does not mean that everyone can succeed.
One person who puts in weeks or months of dedicated searching may find an apartment within an hour's commute of their job that they can afford or a good deal on a used car. Such opportunities do not exist for everyone even if everyone expended the same amount of work.
According to this article you can opt out of the shit pile entirely. Maybe these guys are right and we should present them with a society that isn't so well-served by the crawling through shit metaphor.
You could look to the fact that most americans support policies like medicare for all when asked in a way that doesn't divide people purposefully (i.e. calling legislation obamacare), most elected politicians and the corporate media considers that extremist lol
I don't really buy the argument that the average worker is facing the worst and most desperate job market and economy in US history. Sure you can list a bunch of negative things about our current situation but is it uniquely negative in history? The discussion is around why so few men are working when things are not really uniquely bad.
Unless you can work remotely the main reason to move to urban areas is for jobs. There are next to no high paying jobs in rural America unless you start your own business.
Factor in housing costs and in some cases making less in a smaller city or rural area in fact pays you far more. Housing in high cost of living cities is pretty ludicrous, especially if you ever want to buy.
That and I'm not just talking about rural areas. There are dozens of medium sized cities with fairly affordable housing, especially in the Midwest. Texas isn't bad either if you stay away from tech exodus hotspots and trendy/posh areas.
Try just doing a nationwide job search with salaries adjusted for housing cost.
This remains to be seen. Most of these communities have either no jobs or one primary employer are are very subject to disruption. When you're laid off and your house becomes worthless because the biggest employer in town is shutting down, what are you left with?
It also limits your mobility dramatically. By working in a HCOL city, even if I'm struggling to save, I'm maxing out my 401(k) plus match and more every year. If I want, I can do that for a while and then move to somewhere cheaper. My family in the midwest, despite saving enough for an incredibly comfortable retirement there, couldn't purchase a home anywhere within 1.5 hours of Seattle if they wanted to move there now.
Most medium-sized cities have either no jobs or only one primary employer? I want to see your data to back up that claim, because it sounds like you're just making stuff up to argue.
Rural areas, small towns, and small cities maybe. Medium sized cities usually have several large employers and many dozens of smaller ones at least.
Medium sized would be places like Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Phoenix, etc. Austin used to be high on that list before it got inflated.
A lot of small town America can lean heavily to the right unless it’s a college town and it’s not what a lot of young people are looking for. This is probably more acceptable once you’ve settled down with a family but still isn’t great especially if you’re a different ethnicity or have non normative sexual preferences.
Small cities are a good option but wasn’t great for me especially when I was dating with the mindset of trying to find a wife. Options are limited and when I moved to NYC the dates I was able to go on exploded which helped me eventually find my wife.
You also have to be a specific kind of person (like me) that wants to do outdoorsy things for entertainment to live outside the major cities.
That being said there are several major small city hubs that fulfill a lot of the requirements that people are looking for from big cities especially in Texas like you mentioned, the triangle in North Carolina, parts of Colorado etc.
there are lots of job concentrations with affordable costs of living. They're just not hip. One example off the top of my head is suburban DFW. It may not be cool enough for you but you can get a pretty good tech job and afford a house there.
> and not even the illusion that they will ever afford a home
This may or may not be true within some circles, but it is absolutely not true for American society as a whole. The majority (~2/3) of households own their home.
Warning: Bad graph callout. The graph there is not 0 based for its Y-axis, and the fluxuations look a lot bigger than they actually are, but I haven't found any with better graphs.
I'm a renter for the foreseeable future, and I don't know anything at all about home ownership and all of the nuances so maybe I'm off base here... but surely this number includes people with mortgages that haven't yet been fully paid off?
If this is the case, then to me this data simply illustrates that up to 2/3 of American households were able to obtain bank loans. Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but recent history has shown us that being able to obtain credit doesn't necessarily mean you can afford the underlying thing.
Now, might some people have to downsize? Absolutely. Some people are absolutely living beyond their means. That being said, mortgages are pretty safe. If you get one, there's a real good chance you will end up owning your home at some point. The problem with mortgages in 2007/2008 were that people were taking higher risks and trying to chop up the numbers in a semi-fraudulent way (and in several cases, blatantly fraudulent).
mortgages in the US are 30 year loans so it stands to reason that most homeowners are still paying their mortgage. The thing is that home values "typically" go up so you can always sell for more than you bought so, yeah, you're in debt but it's secured by an appreciating asset. Further, assuming a couple of other things, inflation makes your mortgage payment effectively less and less as time goes on meanwhile your home is worth more and more.
Where did this 0 based graph fallacy originate? There is nothing magical about 0, and in many graphs it doesn't make sense to show at all.
Do you criticize atmospheric CO2 plots because they don't start at 0 CO2 which hasn't been the case for billions of years?
Do you think you should plot human body temperature reading with 0 in which the human body is more than frozen?
Should BRK-A stock movements always be plotted from 0?
The limits of a chart should be scaled to the meaningful realistic values, and it's okay to have the bottom and top of the chart be some epsilon smaller/lager than the highest magnitude observed extremes. This has the nice visual property of conveying "near the top or bottom means it's more extreme".
Home ownership has never realistically been close to 0, showing zero to hide the fluctuations is not "more honest", it's less so. Most meaningful data cannot be visualized and understood correctly if you assume that all charts should have zero.
My pointing it out is because the graph looks like it swings wildly up and down, but in reality home ownership rates aren't doubling/halving, they're swinging by 1-2 percent or so.
If what you are saying is true, I would expect those forces would affect men and women, Americans and immigrants equally and that doesn't seem to be the case. Eberstadt says it's really just American-born men who have dropped out.
Who believes this? Do you know any first generation Mexican immigrants? Some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met, who are also rapidly pulling themselves towards the middle class.
