All of those problems had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economic mismanagement. And the commies were the worst at it. The US never had famines even at the worst of the great depression.

FRED shows Federal outlays as a percent of GDP broadly leveling off and declining. 2008 GFC and COVID being transient exceptions

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

Meanwhile here's employee compensation* over GDP (both seasonally adjusted)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1XO2h

Any chance you can share the sources for your assertions?

* includes benefits as per https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pd...

The Robber Barons were able to r>g their empires just fine in gold-backed currency.

The Cantillon Pump is only one of several major "rich get richer" mechanisms in the economy. It is not the most important, and it does not consistently run in the same direction (wages can inflate faster than assets).

Inflation is caused by deficit spending. It is a tool for government to increase spending without raising taxes.

1) Based on your numbers, 65% of women were not working at that time.

2) That 35% number was likely even lower for married women.

3) Racism was still a systemic problem and was bad. Black men were excluded from the GI bill for example.

4) In spite of that, the median American household needed only 2x their salary to buy the median house. That number is 5x today, and after taxes the ratios are 2.2x then vs 6x today, when two adults are often working rather than one.

5) In short, Americans are working much harder today.

“Upper middle class” has nothing to do with it.

In 1950, the median household could buy a house with 2 years of income. That is, 50% of households could do this.

Today, the median house costs $400k. Only the top 12-14% of households make 200k per year.

So proportionally, the % of households that have the same buying power as a median 1950s household has shrunk roughly 4x.

The only way one can claim that the middle class isn’t shrinking is to have a floating definition of the middle class.

If you lock it in any way to something like “home ownership and simple vacations once a year” (which was absolutely possible in the 90s), it has plummeted.

The data that deflate with CPI? The metric notorious for laundering forced substitution into voluntary substitution? The American Dream is to Owner's Imputed Rent a house?

I love BLS, they do a lot of thankless work very well, but if you give someone else control of the inflation basket you are letting them pick any slope for these graphs that they want. Don't do that. It's the economic equivalent of handing your passport to an employer, talking about your net worth in public, or signing a blank check. Just don't. Yeah, we're all busy, you probably don't have time to construct a basket more sophisticated than "gold" or "housing" -- but even though those both have big problems, they still aren't as bad long-term as CPI. Or maybe you disagree and think the CPI basket and hedonic adjustment methodology compounds better for your purposes, but if so you should be able to roughly account for the dramatic difference and articulate why.

> Take a tour through Fort Williams. There is a collection of clothing from the Revolutionary War. The baby clothes look like doll clothes, and the adult clothes look like they were for boys. Then look at the clothing in the Gettysburg museums. The people were taller then, but still about the size of boys.

I don't think that's a correct interpretation, see the explanation here [0]. Not quite the same situation, but likely a similar case. Are you sure the "adult" clothes weren't made for young boys or teens, or women?

[0] https://dyckmanfarmhouse.org/people-were-shorter-back-then-r...

I don't think your statement about short lives in colonial America is correct either, they had a low life expectancy like everyone else, but mostly due to a lot of childbirth deaths and young infant deaths. Surviving childhood gave you a good shot at making it to your 70s, which has been true for a long time pretty much everywhere.

> Not me! I'm 100x AI engineer who will certainly remain comfy an secure. LLMs are awesome! It's all those luddite doomer jerks who cling to their old ways of understanding how things work and manual coding that are going to be poor, and they deserve it.

We will see in 5 years ! I think you highly overestimate llms