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| ▲ | lumost 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall. We may be reaching the breaking point where Americans view any solution to this problem as worth trying. We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. When your grandparents are the last generation to remember rising living standards, it’s hard to buy that the system is working for you at all. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. No, we aren't! We have statistics on this (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N). Median real income is up substantially since 40-50 years ago, depending on what you count as a generation. And we have stories and records of what life was like in the 1970s, when 80% of households had to hand wash dishes and 50% had to line-dry clothes. The reason people believe living standards haven't risen since their grandparents' day is that they get false nostalgia bait depictions of how a typical person lived in their grandparents' day. (What is true, and what I'm sure contributes to the power of the nostalgia bait, is that real income stagnated with the dot-com bubble and didn't hit a sustained rise again until the mid-late 2010s.) | | |
| ▲ | lansol 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Real people don't care about "real income". They care about if they can get and retain a decent home, job and life. How much debt they are in, that their education is enough, how their social life is, if they can have kids and how they think about their future. "Real income" is measured against the consumer price index (CPI). CPI is used to gauge inflation, "are people paying more for groceries this year than last?", not living standard. Most of the important questions like "how many years of education do you need for a good job?" or "how many average salaries do you need for a good home?" are all massively worse. So are many metrics of despair. What real income really shows is that more money now gives you less. That what buys you a loaf of bread doesn't buy you a good life anymore. Because median income might be keeping up with inflation, but not with anything else. | | |
| ▲ | hdgvhicv 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Adjusting for CPI the median wage in America is up about 10% in the last 20 years. | | |
| ▲ | nothercastle 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You can’t use cpi directly like that. The model uses hedonic adjustment to say that modern goods are better than old stuff so you are earning more. For example your $1000 oled tv is better than your $1000 crt tv therefore you your purchasing power has gone up. Or your base truck now comes with nav therefore your truck can be 5k more and still be net neutral.
The problem with this system is that in order to stay in the same price catagory on the index you continually need to move down the product tiers. So today’s lowest tier is a decade ago mid tier is 2 decades ago high end. Moving down like that makes you feel poorer because wealth is relative. | | |
| ▲ | confidantlake 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Even this is missing the point. While they try to distract us with the price vs quality of tvs, the cost of college and housing has skyrocketed. 60 year ago, a 20 year old guy with a high school education could support a wife and 2 kids. Today he needs his wife to work and has to wait until 30 just to buy a 1 bedroom apartment. Forget about kids. But they act like we are kings because now we have iphones. | | |
| ▲ | nothercastle 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They can just say that Kahn academy is equivalent to college 20 years ago so qol is maintained |
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| ▲ | hdgvhicv a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > "Real income" is measured against the consumer price index (CPI). > What real income really shows is that more money now gives you less | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | TVs are the archetype of of why hedonic adjustment is necessary. Your $1000 OLED TV is better than your $1000 CRT TV, but it's not even the right comparison. Every TV on the market today, even the bargain basement ones it never even crossed your mind to buy, is better than your $1000 CRT TV. We've hedonically adjusted, so it's hard to believe - is it really true that the "huge" "high definition" CRTs our cool friends had two decades ago were 720p and <35 inches? But yes, it is true. Consider a more concrete example. In 2005, a 40 inch 720p LCD panel cost $3,500 (https://slate.com/culture/2005/09/it-s-finally-time-to-buy-a...). Today, that same panel in 1080p is $100 at Best Buy (https://www.bestbuy.com/product/insignia-40-class-f40-series...). | | |
| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I never had a CRT die on me. A $100 Best Buy TV is disposable junk. Is that factored in to your index? Modern product lifespan is at least half, and repairing something is no longer an option or is 'replace $1000 board' not the $50 fix it used to be. The current price should be at least doubled to try and match in some way. For 30 years my parents had the same TV, is that factored in? My TV has an explicit shelf life. Apps have already stopped working/being supported even without the TV breaking. My parent's TV never sold any data. My new, much more 'expensive' TV spys on me 24X7. You would not have been able to PAY my grandparents enough to put a TV like that in their house, yet alone consider it an 'upgrade'. | |
| ▲ | tossandthrow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As the sibling also mentions, you need to add in ongoing costs, or expected yearly ecpensiture on TVs, which makes even the worst modern TVs much more expensive that older crts. You need to do this with all tech. But factoring in hedonic adaptation is fine, if general societal trends are also factored in. 30 years ago there was strong social institutions on workplaces that people have to buy into now. More people did manual labor where they need to pay for fitness now. These things also needs to be factored in. | |
| ▲ | account42 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your CRT TV didn't try to manipulate you into spending on stuff you don't need. Your average OLED today does (if you give it an internet connection for now, but you need that for some of the features that supposedly make it better). It may have improved on paper but the quality of the experience has not. |