No, hard work does result in success, but you just have to do the actual hard work part. I have never, ever met somebody who works really hard who isn’t rapidly seeing their life improve.
Some other lessons to take from first generation immigrants:
1) Focus on your family.
2) Traditional values are traditional because they work.
Don’t get caught into the contrarians trap of believing that conventional wisdom is wrong.
“Ackshually working hard doesn’t work” is demonstrably wrong. You may just have to do some work that isn’t very fun.
I don’t know what you mean by conservative, but if you mean: “support working class people” then yes you caught me.
I wish people just spent more time around these communities they want to talk about. If you’re honestly going to tell me that you’re spending time around working class first generation immigrants, (my experience is working specifically with Mexicans) and not seeing a very strong obvious positive correlation between hard work and success, then I just frankly don’t believe you.
that's a ridiculous statement and doesn't belong here. Hard work is required for success but not all hard work will lead you there. You have to know where to work hard and that comes from identifying and fighting for opportunities. Lots of first gen immigrants do this very well. If didn't work hard to leverage opportunities presented to them then they wouldn't be first-gen immigrants to begin with.
What do you think this signals to people? That he may be conservative.
> I've met plenty of people who work two or more jobs and barely scrape by. God forbid someone gets really sick.
Yeah and you could work really hard for free and not scrape by at all. It's not that all hard work results in higher income, it's that working hard __to raise your income__ tends to raise your income.
Our society is built on the backs of those who work hard at things that don't raise their income. Why should they have any hope?
This is the same crowd that told all food service workers to "get a real job" and then go out and complain that Starbucks is having trouble retaining workers.
This narrative is so full of lies I cannot imagine incompetence, it has to be malice. So, I won't bother getting links, you can look them up. For others...
Paragraph by paragraph.
1) Housing price-to-income ratio in the US is low by the developed world standard, and has not increased much faster than inflation over long term before the last 2-3 years, when it went noticeably up... not due to corporations.
2a) Massive corporations provided railroads, utilities, etc. well before the government started regulating them and taking over certain responsibilities. I can maybe grant you clean water.
2b) Education funding, even adjusted by inflation, has increased massively over time.
3) De-policing results in much more suffering, especially among minorities. While to an extent any police force is basically a gang currently in control, the alternative - as literally any collapsing society from Ethiopia to post-Soviet Russia to parts of current Mexico show - is a different gang, and as far as these things go US police at least generally do their job, and police brutality is a minor, statistically insignificant issue blown out of proportion by activists. Look up numbers.
4) " the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident" - except pretty much all of history, and most modern countries. While not a factual error, I like how accumulating wealth by a large number of people is conflated in the same sentence with a few criminals, to taint it. A typical trick of malicious propaganda.
5) Very strong and non-quantified statement comparing an improbable anecdote with another improbable anecdote. Don't know what data would disprove this, but basically a lie.
6) "Starvation" wages in the US are some of the highest in the world, and disposable income a median American enjoys makes many other developed countries look like "3rd world" countries compared to them in turn.
Of course, as this whole thing develops, US also starts as a ~sole industrial power in the world (with others either undeveloped or bombed into oblivion) with strong demographics, and ends as a much smaller percentage of the world economy (primarily because others develop), and with an aging population. Even in a perfect system you would expect decline in relative standards, so it's actually a marvel how well US is doing so far.
> All of American society was based on the mythos that if you worked hard, you can succeed. We can debate to what degree this was ever true, but it's been obvious for decades that it's not true and that it's getting worse.
Well it certainly helps. IQ has always been the biggest predictor for future income though.
Does it, though? I now make more money off of my T bills than I used to working 70 hour weeks for $30K/year, and my accumulation of cash to plow into T bills was not due to hard work or even particularly large amounts of risk.
In fact, in my case, I accumulated capital in spite of my hard work, not because of it.
Seems your anecdotal experience may be biasing you.
How do you get a high paying job? You identify the requirements and work hard towards them. Did you do that?
You can make $30k/yr making $14.42/hr @ 40 hours a week. Spend the extra 30 skilling up. When you make so little hourly, it doesn't even pay much to work more. Spend that time improving your skills instead.
Seattle: $2334 (almost 30K/year)
Boston: $3774 (more than 30K/year)
Des Moines, IA: $982 (a significant chunk)
Plus healthcare. Plus utilities. Plus food. On and on. Skilling up won't do much if you're not networking, and that costs time and money too. The bootstraps discussion doesn't work in the real world.
Oh, and don't forget to somehow go out and date, find a partner, and have tons of kids (and pay for them somehow) because as the bootstraps-evangelists point out, we need the labor force and our entire economy is based on an assumption of population growth.
How is networking hard not working hard? How is building a network not "bootstrapping"?
The gist of it is that you have to put in effort. If you put in a lot of effort towards increasing your income over a long period of time, you're almost always going to see signficant results.
COL in Seattle and dating is irrelevant to whether or not putting in more effort tends to increase your income. You're demoralized, we get it.
what are those evil corporations precisely? looks like they caused all the problems.
be it a private business or a public one, it typically is owned by a (large) group of shareholders, who put their hard earned money including retirement savings into those evil companies and just trying to get a better return than CDs in the bank after they spent (lots of) time to study about the market, or spent money to hire specialists. And yes there are lots of risks associated with that move, many of them lost money in the end.
These evil corps are not Satan sitting somewhere in the darkness counting for the money they just stole, they're just a proxy for tens of millions of ordinary people to invest like you and me.
yes some individuals are earning way more than the rest, they're typically taxed half of that away in the end, maybe they should be taxed more. The fact is still, about 50% never pay federal tax, and the top 1% earner paid 26% of all the taxes, how far can that go?
