We, the public, who are unwilling to fund quality journalism, have ourselves to blame for this.
Granted, the ad-driven business model that enabled print newspapers to flourish in the 20th century made it easy for quality journalism to be sustainable. But unless we come up with some way to replace that in the digital age, we will only get the news that other people want us to read. In other words, P.R.
I am a former journalist who has watched a number of failed attempts at alternative business models. I don't know what the answer is. But I sure know that the problem is a problem.
Unwilling? Journalism printed money hand over fist for many years, at least newspapers did. How was the quality of journalism during e.g. Vietnam or the Gulf War to name two examples? Somewhere on the spectrum between outright propaganda and garbage.
Things are getting worse, but let's not pretend that when journalism was raking it in the quality was actually decent. Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent in 1988.
Yeah, there are some keywords I used to search basically daily on CL. The results are less and less. I have a family member hop on FB marketplace (I don't use FB anymore) and there are numerous results for what I'm usually searching unsuccessfully on CL. Sad times. I get it, but yeah.. disappointing.
This is something that comes up so often, particularly in the past few years, and I'm surprised at how little push back there is. It's not that people are unwilling. It's that the average American, in real terms, is increasingly broke. Any number of businesses would have collapsed in the last 20-30 years - music, selling physical albums; cable TV, with reasonable bills; air travel, without security theater and sardine can booking - if not for ad-supported revenue, all-you-can-eat subscriptions, and/or barebones service. And that's because most Americans don't have the disposable income to actually buy and own things anymore. What I'll give is that it's been such a slow boil that I don't think people realized it before. But now that even basics - food, housing, transportation, education - are unattainable or warped to where the customer is the product or degraded to the point of being unrecognizable, there's really no excuse anymore.
odd formulas since lots of common urban addictions use up money, and lots of incarcerated cant buy things directly. Not an economist here, but I think of it like "circulation" in a body.. there are cold spots and overheated spots, not evenly flowing.
Commerce in this US West location is not at all as it was before the ubiquitous phone, that is for certain.
Inequality is absolutely part of what's masking things, yeah. And, yes, we've found cheaper and more efficient ways of doing things via ubiquitous connectivity and compute. Weirdly, the cost savings never really bolstered individual savings.
OK, but the second point also stands. Income is not the same as disposable income. The OECD data claims to measure the latter, but you'd have to look into the data definitions to see what that means.
Friendly reminder that "inflation" more or less definitionally implies that wages increase proportionally to consumer goods prices. If prices are going up and wages aren't, it's just people getting proportionally poorer.
There is a psychological effect in that price rises are perceived as inflation while wage increases are seen as personally earned. So even though real wages are going up, at the individual level, they're not seen as being macro-economically driven.
>It's that the average American, in real terms, is increasingly broke.
AFAIK inflation adjusted wages have been creeping up in the last decade, or at least remained flat. What statistics support the claim that they're "increasingly broke"?
There is also deeper nuance to consider, like the fact that essential goods such as grocery items have been inflating much faster than other markets, especially in most recent years.
You're right, I missed that in haste. I do think it's still worthwhile to consider the minimum wage since it applies direct upward pressure on other hourly wages, and the question is "how many Americans are effectively broke." The purchasing power of the absolute average American doesn't really answer that question with growing wealth inequality.
>You're right, I missed that in haste. I do think it's still worthwhile to consider the minimum wage since it applies direct upward pressure on other hourly wages
That's all true, but is there any reason why we should take the minimum wage seriously when we have median wage data, and only 1.5% of Americans are on the federal minimum wage? Clearly it's not a representative number at all.
>the question is "how many Americans are effectively broke." The purchasing power of the absolute average American doesn't really answer that question with growing wealth inequality.
Why don't you present your statistics then? Also, "broke" =/= "wealth inequality", unless you subscribe to the view that living in 1400s like conditions is not "broke" if everyone else is also equally poor.
Pointing out the points raised is hardly "conceding" when the points are of very little relevance to the claim of "Americans are broke", nor does it rebut the claim of "inflation adjusted wages have been creeping up in the last decade". It's not contradictory to admit that minimum wages have effects on economy wide wages, but also claim that wages have been creeping up.
Were you planning to actually contribute something to the conversation, in terms of a counterpoint with additional data to consider? Or just be an aggressive naysayer?