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| ▲ | lotsofpulp 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yet people feel like their purchasing power is going down. Their expectations might be to live in the top few decile neighborhoods of a metro, where land prices have gone up a few hundred thousand in the previous decade. It doesn’t matter if the stats say income went up 10% if they or their kids won’t be able to land that house they wanted, or can’t make that appointment with the doctor and instead have to see an NP, or worry about having to move to a more expensive metro to reduce income volatility. | | |
| ▲ | camgunz 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This is pretty spot on. In the mid/latter half of the 20th century, most people who thought they should have what they thought was the good life could get it. It's less about "you didn't need 2 incomes" and more about "culturally, people thought women should work in the home while men worked outside it". Now, it's not really even clear what the good life is, but whatever you think, it's very hard to get it. Schools, commutes, quality housing, health care, stable income, they've all gotten far, far worse for almost everyone, and there's nothing they can do about it. |
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| ▲ | chessgecko 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The real issue is that housing is heavily underweighted in the cpi basket. How many people do you know that are only spending 12.9% of their after tax take home on housing, water and fuel? Only people with paid off mortgages. | |
| ▲ | geye1234 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the 1970s, a single-income family on a factory worker's wage could buy a 3-bedroom house with a 3x mortgage. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Factory workers weren't (and even today really aren't) a replacement-level job that anyone can just go out and get. A guy making $4.50/hr at GM in 1970 had a great job that his peers would have envied; quite a lot of people who worked just as hard were making $3 or $2. | | |
| ▲ | geye1234 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Sure, but the 2025 equivalent of that GM job -- if you can find it -- is not going to pay enough to support a family and pay a mortgage on one income. |
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| ▲ | somenameforme 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That data series is misleading because of what you're seeing. Ostensibly you'd think that means wages are going up, right? It doesn't. Here [1] is the data set for that - weekly real earnings. They're barely moving - up about 13% over 50 years. And given now a days we have a lot of new and practically mandatory costs to deal with, such as internet and computing/telephony devices, real wages are probably down in practical terms. So what gives with your data set? The data set I give covers wages for full time workers. The data set you gave covers all individuals 15+ with any "income", which includes governments benefits. So what you're likely seeing there is going to be, in part, driven by things like an aging population - with a large number of retirees retiring with social security, medicaid, pensions, etc fattening out the middle part of society where income, after all is accounted for, of around $40k sounds just about right. It's mostly unrelated to the change in wages. --- Also, unrelated but I found your examples of 'better life' weird. I still hand wish dishes and line-dry clothes. I know Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates also hand wash their dishes. The "nostalgia" people have is for things like somebody graduating debt free, with a decent car, and ready to put a down payment on the first home - on the back of a part time job that put them through school. That really did happen, but now a days it sounds like a fantasy. I think society would happily trade dish washers for that! [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q | |
| ▲ | tossandthrow 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is reasonable to be skeptical about their definition of inflation, and henceforth what "real" means. While this chart shows "real" income increases we apparently also see "real" increases on housing, rents, education, etc. If your inflation metric is only on rolled oats, then it is not really worth much, is it? | |
| ▲ | lumost 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ While you are correct that real wages are up around 25%, productivity has nearly doubled. While various consumer goods, and technology have seen large improvements - ignoring the measurable and qualitative ways that affording basic aspects of life have become more difficult is not wise. | |
| ▲ | mafuy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | Yeul 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think many women were happy that they could get an education and job to make their life more interesting besides being the house slave of their husband. | | |
| ▲ | GOD_Over_Djinn 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Comparing raising your children, cooking food for your family, and maintaining the home to slavery is… quite the position.. | | |
| ▲ | davkan 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s certainly hyperbolic but lack of autonomy and complete financial dependence were pretty par for the course for women back in the day. My grandma slowly squirreled away money in a shoe box over decades as she had no personal bank account and lived on what my grandpa provided while she took care of seven kids. She saw it as her lifeline. Meanwhile he got drunk every night at the yacht club. When the last of the kids were nearing college she spent that money on classes for clerical work and got a job. I could not possibly imagine being in her shoes and I can imagine why a woman would be loathe to enter into such dependence on another person, regardless of how fulfilling child rearing and house keeping may be. And the further you go back from there the worse it looks for women. | | |