I'm a regular worker and I lost investment in those evil big guns all the time, I just never understand why people blame the 'evil corps' for all the troubles while those people might have bought quite a lot stocks investing in those evil entities themselves, it looks me to you're cursing yourself.
I don't quite know the best way to measure it instead, but isn't saying the top 1% of PEOPLE pay 26% a pretty misleading statistic? I have no idea if it is too high. The 1% is a fixed number of people, how rich are they? If they have 99% percent of the wealth then 26% is too low. If they have 1% of the wealth 26% is too high. It also can grow if you lower their tax rate, if they get enough richer they might pay 27% even if you lowered their rates. It feels like we should be saying X% of wealth pays Y% of taxes, I think I could at least have an opinion about that number that has some meaning.
Oh, this is knowable, a quick search says the top 1% owns 32% of the wealth (I know this isn't income, so not perfect) but given that I'm going to say I think 26% is either fine or too low.
Based on a reported $820k mean income for the top 1% of earners vs something like 47k for everyone else (US figures), it'd be about 15% of total income being earned by the top 1%, which is lower than I would've thought.
Those numbers are just a few clicks away. I'm not defending them by the way, I'm myself just a regular employee.
Between a communist utopia and an unregulated greedy-driven capitalism nation, here is what we got, not optimal but works better than average. Neither big corps are evil nor poor people are lazy will be able to fix the problems. There is still hope if you keep working hard to fulfill your dreams in US, the worst is doing nothing and blaming all the faults to the system, the big companies, the rich, the COVID...it will make things worse.
Not suggesting that this necessarily invalidates the opinions in this one article, but this IWF site is extremely politicised, and some of the other content is really awful. And it's misleading, I suspect intentionally. For example by offering strong counter-feminist opinions under the title feminism, campaigning against gun control, etc etc etc. Free speech, yes, but be aware where you get your information from.
agree, and I just flag content like this that comes from untrustworthy sources. I would guess a site called "Independent Womens Forum" that goes on to have a story about a "mens crisis" written by a man would propose.....women are the problem? The author (person being interviewed) can't quite hold himself back: "That is not true for women. That has not been as true for women. We’ve got this fantastic existence proof in our society that people can drop out of the labor force for years and years and go back and be productive, because they’re called mothers." Wow bitter much? let's blame working moms.
Except that he later goes on to describe how this is also affecting women more and that we should be paying attention to that as well? I don't think anything the author said is actually disparaging of women, in fact there was quite a bit of the opposite, talking about how vital their role in society has been. He's not blaming working moms, he's using them as the perfect example that a person can leave the workforce for years at a time and rejoin without much loss.
Where is he blaming mothers for this situation in the statement you quoted?
implication that there is supposedly some bias towards giving jobs to moms re-entering the workforce and not to men. which is absurd. the US does not even have any system of state-supported childcare set up. The lives of working moms could not be more difficult.
well, chalk it up to a site that as soon as I go there pops up a giant, screen-covering banner for me to learn about how trans people are horrible (only a few days after a massacre of trans people in Colorado, very tasteless) and deceptively calls itself "Independent Women's Forum" while being an obviously conservative / libertarian site that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33709488 was founded as a group to defend Clarence Thomas of all people, who not only was indeed a sexual harasser but also just voted to strip the right to abortion for women across the US.
That wasn't my take. He's saying the fact that women in similar circumstances have children, leave the work force for years and then return implies there's something at work beyond the age/demographic bucket. Similarly he also says this experience is unique from foreign-born men of similar demographics.
Agreed. This is typical anti-intellectualism disguised in academic language. They make frequent appeals to the past, talk about the "West" as a unified concept (a favorite of the modern Right that sounds catchy but has no real substance) - and they insinuate that refusal to work is a moral failure of individuals, rather than symptoms of a declining economic system. They cherry pick information to support their points and get more and more preachy as the article goes on.
The Independent Women's Forum (IWF) is a conservative American non-profit organization [1]
the IWF grew out of the ad hoc group "Women for Judge Thomas," created to defend Clarence Thomas against allegations of sexual harassment and other improprieties. [1]
The IWF has been described as "a virtual 'Who's Who' of Washington's Republican establishment."[1]
FactCheck.org labeled the IWF ad "a false appeal to women's fears", finding that the IWF ad relied on "old statistics, faulty logic and false insinuations[1]
Over the years IWF has received funding from Altria, Phillip Morris International, and vaping giant Juul. Without disclosing its its tobacco funding, IWF has defended the vaping industry using Juul's own talking points. [2]
"Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position. "[3]
IWV made $67,242 in independent expenditures aiding Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin with calls and independent voter outreach in November 2012, after Akin claimed on August 19, 2012 that rape victims couldn’t get pregnant because “if it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”[2]
"IWF has repeatedly defended right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh,[24][25] including supporting Limbaugh after his misogynist comments towards Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke on his show in 2012.
A report by The Nation and the American Independent Institute found that Limbaugh gave about $273,000 to IWF in 2007, making him the group's largest donor that year. The report noted that in later years, "donors to the IWF began cloaking its contributions by running them through the right-wing's biggest donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust," making it difficult to know how much Limbaugh may have contributed since then."[2]
Independent Women’s Forum President Sabrina Schaefer offered to help American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislators “sell” corporate-backed alternatives to paid sick leave, equal pay, quality childcare, and workplace flexibility in their home states in a meeting with ALEC in July.[2]
As of September 2020, Heather Higgins, chairman of the Independent Women’s Forum, is a gold circle member of the Council for National Policy.
Council for National Policy. The Council for National Policy (CNP) is a secretive, Christian Right organization of funders and activists [2]
[3] Lisa Graves, Kim Haddow and Calvin Sloan, Independent Women's Forum and Independent Women's Voice Use “Independent” Brand to Push Right-Wing Agenda to Women Voters, ExposedbyCMD, August 17, 2016.