Median. And my 20-30 years might have been inaccurate; compare to 1970, not 2000. It seems to be a "crime is on the rise" situation; a 50% gain after a 50% drop doesn't get you back to 100.
>Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over
So, a number of problems:
>Since 1979. The drop you see at the beginning of the chart is the tail end of a plunge in the 70s as productivity decoupled from wages. This is where the "gain after a drop" is an issue: we are slightly up from rates that were massively down (and not shown on this chart). Then we see stagnation within a ~15% band until just before the start of the pandemic, where there is a dramatic spike that's already regressing.
>Then we see stagnation within a ~15% band until just before the start of the pandemic, where there is a dramatic spike that's already regressing
Again, im not understanding how this could be an issue when the chart is using absolute numbers. If it dips a little then returns to previous levels that does not cause a "50% gain after a 50% drop doesn't get you back to 100" situation because the graph isn't using percentage change.
> Many of the increased costs are not reflected.
Which specific components do you have issue with? Moreover, the cpi is supposed to represent the country as a whole, so depending on your life situation your true living costs will either be lower or higher than expected. College tuition makes up about 1% of CPI, but if you're a student it's probably your top 3 expense. That's fine, because it's canceled out by all the Americans that aren't in college. The same applies for housing. If you're just moving out and have to find an apartment at market rates you might think the CPI isn't accurately capturing housing costs, but keep in mind that most Americans own their homes and therefore aren't paying market rents.
Again, growth is overstated because CPI is flawed and tends to understate the actual growth of cost burdens. So the "slow growth" mentioned here is people losing ground.
> If it dips a little then returns to previous levels
That's the problem: it didn't. Your assertion that it did is based on an unnecessarily limited data window. Zoom out, and you'll see a declining standard of living and a lowered ability for Americans to take their wages and buy durable goods (colloquial denotation). The declining birth and home-ownership rates for younger generations compared to older ones at the same age did not just come out of nowhere, and the general increase in debt load is part of the answer to why the entire thing hasn't collapsed yet.
>Which specific components do you have issue with? Moreover, the cpi is supposed to represent the country as a whole
The link went over many, and I would hope that you'd have read it and not asked that question. But, as a general gripe: its basic nature as an index makes it game-able, and the people who make the decisions about what goes into it have a conflict of interest: they answer to the people who answer to voters (more likely to be older, monied, white), and the people who can pay for votes. You might say that it's a coincidence that it then tends to show less of a crisis in income and purchasing power than many (younger, poorer, not white) feel exists, but I'm not so naive.
If by government you mean local agencies staffed by local people using this tech to make their job easier for what to them is the small concession of reigning in how they speak of it, then sure, I guess people can can just go against what they see as their best interests. Easy.
The entities I pay to carry guns under the pretense that they're defending and not violating my civil rights, yes. It is not the free market's job to prevent corruption among such entities, and it's certainly not my fault that they're spreading propaganda.
I'm not making an argument for or against thr free market, I'm making a an argument about human nature. If we want people not not do something that they see as beneficial for themselves (and the negative effects are not necessarily obvious or are spread enough that they're easy enough to rationalize away), we need to make it so it's not longer so easy to see as purely beneficial. In this case that's likely either policies or laws that prevent it.
The government is just a bunch of people much of the time, and emergent behavior is rampant, so I don't think it's useful to complain about the government doing things we expect them not to when those expectations haven't been clearly communicated through laws or policies. If they have been communicated, then we're looking at corruption, or at best incompetence, both of which we have ways to deal with.
Cops in the US are not paid to defend the public. There are Supreme Court cases ruling that e.g. they can in fact just hide behind a door while you're actively being murdered.
>We, the public, who are unwilling to fund quality journalism, have ourselves to blame for this.
I'm afraid that even if good journalism existed today, yellow journalism will always pay more.
>In both cases, the public is being screwed by entities they’d rather trust. The sad thing is neither of these entities appear to care they’re harming their relationship with the people they serve.
Granted, the ad-driven business model that enabled print newspapers to flourish in the 20th century made it easy for quality journalism to be sustainable. But unless we come up with some way to replace that in the digital age, we will only get the news that other people want us to read. In other words, P.R.
I am a former journalist who has watched a number of failed attempts at alternative business models. I don't know what the answer is. But I sure know that the problem is a problem.