| ▲ | lazystar 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 100% agreed - the lack of choice is terrible, and society is better now that women have more freedom. I think what people look back and get nostalgia for is the fact that it was possible for one adult to stay at home full time. Now its not possible; we dont have a choice, everyone must work. |
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| ▲ | red_rech 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What about when they’re 9 years old? |
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| ▲ | hdgvhicv 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And many couples are tired of both having to go to work and outsource the childcare to third parties to be able to afford the mortgage which is high because everyone has two incomes. | |
| ▲ | johnisgood 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And what about women who love their family and kids and would like to support the family by staying at home? Come on dude, calling it slavery is fucked up. | | |
| ▲ | sterlind 3 days ago | parent [-] | | or men, for that matter. no reason it has to be the woman to stay home and support the family. | | |
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| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Is a cultural perception that raising children and a family is being a slave. I personally find it a disgusting perception. I love my family. | | |
| ▲ | ozim 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think more people will find disgusting walking over all the abuse women had to endure you did here. earlier wife beating was „normal thing” leaving abusive partners was not possible or much harder than nowadays. Then in a lot of places in the world it still is like that. | | |
| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't know in what culture you were raised. My culture has no history of systematic wife beating. | | |
| ▲ | ozim 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What kind of comment is that? Do you feel superior or somehow you just make my argument not true because it didn't happen to you or anyone you know? You definitely seem to be genuine asshole and I don't care what culture you were raised in because there are definitely nicer people from that culture. | | |
| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm Jewish. We hold our women in high esteem. | | |
| ▲ | root_axis 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I wouldn't characterize raising a family as slavery, I also won't debate the prevelance of domestic violence in Jewish families (those curious can google it), but pointing out that you're from a culture that represents a rounding error of the world population doesn't strengthen your argument. | |
| ▲ | ozim 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am at the gym, can’t talk. Bro but you called. |
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| ▲ | matthewdgreen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you positive about this? | | |
| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Am I positive about what? That my culture does not have a history of wife beating? Yes, I am positive. | | |
| ▲ | matthewdgreen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I have no idea what your culture is, but the entire notion that domestic violence is something to be monitored and prevented by outsiders was invented very recently in most cultures. So my assumption is that it was pretty damn widespread everywhere, no matter what our ancestors like to tell us. | | |
| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | matthewdgreen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I assume this is just garden-variety "being racist on the Internet" commentary, but in case you actually believe this: go ask ChatGPT for a list of the sections that urge murder and violence against women in any given holy text. | | |
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| ▲ | panloss125 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | tiahura 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you have any idea how many women hate having to work and would you rather be raising a family? |
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| ▲ | scrubs 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Thank you for chart. I will reassess real income gains. I'd be lovely to have a chart on housing/rent, healthcare, and higher education to see if people had both higher income and expenses. Global trade as made consumer prices competitive in many things, but those are a big three. Nostalgia was not at root of my original comment. | | |
| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Global trade has made shippable commodities cheaper, so purely local expenses such as housing, healthcare, and education are relatively more expensive. Especially as inflation measurements include items from both categories. This is why many places in the world no longer produce enough food to feed their populations - refrigeration and cheap oil enable food to no longer be a local commodity. Education is sometimes headed in the same direction. But housing cannot be sourced anywhere but locally. |
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| ▲ | henrikschroder 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > and 50% had to line-dry clothes. Sorry for hijacking, but this is quite possibly one of the funniest American poverty markers around. | | |
| ▲ | jjav 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Seriously! Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury. When one lives in a tiny apartment with no balcony, you better have a dryer. When living with plenty of land, it's not a problem to hang clothes to dry in the sun. | | |
| ▲ | Scoundreller 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Clothes dryers are a sign of shrinking real estate, not a sign of luxury. My euro family disagrees, even in places that don’t have a balcony. Get the rack out and dry indoors and it’s pretty dry overnight (in the not so humid places). I have a dryer but avoid it for most clothes because I think it wears them out. | | |
| ▲ | nly 3 days ago | parent [-] | | A lot of rent agreements in then UK explicitly forbid tenants from drying clothes indoors on a rack because it is claimed that it raises humidity and the risk of mould (being an already quite damp, cold country) | | |