"Independent Women’s Forum President Sabrina Schaefer offered to help American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislators “sell” corporate-backed alternatives to paid sick leave, equal pay, quality childcare, and workplace flexibility in their home states in a meeting with ALEC in July.[2]"
^ Well this makes the whole narrative reasoning for going on about people not working pretty clear doesn't it?
It's funny to me how the simple category of having a job is weighted so highly in some people's minds. I live a life pretty similar to the NEETs described, in all honesty. I live in a suburb in my 20s, I spend most of my time on screens, single, living alone, very occasionally get together with friends. But because I have a software job, I guess I am part of the "successful" class? No, it's not about working or not working in my opinion. It's about a society that has GINI-d it's way out of social mobility, a society that easily lets people close themselves off in extremely comfortable bubbles of cheap entertainment, a society that is so stratified, so alienating, that people would rather just close themselves off from it.
Western society has basically just reverted to feudalism, IMO. Assets are simply too expensive, so circumstances of birth become the most important factor in your quality of life. Working hard doesn't matter because even with the most prestigious jobs in society, you have no way to catch up. The losers who weren't born into a favorable position, such as myself, just occupy themselves with digital bread and circuses. What else is there to do? I'm basically just a bitch of the Outer Party and I've accepted it.
NEETs? GINI-d? The "Outer Party"? Do you hear yourself? I don't know what those things mean, and I think it's pretty weird that you assume the average reader will.
And we're pretty far from "feudalism." What "assets" are you talking about that you need to get a decent job? The only one I can think of that is truly locked away behind high prices is education, but even there lots of people succeed by working hard and taking on debt for school.
I'd really hope most HN users who are unfamiliar with common internet slang (NEET) or economic measures (GINI) would be smart enough to use their preferred search engine to fill in the blanks.
> I'd really hope most HN users who are unfamiliar with common internet slang (NEET) or economic measures (GINI) would be smart enough to use their preferred search engine to fill in the blanks.
It hurts the efficiency of discussion. You write a post that 100+ people will read many of them not immediately knowing what some of those are. You may have saved 5 seconds typing abbreviations, but wasted quite a few minutes of their time in aggregate.
P.S.
NEET (from urban dictionary):
> This is a term used in the field of education. The acronym stands for "Not in Education, Employment or Training" but young people have started to use it as a term for bums/layabouts with no future.
GINI is a way to measure value of some definition of inequality.
> NEETs? GINI-d? The "Outer Party"? Do you hear yourself? I don't know what those things mean, and I think it's pretty weird that you assume the average reader will.
Did you not read the article? Do you not know what the GINI coefficient is? It strikes me that you're being disingenuous.
Such great points you've brought up, and hopefully it's not lost on many posters on HN, that technicality of on paper being "successful" but realistically not living very differently from NEETs.
It says a lot about western society when many would likely see company towns as a hugely beneficial move these days. An example is bloomberg calling Amazon's potential factory towns as champions for the working class. What a backwards world.
Wealth inequality was been worse in the US at other times and I would challenge the notion that our current wealthy elite is the most powerful and influential version in history. If anything workers have never had as many rights and opportunities as they do now.
Maybe we are more aware of it than previous generations were, maybe humans are just animals and we function better with idealistic blinders of nationalism.
> I live in a suburb in my 20s, I spend most of my time on screens, single, living alone, very occasionally get together with friends. But because I have a software job, I guess I am part of the "successful" class?
I would say "I have a software job" is the healthiest quality you listed with the other things ranging from a little negative to neutral. By all means pursue your own interests, but we all know people choose things that aren't good for them all the time so simply professing a preference doesn't undermine concern.
There's a huge difference between you choosing to spend the resources you earned on whatever you want, and resources other people earned. It is the later part, that calls for questioning.
Weren't people like you described as hermits before Internet culture? There's a difference between choosing to live the life of a hermit and being forced to.
I expected an article about the actually idle capital class, who really do live entire lives without working (or only working glamorous jobs that are more about contributing to their social status than doing actually necessary work).
Instead it was "the uppity and lazy lower class is now refusing work for poverty wages; we need to saddle men with children and debt or we won't have cheap labor off of which we can profit".
How do you explain that women and foreign-born men in otherwise very similar demographics are participating in the work force by many factors though? I found that very interesting.
I think there are a couple things that mediate these phenomena:
1) a multi-year gap in the CV is generally looked at less suspiciously when the reason is child-rearing or some other positive commitment; you'll have to have an explanation for that gap that doesn't reduce confidence in you as a candidate.
2) There is a selection bias, I presume, with the immigrant comparison.
Not saying these things invalidate the claim, but should be considered before accepting the claim at face value.
BTW, the claim in the article was fairly weak: since women do return to work after child-rearing, then it is possible that an applicant can get hired after a multi-year gap in the CV.
Why should I even give a shit as long as fourth generation land lords are living off of rent checks?
Need more labor? Start by at least disappropraiting the trust funders and petite landlorders of any revenue stream that comes on the back of the working class. We can talk about the rest later.
Good discussion on UBI, I used to be a big proponent of it, but after the pandemic I agree that it's not a cure all, and definitely will cause a lot of people to fall further down a vice trap, encouraging others to join them.
With that said, UBI is very much a fringe policy prescription, and Andrew Yang was pretty much kicked out of the Democratic party. He offers no prescriptions as far as I can tell other than an organic great awakening arriving, in other words a collective delusion convincing everyone to work and work hard.
Something has to give with housing I think. The ramifications of policy there would impact trillions of dollars in wealth and any debates would be sluggish and full of inertia.
> "definitely will cause a lot of people to fall further down a vice trap", "UBI is very much a fringe policy prescription"
Unfortunately, I think these two things are working against each other. Regardless of the hypothetical virtues of UBI, I am increasingly certain that our political powers that be see it as a primo-grade mechanism for creating dependence, and they like dependent people. They do as they are told. I expect UBI to rapidly leave "fringe" status in the relatively near future for precisely this reason.
I think anyone reading my little post here who fancies themselves a UBI advocate should take some time to do a red-team attack on a society using UBI and consider the possible outcomes with the real politicians we have, rather than hypothetical ones. However wonderful a well-administered UBI run by caring, selfless politicians may be, the more I think about it the more it's handing the keys to eagerly-worn iron collars to our political class.
I just started rewatching The Expanse and I had forgotten about the amount of casual nationalism (racism but by planet) is in the first season. This is making me feel things post-pandemic that I didn’t feel so strongly before.
The Belters see Earthers as the head of the snake. The Martians jeer at them for being listless, directionless planet destroyers on the dole.
The thing is that there may be a solution for UBI that also reduces the planet destroyer aspect, and that’s to claw back mineral rights and charge companies for their extraction. From land, from water, or just to burn the air. This treats the Physical wealth of the US as something owned by her citizens, who are entitled to recompense for the consequences of exploitation.
It’s not without its flaws, because getting paid more tends to make people want to say yes, but right now there isn’t even a question you own the rights you can do whatever you want and skip to the bank feeling safe about externalization of the risks. The government is your personal janitor.
The fun thing about this economic situation is that it would normally work itself out.
Money runs out or runs low for government benefits, the benefits paid go down and people go back to work. The problem self resolves due to the money supply.
Now, instead the same thing happens but we print more money, causing inflation. Cost of goods goes up. People need more money to survive and the cost of labor goes up…which further drives up the cost of goods. But the way our government benefits work, if you go back to work you lose them in many cases.
The inflation cycle is dangerous and it only happens because once you vote in dependency programs you can never vote them out.
It’s made worse because of the benefit cliffs that make people want to stay below certain income lines to avoid losing the benefits that come with it.
It’s a situation born entirely from far too much government intervention.
If you read some statistics about the group, it pretty much makes sense. There is a decent chunk of the population that is disabled, and then a bunch identify as caregivers for someone else. Being in school makes up another large chunk.
Speaking of disability, there are something like 30% more people on long-term disability since the pandemic, on top of the skyrocketing amount since the 80's
The "disabled" metric is a joke. A lot of NEETs aren't really disabled and are gaming the system with fake diagnoses and are outright lying.
There's a whole class of these guys who have basically retired on the state dime and use MGTOW tropes like blaming women, the work force, home ownership, etc to justify their laziness.
I used to be sympathetic but when you meet these guys, they're basically a "big rock candy mountain" hobos and have a myriad of personal problems they refuse to fix since the state freebies make it possible to live this way.
He also doesn't really go into the realities of disability benefits, but I think it's worth pointing out that the criteria of a disability preventing you from working can be dependent both on the kinds of work available to you in your community, and the judgement of medical professionals.
My understanding is that many people on disability could plausibly do _some_ work, but if a past injury or illness makes it difficult to be on their feet throughout the day, and the jobs available to them in their communities are in some way physical (even just standing at a register), they end up out of the workforce.
I wonder if it would be better for everyone if there was a middle tier for people whose disability makes them unable to get a job in the market with their current abilities, but doesn't preclude them from doing something useful (e.g. volunteering in their community) or from studying to be able to do other work, and require them to do one or the other to continue receiving benefits. Perhaps this, coupled with greater support for employers making accessibility affordances for workers could get more of these people reengaged with society.
Tossing numbers around like this always looks "insane" until you realize that there are hundreds of millions of people in the United States.
Kind of like when you say "Chicago has the most murders!" without pointing out that it's solidly safer per-capita than a number of mid-size cities that don't have the same reputation.
5% of the US workforce seems like a lot! And about 10% of the US male workforce, depending on which source number you use. That is a considerable figure in my opinion. And that's only the 25-54 year olds!
They don't have the headlines of '60 people shot this weekend' because they have far less shootings. But they definitely have the high crime reputation.
While Atlanta has experienced substantial economic and population growth in recent years, the city's high violent crime rate continues to hinder the area's quality of life. There were 1,084 violent crimes reported in 2016 per 100,000 Atlanta residents, nearly three times the national violent crime rate of 386 incidents per 100,000 Americans.
More than half of people in the survey think Chicago is #1, when it's not!
There's a big difference between people understanding that Atlanta or DC have generally high crime, versus crime being a nationally-recognized brand and identity like it is for Chicago.
I spent half my 20s (in various spurts) living off savings trying to do solo lifestyle business entrepreneurship but mostly just building for a non-existent audience and none of those stretches would have been registered as any form of 'employment', as I didn't bother to register any sort of business or have any income to report.
If you have a good job and live very frugally in a cheap COL area with roommates, cooking your own food, and no one else to provide for, it's achievable to only work half the time and live off savings the other half.
Wonder if there's a generation of men who have stints of trying to make an app, or learn coding, or make it big as a YouTuber or soundcloud rapper, etc. who don't show up in employment statistics.
This, this, this. When I first heard the statistics bandied about in interviews with this author, my first thought was the quality of the statistics (I won't refer to the numbers using the modern-day honorific "data"). Perhaps this is discussed at length in his book? I have not yet read it.
It could be "savings" for some of them. I know guys (engineers) who work for a couple years, save up a bunch of money, they drop out of the work force for a while.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I also have a friend with a "fake" job at a family business. They have an income, but don't actually work for it.
Being from EU-context, I'd like anecdata to say either way if my take makes any sense:
Shared flats/houses with no official subletting. Basically you have a friend (of a friend) who can barely but legally afford a place for themselves that are happy to give you a room/couch/corner for pitching in some money.