| ▲ | ninalanyon 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That's because UK rental homes for the hoi polloi are notoriously badly insulated, ventilated, and heated. The landlords are blaming the tenants for the landlords' failings. |
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| ▲ | incone123 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Plenty of old photos of people running drying lines between them and the opposite tenement building. Not saying people should do that today, just that it's what people did when they had neither space nor means to buy a dryer (or before dryers were invented) | | |
| ▲ | autoexec 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Many Americans would love to do this today, but every apartment I've rented in the last 15 years has strict rules against drying clothes outside along with other restrictions on what you're allowed to place or store on patios and balconies there. Most of the rules seem to be in place purely so that the complex/tower doesn't look "poor" or "trashy" | | |
| ▲ | henrikschroder 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It's pretty much only Americans who think clothes on clothes lines makes a place look "poor". Consumerism demands that everyone buys a tumble dryer, therefore not having a tumble dryer means you're a povvo! Meanwhile, in civilisation, I have a washer, a dryer, and a collapsible wall-mounted clothesline in my apartment, and I can choose which piece of clothing goes where to dry depending on need! |
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| ▲ | Yeul 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Where is this sun in November? | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You have indoor heating, right? Clothes dry just fine on a rack indoors (albeit you may need some way to remove the resulting humidity if your heating system isn't doing that job already) | |
| ▲ | dotancohen 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Australia |
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| ▲ | ksenzee 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We don’t have time to hang our clothes out on the line and bring them in again and iron them. We’re too busy working. sobs | |
| ▲ | hallway_monitor 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Washing dishes and hanging clothes out aren’t actually torture. | | |
| ▲ | fuzzfactor 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | One of the most indulgent approaches when money is no object, is to have enough luxurious time to be able to fix your own food, do your own dishes, and wash your own laundry. | |
| ▲ | jerojero 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't like using a dryer even when I had one. Its way too taxing on the fabrics. Its nice to have as a last resort or during winter tho. | |
| ▲ | garciasn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Very true statement; but, it’s certainly neither convenient nor the least bit enjoyable, either. | | |
| ▲ | hyperman1 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I've been handwashing my dishes for a long time and now have a dishwasher. One of the main benefits is having a place to store the dirty dishes until there are enough to make it worth washing. I used to do 3 washes a day, with 2 tiny ones. | |
| ▲ | madaxe_again 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I quite like hanging out the clothes to dry - bit of sunshine and birdsong, something to do with my hands while my brain plots and schemes. | | |
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| ▲ | LightBug1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | We bought a dishwasher about 5 years ago. Still haven't used it. True story. |
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| ▲ | nick49488171 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Couldn't afford to throw enormous amounts of heat out the window during winter time! And all the time. |
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| ▲ | smugma 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And >50% of families could go to Disneyland* and own homes. * https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-econ... | |
| ▲ | EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Many households in European countries such as Germany or Finland line-dry clothes, and I would argue living standards are higher in those countries compared to the US. | | | |
| ▲ | vaxman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nooo. Wages only jumped in the Tech biz just before the dot-com crash and again before the AI crash that hasn't happened yet (unless you count laying off workers to pay for capX on NVIDIA hahaha). Bottom line: McDonalds is paying $20/hr now in California to flip burgers --YUUUGE, but a whole lot of people lost their jobs when major automobile manufacturers laid them off because they "didn't want to compete with McDonalds for workers"...where is that in your "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" (I'mma change that to "and LLMs" rofl). Hey it's iPhone Day, "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish"*
--- *-nevermind the $10000 workstation named after a gf or more recently $2000 orange phones (I bought a DEEP Blue because Apple is always threatening to "Care-Deeply" me), $1000 watches and $300 earpieces for errbody. So Hungry. Also, we'll make sure you never work anywhere in Tech again if you even so much as interview for a new job outside of our company and Non-Competes Are No Longer Blocked! But What the Helly..Turtleneck also didn't invent the hungry mantra which is embraced by many other similar brilliant people, from Einstein to Elon'n-on and of course, my dad's gang one of whom brought Turtleneck back to Apple.) Get it? Got it? Good. | |
| ▲ | lumb63 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can’t comment on the nostalgia aspect, because I wasn’t alive back then, but I can say that there are several aspects of the statistic you used that make it not reflective of the experience people have. One issue is median real income does not tell you anything about the distribution of income. It can be used to show that the top 50% of people have had “real income growth”, but can hide a lot at both extremes; the poor and rich have had vastly different experiences [1]. The metric on that page looks at “share of national income”, so it has issues as well (not anchored to any objective measures), but it illustrates my point just as well. The bigger issue I find is the way that “real income” is measured. There are a slew of issues, IMO (hedonic adjustment, for instance), but the biggest is the way that asset prices are treated in CPI - that is to say, they are not! Shelter prices reflect “owner equivalent rent”, not the price to actually buy a home, which has ballooned massively in the last few decades, especially the past five years, relative to income [2]. The same applies to other assets such as stocks; they are nowhere in the CPI metric, but have a direct impact on our lives; higher-priced stocks impeded the purchasing ability of people with respect to stocks, costing them returns over time (couple this with the larger cost of other assets over time and it is clear retirement age will have to go up). So, yes, maybe real income has increased, but substitutions are being made and tricks are being played; more people are renting longer because of home prices. Future returns on investments will be lower because of a giant asset bubble. Also, future liabilities are nowhere to be seen in the real income metrics. The national debt that the US has saddled its current and future citizens with is shameful and will inevitably cause financial drag in the future (could be higher tax rates, but my personal bet is persistently higher inflation over time; you can already see the Fed giving up on its 2% target). [1]: https://wid.world/country/usa/ [2]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/median-house-prices-vs-inco... | | |
| ▲ | fuzzfactor 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Very bright observations. You must be looking at some serious equations and related data. If you were alive back then you would have watched as inflation appeared "out of nowhere" and before long it was obvious that dollars were going to buy less & less each year for the foreseeable future. Government benefits needed to be tied to inflation under emergency conditions or everyone was going to be voted out by millions that were now underwater otherwise. So they needed something to gauge inflation by and tie benefit dollar increases to, and ended up inventing the CPI. The CPI was not expected to be very good, just quick. To say expectations were "highly manipulated" would be an understatement. If people didn't settle for something quite deficient in realism to begin with, who knows how many legislative sessions it might take? People could lose everything in that much time. The exact purpose of CPI was carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of inflation as much as possible and get away with it. It was plain to see as it went along, like any other slow-motion dumpster fire that lawmakers go through when almost none of their intents are entirely honorable. And CPI just became more laughable ever since. But that wasn't enough. Then one day the GDP comes along, with "reasonable" excuses about how multinational American companies are not like they used to be, so good old GNP can no longer act as the best measure going forward. GDP was even more carefully crafted to minimize the appearance of non-prosperity and inflation, allowing it to run its course under the radar if it could just be brought low enough (but not low enough to be tolerable all the way back when things were really prosperous). Without knowing if that could even be achieved, it was plain to see when overprovisioning was taking place to try and compensate. There's nothing like a long, deep massage of the figures, and "feelings" can improve remarkably if the most obvious pain points are addressed. Temporarily of course. You will notice that it is never obvious when the overnight transition from GNP to GDP took place. You had to be there. All the old data has been "refactored" creatively as designed in an attempt to make "comparison more valid". Who would benefit or not if people were still able to compare apples to apples, and who makes the rules anyway? By this time after all these years without recovery, "sentiment" was thought to be the only salvation possible, but even the most positive outlook couldn't help consumers who had lost their purchasing power. But a consumer economy was going to be the only road to "recovery", they had to keep spending just to survive regardless of how anemic it was by then. Anyway the stock market crashes, continuous devaluation of the dollar for years, millions of layoffs, and consumers (millions of who could not afford US-made cars or other products any more) who were increasingly offered foreign alternatives they would readily purchase as much as they can -- all ran their course and it was not enough to end the most ridiculous part of the madness. There had to be an oil crash and a real estate crash too, before things could finally level out under that old radar beam. |
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| ▲ | Slava_Propanei 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | roenxi 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Insofar as a "pro-labour" position exists in practice it has to be anti-globalist. If pro-labour is going to mean something it has to mean trying to get labour a better deal than a free market would offer, otherwise it isn't really taking a position on labour at all. A key part of globalism is it makes it impossible for labour in any given country to avoid being paid the market price for their labour. Environmentalism is similar. Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets. You seem to be arguing that globalism makes the world better off. I agree, but that is because pro-labour and pro-environmentalist ideologies are pretty explicit that they aren't trying to maximise the general welfare. A situation where one soul works very hard and happily for little pay making things for everyone else could be a good outcome for everyone (see also: economic comparative advantage). The pro-labour position would resist that outcome on the basis that the labourer is not making very much money. And the environmentalist would probably be unhappy with the amount of pollution that the hard work generates. The globalist would call it a win. | | |