IMHO: The modern work environment (or possibly any work environment) is simply not appealing to certain types of people. If those people can find other ways to survive without having to do things they really dislike why do them? Emigrants are a poor comparison because they are self selecting - many of them came to the US specifically for the purpose of working.
The 9-5 with 2 weeks vacation work thing is a relatively new invention for humans. We have spent far more time evolving under more fluid time management situations like seasonal work or doing different work during the course of the year. The current pattern is specialized and somewhat mind numbingly repetitive.
> IMHO: The modern work environment (or possibly any work environment) is simply not appealing to certain types of people.
> The 9-5 with 2 weeks vacation work thing is a relatively new invention for humans.
I don't think it could be that though, because conditions have generally gotten better, and there was less resistance to work at time where working conditions were worse. Say 1950's or so.
I mean the environment where we work from home and have very flexible hours, retirement, healthcare, generous vacation policies, etc. is pretty new an spectacular in relation to past work environments. These sorts of things used to be the privilege of some business owners who weren't critical to daily business.
In many respects conditions have gotten better for certain types of work. That doesn't mean that certain people are not predisposed to not like the work. I work remotely, have many of the benefits you list but I am still tied to keyboard many hours per day. I can see where certain people might feel like that is akin to spending the day in hell. I have made certain concessions to achieve my desired work life balance. I could see how others may have a different calculus concerning that. It has nothing to do with being tough. Some of them may actually have options and chose to exercise them.
You are missing some big components though: this has grown for decades with very little deflection in the trend, and "survive without doing things they really dislike" seems odd motivation to do absolutely nothing.
Maybe the ways these people have found to survive has grown for decades. People are simply taking advantage of the opportunity. I am not implying this is the only reason but it maybe one reason. It also depends on how these people are counted.
Does a person that lives a sailing cruiser life style count as being employed. Many people in that category make money on Youtube, move rich peoples boats in the off season and do boat repair work and cleaning etc. They simply do not have a traditional job.
I would love to spend my life free from the endless cycle of meaningless work that is the every day reality of a software developer. When I have more than a couple days off, I can find happiness and meaning from walking around and looking at a tree.
I will have to work for 20 years before I can pay off a house. I don't get that many vacations. I usually spend the weekend recovering. Work sucks out the energy that I would otherwise be able to use for anything that brings me joy.
You have one life, if you don't wan't to live it as a forced laborer, why should you? Why would you?
You envy people who have absolutely nothing to live for? No job, charity, religion, community, children, no hopes, no dreams?
These are not people who said "NO!" to the 9-5 rat race and are doing their own thing; they literally do nothing. For me this is the saddest existence I could imagine, a fate worse than death.
yeah it's like negative life. You are effectively dead but continue to be a cost center to others around you. ...as if you rented your grave and stuck your neighbors/family/partner with the lease.
Well, it's a small place. You hardly spend any time commuting. Work hours are 0800-1630 with an hour lunch which leaves you with plenty of time to do other activities. Work culture is quite relaxed, no rushing as long as projects get done. Internet is decent enough that you can work remotely, if thats your thing. 1,5 hour flight to the continent.
Downside is that software engineering is not really a thing, so you really need to make an effort to get a job, but once you're in you will have no serious concerns like those you mention... additionally there is a lot of potential for meaningful work, or plenty of avenues to help the community with your talent.
It's not perfect,not at all... but it's a much simpler lifestyle, much more quiet... seems like the opposite of a life in any large city, alas you will unlikely every be on 100k
>You have one life, if you don't wan't to live it as a forced laborer, why should you? Why would you?
Because until recently in history, the choices for most humans was work or starve. And nowadays the choice is work or take advantage of the generosity of others. And note that said "generosity" is usually collected under threat of violence via taxation.
So if you feel morally ok taking advantage of those who actually do work, you do you. Just don't be surprised when those who do work resent and despise you.
When I hear this sentiment I'm always completely baffled, because it sounds like the person expressing it lives in some other world than I do. No country that I know of allows you to collect unemployment benefits forever. You get maybe 1-2 years to find a new job, and after that they leave you on your own. This usually means homelessness. As a homeless person, you might get some food, but many starve and freeze. By no means is that a secure existence.
I don't think you are really informed on the matter thought. "maybe 1-2 years" here sounds like an educated guess, and the whole point of the article is that that guess is wrong at least in the US.
No country in Europe that I know of will give you unemployment benefits forever. There are 44 countries here, please back up your claim and name 10 where you can live without working indefinitely. Otherwise, I'm going to have to assume that you're making stuff up.
There are other welfare benefits besides unemployment, even in the US. If you qualify for food stamps, medicaid, and section 8 housing you can live without starving or freezing to death, no unemployment benefits needed. I'm sure that comparable types of benefits exist in Europe.
Is this a joke, or is it some "you don't get unemployment benefits until the end of time, after some months/years you get welfare/social security/some other name" thing? Most European countries have significant percentages of unemployment, and very few people end up on the streets (and starvation is essentially unheard of), that alone should give you a hint that you've missed something in your reading on the subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_state has an introduction and also contains various links to individual state's current setup. Germany is currently in the process of increasing welfare (Bürgergeld, literally "citizen money") to something like 60% of average post-tax income.
"Arbeitslosengeld II bekommen Sie normalerweise für 12 Monate".
You usually get it for 12 months.
It sounds like you're having a cognitive dissonance where your idea of what's happening in Germany doesn't match reality. That might explain why you think my post is a joke.
> Bürgergeld is increasing Arbeitslosengeld 2 aka Harz VI. They want to increase it from 449 to 502 euro per month.
That's the cash-part of it. They also pay for housing + utilities, health insurance and additional costs, it comes down to about 1000-1200 Euros per months for a single adult.
> You usually get it for 12 months.
Yes, and then you get it for another 12 months. And then another. And another. They require you to renew your claim once a year ("Folgeantrag", "Weiterbewilligungsantrag"), but there is no limit on total duration, the idea is (allegedly, maybe it's just to annoy people, who knows) that you have to prove your eligibility and you'll commit fraud if your claim is fraudulent.
The choice for most humans wasn't "work or starve". Back then the concept of "work" didn't exist. You lived your life, you hunted and farmed for nourishment, these tasks while laborous were also incredibly fulfilling. There were no abstract timelines to complete tasks by, you collected eggs because they had to be collected and you harvested crops because your family needs food.
Nowadays the choice is "do meaningless tasks to make someone else much wealthier, or cease to exist with the social institutions created explicitly to exploit the lower classes".
Why are you morally OK with forcing people into this system of exploitation?
I did not claim we should go back to farm life or that it was perfect, only that these tasks were fulfilling.
Are your tasks at work not fulfilling? Perhaps another hour long meeting will give you the same joy as turning your harvested crops into a simple cake.
Protip: you will struggle to find any book of the past that brings up their daily routine tasks for sustenance as a major source of agony in the same way we do about our modern office jobs. There is a reason for this and I hope you figure it out soon.
It's not just men who are ending up in the NEET vortex. The pandemic really seems to have taken the best years away from some of the generation coming of age around now who seems to have spent the past few years holed up at home on discord. I recently met a 20 year old girl who was calling people who don't watch anime "normies" with literally no aspirations other than being a camgirl. I am friends with another age 24 who is in an extremely similar position, literally just sounds like she smokes weed plays video games and watches anime with most of her time. I think it's important to realize that this demographic is probably way wider than the typical idea of who ends up in this position. These are (outside of their agoraphobic habits) very attractive young women.
Without a corporate income it's too expensive to move closer to a city to be with other young people unless you want to get caught up in the service industry spiral.
I think the other crazy thing is that people are pulling internet hustles that offer questionable value to local societies for stacks more money on less effort than those in either the service industry spiral or the corporate income bracket. It's really wild how easy stuff like dropshipping, social media marketing, playing video games on twitch, and all these other things are compared to hard work in any field. It's going to be interesting if any of that hits a collapse wall in the future.
It kind of already has collapsed. How many Americans actually earn enough to survive as Twitch streamers? Maybe a few thousand at most? Relative to the population size they are completely irrelevant.
Yeah, but the other low-effort high-income hustles out there? It's like the easiest money I've ever made in my life, it's crazy how easy it still is to do that kind of thing.
Obviously the twitch thing seems to be about how charming you are to all the fans, but if that's your thing and you're making that money, it's a pretty crazy thing
a handful of my wife's coworkers and friends (she's a teacher) have onlyfans accounts to supplement income. That's certainly a lucrative side hustle for women but comes with risks as "lucrative side hustles" usually do.
I dunno, I remember people around that age years ago going to parties and stuff like that on a very regular basis. Like the shut-in was definitely a thing but now that's almost normal?
The people I'm talking about are legitimately scared of doing these things.
The part where they talk about how men leaving the workforce started in the 60s and is a linear trend till now (I wish they'd show some graphs). It got me to thinking in a different direction: The percentage of women in the workforce has risen during that time and (I suspect) mirrors the change they're seeing in male workforce participation decline. Is it possible that some of this is due to men opting to stay at home with the kids while the wife is working a professional job? Looking at it from that angle it doesn't seem quite as terrible. Culturally, we tend to think that men should be at work, but with more women in the workforce that opened up alternatives for men to be at home with the kids instead. Not saying that that's what all of this is, but we need to try to separate out those who are opting to stay home to take care of the kids - that's not a bad thing, they're actually doing something important (and the cost of childcare can be quite high in many areas).
I know this is sexist but in many types of jobs you find today men simply can't compete with women. The multi-tasking and keeping all the balls in the air at the same time type work is something I see women excelling at and out competing their male coworkers for promotions/bonus time and time again.
Sorry but I could not find in the article what is the problem that others are facing due to this so called non working class folks? AFAICT they are just watching videos and playing video games and not hurting anyone (except themselves maybe). If the author is concerned about some decline in something’s due to this there should be clear evidence for that claim.
When you have MILLIONS of people choose to not participate or contribute to society in any way, AND depend on others for their survival, we all loose - full stop.
Yeah? With growing automation it is inevitable that human beings will have more free time to spend any way they please to. Some would travel to other planets but that does not mean that it should be imposed on everyone. As far as personal growth is concerned it may take a form of mandatory community service for everyone for one or two years. As human beings we do not have to stick to our herd mentality. In fact as humans we dare to imagine things differently.
Interview with Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt. He holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI
From the book:
Today, in 2022, American men suffer Depression-era employment rates, even though they inhabit the wealthiest and most productive society ever known. After the pandemic, we have gone from men without work, to work without men
"""
Well, the UBI siren, as you indicated, and I completely agree with you about this, it’s a false solution. It’s a false solution for a democratic society. It’s a false solution for economic malady. It’d be a very convenient way of funding a vehicle so that the little people would be quiet, go back to their television screens and Percocets; but we’ve seen what happens with people who are disconnected from the workforce of working age now and not involved in the raising of kids and stuff, and it’s not pretty.
"""
In general, I haven't seen much attempt when all adults in the household are out-of-work to raise a family, because how would they afford it?
I don't think we know what things look like if we restructure the economy to say "You have enough money to raise one or more children on even if you do not have a job."
I used to work in retail, worked as a security guard, and many such odd jobs. Majority of my ex-colleagues (including myself) then would rather stay home, if they can get free housing and food.
I believe productivity and work are essential to human happiness. However, I also think we need to dial it back a bit. What's the point of all this work work work, if you never have the chance to balance it with creative pursuits and other enjoyable activities? Likewise, without work, my other activities are not as enjoyable. Balance is key for me, but our culture seems to favor more work and more stress. Hopefully that can change to something more tenable for more people.