| ▲ | palmfacehn 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Globalism as an ideology is distinct from globalization of trade. Globalists would argue for expansive supranational regulatory controls. Migration and alleged environmental concerns are typical rationalizations for their expanding powers. The distinction is better understood as between a set of liberal, laissez-faire trade policies and an emerging illiberal supranational regulatory state. Specifically when you say: >Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets. We can observe that the Globalist organizations regard not just pollution, but carbon consumption to be something which markets cannot be trusted to manage. Instead they propose top-down regulatory management on a supranational level. https://www.imo.org/en/mediacentre/pressbriefings/pages/imo-... | | |
| ▲ | roenxi 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Hmm, yes. I am forced to agree. Sorry, please interpret my comment as talking about globalisation (the effect), not globalism (the ideology). |
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| ▲ | Peritract 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If pro-labour is going to mean something it has to mean trying to get labour a better deal than a free market would offer, otherwise it isn't really taking a position on labour at all I think you're assuming here that 'a better deal' means 'more money than someone else', whereas lots of people would define it as 'everyone has more rights/security'. |
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| ▲ | sokoloff 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm very much free trade and pro-globalization, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a candidate for political office in country X should be most concerned about the overall welfare of the citizens of country X, then next for the non-citizen residents of country X, then non-citizen/non-residents last. We can argue how steep the dropoff should be, but I think most people would believe that the ordering is that one, with some possible ties. | | |
| ▲ | simonh 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Overall welfare is about more than just income though. It’s about national security, the cost of living, and the benefits of things like innovation, technology, culture. Let’s look at US imports from China. Last year that was $462bn worth of goods. Suppose the development of China never happened and all those goods were manufactured in the USA instead. That’s impossible, the US doesn’t have tens of millions of industrial workers lying around spare to do those mostly low end, low value jobs and if it did they would cost more and the goods would all be much more expensive. So the cost of living would go up, the economy would less efficient because many workers would be doing lower value add jobs than they are now. The country would be much worse off overall. It would basically amount to enormous government subsidies and protections for vast swathes of lower value assembly work than what many people are doing now. I support global trade because I think it’s best for the west. Not hyper-liberal ultra free market trade. Negotiated, rules based, moderately regulated trade and investment that is balanced to meet domestic and international needs. | |
| ▲ | TheOtherHobbes 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Good news! Native USian developers will no longer be made unemployed by cheap immigrants. Instead they'll be made unemployed by AI and a crashing tech economy. But that isn't the point of this. It's leverage - much like the tariffs. Big companies making significant donations to the Donald Trump Presidential Aggrandisement Fund will receive carve-outs and exclusions. It's a grift, like everything else done by this benighted administration. | | |
| ▲ | itake 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | its a common tactic for companies to force high paying employees to relocate to other offices, or leave... This could be a tactic to force lower end to go home and accept a lower salary at the same company for their same role. up or out. or in this cause, over or out... | |
| ▲ | cantor_S_drug 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In the recent podcast Balaji said, both Red and Blue America will start hating Tech for distinct reasons. Red America will hate for H1Bs. Blue will hate for AI displacing high paying white collar jobs. | |
| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hope you are right. If this is just grift...well...I guess the bar is still low but at least it isn't at the bottom. |
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| ▲ | franktankbank 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Its arbitrage. You think the low rung indians are happy suresh is making top dollar programming a web app? | | |
| ▲ | sokoloff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | They may not care about Suresh specifically, but they're probably happier than if no one in their country had a well-paying tech job. Suresh and his tech worker colleagues don't sit on Scrooge McDuck piles of gold coins; instead they spend the money in their country and community. I'm pretty sure my local pizza shop, waitstaff, and other small businesses are happy to have my money spent on their products and services. They don't care that I have a tech job, but they do care that I spend money with them, and spending money with them is only one degree of separation from having a job. |
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| ▲ | harimau777 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I could see that being the case in a scenario where all countries had strong labor protections. However, in practice globalism tends to result in jobs being exported from countries with strong protections to countries with weak protections. In that sense it is anti-labor. In the case of bringing in workers; those workers are less likely to join unions or demand good working conditions since they are effectively indentured servants. That also is bad for labor. | | |
| ▲ | MiguelX413 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Nothing stopping a country for regulating the offshore labor of companies based in it |
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