Here is my two cents on this whole non-work thing.
We are in a 21st century western civilisation where food (= no hunger) and entertainment (= no boredom) are cheap and abundant. If you somehow manage to find an abode (the hard part), why would you "have" to be working for money? Why is the assumed "issue" here even labelled as an issue to start with?
1- At the personal level: What do really every human yearn for? We need to stop generalizing our value-system. Even if you are poor, without a college education or a job. you can still be growing inwardly (= better person) and contributing around you in many non-monetary ways (= better [virtual]community).
2- At the society level: what do the world really need/want among all this busy-ness and activity (= growing GDP)? aren't we, to a great extent, just carried away with the momentum and weight of the modern world, unable (and unwilling) to collectively change the course of this high-speed, problem-riddled train ?
The rise of the Non-Working-for-Money (and not work per se) Class is not an issue. It is just a symptom. We need (and will have) more of them.
Talking about EU - working on employment contract and seeing over 40% cut off every month... on services mostly not available for relatively healthy man... it effectively uproots the motivation to hop in back once one got off this train at some point for some reason. No children and spouse? Even better...
Not having children is probably the primary factor in opting out of wage slavery (wages that don't or barely cover living expenses). Various political blocks are absolutely desperate for law changes that would force people to have unwanted children that would lock them back in.
As a person paying taxes, I'd rather them spent on making raising children to be "free", than supporting a multimillion cohort of jobless men who are otherwise fully capable.
I don't care much anything the social media or government (together with their law) did, because i know, they're not capable of doing the right and fair things to the people. They just know how to make the most profit as possible from the system as they have the right to do so.
I'm confused why this would be flagged? At the time of my post here, there's 71 comments in < 2 hours. It's obviously a discussion point for folks here.
What did part of the submission guidelines does this article go against?
Probably because so many people find this controversial. From what I see in the comments, there is a strong dislike of the source's conservative values and relations to conservative political groups.
Wouldn't be surprised to see it labeled as "disinformation" or something like that. Quite frankly I'm shocked that there is so much resistance to the ideas in this video. Kinda proves the point I guess.
Just a heads up, this source is a conservative think tank according to Wikipedia and just...looking at their articles.
Upon visiting the site, a popup window was sent my way that was trying to toss a transphobic article at me. If you search for "transgender" on their site it's full of anti-transgender and TERF articles with titles like "‘Women’s Bill of Rights’ Introduced to Counter Transgender Ideology."
Now onto the article itself...
Again, it's really obviously a conservative-slanted article, even including a random dig at Nancy Pelosi for...ya know, the standard reasons.
The article is making the argument that this new fangled society is disincentivizing work. Ya know, the same "nobody wants to work anymore" line that we've heard from capitalists for decades and decades. [1]
The article is basically slapping us in the face with the Protestant work ethic, very unscientifically connecting the lack of a need to work with drug use and "despair."
Apparently, this negative side effect of degenerate drug use only applies to men. Undoubtedly these authors have no problem with the close to 30% of mothers who are stay at home parents, but I guess the 7% of fathers who are stay at home parents are at home taking drugs and looking at screens when they should be out digging for coal and hauling logs.
I do wonder how this concept of despair applies to the non-working members of the ownership class! Let me guess, they worked their way up with their bootstraps and earned their wealth?
Doesn't this entire idea fall apart when you think for five seconds about retirees? Under this philosophy, how do they have a happy life if they aren't working? Is everyone 65+ just sad all the time and doing drugs to cope with their despair? Weird because every piece of demographic information I can find talks about how retirees are the happiest age group.
You want men to work the "dirty" jobs they used to work back when "America was Great"? Pay them! If these jobs are all left open, clearly the companies that have these job openings don't need to fill the roles all that badly, because otherwise they'd raise the pay rate.
You'd think an economist like the one engaged in the conversation would understand supply and demand!
The trend seems to correlate with drug use in society. Not sure which is the chicken or the egg, but from personal observation of people I grew up with, I'd say its worth examining drugs as potential causation.
With housing becoming an investment increasingly dominated by cynical corporations with no empathy, only greed, even hard workers have to spend every cent they have with no source of significant savings (other than the death of a relative, not available to most) and not even the illusion that they will ever afford a home or be able to raise a family in a middle class lifecycle.
Massive corporations have been built off American workers and American infrastructure - the regulations and taxes that provide us roads, utilities, clean water, safe food, safety, and more. Since at least the 1980s these corporations have abandoned the belief that they need to give back to or invest in these communities and have gone to great measure to slash worker pay, fight regulations, and tear down the educational systems and social safety nets that enabled America's growth in the twentieth century.
Even safety is far from guaranteed - minorities have known forever that the police are not there to protect them, but it's increasingly apparent to everyone that they're an organized crime protection racket, refusing to discipline or remove abusive cops, refusing to do their jobs and throwing hissy fits at the slightest suggestion that they be subject to any accountability. In cities across the country, the mere suggestion that officers not be allowed to physically abuse people leads to a refusal to go on patrol and no consequences.
Meanwhile, at the very top billionaires accumulate more and more wealth and face no consequences for their actions. Whether it's manipulating financial markets (and being fined far less than you profited) or blatantly stealing and mishandling classified documents and not even being charged, the fact that there are different concepts of "justice" for different classes has rarely if ever been more evident.
Hard work isn't rewarded and is often punished with higher expectations (whether that's an increased quota or a 'manager' title) with no increase in pay. Long gone are the days of joining a company as a janitor with the dream of working your way up; upper and even middle management is an incestuous club who would rather hire someone externally than train someone internal.
Why should people want to work for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings to make others rich?